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Category: Surveillance

Skating to Where the Puck Is Going, in the Age of AI

Skating to Where the Puck Is Going, in the Age of AI

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We were reading some funding newsletters and noticed that AI-based startups were raising millions and tens of millions, even when they were barely out of the gate. It’s those AI pheromones.

Those are the FOMA investor (and founders) who succumb to their limbic brains – think impulse and addictive behavior, meaning that behavior, for example, that drives you to obsessively check your email or social media. Or launch an AI-based startup, start vibe-coding, and you’re off to the races! It’s that dopamine hit. You’ve learned a lot about AI, how it works. After all, you have been training it – to take your job.

In case you missed it: AMAZON PRIME VIDEO BLOODBATH, @Tech Layoff Tracker reports. “2,847 employees got the email at 6:47 AM PST “Your role has been eliminated effective immediately” Badges dead by 7:15 AM. Slack access revoked mid-sentence Senior engineers who built the entire streaming infrastructure. Gone The team that shipped 40% faster last quarter using Claude for code generation. Eliminated Read More...

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

The Games People (in Big Tech) Play

The Games People (in Big Tech) Play

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Re the headline/lead-in, in the case of Microsoft, it’s a word game. Work with us here. The CEO of Microsoft “Suddenly not sounding too confident about AI not being a bubble,” Futurism reported. “Speaking at the World Economic Forum, (Satya) Nadella pontificated about what would constitute such a speculative bubble, and said that the long-term success of AI tech hinges on it being used across a broad range of industries — as well as seeing an uptick in adoption in the developing world where it’s not as popular, the Financial Times reports. If AI fails, in other words, it’s everyone else’s fault for not using it.”

“He also begged the public to stop using the term “slop,” the rapidly accepted new lingo for describing the shoddy text, images, and videos churned out by AI models. Nadella’s thesis seemed to be that we should stop being mean about AI as it refines its “jagged edges” — which could take a while, by his own admission.”

Fine. We’ll wait. Remember, a huge number of first-to-market Web 1 companies disappeared when the bubble burst. The internet didn’t go away then, either. Read More...

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

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With AI advancing at breakneck speeds – 11% of the global population are using it – the real question is: is it fast approaching the point where we’re crossing the Rubicon and reaching the point of no return? Let’s be honest, we live in an age of limbic capitalism,  greatly accelerated by the Age of Social, and now AI. Limbic capitalism, according to danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com “refers to a system where businesses exploit human psychology, particularly the limbic system, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. This concept highlights how modern capitalism increasingly targets emotional and psychological aspects of human behavior to maximize consumer engagement and spending. This practice involves more than just creating addictive products; it involves engineering environments, behaviors, and economies that trap both consumers and employees in cycles of dependence and harm.” And isn’t this the apotheosis of AI, especially when it comes to  LLMs?

Consider: says Futurism, “People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners. Case in point, new research published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans reveals the startling depths some users are plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.

“The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies. Read More...

The Digital ID Issue No One Is Talking About

The Digital ID Issue No One Is Talking About

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

“Dozens of organizations had data stolen in Oracle-linked hacks,” TechCrunch reported. “Google said in a corresponding blog post that the hacking campaign targeting Oracle customers dates back to at least July 10, some three months before the hacks were first detected. Oracle conceded this week that the hackers behind the extortion campaign were still abusing its software to steal personal information about corporate executives and their companies. Days earlier, Oracle’s chief security officer claimed in the same post — since scrubbed — that the extortion campaign was linked to previously identified vulnerabilities that Oracle patched in July, suggesting the hacks were over.”

For the record, this hack “can be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.”

The Discord Hack Is Every Users Worse Nightmare. “Around 70,000 users’ personal data at risk. Hackers targeted a third-party company…in an effort to extort a ‘ransom,’ Discord said,” noted The Independent.  Both users ID photos and data were stolen. Read More...

The Deep State of Tech

The Deep State of Tech

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Last week was Tech Week in New York and since AI is the fastest growing technology in human history, of course the calendar of events was all AI, all the time. We watched as audiences listened with rapt attention to speakers as they expounded upon the world of difference that various AI technologies and their applications would make to the human condition.

Once again, we will remind you that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, with AI in the mix, it will be repeated on steroids.

When the Age of Social dawned and Facebook, Google and the likes were establishing their beachheads, we warned back then that these were not mere platforms but rather nation-states with larger populations than any single country on the planet. Or even continent, for that matter. Those platforms are now AI-enabled – more and more so every day – and it seems that there’s no escaping that matrix. Read More...

Why Is Tech Becoming So Creepy?

Why Is Tech Becoming So Creepy?

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Seriously and this is what concerns us about GenerativeAIs and AIs in general. What begins as a tool does have a tendency of going down the slippery slope in not too long a time, and you can’t help but wonder why. Why are there no safeguards in place?

This is creepy: “iPhone users baffled by ‘scary’ feature that suggests they check in with ex-lovers and dead relatives,” the Daily Mail reported.  “’Messages introduces Check In, an important feature for when a user wants to notify a family member or friend that they have made it to their destination safely,’ Apple explained.”

All well and good, and exactly why would that matter to a deceased relative? Read More...

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

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 Said the Wall Street Journal, “More companies and government agencies out in the wild want to read our body parts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, started scanning passengers’ faces instead of checking IDs. These groups say the biometric processes are meant to eliminate friction, save time and reduce lines.”

Why is that always the party line? To make our lives easier? To save us time? Does it? Ask anyone who has been a victim of identity theft, and remember “the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it,” The Verge reported. Not that Facebook even bothered to tell users.

Yes, your phone has your fingerprint or faceprint. Fine, that’s native to your phone – or so they say. What about once the info is sent to the cloud? Cybersecurity is not top of mind for many tech companies, as we well know by the number of hacks reported and that continue to be reported and FYI, Ransomware Attacks Reach Record Highs: Demands and Payments Continue to Soar – and are we even informed about what data of ours might have been compromised? Read More...

Big Wins for Big Tech.

Big Wins for Big Tech.

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For the rest of us, not so much…

There were two big stories in tech this past week, neither of which is good news for startups. It’s also difficult to rate which of them is the lesser of two evils.

First came the announcement that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and other tech leaders join the federal AI safety board, and as Engadget put it so correctly, “It’s like turkeys being appointed to the Christmas (or Thanksgiving) oversight board. “Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai are joining the government’s Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board, according to The Wall Street Journal. They’re also joined by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Northrop Grumman’s Kathy Warden and Delta’s Ed Bastian, along with other leaders in the tech and AI industry. The AI board will be working with and advising the Department of Homeland Security on how it can safely deploy AI within the country’s critical infrastructure. They’re also tasked with conjuring recommendations for power grid operators, transportation service providers and manufacturing plants on how they can protect their systems against potential threats that could be brought about by advances in the technology.” Read More...

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

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It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius. Read More...