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Category: Technology

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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Chemical plants in China and U.S. emit climate super-pollutant that’s 273 times more potent than CO2

Chemical plants in China and U.S. emit climate super-pollutant that’s 273 times more potent than CO2

Inside Climate News reports: Twelve chemical plants in China and the United States emit a potent climate pollutant with collective emissions equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 31 million automobiles, according to a report published on Thursday by Global Efficiency Intelligence, an industrial decarbonization research and consulting firm based in Tampa. The emissions, which also deplete the earth’s protective ozone layer, could be effectively eliminated at little cost, the report’s authors conclude. The 11 Chinese plants and one U.S….

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Why fusion power won’t avert climate catastrophe

Why fusion power won’t avert climate catastrophe

Philip Ball writes: One look at your energy bills this winter might have convinced you that the 1950s idea that electricity would, in the near future, become “too cheap to meter” was not so much a false promise as a sick joke. That over-excited claim was prompted by hopes that nuclear fusion – the process triggered in an uncontrolled manner in hydrogen bombs – would soon be harnessed for power generation. In the type of nuclear power we have today,…

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Facing brutal climate math, U.S. bets billions on direct air capture

Facing brutal climate math, U.S. bets billions on direct air capture

Reuters reports: The world is failing to cut carbon emissions fast enough to avoid disastrous climate change, a dawning truth that is giving life to a technology that for years has been marginal – pulling carbon dioxide from the air. Leading the charge, the U.S. government has offered $3.5 billion in grants to build the factories that will capture and permanently store the gas – the largest such effort globally to help halt climate change through Direct Air Capture (DAC)…

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The hacking of ChatGPT is just getting started

The hacking of ChatGPT is just getting started

Wired reports: It took Alex Polyakov just a couple of hours to break GPT-4. When OpenAI released the latest version of its text-generating chatbot in March, Polyakov sat down in front of his keyboard and started entering prompts designed to bypass OpenAI’s safety systems. Soon, the CEO of security firm Adversa AI had GPT-4 spouting homophobic statements, creating phishing emails, and supporting violence. Polyakov is one of a small number of security researchers, technologists, and computer scientists developing jailbreaks and prompt injection…

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AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why

AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why

Shutterstock/Valentyn640 By David Beer, University of York In 1956, during a year-long trip to London and in his early 20s, the mathematician and theoretical biologist Jack D. Cowan visited Wilfred Taylor and his strange new “learning machine”. On his arrival he was baffled by the “huge bank of apparatus” that confronted him. Cowan could only stand by and watch “the machine doing its thing”. The thing it appeared to be doing was performing an “associative memory scheme” – it seemed…

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If it’s advertised to you online, you probably shouldn’t buy it. Here’s why

If it’s advertised to you online, you probably shouldn’t buy it. Here’s why

Julia Angwin writes: Tech firms track nearly every click from website to website, develop detailed profiles of your interests and desires and make that data available to advertisers. That’s why you get those creepy ads in your Instagram feed or on websites that seem to know what you were just talking about. The ability to track people has turned out to be an unbeatable advantage for the online ad industry, which has grown to a $540 billion market worldwide, according…

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AI can spread climate misinformation ‘much cheaper and faster,’ study warns

AI can spread climate misinformation ‘much cheaper and faster,’ study warns

Inside Climate News reports: A team of researchers is ringing new alarm bells over the potential dangers artificial intelligence poses to the already fraught landscape of online misinformation, including when it comes to spreading conspiracy theories and misleading claims about climate change. NewsGuard, a company that monitors and researches online misinformation, released a study last week that found at least one leading AI developer has failed to implement effective guardrails to prevent users from generating potentially harmful content with its…

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