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AI poses as great a threat to humanity as nuclear war and pandemics, industry leaders warn

AI poses as great a threat to humanity as nuclear war and pandemics, industry leaders warn

The New York Times reports: A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit…

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AI desperately needs global oversight

AI desperately needs global oversight

Rumman Chowdhury writes: Every time you post a photo, respond on social media, make a website, or possibly even send an email, your data is scraped, stored, and used to train generative AI technology that can create text, audio, video, and images with just a few words. This has real consequences: OpenAI researchers studying the labor market impact of their language models estimated that approximately 80 percent of the US workforce could have at least 10 percent of their work…

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Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

France 24 reports: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is “mismanaged”, meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent…

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How the media is covering ChatGPT

How the media is covering ChatGPT

Columbia Journalism Review reports: With advancements in AI tools being rolled out at breakneck pace, journalists face the task of reporting developments with the appropriate nuance and context—to audiences who may be encountering this kind of technology for the first time. But sometimes this coverage has been alarmist. The linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky criticized “hyperbolic headlines” in a New York Times op-ed. And there have been a lot of them. “Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’” “‘Godfather of AI’ says AI could kill…

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A lawyer used ChatGPT to help prepare a court filing. The program fooled him with fiction and lies

A lawyer used ChatGPT to help prepare a court filing. The program fooled him with fiction and lies

The New York Times reports: The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air…

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Create an IPCC-like body to harness benefits and combat harms of digital tech

Create an IPCC-like body to harness benefits and combat harms of digital tech

Joseph Bak-Coleman et al write: Search engines, online banking, social-media platforms and large-language models, such as ChatGPT, are among the many computational systems that offer (or could offer) tremendous benefits. They provide people with unprecedented access to information. They help to connect hundreds of millions of individuals. And they could make all sorts of tasks easier, from writing computer code to preparing scientific manuscripts. Such innovations also come with risks. The speed at which content can be generated and shared…

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Some neural networks learn language like humans

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Steve Nadis writes: How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, ostensibly mimicking the way our brains process information, we don’t know if they process input in similar ways. “There’s been a long-standing debate as to whether neural networks learn in the same way that humans do,” said…

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Archaeologists discover the oldest known blueprints

Archaeologists discover the oldest known blueprints

Smithsonian Magazine reports: Stone Age hunters in the Middle East and Central Asia used giant stone structures to trap wild animals. Today, archaeologists refer to these massive constructions as desert kites because of how they look from above—like a kite with several long tails. Now, in a study published last week in the journal PLOS One, researchers say they have found stone engravings that are accurate, to-scale depictions of desert kites that date to between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago….

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ChatGPT can’t think – consciousness is something entirely different to today’s AI

ChatGPT can’t think – consciousness is something entirely different to today’s AI

Illus_man / Shutterstock By Philip Goff, Durham University There has been shock around the world at the rapid rate of progress with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence created with what’s known as large language models (LLMs). These systems can produce text that seems to display thought, understanding and even creativity. But can these systems really think and understand? This is not a question that can be answered through technological advance, but careful philosophical analysis and argument tells us the answer…

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AI’s ostensible emergent abilities are a mirage

AI’s ostensible emergent abilities are a mirage

Stanford University Human-Centered AI: For a few years now, tech leaders have been touting AI’s supposed emergent abilities: the possibility that beyond a certain threshold of complexity, large language models (LLMs) are doing unpredictable things. If we can harness that capacity, AI might be able to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, the story goes. But unpredictability is also scary: Could making a model bigger unleash a completely unpredictable and potentially malevolent actor into the world? That concern is widely…

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FBI disrupts Russian hacking tool used to steal information from foreign governments

FBI disrupts Russian hacking tool used to steal information from foreign governments

CNN reports: The FBI announced Tuesday that it has disrupted a network of hacked computers that Russian spies have used for years to steal sensitive information from at least 50 countries, including NATO governments. The action appears to be a major blow to Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, which has allegedly used the sophisticated hacking tool to infiltrate US and Western diplomatic and military agencies for nearly two decades. It’s the latest move by the Justice Department to more…

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EPA’s car pollution rules would save Americans trillions of dollars

EPA’s car pollution rules would save Americans trillions of dollars

Yale Climate Connections reports: Electric vehicle (EV) sales are surging in many countries around the world, including the United States. According to the Department of Energy, EVs accounted for just 1% of new U.S. car sales in 2017. That share surpassed 3% in 2021 and approached 6% in 2022. Though the U.S. remains well below the global average EV share of new car sales, which exceeded 14% in 2022, the American market is catching up fast. According to an analysis of global markets…

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Our way of life is poisoning us

Our way of life is poisoning us

Mark O’Connell writes: There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we have learned of it, it has become a…

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Federal Trade Commission chair: We must regulate AI. Here’s how

Federal Trade Commission chair: We must regulate AI. Here’s how

Lina M. Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, writes: It’s both exciting and unsettling to have a realistic conversation with a computer. Thanks to the rapid advance of generative artificial intelligence, many of us have now experienced this potentially revolutionary technology with vast implications for how people live, work and communicate around the world. The full extent of generative A.I.’s potential is still up for debate, but there’s little doubt it will be highly disruptive. The last time we found ourselves…

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The oceans are missing their rivers

The oceans are missing their rivers

Erica Gies writes: Gazing out from the eighth floor of a hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, the broad expanse of the Atlantic Ocean was a muddy brown. Only a thin rim of blue on the horizon showed the ocean’s true color; the rest swirled with sediment emerging from the mouth of the Essequibo River. In a rhythm that’s pulsed through epochs, a river’s plume carries sediment and nutrients from the continental interior into the ocean, a major exchange of resources from…

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‘The Godfather of AI’ leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

‘The Godfather of AI’ leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

The New York Times reports: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative…

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