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“Anonymized” Data Is Not Confidential
It’s almost as anonymous as your fingerprint, actually
The Machine Knows You Are Angry
Okay, it knows if your facial muscles are twisted in a certain way… does the difference matter?
What Others Are Saying About the New Google Insider’s Revelations
The documents' authenticity is not in dispute. What to do about them is another matter
A Silicon Valley Insider Asks the Awkward Questions
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, speaking at COSM in October, has a history of challenging Valley orthodoxiesHis question, “How can Google use the rhetoric of ‘borderless’ benefits to justify working with the country whose ‘Great Firewall’ has imposed a border on the internet itself?”, is timely. China’s government uses high tech for, among other things, sophisticated racial profiling.
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In China, high-tech racial profiling is social policy
For an ethnic minority, a physical checkup includes blood samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and voice recordingsThe Chinese government seeks a database of everyone in the country, not only to track individuals but to determine the ethnicity of those who run up against the law.
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Why Some Scientists Believe the Universe Is Conscious
They’re not mystics. But materialism is not giving good answers so they are looking aroundThese prominent thinkers are driven to panpsychism because materialism about the mind doesn’t really work. So if panpsychism ends up seeming absurd, dualism—there really is an immaterial world—is also worth considering.
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Many Parents Ignore Risks of Posting Kids’ Data Online
The lifelong digital footprint, which starts before birth, makes identity theft much easier
Google Engineer Reveals Search Engine Bias
He found Google pretty neutral in 2014; the bias started with the US 2016 electionThe algorithms—the series of commands to computers—“don’t write themselves,” Coppola says. People who have their own opinions may write them into an algorithm, knowingly or otherwise.
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We Built the Power Big Social Media Have Over Us
Click by click, and the machines learned the patterns. Now we aren’t sure who is in chargeWe’re stuck, working for free, training the Web giants’ ML systems to reap benefits for them while enduring (assuming we notice) the downsides.
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Jordan Peterson’s New “Thinkspot” Takes Shape
Analysts ask, can his proposed rules work?What about the problem of expecting people to pay? Perhaps most people are so used to getting their social media for free for the same reasons as turkeys get their feed for free—because they’re the product—that they willingly submit to censorship?
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Is the Human Mind a Computer?
As a software engineer, I'd say we need to be clear what the question is before answering itOnce we understand clearly what a computer is, we will see why consciousness is not a form of computation.
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The Internet Doesn’t Free Anyone by Itself
China is testing 100% surveillance on the Uighurs, a strategically critical minorityThe Uyghur people in Xinjiang province in northwest China spend their lives in a digital panopticon. Over 2.5 million Muslims are tracked via facial recognition software and cameras, and their cell phone monitored for any language that could be construed as religious. Over a million have been placed in so-called “vocational training centers” that are widely described as detention camps. Even when not detained, they live like prisoners: For Uyghurs in Xinjiang, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. Isobel Read More ›
Why It’s So Hard To Reform Peer Review
Robert J. Marks: Reformers are battling numerical laws that govern how incentives work. Know your enemy!Measurement creates a temptation to achieve a measurable goal by less than totally honest means. As in physics, the simple act of measuring invariably disturbs what you are trying to measure.
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Researchers: Apes Are Just Like Us!
And we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way…In 2011, we were told in Smithsonian Magazine, “‘Talking’ apes are not just the stuff of science fiction; scientists have taught many apes to use some semblance of language.” Have they? If so, why has it all subsided? What happened?
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Is Data Privacy a Luxury Now?
In an age of constant connectedness and digital monitoring, access to privacy is becoming the new digital divide. Can you afford it?The people most likely to know how to protect their privacy are the well-informed. In an information society in the free world, as an information analyst notes, “well-informed” tends to correlate with well-educated (which in turn correlates with being better off).
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Could Huge Chunks of Asteroid Gold Wreck Our Economy?
16 Psyche’s gold illustrates how AI affects jobs. Not the way many think…“By lowering the price of gold, it would create new, currently nonexistent, markets for other uses of gold,” says Jay Richards. In the same way, AI creates new, currently nonexistent, markets for human time and creativity.
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Can the AI Poker Champ Improve Real-World Decisions?
That’s the claim aired at Nature for Pluribus, the new Texas hold ‘em champ. Bradley Center fellows are skeptical“The trouble is," says Brendan Dixon, "any technique that works by searching ‘to the end of the game’ will not help self-driving cars (as an example) one bit…unless they have also mastered predicting the future. There is no ‘end of the game’ for nearly all decisions we make.”
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Our AI Overlords Will Save Earth, Says Prominent Scientist
AlphaGo, the Go-playing computer program, is the start of telepathic superintelligences that will tackle climate changeJames Lovelock, both distinguished scientist and founder of the Gaia concept of Earth, need only live to July 26 to be a centenarian. In his new book, co-authored with Bryan Appleyard, he sees the Go-playing computer program AlphaGo as the start of a new type of life that will save the planet, as he told New Scientist recently: Specifically, about the new AI overlords: In his new book Novacene, James Lovelock says the creation of AlphaGo was the start of a new kingdom of life that will create and think for itself. He’s optimistic that this new kingdom of life will want to keep us around like we keep plants in gardens. “James Lovelock says artificial intelligence is the start Read More ›
If the mind is immaterial, is human cloning impossible?
I agree with Mike Egnor that the mind is immaterial but I don’t think human cloning is impossibleThere are, of course, empirical implications of both the materialist and non-materialist understanding of the human mind. But the success of human cloning won’t weigh on the question one way or the other.
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