Watch and See: The Medium Really Is the Message
How communication technologies shaped the arts and sciences.
Cesar Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, would like you to know that Marshall McLuhan was right. And he has the datasets to prove it. In a new paper, “How the Medium Shapes the Message: Printing and the Rise of the Arts and Sciences,” named after the media philosopher’s renowned phrase, “the medium is the message,” Hidalgo and his MIT colleagues show that communication technologies, “from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded.”
“We completely agree with McLuhan,” Hidalgo said to Nautilus. “What he was saying was not that messages were irrelevant, but the medium by which they were transmitted was more consequential. The famous example is the Nixon and JFK debate. People who watched on TV thought the good-looking JFK won, and ones who listened on radio thought Nixon won. It was the same content but what people observed, or what they thought happened, was very different depending on the medium they were using. We found every communication technology changes the way in which we interact.”
Hidalgo and his colleagues composed the short video below to give props to McLuhan and show how mediums, from oral culture to printing to TV, transformed society. During the oral age, political and religious leaders were the talk of the town. But the advent of printing gave rise to artists and scientists, while TV spurred the rise of entertainment and sports heroes. Causation or correlation? Watch and read the MIT group’s work to find out.
Video at:
http://nautil.us/issue/69/patterns/watc ... he-message
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
A.I. Still Needs H.I. (Human Intelligence), for Now
Chatbots and other computers are learning, but we still have skills they don’t.
Excerpt:
So — for now — if you have critical thinking and empathy skills, Aiva is your friend. But I wonder what happened to all those Indian high school grads I met 15 years ago. Because if you don’t have those skills — and just have a high school degree or less, which applies to hundreds of millions of Indians — or you are doing routine tasks that will be easily roboticized, well, Aiva the robotic fruit picker, Aiva the file clerk or Aiva the trucker will not be your friend.
So what will a country like India, with so much unskilled labor, do about this challenge? It’s coming. But so is a possible savior. It’s also called technology and A.I.
While technology taketh it also giveth. India’s newest high-speed mobile network, Jio, in just the past couple years dramatically slashed the price of cellphone connectivity. This has taken smartphone diffusion much deeper into Indian society than ever before, connecting those making only a few dollars a day to the mobile network, and creating a vast new tool kit to lift them from poverty.
In Mumbai, for example, I met with Sagar Defense Engineering, founded by Nikunj Parashar, which is using technology spun off from the defense industry to create a simple vessel, connected to satellites, that rag pickers, the poorest of the poor here, can be quickly trained on to target and collect the pools of waste that float atop so many Indian rivers and lakes — and get paid for it by the ton.
I also met with LeanAgri, founded by Siddharth Dialani and Sai Gole. It is using A.I. to create a simple cellphone-based app to make poor Indian farmers more successful. The app creates a “dynamic calendar” that tells each farmer which and how much seed and fertilizer to use, the quantity of water to apply and at what time based on changing climate conditions. LeanAgri’s pilot has been serving 3,000 farmers in three Indian states, where some have already seen tenfold increases in their incomes, the company said.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opin ... dline&te=1
Chatbots and other computers are learning, but we still have skills they don’t.
Excerpt:
So — for now — if you have critical thinking and empathy skills, Aiva is your friend. But I wonder what happened to all those Indian high school grads I met 15 years ago. Because if you don’t have those skills — and just have a high school degree or less, which applies to hundreds of millions of Indians — or you are doing routine tasks that will be easily roboticized, well, Aiva the robotic fruit picker, Aiva the file clerk or Aiva the trucker will not be your friend.
So what will a country like India, with so much unskilled labor, do about this challenge? It’s coming. But so is a possible savior. It’s also called technology and A.I.
While technology taketh it also giveth. India’s newest high-speed mobile network, Jio, in just the past couple years dramatically slashed the price of cellphone connectivity. This has taken smartphone diffusion much deeper into Indian society than ever before, connecting those making only a few dollars a day to the mobile network, and creating a vast new tool kit to lift them from poverty.
In Mumbai, for example, I met with Sagar Defense Engineering, founded by Nikunj Parashar, which is using technology spun off from the defense industry to create a simple vessel, connected to satellites, that rag pickers, the poorest of the poor here, can be quickly trained on to target and collect the pools of waste that float atop so many Indian rivers and lakes — and get paid for it by the ton.
I also met with LeanAgri, founded by Siddharth Dialani and Sai Gole. It is using A.I. to create a simple cellphone-based app to make poor Indian farmers more successful. The app creates a “dynamic calendar” that tells each farmer which and how much seed and fertilizer to use, the quantity of water to apply and at what time based on changing climate conditions. LeanAgri’s pilot has been serving 3,000 farmers in three Indian states, where some have already seen tenfold increases in their incomes, the company said.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opin ... dline&te=1
Why A.I. Without Humans Will Not Solve Our Problems
Let’s not let artificial intelligence put society on autopilot.
Excerpt:
The web’s 30th anniversary gives us a much-needed chance to examine what is working well on the internet — and what isn’t. It is clear that people are the common denominator. Indeed, many of the internet’s current problems stem from misguided efforts to take the internet away from people, or vice versa.
Sometimes this happens for geopolitical reasons. Nearly two years ago, Turkey fully blocked Wikipedia, making it only the second country after China to do so. Reports suggest a Russian proposal to unplug briefly from the internet to test its cyber defenses could actually be an effort to set up a mass censorship program. And now there is news that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is trying to implement government controls that some worry will lead to Chinese-style censorship.
But people get taken out of the equation in more opaque ways as well. When you browse social media, the content you see is curated, not by a human editor but by an algorithm that puts you in a box. Increasingly, algorithms can help decide what we read, who we date, what we buy and, more worryingly, the services, credit or even liberties for which we’re eligible.
Too often, artificial intelligence is presented as an all-powerful solution to our problems, a scalable replacement for people. Companies are automating nearly every aspect of their social interfaces, from creating to moderating to personalizing content. At its worst, A.I. can put society on autopilot that may not consider our dearest values.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opin ... dline&te=1
*******
If Stalin Had a Smartphone
Suddenly technology has a centralizing effect.
I feel bad for Joseph Stalin. He dreamed of creating a totalitarian society where every individual’s behavior could be predicted and controlled. But he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier!
In the first place, he’d have much better surveillance equipment. These days most interactions are through a computer, so there is always an electronic record of what went on.
The internet of things means that our refrigerators, watches, glasses, phones and security cameras will soon be recording every move we make. In 2017, Levi Strauss made an interactive denim jacket, with sensors to detect and transmit each gesture, even as minimal as the lifting of a finger. Soon prosecutors will be able to subpoena our driverless cars and retrieve a record of every place they took us.
And this is not even to mention the facial recognition technology the Chinese are using to keep track of their own citizens. In Beijing, facial recognition is used in apartment buildings to prevent renters from subletting their apartments.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opin ... dline&te=1
Let’s not let artificial intelligence put society on autopilot.
Excerpt:
The web’s 30th anniversary gives us a much-needed chance to examine what is working well on the internet — and what isn’t. It is clear that people are the common denominator. Indeed, many of the internet’s current problems stem from misguided efforts to take the internet away from people, or vice versa.
Sometimes this happens for geopolitical reasons. Nearly two years ago, Turkey fully blocked Wikipedia, making it only the second country after China to do so. Reports suggest a Russian proposal to unplug briefly from the internet to test its cyber defenses could actually be an effort to set up a mass censorship program. And now there is news that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is trying to implement government controls that some worry will lead to Chinese-style censorship.
But people get taken out of the equation in more opaque ways as well. When you browse social media, the content you see is curated, not by a human editor but by an algorithm that puts you in a box. Increasingly, algorithms can help decide what we read, who we date, what we buy and, more worryingly, the services, credit or even liberties for which we’re eligible.
Too often, artificial intelligence is presented as an all-powerful solution to our problems, a scalable replacement for people. Companies are automating nearly every aspect of their social interfaces, from creating to moderating to personalizing content. At its worst, A.I. can put society on autopilot that may not consider our dearest values.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opin ... dline&te=1
*******
If Stalin Had a Smartphone
Suddenly technology has a centralizing effect.
I feel bad for Joseph Stalin. He dreamed of creating a totalitarian society where every individual’s behavior could be predicted and controlled. But he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier!
In the first place, he’d have much better surveillance equipment. These days most interactions are through a computer, so there is always an electronic record of what went on.
The internet of things means that our refrigerators, watches, glasses, phones and security cameras will soon be recording every move we make. In 2017, Levi Strauss made an interactive denim jacket, with sensors to detect and transmit each gesture, even as minimal as the lifting of a finger. Soon prosecutors will be able to subpoena our driverless cars and retrieve a record of every place they took us.
And this is not even to mention the facial recognition technology the Chinese are using to keep track of their own citizens. In Beijing, facial recognition is used in apartment buildings to prevent renters from subletting their apartments.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opin ... dline&te=1
The breathing machine
A small incubator designed by a Toronto surgeon is transforming how lung transplants are done in this country. It also means some Atlantic Canadians will no longer have to choose between near-financial ruin and death.
Excerpt:
Every year, around two dozen patients from Atlantic Canada receive lung transplants in Toronto. Since the organ survives only a few hours outside the body, recipients have typically moved to the city in order to be close to Toronto General Hospital as they await their match.
It's come at a steep financial cost to them and their families. On average, patients and their support person (often a family member) have had to live in Toronto for six months before the operation, followed by another three during recovery.
But Davis's experience last year marked an extraordinary change. She was the first patient allowed to wait in Halifax — 1,793 kilometres away from the hospital — until a match was found.
It was a risky experiment, made possible by a significant piece of technology that is changing the way lung transplants will be performed across Canada, at least for some patients.
In Toronto, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee has spent years trying to solve the problem of geography and transplants. He is the surgeon-in-chief of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, considered one of the top programs of its kind in the world.
He developed the Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion System (EVLP). The machine looks like an incubator; it holds lungs and keeps them alive between the time of donation and transplant.
Lungs are the most fragile organs, and they were the last of the major organs to be transplanted successfully, Keshavjee points out. Historically, he says, only one in five donations could be used. The remaining lungs were rejected due to infection or other issues.
The new technology has allowed doctors to make major gains, opening the door for them to transplant lungs that were once thought to be unusable.
Photos, video and more...
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longfor ... ng-machine
A small incubator designed by a Toronto surgeon is transforming how lung transplants are done in this country. It also means some Atlantic Canadians will no longer have to choose between near-financial ruin and death.
Excerpt:
Every year, around two dozen patients from Atlantic Canada receive lung transplants in Toronto. Since the organ survives only a few hours outside the body, recipients have typically moved to the city in order to be close to Toronto General Hospital as they await their match.
It's come at a steep financial cost to them and their families. On average, patients and their support person (often a family member) have had to live in Toronto for six months before the operation, followed by another three during recovery.
But Davis's experience last year marked an extraordinary change. She was the first patient allowed to wait in Halifax — 1,793 kilometres away from the hospital — until a match was found.
It was a risky experiment, made possible by a significant piece of technology that is changing the way lung transplants will be performed across Canada, at least for some patients.
In Toronto, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee has spent years trying to solve the problem of geography and transplants. He is the surgeon-in-chief of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, considered one of the top programs of its kind in the world.
He developed the Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion System (EVLP). The machine looks like an incubator; it holds lungs and keeps them alive between the time of donation and transplant.
Lungs are the most fragile organs, and they were the last of the major organs to be transplanted successfully, Keshavjee points out. Historically, he says, only one in five donations could be used. The remaining lungs were rejected due to infection or other issues.
The new technology has allowed doctors to make major gains, opening the door for them to transplant lungs that were once thought to be unusable.
Photos, video and more...
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longfor ... ng-machine
These inventions had the biggest impact on humanity
These inventions had the biggest impact on humanity
In prehistoric times, human beings lived in dark, chilly caves completely lacking in Wi-Fi. Now, just a few millennia later, we can reach into our pockets and call up a good chunk of our species’ accumulated knowledge (along with a lot of cat photos). How did we go from worshipping the Moon to walking on it? Much of human progress is the direct result of the history-making inventions that follow.
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/sma ... ut#image=1
These inventions had the biggest impact on humanity
In prehistoric times, human beings lived in dark, chilly caves completely lacking in Wi-Fi. Now, just a few millennia later, we can reach into our pockets and call up a good chunk of our species’ accumulated knowledge (along with a lot of cat photos). How did we go from worshipping the Moon to walking on it? Much of human progress is the direct result of the history-making inventions that follow.
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/sma ... ut#image=1
Forget Self-Driving Cars. Bring Back the Stick Shift.
Technology meant to save us from distraction is making us less attentive.
I was backing my wife’s car out of our driveway when I realized I wasn’t watching the backup camera, nor was I looking out of the rear window. I was only listening for those “audible proximity alerts” — the high-pitched beeps that my car emits as I approach an object while in reverse. The problem was that my wife’s car, an older model, doesn’t offer such beeps.
I had become so reliant on this technology that I had stopped paying attention, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences.
Backup cameras, mandatory on all new cars as of last year, are intended to prevent accidents. Between 2008 and 2011, the percentage of new cars sold with backup cameras doubled, but the backup fatality rate declined by less than a third while backup injuries dropped only 8 percent.
Perhaps one reason is, as a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put it, “Many drivers are not aware of the limitations” of the technology. The report also found that one in five drivers were just like me — they had become so reliant on the backup aids that they had experienced a collision or near miss while driving other vehicles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opin ... ogin-email
Technology meant to save us from distraction is making us less attentive.
I was backing my wife’s car out of our driveway when I realized I wasn’t watching the backup camera, nor was I looking out of the rear window. I was only listening for those “audible proximity alerts” — the high-pitched beeps that my car emits as I approach an object while in reverse. The problem was that my wife’s car, an older model, doesn’t offer such beeps.
I had become so reliant on this technology that I had stopped paying attention, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences.
Backup cameras, mandatory on all new cars as of last year, are intended to prevent accidents. Between 2008 and 2011, the percentage of new cars sold with backup cameras doubled, but the backup fatality rate declined by less than a third while backup injuries dropped only 8 percent.
Perhaps one reason is, as a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put it, “Many drivers are not aware of the limitations” of the technology. The report also found that one in five drivers were just like me — they had become so reliant on the backup aids that they had experienced a collision or near miss while driving other vehicles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opin ... ogin-email
He Helped Create A.I. Now, He Worries About ‘Killer Robots.’
MONTREAL — Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands.
But the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”
“In ‘Star Trek,’ there is a world in which humans are governed through democracy, everyone gets good health care, education and food, and there are no wars except against some aliens,” said Dr. Bengio, whose research has helped pave the way for speech- and facial-recognition technology, computer vision and self-driving cars, among other things. “I am also trying to marry science with how it can improve society.”
Dr. Bengio was expounding on the promises — and perils — of A.I. on a recent day while sitting in his small, cramped office at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, a research center he founded that has made Montreal a global center for artificial intelligence. Next to him was a whiteboard covered with complex mathematical equations, along with a warning for the cleaners written in French: “Do Not Erase.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/worl ... dline&te=1
MONTREAL — Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands.
But the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”
“In ‘Star Trek,’ there is a world in which humans are governed through democracy, everyone gets good health care, education and food, and there are no wars except against some aliens,” said Dr. Bengio, whose research has helped pave the way for speech- and facial-recognition technology, computer vision and self-driving cars, among other things. “I am also trying to marry science with how it can improve society.”
Dr. Bengio was expounding on the promises — and perils — of A.I. on a recent day while sitting in his small, cramped office at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, a research center he founded that has made Montreal a global center for artificial intelligence. Next to him was a whiteboard covered with complex mathematical equations, along with a warning for the cleaners written in French: “Do Not Erase.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/worl ... dline&te=1
The promise and perils of synthetic biology
To understand them well, look to the past
For the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a sequence of dna—a gene—was by copying a sequence it already had to hand. Sometimes the gene would be damaged or scrambled, the copying imperfect or undertaken repeatedly. From that raw material arose the glories of natural selection. But beneath it all, gene begat gene.
That is no longer true. Now genes can be written from scratch and edited repeatedly, like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things which this provides represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life. It permits the manufacture of all manner of things which used to be hard, even impossible, to make: pharmaceuticals, fuels, fabrics, foods and fragrances can all be built molecule by molecule. What cells do and what they can become is engineerable, too. Immune cells can be told to follow doctors’ orders; stem cells better coaxed to turn into new tissues; fertilised eggs programmed to grow into creatures quite unlike their parents.
The earliest stages of such “synthetic biology” are already changing many industrial processes, transforming medicine and beginning to reach into the consumer world (see Technology Quarterly). Progress may be slow, but with the help of new tools and a big dollop of machine learning, biological manufacturing could eventually yield truly cornucopian technologies. Buildings may be grown from synthetic wood or coral. Mammoths produced from engineered elephant cells may yet stride across Siberia.
More....
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... ic-biology
To understand them well, look to the past
For the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a sequence of dna—a gene—was by copying a sequence it already had to hand. Sometimes the gene would be damaged or scrambled, the copying imperfect or undertaken repeatedly. From that raw material arose the glories of natural selection. But beneath it all, gene begat gene.
That is no longer true. Now genes can be written from scratch and edited repeatedly, like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things which this provides represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life. It permits the manufacture of all manner of things which used to be hard, even impossible, to make: pharmaceuticals, fuels, fabrics, foods and fragrances can all be built molecule by molecule. What cells do and what they can become is engineerable, too. Immune cells can be told to follow doctors’ orders; stem cells better coaxed to turn into new tissues; fertilised eggs programmed to grow into creatures quite unlike their parents.
The earliest stages of such “synthetic biology” are already changing many industrial processes, transforming medicine and beginning to reach into the consumer world (see Technology Quarterly). Progress may be slow, but with the help of new tools and a big dollop of machine learning, biological manufacturing could eventually yield truly cornucopian technologies. Buildings may be grown from synthetic wood or coral. Mammoths produced from engineered elephant cells may yet stride across Siberia.
More....
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... ic-biology
Introducing the World’s First Gene-Edited Lizard
Scientists weren’t expecting him to look like this.
Excerpt:
George Church, a geneticist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., called the application of Crispr to lizards “significant.” Dr. Church uses genome modification techniques to try to reverse aging in dogs, to make pigs more compatible for organ transplants in humans, and to protect elephants from herpesvirus.
There is a movement to use gene editing to combat pathogens and environmental threats. Many reptiles are endangered. “Editing could help,” he said.
Photo and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/c ... dline&te=1
Scientists weren’t expecting him to look like this.
Excerpt:
George Church, a geneticist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., called the application of Crispr to lizards “significant.” Dr. Church uses genome modification techniques to try to reverse aging in dogs, to make pigs more compatible for organ transplants in humans, and to protect elephants from herpesvirus.
There is a movement to use gene editing to combat pathogens and environmental threats. Many reptiles are endangered. “Editing could help,” he said.
Photo and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/c ... dline&te=1
Why Technology is Essential to Human Survival | Adam Nanjee | TEDxDonMills
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 06yBLONrD4
In today's world, technology is moving faster than the human society can comprehend. Our world, tomorrow, is changing more rapidly than we can imagine and therefore we need to ensure that we enable everyone on the planet to have basic access to technology. Technology is the new English. Adam is an avid technologist, futurist, innovator and presently Managing Director for Canada at Microsoft for Startups. As an executive and leader at various technology startups and Fortune 500 companies, Adam founded and built Canada's first dedicated financial technology and innovations startup vertical at MaRS Discovery District.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 06yBLONrD4
In today's world, technology is moving faster than the human society can comprehend. Our world, tomorrow, is changing more rapidly than we can imagine and therefore we need to ensure that we enable everyone on the planet to have basic access to technology. Technology is the new English. Adam is an avid technologist, futurist, innovator and presently Managing Director for Canada at Microsoft for Startups. As an executive and leader at various technology startups and Fortune 500 companies, Adam founded and built Canada's first dedicated financial technology and innovations startup vertical at MaRS Discovery District.
It’s Time to Panic About Privacy
Multi-media presentation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... e=Homepage
******
A.I. Is Changing Insurance
Some technologies are better left in the laboratory.
A smartphone app that measures when you brake and accelerate in your car. The algorithm that analyzes your social media accounts for risky behavior. The program that calculates your life expectancy using your Fitbit.
This isn’t speculative fiction — these are real technologies being deployed by insurance companies right now. Last year, the life insurance company John Hancock began to offer its customers the option to wear a fitness tracker — a wearable device that can collect information about how active you are, how many calories you burn, and how much you sleep. The idea is that your Fitbit or Apple Watch can tell whether or not you’re living the good, healthy life — and if you are, your insurance premium will go down.
This is the cutting edge of the insurance industry, adjusting premiums and policies based on new forms of surveillance. It will affect your life insurance, your car insurance and your homeowner’s insurance — if it hasn’t already. If the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions should vanish, it will no doubt penetrate the health insurance industry as well.
Consumers buy insurance from companies to protect against possible losses. But this contractual relationship is increasingly asymmetrical. The insurance companies once relied on a mix of self-reported information, public records and credit scores to calculate risk and assess how much to charge. But thanks to advances in technology, the capacity to collect, store and analyze information is greater than ever before.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opin ... 3053090414
Multi-media presentation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... e=Homepage
******
A.I. Is Changing Insurance
Some technologies are better left in the laboratory.
A smartphone app that measures when you brake and accelerate in your car. The algorithm that analyzes your social media accounts for risky behavior. The program that calculates your life expectancy using your Fitbit.
This isn’t speculative fiction — these are real technologies being deployed by insurance companies right now. Last year, the life insurance company John Hancock began to offer its customers the option to wear a fitness tracker — a wearable device that can collect information about how active you are, how many calories you burn, and how much you sleep. The idea is that your Fitbit or Apple Watch can tell whether or not you’re living the good, healthy life — and if you are, your insurance premium will go down.
This is the cutting edge of the insurance industry, adjusting premiums and policies based on new forms of surveillance. It will affect your life insurance, your car insurance and your homeowner’s insurance — if it hasn’t already. If the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions should vanish, it will no doubt penetrate the health insurance industry as well.
Consumers buy insurance from companies to protect against possible losses. But this contractual relationship is increasingly asymmetrical. The insurance companies once relied on a mix of self-reported information, public records and credit scores to calculate risk and assess how much to charge. But thanks to advances in technology, the capacity to collect, store and analyze information is greater than ever before.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opin ... 3053090414
In African Villages, These Phones Become Ultrasound Scanners
A hand-held device brings medical imaging to remote communities, often for the first time.
BUSHORO, Uganda — Lying on a church pew with his arm over his head, 6-year-old Gordon Andindagaye whimpered a bit — in fear, not pain — as Dr. William A. Cherniak slowly swept a small ultrasound scanner up and down his chest.
Dr. Cherniak and Rodgers Ssekawoko Muhumuza, the Ugandan clinical officer he was training, stared at the iPhone into which the scanner was plugged, watching Gordon’s lung expand and contract.
“O.K.,” Dr. Cherniak finally said. “What do you recommend?”
Gordon had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and looked tired and unwell. As other boys ran around outside, kicking a soccer ball made of rags and twine, he clung weakly to his mother. The scan on the iPhone’s screen suggested his lungs had fluid in them.
As Dr. Cherniak nodded approval, Mr. Muhumuza prescribed an antibiotic, and ordered blood tests to rule out tuberculosis, malaria and H.I.V. He arranged for Gordon and his mother to get a ride to a local clinic for an X-ray and a night of observation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/heal ... dline&te=1
******
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd
Once, it was easy to be obscure. Technology has ended that.
We are constantly exposed in public. Yet most of our actions will fade into obscurity. Do you, for example, remember the faces of strangers who stood in line with you the last time you bought medicine at a drugstore? Probably not. Thanks to limited memory and norms against staring, they probably don’t remember yours either.
This is what it means to be obscure. And our failure to collectively value this idea shows where we’ve gone wrong in the debates over data and surveillance.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opin ... 3053090418
******
One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority
In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.
The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.
Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/tech ... iling.html
A hand-held device brings medical imaging to remote communities, often for the first time.
BUSHORO, Uganda — Lying on a church pew with his arm over his head, 6-year-old Gordon Andindagaye whimpered a bit — in fear, not pain — as Dr. William A. Cherniak slowly swept a small ultrasound scanner up and down his chest.
Dr. Cherniak and Rodgers Ssekawoko Muhumuza, the Ugandan clinical officer he was training, stared at the iPhone into which the scanner was plugged, watching Gordon’s lung expand and contract.
“O.K.,” Dr. Cherniak finally said. “What do you recommend?”
Gordon had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and looked tired and unwell. As other boys ran around outside, kicking a soccer ball made of rags and twine, he clung weakly to his mother. The scan on the iPhone’s screen suggested his lungs had fluid in them.
As Dr. Cherniak nodded approval, Mr. Muhumuza prescribed an antibiotic, and ordered blood tests to rule out tuberculosis, malaria and H.I.V. He arranged for Gordon and his mother to get a ride to a local clinic for an X-ray and a night of observation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/heal ... dline&te=1
******
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd
Once, it was easy to be obscure. Technology has ended that.
We are constantly exposed in public. Yet most of our actions will fade into obscurity. Do you, for example, remember the faces of strangers who stood in line with you the last time you bought medicine at a drugstore? Probably not. Thanks to limited memory and norms against staring, they probably don’t remember yours either.
This is what it means to be obscure. And our failure to collectively value this idea shows where we’ve gone wrong in the debates over data and surveillance.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opin ... 3053090418
******
One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority
In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.
The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.
Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/tech ... iling.html
Artificial Intelligence: Will it Transform Civilization?
“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think Artificial Intelligence will transform in the next several years.” states Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu.
Whether you fully believe this assertion or not, there is no question that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the human race like few things before it have. In fact, AI is no longer something ‘out there’ in the future – it's already amidst us. Organizations and people are now routinely using a branch of AI called Machine Learning to automate tasks, establish patterns in huge reams of data and even predict outcomes with unprecedented accuracy.
Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems to be able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Most AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in the data.
Why is artificial intelligence important?
More...
https://the.ismaili/usa/artificial-inte ... vilization
“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think Artificial Intelligence will transform in the next several years.” states Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu.
Whether you fully believe this assertion or not, there is no question that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the human race like few things before it have. In fact, AI is no longer something ‘out there’ in the future – it's already amidst us. Organizations and people are now routinely using a branch of AI called Machine Learning to automate tasks, establish patterns in huge reams of data and even predict outcomes with unprecedented accuracy.
Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems to be able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Most AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in the data.
Why is artificial intelligence important?
More...
https://the.ismaili/usa/artificial-inte ... vilization
San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco, long at the heart of the technology revolution, took a stand against potential abuse on Tuesday by banning the use of facial recognition software by the police and other agencies.
The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.
The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor who sponsored the bill, said that it sent a particularly strong message to the nation, coming from a city transformed by tech.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/f ... _th_190515
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco, long at the heart of the technology revolution, took a stand against potential abuse on Tuesday by banning the use of facial recognition software by the police and other agencies.
The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.
The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor who sponsored the bill, said that it sent a particularly strong message to the nation, coming from a city transformed by tech.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/f ... _th_190515
3D printers will make better implants
They create a special surface that fuses with bone
A robotic lawnmower keeping the grass neat and tidy outside a modern industrial building in Carrigtwohill, near Cork in Ireland, is a good indication that something whizzy may be going on inside. And so it proves. The airy production hall contains row after row of 3d printers, each the size of a large fridge-freezer. The machines are humming away as they steadily make orthopaedic implants, such as replacement hip and knee joints. Even though several hundred employees’ cars are parked outside, the hall is almost deserted. Every so often a team appears, a bit like a Formula One pit crew, to unload a machine, service it and set it running again to make another batch of implants.
It is not unusual in modern, highly automated plants to find the workforce distributed like this, with most of them in the surrounding offices engaged in engineering tasks, logistics, sales and so on, rather than on the factory floor. But this two-year-old factory, owned by Stryker, an American medical-technology company, differs from conventional manufacturing in another way as well. It is an example of how 3d printing, which a decade ago was seen by manufacturers as suitable only for making one-off prototypes, is quickly entering the world of mass production. For commercial reasons, Stryker keeps some of the details secret. But the factory, the largest 3d-printing centre of its type in the world, works around the clock and is said to be capable of producing “hundreds of thousands” of implants a year.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... a/243350/n
******
Online identification is getting more and more intrusive
Phones can now tell who is carrying them from their users’ gaits
Excerpt:
LexisNexis Risk Solutions, an American analytics firm, has catalogued more than 4bn phones, tablets and other computers in this way for banks and other clients. Roughly 7% of them have been used for shenanigans of some sort. But device fingerprinting is becoming less useful. Apple, Google and other makers of equipment and operating systems have been steadily restricting the range of attributes that can be observed remotely. The reason for doing this is to limit the amount of personal information that could fall into unauthorised hands. But such restrictions also make it harder to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate users.
That is why a new approach, behavioural biometrics, is gaining ground. It relies on the wealth of measurements made by today’s devices. These include data from accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors, that reveal how people hold their phones when using them, how they carry them and even the way they walk. Touchscreens, keyboards and mice can be monitored to show the distinctive ways in which someone’s fingers and hands move. Sensors can detect whether a phone has been set down on a hard surface such as a table or dropped lightly on a soft one such as a bed. If the hour is appropriate, this action could be used to assume when a user has retired for the night. These traits can then be used to determine whether someone attempting to make a transaction is likely to be the device’s habitual user.
Behavioural biometrics make it possible to identify an individual’s “unique motion fingerprint”, says John Whaley, head of UnifyID, a firm in Silicon Valley that is involved in the field. With the right software, data from a phone’s sensors can reveal details as personal as which part of someone’s foot strikes the pavement first, and how hard; the length of a walker’s stride; the number of strides per minute; and the swing and spring in the walker’s hips and step. It can also work out whether the phone in question is in a handbag, a pocket or held in a hand.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... -intrusive
They create a special surface that fuses with bone
A robotic lawnmower keeping the grass neat and tidy outside a modern industrial building in Carrigtwohill, near Cork in Ireland, is a good indication that something whizzy may be going on inside. And so it proves. The airy production hall contains row after row of 3d printers, each the size of a large fridge-freezer. The machines are humming away as they steadily make orthopaedic implants, such as replacement hip and knee joints. Even though several hundred employees’ cars are parked outside, the hall is almost deserted. Every so often a team appears, a bit like a Formula One pit crew, to unload a machine, service it and set it running again to make another batch of implants.
It is not unusual in modern, highly automated plants to find the workforce distributed like this, with most of them in the surrounding offices engaged in engineering tasks, logistics, sales and so on, rather than on the factory floor. But this two-year-old factory, owned by Stryker, an American medical-technology company, differs from conventional manufacturing in another way as well. It is an example of how 3d printing, which a decade ago was seen by manufacturers as suitable only for making one-off prototypes, is quickly entering the world of mass production. For commercial reasons, Stryker keeps some of the details secret. But the factory, the largest 3d-printing centre of its type in the world, works around the clock and is said to be capable of producing “hundreds of thousands” of implants a year.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... a/243350/n
******
Online identification is getting more and more intrusive
Phones can now tell who is carrying them from their users’ gaits
Excerpt:
LexisNexis Risk Solutions, an American analytics firm, has catalogued more than 4bn phones, tablets and other computers in this way for banks and other clients. Roughly 7% of them have been used for shenanigans of some sort. But device fingerprinting is becoming less useful. Apple, Google and other makers of equipment and operating systems have been steadily restricting the range of attributes that can be observed remotely. The reason for doing this is to limit the amount of personal information that could fall into unauthorised hands. But such restrictions also make it harder to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate users.
That is why a new approach, behavioural biometrics, is gaining ground. It relies on the wealth of measurements made by today’s devices. These include data from accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors, that reveal how people hold their phones when using them, how they carry them and even the way they walk. Touchscreens, keyboards and mice can be monitored to show the distinctive ways in which someone’s fingers and hands move. Sensors can detect whether a phone has been set down on a hard surface such as a table or dropped lightly on a soft one such as a bed. If the hour is appropriate, this action could be used to assume when a user has retired for the night. These traits can then be used to determine whether someone attempting to make a transaction is likely to be the device’s habitual user.
Behavioural biometrics make it possible to identify an individual’s “unique motion fingerprint”, says John Whaley, head of UnifyID, a firm in Silicon Valley that is involved in the field. With the right software, data from a phone’s sensors can reveal details as personal as which part of someone’s foot strikes the pavement first, and how hard; the length of a walker’s stride; the number of strides per minute; and the swing and spring in the walker’s hips and step. It can also work out whether the phone in question is in a handbag, a pocket or held in a hand.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... -intrusive
Online fraud: Protecting yourself when using the Internet
Earlier this month, a vulnerability in the popular messaging service WhatsApp was discovered, which allowed hackers to install spyware though a voice call. This illicit software was capable of accessing calls, texts, and other data; even activating the phone’s microphone and camera. WhatsApp’s owner, Facebook, released an update in response, but it was already too late for some.
The significant rise in Internet and social media use around the world has enabled increased connectivity, collaboration, and convenience for growing numbers of users. At the same time however, all of us potentially face an increased risk of online fraud.
Online fraud and scams can target anyone, regardless of age, gender, or location. According to a report published by the Federal Trade Commission, the millennial generation are more vulnerable to online deception than seniors, as surprising as it may seem. The research finds that 40 per cent of adults aged 20-29 who have reported fraud ended up losing money in a fraud case.
At a speech in Athens in 2015, Mawlana Hazar Imam spoke of the risks that come with using information technologies, saying, “the danger in an age of mass media is that information also can be misused to manipulate the public.” Hazar Imam went on to say that “our technologies alone will not save us. But neither need they ruin us. It is not the power of our tools, but how we use them that will determine our future.”
Internet fraud is a type of deception which uses online platforms to trick victims out of money, property, or inheritance. It differentiates from theft, as the victim voluntarily provides information to the perpetrator. When we access the Internet, whether at home on desktops or tablets, or when out and about on smartphones, we may be at risk of fraudulent activity, which can present itself in a number of different ways. Some examples include
More...
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/online- ... g-internet
Earlier this month, a vulnerability in the popular messaging service WhatsApp was discovered, which allowed hackers to install spyware though a voice call. This illicit software was capable of accessing calls, texts, and other data; even activating the phone’s microphone and camera. WhatsApp’s owner, Facebook, released an update in response, but it was already too late for some.
The significant rise in Internet and social media use around the world has enabled increased connectivity, collaboration, and convenience for growing numbers of users. At the same time however, all of us potentially face an increased risk of online fraud.
Online fraud and scams can target anyone, regardless of age, gender, or location. According to a report published by the Federal Trade Commission, the millennial generation are more vulnerable to online deception than seniors, as surprising as it may seem. The research finds that 40 per cent of adults aged 20-29 who have reported fraud ended up losing money in a fraud case.
At a speech in Athens in 2015, Mawlana Hazar Imam spoke of the risks that come with using information technologies, saying, “the danger in an age of mass media is that information also can be misused to manipulate the public.” Hazar Imam went on to say that “our technologies alone will not save us. But neither need they ruin us. It is not the power of our tools, but how we use them that will determine our future.”
Internet fraud is a type of deception which uses online platforms to trick victims out of money, property, or inheritance. It differentiates from theft, as the victim voluntarily provides information to the perpetrator. When we access the Internet, whether at home on desktops or tablets, or when out and about on smartphones, we may be at risk of fraudulent activity, which can present itself in a number of different ways. Some examples include
More...
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/online- ... g-internet
Their Children Were Conceived With Donated Sperm. It Was the Wrong Sperm.
As genetic testing becomes more widespread, parents are finding that sperm used in artificial insemination did not come from the donors they chose.
Seventeen years ago, when she was in her thirties, Cindy and her female partner decided they wanted to have children.
The couple spent hours poring over sperm donor profiles, finally settling on an anonymous man with a clean medical record and few health issues in his family. He was an anonymous donor, and they knew him only by his identifying number.
Cindy gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Eventually the couple used the same donor to conceive again — and soon enough they were raising two boys.
When they were older, the boys found some of their half-siblings by entering the sperm donor’s number into an online database. Eventually the parents of the half-siblings decided to have them all take DNA tests.
The results were not what anyone expected: Cindy’s boys were not related to the other children. As it turned out, the sperm bank had sold her sperm not from the man she had carefully selected, but from a completely different donor.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/heal ... c_20190604
As genetic testing becomes more widespread, parents are finding that sperm used in artificial insemination did not come from the donors they chose.
Seventeen years ago, when she was in her thirties, Cindy and her female partner decided they wanted to have children.
The couple spent hours poring over sperm donor profiles, finally settling on an anonymous man with a clean medical record and few health issues in his family. He was an anonymous donor, and they knew him only by his identifying number.
Cindy gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Eventually the couple used the same donor to conceive again — and soon enough they were raising two boys.
When they were older, the boys found some of their half-siblings by entering the sperm donor’s number into an online database. Eventually the parents of the half-siblings decided to have them all take DNA tests.
The results were not what anyone expected: Cindy’s boys were not related to the other children. As it turned out, the sperm bank had sold her sperm not from the man she had carefully selected, but from a completely different donor.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/heal ... c_20190604
The second half of humanity is joining the internet
They will change it, and it will change them
In 2007 more humans lived in cities than outside them for the first time. It was a transition 5,000 years in the making. The internet has been quicker to reach the halfway mark. Over 50% of the planet’s population is now online, a mere quarter of a century after the web first took off among tech-savvy types in the West. The second half of the internet revolution has begun. As our briefing describes, it is changing how society works—and also creating a new business puzzle.
Most new users are in the emerging world; some 726m people came online in the past three years alone. China is still growing fast. But much of the rise is coming from poorer places, notably India and Africa. Having seen what fake news and trolling has done to public discourse in rich countries, many observers worry about politics being debased, from the polarisation of India’s electorate to the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. On the positive side, charities and aid workers talk endlessly and earnestly about how smartphones will allow farmers to check crop prices, let villagers sign up for online education and help doctors boost vaccination rates.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... e-internet
They will change it, and it will change them
In 2007 more humans lived in cities than outside them for the first time. It was a transition 5,000 years in the making. The internet has been quicker to reach the halfway mark. Over 50% of the planet’s population is now online, a mere quarter of a century after the web first took off among tech-savvy types in the West. The second half of the internet revolution has begun. As our briefing describes, it is changing how society works—and also creating a new business puzzle.
Most new users are in the emerging world; some 726m people came online in the past three years alone. China is still growing fast. But much of the rise is coming from poorer places, notably India and Africa. Having seen what fake news and trolling has done to public discourse in rich countries, many observers worry about politics being debased, from the polarisation of India’s electorate to the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. On the positive side, charities and aid workers talk endlessly and earnestly about how smartphones will allow farmers to check crop prices, let villagers sign up for online education and help doctors boost vaccination rates.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... e-internet
Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube
What seems like a sensible decision to an algorithm can be a terrible misstep to a human.
YouTube deals in the extraordinary, and shuns the ordinary. Whether that’s the everyday life of improbably rich young millionaires like Jake Paul, a high school dropout from Westlake, Ohio, or PewDiePie, a skinny, fast-talking Swede whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, YouTube seeks to serve a need.
It does so through “the algorithm” — YouTube’s recommendation engine. It’s a black box that YouTube introduced to keep us watching, but which has become a thorn in its side as the platform grows at an astronomically grand scale.
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is a set of rules followed by cold, hard computer logic. It was designed by human engineers, but is then programmed into and run automatically by computers, which return recommendations, telling viewers which videos they should watch. Google Brain, an artificial intelligence research team within the company, powers those recommendations, and bases them on user’s prior viewing. The system is highly intelligent, accounting for variations in the way people watch their videos.
Like many aspects of Google, it is also notoriously opaque. Occasionally, however, the curtain is lifted a little. In 2016, a paper by three Google employees revealed the deep neural networks behind YouTube’s recommended videos, which rifle through every video we’ve previously watched. The algorithm then uses that information to select a few hundred videos we might like to view from the billions on the site, which are then winnowed down to dozens, which are then presented on our screens.
In the three years since Google Brain began making smart recommendations, watch time from the YouTube home page has grown 20-fold. More than 70 percent of the time people spend watching videos on YouTube, they spend watching videos suggested by Google Brain.
This suits Google: it doesn’t want viewers to stay in their silos and watch only one or two creators. There are plenty of others they could watch. The more videos that are watched, the more ads that are seen, and the more money Google makes. As well as helping people find what they are looking for, Jim McFadden, YouTube’s technical lead for recommendations, told The Verge: “We also wanted to serve the needs of people when they didn’t necessarily know what they wanted to look for.”
But, as we’ve come to learn with YouTube, what seems like a sensible decision to the algorithm can be a terrible misstep to a human. And it can all go hideously wrong.
Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to watch videos of partially-clothed children, often after they watched sexual content. To most of the population, these videos are innocent home movies capturing playtime at the pool or children toddling through water fountains on vacation. But to the pedophiles who were watching them thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, they were something more.
Human intuition can recognize motives in people’s viewing decisions, and can step in to discourage that — which most likely would have happened if videos were being recommended by humans, and not a computer. But to YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opin ... 3053090615
What seems like a sensible decision to an algorithm can be a terrible misstep to a human.
YouTube deals in the extraordinary, and shuns the ordinary. Whether that’s the everyday life of improbably rich young millionaires like Jake Paul, a high school dropout from Westlake, Ohio, or PewDiePie, a skinny, fast-talking Swede whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, YouTube seeks to serve a need.
It does so through “the algorithm” — YouTube’s recommendation engine. It’s a black box that YouTube introduced to keep us watching, but which has become a thorn in its side as the platform grows at an astronomically grand scale.
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is a set of rules followed by cold, hard computer logic. It was designed by human engineers, but is then programmed into and run automatically by computers, which return recommendations, telling viewers which videos they should watch. Google Brain, an artificial intelligence research team within the company, powers those recommendations, and bases them on user’s prior viewing. The system is highly intelligent, accounting for variations in the way people watch their videos.
Like many aspects of Google, it is also notoriously opaque. Occasionally, however, the curtain is lifted a little. In 2016, a paper by three Google employees revealed the deep neural networks behind YouTube’s recommended videos, which rifle through every video we’ve previously watched. The algorithm then uses that information to select a few hundred videos we might like to view from the billions on the site, which are then winnowed down to dozens, which are then presented on our screens.
In the three years since Google Brain began making smart recommendations, watch time from the YouTube home page has grown 20-fold. More than 70 percent of the time people spend watching videos on YouTube, they spend watching videos suggested by Google Brain.
This suits Google: it doesn’t want viewers to stay in their silos and watch only one or two creators. There are plenty of others they could watch. The more videos that are watched, the more ads that are seen, and the more money Google makes. As well as helping people find what they are looking for, Jim McFadden, YouTube’s technical lead for recommendations, told The Verge: “We also wanted to serve the needs of people when they didn’t necessarily know what they wanted to look for.”
But, as we’ve come to learn with YouTube, what seems like a sensible decision to the algorithm can be a terrible misstep to a human. And it can all go hideously wrong.
Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to watch videos of partially-clothed children, often after they watched sexual content. To most of the population, these videos are innocent home movies capturing playtime at the pool or children toddling through water fountains on vacation. But to the pedophiles who were watching them thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, they were something more.
Human intuition can recognize motives in people’s viewing decisions, and can step in to discourage that — which most likely would have happened if videos were being recommended by humans, and not a computer. But to YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opin ... 3053090615
Dangerous work
Cleaning up nuclear waste is an obvious task for robots
But designing ’bots that can do it is hard
SOME PEOPLE worry about robots taking work away from human beings, but there are a few jobs that even these sceptics admit most folk would not want. One is cleaning up radioactive waste, particularly when it is inside a nuclear power station—and especially if the power station in question has suffered a recent accident.
Those who do handle radioactive material must first don protective suits that are inherently cumbersome and are further encumbered by the air hoses needed to allow the wearer to breathe. Even then their working hours are strictly limited, in order to avoid prolonged exposure to radiation and because operating in the suits is exhausting. Moreover, some sorts of waste are too hazardous for even the besuited to approach safely.
So, send in the robots? Unfortunately that is far from simple, for most robots are not up to the task. This became clear after events in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, which suffered a series of meltdowns after its safety systems failed following a tsunami. The site at Fukushima has turned into something of a graveyard for those robots dispatched into it to monitor radiation levels and start cleaning things up. Many got stuck, broke down or had their circuits fried by the intense radiation.
Intelligence test
Stopping such things happening again is part of the work of the National Centre for Nuclear Robotics (NCNR). This is a collaborative effort involving several British universities. It is led by Rustam Stolkin of the University of Birmingham, and its purpose is to improve the routine use of robotics in nuclear power stations as well as to ensure that robotic trips into irradiated areas are less likely to end up as suicide missions.
One problem with the robots dispatched into the ruins of Fukushima Dai-ichi was that they were not particularly clever. Most were operated by someone twiddling joysticks at a safe distance. Such machines are awkward to steer and their arms are tricky to move accurately when viewed via a video screen. Dr Stolkin reckons the answer is to equip then with artificial intelligence (AI), so that they can operate autonomously.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... for-robots
Cleaning up nuclear waste is an obvious task for robots
But designing ’bots that can do it is hard
SOME PEOPLE worry about robots taking work away from human beings, but there are a few jobs that even these sceptics admit most folk would not want. One is cleaning up radioactive waste, particularly when it is inside a nuclear power station—and especially if the power station in question has suffered a recent accident.
Those who do handle radioactive material must first don protective suits that are inherently cumbersome and are further encumbered by the air hoses needed to allow the wearer to breathe. Even then their working hours are strictly limited, in order to avoid prolonged exposure to radiation and because operating in the suits is exhausting. Moreover, some sorts of waste are too hazardous for even the besuited to approach safely.
So, send in the robots? Unfortunately that is far from simple, for most robots are not up to the task. This became clear after events in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, which suffered a series of meltdowns after its safety systems failed following a tsunami. The site at Fukushima has turned into something of a graveyard for those robots dispatched into it to monitor radiation levels and start cleaning things up. Many got stuck, broke down or had their circuits fried by the intense radiation.
Intelligence test
Stopping such things happening again is part of the work of the National Centre for Nuclear Robotics (NCNR). This is a collaborative effort involving several British universities. It is led by Rustam Stolkin of the University of Birmingham, and its purpose is to improve the routine use of robotics in nuclear power stations as well as to ensure that robotic trips into irradiated areas are less likely to end up as suicide missions.
One problem with the robots dispatched into the ruins of Fukushima Dai-ichi was that they were not particularly clever. Most were operated by someone twiddling joysticks at a safe distance. Such machines are awkward to steer and their arms are tricky to move accurately when viewed via a video screen. Dr Stolkin reckons the answer is to equip then with artificial intelligence (AI), so that they can operate autonomously.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... for-robots
How Artificial Intelligence Can Save Your Life
The machines know you better than you know yourself.
Artificial intelligence is by turns terrifying, overhyped, hard to understand and just plain awesome.
For an example of the last, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco were able this year to hook people up to brain monitors and generate natural-sounding synthetic speech out of mere brain activity. The goal is to give people who have lost the ability to speak — because of a stroke, A.L.S., epilepsy or something else — the power to talk to others just by thinking.
That’s pretty awesome.
One area where A.I. can most immediately improve our lives may be in the area of mental health. Unlike many illnesses, there’s no simple physical test you can give someone to tell if he or she is suffering from depression.
Primary care physicians can be mediocre at recognizing if a patient is depressed, or at predicting who is about to become depressed. Many people contemplate suicide, but it is very hard to tell who is really serious about it. Most people don’t seek treatment until their illness is well advanced.
Using A.I., researchers can make better predictions about who is going to get depressed next week, and who is going to try to kill themselves.
The Crisis Text Line is a suicide prevention hotline in which people communicate through texting instead of phone calls. Using A.I. technology, the organization has analyzed more than 100 million texts it has received. The idea is to help counselors understand who is really in immediate need of emergency care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opin ... y_20190625
The machines know you better than you know yourself.
Artificial intelligence is by turns terrifying, overhyped, hard to understand and just plain awesome.
For an example of the last, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco were able this year to hook people up to brain monitors and generate natural-sounding synthetic speech out of mere brain activity. The goal is to give people who have lost the ability to speak — because of a stroke, A.L.S., epilepsy or something else — the power to talk to others just by thinking.
That’s pretty awesome.
One area where A.I. can most immediately improve our lives may be in the area of mental health. Unlike many illnesses, there’s no simple physical test you can give someone to tell if he or she is suffering from depression.
Primary care physicians can be mediocre at recognizing if a patient is depressed, or at predicting who is about to become depressed. Many people contemplate suicide, but it is very hard to tell who is really serious about it. Most people don’t seek treatment until their illness is well advanced.
Using A.I., researchers can make better predictions about who is going to get depressed next week, and who is going to try to kill themselves.
The Crisis Text Line is a suicide prevention hotline in which people communicate through texting instead of phone calls. Using A.I. technology, the organization has analyzed more than 100 million texts it has received. The idea is to help counselors understand who is really in immediate need of emergency care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opin ... y_20190625
Are You Ready for Weapons That Call Their Own Shots?
The speed with which the military is developing artificial intelligence raises fears of an autonomous weapons race.
Excerpt:
As the ability of systems to act autonomously increases, those who study the dangers of such weapons, including the United Nations’ Group of Governmental Experts, fear that military planners may be tempted to eliminate human controls altogether. A treaty has been proposed to prohibit these self-directed lethal weapons, but it’s gotten limited support.
The proposed ban competes with the growing acceptance of this technology, with at least 30 countries having automated air and missile defense systems that can identify approaching threats and attack them on their own, unless a human supervisor stops the response.
The Times of Israel has reported that an Israeli armed robotic vehicle called the Guardium has been used on the Gaza border. The United States Navy has tested and retired an aircraft that could autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier and refuel in midair.
Britain, France, Russia, China and Israel are also said to be developing experimental autonomous stealth combat drones to operate in an enemy’s heavily defended airspace.
The speed with which the technology is advancing raises fears of an autonomous weapons arms race with China and Russia, making it more urgent that nations work together to establish controls so humans never completely surrender life and death choices in combat to machines.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/opin ... 3053090627
The speed with which the military is developing artificial intelligence raises fears of an autonomous weapons race.
Excerpt:
As the ability of systems to act autonomously increases, those who study the dangers of such weapons, including the United Nations’ Group of Governmental Experts, fear that military planners may be tempted to eliminate human controls altogether. A treaty has been proposed to prohibit these self-directed lethal weapons, but it’s gotten limited support.
The proposed ban competes with the growing acceptance of this technology, with at least 30 countries having automated air and missile defense systems that can identify approaching threats and attack them on their own, unless a human supervisor stops the response.
The Times of Israel has reported that an Israeli armed robotic vehicle called the Guardium has been used on the Gaza border. The United States Navy has tested and retired an aircraft that could autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier and refuel in midair.
Britain, France, Russia, China and Israel are also said to be developing experimental autonomous stealth combat drones to operate in an enemy’s heavily defended airspace.
The speed with which the technology is advancing raises fears of an autonomous weapons arms race with China and Russia, making it more urgent that nations work together to establish controls so humans never completely surrender life and death choices in combat to machines.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/opin ... 3053090627
How to Protect Your Digital Privacy
By making a few simple changes to your devices and accounts, you can maintain security against outside parties’ unwanted attempts to access your data as well as protect your privacy from those you don’t consent to sharing your information with. Getting started is easy. Here’s a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/guides/privacy- ... irect=true
By making a few simple changes to your devices and accounts, you can maintain security against outside parties’ unwanted attempts to access your data as well as protect your privacy from those you don’t consent to sharing your information with. Getting started is easy. Here’s a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/guides/privacy- ... irect=true
Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face
SAN FRANCISCO — Dozens of databases of people’s faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology.
The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million.
The face compilations are being driven by the race to create leading-edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using “neural networks,” which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google have most likely amassed the largest face data sets, which they do not distribute, according to research papers. But other companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence, according to academics, activists and public papers.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/tech ... 3053090714
SAN FRANCISCO — Dozens of databases of people’s faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology.
The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million.
The face compilations are being driven by the race to create leading-edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using “neural networks,” which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google have most likely amassed the largest face data sets, which they do not distribute, according to research papers. But other companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence, according to academics, activists and public papers.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/tech ... 3053090714
Elon Musk’s latest project shows first step toward mind-reading brain implant
Elon Musk’s ambitious brain-computer start-up Neuralink is looking to start trials on humans next year. Musk talked about the project at an event in San Francisco that was streamed live —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbh3t ... utu.bewith an eye toward recruiting more talent — late on Tuesday.
Neuralink aligns with a broader trend of technology minds seeking to merge their approaches with the world of in healthcare. Facebook has previously devoted resources to exploring computer systems that people could communicate with simply by thinking.
The start-up envisions drilling holes into the brain with a custom machine to embed thin threads that connect to a tiny processor, which can then be connected to a smartphone over Bluetooth. Over time it would like to make the installation process as simple as laser-eye surgery.
The company is seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to begin clinical trials as soon as next year, Bloomberg said, and Musk said the start-up wants to have its first human patient equipped with the technology before the end of 2020.
“It will take a long time, and you’ll see it coming,” Musk said at Tuesday’s event. He said in the future there could be an “app store” for different programs that could tap the technology.
Neuralink has operated in relative secrecy ever since Musk, the CEO of Teslaand a co-founder of PayPal, laid out the ideas for the start-up in an lengthy article on Tim Urban’s blog “Wait But Why” in 2017.
“We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years,” Musk told Urban.
Musk believes the technology could eventually assist in cognitive capabilities like speech and sight, according to the New York Times. Applications include helping people control computers with their brain activity or restoring the ability to speak, Philip Sabes, senior scientist at Neuralink, said at Tuesday’s event.
More....
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/technol ... n-implant/
Elon Musk’s ambitious brain-computer start-up Neuralink is looking to start trials on humans next year. Musk talked about the project at an event in San Francisco that was streamed live —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbh3t ... utu.bewith an eye toward recruiting more talent — late on Tuesday.
Neuralink aligns with a broader trend of technology minds seeking to merge their approaches with the world of in healthcare. Facebook has previously devoted resources to exploring computer systems that people could communicate with simply by thinking.
The start-up envisions drilling holes into the brain with a custom machine to embed thin threads that connect to a tiny processor, which can then be connected to a smartphone over Bluetooth. Over time it would like to make the installation process as simple as laser-eye surgery.
The company is seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to begin clinical trials as soon as next year, Bloomberg said, and Musk said the start-up wants to have its first human patient equipped with the technology before the end of 2020.
“It will take a long time, and you’ll see it coming,” Musk said at Tuesday’s event. He said in the future there could be an “app store” for different programs that could tap the technology.
Neuralink has operated in relative secrecy ever since Musk, the CEO of Teslaand a co-founder of PayPal, laid out the ideas for the start-up in an lengthy article on Tim Urban’s blog “Wait But Why” in 2017.
“We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years,” Musk told Urban.
Musk believes the technology could eventually assist in cognitive capabilities like speech and sight, according to the New York Times. Applications include helping people control computers with their brain activity or restoring the ability to speak, Philip Sabes, senior scientist at Neuralink, said at Tuesday’s event.
More....
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/technol ... n-implant/
France Jamat looks to key technologies of the future
Two emerging technologies we often hear about include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, which have the potential to revolutionise everyday life. Recently, the Aga Khan Education Board, Economic Planning Board, and Youth & Sports Committee of the Ismaili Council for France, invited members of the Jamat to learn about these key technologies from experts in the field.
Our daily lives are surrounded by intelligent systems based on new technology, and are becoming even more so, while many economic and social fields are undergoing a transformative process, due to the widespread adoption of these technologies. As such, it is thought that many jobs could be impacted, and some may even disappear.
During an afternoon at the Principal Jamatkhana in Paris, a keen audience intently listened to Ismaili technology experts, Aiaze Mitha and Hamza Didaraly, explaining how new technologies such as AI and the Blockchain work. They spoke about the potential opportunities and risks of the innovations, which are already in use in many countries around the world.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing technology, and has become embedded in smartphones and smart-speakers with various applications for users to look up information, purchase items, or book services through virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Google). An increasing number of industries also use AI, including the healthcare sector for analysing X-rays, or the transport sector with intelligent navigation systems and autonomous cars. Buses and metros are also slowly moving towards intelligent systems.
Through data analysis, AI may provide the ability to detect potential epidemics, could help farmers to increase yields, and help with the restoration of damaged monuments or even entire cities. However, there are also risks attached to the unregulated growth of AI. While it promises to offer consumers more personalised services, this could come at the cost of a loss of privacy, as we have seen with social networks that use AI to better target individual profiles and influence behaviour.
Blockchain is a technology for storing and exchanging information in a secure, reliable and non-modifiable manner, without the need for a central authority. Today, it is mainly used in the financial sector to simplify back-end operations such as reconciliations and settlements and as such, removes the need to pay commissions to intermediaries. Although Blockchain has been largely popularised by crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, its applications go well beyond the crypto world. Traditional industries including the food business increasingly use Blockchain. For example, supermarkets use it in QR codes for packaging, to secure all the information related to the production and supply chain, right up to their delivery in stores.
This revolutionary innovation has many potential use cases other than financial transactions; including voting, healthcare record-keeping, entertainment, and even delivery of humanitarian aid. Although The Guardian suggests that Blockchain may be overhyped — not yet practically useful — and just as with AI, Blockchain also has risks attached, such as hacking, and the concentration of wealth and power.
Xavier Vasques, Director of the Worldwide IBM Systems Centre in Montpellier has said, “Technology, such as AI and blockchain, is already creating new opportunities for individuals, society, and the global economy, and is solving real problems. But, like any new technology shift, technology has the potential to disrupt the current livelihoods of millions of people.”
“Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality depends less on the technology itself, but more on the institutions and policies that are in place at the corporate and government levels. Companies must prepare for massive reskilling; governments must create programs and policies which lift the unskilled and individuals need to take personal responsibility for their skills growth.”
At the event in Paris Principal Jamatkhana, University and high school students heard about various types of jobs linked to artificial intelligence, and realised that most future jobs do not yet exist. According to the OECD, 17 per cent of all jobs will be completely automated and 35 per cent will be profoundly transformed. To address the skills gap, the European Commission is setting up policies for supporting advanced diplomas in the field of artificial intelligence, in particular through specific scholarships.
The digital revolution is still at an early stage. This first meeting allowed parents in the Jamat to grasp that the employment market for their children will be profoundly different from theirs, and gave them an opportunity to raise questions with the experts. This resulted in a promising and stimulating conversation that will call for more thought and exploration over time.
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/france- ... ies-future
Two emerging technologies we often hear about include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, which have the potential to revolutionise everyday life. Recently, the Aga Khan Education Board, Economic Planning Board, and Youth & Sports Committee of the Ismaili Council for France, invited members of the Jamat to learn about these key technologies from experts in the field.
Our daily lives are surrounded by intelligent systems based on new technology, and are becoming even more so, while many economic and social fields are undergoing a transformative process, due to the widespread adoption of these technologies. As such, it is thought that many jobs could be impacted, and some may even disappear.
During an afternoon at the Principal Jamatkhana in Paris, a keen audience intently listened to Ismaili technology experts, Aiaze Mitha and Hamza Didaraly, explaining how new technologies such as AI and the Blockchain work. They spoke about the potential opportunities and risks of the innovations, which are already in use in many countries around the world.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing technology, and has become embedded in smartphones and smart-speakers with various applications for users to look up information, purchase items, or book services through virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Google). An increasing number of industries also use AI, including the healthcare sector for analysing X-rays, or the transport sector with intelligent navigation systems and autonomous cars. Buses and metros are also slowly moving towards intelligent systems.
Through data analysis, AI may provide the ability to detect potential epidemics, could help farmers to increase yields, and help with the restoration of damaged monuments or even entire cities. However, there are also risks attached to the unregulated growth of AI. While it promises to offer consumers more personalised services, this could come at the cost of a loss of privacy, as we have seen with social networks that use AI to better target individual profiles and influence behaviour.
Blockchain is a technology for storing and exchanging information in a secure, reliable and non-modifiable manner, without the need for a central authority. Today, it is mainly used in the financial sector to simplify back-end operations such as reconciliations and settlements and as such, removes the need to pay commissions to intermediaries. Although Blockchain has been largely popularised by crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, its applications go well beyond the crypto world. Traditional industries including the food business increasingly use Blockchain. For example, supermarkets use it in QR codes for packaging, to secure all the information related to the production and supply chain, right up to their delivery in stores.
This revolutionary innovation has many potential use cases other than financial transactions; including voting, healthcare record-keeping, entertainment, and even delivery of humanitarian aid. Although The Guardian suggests that Blockchain may be overhyped — not yet practically useful — and just as with AI, Blockchain also has risks attached, such as hacking, and the concentration of wealth and power.
Xavier Vasques, Director of the Worldwide IBM Systems Centre in Montpellier has said, “Technology, such as AI and blockchain, is already creating new opportunities for individuals, society, and the global economy, and is solving real problems. But, like any new technology shift, technology has the potential to disrupt the current livelihoods of millions of people.”
“Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality depends less on the technology itself, but more on the institutions and policies that are in place at the corporate and government levels. Companies must prepare for massive reskilling; governments must create programs and policies which lift the unskilled and individuals need to take personal responsibility for their skills growth.”
At the event in Paris Principal Jamatkhana, University and high school students heard about various types of jobs linked to artificial intelligence, and realised that most future jobs do not yet exist. According to the OECD, 17 per cent of all jobs will be completely automated and 35 per cent will be profoundly transformed. To address the skills gap, the European Commission is setting up policies for supporting advanced diplomas in the field of artificial intelligence, in particular through specific scholarships.
The digital revolution is still at an early stage. This first meeting allowed parents in the Jamat to grasp that the employment market for their children will be profoundly different from theirs, and gave them an opportunity to raise questions with the experts. This resulted in a promising and stimulating conversation that will call for more thought and exploration over time.
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/france- ... ies-future
If it isn’t on Instagram, did it happen?
In October 2015, Essena O’Neill, a popular Instagram Influencer, deleted 2000 pictures from her profile in what appeared to be a crisis of conscience. Having counted over half a million followers, and living many young peoples’ dream life, she eventually came to realise that the so-called ‘real world’ was a better place to spend her time.
The pictures that O’Neill deleted, she stated, “served no real purpose other than self-promotion.” She went on to dramatically edit the captions on the remaining 96 posts to expose the reality behind each supposedly candid image. Of one particular image, she revealed that after taking hours to get ready, she took over 50 pictures in order to get the one that she could use - spending even further time editing the image on various social media apps.
“I had it all and I was miserable” she said. “Everything I did was for views, for likes, for followers. I had the dream life and I was not happy.”
What is the relevance of O’Neill’s story and its correlation to an everyday user’s experience of social media? In an increasingly visual world, exploring the role of social media and its effects on members of society is particularly pertinent. Social media encompasses everything from the now dated Facebook to the more recent Snapchat and Instagram, with its prime demographic of users between the ages of 18 and 34.
Today, social media also plays a vital role in the distribution of information, and a central role in other aspects of our lives. It has changed the way that we access news, by publishing stories directly from the source. Permanent connectivity has become the new normal. As with everything however, there are positive aspects of social media, and other less-favourable aspects.
In a speech at Brown University in 2014, Mawlana Hazar Imam spoke of both aspects, saying, “More information at our fingertips can mean more knowledge and understanding. But it can also mean more fleeting attention-spans, more impulsive judgments, and more dependence on superficial snapshots of events.”
“Communicating more often and more easily can bring people closer together, but it can also tempt us to live more of our lives inside smaller information bubbles, in more intense but often more isolated groupings.”
The breadth of social media today has extended to incorporate lifestyle — the word ‘selfie’ has entered our everyday vocabulary. Some individuals and societies are becoming intent on inciting ‘Insta-envy’, showing off every aspect of their lives - what they eat, wear, who they are socialising with and where. We are living in a time where restaurants and holidays are being marketed to cater especially to heavy social media users. Research shows that amongst millennials, a major concern when travelling abroad is how ‘Instagrammable’ their destination is — the more exotic and picturesque the better — and therein lies a dire yet veritable conclusion - ‘If it isn’t on Instagram, it didn’t happen.’
Current social media practices — primarily centred around sharing attractive photos and images — are creating a generation dissatisfied with their own looks and lifestyle while battling a ‘Fear of Missing Out’ (FOMO). This in turn deepens their feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.
Looking at images that are carefully constructed to highlight beautiful people’s fabulous lives creates an aspiration of something unattainable, thus setting a bar for a level of perfection that is unrealistic. Needless to say, this can have a negative impact on young people’s wellbeing.
While commentators have long recognised the dangers of airbrushed images in magazines, social media has brought with it a new medium through which photos can be distorted, using filters and apps. One 2015 study found that despite over two-thirds of female respondents thinking it was wrong for magazines to airbrush pictures, 57% admitted to regularly editing their own social media pictures to enhance their appearances. More alarmingly, plastic surgeons are reporting that patients are coming to them with edited selfies of themselves, and asking to look more like the retouched photo.
Recently, frequent users of social media have reported increased feelings of depression, anxiety and loneliness. Therefore, it is important for young people to moderate how much time they spend on social media, how they are using these platforms and to recognise the negative impact it can have on their mental health. O’Neill seemingly reinforces this idea. Talking about her first ever Instagram post she said, “I remember I obsessively checked the number of likes for a full week after uploading it… I was so starved for social media validation.”
O’Neill’s decision to quit social media carries a learning for us all. In her final YouTube post she said, “Real life isn’t through screens… Go and do things that you love to do in the real world. Volunteer, help out somewhere, go to a cafe and just sit… you can go outside and meet people and feel connected. You don’t need to prove your value on social media.”
As such, rather than spending hours of time scrolling, absorbing questionable information and comparing oneself to others, our time might be better spent on other pursuits, such as being creative, enjoying nature, reading for pleasure, or learning something new. In the spirit of pluralism, it behoves us to break out of bubbles, to reach out and embrace difference, and to unplug and explore the ‘real world.’
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/if-it-i ... -it-happen
In October 2015, Essena O’Neill, a popular Instagram Influencer, deleted 2000 pictures from her profile in what appeared to be a crisis of conscience. Having counted over half a million followers, and living many young peoples’ dream life, she eventually came to realise that the so-called ‘real world’ was a better place to spend her time.
The pictures that O’Neill deleted, she stated, “served no real purpose other than self-promotion.” She went on to dramatically edit the captions on the remaining 96 posts to expose the reality behind each supposedly candid image. Of one particular image, she revealed that after taking hours to get ready, she took over 50 pictures in order to get the one that she could use - spending even further time editing the image on various social media apps.
“I had it all and I was miserable” she said. “Everything I did was for views, for likes, for followers. I had the dream life and I was not happy.”
What is the relevance of O’Neill’s story and its correlation to an everyday user’s experience of social media? In an increasingly visual world, exploring the role of social media and its effects on members of society is particularly pertinent. Social media encompasses everything from the now dated Facebook to the more recent Snapchat and Instagram, with its prime demographic of users between the ages of 18 and 34.
Today, social media also plays a vital role in the distribution of information, and a central role in other aspects of our lives. It has changed the way that we access news, by publishing stories directly from the source. Permanent connectivity has become the new normal. As with everything however, there are positive aspects of social media, and other less-favourable aspects.
In a speech at Brown University in 2014, Mawlana Hazar Imam spoke of both aspects, saying, “More information at our fingertips can mean more knowledge and understanding. But it can also mean more fleeting attention-spans, more impulsive judgments, and more dependence on superficial snapshots of events.”
“Communicating more often and more easily can bring people closer together, but it can also tempt us to live more of our lives inside smaller information bubbles, in more intense but often more isolated groupings.”
The breadth of social media today has extended to incorporate lifestyle — the word ‘selfie’ has entered our everyday vocabulary. Some individuals and societies are becoming intent on inciting ‘Insta-envy’, showing off every aspect of their lives - what they eat, wear, who they are socialising with and where. We are living in a time where restaurants and holidays are being marketed to cater especially to heavy social media users. Research shows that amongst millennials, a major concern when travelling abroad is how ‘Instagrammable’ their destination is — the more exotic and picturesque the better — and therein lies a dire yet veritable conclusion - ‘If it isn’t on Instagram, it didn’t happen.’
Current social media practices — primarily centred around sharing attractive photos and images — are creating a generation dissatisfied with their own looks and lifestyle while battling a ‘Fear of Missing Out’ (FOMO). This in turn deepens their feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.
Looking at images that are carefully constructed to highlight beautiful people’s fabulous lives creates an aspiration of something unattainable, thus setting a bar for a level of perfection that is unrealistic. Needless to say, this can have a negative impact on young people’s wellbeing.
While commentators have long recognised the dangers of airbrushed images in magazines, social media has brought with it a new medium through which photos can be distorted, using filters and apps. One 2015 study found that despite over two-thirds of female respondents thinking it was wrong for magazines to airbrush pictures, 57% admitted to regularly editing their own social media pictures to enhance their appearances. More alarmingly, plastic surgeons are reporting that patients are coming to them with edited selfies of themselves, and asking to look more like the retouched photo.
Recently, frequent users of social media have reported increased feelings of depression, anxiety and loneliness. Therefore, it is important for young people to moderate how much time they spend on social media, how they are using these platforms and to recognise the negative impact it can have on their mental health. O’Neill seemingly reinforces this idea. Talking about her first ever Instagram post she said, “I remember I obsessively checked the number of likes for a full week after uploading it… I was so starved for social media validation.”
O’Neill’s decision to quit social media carries a learning for us all. In her final YouTube post she said, “Real life isn’t through screens… Go and do things that you love to do in the real world. Volunteer, help out somewhere, go to a cafe and just sit… you can go outside and meet people and feel connected. You don’t need to prove your value on social media.”
As such, rather than spending hours of time scrolling, absorbing questionable information and comparing oneself to others, our time might be better spent on other pursuits, such as being creative, enjoying nature, reading for pleasure, or learning something new. In the spirit of pluralism, it behoves us to break out of bubbles, to reach out and embrace difference, and to unplug and explore the ‘real world.’
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/if-it-i ... -it-happen
A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans.
Artificial intelligence is being taught by thousands of office workers around the world. It is not exactly futuristic work.
BHUBANESWAR, India — Namita Pradhan sat at a desk in downtown Bhubaneswar, India, about 40 miles from the Bay of Bengal, staring at a video recorded in a hospital on the other side of the world.
The video showed the inside of someone’s colon. Ms. Pradhan was looking for polyps, small growths in the large intestine that could lead to cancer. When she found one — they look a bit like a slimy, angry pimple — she marked it with her computer mouse and keyboard, drawing a digital circle around the tiny bulge.
She was not trained as a doctor, but she was helping to teach an artificial intelligence system that could eventually do the work of a doctor.
Ms. Pradhan was one of dozens of young Indian women and men lined up at desks on the fourth floor of a small office building. They were trained to annotate all kinds of digital images, pinpointing everything from stop signs and pedestrians in street scenes to factories and oil tankers in satellite photos.
A.I., most people in the tech industry would tell you, is the future of their industry, and it is improving fast thanks to something called machine learning. But tech executives rarely discuss the labor-intensive process that goes into its creation. A.I. is learning from humans. Lots and lots of humans.
Before an A.I. system can learn, someone has to label the data supplied to it. Humans, for example, must pinpoint the polyps. The work is vital to the creation of artificial intelligence like self-driving cars, surveillance systems and automated health care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/tech ... umans.html#
Artificial intelligence is being taught by thousands of office workers around the world. It is not exactly futuristic work.
BHUBANESWAR, India — Namita Pradhan sat at a desk in downtown Bhubaneswar, India, about 40 miles from the Bay of Bengal, staring at a video recorded in a hospital on the other side of the world.
The video showed the inside of someone’s colon. Ms. Pradhan was looking for polyps, small growths in the large intestine that could lead to cancer. When she found one — they look a bit like a slimy, angry pimple — she marked it with her computer mouse and keyboard, drawing a digital circle around the tiny bulge.
She was not trained as a doctor, but she was helping to teach an artificial intelligence system that could eventually do the work of a doctor.
Ms. Pradhan was one of dozens of young Indian women and men lined up at desks on the fourth floor of a small office building. They were trained to annotate all kinds of digital images, pinpointing everything from stop signs and pedestrians in street scenes to factories and oil tankers in satellite photos.
A.I., most people in the tech industry would tell you, is the future of their industry, and it is improving fast thanks to something called machine learning. But tech executives rarely discuss the labor-intensive process that goes into its creation. A.I. is learning from humans. Lots and lots of humans.
Before an A.I. system can learn, someone has to label the data supplied to it. Humans, for example, must pinpoint the polyps. The work is vital to the creation of artificial intelligence like self-driving cars, surveillance systems and automated health care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/tech ... umans.html#
Interview with Professor El-Nasir Lalani, Director of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at AKU
The.Ismaili is pleased to publish an interview with Dr El-Nasir Lalani, Founding Director and Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Translational Medicine at the Aga Khan University’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine. Professor Lalani discusses the implications of scientific breakthroughs in a rapidly changing world, and the potential of stem cell research to better treat diseases in the future.
Earlier this summer, the Aga Khan University and the NOVA University in Lisbon co-hosted a symposium on stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and the ethics surrounding these advances in scientific research. An esteemed panel of experts in the fields of science, theology, law, and ethics came together to present, discuss, and debate on the various issues and anticipated advances in this field.
To shed more light on this complex topic, Professor Lalani explains what stem cells are, discusses the implications of such scientific breakthroughs, and describes some of the Aga Khan University's work in this growing field.
Interview and photos at:
https://the.ismaili/interviews/intervie ... rce=Direct
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Converting digital acumen into social capital
Originally intended to help with productivity tasks such as email, calendars, and contact lists; mobile apps have expanded into other areas such as games, location-services, purchasing, and countless others. Here we feature three Ismaili entrepreneurs who have ventured onto the app space, and are helping others through their technology.
More....
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/convert ... al-capital
The.Ismaili is pleased to publish an interview with Dr El-Nasir Lalani, Founding Director and Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Translational Medicine at the Aga Khan University’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine. Professor Lalani discusses the implications of scientific breakthroughs in a rapidly changing world, and the potential of stem cell research to better treat diseases in the future.
Earlier this summer, the Aga Khan University and the NOVA University in Lisbon co-hosted a symposium on stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and the ethics surrounding these advances in scientific research. An esteemed panel of experts in the fields of science, theology, law, and ethics came together to present, discuss, and debate on the various issues and anticipated advances in this field.
To shed more light on this complex topic, Professor Lalani explains what stem cells are, discusses the implications of such scientific breakthroughs, and describes some of the Aga Khan University's work in this growing field.
Interview and photos at:
https://the.ismaili/interviews/intervie ... rce=Direct
******
Converting digital acumen into social capital
Originally intended to help with productivity tasks such as email, calendars, and contact lists; mobile apps have expanded into other areas such as games, location-services, purchasing, and countless others. Here we feature three Ismaili entrepreneurs who have ventured onto the app space, and are helping others through their technology.
More....
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/convert ... al-capital
How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects
The “Internet of Things” will fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and producers
On august 29th, as Hurricane Dorian tracked towards America’s east coast, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car maker, announced that some of his customers in the storm’s path would find that their cars had suddenly developed the ability to drive farther on a single battery charge. Like many modern vehicles, Mr Musk’s products are best thought of as internet-connected computers on wheels. The cheaper models in Tesla’s line-up have parts of their batteries disabled by the car’s software in order to limit their range. At the tap of a keyboard in Palo Alto, the firm was able to remove those restrictions and give drivers temporary access to the full power of their batteries.
Mr Musk’s computerised cars are just one example of a much broader trend. As computers and connectivity become cheaper, it makes sense to bake them into more and more things that are not, in themselves, computers—from nappies and coffee machines to cows and factory robots—creating an “internet of things”, or iot (see Technology Quarterly). It is a slow revolution that has been gathering pace for years, as computers have found their way into cars, telephones and televisions. But the transformation is about to go into overdrive. One forecast is that by 2035 the world will have a trillion connected computers, built into everything from food packaging to bridges and clothes.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... a/307494/n
The “Internet of Things” will fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and producers
On august 29th, as Hurricane Dorian tracked towards America’s east coast, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car maker, announced that some of his customers in the storm’s path would find that their cars had suddenly developed the ability to drive farther on a single battery charge. Like many modern vehicles, Mr Musk’s products are best thought of as internet-connected computers on wheels. The cheaper models in Tesla’s line-up have parts of their batteries disabled by the car’s software in order to limit their range. At the tap of a keyboard in Palo Alto, the firm was able to remove those restrictions and give drivers temporary access to the full power of their batteries.
Mr Musk’s computerised cars are just one example of a much broader trend. As computers and connectivity become cheaper, it makes sense to bake them into more and more things that are not, in themselves, computers—from nappies and coffee machines to cows and factory robots—creating an “internet of things”, or iot (see Technology Quarterly). It is a slow revolution that has been gathering pace for years, as computers have found their way into cars, telephones and televisions. But the transformation is about to go into overdrive. One forecast is that by 2035 the world will have a trillion connected computers, built into everything from food packaging to bridges and clothes.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... a/307494/n