A little over 50% of the votes in Estonia's parliamentary elections over the weekend were cast online — marking what appears to be the first mostly online nationwide election in the world.
Estonia has been a pioneer in "i-voting," first offering it as an option in 2005. The number of citizens taking advantage of internet voting has crept up since then.
Still, the Baltic state remains a global outlier when it comes to online voting. ...
Despite Estonia's success with internet voting, it could be hard for other countries to implement it on a large scale, according to Steve Kremer of the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. ...
The results are so ultra-realistic it’s going to become harder and harder to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. ...
Rather than answering our questions, a TikTok spokesperson provided a statement that read, “Being true to yourself is celebrated and encouraged on TikTok. Creative Effects are a part of what makes it fun to create content, empowering self-expression and creativity. Transparency is built into the effect experience, as all videos using them are clearly marked by default.”
But there’s a fraught debate about whether filters enable self-expression or cause users, particularly young girls, to hold themselves to unattainable ideals. ...
“It’s good that people are freaking out. It’s raising awareness. Is that really beauty? Do we really want young girls to dream about becoming the clone of a clone?” she asks.
...you are firmly grounded in a time and place. There are waves rippling around you, orange cones to indicate the boundaries of where you can go, and tiny little people on the island of La Kalma talking to you. Why are the people so tiny? Well, because you’re an enormous sea kraken. But to these people, who saw you grow up from an adorable, teeny-tiny kraken, you are just a person. And now that you’re 16, it’s time for you to get to work. ...
Sticking and building with your tentacles is full of feedback that feels completely real. If you try to pick up something huge with the tip, your tentacle streeeeeeetches until it unsticks and thwaps someone right into the sea. ...
Look, I get it: Reading is boring. ... Tentacular does give you the option of using the O button to rapidly click through dialog. But every time I slowed down, I caught something sly and funny, like a villager shrieking “Mommy!” when I accidentally shot a cannon at her. ...
The PSVR 2’s comfort also makes that much easier to achieve. I love the accessibility of the Meta Quest 2 (getting it set up and switching between users is much easier), but the PSVR 2 is just much, much easier to wear. The headset’s balance is better. I don’t feel like I have something huge and sweaty hanging off my face, and the controllers are much more comfortable and stable, better able to cope with Tentacular’s tactile challenges. ...
Government should not “abdicate” its responsibilities and leave the future path of artificial intelligence solely to Big Tech, Aleksander Mądry, the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing at MIT and director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning, told a Congressional panel on Wednesday.
Rather, Mądry said, government should be asking questions about the purpose and explainability of the algorithms corporations are using, as a precursor to regulation, which he described as “an important tool” in ensuring that AI is consistent with society’s goals. If the government doesn’t start asking questions, then “I am extremely worried” about the future of AI, Mądry said in response to a question from Rep. Gerald Connolly.
Mądry, a leading expert on explainability and AI, was testifying at a hearing titled “Advances in AI: Are We Ready for a Tech Revolution?” before the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, a panel of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. The other witnesses at the hearing were former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, IBM Vice President Scott Crowder, and Center for AI and Digital Policy Senior Research Director Merve Hickok. ...
... Mądry raised three overarching points. First, he noted that AI is “no longer a matter of science fiction” ...Second, he said AI exposes us to “interactions that go against our intuition.” ... Finally, he said too little attention has been paid to problems that will result from the nature of the AI “supply chain” — the way AI systems are built on top of each other. ... the mix of AI tools makes it difficult to know whom to hold responsible when a problem results — who should be legally liable and who should address the concern. ...
... That's because the work - one of several fan recreations replacing the 1665 original while it's on loan for a huge Vermeer show at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum - was made using artificial intelligence (AI).
Its presence has sparked a fierce debate, with questions over whether it belongs in the hallowed halls of the Mauritshuis - and whether it should be classed as art at all....
"The people who selected this, they liked it, they knew that it was AI, but we liked the creation. So we chose it, and we hung it."...
The Mauritshuis then chose it as one of five images out of 3,482 submitted by fans that would be printed and physically hung in the room where "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is normally housed. ...
... It’s why more than three years ago, he conceived of a new company that could serve first and foremost as proof-of-personhood. Called Worldcoin, its three-part mission — to create a global ID, a global currency and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers using its own token, along with other digital assets and traditional currencies — is as ambitious as it is technically complicated, but the opportunity is also vast.
In broad strokes, here’s how the outfit, still in beta and based in San Francisco and Berlin, works: To use the service, users must download its app, then have their iris scanned using a silver, melon-sized orb that houses a custom optical system. Once the scan is complete, the individual is added to a database of verified humans, and Worldcoin creates a unique cryptographic “hash” or equation that’s tied to that real person. The scan isn’t saved, but the hash can be used in the future to prove the person’s identity anonymously through the app, which includes a private key that links to a shareable public key. ...
Now, reorganized under a new parent organization called Tools for Humanity that calls itself both a research lab and product company, the outfit is sharing more details. ...
... What Lark Optics does differently, Shrestha says, is it projects the augmented reality image onto the user’s retina. This means the AR is always in focus no matter what your eyes do to adjust to the real world around you.
So far the startup has developed a proof of concept and is now iterating to refine its demonstrator model. Shrestha says they conducted two successful user studies with their proof of concept; one in their own lab and another with an external partner he prefers not to name. ...
Competition
As mentioned above, others are tackling the problem of AR sickness in different ways. LetinAR uses a ‘pin mirror’ method, Kura Technologies has developed a ‘structured geometric waveguide eyepiece’, while VividQ “compute[s] holograms in real-time on low power devices and integrate[s] them with off-the-shelf display hardware.”
Another company, SeeReal develops holography-based solutions to address depth issues in 3D displays. ...
... The team asked 444 white collar workers to do writing and editing tasks along the lines of marketing, grant writing, data analysis, and human resources and then split the group into two: one that used ChatGPT and one that did not. ...
The ChatGPT using group was 37% faster at completing tasks (17 minutes to complete vs. 27 minutes) with roughly similar grades (level of quality), and as the workers repeated their tasks for improvement the ChatGPT groups quality went up significantly faster. In other words, ChatGPT did make work speedier with no sacrifice in quality and then made it easier to “improve work quickly” using the tool. ...
Then they asked the participants to “iterate” on their work to improve quality and once again the ChatGPT group outperformed their peers. As this chart shows the aided team scores higher quality at the outset and after multiple iterations the two groups start to come together. This is true despite the fact that 68% of the ChatGPT group submitted results from only one query, essentially saying that ChatGPT is dramatically reducing effort (ie. people are not iterating a lot to get a better and better answer). ...
The tool somewhat reduces brainstorming, greatly reduces rough draft creation, but is then more actively used during the final editing process. ...
To me this study confirms my belief that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular has an enormously positive role to play in our business and personal lives in the future. It’s up to us, as users, to learn to use it for good.
PhilNote: I am glad they mention the ethical issues. Our curiosity will eventually kill us, I think, based on this group's comments.
“Xenobots” are living, swimming self-powered robots that measure less than a millimeter across. They are evolved by artificial intelligence and built out of frog stem cells—and they could open new medical frontiers.
“We created the Digital Economy Lab because, as much as I’m blown away by these technologies, the bottleneck is our human response,” he says. “What will we do about the economy, jobs and ethics? How will we transform organisations that aren’t changing nearly fast enough? I want to speed up our response.”
Brynjolfsson spoke passionately about this subject at Davos in a session entitled “AI and white-collar jobs”. In it, he advised companies to adopt technology in a controlled manner. Offering a historical analogy, he pointed out that, when electricity infrastructure became available about a century ago, it took at least three decades for most firms to fully realise the productivity gain it offered because they first needed to revamp their workplaces to make the best use of it.
“We’re in a similar period with AI,” Brynjolfsson told delegates. “What AI is doing is affecting job quality and how we do the work. So we must address to what extent we keep humans in the loop rather than focus on driving down wages.”
Why AI will create winners and losers
The risk of technology racing too far ahead of humanity for comfort is a familiar topic for Brynjolfsson. In both Race Against the Machine (2011) and The Second Machine Age (2014), he and his co-author, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, called for greater efforts to update organisations, processes and skills.
... “When we wrote those books, we were optimistic about the pace of technological change and pessimistic about our ability to adapt,” Brynjolfsson says. “It turns out that we weren’t optimistic enough about the technology or pessimistic enough about our institutions and skills.” ...
Brynjolfsson commends an alternative route, which has been taken by the Toyota Research Institute, among others. When he was in Davos, the institute’s CEO, Dr Gill Pratt “told me how his team has flipped things around so that the autonomous system is used as the guardian angel. Creating a self-driving car that works in all possible conditions is tough, but humans can handle those exceptions.” ...
