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Category: Technology

What Elon Musk really wants from Trump

What Elon Musk really wants from Trump

Franklin Foer writes: Musk’s public affection for Trump begins, almost certainly, with his savvy understanding of economic interests—namely, his own. Like so many other billionaire exponents of libertarianism, he has turned the government into a spectacular profit center. His company SpaceX relies on contracts with three-letter agencies and the Pentagon. It has subsumed some of NASA’s core functions. Tesla thrives on government tax credits for electric vehicles and subsidies for its network of charging stations. By Politico’s tabulation, both companies…

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Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza

Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza

The Associated Press reports: Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas. The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology…

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Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Muriel Leuenberger writes: Your phone and its apps know a lot about you. Who you are talking to and spending time with, where you go, what music, games, and movies you like, how you look, which news articles you read, who you find attractive, what you buy with your credit card, and how many steps you take. This information is already being exploited to sell us products, services, or politicians. Online traces allow companies like Google or Facebook to infer…

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Can computers think? No, they can’t actually do anything

Can computers think? No, they can’t actually do anything

Alva Noë writes: Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without…

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Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide?

Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide?

Kevin Roose reports: On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.” “I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote. “I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied. Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters…

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How tech billionaires became the GOP’s new donor class

How tech billionaires became the GOP’s new donor class

The New York Times reports: Last February, the billionaire financier Nelson Peltz summoned a group of about 20 wealthy, predominantly Republican donors and a handful of G.O.P. strategists to dinner at his $334 million waterfront estate in Palm Beach, Fla. There were plenty of people in the room who had publicly disavowed former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — Peltz among them — but it was pretty clear now that he was going to…

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An AI-powered bot army on X spread pro-Trump and pro-GOP propaganda, research shows

An AI-powered bot army on X spread pro-Trump and pro-GOP propaganda, research shows

NBC News reports: An army of political propaganda accounts powered by artificial intelligence posed as real people on X to argue in favor of Republican candidates and causes, according to a research report out of Clemson University. The report details a coordinated AI campaign using large language models (LLM) — the type of artificial intelligence that powers convincing, human-seeming chat bots like ChatGPT — to reply to other users. While it’s unclear who operated or funded the network, its focus…

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What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis

What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis

Charlie Warzel writes: The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene…

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Google’s former CEO: AI advances more important than climate goals

Google’s former CEO: AI advances more important than climate goals

Mashable reports: AI is demanding more and more energy for its immense processing needs, and while many of it’s leaders are addressing the climate concerns, others are letting artificial intelligence lead the way. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is among the latter, for one. Appearing at a recent Washington AI summit, Schmidt argued that current climate goals should be abandoned in favor of a no-bars-held approach to AI investment. “All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this…

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In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots

In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots

Ryan Carter Images / Shutterstock By Hallam Stevens, James Cook University By now, many of us are probably familiar with artificial intelligence hype. AI will make artists redundant! AI can do lab experiments! AI will end grief! Even by these standards, the latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of “The Intelligence Age”, he declares, powered by a “superintelligence” that may just be a…

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The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation

The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation

The Washington Post reports: Extremists are using artificial intelligence to reanimate Adolf Hitler online for a new generation, recasting the Nazi German leader who orchestrated the Holocaust as a “misunderstood” figure whose antisemitic and anti-immigrant messages are freshly resonant in politics today. In audio and video clips that have reached millions of viewers over the past month on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube, the führer’s AI-cloned voice quavers and crescendos as he delivers English-language versions of some of his most…

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How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

Robert Reich writes: Shortly after the apparent second assassination attempt against Trump, Elon Musk responded in a now deleted post: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔 ????” Musk later said his post was intended as a joke. But it could be interpreted as a call to murder Biden and Harris — at least by one of the 198 million followers of Musk who initially received it. Presumably this is why the Secret Service is investigating it. Under 18…

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Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize

Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize

Nature reports: A study of newer, bigger versions of three major artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots shows that they are more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance. The assessment also found that people aren’t great at spotting the bad answers. Plenty of attention has been given to the fact that the large language models (LLMs) used to power chatbots sometimes get things wrong or ‘hallucinate’ strange responses to queries. José Hernández-Orallo at the Valencian Research Institute for Artificial…

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Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Universe Today reports: Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C…

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Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Robyn Speer, the creator of wordfreq, writes: The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore. Generative AI has polluted the data I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans. The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language…

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Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

The Guardian reports: Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution. According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter…

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