In his latest newsletter, the venerable Steven Levy unpacked the background for the kerfuffle surrounding Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book. While there…
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Under the rug The darkside of technology, particularly regarding social media and the AI stampede, continues to unfold, with whistle-blower testimonies and books. Even a movie now & then, like The Social Dilemma. We’re in a political climate where hypocrisy is no longer a disqualification. Yet again money muddies moral missteps. Ancient wisdom butts heads…
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My holiday digital card for 2024.
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Benefits and costs of the new AI gold rush. Move fast and break things … vying for supremacy (“America’s AI edge,” like another Manhattan Project) … but … who’s a developer, and what are their responsibilities in some type of regulatory framework? Who does AI safety testing? Are there 3rd party evaluations? Certifications? Kill switches? Incident logging and reporting? AI “meltdowns” and lawsuits? Collateral damage from embedded AI medical devices?…
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Another gold rush is underway. Recast as the AI tech boom. Yet, AI is power hungry, a voracious beast consuming vast amounts of electricity. And water [1]. And those gas-fired power plants [2] … Generative AI data centers are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and tax the electric grid and our limited water resources (like the Colorado River). Companies that invest in AI see profit. Electric utilities see profit…
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Who likes being fooled by a con? Scams are one thing, and there’re tips to avoid those, whether via USPS (paper) mail, phone, email, text, etc. Whether obvious or not, the business model typically is about money – monetizing your personal data, either directly or indirectly. But what’s the business model for misinfo, disinfo, and all the varieties of outright falsehoods / fabrication / propaganda? What’s the payoff? For example,…
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I like the way that I can do a Google search using a photo – drag & drop it into a search box – to identify its content. I like the way I can extract text from a photo (providing the photo has sufficient resolution on that content). And Amazon uses AI to summarize the gist of product reviews (to some degree). But in the rush to embed AI for directly…