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Tag: #AI

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

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Image by NVD from Pixabay

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

AI and the Easy Answer/Quick Fix Era

AI and the Easy Answer/Quick Fix Era

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

This week, a personal anecdote, with a lesson.

We were in LA last week for LA Tech Week, where we moderated our Investor Insights panel. Just before we left, we hurt the thumb of our dominant hand, and by ‘hurt,’ we mean broke the small bone at the tip of the digit. Which makes using a computer problematic and in attempting to maneuver everyday activities, we have a newfound empathy for those who are left-handed. Many tools are not made with them in mind.

Everyone we’d encountered dispensed advice: wrap it, splint it, take aspirin for the pain, ask AI. Or, see a doctor, which was the right advice and the way our life works, upon arrival at the hotel, our group assembled in the lobby. We were introduced to someone who was on the health panel that followed ours. We fist-bumped rather than shook hands, which roused his curiosity. We explained the issue. He asked if he could examine the finger and after identifying himself as being an orthopedic surgeon, yes, and what are the chances!!! He didn’t have an x-ray machine but had seen this injury often enough to know which bone was broken. He recommended naproxen over acetylsalicylic acid, and it would take about two months to fully heal. No splinting or wrapping it., as AI et al had recommended: that would inhibit the healing process and cause more damage than good. For the record, aspirin was counter-advised. It would take months to fully recover. Read More...

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

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Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean. Read More...

Does AI Have an Agenda?

Does AI Have an Agenda?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It certainly seems to, although it is a technology created by humans.* But given, say, Meta’s manipulation of people’s emotions that was revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (and which we reported on), the proverbial men behind the curtain do appear to have one, and the question is, given the past behavior of the tech bros, will AI be used for good instead of evil during this next iteration of tech?

Ah, it’s that old “Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It” George Santayana thing again and if there’s one thing we cannot shrink from doing, it’s connecting dots.

First up, “A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court,” TechCrunch reported. Read More...

AAAAIIiiii!!!! Or, It’s Just Another Algorithm…

AAAAIIiiii!!!! Or, It’s Just Another Algorithm…

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image by Gerd Altmann @Pixaby

An issue that the mainstream tech seems bent on ignoring is whether or not AI is sentient. As Yahoo!Finance reported, “the issue of machine sentience – and what it means – hit the headlines…when Google placed senior software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave after he went public with his belief that the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person… Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.”

 

Nothing to see here…Seriously?

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The New Era of Tracking: Too Much to Swallow?

The New Era of Tracking: Too Much to Swallow?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

 We have entered a new era of tech. Web 3.0, including blockchain/the distributed web, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, 5G and before too long, quantum computing (The Need, Promise, and Reality of Quantum Computing), which will certainly be a huge game-changer.

After all the loss of privacy we’d experienced during Web 2.0h???, as we now like to call it, as capturing all our personal data was supposedly all in the name of selling us yet another pair of, say, sneakers. Oh, and connecting the world through social, too, as it was the social web after all, no matter how anti-social it became over time. But considering how much more the next era in tech is promising – and let’s not forget robotics, connected glasses, eg the upcoming Apple Glasses, the Internet of Things, AI, Smart Cities, Smart Agriculture, et al are also in the mix – what a wonderful era of promise awaits us! We’re finally going to get it all right and in fact, to help you prepare, head’s up: “To succeed in the future, you MUST learn web3, @Mishadavinci tweeted.  These 7 world-changing concepts get you up to speed.”

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Same Schmidt, Different Day

Same Schmidt, Different Day

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It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the tech cabal,. You know that there’s always something to see. And something they’d prefer you’d not see.

One of the latest reports is that Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests. It seems the two behemoths “provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials,” Yahoo!finance reported, including “basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.””

It seems that rather than hacking Apple and Meta (nee Facebook) directly, given their armies of coders, instead, the hackers breached law enforcement agencies worldwide. For the record, the hackers who sell this information to various and nefarious, only charge $100-$250 for this service. In 2021, Meta received 21,000+ ‘emergency requests’ which do not need to be signed off by a judge, and complied with 77% of them, while Apple received over 1100 and complied with 93% of them. Read More...

Is Tech Starting to Get Under Your Skin?

Is Tech Starting to Get Under Your Skin?

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We used to play competitive field hockey. Center halfback. Winning team and why? We and our center forward had a strategy: Yours Truly always fell back – to the least protected part of the field – rather than shadowing her.  She would invariably get the ball at some point, send it to us, who would guard it until she was in position to score, return it to her. Score! Game over. Worked every time.

It’s one thing to skate to where the puck is going, as per ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s advice. And quite another to follow the strategy/keep an eye on the field at large. Which is also potentially a winning play.

As a result of our lessons from field hockey, we personally don’t necessarily only follow where the puck is going, but rather, attempt to sort out the underlying strategy as well – and look to what else is happening on the field. For example, it was recently widely reported that Elon Musk says the US should ‘get rid of all’ government subsidies re EVs. As The Verge said, “Musk’s companies have benefitted from many different federal and state subsidies over the years, and the government is a major SpaceX customer (though SpaceX won much of that business by dramatically undercutting the prices of established players). Tesla has also found tremendous success in China after receiving lots of help from the central government there. Musk said Monday that Tesla “did not anticipate any subsidies” when the company was in its early years. Read More...

Wee the People

Wee the People

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Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

We were half joking last week when we suggested that, in many cases in tech, so-called terms of service be renamed ‘terms of servitude.’ Given the amount of data scraping and surveillance we’ve seen because of the lockdowns (think the enormous spike in Amazon and Walmart online orders, while mom and pops were forced to close). It’ll be interesting to see what fresh hell comes next. The New Normal? Might want to think New Police State.

Or something like that.

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