He thinks that expected massive increases in computing power will enable blockchain technologies that allow users to safely bypass the global data monopoly that Google and similar firms represent.
Read More ›
The unchallenged manipulation of search engine results during elections is a new phenomenon made possible by the domination of the internet by a few big players.
Read More ›
Quip making the rounds: Would you trust a self-driving car from Google? Answer: Sure, if I needed a car that decided for me where I should go and then just drove me there.
Read More ›
Dr. Dinerstein: In what is now a classic study, researchers used de-identified credit card data for 1.1 million people, in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. Using just four pieces of “outside” data they could identify 90% of the shoppers.
Read More ›
Because Marx held that the value of goods resided in the labor required to produce them, if goods were produced by automatons, without human labor, the economy would fall apart and capitalism would fail.
Read More ›
Atkins is arguing that the fact that we do not understand what consciousness is, far from being a barrier to creating artificial consciousness, offers the hope that, once we do create them, artificially conscious entities will understand consciousness but we won’t. The proposition sounds a bit confused, no?
Read More ›
Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines,sees it as more of a retooling than a meltdown. But retooling does mean change, work, cost, and risk.
Read More ›
The social media companies will force us to define ourselves over against the specifications of our would-be programmers. And say what you want about the conflict, it will never be dull.
Read More ›
Recently, we looked at philosopher of technology George Gilder’s Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy. But what form would that decline take? A look at the advertising picture offers one clue.
Read More ›
AI (machine learning) was probably faster and cheaper but the whole point of the system was supposed to be justice which, whatever the explanation, proved too difficult to calculate…
Read More ›
In 2017, a group of 26 AI researchers got together at Oxford and created a report which offers a number of examples of malicious technologies of the near future.
Read More ›
We also know very little about the human brain. Take this controversy about why the large human brain evolved…
Read More ›
Consumer digital hells can be dreadful indeed but they are mostly of our own making. The companies that profit from them are not forcing us to live in them. That said, students should be taught in school that the internet’s virtual world features a great deal of fakery, including fake friends.
Read More ›
Companies sometimes pretend to be using AI or machine learning when they are actually using human employees for various reasons. One reason is that they have promised potential investors more high tech than they can deliver. Sometimes, as we learned recently at The Guardian, it gets a bit sticky…
Read More ›
Karl D. Stephan: Zimbabwe, an African country well-known for its human-rights abuses, has received advanced Chinese AI technology from a startup company in exchange for letting the firm have access to the country’s facial-recognition database. So China is helping the government of Zimbabwe to keep tabs on its citizens as well.
Read More ›
It bears repeating: A technology is adopted when it solves problems as identified by users rather than problems as identified by developers.
Read More ›
Children could easily give in to peer pressure from other children to give an incorrect answer in place of a correct one. How much difference it makes that the pressure is supplied by a robot would surely depend on how the child is taught to see robots.
Read More ›
It is actually a constantly shifting network of agreements to trust others. Maria Bustillos, editor of Ethereum’s culturemag, Popula, asks us to think about just what money is before we make up our minds about Bitcoin.
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
Human life is full of these challenges. Some knowledge simply cannot be conveyed—or understood or accepted—in a propositional form. For example, a nurse counselor may see clearly that her elderly post-operative patient would thrive better in a retirement home. But she cannot just tell him so.
Read More ›