... VR sleep rooms are becoming popular among people who suffer from insomnia or loneliness, offering cozy enclaves where strangers can safely find relaxation and company—most of the time.
Each VR sleep room is created to induce calm. ...
The opportunity to sleep in groups can be particularly appealing to isolated or lonely people who want to feel less alone. ...
“Neuroscientifically, VR works because you can modulate the environment you are in, but you have an anchor to reality and can feel safe enough to fall asleep.” ...
It’s well known that the metaverse is full of underage users, and my journey through sleep rooms confirmed that kids pop up disturbingly often in these adult spaces. ...
But while I found some rooms to be disturbing, I did discover sleep rooms that were hushed and peaceful, places to simply sit and be. ...
As ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence programs infiltrate workplaces, white-collar jobs are transforming the fastest.
That professional and office work is changing so fast is according to a panel of executives who addressed thousands of professionals and job seekers at Tuesday’s WSJ Jobs Summit. The biggest workplace challenge so far this year across industries is how to adapt to the rapidly evolving role of AI in office work, they say.
“AI is the next revolution and there is no going back,” Melissa Werneck, executive vice president and global chief people officer at Kraft Heinz Co. said.
As long as artificial intelligence has existed, so have the predictions that it could disrupt—and someday replace—blue-collar work. Now, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, most jobs will be changed in some form by generative pretrained transformers, or GPTs, which use machine learning based on internet data to generate any kind of text, from creative writing to code.
Many executives and analysts said that transformation is already taking shape, and workers can find ways to use the ChatGPT and other new technology to free them from boring work.
“Every month there are hundreds more job postings mentioning generative AI,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter Inc., an online marketplace for job seekers and employers.
Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda at the WSJ Jobs Summit.PHOTO: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Be willing to adapt and learn
One thing leaders from sectors including retail, e-learning and consumer packaged goods agreed on is this moment’s level of uncertainty.
Several executives mentioned inflation, political tensions and fears of a potential recession that continue to mount. Jeff Maggioncalda, chief executive of Coursera Inc., said that amid all the chaos, there are opportunities to improve the workforce.
“The way things have been done in the past aren’t necessarily the way they need to be done today,” he said, adding that workers and employers should invest in retraining and upskilling where possible.
People who are willing to experiment should come out ahead, said Ms. Pollak.
“There is an enormous demand for people who are tech-savvy and who will be the first adopters, who will be the first to figure out what opportunities these technologies open up,” she said.
Work with AI, not against it
The jobs of the future will require a mind-set shift for employees, several executives said. Rather than viewing generative AI and other machine-learning software as a threat, workers should embrace new technology as a way to free them from less-rewarding work and augment their strengths.
“The level by which we can all operate will be enhanced by virtue of technology,” said Donna Morris, Walmart Inc.’s chief people officer. “This is a huge opportunity to advance a lot of professions—allow people to do work that’s, frankly, more stimulating.”
Malaika Myers, Hyatt Hotels Corp.’s chief human-resources officer, said she doesn’t see AI replacing workers soon, but expects it to better serve and engage consumers. For the hotel chain, that could look like using AI to determine which brand of wine a guest likes, and adjusting recommendations accordingly.
United Airlines Holdings Inc., aims to use AI to do transactions that shouldn’t require a human, such as placing someone in an aisle or window seat depending on their preference, or suggesting a different flight for someone trying to book a tight connection, said Kate Gebo, executive vice president of human resources and labor relations. That leaves employees free to have more complex interactions with customers, she added. Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
Sima Sistani, CEO of WeightWatchers parent company WW International, at the WSJ Jobs Summit.PHOTO: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
AI can’t do everything
Workers—and bosses—would be wise to remember that AI can’t replace a human touch, several executives stressed.
Sima Sistani, CEO of WeightWatchers parent company WW International Inc., said services intended to help customers solve emotional problems require solutions a machine can’t provide.
“AI is not sentient. It can’t be emotional. And that is the kind of accountability and reciprocity that is needed…for people to have the outcomes that we’re hoping to provide,” she said of the weight-loss and lifestyle company.
Ms. Werneck of Kraft Heinz said that what is keeping her up at night is figuring out how AI can be co-piloted by talented people, instead of becoming something that runs on autopilot, replacing people.
“My advice is be curious, research it, try to understand how it can be used,” she said.
At Yelp Inc., employees are experimenting through internal pilot projects to see what ChatGPT could be used for, without eroding trust with consumers and employees.
“Certain business processes could be enhanced,” said Carmen Whitney Orr, Yelp’s chief people officer, adding that there are plenty of concerns, too. “We don’t want it for high human-touch things.”
... Proponents of widespread AI adoption have looked to these systems as tools, rather than total replacements, for the creatives who have clawed their way into Hollywood to tell the stories they care about the most. That’s the way OpenAI’s co-founder and president, Greg Brockman, described his company’s APIs on March 10 — as an “amplification of what humans can do.”
“It’s kind of like if you hire six assistants who are not perfect. They need to train up a little bit. They don’t quite know exactly what you want, always, but they’re so eager and never sleep. They’re there to help you. They’re willing to do the drudge work, and you get to be the director,” Brockman said at a SXSW panel. ...
“Human creators are the foundation of the creative industries and we must ensure that they are respected and paid for their work,” SAG-AFTRA said in a statement on March 17. “Governments should not create new copyright or other IP exemptions that allow AI developers to exploit creative works, or professional voices and likenesses, without permission or compensation. ...
“There’s a fine line between when is something inspiring someone versus when is someone just ripping off or absolutely treading protected intellectual property,” Candle Media’s chief development officer, Brent Weinstein, said in a SXSW panel. “AI is going to force us to examine that fine line and rules will be written, and we will all adapt to a new world order.”
Apple is projected to ship fewer than 500,000 headsets in a year, according to Counterpoint Research, a market research firm. By comparison, the company was expected to ship about 40 million Apple Watches after its debut. ...
Seeking to define a nascent market is an aberration for Apple.
“Apple is always pretty good at coming into a market when the market is already established and changing that market,” said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. “This is not the case for Apple VR and XR. There’s still a lot of learning.”
Some internal skeptics have questioned if the new device is a solution in search of a problem. ...
The company has called the device’s signature application “copresence,” a word designed to capture the experience of sharing a real or virtual space with someone in another place. It is akin to what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, calls the “metaverse.” ...
On March 2, an international gathering of media technology executives and startups spent an hour discussing “the multiverse” and related topics. It was part of a day-long SPROCKIT Sync and ETC@USC Multiverse Symposium co-sponsored by the ETC and SPROCKIT, with additional support from ETC member Ronin X Foundation. Moderated by ETC’s Phil Lelyveld and Ronin X’s Sandeep Casi, attendees debated how to define the metaverse; discussed how development would impact contracts, rights and payments; raised tech implications of free range experiences and dynamic storytelling on capture and distribution processes and infrastructure; and addressed mixed reality experiences being planned and tested for theme parks. Watch a 9-minute video highlight reel of the discussion.
From Stanford VR - James G. Brown, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Jeffrey Hancock
Abstract
... The current paper reviews research on VR and misinformation and proposes an affordance-based framework for examining how VR features may foster false beliefs. We categorize VR features into two categories, immersive features (e.g., stereoscopic vision, head tracking, etc.) and content features (e.g., self- embodiment, consistency, and persistence), and for each, we review previous research on its relationship with influencing beliefs and provide informed predictions as to if and how that feature will contribute to the effectiveness of misinformation. We argue that VR can produce “mis- experiences” and will require new mitigation strategies in the Trust and Security space. ...
... A study by McKinsey exploring technology trends from 2022 onwards found that around 63% of companies are now embracing immersive technologies for training purposes. McKinsey also believes that deskless workers, accounting for about 80% of the workforce, will be the greatest AR/VR technology adopters in the years ahead. ...
88% of people believe VR technologies can improve education: According to one report, 88% of Americans believe VR can help to improve education. 66% say they think immersive technology can help fight social isolation. Moreover, 77% of users say they would consider using VR to see somewhere they haven’t seen before. (Source: ARRIS Composites) ...
... Before her book [Weapons of Math Destruction] came out, says O’Neil, “people didn’t really understand that the algorithms weren’t predicting but classifying … and that this wasn’t a math problem but a political problem. A trust problem.” ...
In The Shame Machine, you argue that shame is a massive structural problem in society. Can you expand on that?
The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Shame is a potent mechanism to turn a systemic injustice against the targets of the injustice. Someone might say, “This is your fault” (for poor people or people with addictions), or “This is beyond you” (for algorithms), and that label of unworthiness often is sufficient to get the people targeted with that shame to stop asking questions. As just one example, I talked to Duane Townes, who was put into a reentry program from prison that was essentially a no-end, below-poverty-level manual-labor job done under the eye of armed men who would call his parole officer if he complained or took a bathroom break for longer than five minutes. It was humiliating, and he felt that he was treated as less than a man. This was by intentional design of the program, though, and was meant to train people to be “good workers.”
It’s tantamount to a taser to one’s sense of self. It causes momentary helplessness and the inability to defend one’s rights. ...
After Weapons was published you started ORCA, an algorithmic auditing company. What does the company’s work entail?
Algorithmic auditing, at least at my company, is where we ask the question “For whom does this algorithmic system fail?” That could be older applicants in the context of a hiring algorithm, or obese folks when it comes to life insurance policies, or Black borrowers in the context of student loans. We have to define the outcomes that we’re concerned about, the stakeholders that might be harmed, and the notion of what it means to be fair. [We also need to define] the thresholds that determine when an algorithm has crossed the line. ...
An AI platform for the film industry, Filmustage, is today announcing new funding. First launched in 2020, the platform is designed to streamline pre-production in the film industry using a variety of features, such as the ability to break down scripts in a few minutes and categorize them into scenes and elements like props, costumes and characters.
The latest funding, which totals $550,000, includes backing by Flyer One Ventures, Geek Ventures, Vesna Capital and Imaguru and will go toward an international expansion that will make the product available in multiple foreign languages. For instance, this summer, Filmustage will become available in Spanish, French and German. In 2024, it will roll out in Hindi and Chinese. ...
The product is mainly known for its script breakdown feature, which highlights characters and other elements like locations, props, extras, costumes and more. Users can also search for, change or remove any breakdown element and add new categories. It can then be uploaded as a PDF file or into Final Draft.
Other features include a script summary tool, which gathers all the elements for one scene on a page to determine the number of cast members, props, costumes, locations, vehicles and extras a particular film will need, as well as the reports and references feature, which allow users to add a visual reference to categories with stock images or their own uploads. The visual reference tool is probably handy for set directors that want to visualize props for certain scenes. ...
One notable user is Roger Christian, Oscar-winning set decorator and director known for his work on “Star Wars.”
Christian spoke about Filmustage during the 2022 European Film Marketevent. “You have to be experienced to break the rules. It’s like architecture; if you’ve got a grounding in the basis, then you can break the rules. So, what [Filmustage] has done there is broke some rules now because it was actually needed in the marketplace. And I will encourage filmmakers to do this because you need this knowledge,” he said. ...
As of February 2023, Filmustage has more than 4,400 registered users, and over 350 paid users, the company claims.
Users can either sign up for the basic plan, which is $49/month and lets you upload three projects per month, or the studio plan, which is $149/month and lets you upload 10 projects per month. The platform also offers a seven-day free trial.
Biologists, physicists, ecologists and other scientists use the term “emergent” to describe self-organizing, collective behaviors that appear when a large collection of things acts as one. Combinations of lifeless atoms give rise to living cells; water molecules create waves; murmurations of starlings swoop through the sky in changing but identifiable patterns; cells make muscles move and hearts beat. Critically, emergent abilities show up in systems that involve lots of individual parts. But researchers have only recently been able to document these abilities in LLMs as those models have grown to enormous sizes. ...
What makes a model “recurrent” is that it learns from its own output: Its predictions feed back into the network to improve future performance. ...
But the debut of LLMs also brought something truly unexpected. Lots of somethings. With the advent of models like GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters — or Google’s PaLM, which can be scaled up to 540 billion — users began describing more and more emergent behaviors. One DeepMind engineer even reported being able to convince ChatGPT that it was a Linux terminal and getting it to run some simple mathematical code to compute the first 10 prime numbers. Remarkably, it could finish the task faster than the same code running on a real Linux machine. ...
..., researchers had no reason to think that a language model built to predict text would convincingly imitate a computer terminal. Many of these emergent behaviors illustrate “zero-shot” or “few-shot” learning, which describes an LLM’s ability to solve problems it has never — or rarely — seen before. ...
Unpredictable Powers and Pitfalls
There is an obvious problem with asking these models to explain themselves: They are notorious liars. “We’re increasingly relying on these models to do basic work,” Ganguli said, “but I do not just trust these. I check their work.” ...
“It’s hard to know in advance how these models will be used or deployed,” Ganguli said. “And to study emergent phenomena, you have to have a case in mind, and you won’t know until you study the influence of scale what capabilities or limitations might arise.” ...
“Certain harmful behaviors kind of come up abruptly in some models,” Ganguli said. He points to a recent analysis of LLMs, known as the BBQ benchmark, which showed that social bias emerges with enormous numbers of parameters. “Larger models abruptly become more biased.” Failure to address that risk, he said, could jeopardize the subjects of these models.
But he offers a counterpoint: When the researchers simply told the model not to rely on stereotypes or social biases — literally by typing in those instructions — the model was less biased in its predictions and responses. This suggests that some emergent properties might also be used to reduce bias. ...
“We spend a lot of time just chatting with our models,” he said, “and that is actually where you start to get a good intuition about trust — or the lack thereof.” ...
