The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence
Erik Brynjolfsson
Director
Stanford Digital Economy Lab
... The future is not preordained. We control the extent to which AI either expands human opportunity through augmentation or replaces humans through automation. We can work on challenges that are easy for machines and hard for humans, rather than hard for machines and easy for humans. The first option offers the opportunity of growing and sharing the economic pie by augmenting the workforce with tools and platforms. The second option risks dividing the economic pie among an ever-smaller number of people by creating automation that displaces ever-more types of workers. ...
More and more Americans, and indeed workers around the world, believe that while the technology may be creating a new billionaire class, it is not working for them. ...
The solution is not to slow down technology, but rather to eliminate or reverse the excess incentives for automation over augmentation. ...
See the full 20 minute read here: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/the-turing-trap-the-promise-peril-of-human-like-artificial-intelligence/?fbclid=IwAR3FnzIYD1E3MWdInpFvJ1dOY0WROVtZ9gDdbvhVCsD5-EnlAaoGcnv4vAI
The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing will Emerge from a Failed Idea
... Why do some consumer social products finally make it big after a series of misses? Part of the magic often hides within UX details — particularly, those that help people make fewer decisions and take fewer risks. The more opinionated an app is about how it should be used, the easier it is for users to act without fear of rejection. Products benefit from giving people the plausible deniability to say: “I’m not seeking attention, I’m just doing what this app tells me to do!” ...
Vine's UX placed an enormous amount of decision-making baggage upon users. TikTok, on the other hand, gave users just one easy option: open the app and watch entertaining videos. ...
Just as importantly, the app helped new creators—even those without followers!—get attention for their videos, lessening their fear of rejection. When a creator posted a video, TikTok showed it to a sample audience and then expanded to bigger targeted audiences if it did well—a form of a recursive publishing feedback loop. ...
See the full story here: https://every.to/p/the-boneyard-principle?fbclid=IwAR2ZNSSz_-jHlLAwaN-5VG5QiDC3OiSNZdQedDW43XnNDjkfjZzknu0hvIg
Bored? Follow the ETH.
On the morning of January 23, 2022, I saw a tweet about purchasing a Bored Ape NFT for 135 ETH that I assumed was completely fake. It turned out to be fake. But the transaction was absolutely real. How do I know? The Ethereum blockchain is a public ledger. Transactions are viewable by anyone (including you and me), so let’s do a little exploring and see who spent $337,500 (1 ETH = $2,500 at the time) to get their Bored Ape. ...
If you feel like you’ve invaded Rob Kapito’s privacy, you haven’t. This Twitter account was a fake and, to my knowledge, Rob Kapito had nothing to do with this. The strength and the weakness of public blockchain transactions is that they are public. If I were slightly more motivated and wanted more information about this wallet’s activity, a company like Chainalysis would be my next stop.
This Is Not the Future, It’s Now
We are used to public records. Deeds to houses, car registrations, driver’s licenses, titles to land, etc. We are less used to public records of our daily transactions. Yet, here we are. Forewarned is forearmed.
See the full article here: https://www.shellypalmer.com/2022/04/bored-follow-the-eth/?ck_subscriber_id=1646162133&utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bored%3F+Follow+the+ETH.%20-%207995063
AI-Generated Characters Are Here, They’re Just Not Evenly Distributed
Sarah Guisto from Aww Inc took the audience through a fast-paced tour of virtual characters that her studio in Tokyo has successfully built and deployed. Perhaps the most famous is Imma, who is now three years old and most well-known for performing at the Tokyo Paralympics closing ceremony. Aww is the leading Asian company in virtual humans combining not just advanced technology but an empathetic approach to design, crafting these beings in a way that not just renders them technical, but also credible and emotional.
As Asia’s number one influential virtual human with over 1 million followers on Instagram and Tik Tok, Imma has ‘worked with’ brands such as Porsche, Dior, and Nike, regularly appearing on the covers of magazines, and one can see the appeal for brands. These characters are flexible, adaptable, and global. They don’t demand repeat fees in media and they probably turn up on the dot and are never late for a shoot. But the foremost reason is that they can become whoever you want them to be. ...
As Jeanne Lim, CEO of Being AI suggested,... Lim wants to build trust between humans and these virtual beings. What are the required elements to achieve that? According to Lim, it’s a combination of an engaging and consistent personality, a sense of morality and empathy to avoid causing harm, a way to perceive a user’s emotions (by detecting when people are sad or happy through facial expressions as well as through conversation), each being having a specific skill set, and an interoperable approach for real-time interactivity so these beings are not trapped in an app only to be used on certain platforms or in certain spaces. ...
Professor Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University ... in virtual reality (VR), tracking and rendering are used, so the only thing that travels over the network is tracking data rather than any visual information about the world.
The people you see within your VR headset have been redrawn using that tracking information. ...
Finally, one theme that came up more than once was how deep fakes could help us to anonymize ourselves. For example, if we had an app where we could choose a different face and a new tone of voice, before being connected to a counselor in group therapy, we could speak about our emotional situation without giving away our identity. ...
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceyfollows/2022/04/15/ai-generated-characters-are-here-theyre-just-not-evenly-distributed/?sh=5dd387716b31
DALL-E 2: New AI Technology Generates Astounding Images with Just a Few Words of Text
San Francisco artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI announced last week its image generation AI, DALL-E, has received a major upgrade, reported MIT Technology Review.
DALL-E 2, as the upgraded tool is called, converts text prompts into images like its predecessor. However, the new version is reportedly far more advanced, creating images that more accurately match the text prompt and can even be tweaked to incorporate different styles. ...
See the full story here: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/new-ai-technology-dall-e-2-1234625354/
Niantic Releases its New Augmented Reality Pet Game, ‘Peridot’
Peridot is a Tamagotchi-like pet game where players care for unique virtual creatures and raise them to adulthood.
....
Similar to Tamagotchi, Dots need to be maintained, and players can pet, play, feed, and teach them new tricks to help them grow. Players can also collaborate with each other to cross-breed and expand the Peridot species for “infinite possibilities of Peridot archetypes” resembling “cheetahs, dragons, unicorns, and more.”
The Peridot creatures come to life through the camera-based augmented reality, and the Dots are able to recognize the difference between real-world surfaces such as water, grass, sand, etc. The app can also be easily integrated with social media platforms for quick and easy photo-sharing of in-game snapshots. ...
See the full story here: https://hypebeast.com/2022/4/niantic-new-augmented-reality-virtual-pet-game-peridot-release-info
The cult-inspired designs for Seattle International Film Festival
The posters and other materials reference that idea of cult-like devotion through a variety of references to new age spirituality, secret societies, fringe religions and ‘depictions of paradise’. “We wanted to create a feeling of ritual and worship with the Seekers that was secular, positive and especially fun,” Watson adds. “This cult is all about the good culty stuff, like comfortable robes, dancing, and singing the praises of SIFF. It’s more like the Partridge Family than the Manson Family.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-cult-inspired-designs-for-seattle-international-film-festival/
