Digit_al Society

"There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time.""

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"The hacker compromised the firm's global email server through an "administrator's account" that, in theory, gave them privileged, unrestricted "access to all areas". The account required only a single password and did not have "two-step" verification, sources said."

"On paper, making human beings behave like simple machines might deliver greater efficiency. But modern-day Taylorism threatens something that those kinds of market analyses fail to capture: the value of being human."

"A "category one" cyber-attack, the most serious tier possible, will happen "sometime in the next few years", a director of the National Cybersecurity Centre has warned. According to the agency, which reports to GCHQ and has responsibly for ensuring the UK's information security, a category one cybersecurity incident requires a national government response. "

"Automating teaching is an example of a task that would require artificial general intelligence (as opposed to narrow or specific intelligence). In other words, this is the kind of task that would require an AI that understands natural human language, can be empathetic towards emotions, plan, strategize and make impactful decisions under unpredictable circumstances."

"People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model. Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time."

"He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. After a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away, exposing the white surface of a conference table in the midtown Manhattan headquarters of his startup. He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on…nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor."

""What is emerging is that [Aadhaar] is being used to create a panopticon, a centralized database that's linked to every aspect of our lives - finances, travel, birth, deaths, marriage, education, employment, health, etc.," Reetika Khera, an Indian economist and social scientist, told VICE News. Security concerns have plagued the system for years, but in recent weeks criticism has grown deafeningly loud. Earlier this month, as part of the Supreme Court case on privacy, an activist's freedom of information request suggested that foreign firms were being given "full access" to the classified data - including fingerprints and iris scans."

"Robots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next 10 years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning, a leading educationist has predicted. Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, said intelligent machines that adapt to suit the learning styles of individual children would soon render traditional academic teaching all but redundant."

"How can we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than AI?" Great talk - she also presented at recent IB conference in Yokohama.

"But the answer to how he was chosen is actually an algorithm, a computer program that crunched through reams of data, looking at how much each passenger had paid for their ticket, what time they checked in, how often they flew on United, and whether they were part of a rewards program. The algorithm likely determined that Dr. Dao was one of the least valuable customers on the flight at the time."

"In quantum cryptography, a sender uses a cryptographic key encoded in a quantum signal to encrypt a message. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, if someone tried to intercept the key, they would destroy it."

"Luddism refuses to die because each innovation creates a pool of people who feel economically or culturally dispossessed. The greater the leap forward, the wider the chasm of obsolescence. And the scale of the digital revolution defies hyperbole. No area of human activity is undisrupted. "

"Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition shows that these watermarks can be reliably detected and undetectably erased by software."

"brings a fully robotic weaponry system to an airborne platform. TIKAD, "

"A new proposal could see the country reduce the amount of tax benefits for companies that invest in automated machinery."

"Researchers from MIT and Google recently showed off a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically retouching photos just like a professional photographer. Snap a photo and the neural network identifies exactly how to make it look better-increase contrast a smidge, tone down brightness, whatever-and apply the changes in less than 20 milliseconds."