Tag: technology

MOLD WILL BE THE FOOD OF OUR DYSTOPIAN FUTURE: NEW RESEARCH EXAMINES THE FUTURE OF FUNGI AS FOOD

In the ongoing search for sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and other animal proteins, researchers have settled on a new product that only solidifies our descent into a dystopian science fiction story. Published in Nature Communications, this could be humanity’s new favorite food; genetically engineered mold. 

The study, led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, demonstrates how the edible fungus, Aspergillus oryzae, can be bioengineered to enhance its nutritional value and sensory appeal as a meat substitute. By modifying the fungus’s genome using cutting-edge synthetic biology tools, the researchers were able to elevate the production of key nutrients and flavor molecules, bringing it closer to mimicking the taste and texture of real meat.

A. oryzae, also known as koji mold, has a long history of safe use in fermented foods and has recently gained attention as a potential scaffold for cellular agriculture and alternative protein production. However, like many other fungi used in food applications, it has inherent limitations in nutrition and taste. To overcome the reality that this mold basically tastes like crap, the research team developed a comprehensive synthetic biology toolkit for A. oryzae. 

Using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system, which allows for precise genomic modifications, the researchers first set out to enhance the production of ergothioneine, a potent antioxidant with potential health benefits, in the fungal mycelium. By overexpressing the fungus’s native ergothioneine biosynthetic genes, they were able to achieve levels much higher than those found in oyster mushrooms, currently the top dietary source of ergothioneine.

Next, with every dystopian science fiction trope imaginable, the team tackled the challenge of creating a more meat-like flavor and appearance. 

They engineered the fungus to overproduce heme, the iron-containing molecule responsible for the characteristic taste and color of red meat. By modulating the expression of key enzymes in the heme biosynthetic pathway and introducing a heme-binding protein, they elevated intracellular heme levels to 40% of those found in leading plant-based meats that incorporate heme for flavor and color.

Remarkably, the heme-overproducing strain exhibited a distinct red color and could be readily formulated into realistic meat alternatives with minimal processing, setting it apart from plant-based proteins that often require extensive purification and additives.

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How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You (and Opt Out of Sharing When You Can)

Cars collect a lot of our personal data, and car companies disclose a lot of that data to third parties. It’s often unclear what’s being collected, and what’s being shared and with whom. A recent New York Times article highlighted how data is shared by G.M. with insurance companies, sometimes without clear knowledge from the driver. If you’re curious about what your car knows about you, you might be able to find out. In some cases, you may even be able to opt out of some of that sharing of data.

Why Your Car Collects and Shares Data

A car (and its app, if you installed one on your phone) can collect all sorts of data in the background with and without you realizing it. This in turn may be shared for a wide variety of purposes, including advertising and risk-assessment for insurance companies. The list of data collected is long and dependent on the car’s make, model, and trim.  But if you look through any car maker’s privacy policy, you’ll see some trends:

  • Diagnostics data, sometimes referred to as “vehicle health data,” may be used internally for quality assurance, research, recall tracking, service issues, and similar unsurprising car-related purposes. This type of data may also be shared with dealers or repair companies for service.
  • Location information may be collected for emergency services, mapping, and to catalog other environmental information about where a car is operated. Some cars may give you access to the vehicle’s location in the app.
  • Some usage data may be shared or used internally for advertising. Your daily driving or car maintenance habits, alongside location data, is a valuable asset to the targeted advertising ecosystem. 
  • All of this data could be shared with law enforcement.
  • Information about your driving habits, sometimes referred to as “Driving data” or “Driver behavior information,” may be shared with insurance companies and used to alter your premiums.  This can range from odometer readings to braking and acceleration statistics and even data about what time of day you drive.. 

Surprise insurance sharing is the thrust of The New York Times article, and certainly not the only problem with car data. We’ve written previously about how insurance companies offer discounts for customers who opt into a usage-based insurance program. Every state except California currently allows the use of telematics data for insurance rating, but privacy protections for this data vary widely across states.

When you sign up directly through an insurer, these opt-in insurance programs have a pretty clear tradeoff and sign up processes, and they’ll likely send you a physical device that you plug into your car’s OBD port that then collects and transmits data back to the insurer.

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The War Between Knowledge and Stupidity

Bernard Stiegler was, until his premature death, probably the most important philosopher of technology of the present. His work on technology has shown us that, far from being exclusively a danger to human existence, it is a pharmakon – a poison as well as a cure – and that, as long as we approach technology as a means to ‘critical intensification,’ it could assist us in promoting the causes of enlightenment and freedom.

It is no exaggeration to say that making believable information and credible analysis available to citizens at present is probably indispensable for resisting the behemoth of lies and betrayal confronting us. This has never been more necessary than it is today, given that we face what is probably the greatest crisis in the history of humanity, with nothing less than our freedom, let alone our lives, at stake. 

To be able to secure this freedom against the inhuman forces threatening to shackle it today, one could do no better than to take heed of what Stiegler argues in States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century (2015). Considering what he writes here it is hard to believe that it was not written today (p. 15): 

The impression that humanity has fallen under the domination of unreason or madness [déraison] overwhelms our spirit, confronted as we are with systemic collapses, major technological accidents, medical or pharmaceutical scandals, shocking revelations, the unleashing of the drives, and acts of madness of every kind and in every social milieu – not to mention the extreme misery and poverty that now afflict citizens and neighbours both near and far.

While these words are certainly as applicable to our current situation as it was almost 10 years ago, Stiegler was in fact engaged in an interpretive analysis of the role of banks and other institutions – aided and abetted by certain academics – in the establishment of what he terms a ‘literally suicidal financial system’ (p. 1). (Anyone who doubts this can merely view the award-winning documentary film of 2010, Inside Job, by Charles Ferguson, which Stiegler also mentions on p.1.) He explains further as follows (p. 2): 

Western universities are in the grip of a deep malaise, and a number of them have found themselves, through some of their faculty, giving consent to – and sometimes considerably compromised by – the implementation of a financial system that, with the establishment of hyper-consumerist, drive-based and ‘addictogenic’ society, leads to economic and political ruin on a global scale. If this has occurred, it is because their goals, their organizations and their means have been put entirely at the service of the destruction of sovereignty. That is, they have been placed in the service of the destruction of sovereignty as conceived by the philosophers of what we call the Enlightenment…

In short, Stiegler was writing about the way in which the world was being prepared, across the board – including the highest levels of education – for what has become far more conspicuous since the advent of the so-called ‘pandemic’ in 2020, namely an all-out attempt to cause the collapse of civilisation as we knew it, at all levels, with the thinly disguised goal in mind of installing a neo-fascist, technocratic, global regime which would exercise power through AI-controlled regimes of obedience. The latter would centre on ubiquitous facial recognition technology, digital identification, and CBDCs (which would replace money in the usual sense). 

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Your car is secretly spying on you and driving your insurance rates through the roof: report

Drivers of cars manufactured by General Motors, Honda and other popular brands say that their insurance rates went up after the companies sent data about their driving behavior to issuers without their knowledge.

Kenn Dahl, 65, is a Seattle-area businessman who told The New York Times that his car insurance costs soared by 21% in 2022 after GM’s OnStar Smart Driver computerized system installed in his Chevy Bolt collected information about the particulars of his driving habits.

Dahl said that his insurance agent told him the price increase was based on data collected by LexisNexis, which compiled a report tracking each and every time he and his wife drove their Chevy Bolt over a six-month period.

According to Dahl, the 258-page report contained information about the start and end times of his trips, distance driven and other data detailing possible instances of speeding, hard braking and sharp accelerations.

The report contained information about one particular trip in June which lasted 18 minutes and spanned 7.33 miles

During that same trip, the LexisNexis report recorded two instances of rapid acceleration and two incidents of hard braking.

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Hackers can read private AI assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce, seek information about drug addiction, or ask for edits in emails containing proprietary trade secrets. The providers of these AI-powered chat services are keenly aware of the sensitivity of these discussions and take active steps—mainly in the form of encrypting them—to prevent potential snoops from reading other people’s interactions.

But now, researchers have devised an attack that deciphers AI assistant responses with surprising accuracy. The technique exploits a side channel present in all of the major AI assistants, with the exception of Google Gemini. It then refines the fairly raw results through large language models specially trained for the task. The result: Someone with a passive adversary-in-the-middle position—meaning an adversary who can monitor the data packets passing between an AI assistant and the user—can infer the specific topic of 55 percent of all captured responses, usually with high word accuracy. The attack can deduce responses with perfect word accuracy 29 percent of the time.

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JPMorgan To Roll Out Controversial Biometric Payments

America’s largest bank and one of the largest in the world, J.P. Morgan, is preparing to launch biometric payments next year and is currently carrying out pilot projects.

J.P. Morgan has chosen PopID – which verifies a person’s identity via facial recognition, among other methods – as the backbone for the project.

The massive financial corporation is clearly unwilling to be left behind the likes of Mastercard or Visa, who are both implementing biometrics-powered payments.

According to the bank, one of the first events where this was trialed was the Formula 1 race in Miami, and that was also the first time this happened at a Formula 1 venue.

The ultimate goal is to expand authentication based on individuals’ fingerprints, palms, and faces to anyone interested, but with a focus on stores, restaurants, and various event venues.

J.P. Morgan says this will be a faster and safer, as well as “personalized” way for customers to pay, while those with things to sell are promised higher turnover and improved customer loyalty, but also a centralized place to access transactions and marketing data, say reports.

And what’s in it for the bank, other than potentially amassing large amounts of biometric data? Merchants will have the opportunity to buy J.P. Morgan Payments tablets, though this will not be obligatory, but support and transaction processing fees will be.

In a statement, the bank revealed that it is betting on biometric payments as the industry is forecast to grow to 3 billion users and $5.8 trillion worth of transactions over the next two years. And the giant expects digital commerce to eventually cover online, mobile, and in-store checkout.

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Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom Can Only Offer Artificial Educations

Educators are grappling with how to approach ever-evolving generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can create language, images, and audio. Programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot pose far different challenges from the AI of yesteryear that corrected spelling or grammar. Generative AI generates whatever content it’s asked to produce, whether it’s a lab report for a biology course, a cover letter for a particular job, or an op-ed for a newspaper.

This groundbreaking development leaves educators and parents asking: Should teachers teach with or against generative AI, and why? 

Technophiles may portray skeptics as Luddites — folks of the same ilk that resisted the emergence of the pen, the calculator, or the word processor — but this technology possesses the power to produce thought and language on someone’s behalf, so it’s drastically different. In the writing classroom, specifically, it’s especially problematic because the production of thought and language is the goal of the course, not to mention the top goals of any legitimate and comprehensive education. So count me among the educators who want to proceed with caution, and that’s coming from a writing professor who typically embraces educational technology. 

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The Chinese company at the center of Biden’s crane concerns denies it’s a threat to U.S. national security

Chinese shipping cranes are fast becoming the latest item to get caught up in Washington and Beijing’s fractious relationship. U.S. officials have been talking about the security threat posed by Chinese-made cranes at U.S. ports for months. Then, last month, the U.S. announced an initiative to bolster cybersecurity at the country’s ports.

Now, the company at the heart of the controversy—China’s Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, also known as ZPMC—is denying that it poses a security threat. ZPMC said it “strictly adheres to laws and regulations of relevant countries and regions,” in a statement released on Sunday.

ZPMC accounts for over 70% of the global market in shipping cranes. There are over 200 Chinese-made cranes at U.S. ports, accounting for “nearly 80%” of the total, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

These cranes help move goods through maritime ports. The cranes can often be controlled remotely, which U.S. officials fear could be an avenue for hackers to disrupt the economy. A recent congressional probe claimed to find over a dozen cellular modems on cranes that could be remotely accessed, the Wall Street Journal reports.

ZPMC, in Sunday’s statement, said that recent reports “can easily mislead the public without sufficient factual review.”

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Suspicious tech found in Chinese-made cargo cranes, fueling spying worries: Congress probe

An investigation by the US Congress into Chinese-built cargo cranes has found suspicious technology that could potentially be used to disrupt or spy on American commercial activities, according to a report.

The House Homeland Security Committee said that it has discovered cellular modems that were installed in cranes and which can be remotely accessed by hostile powers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The committee’s discovery has fueled concerns in the Biden administration that cranes built by a Chinese firm, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), could potentially be used to spy on US ports.

More than 12 cellular modems were found in Chinese-made cranes that were relied upon in several US ports, according to the Journal.

While some of the modems were used for operational functions such as monitoring and tracking maintenance remotely, others were installed despite the fact that the ports in which they were being used hadn’t requested them.

China “is looking for every opportunity to collect valuable intelligence and position themselves to exploit vulnerabilities by systematically burrowing into America’s critical infrastructure, including in the maritime sector,” Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said.

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Emotion-Tracking – AI on the job: Workers Fear Being Watched – and Misunderstood.

We have heard the warnings from Yuval Noah Harari, that if we don’t figure out how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) human brains will be hacked soon,” a statement that arguably speaks to humanity’s worst fears about AI. This may be especially so, when hearing from Schwab’s advisor Harari that to “hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves,” which can enable those who own the technology to increasingly manipulate us.

We may believe this extreme threat to our privacy will occur some time in the future, but, the hacking Harari is describing is more proverbial than literal, and has already been occuring in environments like Facebook and YouTube where we are led to view content that the algorithms have deemed to be of interest to us. It now would appear that many have gradually become desensitised to it the “hacking” and manipulation allowing it to increase without too much protest.

But how would you feel if your workplace was tracking how you feel? asks Nazanin Andalibi who is Assistant Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. and in the article below dissuses emotion AI which is already being used in the workplace.

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