Browsed by
Category: Technology

Graphite, the Israeli spyware acquired by ICE

Graphite, the Israeli spyware acquired by ICE

El País reports: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has reactivated a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded spyware company whose products can hack any cell phone. The agreement includes a fully configured software package, including licensing, hardware, training, and ongoing maintenance. The original contract with Paragon was signed in September 2024 during the Biden administration, but was put on hold after reports emerged that the technology, known as Graphite, had been misused abroad. Biden’s March…

Read More Read More

AI has a hidden water cost − here’s how to calculate yours

AI has a hidden water cost − here’s how to calculate yours

How many AI queries does it take to use up a regular plastic water bottle’s worth of water? kieferpix/iStock/Getty Images Plus By Leo S. Lo, University of Virginia Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty, consuming as much as 500 milliliters of water – a single-serving water bottle – for each short conversation a user has with the GPT-3 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system. They use roughly the same amount of water to draft a 100-word email message. That figure includes the…

Read More Read More

Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

Philip Ball writes: In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of the computer company Sun Microsystems, sounded an alarm about technology. In an article in Wired titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Joy wrote that we should ‘limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.’ He feared a future in which our inventions casually wipe us from the face of the planet. The concerns expressed in Joy’s…

Read More Read More

Trump’s pick to head CDC is a Peter Thiel acolyte

Trump’s pick to head CDC is a Peter Thiel acolyte

The New Republic reports: Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control. Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background. But he does have a history of feverish advocacy…

Read More Read More

AI companies stand to profit from denying care to patients on Medicare

AI companies stand to profit from denying care to patients on Medicare

The New York Times reports: Like millions of older adults, Frances L. Ayres faced a choice when picking health insurance: Pay more for traditional Medicare, or opt for a plan offered by a private insurer and risk drawn-out fights over coverage. Private insurers often require a cumbersome review process that frequently results in the denial or delay of essential treatments that are readily covered by traditional Medicare. This practice, known as prior authorization, has drawn public scrutiny, which intensified after…

Read More Read More

How AI is undermining education

How AI is undermining education

Clay Shirky writes: I remember the moment I knew my approach to student use of artificial intelligence was not working. Early in a meeting at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus last fall, a philosophy professor, arms crossed over his chest, told me he’d tried one of the strategies my office had suggested — talking with his students about the ways A.I. could interfere with their learning — and it hadn’t worked. His students had listened politely, then several of them had…

Read More Read More

How AI became the far right’s latest weapon against refugees

How AI became the far right’s latest weapon against refugees

Anagha Nair writes: Earphones plugged in, a cigarette dangling from his hand, Mohammed al-Mohammed was waiting for a train at a station in Hamburg, Germany, when he was enveloped by screams of horror. Amid the chaos of people fleeing, he glimpsed a flash of metal out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a lady clutching a raised knife, pointed toward him. Mohammed’s reflexes kicked in, and he pushed the lady away. As another man tackled her and…

Read More Read More

The AI-profits mirage and the lessons of history

The AI-profits mirage and the lessons of history

John Cassidy writes: In a 1987 article in the Times Book Review, Robert Solow, a Nobel-winning economist at M.I.T., commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Despite massive increases in computing power and the rising popularity of personal computers, government figures showed that over-all output per worker, a key determinant of wages and living standards, had stagnated for more than a decade. The “productivity paradox,” as it came to be known, persisted into the…

Read More Read More

DOGE uploaded live copy of Social Security database to ‘vulnerable’ cloud server, whistleblower reveals

DOGE uploaded live copy of Social Security database to ‘vulnerable’ cloud server, whistleblower reveals

TechCrunch reports: A top Social Security Administration official turned whistleblower says members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of most Americans at risk of compromise. Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, said in a newly released whistleblower complaint published Tuesday that other top agency officials signed off on a decision in June to upload “a live copy…

Read More Read More

Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

By Aaron French, Kennesaw State University Back in 2008, The Atlantic sparked controversy with a provocative cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid? In that 4,000-word essay, later expanded into a book, author Nicholas Carr suggested the answer was yes, arguing that technology such as search engines were worsening Americans’ ability to think deeply and retain knowledge. At the core of Carr’s concern was the idea that people no longer needed to remember or learn facts when they could instantly…

Read More Read More

The era of degenerative-AI

The era of degenerative-AI

Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…

Read More Read More

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much

The Columbia River running through The Dalles, Oregon, supplies water to cool data centers. AP Photo/Andrew Selsky By Peyton McCauley, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Melissa Scanlan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also…

Read More Read More

AI bubble: Sam Altman says, ‘investors as a whole are overexcited about AI’

AI bubble: Sam Altman says, ‘investors as a whole are overexcited about AI’

TechSpot reports: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged what many economists have suspected for months: the artificial intelligence sector is in a bubble fueled by overexcited investors. In a dinner interview with reporters in San Francisco, the ChatGPT chief compared today’s AI investment frenzy to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s – a rare moment of candor from a leader whose company sits at the center of the boom. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole…

Read More Read More

In Silicon Valley, eugenics is called ‘genetic optimization’ with breeding programs for smarter babies

In Silicon Valley, eugenics is called ‘genetic optimization’ with breeding programs for smarter babies

The Wall Street Journal reports: Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon. Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting cutting-edge technology to create smarter humans who will be up to the task of saving us all. “My intuition is it’s one of our best hopes,” said Benson-Tilsen, co-founder of the Berkeley Genomics Project, a nonprofit…

Read More Read More

The excitement around AI chatbots is being driven by the people who stand to profit from promoting them

The excitement around AI chatbots is being driven by the people who stand to profit from promoting them

Mat Honan writes: My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something revolutionary. “GPT-5 is, above all else,” Grace concludes, “a refined product.” This is pretty much in line with my colleague Will Heaven’s recent argument that the latest model releases have been a bit like smartphone releases: Increasingly,…

Read More Read More

Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

The New York Times reports: In 2023, as Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, prepared to plead guilty to U.S. money-laundering violations, he fashioned a crash course for himself on clemency politics, reading books about business tycoons who had received pardons, including Marc Rich and Michael Milken. Two years later, Mr. Zhao, a Chinese-born billionaire, is out of prison and mounting a pardon campaign of his own, backed by a sophisticated influence operation worthy of those…

Read More Read More