Meet the humans training robots at the ‘arm farm’

Meet the humans training robots at the ‘arm farm’

AI still needs us, but not for long

AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist, coder or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will.

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Waymo reportedly plans to test robo taxis in Ontario. Toronto’s mayor has her doubts about its technology

Waymo reportedly plans to test robo taxis in Ontario. Toronto’s mayor has her doubts about its technology

Waymo is reportedly planning a significant step toward bringing its driverless taxis to Toronto’s streets. But it’s unclear if the California-based tech company will be welcome north of the border, with the mayor and premier harbouring concerns about the autonomous driving technology’s impact on local jobs.

According to a spokesperson for Mayor Olivia Chow, Waymo has told her office it plans to apply to the Ontario government’s automated vehicle pilot program. That would enable the company to test its vehicles in the province and serve as a potential precursor to launching commercial robo taxi operations in its largest city.


No more migrant drivers? I’m on board.

Yes, Waymo (and to a lesser extent other driverless systems) has begun to take market share and exert downward pressure on human cab, Uber, and Lyft drivers in the cities where robotaxis operate at scale—but it has not caused widespread or total displacement yet.

 

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Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race

Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race

At a military parade in Beijing in September, President Xi Jinping and his special guests, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, watched as Chinese forces showed off several models of drones that could autonomously fly alongside fighter jets into battle.

The demonstration of technological might immediately set off alarm bells in the United States. Pentagon officials concluded that America’s program for unmanned combat drones was lagging China’s, according to three U.S. defense and intelligence officials. Russia, too, was thought to be ahead in building facilities that could produce advanced drones, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly on military capabilities.

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Study: 86% of AI Unemployed will be Women

Study: 86% of AI Unemployed will be Women

A new study predicts 86% of AI unemployment will be women.

And not just any women: rich Democrat women.

Tragically, AI is coming for the notorious Karen who’s overpaid for what she produces but still needs to see the manager.

h/t Hermes

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Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders.

Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders.

SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company valued at $380 billion, can take its pick of Silicon Valley talent thanks to the success of its chatbot Claude. But last month, the start-up sought help from a group rarely consulted in tech circles: Christian religious leaders.

The company hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia and the business world at its headquarters in late March for a two-day summit that included discussion sessions and a private dinner with senior Anthropic researchers, according to four participants who spoke with The Washington Post.

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Anthropic’s new AI tool has implications for us all – whether we can use it or not

Anthropic’s new AI tool has implications for us all – whether we can use it or not

In June 2024, a cyber-attack on a pathology services company caused chaos across London’s hospitals. More than 10,000 appointments were cancelled. Blood shortages followed and delays to blood tests led to a patient’s death.

Lethal cyber-attacks like this are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that – plunging us into a terrifying new world of chaos and disruption to the digital systems that we rely on.

This week Anthropic, a leading AI company in San Francisco, announced “Claude Mythos Preview”, an AI model that the startup says is too dangerous to publicly release, thanks to its exceptional cybersecurity – and cyber-attacking – capabilities. Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software.

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Regulating the Sex Robot Revolution

Regulating the Sex Robot Revolution

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy in Florida named Sewell Setzer shot himself after months of deepening emotional entanglement with a chatbot on Character.AI. He had named the bot after Daenerys Targaryen, a Game of Thrones character, and the conversations had turned romantic, then sexual, then dark. In his final exchange, Setzer told the chatbot he wanted to die. It told him to “come home” to it. A year later, a second teenager’s parents sued OpenAI after their 16-year-old son used ChatGPT as what they called his “suicide coach,” confiding suicidal plans that the bot never flagged and his parents never saw. A third suit followed: it involved a 13-year-old honor roll student, an artist who once rescued a friend from bullies but was found dead after months of confiding in a Character.AI bot named Hero.

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WSJ: ‘Hollywood Will Soon Resemble Detroit’ After Auto Industry‘s Decline, ‘Nightmare Scenario Is Playing out’

Hollywood is locked in a death spiral that it may never be able to reverse, a report claims.

The days of La La Land may be numbered with the pressures of how people consume entertainment continuing to undergo massive shifts. And the legacy studio system is struggling to respond and reinvent itself accordingly, especially in the U.S. as productions of movies and TV shows flee California in droves and even increasingly head to other countries looking for far cheaper costs.

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Tech CEOs suddenly love blaming AI for mass job cuts. Why?

Sweeping job cuts at Big Tech companies have become an annual tradition. How executives explain those decisions, however, has changed.

Out are buzzwords like efficiency, over-hiring, and too many management layers.

Today, all explanations stem from artificial intelligence (AI).

In recent weeks, giants including Google, Amazon, Meta, as well as smaller firms such as Pinterest and Atlassian, have all announced or warned of plans to shrink their workforce, pointing to developments in AI that they say are allowing their firms to do more with fewer people.

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AI: The Biggest Heist in World History

Davos, Big Tech, and the quiet looting of everyone’s intellectual property.

What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history. A forced income transfer worth trillions of dollars, siphoned from the public, headed to a small sliver of the 1 percent.

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Musk has a plan to make human labor obsolete. Billionaires are joining in.

In the utopia proposed by Elon Musk, billions of robots perform all necessary work. A network of autonomous vehicles and humanoids, fueled by solar energy, provide boundless resources. Poverty is eliminated. Work is optional.

And the world’s richest person would become the first trillionaire in the process.

While Musk has a well-documented penchant for overpromising, he has recast his companies to chase this future. He pivoted Tesla this year to prioritize building robots, phasing out car models including its popular luxury sedan to stand up a new production line of Optimus humanoids.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Fix Social Science?

Artificial intelligence can do many of the things that social scientists do. It can analyze data, write and review code, identify appropriate statistical methods, and offer suggestions on study drafts. It can even take a dataset and a research question and produce an entire paper on its own. Given that human-led social science is often marred by mistakes, dubious methods, ideological bias, and even outright fraud, one can hope that AI will improve the field in the years ahead.

Some recent studies, though, highlight the limitations of current models. For now, AI is a productivity- and quality-enhancing tool, but not a panacea for what ails social science, nor a reason to let one’s guard down.


AI is easily enough co-opted by the left to suit any “studies” faculty.

ChatGPT’s ‘liberal’ bias allows hate speech toward GOP, men: research

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US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI

A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms and his fellow musicians out of millions in royalties by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs – and using automated “bots” to artificially boost the number of listens into the billions.

As part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York’s southern district, 52-year-old Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Props for being an early adopter.

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