CategorySocial Factors
Could HAL 9000 Ever Be Built?
I say yes. Some reflections on the 50th Year Anniversary of 2001: A Space OdysseyAt one point on the trip from Earth to Jupiter, HAL becomes suspicious that the crew might be sabotaging the mission. HAL then purposely tries to kill all the crew. The most logical explanation for this act is a coding error. HAL was programmed to operate on the basis that the mission took priority over human life.
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Silicon Valley as a Colonial Power
Irish writer asks us to look more carefully at claims about “liberation”
Giant Google’s Vulnerable Spot
Social media are free because we are both the content and the market
Ethics for an Information Society
Because machines can’t learn to solve their own ethical problems
AI Tools for Mass Manipulation?
Machine learning can unleash a perfect storm of malice, experts warn
Hell Is a “Parasocial” Place
Where your "friends" may not even exist
Will AI Liberate or Enslave Developing Countries?
Perhaps that depends on who gets there first with the technology
So what happened to Google Glass?
We are told that the “wetware” (humans) got in the way
Do children trust robots too much?
Maybe, but more study is needed, say researchers
George Gilder: Life after Google Will Be Okay
People will take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man”In his new book, he calls the successor era he envisions the “cryptocosm,” referring to the private encryption of data, represented by technologies such as blockchain.
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Who Creates Information in a Market?
Do exchange-traded funds (ETFs)' algorithms make personally gathering information obsolete?Algorithmic strategies can only be as good as the information that goes into them. Ignoring how the information is created causes us to misunderstand the dynamics of value creation. Algorithms can leverage information, they can’t create it.
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The New Politically Correct Chatbot Was Worse?
If you are a human being who talks to people for a living, don’t quit your job
AI That Can Read Minds?
Deconstructing AI hypeThe source for the claims seems to be a 2018 journal paper, "Real-time classification of auditory sentences using evoked cortical activity in humans." The carefully described results are indeed significant but what the Daily Mail article didn't tell you sheds a rather different light on the AI mind reader.
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Is Bitcoin Safe?
Why the human side of security is criticalBitcoin solves a lot of tough problems in very ingenious ways. Unfortunately, however, those benefits don’t tend to translate well for end users, who are not nearly as ingenious as the people developing the system.
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Claim: Yes, you can upload your brain
Fine print: They might have to kill you first
Better medicine through machine learning?
Data can be a dump or a gold mine
The driverless car: A bubble soon to burst?
Car expert says journalists too gullible about high techWhy do we constantly hear that driverless, autonomous vehicles will soon be sharing the road with us? Wolmar blames “gullible journalists who fail to look beyond the extravagant claims of the press releases pouring out of tech companies and auto manufacturers, hailing the imminence of major developments that never seem to materialise.”
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Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads
AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest ToilJust as a train on a rail requires minimal, or indeed no, human intervention, so cars driving on virtual railroads might readily dispense with the human element.
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