Project Debater argued both for and against the benefits of artificial intelligence
An artificial intelligence has debated the dangers of AI – narrowly convincing audience members that the technology will do more good than harm.
Project Debater, a robot developed by IBM, spoke on both sides of the argument, with two human teammates for each side helping it out. Talking in a female American voice to a crowd at the University of Cambridge Union on Thursday evening, the AI gave each side’s opening statements, using arguments drawn from more than 1100 human submissions made ahead of time.
It may be little more than grains of weathered rock, and can be found in deserts and on beaches around the world, but sand is also the world’s second most consumed natural resource.
A South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June.
Though separated by thousands of miles, these killings share an unlikely cause. They are some of the latest casualties in a growing wave of violence sparked by the struggle for one of the 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, commodities: ordinary sand.
Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand.
Two decades ago, total government debt was estimated to sit at $20 trillion.
Since then, according to the latest figures by the IMF, the number has ballooned to $69.3 trillion with a debt to GDP ratio of 82% — the highest totals in human history.
Which countries owe the most money, and how do these figures compare?
A protester holds an Amazon box made into a sad face as part of a protest against the company’s cloud services contracts with Palantir, which supports ICE.
Election interference and government surveillance on social media are hurting internet freedoms.
Amazon has been under fire from protesters lately for assisting surveillance technology company Palantir — and, by extension, ICE — as well as for its own surveillance products like Ring.
Free speech and privacy on the internet declined globally for the ninth consecutive year according to the Freedom on the Net 2019 report by bipartisan watchdog and think tank Freedom House.
The report’s authors cite two main reasons for the decline: increased online election interference — by government and civilian actors alike — and increased government surveillance, both of which are spreading on social media platforms. These are topics that continue to dominate the news cycle, whether it’s Facebook’s ad policy that allows politicians to spread lies or Amazon’s growing relationships with police departments that use its Ring smart doorbells and associated social media products to surveil communities. Freedom House recommends increased transparency and oversight of these platforms in order to stop the situation from getting worse.
Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game
The US criminal legal system uses predictive algorithms to try to make the judicial process less biased. But there’s a deeper problem .
As a child, you develop a sense of what “fairness” means. It’s a concept that you learn early on as you come to terms with the world around you. Something either feels fair or it doesn’t.
But increasingly, algorithms have begun to arbitrate fairness for us. They decide who sees housing ads, who gets hired or fired, and even who gets sent to jail. Consequently, the people who create them—software engineers—are being asked to articulate what it means to be fair in their code. This is why regulators around the world are now grappling with a question: How can you mathematically quantify fairness?
This story attempts to offer an answer. And to do so, we need your help. We’re going to walk through a real algorithm, one used to decide who gets sent to jail, and ask you to tweak its various parameters to make its outcomes more fair. (Don’t worry—this won’t involve looking at code!)
Disinformation campaigns used to consist of trolls and bots orchestrated and manipulated to produce a desired result. Increasingly, though, these campaigns are able to find willing human participants to amplify their messages and even generate new ones on their own.
The big picture: It’s as if they’re switching from employees to volunteers — and from participants who are in on the game to those who actually believe the disinformational payload they’re delivering.
Why it matters: Understanding this changing nature is critical to preparing for the next generation of information threats, including those facing the 2020 presidential campaign.
Speaking at Stanford University Tuesday, researcher Kate Starbird — a University of Washington professor who runs a lab that studies mass participation — traced the change across the stories of three different campaigns.
For many people, when we were starting out in our careers, earning a six-figure salary was the ultimate goal. If you made $100,000 or more, you were considered relatively successful. The compensation would afford you the opportunity to fulfill the American dream—owning a home with a white picket fence in a lovely neighborhood with good schools for when you have children. Fast-forward to today and that has all changed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there is a growing trend of $100k-earning professionals electing to rent instead of purchasing homes. Almost 20% of households earning $100k or more are bucking historical norms and renting apartments. A $100k income is still considered a comfortable living, dependent upon the city. To put things into perspective, the median U.S. household income, according to the Census Bureau, was $63,179 in 2018.
Here’s why this trend is an issue. The reasons for renting—compared to buying a home—are complex. Due to exceedingly high student-loan debt, burdensome personal expenses (such as insurance and health care costs), leased cars, credit card debt, smartphones, utility bills and other expenses have made it difficult for potential buyers to save enough for the down payment on a home.
Abqaiq has the world’s largest oil processing plant
When a mixed formation of cruise missiles and small drone aircraft rained explosive charges on the Saudi Arabian state oil group Aramco sites at Abqaiq and Khurais on 14 September they halved national oil output, cutting 5.7 million barrels of crude per day from the company’s production.
But they did more than economic damage. This attack has had a huge impact on how nations think about protecting their airspace.
Companies are now developing and deploying sophisticated new defences, from frying the electronic circuits with powerful beams of microwave radiation, to precise jamming systems.
While both the United States and Saudi Arabia have blamed Iran for the Abqaiq attack, it’s still not clear who was behind it.
But it would be a mistake to confuse the use of drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in this attack with other incidents where off-the-shelf drones have disrupted airports, football matches or political rallies, says Douglas Barrie, an air power fellow at think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society.
Just under a century ago, the Soviet Union embarked on one of the strangest attempts to reshape the common calendar that has ever been undertaken. As Joseph Stalin raced to turn an agricultural backwater into an industrialized nation, his government downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished.
In place of the weekend, a new system of respite was introduced in 1929. The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group. The staggered schedule was known as nepreryvka, or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped.
The tech industry is producing a rising din. Our bodies can’t adapt.
Karthic thallikar first noticed the noise sometime in late 2014, back when he still enjoyed taking walks around his neighborhood.
He’d been living with his wife and two kids in the Brittany Heights subdivision in Chandler, Arizona, for two years by then, in a taupe two-story house that Thallikar had fallen in love with on his first visit. The double-height ceilings made it seem airy and expansive; there was a playground around the corner; and the neighbors were friendly, educated people who worked in auto finance or at Intel or at the local high school. Thallikar loved that he could stand in the driveway, look out past a hayfield and the desert scrub of Gila River Indian land, and see the jagged pink outlines of the Estrella Mountains. Until recently, the area around Brittany Heights had been mostly farmland, and there remained a patchwork of alfalfa fields alongside open ranges scruffy with mesquite and coyotes.
In the evenings, after work, Thallikar liked to decompress by taking long walks around Brittany Heights, following Musket Way to Carriage Lane to Marlin Drive almost as far as the San Palacio and Clemente Ranch housing developments. It was during one of these strolls that Thallikar first became aware of a low, monotone hum, like a blender whirring somewhere in the distance. It was irritating, but he wrote it off. Someone’s pool pump, probably. On another walk a few days later, he heard it again. A carpet-cleaning machine? he wondered. A few nights later, there it was again. It sounded a bit like warped music from some far-off party, but there was no thump or rhythm to the sound. Just one single, persistent note: EHHNNNNNNNN. Evening after evening, he realized, the sound was there—every night, on every street. The whine became a constant, annoying soundtrack to his walks.
A fierce battle over the regulation of the internet was riddled with millions of fake comments in the most prolific known instance of political impersonation in US history.
Sarah Reeves sat on her couch in Eugene, Oregon, staring at her laptop screen in furious disbelief. She was reading the website of a government agency, where her mother appeared to have posted a comment weighing in on a bitter policy battle for control of the internet. Something was very wrong.
For a start, Annie Reeves, who loved to lead children’s sing-alongs at the Alaska Zoo, had never followed wonky policy debates. She barely knew her way around the web, let alone held strident views on how it should be regulated — and, according to her daughter, she definitely didn’t post angry comments on government websites.
But Sarah Reeves had a more conclusive reason to feel sure her mother’s name had been taken in vain: Annie Reeves was dead. She died more than a year before the comment was posted.
Why it makes sense to fight deepfakes with deepfakes.
Deepfakes are becoming so convincing that it’s hard to tell them from real videos. And that could soon spell disaster, eroding trust in what we see online.
That’s why Facebook is teaming up with a consortium of researchers from Microsoft and several prominent research universities for a “Deepfake Detection Challenge.”
The idea is to build a data set, with the help of human user input, that’ll help neural networks detect what is and isn’t a deepfake. The end result, if all goes well, will be a system that can reliably fake videos online.
