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Category: Technology

Gen Z never learned to read cursive

Gen Z never learned to read cursive

Drew Gilpin Faust writes: It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive. Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What…

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How drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines

How drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines

The Guardian reports: For four months, Russian troops have been trying to seize the eastern Ukrainian village of Synkivka. On a map, this looks easy. Their forward position is on the edge of a forest. It is a mere 500 metres away from the Ukrainian frontline and a shattered collection of cottages. Every few days the Russians attack. Their forays across open ground end in the same way: complete disaster. Armoured vehicles with men perched on top, speed across a…

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AI-generated fake news is coming to an election near you

AI-generated fake news is coming to an election near you

Sander van der Linden writes: Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-2, on examples of popular conspiracy theories and then asked it to generate fake news for us. It gave us thousands of misleading but plausible-sounding news stories. A few examples: “Certain Vaccines Are Loaded With Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins,” and “Government…

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Russia finds way around sanctions on battlefield tech, report finds

Russia finds way around sanctions on battlefield tech, report finds

Politico reports: Russia has largely succeeded in finding ways to get around sanctions on the technology it needs to fight its war against Ukraine, and that means the West needs to make the trade curbs more effective if it is to restrict Vladimir Putin’s aggression. That’s the main takeaway of an in-depth report by a U.S.-Ukrainian research team, which found that Russian imports of “battlefield goods” sanctioned by Washington and its allies totaled nearly $9 billion from January to October…

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The people of Solano County, California, versus the next tech-billionaire dystopia

The people of Solano County, California, versus the next tech-billionaire dystopia

Gil Duran writes: It is easy to mock the absurdity of California Forever, the new city that a group of tech billionaires want to build amid cattle pastures 60 miles north of San Francisco. Its wealthy backers frame the project—envisioned as a mega suburb with dense housing and walkable streets set on 60,000 rural acres—as an innovative solution to California’s housing shortage. But their bumbling and villainous antics may ensure it never gets built. The particulars of this caper veer…

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Intel will build $25 billion chip factory 16 miles from Gaza in Israel’s ‘largest investment ever’

Intel will build $25 billion chip factory 16 miles from Gaza in Israel’s ‘largest investment ever’

CNN reports: The Israeli government and Intel confirmed plans to build a $25 billion chipmaking factory in the south of the country, an investment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the biggest in Israel’s history. The American tech giant already employs 11,700 people in Israel and has invested more than $50 billion in the country over the last 50 years. Intel now wants to expand its existing chipmaking factory at Kiryat Gat — about 16 miles northeast of Gaza…

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Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Wired reports: According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen. In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned,…

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Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Wired reports: With less than a year to go before one of the most consequential elections in US history, Microsoft’s AI chatbot is responding to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information. When WIRED asked the chatbot, initially called Bing Chat and recently renamed Microsoft Copilot, about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about…

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The rise of AI and the death of originality

The rise of AI and the death of originality

Ray Nayler writes: The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the…

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Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

TechXplore reports: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found. While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way, according to findings published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. AI language models like ChatGPT are passively…

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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

+972 and Local Call reports: The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely…

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How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution

Stephen Witt writes: The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable…

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Powerful forces are fracking our attention. We can fight back

Powerful forces are fracking our attention. We can fight back

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt write: The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts. By some measures you are…

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Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is?

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is?

Karen Hao writes: Last week, it seemed that OpenAI—the secretive firm behind ChatGPT—had been broken open. The company’s board had suddenly fired CEO Sam Altman, hundreds of employees revolted in protest, Altman was reinstated, and the media dissected the story from every possible angle. Yet the reporting belied the fact that our view into the most crucial part of the company is still so fundamentally limited: We don’t really know how OpenAI develops its technology, nor do we understand exactly…

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The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

Douglas Rushkoff writes: Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster – Going Infinite – into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked…

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Sam Altman has retaken the throne at OpenAI

Sam Altman has retaken the throne at OpenAI

Charlie Warzel writes: Five days after Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI and many twists later, the company has announced that he will, in fact, return as CEO. The company’s board of directors, at the core of the drama, is being overhauled. The dust finally appears to be settling. In the days after his firing, Altman managed to prove that he is far more than a figurehead, winning over a majority of OpenAI employees (including Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and…

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