Category Archives: artificial intelligence

artificial intelligence, dystopia, economics, ethics, government, privacy, social media, technology, work

FBI Says People Are Using Deepfakes to Apply to Remote Jobs

According to the FBI’s announcement, more companies have been reporting people applying to jobs using video, images, or recordings that are manipulated to look and sound like somebody else. These fakers are also using personal identifiable information from other people—stolen identities—to apply to jobs at IT, programming, database, and software firms. The report noted that many of these open positions had access to sensitive customer or employee data, as well as financial and proprietary company info, implying the imposters could have a desire to steal sensitive information as well as a bent to cash a fraudulent paycheck.

https://gizmodo-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/gizmodo.com/deepfakes-remote-work-job-applications-fbi-1849118604/amp
archetypes, artificial intelligence, cities, climate change, culture mapping, dystopia, education, ethics, forecasting, global, government, society

Can humanity leave nature behind?

In the face of environmental collapse, humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature – how might we avoid the most dystopian of these futures? Researcher Lauren Holt makes the case for a broader form of “offsetting” to help balance technology with natural systems.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220608-should-we-detach-ourselves-from-nature

artificial intelligence, health, language, technology, wearable technology

Google Shows Early Preview of Augmented Reality Glasses

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which failed to find a consumer audience for its internet-connected glasses about a decade ago, on Wednesday presented a prototype of augmented reality glasses aimed at the general public. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/google-shows-early-preview-of-augmented-reality-glasses
artificial intelligence, dystopia, ethics, facial recognition, genetics, health, internet of things, society, surveillance, technology, the home, wearable technology

What Nietzsche can teach us about embracing risk and failure in an age of technological comforts

Safety through technology is certainly not a bad thing. But the need for safety can become pathological. Friedrich Nietzsche’s basic premise is that failure is an option. It is woven tightly into a life worth living. It is time for a personal inventory: Which of our devices and practices enable a life that experiences the world in ways and places not always engineered for our comfort?

https://bigthink.com/thinking/nietzsche-failure-comfort/
artificial intelligence, dystopia, forecasting, generations, global, government, politics, surveillance, technology

How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War?

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling previously infeasible capabilities, potentially destabilizing the delicate balances that have forestalled nuclear war since 1945. Will these developments upset the nuclear strategic balance, and, if so, for better or for worse? To start to address this question, RAND researchers held a series of workshops that were attended by prominent experts on AI and nuclear security. The workshops examined the impact of advanced computing on nuclear security through 2040. The culmination of those workshops, this Perspective — one of a series that examines critical security challenges in 2040 — places the intersection of AI and nuclear war in historical context and characterizes the range of expert opinions. It then describes the types of anticipated concerns and benefits through two illustrative examples: AI for detection and for tracking and targeting and AI as a trusted adviser in escalation decisions. In view of the capabilities that AI may be expected to enable and how adversaries may perceive them, AI has the potential to exacerbate emerging challenges to nuclear strategic stability by the year 2040 even with only modest rates of technical progress. Thus, it is important to understand how this might happen and to assure that it does not.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE296.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE296.html

More than half the world’s millennials fear a nuclear attack this decade

The International Committee of the Red Cross, a worldwide humanitarian organization, surveyed 16,000 millennials — adults between the ages of 20 and 35 — in 16 countries and territories last year: Afghanistan, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestinian Territories, Russia, South Africa, Syria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the United States.

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/20/21070621/millennials-survey-nuclear-world-war-3-red-cross
artificial intelligence, beauty, color, ethics, facial recognition, innovation, language, technology

Building a more inclusive way to search

Detecting a skin tone in an image is a challenging problem, because it depends a lot on lighting, shadows, how prominent a face is, blurriness, and many other factors. The most accurate way to detect a skin tone in a Pin’s image would be to have a human label every single Pin image according to a scientific skin tone palette. But with billions of unique images, and many more created each day, that’s an expensive approach that would be hard to scale.

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-a-more-inclusive-way-to-search-789f4c92fd73
artificial intelligence, dystopia, ethics, forecasting, generations, health, innovation, living room, surveillance, technology, the home, virtual reality

What the metaverse might mean for kids

And not fully understanding the difference between a virtual world and real life can have darker consequences as well. Graber says that playing a game in which you’re attacked with a gun or knife can feel more intense to a child than an adult. And metaverse worlds could expose children to bullies or even pedophiles in new, scary ways.

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/family/2022/02/what-the-metaverse-might-mean-for-kids