No-Code AI and Prediction Tools Bring Coding to the People
A new AI revolution is underway, turning people who know little about coding into developers. Called “no code,” startups are emerging to productize this new category, which essentially lets people use familiar, clickable web interfaces and even natural language to automate tasks or create simple applications, while machine learning takes over the rest. Proponents predict it will be a game-changer, powering a brigade of “citizen developers” to leverage artificial intelligence without knowing how to write code. Startups entering the space include Juji, which makes creating AI chatbots as easy as programming PowerPoint. ...
Wired explains that OpenAI developers “have already built demos that let a layperson write simple apps just by describing what they want: ‘Make me a personal website with PayPal embedded for payments,’ or ‘Write an app that finds travel expenses in my bank statements and puts them in a spreadsheet.’” ...
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/no-code-ai-and-prediction-tools-bring-coding-to-the-people/
Can an Online Course Help Big Tech Find Its Soul?
The course, which comes out of beta today, was developed by the Center for Humane Technology. The nonprofit’s purpose has mainly been to give language to the uneasiness around technology’s impact on society, popularizing terms like “time well spent” (a metric to replace engagement on screens) and “human downgrading” (to describe the cumulative negative effect of technology on peoples’ cognition). The organization’s cofounder is Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler who called attention to the search giant’s extractive features in 2013. He has since left the industry and made a career out of rehabilitating it. ...
The new course is meant, in part, to answer that question, speaking directly to rehabilitated techies like Read. It contains eight modules and is intended to take about eight hours total, plus additional time spent on worksheets, reflection exercises, and optional discussion groups over Zoom. Read, who “binged” the course, says he completed it in about two weeks. ...
One module focuses on the psychology of persuasive tech and includes a “humane design guide” for creating more respectful products. Another encourages technologists to identify their highest values and the ways those values interact with their work. At the end of the lesson, a worksheet invites them to imagine sipping tea at age 70, looking back on their life. “What’s the career you look back on? What are the ways you’ve influenced the world?” ...
The Center for Humane Technology is not the first organization to make a tool kit for concerned tech workers. The Tech and Society Solutions Lab has released two, in 2018 and 2020, designed to encourage more ethical conversations within tech companies and startups. But the center’s new course is novel in the way that it tries to create community out of the burgeoning “humane tech” movement. ...
How Ukraine’s Digital Artists Are Grappling With Working Through Wartime
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, VideoGorilla senior developer/chief science officer Andrew Yakovenko is glued to his computer, not doom-scrolling but rather working on an AI-enabled software tool for a Hollywood entertainment company. The company’s senior developer Anton Linevich, holed up in a small village in the center of the country, is likewise focused on work, checking in with remote teammates via Slack. Senior developer Aleksey Sevruk, who stayed in Kyiv, just joined the Army and is fighting for that city. ...
ReSpeecher co-founder/co-CEO Alex Serdiuk reports that two of his employees are still in the Kyiv office but that, one month ago, 10 team members relocated to Lviv. He stayed in Kyiv until the first Russian bombs fell, and his whole family headed to western Ukraine (his wife and child have since gone on to Europe). The advantage, he says, is that he is more focused on work. “The day that bombs hit Kyiv, a Hollywood company received the audio files we had to deliver,” he says. “We haven’t any disruption with ReSpeecher business at all.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ukraine-digital-artists-grappling-working-220428416.html
Color affects people’s behavior differently in virtual reality
... Guobin Xia, assistant professor of digital design and innovation at Heriot-Watt's School of Textile and Design, set up experiments with 70 people. ...
Xia said: "We know color affects people's emotions and behavior—blues are calming, yellows are cheering, for example. We established that some colors affect people very differently in virtual reality settings. In the real world, red makes people most impulsive. But in virtual reality, orange gives the highest state of impulsivity. Green has the most positive effects on people's logical and lateral thinking abilities, and their attention to detail in the real world and in VR." ...
Color can trigger positive engagement and improve cognitive performance—so designers could use this information to trigger buying behaviors or deep concentration. ...
See the full story here: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-affects-people-behavior-differently-virtual.html
Google Acquires MicroLED Startup Raxium for Future AR and MR Tech
... "They claim to have been able to achieve every good performance for R, G and B MicroLEDs at very small sizes without significant efficiency loss," said Ross Young, co-founder and CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants in an email with CNET. "Achieving good R, G and B performance on a single wafer without color conversion is impressive enough, but to do it at <5um is even more impressive." ...
"MicroLED can be much brighter than OLED. This is particularly important for AR smart glasses that will be used outdoor," said Guillaume Chansin, director of display research at DSCC. "MicroLED has the potential to deliver high resolution, high contrast and high brightness. This is why it has become such a strategic investment for tech companies working on smart glasses." ...
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-acquires-microled-startup-raxium-for-future-ar-and-mr-tech/
AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours
It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.
All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx
A new Stanford study suggests AI still has a bias problem
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“The AI Index 2022 Annual Report” measures and evaluates the yearly progress of AI by tracking it from numerous angles including R&D, ethics, and policy and government. Here are the biggest takeaways.
NLP LEAPS FORWARD
Some of the most significant developments in AI over the past few years have occurred in the performance of natural language models–that is, neural networks trained to read, generate, and reason about language. ...
EYES ON ETHICS
There are also signs that AI companies are not ignoring the bias and ethics challenges of the technology. Researchers with industry affiliations contributed 71% more publications year-over-year in 2021 at fairness-focused industry conferences, the report says.
“Algorithmic fairness and bias have shifted from being primarily an academic pursuit to becoming firmly entrenched as a mainstream research topic with wide-ranging implications,” the researchers write. ...
The U.S. and China had the by far the highest number of cross-country collaborations in AI publications of any other two countries from 2010 to 2021. And the pace is accelerating: American and Chinese collaborations increased five times within that same time window. ...
See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90731527/a-new-stanford-study-suggests-ai-still-has-a-bias-problem
