My heartbeat quickens just a little as the cab approaches. It’s a bizarre sight, one that I thought I wouldn’t see in my lifetime.
The cab has no driver. It stops in front of me and invites me to unlock its door with my phone – before whisking me into the night.
But as I am about to get in, a passer-by approaches.
“They’re unsafe,” he tells me. He says he saw someone nearly get run over by a robotaxi – and warns me to be careful.
When the government sets about to marry its limitless appetite for social control with the seemingly limitless computing power of artificial intelligence, the end result is destined to be Orwell’s “thoughtcrime” – a concept that was once exclusively in the domain of speculative fiction — becoming reality. Life imitates art, it seems.
It is powered into flight by a rocket engine. It can fly a distance equal to the width of China. It has a stealthy design and is capable of carrying missiles that can hit enemy targets far beyond its visual range.
But what really distinguishes the Air Force’s pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is that it is run by artificial intelligence, putting it at the forefront of efforts by the U.S. military to harness the capacities of an emerging technology whose vast potential benefits are tempered by deep concerns about how much autonomy to grant to a lethal weapon.
Artificial intelligence can “listen” to keystrokes and steal passwords, according to new research.
An Aug. 3 research paper from the UK, titled “A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards,” examines how hackers could use artificial intelligence (AI) to figure out passwords by “listening” to keystrokes. AI achieved over 90 percent accuracy in determining passwords, and was even able to adjust for variations such as the weight of the finger pressing on a key. This raises new concerns for the already severe risks associated with AI.
A federal judge has ruled that art that was wholly created by artificial intelligence technology is not protected by copyright law — a decision that could have far-reaching implications for Hollywood as studios continue to adopt AI as a creative tool.
A bespectacled Person of Color™ appeared on Social Justice™ paragon Democracy Now! recently to share with the audience that artificial intelligence is — and you’ll never guess what’s coming next — racist!
… The development comes just over a week after California regulators allowed Cruise and the Google spinoff Waymo to operate autonomous robotaxis throughout San Francisco at all hours, despite safety worries spurred by recurring problems with unexpected stops and other erratic behavior.
“The DMV is investigating recent concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco,” the DMV said on Saturday in a statement to the Associated Press. “Cruise has agreed to a 50% reduction and will have no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night.”
Robotaxi breakdowns cause mayhem in San Francisco days after expansion vote
“I’ve written a bunch about how likely it is that this AI revolution is going to go up in smoke, such as here or here. In these pieces I’ve tended to focus on the broader philosophical questions and the terrible record of humanity’s efforts to predict the future. Typically I’ve left the actual generative powers of these existing systems alone. But what if this software just sucks? What if we’re all so desperate to move to the next era of human history that we talked ourselves into the idea that not-very-impressive predictive text and image compilers are The Future?”
Zoom has updated its terms of service after a backlash over fears that it trained its artificial intelligence (AI) models on customer calls.
In a blog post the firm stressed that audio, video and chats were not used for AI without consent.
The video-calling app acted after users noticed changes to the firm’s terms of service in March which they worried enabled AI training.
The firm said it made the changes to be more transparent.
The backup driver in the 1st death by a fully autonomous car pleads guilty to endangerment
… Defense attorney Albert Jaynes Morrison told Garbarino that Uber should share some blame for the collision as he asked the judge to sentence Vasquez to six months of unsupervised probation.
“There were steps that Uber failed to take,” he said. By putting Vasquez in the vehicle without a second employee, he said. “It was not a question of if but when it was going to happen.”
Prosecutors previously declined to file criminal charges against Uber, as a corporation. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded Vasquez’s failure to monitor the road was the main cause of the crash.
The queue for the bar has long been a bugbear for the thirsty sports fan, a gamble that all too often results in a rushed pint, downed just before the whistle for the start of the second-half.
After missing a key try at an international rugby match while waiting for a beer a few years ago, Sam Pettipher decided to do something about it. Studying for an MBA at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen at the time, he dedicated his final project on “technology commercialisation” to finding a better way of lubricating crowds at mass events.
We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shrivelling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas – and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. ‘We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,’ said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: ‘I would hope that in the future people understand the difference between real people making real choices and something that’s basically animation.’
But here’s an uncomfortable fact. When it comes to scripts, I’m not sure using AI instead of flesh and blood writers would make a whole lot of difference.
In March last year a video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelensky telling the people of Ukraine to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia.
It was a pretty obvious deepfake – a type of fake video that uses artificial intelligence to swap faces or create a digital version of someone.
But as AI developments make deepfakes easier to produce, detecting them quickly has become all the more important.
Intel believes it has a solution, and it is all about blood in your face.
In a Twitter thread, a Shopify employee has broken their non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to shed light on the company’s controversial actions and strategic direction. The thread exposed a series of events starting from the first quarter of 2022 when Shopify promised job security to its staff, only to carry out massive layoffs in July of the same year.
Some executives found it “unsettling.” And some people “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.”
That’s how, according to the New York Times, leaders at the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal reacted to a new tool that Google is testing, known internally as Genesis, that uses artificial intelligence to write news articles. The tool “can take in information—details of current events, for example—and generate news content,” according to the Times, which reported on Wednesday that Genesis had been demonstrated for executives at the three organizations. “Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others,” the Times reports, adding that “the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.”
