There are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided.
We are assigning more societal decision-making power to systems that we don’t fully understand and can’t always audit, and that lawmakers don’t know nearly well enough to effectively regulate. As impressive as modern artificial intelligence can seem, right now those AI systems are, in a sense, “stupid.” They tend to have very narrow scope and limited computing power. To the extent they can cause harm, they mostly do so either by replicating the harms in the data sets used to train them or through deliberate misuse by bad actors. But AI won’t stay stupid forever, because lots of people are working diligently to make it…
Evolution of Gambling: Pay by Phone Casino
What will we use our phones for next? Image Source The online casino world is consistently evolving. New technologies are transforming the way these platforms operate and how people use them. The biggest evolution occurred when smartphone popularity reached mainstream consumers. People were able to play online casino games no matter where they were. Still, that meant that other technologies had to follow to ensure that all players had the best experience possible. As quick and safe payments were essential, new payment technologies became available. Today, users can enjoy a wide range of payment methods, one of which is…
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to fast from meat as part of a deal with the fishing industry? Never happened.
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to eat fish as part of a deal with fishing industry? For some reason people keep sharing this story with the idea that the economic angle is scandalous, or it supports the assertion that the Catholic church is corrupt, or that liturgical practices not literally described in the Bible (Jesus never said anything about the Latin Mass or organ-and-choir music vs. guitar-and-tambourine music) are all random rules that make no sense. No pope never made a deal with the fishing industry — though MacDonald’s did invent the Filet-o-Fish because hamburger sales…
‘Aims’: the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles
At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread “propaganda”. Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation…
A news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster.
Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and never goes on strike. Until last week, CNET had coyly attributed its machine-written stories to “CNET Money Staff.” Only by clicking on the byline would a reader learn that the article was produced by “automation technology” — itself a euphemism for AI. The company came…
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it…
Visionary #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 17) Time-jumping O’Brien Must Suffer
Rewatching ST:DS9 The episode starts with O’Brien on the floor, as Bashir exposits that he was exposed to plot contrivance particles. On his way to meet a Romulan delegation, Sisko passes rowdy, drunken Klingons whose ship is in for repairs. O’Brien, trying to relax, talks Quark into setting up a dart board. He’s about to throw when suddenly he is on the promenade deck, watching another O’Brien talking to another Quark. Our O’Brien and the other O’Brien lock eyes, and O’Brien is back at the bar, looking queasy. Bashir says hallucinations are “a fairly common side-effect of radiation poisoning.” The…
2023 public domain debuts include last Sherlock Holmes work
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my dissertation time period of 1920-1950 because I expected the works I studied would fall out of copyright one by one during my academic career, and I had visions of leisurely preparing annotated hypertext versions of those works and publishing them online. But then in 1998,…
‘Unexpected item’: how self-checkouts failed to live up to their promise
Businesses still fret over these issues, and against a tight labor market, more companies are making self-checkouts the norm. But the machines failed to live up to their promises. This week, Walmart’s CEO said that thefts “are higher than what they’ve historically been”, which many staff and customers link to self-checkouts. On top of that, the machines have made things harder for the workers who they were supposed to replace. That includes 25-year-old James, head cashier at a large Washington state store, where he’s worked for four years. He says running the self-checkout has become one of the most tiring…
I am very happy for these folks, who spent 20 or so years tweaking an insanely complex, completely free game, and are now selling a deluxe version that fans like me can’t wait to buy.
Prophet Motive (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 16) The Nagus’s eccentricities annoy, alarm Quark
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark is enjoying an ear massage from a humanoid woman who is clearly more interested in a business deal when they are interrupted by the arrival of Grand Nagus Zek. In the B story, Bashir is nominated for a prestigious Federation medical award, yet he seems aggressively unenthusiastic. (Some good character bits, and in retrospect this subplot could be seen as laying groundwork for the “Bashir is genetically enhanced” storyline, but that’s a charitable reading.) In a sitcom-worthy scene, Quark is annoyed to live in his brother’s cluttered quarters, but Rom stands his ground. Zek surprises them both…
Eco-critical Code Studies: Reconfigurations of nature in the born-digital artifact “Colossal Cave Adventure” from text to VR
Video game history is colliding: Sierra founders are bringing a seminal text adventure game to VR (The Verge) Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 1976; Crowther and Woods 1977) (photo credit) Photo of Ken and Roberta Williams; Wikipedia photo of Adventure on a CRT Sierra On-Line (Sierra Entertainment, Inc.); King’s Quest, Space Quest, Phantasmagoria; original publisher of Half-Life How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud (Vice) Klein, Ernst. Ready Player One; Ready Player Two Culver, Nathaniel. “Adventure Family Tree” Nelson, Graham. “A short history of interactive fiction” Infocom; Adventure International; adaptations of The Hobbit; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to…
The White House’s plan to colonize the moon, briefly explained: Putting humans on the moon is more political than you might think.
Political tensions alone could be a major source of conflict, according to Michelle Hanlon, the co-director of the Air and Space Law Center at the University of Mississippi law school. For one, there still isn’t a globally shared vision for what the future of the moon should entail. Just over 20 countries have signed the US-led Artemis Accords, a set of principles for, among other things, exploring and using the lunar surface. The former head of Russia’s space agency, unsurprisingly, said that the country would not support the Artemis program in its current form, and Congress has barred NASA from working with China since 2011. And…
CBS News Suspends Twitter Posting ‘In Light of the Uncertainty’ About Musk-Owned Social Platform
CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company. “In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan Vigliotti, CBS News national correspondent, said in a report about the latest chaos at the company on the “CBS Evening News” Friday. —Variety
Adobe steals your color
What a horrible situation. The Adobe monthly leases are way too expensive for a student paper that only prints a few magazines a term. The software costs more than the printing process, and about the same as the web hosting service. Just not worth the expense. We are making do with free alternatives. For people who work in prepress, a key part of their Adobe tools is integration with Pantone. Pantone is a system for specifying color-matching. A Pantone number corresponds to a specific tint that’s either made by mixing the four standard print colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black,…
Really, WCCC?
No, this pie chart does not mean that anyone at CNBC believes the typical 25 year old earns a salary of $100k/y and spends $825/mo on rent
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link. I don’t watch any TV news and CNBC plays no role in my life, but come on. This post has gotten thousands of likes and generated hundreds of comments, many of them suggesting that CNBC is out of touch for reporting these figures as “typical.” It’s easy to attack the messenger, but it’s really not hard to Google “cnbc budget breakdown of a 25 year old” and click the first link. This chart, from a profile of a specific person who “brings in $100,000 a…
Shutting the Door on the Hard-Knock Life
In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night? Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the…
Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material. And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just…