Tag: technology

Police Use of Artificial Intelligence: 2021 in Review

Decades ago, when imagining the practical uses of artificial intelligence, science fiction writers imagined autonomous digital minds that could serve humanity. Sure, sometimes a HAL 9000 or WOPR would subvert expectations and go rogue, but that was very much unintentional, right?

And for many aspects of life, artificial intelligence is delivering on its promise. AI is, as we speak, looking for evidence of life on Mars. Scientists are using AI to try to develop more accurate and faster ways to predict the weather.

But when it comes to policing, the actuality of the situation is much less optimistic.  Our HAL 9000 does not assert its own decisions on the world—instead, programs which claim to use AI for policing just reaffirm, justify, and legitimize the opinions and actions already being undertaken by police departments.

AI presents two problems,  tech-washing, and a classic feedback loop. Tech-washing is the process by which proponents of the outcomes can defend those outcomes as unbiased because they were derived from “math.” And the feedback loop is how that math continues to perpetuate historically-rooted harmful outcomes. “The problem of using algorithms based on machine learning is that if these automated systems are fed with examples of biased justice, they will end up perpetuating these same biases,” as one philosopher of science notes.

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Amazon’s Alexa dishes out potentially deadly challenge

Amazon says it has updated its voice assistant after it transpired that Alexa had suggested a 10-year-old girl touch a coin to the prongs of a partially inserted plug as a challenge.

The girl’s mother posted a tweet on Monday describing how her daughter had been doing some cold-weather indoor challenges set by a phys. ed. teacher on YouTube and was seeking another one. To the woman’s shock, Alexa suggested a “simple” task it had found on the web, whereby the participant “plug[s] in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch[es] a penny to the exposed prongs.” 

The dangerous “penny challenge” started making the rounds on TikTok and other platforms about a year ago and can potentially lead to electric shock as well as cause a fire.

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DARPA awards contracts for Phase 2 of Manta Ray programme

Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group were selected to build and test Manta Ray unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The companies are each developing unique full-scale demonstration systems.

DARPA has awarded on 20 December Phase 2 agreements to continue the Manta Ray programme. The two prime contractors, Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group were selected to build and test unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The total amount of the contracts was not disclosed.

The companies are each developing unique full-scale demonstration systems. This effort began in 2020 and is intended to design and advance UUVs that operate for extended durations without the need for on-site human logistics support or maintenance.

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Paralyzed man with brain chip posts ‘first direct-thought’ tweet

A 62-year-old man in Australia diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – a disease that causes paralysis – is now able to communicate thoughts with others with no muscle activity involved. On Thursday, he published a post on social media “using only direct thought,” the company that enabled him to do so, Synchron, announced.

“I created this tweet just by thinking it” – the tweet read, said to be posted by Philip O’Keefe to the account of Synchron CEO Thomas Oxley.

The ‘first direct-thought tweet’ was created wirelessly from O’Keefe’s brain, according to the company. Following progressive paralysis caused by ALS, the man had a brain computer interface called ‘Stentrode’ installed last year. The implant, “designed to enable patients to wirelessly control digital devices through thought,” was inserted via the jugular vein to avoid drilling into the skull.

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Americans get warning they’re being watched digitally

Americans are getting a warning that they are being watched digitally, whether they agree to the spying or not.

The warning is coming from the Rutherford Institute, which has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a dispute now pending before the Supreme Court, in Hammond v. U.S.

The warning is that “Americans are being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals. “

The Rutherford Institute said it is “challenging the government’s unconstitutional practice of warrantlessly tracking people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

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NIKOLA TESLA PROBABLY DIDN’T INVENT A DEATH RAY, BUT THE FBI STILL TOOK ALL HIS STUFF

After he died in 1943, the FBI immediately searched his hotel room and squirreled away all his notes, drawings, and documents. They stored everything in the FBI vault. The conspiracies surrounding Tesla’s supposed invention and the FBI’s involvement have only added to the mystery of Nikola Tesla. Whether or not you believe he did create a death ray (which, most scholars suggest, was a ploy for funding, as Tesla died broke), Nikola Tesla is a character who only recently had another chapter added to his story.

This new chapter in Tesla’s story happened in 2000 when the FBI released some of the papers they had taken from Tesla’s hotel room, as well as their notes on Tesla’s death. Because of his possible weapon and the occurrence of World War II, the FBI saved almost every publication on Tesla, from newspaper clippings to case files. All these documents were digitally scanned into the vault over the decades of storage. Though these documents have been released to the public, many of the pages still have redacted information on them. Big, thick black lines ink out names of FBI agents and other people involved in the Tesla case. According to self-proclaimed Tesla historian Cameron Prince: “We know for sure that the redactions in the released material indicate that the government is still holding the master keys, at the very least.” 

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Human-like robot’s reaction ‘freaks out’ creators

A machine touted as the world’s most advanced humanoid robot “freaked out” its creators after it reacted with visible irritation and grabbed the hand of a researcher who got into its “personal space.”

A newly posted video demonstration of the interaction shows the robot, called ‘Ameca’, tracking a moving finger before furrowing its brow and leaning back as the person’s hand comes nearer. After the researcher pokes its nose, the robot then grabs their hand and moves it away.

The impressively life-like robot, which is being developed by British firm Engineered Arts, has been billed as the “future face of robotics” and “the perfect humanoid robot platform for human-robot interaction.”

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Entangling a live tardigrade, radiation warning on anti-5G accessories

Tardigrades are tiny organisms that can survive extreme environments including being chilled to near absolute zero. At these temperatures quantum effects such as entanglement become dominant, so perhaps it is not surprising that a team of physicists has used a chilled tardigrade to create an entangled qubit.

According to a preprint on the arXiv server, the team cooled a tardigrade to below 10 mK and then used it as the dielectric in a capacitor that itself was part of a superconducting transmon qubit. The team says that it then entangled the qubit – tardigrade and all – with another superconducting qubit. The team then warmed up the tardigrade and brought it back to life.

To me, the big question is whether the tardigrade was alive when it was entangled. My curiosity harks back to the now outdated idea that living organisms are “too warm and wet” to partake in quantum processes. Today, scientists believe that some biological processes such as magnetic navigation and perhaps even photosynthesis rely on quantum effects such as entanglement. So perhaps it is possible that the creature was alive and entangled at the same time.

In the preprint, the researchers say that the entangled tardigrade was in a latent state of life called cryptobiosis. They say they have shown that it is “possible to do a quantum and hence a chemical study of a system, without destroying its ability to function biologically”.

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Is a new kind of religion forming on the internet?

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”

Her beliefs are reminiscent of many others on the internet, people who speak of “bad vibes,” demonic spirits, or a cosmic calamity looming just over the horizon, one that the government may be trying to keep secret. Juarez tells me she was raised Christian, although at age 19 she began to have a more personal relationship with God outside of organized religion.

Today, she identifies more as spiritual, as an increasing number of young people do, many of them working out their ideas in real time online. They may talk about manifesting their dreams and faceless sex traffickers waiting to install tracking devices on women’s parked cars. Some might act almost as prophets or shamans, spreading the good word and guiding prospective believers, while others might just lurk in the comments. They might believe all or only some of these ideas — part of the draw of internet spirituality is that it’s perfectly pick-and-choosable — but more than anything, they believe in the importance of keeping an open mind to whatever else might be out there.

I asked Joseph Russo, a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University, if this loosely related web of beliefs could ever come together to form into its own kind of religion. “I think it already has,” he says.

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