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Open AI offered to hire Scarlett Johansson for her voice. She declined. They then created a voice just like hers.

Open AI offered to hire Scarlett Johansson for her voice. She declined. They then created a voice just like hers.

Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI situation. Wow: pic.twitter.com/8ibMeLfqP8 — Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) May 20, 2024 NPR reports: Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own. Johansson’s legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed “Sky,” Johansson’s publicist told NPR in a revelation that…

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How 3M executives convinced a scientist the forever chemicals she found in human blood were safe

How 3M executives convinced a scientist the forever chemicals she found in human blood were safe

ProPublica reports: Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination. Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard,…

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The tech baron seeking to ‘ethnically cleanse’ San Francisco

The tech baron seeking to ‘ethnically cleanse’ San Francisco

Gil Duran writes: To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius. “Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve…

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My dinner with Andreessen

My dinner with Andreessen

Rick Perlstein writes: Recently, I read about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces, up for sale for $33.75 million. This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California; or the $34 million one he bought beside it; or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach. Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and…

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Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world

Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world

Bryan Norton writes: By the start of the 1970s, a growing number of philosophers and political theorists began calling into question the immediacy of our lived experience. The world around us was no longer seen by these thinkers as something that was simply given, as it had been for phenomenologists such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The world instead presented itself as a built environment composed of things such as roads, power plants and houses, all made possible by…

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From 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth

From 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth

NASA reports: For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars). Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission…

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Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

Jerry Useem writes: The sight of Bill Boeing was a familiar one on the factory floor. His office was in the building next to the converted boatyard where workers lathed the wood, sewed the fabric wings, and fixed the control wires of the Boeing Model C airplane. there is no authority except facts. facts are obtained by accurate observation read a plaque affixed outside the door. And what could need closer observation than the process of his aircraft being built?…

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Google fires dozens of employees who protested $1.2 billion contract with Israel

Google fires dozens of employees who protested $1.2 billion contract with Israel

HuffPost reports: Google has fired more than two dozen employees who publicly protested against the tech giant’s controversial $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with Israel, as institutions face increased pressure to divest from a government whose U.S.-funded military is in its sixth month of attacking Gaza. The workers held protests on Tuesday at Google’s campuses in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, the latter of which houses the Google Cloud headquarters. Organized by No Tech for Apartheid, the employees participated…

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Texas hacking may be first disruption of U.S. water system by Russia

Texas hacking may be first disruption of U.S. water system by Russia

The Washington Post reports: In January, an alert citizen in Muleshoe, Tex., was driving by a park and noticed that a water tower was overflowing. Authorities soon determined the system that controlled the city’s water supply had been hacked. In two hours, tens of thousands of gallons of water had flowed into the street and drain pipes. The hackers posted a video online of the town’s water-control systems and a nearby town being manipulated, showing how they reset the controls….

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‘No tech for apartheid!’: Google workers revolt over $1.2 billion contract with Israel

‘No tech for apartheid!’: Google workers revolt over $1.2 billion contract with Israel

Time reports: In midtown Manhattan on March 4, Google’s managing director for Israel, Barak Regev, was addressing a conference promoting the Israeli tech industry when a member of the audience stood up in protest. “I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance,” shouted the protester, wearing an orange t-shirt emblazoned with a white Google logo. “No tech for apartheid!” The Google worker, a 23-year-old software engineer named Eddie Hatfield,…

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Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

The Lever reports: ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own. Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in…

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Yes, social media really is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

Yes, social media really is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

Jon Haidt writes: For centuries, adults have worried about whatever “kids these days” are doing. From novels in the 18th century to the bicycle in the 19th and through comic books, rock and roll, marijuana, and violent video games in the 20th century, there are always those who ring alarms, and there are always those who are skeptics of those alarms. So far, the skeptics have been right more often than not, and when they are right, they earn the…

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‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

The Guardian reports: The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war. In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict. Their…

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The deaths of effective altruism

The deaths of effective altruism

Leif Wenar writes: I’m fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed. Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind now sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes. Facebook mogul Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn have spent mega-millions on its causes, and EAs have made major moves to influence American politics. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over…

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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

The American Prospect reports: John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed. “John is…

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Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Science Alert reports: The number of people being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD) has risen sharply in recent decades, and research continues to delve into the factors involved in these conditions. A study revealed there’s a difference in how children with autism or ADHD clear the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), compared to neurotypical children. BPA is used in a lot of plastics and plastic production processes, and can also…

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