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TagMaggie Harrison

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How’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Doing These Days?

That’s been quite the flop — but the world of virtual reality and avatars is mainstreaming quite rapidly

Apple’s Tim Cook doesn’t think much of it, apparently. Billions of dollars later, lots of people don’t: As waves of critics pointed out, the design of this “immersive” world is astoundingly underwhelming. In the cursed screenshot, Zuck’s pasty, robotic avatar — the design of which is perhaps a half step above a Wii Mii — is pictured in front of a sparse, sad landscape upon which arbitrarily sized replicas of France’s Eiffel Tower and Spain’s Tibidabo Cathedral are uncomfortably plopped. Maggie Harrison, “Wave of criticism hits Zuckerberg’s Metaverse for looking like crap” at Futurism (August 17, 2021) It turns out, even employees who built it don’t use it. At Forbes, the Money columnist thinks the basic idea is the way Read More ›

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Webb Telescope Builders “Are Questioning Previous Science”

In an interview at Futurism, Webb astronomer Garth Illingworth shares how the new findings are shaking up what we think we know about the universe

Futurism’s Maggie Harrison recently interviewed UC Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, one of the developers of the James Webb Space Telescope. His observations put the astronomers’ astonishment at the unexpected new findings of very old, developed galaxies in perspective: And I would just say, you know, when I was sitting there watching the first images, I was just blown away by their beauty and the character there, the information. But one of the things I was thinking afterwards was: in that hour, I saw, like, six sets of data. I have to say, that’s more data than I’ve ever seen from anything in any sort of reasonable time period in my whole life. Scientists are going to be working on Read More ›

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Analyst working with computer in Business Analytics and Data Management System to make report with KPI and metrics connected to database. Corporate strategy for finance, operations, sales, marketing..

The machine is not talking to you. You are talking to yourself.

At Futurism, Maggie Harrison discusses the reasons humans decide that AI is “alive.”

Maggie Harrison, a staff writer for Futurism, offers a no-nonsense talk to those who believe in the humanity of the chatbot LaMDA, as announced in June by Google software engineer Blake Lemoine: First, she notes, the idea isn’t even uncommon among software engineers: As Cade Metz wrote for The New York Times, many in the AI industry hold beliefs similar to Lemoine’s. One prominent inventor, Philip Bosua, told the Times he believes OpenAI’s GPT-3 (another language modeling system like Google’s LaMDA) is also sentient. Yet another said that though he think’s GPT-3 intelligence is somewhat “alien,” it “still counts.” There’s a clear, wide gap there between those who think the machine is alive, and the simple computer science backing those Read More ›