Tag: technology

Canada Plots to Increase Online Regulation, Target Search and Social Media Algorithms

Canada is taking steps towards potentially intrusive regulation of artificial intelligence as it pertains to its application in search and social media services. The government’s intentions have been revealed, which includes AI application way beyond the realm of generative AI similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Industry giants such as Google and Facebook, who utilize AI for search results, translation provisions, and customer taste recognition respectively, are among the contenders lined up in the regulatory intent with the pro-censorship government intent on having a say on how these algorithms work.

The information comes by way of Minister François-Philippe Champagne of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) in a letter submitted to the Industry committee analyzing Bill C-27—the privacy reform and AI regulation bill. Precise amendments remain shielded from scrutiny, however, as the governmental body keeps the proposed changes under wraps.

We obtained a copy of the original bill for you here.

The existing framework in Bill C-27 leaves the identification of AI mechanisms that can be classified into the “high-impact” category to future regulatory proceedings.

Bill C-27, by treating search and social media results as “high-impact” systems, is likely to raise eyebrows as the government’s push towards regulating technology has so far been assertive of greater control over content and therefore speech.

Non-compliance, under this proposal, may invite penalties proportional to 3% of gross global revenues.

The legislation veers into controversial territory by infusing the regulation of content moderation and discoverability prioritization into the matrix, in unexpected ways. It attempts to parallel these issues to bias accusation during recruitment or when used by law enforcement, invoking substantial surprise. Consequently, Canada’s rules, although they claim to align more closely with the EU, seem to set the country apart, leaning more towards censorship and less towards free speech.

The news comes on the back of Canada’s more recent online regulations that have raised alarm.

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The Great AI Invasion: Given Enough Time, Artificial Intelligence Would Take Over Every Area Of Our Lives

Artificial intelligence is changing our world at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.  If you would have asked me a decade ago if I would live to see artificial intelligence create a world class piece of art or a full-length feature film, I would have said no way.  But now those are simple tasks for artificial intelligence to accomplish.  So what is going to happen once AI becomes millions of times smarter and millions of times more powerful than it is today?  Given enough time, AI would take over every area of our lives.  Our world is definitely crazy right now, but fifty years from now it would resemble something out of an extremely bizarre science fiction novel if AI is allowed to continue to develop at an exponential rate.

Unfortunately, only a very small minority of the population is even concerned about the potential dangers posed by AI, and that is a problem.

Needless to say, the growth of AI has enormous implications for our economy.

AI can already perform most simple tasks much better and much faster than human workers can, and multiple studies have concluded that millions of jobs are at risk of being lost.  The following comes from Fox News…

For example, in March 2023, technology firm OpenAI released a report that found at least 80% of the U.S. labor force could have at least 10% of their work-related tasks affected by the introduction of GPT, while another 19% of employees may see at least 50% of these work-related tasks impacted. While GPT influence impacts all wage levels, the higher-income jobs potentially face the greatest exposure, concludes OpenAI.

Also in March 2023, researchers at investment banker Goldman Sachs, after collecting data on occupationally-oriented tasks in Europe and the U.S., found that roughly two-thirds of current occupations are exposed to varying degrees of generative AI automation (such as found in ChatGPT), and that AI could substitute for nearly one-fourth of current work performed.

In July 2023, the McKinsey Global Institute issued a report estimating that without generative AI, automation could take over tasks accounting for 21.5% of the hours worked in the U,S. economy by 2030; but with generative AI, that share increased to 29.5%.

So what would happen to all of the workers that would no longer be needed once AI starts taking over most of our jobs?

I think that is a question that all of us should be asking.

Artificial intelligence also threatens to transform our personal relationships.

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Artificial Intelligence Goes to War

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps we should just be happy that an F-35 ever even made it into the air, given its endless problems in these years. After all, as Dan Grazier of the Center for Defense Information wrote, it’s now “the largest and most expensive weapons program in history.” Yet when it comes to something as significant as “mission availability,” according to the Congressional Budget Office, only about 26% of all F-35s, each of which now costs an estimated $80 million to produce and $44,000 an hour to fly, are available at any moment. Not exactly thrilling, all in all.

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500,000x Smaller Than a Human Hair: Game-Changing Electronic Sensor the Size of a Single Molecule

Australian researchers have developed a molecular-sized, more efficient version of a widely used electronic sensor, in a breakthrough that could bring widespread benefits.

Piezoresistors are commonly used to detect vibrations in electronics and automobiles, such as in smartphones for counting steps, and for airbag deployment in cars. They are also used in medical devices such as implantable pressure sensors, as well as in aviation and space travel.

Breakthrough in Piezoresistor Technology

In a nationwide initiative, researchers led by Dr. Nadim Darwish from Curtin University, Professor Jeffrey Reimers from the University of Technology Sydney, Associate Professor Daniel Kosov from James Cook University, and Dr. Thomas Fallon from the University of Newcastle, have developed a piezoresistor that is about 500,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Dr. Darwish said they had developed a more sensitive, miniaturized type of this key electronic component, which transforms force or pressure to an electrical signal and is used in many everyday applications.

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GAO Report Shows the Government Uses Face Recognition with No Accountability, Transparency, or Training

Federal agents are using face recognition software without training, policies, or oversight, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The government watchdog issued yet another report this month about the dangerously inadequate and nonexistent rules for how federal agencies use face recognition, underlining what we’ve already known: the government cannot be trusted with this flawed and dangerous technology.

The GAO review covered seven agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ), which together account for more than 80 percent of all federal officers and a majority of face recognition searches conducted by federal agents.

Across each of the agencies, GAO found that most law enforcement officers using face recognition have no training before being given access to the powerful surveillance tool. No federal laws or regulations mandate specific face recognition training for DHS or DOJ employees, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Marshals Service were the only agencies reviewed to now require training specific to face recognition. Though each agency has their own general policies on handling personally identifiable information (PII), like facial images used for face recognition, none of the seven agencies included in the GAO review fully complied with them.

Thousands of face recognition searches have been conducted by the federal agents without training or policies. In the period GAO studied, at least 63,000 searches had happened, but this number is a known undercount. A complete count of face recognition use is not possible. The number of federal agents with access to face recognition, the number of searches conducted, and the reasons for the searches does not exist, because some systems used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) don’t track these numbers.

Our faces are unique and mostly permanent — people don’t usually just get a new one— and face recognition technology, particularly when used by law enforcement and government, puts into jeopardy many of our important rights. Privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice are all at risk. The technology facilitates covert mass surveillance of the places we frequent and the people we know. It can be used to make judgments about how we feel and behave. Mass adoption of face recognition means being able to track people automatically as they go about their day visiting doctors, lawyers, houses of worship, as well as friends and family. It also means that law enforcement could, for example, fly a drone over a protest against police violence and walk away with a list of everyone in attendance. Either instance would create a chilling effect wherein people would be hesitant to attend protests or visit certain friends or romantic partners knowing there would be a permanent record of it.

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The “Air Vaccine” Is Here, No Needle Necessary To Get mRNA Technology Into Humans

The “air vaccine” is here and it’s able to deliver mRNA technology into the human body without a needle injection. The mRNA can be delivered right into the lungs and has been used to “vaccinate” mice intranasally.

A team from Yale University has developed a new airborne method for delivering mRNA right to your lungs. The method has also been used to vaccinate mice intranasally, “opening the door for human testing in the near future.”

While scientists may celebrate this invention as a convenient method to vaccinate large populations, skeptics have started to raise obvious concerns about the potential misuse of an airborne vaccine, including the possibility of covert bioenhancements a concept that has previously been suggested in academic literature.

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Washington U. Prof: AI Girlfriends Are Ruining a Generation of Men

The rise of AI girlfriends is ruining an entire generation of young men by fostering a silent epidemic of loneliness, according to Washington University Professor of Data Science Liberty Vittert.

There are now apps that offer virtual girlfriends for men who want an AI lover to talk to them, allow them to live out their sexual fantasies, and learn, through data, exactly what they like, according to a op-ed written by Washington U. professor Liberty Vittert and published by the Hill.

These apps reportedly have millions of users, who are able to choose the physical attributes and personalities of their virtual girlfriends.

Some of the artificial lovers are even based on real people. One online influencer, for example, created an AI bot of herself and gained over 1,000 users in less than a week. She believes the AI girlfriend version of herself can generate $5 million a month.

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How the “Surveillance AI Pipeline” Literally Objectifies Human Beings

The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found. Crucially, the study found that computer vision papers often refer to human beings as “objects,” a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition.

“The studies presented in this paper ultimately reveal that the field of computer vision is not merely a neutral pursuit of knowledge; it is a foundational layer for a paradigm of surveillance,” the study’s authors wrote. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, describes what the researchers call “The Surveillance AI Pipeline,” which is also the title of the paper.

The study’s lead author Pratyusha Ria Kalluri told 404 Media on a call that she and her co-authors manually annotated 100 computer vision papers and 100 patents that cited those papers. During this process, the study found that 90 percent of the papers and patents extracted data about humans, and 68 percent reported that they specifically enable extracting data about human bodies and body parts. Only 1 percent of the papers and patents stated they target only non-humans.

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NASA to Use Artificial Intelligence to Better Track and Monitor UFO’s

As inklings of extraterrestrial life continue to make headlines, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will begin to use advancements in artificial intelligence to better monitor the skies in the hopes that non-human eyes may help them understand unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings and other events that may indicate a non-human presence.

NASA said that artificial intelligence (AI) will be “essential” in fully understanding the data surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomena and their origins in talks that followed the release of their highly anticipated UFO report.

The report did not conclude one way or the other whether NASA believes UFO’s are of extraterrestrial origin, but in a press briefing on September 14 the Administrator of NASA emphasized that the agency would continue to use all the resources at its disposal to prove or disprove that the unidentified objects showing up all over American military radar and otherwise baffling the world’s best scientists are of extraterrestrial origin. These resources now include AI programs that can comb through very large datasets for information a human might miss or take much longer to find.

“We will use AI and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies… and will continue to search the heavens for habitable reality,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. “AI is just coming on the scene to be explored in all areas, so why should we limit any technological tool in analyzing, using data that we have?”

NASA administrators emphasized both in the report and press briefing that data surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomenas (UAP’s) and UFO’s is often very hard to analyze or quantify partly because of the nature of the topic and partly because it’s a very large swath of data. By using new tools made possible by artificial intelligence, NASA believes they can find patterns or anomalies in data that humans have thus far been unable to find.

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Baltimore police warn suspect at large in female CEO slaying will ‘kill’ and ‘rape’

Baltimore police say that tech CEO Pava Marie LaPere was found dead in her apartment on Monday morning shortly after a missing-persons report was received.

LaPere, 26, was found dead Monday at 11:34 a.m. in the 300 block of West Franklin Street in Baltimore, police said. Officers found that LaPere had signs of blunt-force trauma.

Shortly before officers arrived at the apartment, a missing-person’s call was made, an investigation revealed. Homicide detectives are investigating her death.

During a press conference, officials revealed that Jason Deans Billingsley, 32, is a suspect in the case and wanted for first-degree murder, assault and other charges.

Police don’t believe Billingsley had any relationship with LaPere.

Billingsley was convicted of attempted rape and other violent crimes in 2011 and received a sentence of 30 years, but he was paroled in October 2022.

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