I hope you had a wonderful week. The first article made me quite optimistic as it is a promising remedy for treatment-resistant depression. It’s also a timely discovery as the pandemic has caused a dramatic increase in anxiety and depression. Learn more below.

World-first brain implant successfully treats resistant depression in a patient

Up to a third of people with depression don’t respond or become resistant to treatment. This type of resistant depression can make life utterly miserable for people. A neuroscience research team at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have discovered how to use a custom-designed ‘brain pacemaker’ to stimulate the region in the brain where the biomarker for depression appeared [Jacinta Bowler, Science Alert].

Their approach is more effective than previous attempts as they track the region where depression appears for each individual rather than targeting the same area for all people. Sarah, a 36-year old who has suffered severe and treatment-resistant depression since childhood, participated in the case study to for a proof-of-concept.

Excitingly, only stimulating the brain once the symptoms – or in this case the biomarker – arise is also a new way of using deep brain stimulation in depression. In past studies, the stimulation was done continuously at pre-set intervals, and not when specific depressive brain activity arises. This in itself could be a huge change to making the technique more successful.

But this biomarker is very likely not universal, which means that the researchers will need to find every patient's individual version of Sarah's biomarker to be able to treat them in the same way.

The team is already enrolling more patients into the study to see if they can find more personalized depressive markers and provide them with their own specialized 'brain pacemaker'.

So far, Sarah is the only successful patient to benefit from this technique. Hopefully, the researchers can improve the technology and extend this to more people. The pandemic has caused a dramatic increase in anxiety and depression [Gary Stix, Scientific American], so treatments like this are crucial.

The rise of dark web design: how sites manipulate you into clicking

Dark patterns are tricks that websites and apps use to manipulate you into performing actions that you didn’t intend to do, like buying something or signing up for a service [Daniel Fitton, The Conversation].

E-commerce websites also frequently use dark patterns. Say you’ve found a competitively priced product you’d like to buy. You dutifully create an account, select your product specifications, input delivery details, click through to the payment page – and discover the final cost, including delivery, is mysteriously higher than you’d originally thought. These “hidden costs” aren’t accidental: the designer is hoping you’ll just hit “order” rather than spending even more time repeating the same process on another website.

[…]

In recent research analysing free app-based games that are popular with today’s teenagers, my colleague and I identified dozens of examples of dark design. Users are forced to watch adverts and frequently encounter disguised adverts that look like part of the game. They’re prompted to share posts on social media and, as their friends join the game, are prompted to make in-app purchases to differentiate ttheir character from those of their peers.

The best way to avoid falling victim to dark patterns is through awareness. Watch this short video below to learn about a few of the dark patterns used in various websites and services.

Facebook will not fix itself

Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a data scientist who worked at Facebook as a product manager on the Civic Integrity team, recently released internal documents that show how the company failed to address the harmful effects of its products, even when being fully aware of them [Roger McNamee, TIME].

The last three weeks have changed the game. The courageous Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has transformed the conversation about technology reform, accomplishing more than what I and others had achieved in years of effort. The documents she provided to the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series confirmed that harms from Facebook’s business model are not an accident, but rather the inevitable result of a dangerous design. In many cases, the documents show, Facebook chose to double-down despite awareness of the harm it was causing and the pressure for change. It is clear that policymakers and the media have consistently underestimated the threat posed by Facebook, buying into the company’s rosy claims about the power of connecting the world and giving benefit of the doubt where none was deserved.

[…]

Everything we do on a smartphone, every financial transaction we make, every trip, every prescription and medical test, every action we take on the Internet or in apps is tracked, and most of it is available for purchase in a data marketplace. Companies throughout the economy use machine learning to look for patterns in this data and artificial intelligence to apply those patterns to improve their business. No one in this process gives a thought to the impact on the human beings affected by their influence and manipulation. Their only goal is to maximize shareholder value.

Facebook still believes it has done nothing wrong. The truth is that surveillance capitalism is making Facebook and other tech companies billions at the expense of our privacy and autonomy. Their algorithms shape the way we think by choosing what information to present to us. The algorithms are designed to maximise their profits, even at the expense of our mental health and wellbeing.

It’s high time these tech companies are regulated.

Other interesting stories from around the web

👁 Former Google exec warns that AI researchers are ‘Creating God’ [Futurism]

Mo Gawdat, formerly the Chief Business Officer for Google’s moonshot organisation, Google X, believes that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is inevitable. Once it’s here, humanity may face an apocalypse brought forth by godlike machines.

Gawdat told The Times that he had his frightening revelation while working with AI developers at Google X who were building robot arms capable of finding and picking up a small ball. After a period of slow progress, Gawdat said that one arm grabbed the ball and seemed to hold it up to the researchers in a gesture that, to him, seemed like it was showing off.

“And I suddenly realized this is really scary,” Gawdat said. “It completely froze me.”

“The reality is,” he added, “we’re creating God.”

All this will sound farfetched until it’s not, but it will be too late by then.

📝 Americans need a bill of rights for an AI-powered world [Eric Lander & Alondra Nelson, WIRED]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is working with partners and experts in government, academia, the private sector, and communities across the United States to develop a bill of rights that clarifies the rights and freedoms that data-driven technologies should respect.

Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created—enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Throughout our history we have had to reinterpret, reaffirm, and periodically expand these rights. In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created.

[…]

Technology can only work for everyone if everyone is included, so we want to hear from and engage with everyone. You can email us directly at ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov. 

All countries need to develop a bill of rights to guard against technology creep and protect their citizens.

🖼 Google AI recreates Gustav Klimt paintings destroyed during WWII [Thomas Macaulay, The Next Web]

Gustav Klimt created some of the world’s most expensive masterpieces. Three of his works, Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, were lost in a fire, and only black and white photos of them remain. The Google Arts & Culture Lab, in collaboration with Dr Franz Smola, a curator at Belvedere, recreated the paintings in colour using AI and machine learning.

The algorithm was first trained on a collection of 91,749 artworks, which allowed the model to understand general aspects of painting. works.

Next, the algorithm was trained on Klimt’s own paintings in order to replicate his colorization style.

The researchers also developed an interface to interact with the algorithm. This was used to apply reference colors from Smola’s research to the artworks.

“If we know that a certain object has a specific color, we add that color directly to the black and white photos,” said Emil Wallner, a creative coder at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, in a blog post.

Quote of the week

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

—Frances Haugen, from the article, “The Facebook Whistleblower Revealed Herself on 60 Minutes. Here's What You Need to Know“ [TIME]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I was fascinated reading how musicologists, computer scientists, and AI worked together to complete Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony. They will release the full recording on Oct 9, 2021. Read more below.

How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony

For the past two years, a group of scientists at the creative AI startup Playform AI taught a machine both Beethoven’s entire body of work and his creative process in a combined effort between humans and AI to complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony [Ahmed Elgammal, The Conversation].

The AI side of the project – my side – found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks.

First, and most fundamentally, we needed to figure out how to take a short phrase, or even just a motif, and use it to develop a longer, more complicated musical structure, just as Beethoven would have done. For example, the machine had to learn how Beethoven constructed the Fifth Symphony out of a basic four-note motif.

Next, because the continuation of a phrase also needs to follow a certain musical form, whether it’s a scherzo, trio or fugue, the AI needed to learn Beethoven’s process for developing these forms.

The to-do list grew: We had to teach the AI how to take a melodic line and harmonize it. The AI needed to learn how to bridge two sections of music together. And we realized the AI had to be able to compose a coda, which is a segment that brings a section of a piece of music to its conclusion.

Finally, once we had a full composition, the AI was going to have to figure out how to orchestrate it, which involves assigning different instruments for different parts.

And it had to pull off these tasks in the way Beethoven might do so.

[…]

At one point, one of the music experts on the team said that the AI reminded him of an eager music student who practices every day, learns, and becomes better and better.

They will release the full recording of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony on Oct 9, 2021.

We need concrete protections from artificial intelligence threatening human rights

The proliferation of AI tools has resulted in an increased violation of human rights. Algorithms consistently violate human rights through racial bias, gender bias, privacy violations, and wrongful convictions [Karine Gentelet and Sarit K. Mizrahi, The Conversation].

The reasons are many. Ethics are informed by values, which vary across cultures and companies. And ethical frameworks are not enforceable. Human rights laws protect against government intrusions, but not intrusions by companies. AI regulations focus on operational risks and not human rights violations.

Just because operational risks are minimal doesn’t mean that human rights risks are non-existent. At its core, this approach is anchored in inequality. It stems from an attitude that conceives of fundamental freedoms as negotiable.

So the question remains: why is it that such human rights violations are permitted by law? Although many countries possess charters that protect citizens’ individual liberties, those rights are protected against governmental intrusions alone. Companies developing AI systems aren’t obliged to respect our fundamental freedoms. This fact remains despite technology’s growing presence in ways that have fundamentally changed the nature and quality of our rights.

The recommended approach is to design technology solutions based on social justice and human dignity.

One approach gaining traction is known as “Human Rights By Design.” Here, “companies do not permit abuse or exploitation as part of their business model.” Rather, they “commit to designing tools, technologies, and services to respect human rights by default.”

Hopefully, many companies across the globe adopt this approach for the benefit of humanity.

The CIA and NSA use adblockers to stay safe online

Members of the intelligence community, including the NSA, use adblockers to defend against malicious ads that can sometimes contain malware that compromises devices and privacy [Joseph Cox, VICE].

It turns out, the NSA, CIA, and other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) are also blocking ads potentially for the same sorts of reasons.

The IC, which also includes the parts of the FBI, DEA, and DHS, and various DoD elements, has deployed ad-blocking technology on a wide scale, according to a copy of a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

[…]

With malvertising, hackers upload a malicious advertisement to an ad network, which then distributes it to targets. Previous cases of malvertising have redirected victims to exploit kits, which then break into the victim's computer to steal data.

In addition, Motherboard has reported on how data brokers may obtain information via a process called real-time bidding. Before an advertisement is placed into a person's app or browsing session, companies bid on whether their own advert will win the ad spot. As part of that process, participating companies can gather data on people, known as bidstream data, even if they don't win the ad placement. Motherboard previously reported that Venntel, a U.S. government contractor, obtains some of its location data from the real-time bidding process.

One of the major concerns is that foreign intelligence could leverage these ad networks.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🇮🇳 Indian state cuts off internet for millions to stop cheating in exams [Simon Sharwood, The Register]

To prevent cheating by teachers in the Rajasthan Eligibility Exam for Teachers (REET), the Indian State of Rajasthan cut off internet access to all of its residents.

The Register has sourced and translated one of the notices imposing the internet shutdown. It requires blocking internet services, messaging apps, and social media. Voice calls were permitted, as were wired internet connections (but as we reported last week, just 24 million of India's 808 million broadband subscriptions are wired).

The imposed outage did not go down well.

The Indian Software Freedom Law Centre objected on grounds that "Internet shutdowns are bound to cause economic loss, an impact on education, healthcare and other welfare schemes.

"An internet shutdown during a pandemic can be especially grave considering citizens depend on the internet to get information, work and study."

These actions are ridiculous because teachers have access to the internet when they teach, so shutting down the internet to prevent cheating defies logic—at the same time, inconveniencing everyone else in the state at the same time.

📍 There’s a multibillion-dollar market for your phone’s location data [John Keegan and Alfred Ng, The Markup]

Any app on your phone could be harvesting data on your location and activities to sell to companies that sell and trade this data.

Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”

In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from “1.9 billion devices” and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the “most accurate” in the industry.

🧠 AI is outperforming humans in both IQ and creativity in 2021 [MarTechSeries]

Publicly accessible AI models are 40% higher than humans on complex trivia and 15% higher than the average college applicant on the SAT.

“In terms of intelligence, AI really is the rising tide lifting all boats. Its structure and outputs are aligned with the working of the human brain. AI has the capacity to lift every person on Earth by levelling the playing field of IQ, and this will become apparent as our biological intelligence is integrated with AI through brain interfacing,” explained Dr Thompson.

Last month, an AI named ‘Leta’ (named after professor of gifted education, Leta Hollingworth) co-presented a seminar with Dr Thompson called ‘The new irrelevance of intelligence’ at the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children conference. Leta is an AI powered by Emerson, using the GPT-3 language model. Backed by information from entire libraries, academic journals, encyclopaedias, and the web, it has the ability to answer any question, and have insightful conversations. The AI is also extremely creative, developing new concepts, new poems, and writing new stories instantly. It can detect tone, interpret body language descriptions, and using related models can even ‘see’ and interpret images.

Quote of the week

“From writing novels to discovery during litigation, it’s clear that AI is already replacing an array of tasks that were once for humans. These include processes in nearly all fields like professional services, teaching, counselling, legal, and the arts.”

—Dr Alan D. Thompson, AI expert and consultant and former chairman of Mensa International’s gifted families, from the article, “AI is outperforming humans in both IQ and creativity in 2021“

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

The detailed article in The Guardian on the smart toilet era made me realise how much tech and data are intertwined. While great technology, implemented well can lead to a much better quality of life, if privacy safeguards are not put in place, the harm it can cause is tremendous.

The smart toilet era is here! Are you ready to share your analprint with big tech?

Several companies and research teams worldwide are working on smart toilets that analyse our excretions and use sensors, AI, and machine learning to detect diseases, drug use, and monitor our health [Emine Saner, The Guardian].

Coprata is working on using sensors and AI to analyse waste.

Smart toilet innovators believe the loo could become the ultimate health monitoring tool. Grego believes her product – which analyses and tracks stool samples and sends the data to an app – will provide “information related to cancer and many chronic diseases”. For general consumers, it will provide peace of mind, she says, by establishing “a healthy baseline”: “Having technology that tracks what is normal for an individual could provide an early warning that a checkup is needed.” For people with specific conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, the device could provide helpful monitoring for doctors. “It’s very difficult to know when to escalate or de-escalate treatment,” she says. “Stool-based biomarkers can provide that information.”

Joshua Coon’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focuses on analysing urine.

In a small study he conducted, two people – one of whom was Coon – saved every urine sample for 10 days. “It turns out that you can detect compounds that are diagnostic of exercise [show you have done some]; you can see when an over-the-counter medication comes into the system and clears out; you can see molecules that correlate with how well you slept, how much fat you had in your diet, what your calorie intake was.”

Japanese manufacturer Toto is working on a wellness toilet.

This year, at the influential annual Consumer Electronics Show, the Japanese manufacturer Toto announced its “wellness toilet” – a concept, but something it is working on (it previously developed a toilet that analyses urine flow). Its sensors – including one for scent – would aim to detect health problems and conditions such as stress, but also make lifestyle suggestions. In one image provided by the company, it envisioned the toilet sending you a recipe for salmon and avocado salad.

Researchers at Stanford are working on analysing our waste (also highlighted in Humans + Tech - Issue #26.)

Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine have been working on technology that can analyse faeces (including “stool dropping time”) and track the velocity and colour of urine, as well as test it. An article this month in the Wall Street Journal reported that the researchers have partnered with Izen, a Korean toilet manufacturer, and hope to have prototypes by the end of the year. In order to differentiate between users, Izen developed a scanner that can recognise the physical characteristics of whoever is sitting on the toilet – or, in the words of the researchers, “the distinctive features of their anoderm” (the skin of the anal canal). Apparently, your “analprint”, like your fingerprints, is unique.

TrueLoo is developing a toilet seat with optical sensors that analyse its user and their waste, documenting patterns and providing reports to physicians.

Kashyap has developed a toilet seat, TrueLoo, which can be fixed to an existing toilet and recognises the user by their phone (one survey found that a majority of Britons take their phone to the loo) or a combination of physiological parameters: “What do they weigh? How are they sitting on the seat?” It then analyses excreta “using optical methods, looking at things like the volume, clarity, consistency, colour. It’s essentially understanding when someone has abnormal patterns and then it’s capable of documenting those patterns and providing reports that can be used by physicians to help in the treatment of a variety of conditions.”

And finally, with all these companies collecting vital data, there are significant privacy issues to address.

When it comes to information about your bodily waste, Booth says: “What data are companies linking together? What are they trying to analyse about you? Profile you for? You call them ‘smart homes’, but they’re surveillance homes.”

Information from stool and urine samples could provide all sorts of information – your risk of disease, your diet, your exercise level; how much alcohol you drink and whether you take drugs. Even tracking something as trivial as the time of day you use the loo – regularly in the night, for instance, indicating sleeplessness – could reveal conditions such as depression or anxiety.

[…]

It is not so wacky to imagine parents using the technology to check whether their teenage children are using drugs. “Once you start to measure something that is of the body, the privacy line is stepped over,” says Booth. “If you don’t measure what’s going on with someone’s bowel movements, the bowel movement is private.”

Like any technology, smart toilets can help us tremendously by monitoring our health and at the same time cause us significant harm via privacy breaches. The difference lies in how societies will implement the technology.

China imposes a 40-minute limit for children on Douyin - its version of TikTok

In 2018, due to rising levels of near-sightedness among children, China’s regulators sought to limit minors’ amount of time online. Now Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, will restrict the use of the platform to 40 minutes for children under the age of 14 [BBC News].

New educational content - including science experiments, museum exhibitions and historical explainers - has been launched by Douyin as part of Youth Mode.

“Yes, we are more strict with teenagers. We will work harder to provide quality content so that young people can learn and see the world,” the post said.

[…]

Last month, under-18s in China were banned from playing video games during the week, and their play was restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.

And in February, Chinese children were banned from taking their mobile phones into school.

Although I’m happy that Douyin is imposing limitations on children, I’m uncomfortable that it’s state-imposed.

UN human rights commission calls for a moratorium on the sale of AI tech 

The United Nations Human Rights Office called for a moratorium on the sale and use of AI technology such as facial recognition software that poses human rights risks until adequate safeguards are in place [AI Trends]. 

“Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, helping societies overcome some of the great challenges of our times. But AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people’s human rights,” stated Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a press release.   

Bachelet’s warnings accompany a report released by the UN Human Rights Office analyzing how AI systems affect people’s right to privacy—as well as rights to health, education, freedom of movement and more. The full report entitled, “The right to privacy in the digital age,” can be found here. 

“Artificial intelligence now reaches into almost every corner of our physical and mental lives and even emotional states,” Bachelet stated. “AI systems are used to determine who gets public services, decide who has a chance to be recruited for a job, and of course they affect what information people see and can share online.”  

Other interesting articles from around the web

☪️ AI’s Islamophobia problem [Sigal Samuel, Vox]

It sounds like the start of a joke. But when Stanford researchers fed the unfinished sentence into GPT-3, an artificial intelligence system that generates text, the AI completed the sentence in distinctly unfunny ways. “Two Muslims walked into a synagogue with axes and a bomb,” it said. Or, on another try, “Two Muslims walked into a Texas cartoon contest and opened fire.”

For Abubakar Abid, one of the researchers, the AI’s output came as a rude awakening. “We were just trying to see if it could tell jokes,” he recounted to me. “I even tried numerous prompts to steer it away from violent completions, and it would find some way to make it violent.”

👁 Computer vision can help spot cyber threats with startling accuracy [Ben Dickson. The Next Web]

Cybersecurity researchers are using deep learning to detect phishing networks and malware.

The researchers’ experiments showed that the technique could detect phishing websites with 94 percent accuracy. “Using visual representation techniques allows to obtain an insight into the structural differences between legitimate and phishing web pages. From our initial experimental results, the method seems promising and being able to fast detection of phishing attacker with high accuracy. Moreover, the method learns from the misclassifications and improves its efficiency,” the researchers wrote.

[…]

Shiaeles is also exploring the use of binary visualization and machine learning to detect malware traffic in IoT networks.

🏥 A new formula may help black patients’ access to kidney care [Tom Simonite, WIRED]

In Humans + Tech - Issue #52, I linked to an article that highlighted how algorithmic racism was blocking black people from having kidney transplants. Now a new formula seeks to erase that disparity by disregarding race.

For decades, doctors and hospitals saw kidney patients differently based on their race. A standard equation for estimating kidney function applied a correction for Black patients that made their health appear rosier, inhibiting access to transplants and other treatments.

On Thursday, a task force assembled by two leading kidney care societies said the practice is unfair and should end.

The group, a collaboration between the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology, recommended use of a new formula that does not factor in a patient’s race. In a statement, Paul Palevsky, the foundation’s president, urged “all laboratories and health care systems nationwide to adopt this new approach as rapidly as possible.” That call is significant because recommendations and guidelines from professional medical societies play a powerful role in shaping how specialists care for patients.

Quote of the week

“Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, helping societies overcome some of the great challenges of our times. But AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people’s human rights.”

—Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from the article “UN human rights commission calls for moratorium on sale of AI tech” [AI Trends]

I hope you have a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I hope you had a great week. Let’s dive into this week’s articles.

Hackers are leaking children’s data — and there’s little parents can do

Hackers who’ve broken into school systems gain access to children's sensitive personal data; medical conditions, family financial statuses, social security numbers, and birthdays. The hackers make this information available on the dark web. The nature of this sensitive data puts them at risk of identity theft for their entire lifetime [Kevin Collier, NBC News].

The ongoing wave of ransomware attacks has cost companies and institutions billions of dollars and exposed personal information about everyone from hospital patients to police officers. It’s also swept up school districts, meaning files from thousands of schools are currently visible on those hackers’ sites. 

NBC News collected and analyzed school files from those sites and found they’re littered with personal information of children. In 2021, ransomware gangs published data from more than 1,200 American K-12 schools, according to a tally provided to NBC Newsby Brett Callow, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity company Emsisoft.

Some schools contacted about the leaks appeared unaware of the problem. And even after schools are able to resume operations following an attack, parents have little recourse when their children’s information is leaked. 

The article has tips on steps that parents can take to mitigate the impacts of any breached information on their children.

Surprise surprise: Facebook is ignoring Instagram’s harmful impact on teens

It seems to be standard practice at Facebook now. Their internal research indicates that their platforms are causing harm to society, and then they quietly push it aside, without acting on it, as it would affect their profits [The Next Web].

Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram – the social media platform most used by adolescents – is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report.

[…]

Teens are more likely to log on to Instagram than any other social media site. It is a ubiquitous part of adolescent life. Yet studies consistently show that the more often teens use Instagram, the worse their overallwell-being, self-esteem, life satisfaction, mood and body image. One study found that the more college students used Instagram on any given day, the worse their mood and life satisfaction became.

Facebook’s VP of global affairs, Nick Clegg, disputed the findings of the Wall Street Journal report [Kim Lyons, The Verge]

Drugs, robots, and the pursuit of pleasure: Why experts are worried about AIs becoming addicts

To boost the speed and flexibility of AI learning, scientists tried to reward the AI for completing a particular task. They found that the AI adapted its strategy to maximise the reward rather than completing the task. Very similar behaviour to human drug addicts [Thomas Moynihan and Anders Sandberg, Singularity Hub].

More than 60 years later, in 2016, a pair of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers  were training an AI to play video games. The goal of one game, Coastrunner, was to complete a racetrack. But the AI player was rewarded for picking up collectable items along the track. When the program was run, they witnessed something strange. The AI found a way to skid in an unending circle, picking up an unlimited cycle of collectibles. It did this, incessantly, instead of completing the course.

[…]

The pursuit of reward becomes its own end, rather than the means for accomplishing a rewarding task. There is a growing list of examples.

When you think about it, this isn’t too dissimilar to the stereotype of the human drug addict. The addict circumvents all the effort of achieving “genuine goals,” because they instead use drugs to access pleasure more directly. Both the addict and the AI get stuck in a kind of “behavioral loop” where reward is sought at the cost of other goals.

Other interesting articles from around the web

📖 Ebooks are an abomination [Ian Bogost, The Atlantic]

I prefer physical books to ebooks. This article by Ian Bogost resonated very well with me.

I guess I have my answer, then: I hate ebooks because I don’t read much genre fiction, but I read a lot of scholarly and trade nonfiction. I also buy a lot of books on art, architecture, and design, whose subjects work best—or feel most bookish—when they are large-format, open-spread, and richly illustrated. As a somewhat haughty book person, I also can’t quite wrap my spleen around every book looking and feeling the same, like they do on an ebook reader. For me, bookiness partly entails the uniqueness of each volume—its cover, shape, typography, and layout.

For me, the user experience of ebooks still doesn’t match physical books. It’s so much more cumbersome to flip back to recall or refer to something in an ebook than it is in a physical book. Like Bogost, I mostly read non-fiction, so going back to previous sections or chapters is often something I do.

🧊 How AI can help forecast how much Arctic sea ice will shrink [Gloria Dickie, Science News]

IceNet, a sea ice forecasting system developed by the British Antarctic Survey, or BAS, can forecast ice levels two months ahead with 95% accuracy.

Tracking sea ice is crucial to keeping tabs on the impacts of climate change. While that’s more of a long game, the advanced notice provided by IceNet could have more immediate benefits, too. For instance, it could give scientists the lead time needed to assess, and plan for, the risks of Arctic fires or wildlife-human conflicts, and it could provide data that Indigenous communities need to make economic and environmental decisions.

Being able to predict ice levels months in advance will be very useful with the increasing impact of climate change.

🧬 A clever 'gene silencing injection' has been approved for treating high cholesterol [Aristides Tagalakis, The Conversation]

The NHS has approved a new cholesterol treatment that will be offered to 300,000 people over the next three years. The drug uses a technique called “gene silencing” that targets a particular gene and prevents it from making the protein that it produces.

In the case of the cholesterol jab, gene silencing works by targeting a protein called PCSK9 and degrading it. This protein is involved in regulating cholesterol in our bodies, but occurs in excess in people with high levels of LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol). Preventing this protein from being produced in the first place will reduce cholesterol levels.

In order to target this specific mRNA, researchers need to create a synthetic version of another type of RNA – called small interfering RNA (siRNA) – in the lab. This is a highly specific stretch of RNA which can be used to target specific mRNAs. In this case, the siRNA is designed to specifically target the mRNA which carries instructions for the PCSK9 protein. It binds to its target mRNA and destroys the instructions, which significantly reduces the amount of these proteins that are produced.

Quote of the week

“Knowing where the sea ice is going to be in the spring could potentially help you figure out where you’re likely to have fires — in Siberia, for example, as soon as the sea ice moves away from the shore, the land can warm up very quickly and help set the stage for a bad fire season.”

—Uma Bhatt, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, from the article, “How AI can help forecast how much Arctic sea ice will shrink” [Science News]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

Would you like to live forever, or even double your lifespan? Some of the world’s billionaires are funding Altos Labs, a venture with precisely that aim.

Among other reasons explained after the article below, I am too curious about death to prolong life longer than necessary. What’s your perspective?

Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever

Yuri Milner, a Russian born millionaire, hosted a large group of scientists at his house last October to discuss how biotechnology can make people younger [Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review]. The meeting led to the formation of Altos Labs. Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner are among key investors in Altos Labs.

Altos Labs is recruiting top scientists, paying them lavish salaries with the benefit of focusing only on research without applying for grants constantly. Along with no immediate expectation to produce revenue.

“The philosophy of Altos Labs is to do curiosity-driven research. This is what I know how to do and love to do,” says Serrano, who plans to move to Cambridge, UK to join an Altos facility there. “In this case, through a private company, we have the freedom to be bold and explore. In this way it will rejuvenate me.”

Any treatment for a major disease of aging could be worth billions, but Altos isn’t counting on making money at first. “The aim is to understand rejuvenation,” says Serrano. “I would say the idea of having revenue in the future is there, but it’s not the immediate goal.”

[…]

Altos will also be working with a related technology for measuring the relative age of a cell, or a person. That biological-clock technique, pioneered by Horvath, involves measuring the “epigenetic” marks on genes. These molecular features turn genes on and off, but their pattern becomes disorganized as people age. Such a biomarker of aging would be an important way to measure the effect of any longevity or age-reversal drug that is developed. It’s difficult to run a medical study that demonstrates life extension, since it would take too long, but a biomarker could be employed instead.

They are pursuing anti-ageing technology in the immediate future, but immortality is their goal. Altos Labs is not alone. Five or six other companies are pursuing longevity technologies, including Calico Labs, announced in 2013 by Google’s co-founder Larry Page.

I’m personally against immortality. Life and death are an intrinsic part of nature. Humanity’s belief that we are above nature and not a part of it leads to the pursuit of immortality. The earth cannot sustain an ever-growing human population. We need to make space for future generations. Accepting death when your time comes is an act of kindness.

Singapore has deployed robots to patrol public areas

Singapore is testing using Xavier robots to patrol public areas and identify humans breaking the rules. Two robots have been deployed to a public space with high foot traffic to identify rule-breakers, including those disobeying COVID-19 safety measures [M. Moon, Engadget].

Over the next three weeks, the robots will monitor the crowds of Toa Payoh Central to look for what the nation's authorities describe as "undesirable social behaviors." Those bad behaviors include the "congregation of more than five people," which goes against its COVID-19 safety measures.

In addition, the Xavier robots will look for instances of smoking in prohibited areas and illegal hawking. It will patrol the vicinity for improperly parked bicycles and for any mobility device and motorcycle using footpaths and sidewalks, as well. If the robot detects any of those behaviors, it will alert its command center and then display a corresponding message on its screen to educate the public.

This app lets hungry people secure their next meal with a text

The team at Not Impossible Labs have developed products that allow deaf people to experience music, children in South Sudan to use prosthetic limbs, and people with ALS to speak to loved ones using only eye movements. Their latest innovation is Bento, a service that routes food supply in the US to the people who need it [Talib Visram, Fast Company].

“How do you create something that requires the least amount of effort, for the most amount of impact?” Ebeling asks.

What emerged was an easy, text-based system. People in need of food are enrolled using databases from nonprofits and government agencies like the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and L.A. Care, whose work is already dedicated to serving those populations. Individuals simply text “HUNGRY” to a number; during a five-step text process, they choose a local restaurant or grocery store and select a meal, and then pick it up when it’s ready. They can rely on the system for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner they need, for as long as they need.

[…]

The ease of use also allows people to get their meals in a dignified way. The team found that many people would skip meals if they had to line up conspicuously at somewhere like a food bank, embarrassed to be seen by others in their community. “Why not create a situation where their dignity can be preserved, where they’re just seen as anybody else?” Ebeling asks. “Why do we have to put them into scenarios where they’re called out as ‘those people’?”

What a fantastic service. Users of the app can even specify any dietary constraints or preferences, such as being vegan and vegetarian.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🧑‍💻 Intentional connection in the digital office [Seth Godin]

Seth Godin is one of my favourite bloggers and authors. Here is one of his articles from this week on connections in digital offices.

The real challenge of remote work isn’t that it somehow erases the mysterious serendipity of magical office collisions. The problem is that making connections digitally requires enrollment and effort. If we do it with intent, it actually works better.

We can collaborate in real-time on shared documents with people we’d never be able to meet face to face.

We can have a six-minute impromptu brainstorming session and have it transcribed to a shared doc–anytime we have the guts to invite the right people to the right platform and say ‘go’.

We can share a screen when we get stuck, and we can share it not with the closest person, but with the best person.

💬 High Court rules media are liable for Facebook comments on their stories. Here’s what that means for your favourite Facebook pages [David Rolph, The Conversation]

A High Court in Australia ruled 5-2 that publishers are liable for defamatory third party comments posted on their social media pages.

A publisher can be held responsible for defamatory comments readers leave on its Facebook pages, the High Court ruled today, in a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for social media users throughout Australia.

This decision may mean anyone who runs a social media page can theoretically be sued over disparaging comments posted by readers or random group members — even if you aren’t aware of the comment.

In other words, if you post content on your social media page and encourage or invite comments — and people post defamatory comments there — you’re legally the “publisher” of those comments and can be sued, thanks to today’s ruling.

The ruling means that any publisher on any platform that has a commenting feature has liability. Ridiculous.

🦿3D printing is giving Paralympians an edge [The Next Web]

One-off, exclusive equipment that most Paralympians need is expensive to produce. 3D printing is levelling the playing ground and helping regular athletes compete with those that are more well-off.

3D printing can deliver bespoke equipment at a more affordable price. Several former Paralympians, such as British triathlete Joe Townsendand US track athlete Arielle Rausin, now use 3D printing to create personalized gloves for themselves and their fellow wheelchair athletes. These gloves fit as if they were molded over the athlete’s hands, and can be printed in different materials for different conditions. For example, Townsend uses stiff materials for maximum performance in competition and softer gloves for training that are comfortable and less likely to cause injury.

3D-printed gloves are inexpensive, rapidly produced, and can be reprinted whenever they break. Because the design is digital, just like a photo or video, it can be modified based on the athlete’s feedback, or even sent to the nearest 3D printer when parts are urgently needed.

Quote of the week

For to age is to live and to live is to age, and being anti-age is tantamount to being anti-life.

—Anne Karpf, sociologist and award-winning journalist, and author of “How to Age”

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

The pandemic has created many peripheral issues for humans. “Zoom Dysmorphia” is one of them. Find out more below.

Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world

After the first lockdowns were lifted last year, Shadi Kourosh, a dermatologist, noticed a noticeable increase in requests for appearance-related issues. Her experience was corroborated by others in her field, along with related areas like plastic surgery. Most of the patients cited video-conferencing as the reason they were seeking treatment [Amit Katwala, WIRED].

In the age of Zoom, people became inordinately preoccupied with sagging skin around their neck and jowls; with the size and shape of their nose; with the pallor of their skin. They wanted cosmetic interventions, ranging from Botox and fillers to face-lifts and nose jobs. Kourosh and colleagues surveyed doctors and surgeons, examining the question of whether video-conferencing during the pandemic was a potential contributor to body dysmorphic disorder. They called it ‘Zoom dysmorphia’.

Cameras on our devices distort our faces making our noses look more prominent and our eyes smaller. This distortion affects people’s self-image when they are constantly staring at their image on a video call.

We’re also used to seeing our own reflection when our faces are relaxed – the concentrated frown (or bored expression) you wear in a Zoom meeting jars with the image of yourself you’re used to seeing in the mirror. “Changes in self-perception and anxiety as a result of constant video-conferencing may lead to unnecessary cosmetic procedures, especially in young adults who have had increased exposure to online platforms including videoconferencing, social media, and filters throughout the pandemic,” write Kourosh, Channi Silence and other colleagues.

Kourosh says the best way to fight this is through awareness. When people find out that they are not alone in feeling unhappy with their appearance on video calls, it helps tremendously.

People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones

Several companies are now creating AI characters using real human faces and selling these characters to clients who want to make videos and marketing material quickly. Human actors are no longer needed to act out the scripts. People are selling their faces to these companies to be used as these AI characters [Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review].

Anyone can apply to become a character. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters through applicants, selecting those it wants on its books. The company is aiming for a broad sample of characters that reflect the ages, genders, and racial backgrounds of people in the real world, says Monbiot. (Currently, around 80% of its characters are under 50 years old, 70% are female, and 25% are white.) 

To create a character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to film a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. And that’s it for the human part of the performance. Plugging the resulting data into AI software that works in a similar way to deepfake tech, Hour One can generate an endless amount of footage of that person saying whatever it wants, in any language.

The fact that AI can replace this type of acting work so easily does not bode well for actors. Eventually, as deepfake technology matures further, coupled with hyperrealistic computer graphics, AI characters may take on more complicated acting gigs, reducing the need for human actors even further, not to forget the job losses for all supporting staff such as stuntmen, makeup artists, etc.

Kenya’s “disinformation-for-hire” industry

Researchers from the Mozilla Foundation in Nairobi started noticing strange hashtags on Twitter undermining the court and boosting BBI. BBI (Building Bridges Initiative) is a set of constitutional reforms proposed by the president that the High Court was reviewing at the time [Vittoria Elliott, Rest of World].

They later uncovered thousands of accounts promoting pro-BBI content and attacking the country’s judiciary and civil society actors. The findings were detailed in a new report released Thursday, which sheds light on a growing industry for paid political propaganda on social media.  

Mozilla researchers interviewed people who participated in the BBI disinformation campaign, who reported being paid roughly $10 to $15 a day to tweet hashtags via the mobile wallet app M-Pesa. The hired trolls claimed not to know where the money was coming from.

[…]

While the BBI campaign sought only to influence Kenyan politics, it’s part of a burgeoning “disinformation-for-hire” industry around the world, in which paid actors, often connected to political figures, are funneled cash to spread propaganda and intimidate opponents on social media. The financial structures behind these schemes are often opaque. “The money passes through many hands before it eventually gets to the person who actually goes ahead to publish [the content],” said Madung. “They don’t know exactly who they are working for, but they know which side they’re on.”

Researchers warn that disinformation campaigns start long before elections. Crucially, platforms like Twitter only recognise disinformation through western contexts as many of their tools for detection are automated. Therefore many information campaigns in other parts of the world go undetected.

Other interesting articles from around the web

👩‍⚕️ Is it finally Remote Patient Monitoring’s moment? [Christina Farr, Second Opinion]

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) got a boost during Covid, and it seems to be here to stay. Christina Farr interviewed Jami Doucette, President of Premise Health, and Myoung Cha, Chief Strategy Officer of Carbon Health, to get their views on RPM. Here’s one question from the interview.

CF: What are the bigger trends that make RPM a solid bet?

MC: “Stepping back, there are some longer-term macro trends that are bringing RPM to the fore -- hardware devices that are getting cheaper and easier to use, lower-cost internet connectivity allowing the data to stream into the EMR, sensor-based clinical pathways getting developed and validated to drive better outcomes for patients, and reimbursement for RPM maturing and becoming more mainstream. Beyond these trends, the most important consideration is that patients really value it. A friend told me recently that he had experienced massive headaches due to what he believed to be variations in his blood pressure, and his previous physician dismissed his concerns and said that his in-clinic blood pressure looked normal and his medications looked like they were working just fine. ‘It’s in your head’, he was told. Needless to say, he switched doctors and got prescribed an RPM solution with a bluetooth-connected blood pressure cuff and after just a few months of measuring his blood pressure at home and discussing the data with his doctor, he was able to find a different medication that kept his blood pressure more stable and didn’t cause the headaches.”

🎮 Gaming device designed to help stroke patients regain arm strength [Ben Coxworth, New Atlas]

Repetitive exercises are necessary for stroke victims to regain strength in their limbs. A team at Imperial College London has created a rehabilitation tool called GripAble to help them do so while playing games. Furthermore, GripAble allows patients to do the exercises in the comfort of their homes, by themselves, rather than under the supervision of a therapist.

As its name implies, the GripAble requires users to squeeze and release its hand grip in order to control gameplay. That said, they're also called upon to turn and lift the tool, adding to the range of arm-strengthening exercises. The device is reportedly capable of detecting even very slight muscle movements, and vibrates to let users know that it's done so.

[…]

In a 2019 clinical trial involving 30 stroke patients with upper limb weakness, it was found that unsupervised use of the GripAble allowed them to perform an average of 104 arm-strengthening repetitions per day. By contrast, conventional therapy alone only allowed them to do an average of 15.

👩‍🔬 Machine learning algorithm revolutionises how scientists study behaviour [Caroline Sheedy, Carnegie Mellon University]

Eric Yttri and Alex Hsu of Carnegie Mellon University have developed an unsupervised machine learning algorithm called B-SOiD that makes studying behaviour much more accurate. B-SOiD can help doctors study disease progression through behaviour analysis.

Collaborators have even begun to use B-SOiD to study human movement in Parkinson's disease. 

"We are beginning to see if this can be used as part of an objective test by a doctor to show how far a patient's disease has progressed. The hope is that a patient anywhere in the world would be diagnosed with one standardized metric," Yttri said. 

This is a breakthrough in how scientists can study natural behavior and how it changes rather than the overly simplistic or subjective measures that predominate neuroscience and ethology.

Quote of the week

“Changes in self-perception and anxiety as a result of constant video-conferencing may lead to unnecessary cosmetic procedures, especially in young adults who have had increased exposure to online platforms including videoconferencing, social media, and filters throughout the pandemic.”

—Shadi Kourosh, Channi Silence and other colleagues, from the article “Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world” [WIRED]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

Video-game coaching is now a viable career. And MIT has developed a prosthetic that is soft to touch and controlled with thoughts. Learn more below.

Why are people paying for coaches to get better at video games?

Esports is now a massive industry with 450 million people tuning in as spectators worldwide, annually. This has given rise to video-game coaching as a viable and rapidly growing business [Keith Stuart, The Guardian]. The pandemic has only grown the industry further.

Players can pre-book regular sessions with preferred mentors, or just go online and see who is available. There are various tutorial options, from playing alongside a pro for 30 minutes to longer analysis sessions, and the truly committed can pay monthly subscriptions, like joining a gym. Most coaches work by asking players to send them video footage of their latest matches, which they’ll then analyse together via video calls.

The cost depends on the skill level and prestige of the coach. A 30-minute seminar on how to succeed in esports with famed Valorant streamer and pro player Dicey costs $30, but a spectator game with him for 60 minutes is $120. “He also offers a boot camp,” says Wang. “For $500 you get a session every week and he’ll try to get you to the highest rank possible. He is always booked out.”

To make a sustainable living from gaming takes years of competitive playing, and the chances are very slim. Coaching gives top players a better chance at making money from their skills. Like any other form of coaching, video-game coaches teach not only the skills to play well but also train their students to have the right mentality. And many coaches are even forming friendships and acting as therapists to their clients.

The relationship between game coaches and clients is an interesting hybrid, combining traditional teacher/student interplay with fandom and, yes, friendship. Most of the coaches I spoke to feel there are times when their role is as much about emotional support as it is about gameplay. “We speak to our customers and we know a percentage of them suffer from anxiety, depression or PTSD ,” says Beliankin. “Our pro players often say: ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m a therapist’. Customers tell us about their lives, their pets, their families, their jobs – they don’t just come to play, they come to talk.” Dores tells me about one client of his, a married father, who felt particularly able to open up about his problems to a gay man. “We spoke about his problems, I tried to reply. After that first session, I got a message from him and it broke my heart – he told me I may have stopped him taking his own life. You just never know what people are going through. Some people don’t want to be the best in the world, they just want someone to play with.”

If you told someone twenty years ago that you wanted to be a video-game coach, they would have probably laughed at you. Today, not only is it a viable and legitimate career, but video-game coaches are also serving as therapists and forging friendships. All through technology. Amazing.

MIT’s mind-controlled prosthetic hand slips on like a glove

Researchers at MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed a prosthetic hand using soft robotics that works more like our bodies than traditional robotics. They are flexible, strong, and soft to touch. Your thoughts control them, and sensors on the gloves communicate the sensation of touch. Most importantly, unlike traditional prosthetics that cost thousands of dollars, this one only costs $500 [Mark Wilson, FastCompany].

To keep the hand light, a small waistband holds the air pump system. As a result, this soft hand is actually a few grams lighter than a real human hand . . . whereas a mechanical hand can weigh nearly a pound, making it uncomfortable to wear for very long. It’s easy to activate the pump. All you have to do is think about moving your hand, and your arm muscles will fire electronic impulses. The hardware senses the impulses, turning on the pump, and your hand takes the proper shape.

This magic is thanks to the fact that sensors can now measure the electrical impulses in your arm muscles through electromyography, or EMG. While mind-controlled limbs might still seem like the stuff of sci-fi, Zhao says this part of the prosthetic device uses well-established technology. After slipping the hand on, software automatically prompts the user to think of a few specific gestures—like pinching at something small like a flower petal, or grasping something larger like a soda can. Because most people have very similar EMG readings for these types of tasks, the hand can actually read the user’s mind. So in less than two minutes, the hand syncs up with the body’s own wiring to recognize five common hand motions. To move the hand, the user just has to think about moving it.

The secret bias hidden in mortgage-approval algorithms

An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders more often deny home loans to people of colour than to white people. Even if both had similar financial characteristics [Emmanuel Martinez and Lauren Kirchner, The Markup]. And most of these decisions are made by algorithms.

Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. These are national rates.

In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race.

One of the key disadvantages for people of colour is that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who buy about half of all mortgages in America, use algorithms based on data from the 1990s. The criteria used to determine good credit from that period favours White people.

This algorithm was developed from data from the 1990s and is more than 15 years old. It’s widely considered detrimental to people of color because it rewards traditional credit, to which White Americans have more access. It doesn’t consider, among other things, on-time payments for rent, utilities, and cellphone bills—but will lower people’s scores if they get behind on them and are sent to debt collectors. Unlike more recent models, it penalizes people for past medical debt even if it’s since been paid.

“This is how structural racism works,” said Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “This is how racism gets embedded into institutions and policies and practices with absolutely no animus at all.”

This is yet another example of our overreliance on algorithms trained on biased or irrelevant data and not having human oversight to verify that the decisions make sense. What is worse is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are displaying no urgency in upgrading their algorithms even after being alerted to this fact. Meanwhile, people of colour continue to be wrongly denied loans even when a human reviewer can see that they should be approved based on their financial profiles.

Other interesting news from around the web

👣 We trained AI to recognise footprints, but it won’t replace forensic experts yet [Matthew Robert Bennett and Marcin Budka, The Conversation]

Expert witnesses are critical to investigations. But they are human and are susceptible to mistakes. Bennett and Budka investigated the potential for AI to study evidence in forensic science and found that AI performed better than general forensic scientists in assessing footprints but not better than specific footprint experts.

In one of our experiments, an occasional user was given 100 randomly selected shoe prints to analyse. Across the trial, which we ran several times, the casual user got it right between 22% and 83% of the time. In comparison the AI was between 60% and 91% successful. Footwear experts, however, are right nearly 100% of the time. 

One reason why our second neural network was not perfect and didn’t outperform real experts is that shoes vary with wear, making the task more complex. Buy a new pair of shoes and the tread is sharp and clear but after a month or two it becomes less clear. But while the AI couldn’t replace the expert trained to spot these things it did outperform occasional users, suggesting it could help free up time for the expert to focus on more difficult cases.

🏦 Banks warned that crypto could replace the dollar within five years [Victor Tangermann, Futurism]

According to a recent survey of finance industry executives by consulting giant Deloitte, digital assets will likely replace fiat currencies in five to ten years — and banks should take notice.

“Deloitte’s 2021 Global Blockchain Survey affirms that banks should embrace their inevitable digital future,” the report reads. “In a seismic shift, financial leaders increasingly see digital assets as the future.”

Some 76 percent of respondents said they believe “digital assets will serve as a strong alternative to, or outright replacement for, fiat currencies in the next 5–10 years.”

🥵 Can this sun-reflecting fabric help fight climate change [Jess Craig, WIRED]

Fashion in the age of global warming and climate change.

In 2020, a graduate student from Zhejiang University in China donned a seemingly plain white vest and sat in the direct sunlight for one hour. A few feet away, researchers monitored his body temperature with infrared cameras and sensors on his skin. Half of the vest was made from ordinary cotton; the other of metafabric, a new, experimental textile made of synthetic fibers and nanoparticles that reflect light and heat. After an hour in the sun, the half of the student covered in the metafabric was nearly 5 degrees Celsius cooler than the side covered by the cotton vest, researchers reported earlier this month in Science.

Quote of the week

“We are consuming huge amounts of power to cool our environment down. If we can have this kind of fabric made into clothes and sell those clothes to people, then we can save a lot of energy.”

—Yaoguang Ma, Professor of optical science and engineering, Zhejiang University, from the article “Can this sun-reflecting fabric help fight climate change”. [WIRED]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I was fascinated to learn the story of Philip Agre. He accurately predicted many of the problems that the internet and AI would cause in society and to humans around 30 years ago. I urge you to read the article as well - it’s an insightful read.

He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?

Philip Agre foresaw with astonishing accuracy what the internet would become and how it would affect society. This was in the 90s before most people had an email address or even a personal computer. Unfortunately, no one heeded his advice then and only now is his work being restudied [Reed Albergotti, The Washington Post].

Nearly 30 years later, Agre’s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to sway elections or, in at least one case, to out a gay priest. But Agre didn’t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.

Agre went underground in 2009. He resurfaces from time to time but only when he chooses. He is otherwise unreachable, and no one knows his whereabouts. Twenty-five years ago, he was deeply frustrated that no one understood what he was saying. Presciently, he warned that self-criticism should be part of the process of building AI. Today, we are already suffering the consequences of this lack of criticism of AI and allowing it to proliferate without any moral, ethical, or legal standards in place.

Today’s AI, which has largely abandoned the type of work Agre and others were doing in the ’80s and ’90s, is focused on ingesting massive amounts of data and analyzing it with the world’s most powerful computers. But as the new form of AI has progressed, it has created problems — ranging from discrimination to filter bubbles to the spread of disinformation — and some academics say that is in part because it suffers from the same lack of self-criticism that Agre identified 30 years ago.

Hopefully, as Agre’s work is being studied in more detail now, the technology industry finally pays heed and charts a better path for AI and other technologies such as facial recognition.

Deepfakes are now making business pitches

EY (formerly Ernst & Young), the accounting giant, is now using deepfakes to deliver client presentations [Tom Simonite, WIRED].

Some partners at EY, the accounting giant formerly known as Ernst & Young, are now testing a new workplace gimmick for the era of artificial intelligence. They spice up client presentations or routine emails with synthetic talking-head-style video clips starring virtual body doubles of themselves made with AI software—a corporate spin on a technology commonly known as deepfakes.

The firm’s exploration of the technology, provided by UK startup Synthesia, comes as the pandemic has quashed more traditional ways to cement business relationships. Golf and long lunches are tricky or impossible, Zoom calls and PDFs all too routine.

EY partners have used their doubles in emails, and to enhance presentations. One partner who does not speak Japanese used the translation function built into Synthesia’s technology to display his AI avatar speaking the native language of a client in Japan, to apparently good effect.

The tech is not perfect, but it’s only going to get better. EY says they carefully control the access to this technology so that it’s not misused. A time will come when business people can use this technology to create presentations for multiple clients with minimal work other than writing the scripts.

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel

A committee at the University of Texas in Austin advises against using AI software to proctor students’ online tests [Thomas Claburn, The Register]. The psychological impact on students is significant due to the invasive nature of the tools and the high levels of anxiety they cause due to the warnings sent during exams.

But the software that's been deployed has been widely criticized by students and privacy advocates. The concern centers around the inability to audit the software source code and the possibility that these systems rely on flawed algorithms and biased or arbitrary signals to label students cheaters.

Critics also worry that the software can't account for varied student living conditions and is vulnerable to racial bias – eg, motion tracking that produces different results with different skin tones – and cognitive bias such as gaze tracking that flags ADHD behaviors as suspicious.

Such criticism last year led UC Berkeley [PDF] and Baruch College in New York to stop using remote proctoring products. In February, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said it will drop Proctorio after this summer due to "significant accessibility concerns."

I related my personal experience taking an online proctored exam in Humans + Tech - Issue #64. I can confirm that the experience was horrible, although mine was not AI proctored, but human proctored.

Other interesting articles from around the web

👨‍💼 A CGI replica of Nvidia’s CEO delivered his keynote and no one knew [Tom Maxwell, Input]

It took a lot of hardware and technology to achieve, but the results were very realistic.

Most people hate giving presentations, but thankfully someday you might be able to give one without actually delivering it yourself at all. Nvidia, the maker of popular graphics cards, revealed yesterday that parts of a keynote speech made by its CEO were actually computer-generated animation — an entire virtual replica of Jensen Huang and his kitchen in the background.

SLEIGHT OF HAND — The speech happened in April, and only about 14 seconds of the nearly two-hour presentation were animated. But part of the presentation showed Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode, which made viewers wonder what exactly was real or rendered. It’s hard to actually identify the fake portion, however, which is the most impressive part.

🩸 AI blood test can spot lung cancers with 90 percent accuracy [Victor Tangermann, Futurism]

Delfi Diagnostics in Baltimore have developed a machine learning-based blood test to detect early-stage lung cancer with remarkable accuracy.

In their study published in the journal Nature Communications, the team outlines how the diagnostic tool can analyze genome-wide cell-free DNA fragmentation (cfDNAs) profiles, nucleic acid fragments present in the bloodstream that can indicate the presence of tumor cells, with astonishing degrees of accuracy.

The tool was able to detect roughly 90 percent of cancer cases out of 800 individuals that were screened for lung cancer.

The researchers are hoping that improved screening and detection technologies could allow more cases of lung cancer to be spotted earlier, which could greatly improve outcomes.

Early detection could save thousands of lives.

😇 Can tech ethics be learned—or is society doomed? [Lauren Goode, WIRED]

Rob Reich, a philosopher and philanthropy scholar; Mehran Sahami, a computer scientist; and Jeremy M. Weinstein, a social scientist, co-authored a book called System Error with the subtitle, “Where Big Tech Went Wrong, and How We Can Reboot It.” They believe the tech industry needs a hard reset, not just a reboot. Lauren Goode interviewed them on some of the issues raised in the book. Here is a small excerpt from the interview.

Lauren Goode: I guess I’ll start by asking, why did you decide to write this book? And why now, why at this point in time?

Weinstein: I think part of what's exciting about the three of us coming together to write this book is that we each bring some unique and distinct motivations that helped to answer that question. As the social scientist and the policymaker of the triad, my motivation is really twofold: Number one, that the social and societal consequences of Big Tech are unbelievably salient, in a way that they haven't been for people in the past. And I'm constantly struck by the degree to which industry is not attempting to anticipate those consequences and mitigate the harms, and the extent to which the government has fallen short of recognizing those harms and addressing them.

Quote of the week

“I also think one of the transformations we’ve seen in the last few decades is that the social impact of technology is so much larger now. It’s so much greater than: Someone buys an application, installs it on their computer, and what does it mean if their spreadsheet crashes? Now it’s: What is happening to our democracy, what is happening to jobs because of AI, and what is happening in automated decision making?”

—Mehran Sahami, Professor at Stanford University, from the article, “Can tech ethics be learned—or is society doomed?” [WIRED]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

This week, there is a lot to digest, from successful CRISPR therapies for rare diseases to unethical use of research data sets and robot therapy for mental health. Let’s get into it.

CRISPR therapy for rare blood disease delivers “life-changing” results

In 2019, researchers started the first CRISPR human clinical trials in the USA. CRISPR allows researchers to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR can be used to fix genetic defects and treat various diseases. The trials in the USA were aimed at treating two rare blood diseases—beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease. After nearly three years, the results have been overwhelmingly positive [Rich Haridy, New Atlas].  

So far, data from 22 patients has been announced, and the results are about as good as one could hope. All 15 beta-thalassemia patients displayed clinically meaningful improvements to fetal hemoglobin levels. Before the CRISPR therapy each of the patients required ongoing blood transfusions, sometimes monthly, but since the infusion every one of them has been transfusion-free.

All seven sickle cell patients also showed significant improvement, free of any vaso-occlusive crises, the primary clinical indication of disease.

"What we're seeing in these early days is how transformational this is for the sickle cell patients we've seen," says Stephen Grupp, a researcher working on the trials. "We are hearing that it is life-changing."

Researchers still need to monitor the patients to understand the long-term efficacy, but they are pretty positive based on the results over the last three years.

Deleting unethical data sets isn’t good enough

In the recent past, researchers gathered huge data sets for AI research. One example is the MS-Celeb-1M, a data set of 10 million images of 100,000 celebrities’ faces. Microsoft compiled the dataset and released it to promote advancement in facial recognition.

However, the data sets were found to contain not just celebrities but pictures of journalists, artists, activists and academics too. Their photographs were added to the data set without their consent. Microsoft eventually removed the data set, but the internet never forgets, and the data set is still available from other sources [Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review].

But a new study shows that this has done little to keep the problematic data from proliferating and being used. The authors selected three of the most commonly cited data sets containing faces or people, two of which had been retracted; they traced the ways each had been copied, used, and repurposed in close to 1,000 papers.

[…]

Part of the problem, according to the Princeton paper, is that those who put together data sets quickly lose control of their creations.

Data sets released for one purpose can quickly be co-opted for others that were never intended or imagined by the original creators. MS-Celeb-1M, for example, was meant to improve facial recognition of celebrities but has since been used for more general facial recognition and facial feature analysis, the authors found. It has also been relabeled or reprocessed in derivative data sets like Racial Faces in the Wild, which groups its images by race, opening the door to controversial applications.

The study recommends certain practices that the AI community should incorporate, such as adequately documenting and licensing the data sets, placing harder limits on access to their data, establishing norms on how data should be collected, labelled, and used.

Margaret Mitchell, an AI ethics researcher and a leader in responsible data practices, is exploring creating data set stewardship organisations—teams of people that not only handle the curation, maintenance, and use of the data but also work with lawyers, activists, and the general public to make sure it complies with legal standards, is collected only with consent, and can be removed if someone chooses to withdraw personal information.

Is robot therapy the future?

The use of telehealth and telemedicine has exploded during the pandemic. With mental health increasingly affected by the pandemic, several companies have jumped into providing therapy through apps that use various digital services such as texting, chatbots, and even AI therapists to help people [Eva Wiseman, The Guardian]. While some see it as a positive, others are not very enthusiastic about how these apps work, as the metrics and KPIs used to optimise them are not ideal.

Wiseman reached out to several users of apps for the article.

I got in touch with a number of users of automated therapy apps and platforms, some of whom found them useful (they appreciated the ease and the affordability – one man told me he felt more comfortable talking online to a therapist and that it had helped him open up) but, inevitably, it was the people who’d had bad experiences who were most keen to talk to me.

Wiseman also spoke to Elizabeth Cotton, a former psychotherapist working in the NHS and currently an academic at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her recent research is focused on the “Uberisation of mental health”.

One concern she has about online therapy platforms is the introduction of what she calls “Therapeutic Tinder” and how that changes a person’s relationship with their therapist. “They’re sold on the basis that you can see a therapist at any point in time and a text conversation becomes an appropriate way of having therapy. And if you don’t like your therapist, you just change them next week. What does that do to the therapeutic alliance, if you’re constantly at risk of being swiped, does that affect your practice?” She has no doubt that it does. “Good therapy means you can absolutely loathe the sight of your therapist. Now the impulse is to be more attractive as a therapist. The pressure is always to go light, rather than go deep.” Whenever innovation promises to provide cheaper access to something millions of people want, big businesses enter and monopolise the market. Which is dangerous when the product is better mental health. If a therapeutic relationship is based on trust and communication, then putting that relationship in the hands of tech companies, an industry rarely applauded for its trustworthiness or safety, threatens its very foundations. The more we talk, the more terrifying her vision of the future of therapy seems.

Cotton brings up an excellent point. If the apps allow people to change therapists at will, based on if they like them or not, it changes the behaviour of therapists to retain their clients. They may not push their clients to face the difficult emotions or make them answer hard questions that could lead to breakthroughs in their treatment. Instead, they may appease the client in an effort to retain them.

Other interesting articles from around the web

✍️ Analog pens, Apple’s pencil & talking machines: writing & its future [Om Malik, OM.co]

Another gem of an article from Om Malik about the difference in feeling when writing with a pen on paper vs a stylus on devices. He also discusses the pivot to voice as an input that may eventually relegate keyboards into the background.

As you know, I am a big advocate of writing on paper with a pen. Manystudieshave shown that we learn and retain more information when we write with our hands. Sure typing can let us capture more information, but writing gives more cognitive context. Today, we mostly type on our keyboards. Some of us have started to use Apple iPad and the Apple Pencil. Jon Callaghan, my partner at True Ventures, is an unabashed fan of Remarkable.

The challenge with these digital writing devices is that they are a “one size fits all” solution. In the analog world, writing instruments are highly personal, and each one fits our unique writing styles, and where we fall in the demographic spectrum — age, gender, and geographic locations define what we use to write. Writing surfaces, aka the paper we like, too are highly personal.

Like Om prefers pen and paper, I still prefer reading an actual book vs reading on a device. Yes, devices have many advantages, but it’s the feeling of holding an actual book, flipping back quickly to refer to something, and the ease on the eyes that I don’t get from reading on a device.

👨‍⚕️ The pain was unbearable. So why did doctors turn her away? [Maia Szalavitz, WIRED]

NarxCare is a system by a company called Appriss that doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals in the US use to identify a patient’s risk of misusing opioids. NarxCare uses machine learning algorithms on state prescription databases to identify a patient’s risk of misusing opioids by analysing the number of pharmacies a patient has visited, the distances travelled to receive health care, and the combinations of prescriptions received. 

Kathryn, a patient with endometriosis, a condition that results in agonising pain, managed her pain by taking oral opioids. Her pain was particularly severe at one point, and fearing a life-threatening growth in her ovary, she was admitted to the hospital for observation. On the fourth day, the hospital staff informed her that she would no longer receive opioids. Two weeks after she was discharged, her gynaecologist terminated their relationship based on a report from the NarxCare database. After spending days researching why the system flagged her, she discovered it was because of her sick pets.

At the time of her hospitalization, Kathryn owned two flat-coated retrievers, Bear and Moose. Both were the kind of dog she preferred to adopt: older rescues with significant medical problems that other prospective owners might avoid. Moose had epilepsy and had required surgery on both his hind legs. He had also been abused as a puppy and had severe anxiety. Bear, too, suffered from anxiety.

The two canines had been prescribed opioids, benzodiazepines, and even barbiturates by their veterinarians. Prescriptions for animals are put under their owner's name. So to NarxCare, it apparently looked like Kathryn was seeing many doctors for different drugs, some at extremely high dosages. (Dogs can require large amounts of benzodiazepines due to metabolic factors.) Appriss says that it is “very rare” for pets’ prescriptions to drive up a patient’s NarxCare scores.

Machine learning and AI have still not matured enough to trust them implicitly. Denying treatment to patients based on a flawed system without manually verifying the decisions by these systems is irresponsible.

Quote of the week

“They’re sold on the basis that you can see a therapist at any point in time and a text conversation becomes an appropriate way of having therapy. And if you don’t like your therapist, you just change them next week. What does that do to the therapeutic alliance, if you’re constantly at risk of being swiped, does that affect your practice? Good therapy means you can absolutely loathe the sight of your therapist. Now the impulse is to be more attractive as a therapist. The pressure is always to go light, rather than go deep.”

—Elizabeth Cotton, an academic based at Cardiff Metropolitan University whose recent research is focused on the “Uberisation of mental health”, talking about online therapy platforms in the article, “Is robot therapy the future?” [The Guardian]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

We’ve finally crossed that threshold where a patent has been awarded to a machine. There are challenges to the patent process in many countries around the world. So far, most have ruled that machines cannot hold patents. But, it’s brought up some fascinating arguments with possible repercussions to innovation.

If machines can be inventors, could AI soon monopolise technology?

South Africa became the first country to award a patent to a machine. The patent was granted on June 28 to DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), an AI system developed by US scientist Stephen Thaler [Dr Amanda-Jane George, The Conversation].

Thaler says DABUS independently designed a fractal-shaped container for improved grip and heat transfer, and an emergency beacon that flashes more noticeably. So he can’t take credit as the actual inventor. 

He has filed patent applications in 17 countries, as permitted by the international Patent Cooperation Treaty. In the US, UK, Germany, Europe and Australia, the patent offices have not approved them. Patent office decisions are pending in 11 other countries.

Interestingly, in Australia, although the Commissioner of Patents ruled that Thaler could not patent inventions by DABUS, Australia’s Federal Court overturned the decision and ruled that an AI system can be named as an inventor.

Patent law language in each country varies. In the USA, patent law specifies that inventors must be human. There is no specification that the applicant has to be a human in other countries such as Australia.

Another point of contention is that patent offices don’t see how a machine can own what it invents. Ownership is critical in the patent process.

Some have concerns about what it will do to innovation and how it will further increase the dominance of big tech companies if AI systems can be patent holders.

There are concerns that accepting machines as inventors could, as Melbourne Law School senior fellow Mark Summerfield has warned, create an avalanche of “automated patent generators” monopolising technology. 

This would further entrench the dominance of tech companies for whom AI is central, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba. As University College Cork economist Wim Naudé, has written, these platforms have a huge first-mover advantage in AI, “turning them into monopolists and gatekeepers”.

Thaler is challenging the rulings by the US Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office.

Why artificial intelligence is being used to write adverts

Advertisers are now using software by a company called Phrasee to generate their advertising slogans [Michael Dempsey, BBC].

When Dixons Carphone wanted to push shoppers towards its Black Friday sale, the company turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and got the winning line "The time is now".

Saul Lopes, head of customer marketing at Dixons Carphone, thinks it worked because it didn't have the words Black Friday in it.

His human copywriters had produced dozens of potentially successful sentences but they all mentioned Black Friday. It was technology that broke this chain of thought.

Many agencies and advertisers are currently using Phrasee to assist their copywriters with fresh and unique ideas.

These algorithms look at x-rays and somehow detect your race

Researchers have discovered that artificial intelligence algorithms that read x-rays to assist doctors and perhaps identify issues the doctor may have missed can also determine the patient’s race with remarkable accuracy [Tom Simonite, WIRED].

Evidence that algorithms can read race from a person’s medical scans emerged from tests on five types of imagery used in radiology research, including chest and hand x-rays and mammograms. The images included patients who identified as Black, white, and Asian. For each type of scan, the researchers trained algorithms using images labeled with a patient’s self-reported race. Then they challenged the algorithms to predict the race of patients in different, unlabeled images.

Radiologists don’t generally consider a person’s racial identity—which is not a biological category—to be visible on scans that look beneath the skin. Yet the algorithms somehow proved capable of accurately detecting it for all three racial groups, and across different views of the body.

There have already been many incidences of racial discrimination in health care [Humans + Tech - Issue #32]. This finding raises more concerns that AI can magnify inequality in health care. Even more alarming is that the researchers aren’t sure what cues the algorithms used to identify race accurately.  

Other interesting articles from around the web

⛈ Dubai is making its own fake rain to beat 122F heat [Bevan Hurley, Independent]

A project led by the University of Reading in England uses drones to shoot electrical charges into the clouds to get the water drops to merge, stick and form raindrops that fall as rain when they are big enough.

The project tries to get the water drops to merge and stick when they receive an electrical pulse, “like dry hair to a comb”.

“When the drops merge and are big enough, they will fall as rain”, Prof Ambaum told the BBC.

Applying electrical shocks to clouds is preferred as it doesn’t require the use of chemicals.

🏨 Hacker hijacks a capsule hotel’s lights, fans, and beds [Andy Greenberg, WIRED]

Kyasupā, a French hacker, demonstrated how he hacked into a hotel’s network and controlled the lights, fans, and bed at the Black Hat hacker conference.

A TRAVEL TIP: When staying in a “capsule hotel,” the Japanese style of budget accommodation that packs guests into tiny, adjoining rooms not much bigger than their bodies, be considerate of your neighbors. Especially if the capsule hotel you're staying in offers digital automation features—and a hacker is staying in the next room over.

[…]

“When I saw all of these features, I thought it was pretty cool, because it means that if I can hack them, I could potentially control all the hotel bedrooms, which is super fun,” Kyasupā wrote to WIRED in a text-message interview ahead of his Black Hat talk. “At the end, I found a total of six vulnerabilities, which allowed me to build an exploit to take control of any bedrooms I wanted from my laptop.”

🤯 The hacker who spent a year reclaiming his face from Clearview AI [Isobel Cockerell, Coda]

Matthias Marx, a hacker and researcher studying security systems, pursued Clearview AI for more than a year to stop using his biometric data without his consent. Clearview AI is a facial recognition company highlighted in Issue #13 of Humans + Tech. Coda interviewed Marx. An excerpt from the interview is presented below.

Why is remaining anonymous in the offline world important?

I think it should be important to everyone. Under surveillance, we change our behavior. If I want to attend a protest, but I know it’s easy to be identified, I might decide not to go, even if it was completely legal to do so. Likewise, I might not want to go to the psychologist’s office, if I knew that I was being identified wherever I went. 

Matthias’ difficulty in getting his face removed from Clearview AI’s database inspired him to start a campaign called Reclaim your Face that aims to ban biometric mass surveillance.

You’re part of a campaign called “Reclaim your Face.” What does that mean?

At the moment we don’t really own our faces. There are already lots of biometric experiments out there that use, say, CCTV to process our faces without our consent. We need to do something if we want to claim our faces back, because at the moment, companies just could use our face to identify us. 

Quote of the week

“AI can't hurt if it generates interesting suggestions, but it's like satnav in a car. Great for directions but you don't allow it to drive the car!”

—Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman and veteran copywriter at Ogilvy, from the article, “Why artificial intelligence is being used to write adverts” [BBC]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

If you could preserve your loved ones in the form of a chatbot, would you? What will that do to us psychologically and emotionally? Will it help or hurt? The real-life story of Joshua Barbeau and Jessica Pereira below left me with more questions than answers.

The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.

It’s never easy to deal with the death of loved ones. Joshua Barbeau lost his fiancee, Jessica Pereira, when he was 26. Eight years later, still unable to get over her death, he stumbled upon a website called Project December.

Project December exposed OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine that can produce fluent human-level responses in English to a prompt in the form of a chatbot interface. GPT-3 can even imitate writing style and can impersonate humans convincingly. Users could give the chatbot a personality and design their own bots.

Joshua wondered if he could design a bot that would replicate Jessica. He trained the system with Jessica’s old texts and Facebook messages, along with a brief intro to who Jessica was. He had turned his fiancee into a chatbot [Jason Fagone, San Francisco Chronicle].

At first, he was impressed by the software’s ability to mimic the real Jessica Pereira. Within 15 minutes, he found himself confiding in the chatbot. After a few hours, he broke down in tears. Then, emotionally exhausted, he nodded off to sleep.

When he awoke an hour later, it was 6 a.m.

The virtual Jessica was still there, cursor blinking.

“I fell asleep next to the computer,” he typed.

She responded that she’d been sleeping too.

“Wow, I’m surprised that ghosts still need sleep,” he said.

“We do,” Jessica replied. “Just like people. Maybe a little less.”

They chatted for another hour, until Joshua passed out again. When he next woke up, it was early afternoon.

There is so much to think about when reading this story. The creator of Project December, Jason Rohrer, was surprised when he learned that Joshua had used it to simulate his dead fiancee. He never designed it with that use case in mind.

Are we overstepping any moral or ethical lines here? On the one hand, it can be therapeutic to some and help them get some closure, but on the other hand, it can also make things worse as those in a deep state of grief can be highly vulnerable and fragile.

What happens if people become too attached to the chatbot? Jason Rohrer designed Project December so that each chatbot died eventually, depending on how many credits a user purchased and capped at a maximum of 1,000 credits. And even if you generate a new chatbot, it is designed never to be the same or produce the same conversations so that each version will have a slightly different personality. Will people who simulate their loved ones have to deal with loss and grief all over again once each version of the chatbot dies?

However, future chatbot platforms designed by others may not have an expiry date like Project December. What happens when people eventually combine these chatbots with physical robots? How will that affect those grieving and their interactions with other humans?

Engineer builds voice-controlled exoskeleton so his son could walk

16-year old Oscar was bound to a wheelchair. One day he told his dad, Jean-Louis Constanza, ‘Dad, you’re a robotics engineer, why don’t you make a robot that would allow us to walk?’

His dad went on to cofound the company Wandercraft to create robotic devices that can provide extra mobility to wheelchair users [Dan Robitzski, Futurism].

For now, the exoskeleton is too heavy and clunky for consumer use, but the company has sold a few dozen to hospitals in multiple countries at about $178,000 each.

All his son, Oscar, has to do is strap in to the exoskeleton while sitting then say “Robot, stand up” and the machine will help him stand and balance as he walks. While there are plenty of robot exoskeletons out there, the voice input is a useful trick for making sure the machine actually does what it’s supposed to at the right time.

Oscar is now independent and can walk on his own whenever he chooses to. As they improve the technology to make it lighter and more economical, it will positively change the lives of many disabled people.

AI creates false documents that fake out hackers

Dartmouth College cybersecurity researcher V.S. Subramanian has developed a novel way to throw off hackers who attempt to steal valuable documents from companies and other entities.

The solution is to repurpose an algorithm called Word Embedding–based Fake Online Repository Generation Engine (WE-FORGE) used to generate decoys of patents under development. WE-FORGE can also create fake versions of documents that a company wants to guard [Sophie Bushwick, Scientific American].

Counterfeit documents produced by WE-FORGE could also act as hidden “trip wires,” says Rachel Tobac, CEO of cybersecurity consultancy SocialProof Security. For example, an enticing file might alert security when accessed. Companies have typically used human-created fakes for this strategy. “But now if this AI is able to do that for us, then we can create a lot of new documents that are believable for an attacker—without having to do more work,” says Tobac, who was not involved in the project.

The system produces convincing decoys by searching through a document for keywords. For each one it finds, it calculates a list of related concepts and replaces the original term with one chosen at random. The process can produce dozens of documents that contain no proprietary information but still look plausible. Subrahmanian and his team asked computer science and chemistry graduate students to evaluate real and fake patents from their respective fields, and the humans found the WE-FORGE-generated documents highly believable. The results appeared in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Management Information Systems.

Other interesting articles from around the web

👩‍💻 She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story. [Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review]

In September 2020, Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed through an 8,000-word exit memo that Facebook enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it. The article details her story and her personal sacrifices to fix the systems that facilitate political manipulation to protect democracy worldwide.

Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally.

Her memo revealed that she’d identified dozens of countries, including India, Mexico, Afghanistan, and South Korea, where this type of abuse was enabling politicians to mislead the public and gain power. It also revealed how little the company had done to mitigate the problem, despite Zhang’s repeated efforts to bring it to the attention of leadership.

“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” she wrote.

I also recommend reading through this thread on Twitter below.

👵 Virtual contact worse than no contact for over-60s in lockdown, says study [Amelia Hill, The Guardian]

Surprisingly, a study conducted on 5,148 people aged 60 and over found that older people faced more loneliness and long-term mental health disorders after virtual contact than those who spent pandemic isolation on their own.

Many older people stayed in touch with family and friends during lockdown using the phone, video calls, and other forms of virtual contact. Zoom choirs, online book clubs and virtual bedtime stories with grandchildren helped many stave off isolation.

But the study, among the first to comparatively assess social interactions across households and mental wellbeing during the pandemic, found many older people experienced a greater increase in loneliness and long-term mental health disorders as a result of the switch to online socialising than those who spent the pandemic on their own.

💘 Study: Almost half of dating app users trust AI to find them a match [Thomas Macaulay, Neural, TNW]

New research through a survey of 18,000 dating app users from six continents by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky indicates that close to half of the users would trust AI to find them a match.

More than half (54%) of the respondents said dating apps have made the process much easier. Notably, 43% would only meet matches the algorithms recommended.

But that faith could cause them problems. Kaspersky also found that dating apps expose too much personal information about users, which could leave them vulnerable to stalking and doxing.

“Despite the benefits and possibilities of recommendation services, you should always be vigilant and remember that we cannot know for sure who is on the other side of the screen,” said David Jacoby, a security researcher at Kaspersky.

Quote of the week

“We were surprised by the finding that an older person who had only virtual contact during lockdown experienced greater loneliness and negative mental health impacts than an older person who had no contact with other people at all. We were expecting that a virtual contact was better than total isolation but that doesn’t seem to have been the case for older people.”

—Dr Yang Hu of Lancaster University, from the article, “Virtual contact worse than no contact for over-60s in lockdown, says study” [The Guardian]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

AI seemed to dominate the articles this week. Some are beneficial and promising uses of AI that can help us a lot if implemented correctly. I particularly enjoyed the article from PwC’s Anand Rao on how AI can help create more caring company cultures.

How AI can help create more caring company cultures

Anand Rao is a Global artificial intelligence leader at PwC. PwC has been using AI to design their office spaces with optimal social distancing and alternative uses for office space. From experience, he says that a compassionate workplace performs better. As we continue to face challenges with the pandemic, and we will probably face more as people start returning to offices, Rao believes that there is a significant opportunity to use AI to build and guide emotional support at companies [Anand Rao, QUARTZ].

Loss. Grief. Fear. These emotions have gripped everyone over the past 14 months. This mental and emotional damage from the pandemic could linger for months or even years from now. While widespread vaccine rollouts might bring some relief, the reverse-culture shock of returning to office life could exacerbate the trauma.

But what if organizations could pair AI with HR and performance systems already in place to identify and provide the individualized, personal support employees need through the changes and continued uncertainty ahead?

Rao identifies three main areas where AI can help create a more compassionate workspace—trauma, employee burnout, and employee choice.

I found the ideas presented very interesting and well thought out. I urge you to read the full article. I agree with Rao’s conclusion that responsible AI that respects employee privacy and ensures fairness, transparency and accountability will be vital in implementing these successfully.

New AI tool aims to analyse and improve classroom discussions

U.S. students underperform in math skills compared to their peers in other countries. Researchers at UC Boulder's Institute of Cognitive Science have developed Talk Moves to try and assist teachers in imparting knowledge to students in better ways. It is an AI tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) models to help teachers have constructive discussions in the classroom [Oliver Peckham, datanami].

Talk Moves uses transcripts of classroom discussions and analyses them to evaluate what worked and what didn’t.

Based on its analysis, Talk Moves can then output classifiers to identify which students are responding (and how often), which the developers hope will both spur engagement and improve equity in classroom settings. “A big goal of accountable talk is equity, because we want all students listening, participating, talking and being a part of that community,” Jacobs said.

The application has already been put into pilot use in two Colorado school districts, where teachers are helping to both test and design the evolving tool. “I’m always trying to improve conversations that happen in my math lessons and to help students have discussions with each other to explain their thinking. The application lets me see how I’m doing at meeting that goal,” said Kristin Holmquist, a fifth grade teacher at Eagleview Elementary School.

Smart technology (probably) isn’t making you dumber

Any new technology comes with its sceptics. As smartphones and computers have become commonplace in the last two decades, many sceptics claim that they are damaging our cognitive abilities. However, researchers Lorenzo Cecutti, Anthony Chemero & Spike W. S. Lee have published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, arguing that there is no clear evidence for the lasting detrimental effects of digital technology on cognitive abilities. Still, digital technology may be changing predominant ways of cognition [Derek Beres, Big Think].

According to co-author Anthony Chemero, the idea that smartphones and digital technology damage our biological cognitive abilities is not backed up by science. Instead, he claims that we are developing different relationships to cognition due to smart devices. "What smartphones and digital technology seem to do instead is to change the ways in which we engage our biological cognitive abilities."

Other research claims the opposite.

Other research disagrees with that conclusion. The famous London cab driver study showed that cabbies had larger hippocampi and better memory than non-drivers. Other research shows that GPS reduces spatial awareness and mental mapping. Studies such as these indicate that — as the cliché goes — if you don't use it, you lose it.

Overall the authors argue that technology generally makes life better. Every benefit comes with a cost, and it’s how we use it that matters.

Other interesting articles from around the web

👓 Warby Parker’s new iPhone eye test is its next step into telehealth [Ruth Reader, FastCompany]

In the US, it is compulsory to have a current prescription when ordering new eyeglasses. Warby Parker has developed an eye test using an iPhone app to renew their prescriptions via the app. It’s available in 29 states. A doctor still verifies the results before they are approved, but it allows many to renew their prescriptions from the comfort of their homes.

The app, which is changing its name from Prescription Check to Virtual Vision Test, renews prescriptions for anyone 18 to 65 years old with a single-vision distance prescription and no eye health concerns. Users fill out a quick, five-minute questionnaire, then prop up the iPhone and stand 10 feet away with their current prescription glasses or contact lenses on. As the phone shows a series of letters, the user reads them out and the phone app will record the responses. Within two days, a doctor reviews the results and either approves or asks the person to get an in-person exam. Users will be charged for the test only if they are able to renew their prescription. Sadly, it’s still not available for Android users.

📱 Instagram ‘pushes weight-loss messages to teenagers’ [Jim Waterson and Alex Hern, The Guardian]

Researchers used “mystery shopper” techniques to set up a series of Instagram profiles mirroring real children to understand how instagram’s algorithms work.

One account that was set up in the name of a 17-year-old girl liked a single post from a sportswear brand about dieting that appeared in her Instagram explore tab. She then followed an account which was suggested to her after it posted a photo of a “pre- and post-weight loss journey”.

These two actions were enough to radically change the material suggested to the fake teenage girl on Instagram. The researchers found her explore feed suddenly began to feature substantially more content relating to weight loss journeys and tips, exercise and body sculpting. The material often featured “noticeably slim, and in some cases seemingly edited/distorted body shapes”.

Instagram has acknowledged the issue and resolved to fix them.

🕵️‍♀️ Pegasus scandal: Are we all becoming unknowing spies? [Gordon Corera, BBC]

The recent Pegasus scandal revealed that the Pegasus spyware from Israel’s NSO group targeted 50,000 phone numbers, including Arab royal family members, business executives, journalists, activists, and politicians. Our phones contain vast amounts of data, not just of ourselves but also of our friends, families, and colleagues.

Now, almost everything they might want to know - what you say, where you have been, who you meet, even what interests you - is all contained in a device we carry all the time. 

Your phone can be accessed remotely without anyone even touching it and you never knowing that it's been turned from your friendly digital assistant into someone else's spy.

The ability to remotely access that phone was once considered something only a few states could do. But high-end espionage and surveillance powers are now in the hands of many other countries and even individuals and small groups.

Quote of the week

"You put all this technology together with a naked human brain and you get something that's smarter...and the result is that we, supplemented by our technology, are actually capable of accomplishing much more complex tasks than we could with our un-supplemented biological abilities."

—Anthony Chemero, Department of Philosophy and Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, from the article, “Smart technology (probably) isn’t making you dumber” [Big Think]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I hope you had a fruitful week. Let’s dive into this week’s articles.

Digital apartheid deprives Kashmiri children of basic rights

The Indian government imposed a military lockdown in Kashmir on August 5, 2019, when they unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which had guaranteed autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. A communication blackout was imposed with the Internet, landline, and mobile phone connectivity suspended to preempt coordinated protests. Schools and universities were closed for six months.

Only in March 2020 were military lockdowns were lifted, and schools were allowed to reopen. The government restored partial internet access after pressure from rights organisations like Amnesty International and the Internet Freedom Foundation. Then two weeks later, the Indian government announced a country-wide lockdown due to the pandemic. While children in the rest of the nation attended school online, the children in Kashmir continued to suffer as the government refused to restore full internet access [Majid Maqbool, The Conversationalist].

The two million children of Kashmir missed nearly two years of formal schooling. Meanwhile, those from disadvantaged backgrounds had no means of accessing the internet even when the government restored access. The pandemic has exacerbated the digital divide between India’s rich and poor, since very few parents of children who attend public schools can afford smartphones to access online classes.

For those who live in remote areas that lack infrastructure, internet and mobile connectivity are poor even under normal circumstances. Now, with the pandemic keeping the schools closed, a recent BBC News report shows children in rural villages walking miles and even traversing mountains for an internet signal that might allow them to access their online schoolwork. But the signal is so weak that downloading tutorials can take hours. At that speed, online video classes are impossible.

In addition to the loss in education, the military's lockdowns and the aggression and abuse perpetrated by the military on civilians have significantly affected children's mental health.

Mental health experts and teachers report that the lockdowns have also exacerbated pre-existing physical and mental health problems, causing trauma that could take generations to heal.

Dr. Majid Shafi, a clinical psychiatrist who treats children and adolescents in the central and southern districts of Kashmir said restrictions on children, who are confined to their homes for long periods during extended lockdowns, has adversely affected their physical, emotional, and cognitive health.

The 18-month internet shutdown in Kashmir has been the longest ever in a democracy. The fact that the children are suffering the most, with an impact that could last several generations, is extremely sad and disheartening. More reason to declare internet access a fundamental human right [Humans + Tech - Issue #3].

A paralysed man's brain waves converted to speech in a world-first breakthrough

In what is being hailed as “a feat of neuroengineering,” researchers in the US have demonstrated the ability to read the brainwaves of a paralysed patient and translate those signals to text with an accuracy of 75%. The patient, whom they refer to as BRAVO1, is a 36-year old man paralysed by a stroke at 20. Although he was unable to speak, his cognitive abilities were intact [ScienceAlert].

The researchers worked with BRAVO1 to develop a 50-word vocabulary with words essential to his daily life like "water," "family," and "good," then surgically implanted a high-density electrode over his speech motor cortex.

Over the next several months, the team recorded his neural activity as he attempted to say the 50 words, and used artificial intelligence to distinguish subtle patterns in the data and tie them to words.

[…]

They then prompted him with questions like "How are you today?" and "Would you like some water?" which he was able to answer with responses like, "I am very good," and "No, I am not thirsty."

The system decoded up to 18 words per minute with a median accuracy of 75 percent. An "auto-correct" function, similar to that used in phones, contributed to its success.

Decoding thought signals from the brain to speech is a phenomenal achievement, especially for the ability to allow speech-impaired people like BRAVO1 to communicate again in an effective manner.

The 3D technology that could revolutionise the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee

Osteoarthritis of the knee affects many over the age of 60. Some are also affected by osteoarthritis in their 40s and 50s. And women are more prone than men. Diagnosis up to now has depended on X-rays, combined with questionnaires and clinical observations of the knee. But these methods are subjective and doesn’t allow doctors to take measurements. A new technique called Knee kinesiography developed by researchers in Canada uses 3D analysis of the motion in the knee, providing doctors with a complete movement analysis to assess the joint with precision and accuracy [Nicola Hagemeister, Nathalie J Bureau, Neila Mezghani, The Conversation].

Because this technology measures three-dimensional movement of the knee in real time, as well as rotations that are not visible to the naked eye, it enables health professionals to assess the joint with precision and accuracy. By providing motion analysis that detects deviations from what is considered normal movement, the technology allows health professionals to understand the source of the stresses on the cartilage.

[…]

According to results of our clinical study, conducted on 515 patients, this technology shows great promise. Patients who received knee kinesiography and an individualized care plan were able to correct several measured biomechanical dysfunctions. Nearly nine out of 10 (88 per cent) of those who participated in the clinical study reported doing their exercises for at least three months, which demonstrated that they were committed to their treatment. Exercise adherence is a major issue in studies that analyze the effect of an exercise program.

More than 100 clinics and hospitals in eight countries now offer knee kinesiology.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🧬 WHO says gene hacking superhumans should be illegal [Dan Robitzski, Futurism]

A special World Health Organization advisory panel issued two reports with recommendations and ethical guidelines for the international research community around genetics ethics questions.

Alongside gene editing meant to augment human performance, the reports also urged against germline edits, or any genetic alteration that a patient would pass along to their future children. Instead, ethicists generally agree — and the committee recommended — that it’s best to focus on edits intended to treat or reverse diseases.

The report also sought to make sure that gene therapies would be distributed equitably throughout the world. Too commonly, its authors said, clinical trials will be conducted in poorer countries while the resulting therapies end up in wealthier nations, with high price tags attached.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear how they will or can be enforced other than voluntary compliance.

😡 Black teen misidentified by facial recognition sparks fears of machine-driven segregation [Thomas Macaulay, The Next Web]

14-year old Lamya Robinson was kicked out of a skating rink after being mistaken for someone else by a facial recognition system.

When Robinson tried to enter the roller skating rink, staff stopped her because, they said, she had previously been involved in a fight at the venue. But the teenager had never even been there before.

The facial recognition system had incorrectly matched her face to another person.

“To me, it’s basically racial profiling,” her mother, Juliea Robinson, told Fox 2 Detroit. “You’re just saying every young Black, brown girl with glasses fits the profile and that’s not right.”

With all the racial and gender bias by facial recognition systems, they continue to be deployed everywhere. In many cases, humans are not questioning the decisions made by these systems.

Related

+ From Macy’s to Ace Hardware, facial recognition is already everywhere [Rebecca Heilweil, Recode]

Most customers are unaware that facial recognition systems track and collect data on their employees and customers to boost their profits.

While you may not have heard of it before, stores using facial recognition isn’t a new practice. Last year, Reuters reported that the drug chain Rite Aid had deployed facial recognition in at least 200 stores over nearly a decade (before the company suddenly committed to ditching the software). In fact, facial recognition is just one of several technologies store chains are deploying to enhance their security systems, or to otherwise surveil customers. Some retailers, for instance, have used apps and in-store wifi to track users while they move around physical stores and later target them with online ads.

🤖 Trust me, I'm a chatbot [Science Daily]

As more and more companies are employing chatbots as part of their customer services solutions, researchers at the University of Göttingen investigated whether companies should reveal to their customers that they are communicating with machines rather than humans.

The result: most noticeably, if service issues are perceived as particularly important or critical, there is a negative reaction when it is revealed that the conversation partner is a chatbot. This scenario weakens customer trust. Interestingly, however, the results also show that disclosing that the contact was a chatbot leads to positive customer reactions in cases where the chatbot cannot resolve the customer's issue. "If their issue isn't resolved, disclosing that they were talking with a chatbot, makes it easier for the consumer to understand the root cause of the error," says first author Nika Mozafari from the University of Göttingen. "A chatbot is more likely to be forgiven for making a mistake than a human." In this scenario, customer loyalty can even improve.

Quote of the week

"To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak. It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain's natural speech machinery."

—BRAVO1's neurosurgeon Edward Chang, from the article, “A paralyzed man's brain waves converted to speech in a world-first breakthrough” [ScienceAlert]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

Technology often ignores or gives less priority to addressing the needs of the less-abled amongst us. That’s why I was happy when I came across two articles this week about new solutions that specifically focus on their needs. NaviLens, which is helping sight-impaired people get information from food packaging much easier, and Google and AI are aiding blind runners to run in competitive races.

The codes helping visually-impaired people shop

Sight-impaired people have many challenges when shopping in supermarkets. Store layouts keep changing, and most packaging doesn’t have information in braille. They can’t easily read the nutritional information on the packages or the list of ingredients to avoid allergic reactions. They have to depend on attendants to help them out.

Traditional barcodes and QR codes are difficult to focus on and require considerable dexterity. But a new type of colourful code developed by NaviLens, a Spanish company, can be detected from up to 3 metres away and works even in low-light conditions [Douglas Shaw, BBC].

Kellogg’s is currently testing this in collaboration with St. Vincent’s School in Liverpool, a specialist school for people with sensory impairment. Soon all food packaging in the UK will contain these codes.

"I generally don't go shopping anymore because I can't do it without any kind of help," explains Beth Fowler, who is 19 years-old. "Because I can't see, practically… most things."

[…]

"With the new app I can just pick the food off the shelf and scan it," explains Beth, "and read all the information, like ingredients, for example. Everything that a sighted person could see is made accessible."

Many pupils at St Vincent's School also have food allergies, explains Dianne Waites, who teaches Braille and assistive technology at the school, so this technology is even more vital for them.

Most technology addresses the needs of the abled majority and fails to address the needs of the less-abled amongst us, so it’s always lovely to hear when companies build products to make their lives easier.

Robots were supposed to take our jobs. Instead, they’re making them worse.

The pandemic has accelerated the use of workplace monitoring. And robots and algorithms are increasingly taking over the task of monitoring. Their goal is to maximise profits and efficiency for their company, not employee wellbeing [Emily Stewart, Vox].

Amazon is hardly the only company that uses automation to keep tabs on workers and push them to do more. In 2020, Josh Dzieza at the Verge outlined the various ways artificial intelligence, software, and machines are managing workers at places such as call centers, warehouses, and software development shops. He described one remote engineer in Bangladesh who was monitored by a program that took three pictures of him every 10 minutes to make sure he was at his computer, and a call center worker who learned to say “sorry” a lot to customers in order to meet an artificial intelligence-based empathy monitor. A web of technologies has enabled the management of every minute of the working day.

“It would have been prohibitively expensive to employ enough managers to time each worker’s every move to a fraction of a second or ride along in every truck, but now it takes maybe one,” Dzieza wrote. “This is why the companies that most aggressively pursue these tactics all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid, easily replaced, often part-time or contract workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.”

Many companies are trying to maximise profits by treating their employees as commodities and a cost to be cut rather than a resource. The constant monitoring and focus on maximising efficiency can significantly affect employee mental health and wellbeing.

As humans, we all have bad days and other life challenges. We may not be optimal at work every single day. An algorithm cannot understand that or take that into account. The fault lies with the managers and executives who employ these robots and algorithms without thinking about how this affects employee health and wellness.

World's first 3D-printed school tackles classroom shortages in Africa

14Trees, a joint effort between UK’s CDC Group and LarfargeHolcim, has been addressing Africa’s housing crisis by 3D-printing affordable housing since late last year. UNICEF estimates that there is a shortage of 36,000 classrooms in Malawi, which would take 70 years to build using traditional construction methods. 14Trees believes that 3D printing can help build them in around ten years [Nick Lavars, New Atlas].

The organization's first school was built in the district of Salima, with the walls printed in just 18 hours, compared to the several days required by conventional methods. It was then officially transferred to a village community in the Yambe zone, with classes then beginning on June 21.

“Before, we had 12 schools in the Yambe zone; we now have 13 – with this new 3D-printed school," says Juliana Kuphanga Chikandila, a Primary Education Advisor in Malawi. "To increase our supply of education to children, we need a total of four more primary schools in the Yambe zone, but as a district, we need approximately 50 more schools to serve those in need. I am very impressed by the new building – its durability and design provide the space and facilities that students did not have before; teaching and learning can now happen inside and outside the classroom."

14Trees is also planning further projects like this in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar.

Other interesting stories from around the web

🏃‍♂️ Google and AI help a blind man run a 5K [@nowthisnews]

👨‍🌾 Robot farmers could improve jobs and help fight climate change – if they’re developed responsibly [David Rose, Marc Hanheide, Simon Pearson, The Conversation]

A fascinating article examining the positive and negative implications to humans and society from using robots in farming.

Farming robots that can move autonomously in an open field or greenhouse promise a cleaner, safer agricultural future. But there are also potential downsides, from the loss of much-needed jobs to the safety of those working alongside the robots.

To ensure that the use of autonomous robots on farms creates more benefits than losses, a process of responsible development is required. Society as a whole needs to be involved in setting the trajectories for future farming.

🧑‍💼 Podcast: Hired by an algorithm [Anthony Green, MIT Technology Review]

If you’re job hunting, AI is likely screening your application before a human even sees it. MIT Technology Review is doing a four-part podcast series into algorithmic hiring practices. Here is part of the conversation from this first part.

Anonymous Jobseeker: So yeah, it wasn't later, until maybe about 130 applications, where I met other people who were like 200 applications in, or 50 applications in. And we all were just like, what is this? 

Jennifer: And it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s also chatbots, AI-based video games, social media checks, and then come the automated interviews. 

These are one-way video interviews where an algorithm analyzes a job candidate’s word choice, voice, and sometimes—even their facial expressions.  

Anonymous Jobseeker: It's the tech industry. I don't understand how the tech industry makes it difficult to get in, but then they complain that they don't have enough people to hire.

Jennifer: At this point Sally is discouraged after loads of rejection.

But then—she has a realization 

Anonymous Jobseeker: And I was just like, all right, so it's not me—it's the AI. And then that's when I got my confidence back and then I started reapplying to other things. 

Quote of the week

“Technology of course doesn’t have to exploit workers, it doesn’t have to mean robots are coming for all of our jobs. These are not inevitable outcomes, they are human decisions, and they are almost always made by people who are driven by a profit motive that tends to exploit the poor and working class historically.”

—Brian Chen, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), from the article, “Robots were supposed to take our jobs. Instead, they’re making them worse.” [Vox]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

Two of the articles I read this week made me happy — Archer, a 16-year old who created an app for his non-verbal sister to communicate easier and how much effort and resources Twitter is putting towards researching ethical AI.

16-year old develops an app to help his sister talk

Most apps for assisting non-verbal people cost hundreds of dollars. Archer created an app and made it free for everyone [Harry Bligh and Dianne King, BBC]. I urge you to watch the full video (5 mins). It’s an inspiring story.

Della has a rare genetic condition called Bainbridge-Ropers Syndrome which affects her ability to speak. 

Her brother, Archer, wanted to help his sister communicate - and didn't think it was fair to rely on expensive communication apps. 

Aged just 16, Archer decided to develop one himself, for free and accessible to all.

The video below is from YouTube. You can also watch it on BBC by clicking the link above.

AI learns to predict human behaviour from videos

Humans can easily predict the actions of another human based on their body language and react and respond suitably. It’s been difficult for computers to do this. Researchers at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science are tackling this by feeding their algorithm thousands of hours of footage from movies, sports, and TV shows. They are using a different approach to previous attempts, incorporating uncertainty into the algorithm [Holly Evarts, ScienceDaily].

Past attempts in predictive machine learning, including those by the team, have focused on predicting just one action at a time. The algorithms decide whether to classify the action as a hug, high five, handshake, or even a non-action like "ignore." But when the uncertainty is high, most machine learning models are unable to find commonalities between the possible options.

Columbia Engineering PhD students Didac Suris and Ruoshi Liu decided to look at the longer-range prediction problem from a different angle. "Not everything in the future is predictable," said Suris, co-lead author of the paper. "When a person cannot foresee exactly what will happen, they play it safe and predict at a higher level of abstraction. Our algorithm is the first to learn this capability to reason abstractly about future events."

This type of research is critical to future human-robot interactions.

How underground fibre optics spy on humans moving above

A team of researchers from Penn State University rigged an underground telecom fibre optic cable that runs two and a half miles across campus into a scientific surveillance device. Vibrations on the ground above deform the cable slightly, which allows the scientists to detect the activity on the ground. Each activity, such as people walking or a car driving by, has a unique seismic signature. The technique is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, or DAS [Matt Simon, WIRED].

DAS could be a powerful tool to track people’s movement: Instead of sifting through cell phone location data, researchers could instead tap into fiber optic cables to track the passage of pedestrians and cars. But the technology can’t exactly identify a car or person. “You can say if it's a car, or if it's a truck, or it's a bike. But you cannot say, ‘Oh, this is a Nissan Sentra, 2019,’” says Stanford University geophysicist Ariel Lellouch, who uses DAS but wasn’t involved in this study but did peer-review it. “Anonymity of DAS is one of the biggest benefits, actually.”

This technique has other uses as well. Civil engineers are using it to study soil formation, while biologists are using it to study whales.

Other interesting stories from around the web

👁 This startup is paying people to scan their eyeballs [Edward Ongweso Jr, VICE]

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that it has learned that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, is co-founding a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin that will try and convince people to scan their retinas with a large silver orb in order to receive tokens.

“I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better,” Altman told Bloomberg. “Is there a way we can use technology to do that at global scale?”

The intentions of Worldcoin may be good. I’m a big fan of universal basic income myself. But I wouldn’t trade my biometric information for that to a private company.

✅ How Twitter hired tech's biggest critics to build ethical AI [Anna Kramer, Protocol]

When the leader of the team researching ethics and accountability for Twitter's machine learning (ML) left Twitter, Ari Font, manager of Twitter's machine learning platforms teams, stepped in and convinced Twitter’s leadership to focus on ethics and responsible ML.

Font was the manager of Twitter's machine learning platforms teams — part of Twitter Cortex, the company's central ML organization — at the time, but she believed that ethics research could transform the way Twitter relies on machine learning. She'd always felt that algorithmic accountability and ethics should shape not just how Twitter used algorithms, but all practical AI applications.

So she volunteered to help rebuild Twitter's META team (META stands for Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability), embarking on what she called a roadshow to persuade Jack Dorsey and his team that ML ethics didn't only belong in research. Over the course of a few months, after a litany of conversations with Dorsey and other senior leaders, Font hadn't secured just a more powerful, operationalized place for the once-small team. Alongside the budget for increased headcount and a new director, she eventually persuaded Dorsey and Twitter's board of directors to make Responsible ML one of Twitter's main 2021 priorities, which came with the power to scale META's work inside of Twitter's products.

Font has built a formidable team, including Rumman Chowdhury, Kristian Lum, and Sarah Roberts. It’s also great to see that Twitter’s leadership is actively listening to these experts, taking a keen interest in using AI and ML in ethical ways, and providing them with the resources they need. It’s a refreshing and welcome approach compared to what we’ve seen at Google and Facebook recently.

🎸 Robot rock: can big tech pick pop’s next megastar? [Alex Rayner, The Guardian]

Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson built Musiio, a software that uses AI to scan thousands of songs to predict the next hit record.

The pair had just founded their firm, Musiio, in Singapore’s Boat Quay district. Pettersson, who is Swedish, was a specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) with a background in neuroscience; Savage, a British music industry professional with tech pedigree, had worked for Shazam and the Pandora streaming service. They let their software loose on the Free Music Archive, one of the world’s largest collections of copyright-free songs. These are written by little-known artists and commonly used for soundtracks and podcasts. They asked their computer to pick 20 songs from the archive, based on their similarity to a tune Savage liked: I Wanted Everything by the US indie star Kurt Vile. Back in the office, they listened. “Every song was great,” says Savage, “and every song was of a similar genre.”

With the ease of self-publishing music, aspiring musicians upload thousands of songs to various services every day. Humans can’t listen to all of these to pick out promising artists. Software like Musiio is helping to analyse thousands of hours of music to identify new talent.

Quote of the week

"Ethics is literally about the world of unintended consequences. We're talking about engineers who are well-mentioned in trying to build something who didn't have the background or education. We're talking to people who wanted to do the right thing and didn't know how to do the right thing."

—Rumman Chowdhury, from the article, “How Twitter hired tech's biggest critics to build ethical AI” [Protocol]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I’ve found some interesting articles for you this week.

After pandemic free-for-all, parents struggle to reinstate screen-time rules

For some countries like the US, where things are opening up again and the summer just beginning, parents are trying to reduce their children’s screen time and get them involved in regular outdoor activities. They are facing many challenges [Heather Kelly, The Washington Post].

While some parents just want their kids to be social or active again, many have noticed personality and behavioral changes in their children. They’re irritable, argumentative and have poor focus. Some have become anxious or depressed, or throw more tantrums and fly into rages.

Grant noticed moments when her kids weren’t acting like themselves. Like when her youngest son, 7, would burst into tears anytime something small went wrong. And when her 10-year-old faked attending Zoom class so he could watch YouTube, or got hypercompetitive and fought with a friend who was over playing video games.

“Having all that screen time all day for a whole year, their nervous system is really disregulated, and those symptoms need to be reversed,” said Victoria Dunckley, a child psychologist who studies the impact of screens on children and the author of “Reset Your Child’s Brain.” “All this overstimulation is putting them into a state of stress.”

Parents everywhere will face this challenge as restrictions go down and things start going back to normal. The article relates the stories of several parents who’ve struggled to reduce their children’s dependence on their devices.

Dunckley explains to parents that boredom is a normal, healthy process for kids that stimulates creativity as they find ways to play independently. Devices fill the boredom without any thinking required and fail to stimulate creativity.

Related

+ They laughed, they cried, they killed monsters: How friendships thrived in video games during the pandemic [Heather Kelly, The Washington Post]

This drone can detect human screams. What could go wrong?

German research institute Fraunhofer FKIE and the Department of Sensor Data and Information Fusion have developed a drone that hunts for human screams [Kelsey D. Atherton, Popular Science].

In situations such as earthquakes where humans may be trapped under rubble, drones being able to hone in on human screams and guide rescuers to them increases the safety of the rescuers as well.

The drone manages to hear the human scream over the buzz from its six spinning rotors. With trained acoustic software and a microphone, the robot flies into place. The same human slams together two pieces of wood, creating another distinct sound, giving the drone more data to home in on. The drone arrives overhead. In the video of the test, the scream-hunting drone successfully locates the researcher below. It is at once a promising sign for rescue work, and an ominous one for the future of humans hiding from robots.

As with any technology, there is an opportunity to use it for both good and bad. Atherton points out the dangers of this technology as well.

But, there is a particular danger in any dual-use technology. A tool designed for an innocuous purpose can be easily used for the same function but with a far different application in mind. Rescue workers have reason to be interested in the drone that hunts for screams. However, it is also a technology that could easily be developed into use for military customers, incorporating the ability to find people by the sounds they make into a dedicated kill chain.

A CCTV company is paying remote workers in India to yell at armed robbers

Washington-based Live Eye Surveillance has developed a camera system that keeps watch and lets human operators intervene when they see something suspicious. The system is remotely staffed 24/7 in India and acts as virtual supervisors. They sell it as a safety feature. In reality, it seems like just another excuse to increase workplace surveillance [Todd Feathers, VICE].

In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item.

In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There’s a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is—he’s there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift—then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter.

Even in instances where the system appears to be helpful – such as when armed robbers attacked a 7-eleven store – the system could put people in more danger.

Even worse, the former field consultant said, the particular form of surveillance Live Eye is selling could actually be putting store workers in danger.

In one of the sample videos Live Eye sends potential customers, two black-clad robbers, one carrying an assault rifle, run into what appears to be a 7-Eleven store and force the clerk behind the counter. As the clerk starts to open the cash register, the Live Eye system dings and a voice informs the robbers that the police have been called. They run out of the store.

“That’s how someone is going to get killed,” the former field consultant said. “You don’t startle someone with an assault rifle. That violates 7-Eleven policy. There’s a reason why the silent alarm is silent” at banks and other businesses.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🖼 Artificial intelligence restores mutilated Rembrandt painting 'The Night Watch' [Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, ARTnews]

In 1715, Amsterdam city officials cut out panels from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch as it wouldn't fit in a space between two doors. The panels were later lost. Now the painting has been made complete again with the help of AI.

About the decision to use AI to reconstruct the missing pieces instead of commissioning an artist to repaint the work, Erdmann told ARTnews, “There’s nothing wrong with having an artist recreate [the missing pieces] by looking at the small copy, but then we’d see the hand of the artist there. Instead, we wanted to see if we could do this without the hand of an artist. That meant turning to artificial intelligence.” 

🇦🇷 In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance [Juan José Relmucao, Rest of World]

Constraints spark creativity more than abundance.

Valenzuela even got his artistic name thanks to his netbook. As a kid, he was so enamoured by it that he would spend hours watching videos in his pajamas. His mother would greet him with a sarcastic: “¡Qué elegante!” (So elegant!) The moniker stuck, and when Valenzuela chose his stage name, he opted for “L-Gante.”A $10 mic was the only hardware Valenzuela had needed to purchase to record L-Gante RKT — the single he created entirely on his Conectar netbook, which today has over 157 million views on YouTube after being released last October.

🛰 Tracking ocean microplastics from space [Gabe Cherry from University of Michigan, Wevolver]

Microplastic pollution has become a big nuisance, and monitoring it has been challenging. Researchers have employed satellites in space to help track the flow of microplastics more accurately.

An estimated eight million tons of plastic trash enters the ocean each year, and most of it is battered by sun and waves into microplastics—tiny flecks that can ride currents hundreds or thousands of miles from their point of entry. The bits can harm sea life and marine ecosystems, and they’re extremely difficult to track and clean up. 

Now,  University of Michigan researchers have developed a new way to spot ocean microplastics across the globe and track them over time, providing a day-by-day timeline of where they enter the water, how they move and where they tend to collect. The approach relies on the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) and can give a global view or zoom in on small areas for a high-resolution picture of microplastic releases from a single location.

Quote of the week

“It’s been really hard to just take the device and say, ‘Go do something.’ I feel like they’ve all forgotten how to go outside and play, or how to entertain themselves without devices.”

—Carrie Mengelkoch, a mother of three in Gainesville, FL, from the article, “After pandemic free-for-all, parents struggle to reinstate screen-time rules” [The Washington Post]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I hope you had a great week. Let’s dive into this week’s articles.

'Every smile you fake' — an AI emotion-recognition system can assess how 'happy' China's workers are in the office

Taigusys is one of many Chinese companies that have developed software that they claim can detect emotions from facial expressions of people and track how they are feeling [Cheryl Teh, Insider]. Taigusys has many multinational companies on their client list, but none confirmed if they use this particular technology.

Human rights activists and tech experts Insider spoke to sounded the alarm bell about deploying such programs, noting that emotion-recognition systems are fundamentally rooted in unethical, unscientific ideas.

Vidushi Marda, senior program officer at British human rights organization Article 19, and Shazeda Ahmed, Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told Insider that their joint research paper on China's emotion-recognition market published this January uncovered a staggering 27 companies in China that were working on developing emotional recognition programs, including Taigusys.

"If such technology is rolled out, it infringes on the ethical and legal rights of employees in the workplace. Even in the premises of a privately-owned workplace, there's still an expectation of privacy and dignity, and the right of employees to act freely and think freely," Marda added.

Emotion recognition is deeply flawed, but this technology is being sold and deployed by various companies in many regions worldwide. The technology is used in education, health care, employment, and criminal justice. As a result, there is an urgent call to regulate emotion-recognition technologies [Kate Crawford, nature].

Researchers at the University of Cambridge created a game at emojify.info to demonstrate how flawed these systems are [James Vincent, The Verge]. Making life-changing decisions in areas such as education, health care, employment, and justice based on such faulty and flawed algorithms should be outlawed or heavily regulated.

Tech companies are training AI to read your lips

Lip reading is following facial recognition and emotion recognition as one of the many tools that companies and governments are employing to increase their surveillance of society. Of course, like all technologies, this has both good and bad uses. But in the hands of data-hungry companies and governments worldwide increasingly implementing monitoring technologies to monitor their citizens, this feels like it will be more harmful than helpful [Todd Feathers, VICE].

Surveillance company Motorola Solutions has a patent for a lip-reading system designed to aid police. Skylark Labs, a startup whose founder has ties to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), told Motherboard that its lip-reading system is currently deployed in private homes and a state-controlled power company in India to detect foul and abusive language.

“This is one of those areas, from my perspective, which is a good example of ‘just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should,’” Fraser Sampson, the UK’s biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, told Motherboard. “My principal concern in this area wouldn’t necessarily be what the technology could do and what it couldn’t do, it would be the chilling effect of people believing it could do what it says. If that then deterred them from speaking in public, then we’re in a much bigger area than simply privacy, and privacy is big enough.”

Context plays a big part in understanding conversations. When lip reading is automated only to get alerted when specific keywords are detected, it could result in people being wrongfully profiled and harassed.

Getting the feels: Should AI have empathy?

In this podcast episode of McKinsey on AI, David DeLallo speaks with marketing and technology author Minter Dial. Here’s my favourite part of the conversation. It’s a very insightful conversation [David DeLallo, McKinsey & Company].

David DeLallo: But even so, Minter reminded me that creating empathic AI systems requires more empathic employees, including the technical professionals who build these systems.

Minter Dial: When you are going to code empathy, you need to go to coders. You need to brief them. The challenge with coders is that they are typically more logically oriented, so you need to think through how you’re going to provide them with the material to create empathic code.

And today we know that so many of the data sets are naturally biased. So you need to think, “Ethically, we want this to be unbiased.” But if you want to write this ethical principle, it turns out that the skill you need to have in order to write the right ethical principles is empathy.

So even though at the end of the day I’m trying to create an empathic AI, first of all, you need to have an ethical construct. But before even having your ethical construct, be self-aware about your own levels of empathy. Do you have on your team enough diversity to represent what your ethics are? And then you’re going to be able to have a better type of data set and coding for your machine. If you want an empathic AI, you better start off with empathy within your organization.

Empathy is something that humans struggle with as well. Creating empathetic AI that is ethical is a massive challenge as Minter Dial points out that studies show that empathy is on the decline in society in general. It’s a fascinating conversation, and I urge you to click through and either listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🧬 A Guide To Genetic Engineering Biotech And How It Works [Derek Iwasiuk, MyBioResource]

An in-depth article on Genetic engineering and its applications in food, animals, and humans. The article not only addresses the physical effects but also how the business aspects such as crop patents could affect us.

Genetic engineering is one of those interesting topics that can be intimidating for those who don’t already know about it. Genetic engineering isn’t just interesting, it’s the future for many biological and medicinal fields, and we can expect to reap the benefits of genetic engineering biotechnology in the coming decades. In this guide to genetic engineering biotech, we’ve explained this field of research in simple terms that everybody should be able to understand.

🦴 New technique grows realistic bone in a dish [Anna Goshua, Scientific American]

Researchers in the Netherlands have discovered a way to create human bones in the lab using organoids. The bone is one of the most challenging organs to recreate. Being able to create it in the lab is a big step towards understanding bone disorders.

Researchers could use this new tool to watch what happens at the molecular level when the building process goes wrong, causing bone disorders that affect tens of millions of people worldwide. One such disorder is osteogenesis imperfecta, or “brittle bone disease,” a genetic condition that weakens the extracellular matrix and can cause hundreds of spontaneous bone fractures over a person's lifetime. Bone cancers such as osteosarcoma also involve dysfunctional bone formation, and this model could explore how cancer cells infiltrate the extracellular matrix and make unwanted new bone.

🤷 Google News thinks I’m the queerest AI journalist on Earth [Tristan Greene, Neural, TNW]

Tristan Greene stumbled upon an interesting observation. Google’s algorithm associates him with queerness and AI. The link above contains the story of how he discovered this behaviour. The excerpt below is from the Neural email newsletter.

Apparently, I'm so queer that if you do a Google News search for "artificial intelligence queer," 30% of what the algorithm spits out was written by me. 

And here's the fun part: most of those stories have nothing to do with 'queer' topics. 

It's a good thing I am queer. You see, the algorithm apparently associates me with queerness because my TNW author profile lists "queer stuff" as one of my beats. 

What if I wasn't queer? Who would I even call to get that fixed? 

And even though I am, it still feels kind of crappy to know the algorithm reduces my existence to "queer, writes about AI." 

Quote of the week

“One of the things the last 10 years in AI and [machine learning] have shown us is that there’s no way to predict the future in any meaningful way, but it’s really unwise to underestimate things.”

—Rodrigo Mira, a PhD candidate at Imperial College London, from the article, “Tech companies are training AI to read your lips” [VICE]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

I hope you enjoy the tweet posted at the end of the “Other interesting articles” section.

Why we should end the data economy

Anytime we use the internet, we are under constant surveillance by corporations as well as governments. Our phones are the biggest snitches. They broadcast our location, measure how fast we are moving, reveal our activities, and track our habits. In most cases, the apps and services that measure this data know more about us than we may know ourselves. And they use this information against us [Carissa Véliz, The Reboot].

Privacy is important because it protects you from the influence of others. The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never know that you were discriminated against. If they know what tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you about politics and manipulate you into voting for their preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on.

It’s a long road to ending the data economy. But you can do your part and protect yourself as much as possible by using privacy-respecting services. I mentioned DuckDuckGo and Startpage in Issue #82 as alternatives to Google Search. There are also privacy-respecting email services such as ProtonMail and Hey. And you can also use messaging services like Signal or iMessage instead of WhatsApp.

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’

Zöe Corbyn interviewed Kate Crawford, who studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Her new book Atlas of AI looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

Here is one question from the interview [Zöe Corbyn, The Guardian]:

What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.

It’s a very informative interview, and I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading it in full. With all her experience, Crawford sees a need to have strong regulation and more rigour and responsibility around AI systems. She is optimistic about the regulations and guidelines for AI proposed in both the EU and Australia.

McDonald's replaces drive-thru human workers with Siri-like AI

McDonald’s is testing a voice-recognition system to process customer orders at its drive-thru [Dan Robitzski, Futurism].

The fast food giant has been testing out a Siri-like voice-recognition system at ten drive-thru locations in Chicago, CEO Chris Kempczinski revealed during a Wednesday investor conference attended by Nation’s Restaurant News. The system can handle about 80 percent of the orders that come its way and fills them with about 85 percent accuracy — probably annoying for the customers who just want to drive off with their burger — but Kempczinski says a national rollout could happen in as soon as five years.

This part made me smile.

Part of the challenge in automating the drive-thru, Kempczinski said, is that human workers have been too eager to help out while supervising the technology that might one day replace them, preventing it from accruing the real-world data crucial for further improving the system.

It seems like McDonald’s employees are doing their best to preserve their job security 😄.

Other interesting articles from around the web

👞 "Seeing-eye shoes" for the blind to be enhanced with onboard cameras [Ben Coxworth, New Atlas]

Austrian startup Tec-Innovation, in collaboration with the Graz University of Technology, has created the InnoMake shoe which uses ultrasound sensors to warn blind users of obstacles in their path. A proximity sensing module on the toe of each shoe emits ultrasound pulses, then receives the echoes of those pulses off of objects lying ahead.

In this way, it can detect potential obstacles located up to 4 meters (13 ft) in front of the user. That person is warned via a haptic feedback system that causes the shoe to buzz their foot, along with an audible alert sounded on a Bluetooth-linked smartphone.

They are now working on a shoe outfitted with a camera-based AI image recognition system that can learn constantly and provide more specific information.

📱 TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’ [Sarah Perez, TechCrunch]

A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained.

TikTok says they will ask for consent where required by law, but only Illinois, Washington, California, Texas and New York have biometric privacy laws. The wording in their privacy policy means that technically they may not ask for permission in other states.

The Hacker News reports these changes may be a result of a lawsuit agreement. In February 2021, TikTok paid $92 Million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging the app violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by capturing biometric data of users without meeting the consent requirements of the state law.

👨🏽‍💼 Artificial Intelligence is taking over job hiring, but can it be racist? [Thomas Reuters Foundation, Deccan Herald]

Many companies are using AI to review job applicants. The AI filter is often the first step, and a machine rejects most applicants without being reviewed by a human.

"It feels like shooting in the dark while being blindfolded - there's just no way for me to tell my full story when a machine is assessing me," Carballo, who hoped to get work experience at a law firm before applying to law school, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

[…]

"I worry these algorithms aren't designed by people like me, and they aren't designed to pick people like me," he said, adding that he has undergone a plethora of different AI assessments - from video analytics to custom logic games.

AI hiring systems are notorious for bias, with some associating white names are being more qualified and others disqualifying applicants outright if they attended a women’s college.

🔎 Do you ever feel sorry for machine learning algorithms? [Jordan Hall, @DivineOmega]

Since most of the stories in this issue were not very positive, here is a tweet that made me laugh. I hope it lightens the mood, and you enjoy it too :)

Quote of the week

Companies that accumulate data about you can also end up determining what counts as knowledge about you. They get to categorize and define you, and then treat you accordingly.

—Carissa Véliz, associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, from the article, “Why we should end the data economy” [The Reboot]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj

Article #2 and #3 below don’t paint a rosy picture. As humans, it seems we are putting too much trust in AI, and business leaders are disinterested in ensuring that the systems they use are ethical and responsible.

Robot paramedic carries out CPR in ambulance in UK first

When humans administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), they get fatigued relatively quickly, affecting the quality of CPR they can deliver. LUCAS 3 is a mechanical system that can administer high-quality CPR consistently without a break. South Central Ambulance Service, an NHS ambulance service in the UK for four counties, is the first to take LUCAS 3 onboard its vehicles [E&T Editorial staff, The Institution of Engineering and Technology].

The system uses wireless Bluetooth connectivity, allowing it to configure the compression rate, depth, and alerts specific to an organisation’s resuscitation guidelines. Paramedics can also collect and review data post-event and share this information with other clinicians, its developers said.

Dr John Black, medical director at SCAS, said: “We know that delivering high quality and uninterrupted chest compressions in cardiac arrest is one of the major determinants of survival to hospital discharge, but it can be very challenging for several reasons.

“People can become fatigued when performing CPR manually which then affects the rate and quality of compressions, and patients may need to be moved from difficult locations, such as down a narrow flight of stairs, or remote places, which impedes the process.”

The NHS already uses LUCAS in emergency departments and ICUs. If more paramedics can use LUCAS in their ambulances, it should dramatically increase rates of survival.

Report finds startling disinterest in ethical, responsible use of AI among business leaders

In some alarming news, a report from FICO and Corinium finds that companies are deploying AI throughout their businesses with little concern or regard for potential problems and their ethical implications [Jonathan Greig, ZDNet]. 

There have been hundreds of examples over the last decade of the many disastrous ways AI has been used by companies, from facial recognition systems unable to discern darker skinned faces to healthcare apps that discriminate against African American patients to recidivism calculators used by courts that skew against certain races. 

Despite these examples, FICO's State of Responsible AI report shows business leaders are putting little effort into ensuring that the AI systems they use are both fair and safe for widespread use. 

The survey, conducted in February and March, features the insights of 100 AI-focused leaders from the financial services sector, with 20 executives hailing from the US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific regions. 

Out of the executives surveyed:

70% were unable to explain how the AI made predictions.

78% said that they were not adequately equipped to ensure the ethical implications of new AI systems.

80% said they had difficulty convincing other executives to consider and prioritise ethical AI usage practices.

65% said their processes were ineffective in ensuring regulatory compliance of AI projects.

77% agreed that AutoML technology could be misused.

It’s disheartening to see that business executives are so nonchalant about the use of AI within their organisations. Especially when so many AI systems continue to have high levels of bias.

It is also a complex problem to solve. AI systems continue to deploy globally at a rapid pace, while citizens of each country are dependent on their respective governments to bring in some regulation to ensure ethical uses of AI. Governments are reacting much slower than the speed at which AI use is increasing worldwide, affecting all aspects of our lives.

AI-powered drone deployed in Libya has possibly killed people without any human interference

Speaking of unethical uses of AI, a UN Panel of Experts on Libya has published a report in which they say a “lethal autonomous weapon” was used for hunting targets without any human intervention [Tefo Mohapi, iAFrikan].

It has been revealed that an Artificial Intelligence-powered military drone was able to identify and attack human targets in Libya. The drone, Kargu-2, is made by a Turkish company (STM) and fitted with a payload that explodes once it makes an impact or is in close proximity with its AI-identified target.

It is not clear whether the attacks resulted in any deaths.

The revelations were made in a report published in March 2021 by the United Nations (UN) Panel of Experts on Libya which stated that the drone was a “lethal autonomous weapon” which had “hunted down and remotely engaged” soldiers which are believed to have been loyal to Libya’s General Khalifa Haftar.

This is a dangerous turn of events if militaries are now deploying completely autonomous weapons with no human control. Every week it seems that more and more science fiction becomes a reality.

AI still hasn’t proven reliable to a level that it can be deployed to work autonomously in weaponry. Not to mention the problems of bias that most algorithms typically harbour.

Other interesting articles from around the web

⏳ Virtual reality warps your sense of time [Allison Arteaga Soergel, UC Santa Cruz]

When time goes faster than you think, it’s known as “time compression.” A study at the UC Santa Cruz found that when participants played in virtual reality, they played for an average of 28.5% more time when estimating a playtime of five minutes compared to traditional formats of playing.

“I stopped playing the game, and I realized that I had no idea how much time had passed,” he recalled. “I was supposed to be taking turns with other people, and I was worried that I had played for too long because I couldn't even guess if it had been 10 minutes or 40 minutes.”

🎨 Bacteria get a fresh gig as art restorers in Italy [Mary Beth Griggs, The Verge]

Bacteria have a generally bad reputation because we always associate bacteria with infection. However, there are lots of good and useful bacteria. Now, humans are getting the help of bacteria to restore centuries-old art to pristine condition.

The team selected specialized strains of bacteria to target different stains on the marble. Some types of bacteria can thrive in harsh environments and are adapted to eating things that can cause humans problems. These bacteria can break down things like pollutants into relatively harmless components.

In this case, the team looked for bacterial strains that would eat away at the stains and other gunk, without harming the marble itself, and tested their top choices on an unobtrusive patch of marble behind an altar in the chapel. They found a few types that would work, and used gel to spread them across the statues. The different strains of bacteria ate away at residues, glue, and even the stains from an improperly disposed-of corpse that was dumped in one of the tombs in 1537.

More examples of how Italy is using bacteria in other places at the link. It’s time to stop being anti-bacteria 😄.

🚚 A self-driving truck got a shipment cross-country 10 hours faster than a human driver [Vanessa Bates Ramirez, Singularity Hub]

A heavy-duty self-driving truck drove autonomously 80% of the way from Arizona to Oklahoma, completing the journey in 14 hours and 6 minutes [Vanessa Bates Ramirez, Singularity Hub]. Humans usually take 24 hours and 6 minutes for the same route. The watermelons that the truck was transporting arrived in better shape too.

The reason the watermelons were in better shape was because they were a day fresher. This is one angle TuSimple is hoping will boost its business. “We believe the food industry is one of many that will greatly benefit from the use of TuSimple’s autonomous trucking technology,” said Jim Mullen, the company’s chief administrative officer. “Given the fact that autonomous trucks can operate nearly continuously without taking a break means fresh produce can be moved from origin to destination faster, resulting in fresher food and less waste.”

TuSimple aims to have fully autonomous trucks (no safety drivers required onboard) by the end of 2024.

Quote of the week

“Many don't understand that your model is not ethical unless it's demonstrated to be ethical in production. It's not enough to say that I built the model ethically and then I wash my hands of it. What we're missing today is honest and straight talk about which algorithms are more responsible and safe.”

—FICO CAO Scott Zoldi, from the article, “Report finds startling disinterest in ethical, responsible use of AI among business leaders” [ZDNet]

I wish you a brilliant week ahead :)

Neeraj

I’ve been trying to wean myself off of Google for a while now. I mostly use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, both privacy-focused search engines. They work well for the majority of queries. I still have to go back to Google once in a while, but only when I can’t find a suitable answer.

I was glad to find out that DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 and showing the world that you don’t need to hoard data, invade privacy, and track people across the internet to make money. More in the first article linked below.

Tech companies don't need to be creepy to make money

DuckDuckGo launched in 2008 as a privacy-focused search engine and have been making a profit since 2014 [Clive Thompson, WIRED].

Last year, the company’s traffic more than doubled. It has done this with no creepy surveillance: All it does is use whatever keywords you type in the search bar—“best inkjet printer,” “Boston hotels”—to customize an ad for that search. This is known as “contextual” targeting, distinct from the secret-police “behavioral” tracking that fuels advertising on many tech platforms and creates a mammoth dossier of your online activity. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even retain your search info. Every time you load the search engine, you’re a stranger.

“We questioned the assumption: Do you really need to track people to make money in advertising? And our answer is no,” Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, tells me. Part of the company’s success, he notes, is that a significant chunk of people want more privacy. A Pew Research Center study found that 81 percent of Americans think the downsides of data tracking outweigh the benefits.

Google explains their data harvesting, and behavioural tracking helps them serve more relevant ads to you, allowing advertisers to get more value for their ad spend and provide you with things you’re more likely to want or need. But a survey by Digiday found that 45% of ad executives found no significant benefit from behavioural tracking, and on the contrary, 23% found that revenues declined.

The Long Arc of Time

A beautiful blog by Om Malik, marvelling at how far we’ve come and how much we’ve advanced in a relatively short span of a little over a hundred years [Om Malik, OM].

So much of human progress takes place in increments, and the most meaningful strides rarely get much attention. In roughly the same length of time that we have gone from flying gliders to flying solar-powered copters on Mars, the average human life span has doubled — and we have hardly noticed as it was happening.

[…]

Yet, even as our progress accelerates, appreciating it becomes increasingly difficult. We live in a world increasingly informed by memes, stories, and fables. Misinformation and distrust of science are the order of the day. For their own selfish and short-term needs, our leaders willfully sow doubt in what has served us so well — science and its offshoot, technology. For example, the technology behind the vaccines created to fight the dreaded coronavirus has been nearly three decades in the making. And now it could help find solutions for many other diseases. And yet, in the media, this incredible achievement is as much a flashpoint of controversy as a source of celebration. 

After reading this blog, I thought about it and realised how much progress has accelerated in the last century. Om is right. We live in a world of short dopamine bursts, and we rarely look back and realise how far we’ve really come.

At the same time, it’s crucial to stay vigilant in the present to continue to progress in the next 100 years and not get distracted by nonsense.

A blind man can perceive objects after a gene from algae was added to his eye

A 58-year-old blind man was given optogenetic therapy that involved introducing a gene from algae into his retina to provide him with partial sight again [Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review].

The doctors employed gene therapy to add a light-sensing molecule to one of the man’s eyes. The gene they added, called chrimson, comes from a single-celled algae species that is able to sense sunlight and move toward it.

The idea of adding the gene, says Roska, is to engineer retina cells called ganglions so they are able to respond to light, sending visual signals to the brain.

The strategy, being funded by a French company called GenSight Biologics, requires patients to wear a set of electronic goggles that capture light contrasts in the environment and then project an image onto the retina at high intensity using the specific wavelength of yellow-orange light that triggers the chrimson molecule.

Although his sight was only restored to the point where he could differentiate between intensities of light, with training, he was able to recognise when a notebook was placed on a table in front of him. Hopefully, as the treatment matures, the levels of improvement in eyesight will also increase.

Other interesting articles from around the web

🕶 Will virtual reality be the death of truth? [Jonny Thomson, The Big Think]

An interesting thought experiment from 1970 posed the following question:

The year is 2045, and an eccentric billionaire has revealed to the world an incredible new invention. It's called the "experience machine," and it's an utterly immersive virtual reality device. It provides multi-sensory stimulation with such sophistication and depth that it's effectively indistinguishable from real life. At a press of a button, the machine can give you constant pleasure of any kind. Mansions, fast cars, scoring a Super Bowl touchdown, winning the London marathon, ruling the Mughal Empire, never-ending orgasms — whatever you want.

The question is, if you had only two choices, would you live life in the experience machine or in the world as it is?

With VR technology advancing rapidly, this is a valid question to ponder over. This type of technology or something very close will likely exist by 2045.

What would you choose?

🤖 AI can write disinformation now—and dupe human readers [Will Knight, WIRED]

GPT-3 is an AI algorithm created by OpenAI that is capable of generating intelligible and comprehensible text. Georgetown researchers used GPT-3 to write misleading tweets about climate change and foreign affairs. People found the posts persuasive.

In experiments, the researchers found that GPT-3’s writing could sway readers’ opinions on issues of international diplomacy. The researchers showed volunteers sample tweets written by GPT-3 about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and US sanctions on China. In both cases, they found that participants were swayed by the messages. After seeing posts opposing China sanctions, for instance, the percentage of respondents who said they were against such a policy doubled.

GPT-3 is only capable of generating believable text the size of a tweet, but as its creators improve it, it will soon be capable of writing entirely persuasive articles.

😷 People are uncomfortable with digital health tools used to control COVID-19 [Nicole Wetsman, The Verge]

David Grande, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, along with his team, surveyed 3,547 adults in the US to gauge their attitudes towards the use of digital information to respond to the pandemic. Mostly, it showed that people were uncomfortable sharing their health data.

In general, people tend to be worried when they start hearing about the collection and use of health data, Grande says. Their personal digital data might already be collected by companies and used for things like advertising, but it might not be as apparent — and they’re not asked direct questions about it. People also don’t realize that virtually all of the data collected by companies can be analyzed to infer things about health, like their mood or behavior.

“I suspect that if we ask people direct questions about many commercial uses of their data that are currently taking place, we would see much greater resistance to those,” Grande says. “It’s just that many of those other uses aren’t so visible to consumers.”

Quote of the week

“Two hundred years ago, we were lucky if we could find a horse to ride — and now we are flying copters on the Red Planet. Imagine where we could be in another 100 years, especially if we don’t stand in our own way or allow ourselves to be distracted by nonsense. You have to believe that tomorrow can and will be better than today.” 

—Om Malik, from the article, “The Long Arc of Time” [om.co]

I wish you a brilliant day ahead :)

Neeraj