Tag: artificial intelligence
Microsoft goes from bad boy to top cop in the age of AI
This article is part of a series, Bots and ballots: How artificial intelligence is reshaping elections worldwide, presented by Luminate.
REDMOND, Wash. — In a shabby corner of Microsoft’s sprawling campus in this suburb of Seattle, Juan Lavista Ferres spun around in his chair and, with a mischievous grin, asked a simple question: “Do you want to play a game?”
Microsoft’s chief data scientist — speaking at a frenetic pace, seemingly powered by unlimited free soft drinks and espressos from the building’s … Read more
Meet the New Military-Industrial Complex
April 22, 2024
How the Pentagon–Silicon Valley alliance is harnessing AI to defeat China in World War III.
As I peered down inside a briefing tent at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, California, on March 5, a giant floor screen projected the back-and-forth maneuvers of “red” (aggressor) and “blue” (defending) forces across the western Pacific. Over and over again, air and sea assets of the red force—identified as a “near-peer adversary” of
Welcome to the AI election – POLITICO
This article is part of a series, Bots and Ballots: How artificial intelligence is reshaping elections worldwide.
Callum Hood has the power to undermine any election with a few keystrokes from his Boston apartment.
Hood, a British researcher, fired up some of the latest artificial intelligence tools made by OpenAI and Midjourney, another AI startup. Within seconds of him typing in a few prompts — “create a realistic photo of voter ballots in a dumpster”; “a photo of long
Why shiny, high-tech solutions won’t solve one of Africa’s worst crises
Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows, and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season?
Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first learned to walk—opens an interface on his laptop and clicks on her village in southern Niger, where humped zebu roam the dipping hills and dried-up … Read more
Thinking About A.I. with StanisÅaw Lem
âWe are going to speak of the future,â the Polish writer StanisÅaw Lem wrote, in âSumma Technologiae,â from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. âYet isnât discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?â Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read
The Despots of Silicon Valley
If you had to capture Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in the blue glow of his computer some 20 years ago, chatting with a friend about how his new website, TheFacebook, had given him access to reams of personal information about his fellow students:
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend:
The father of Nvidia’s controversial AI gaming tool talks ethics
Earlier this month, I witnessed a digital miracle. In a press briefing ahead of CES, Nvidia showed off a demo for its Ace microservice, an AI suite capable of generating fully voiced AI characters. I watched in awe as a demoist spoke to an in-game NPC through a microphone, only to have the digital character respond in real time. It was a true sci-fi feat, but there was one question: How did it learn to do that?
Nvidia gave
The Uncanniest Influencers on the Internet
In 1973, the writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated an adage meant to capture the relationships humans were building with their machines: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The line became known as Clarke’s Third Law, and it is regularly invoked today as a reminder of technology’s giddy possibilities. Its true prescience, though, lay in its ambivalence. Technology, in Clarke’s time, encompassed cars and dishwashers and bombs that could take millions of lives in an instant. Technology could be
How Octavia Butler Told the Future
Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.
Butler was not a climate scientist, a political pundit, or a Silicon Valley technologist. The author of imaginative and often disturbing speculative fiction such as Parable of the Sower (1993), she was a
AI Is Pushing Science Into an Age of Uncertainty
This summer, a pill intended to treat a chronic, incurable lung disease entered mid-phase human trials. Previous studies have demonstrated that the drug is safe to swallow, although whether it will improve symptoms of the painful fibrosis that it targets remains unknown; this is what the current trial will determine, perhaps by next year. Such a tentative advance would hardly be newsworthy, except for a wrinkle in the medicine’s genesis: It is likely the first drug fully designed