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Are Friends Electric? Three books examine our complex and often fraught relationship with #robots, #AI, and #automation. “This discrepancy between the relative ease of teaching a machine abstract thinking and the difficulty of teaching it basic sensory, social, and motor skills is what’s known as Moravec’s paradox. Named after an observation the roboticist Hans Moravec made back in the late 1980s, the paradox states that what’s hard for humans (math, logic, scientific reasoning) is easy for machines, and what’s hard for machines (tying shoelaces, reading emotions, having a conversation) is easy for humans. […] Ultimately, Casilli is less concerned that robots will replace white-collar workers, and more worried that thousands of lower-paid or unpaid digital workers will. As he points out, we are already unwittingly being recruited by companies to collectively perform millions of hours of free work every year. Take the aforementioned captchas: Google, which owns and deploys one of the most popular versions of the service (ReCAPTCHA and No CAPTCHA), has been using this digital labor for more than a decade. The results help detect house numbers to improve Google Street View, digitize texts for Google Books, and train its computer vision algorithms to detect locations and reconstruct scenes, enhancing Google Images and improving the performance of Waymo’s self-driving cars. “The irony here is that a service that is supposed to distinguish humans from robots is actually making humans work to produce more robots,” Casilli writes. While all the hype and hyperbole surrounding today’s AI tools can feel unprecedented, Casilli reminds readers that such rhetoric isn’t really new at all. Robots, automation, and various intelligent systems have been just on the verge of taking over all aspects of our work lives and cultural output for decades now. In the end, artificial intelligence is a technological process that isn’t actually artificial, he says. Peer behind the curtains of smooth and seamless efficiency, and it’s humans all the way down.” By Bryan Gardiner https://lnkd.in/dK_umESk #research #ArtificialIntelligence #LLMs #chatbots #socialmedia #socialscience #computerscience #technology #economy #justice #equality #health #democracy #humanity

Microsoft Says It Has Created a New State of Matter to Power Quantum Computers Microsoft’s new “topological qubit” is not based on a solid, liquid or gas. It is another phase of matter that many experts did not think was possible. “Anyone who has sat through a third-grade science class knows there are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Microsoft now says it has created a new state of matter in its quest to make a powerful machine, called a quantum computer, that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines to artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Microsoft’s scientists said they had built what is known as a “topological qubit” based on this new phase of physical existence, which could be harnessed to solve mathematical, scientific and technological problems.” By Cade Metz https://lnkd.in/erg_5n3v #research #physics #technology #quantum #computing

Nokia Is Putting the First Cellular Network on the Moon The radiation-hardened technology will get its first test in an upcoming mission to the lunar south pole. “Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice, and to put a communications satellite on lunar orbit. But the mission will also bring something that’s never been installed on the moon or anywhere else in space before—a fully functional 4G cellular network. […] To legally deploy the 4G network on the moon, Nokia received a waiver specifically for the IM-2 mission. “For permanent deployment we’ll have to pick a different frequency band,” Klein says. “We already have a list of candidate frequencies to consider.” Even with the frequency shift, Klein says Nokia’s lunar network technology will remain compatible with terrestrial 4G or 5G standards. And that means that if you happened to bring your smartphone to the moon, and it somehow survived both the trip and the brutal lunar conditions, it should work on the moon just like it does here on Earth. “It would connect if we put your phone on the list of approved devices”, Klein explains. All you’d need is a lunar SIM card.” By Jacek Krywko https://lnkd.in/eP5Mai6t #research #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #climate #climatechange #socialmedia #socialscience #computerscience #technology #economy #justice #equality #health #democracy #humanity

MIT Technology Review: The #AI Relationship Revolution Is Already Here #Chatbots are rapidly changing how we connect to each other—and ourselves. We’re never going back. “AI is everywhere, and it’s starting to alter our relationships in new and unexpected ways—relationships with our spouses, kids, colleagues, friends, and even ourselves. Although the technology remains unpredictable and sometimes baffling, individuals from all across the world and from all walks of life are finding it useful, supportive, and comforting, too. People are using large language models to seek validation, mediate marital arguments, and help navigate interactions with their community. They’re using it for support in parenting, for self-care, and even to fall in love. In the coming decades, many more humans will join them. And this is only the beginning. What happens next is up to us. […] The mother partnering with AI to help put her son to sleep, Alina, 34, female, France: “I don’t think using AI will be optional in our future lives. I think it’ll be widely adopted across all societies and companies, and because the internet is already part of my children’s culture, I can’t avoid them becoming exposed to AI. But I’ll explain to them that like other kinds of technologies, it’s a tool that can be used in both good and bad ways. You need to educate and explain what the harms can be. And however useful it is, I’ll try to teach them that there is nothing better than true human connection, and you can’t replace it with AI.”” By Rhiannon Williams https://lnkd.in/e_4J9SM4 #research #health #ArtificialIntelligence #socialmedia #socialscience #computerscience #technology #economy #justice #equality #democracy #humanity

The Wild and Contentious History of Mathematical Symbols A mathematician has uncovered the stories behind the symbols used in math. “It’s important to understand that mathematics is a historical process, just like any social science or politics. Mathematics didn’t arise complete and finished through the work of just one mathematician; it has a cultural history that spans many years. For centuries, we’ve been looking at the sky or computing. In school, they teach addition and multiplication but rarely explain the origins or history of the symbols. This vast history is untold, but the excitement of doing mathematics comes from this knowledge that you are building on a framework developed by fascinating people over thousands of years.” By Max Springer, Edited by Clara Moskowitz https://lnkd.in/ensQaVx4 #history #computerscience #socialscience #mathematics #language #AI #LLMs #technology #humanity

The US #Economy Is Racing Ahead. Almost Everything Else Is Falling Behind. The gap between Americans’ prosperity and quality of life has grown since the 1990s. “Perhaps the most common theme that the researchers mentioned involves social #isolation. […] “If there is one overarching theme, it’s that we’re pulling apart — economically, socially and politically,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economist who came up with the idea for the report card. Frederick Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said that he thought the disconnect between G.D.P. and other outcomes was related to “the weakening bonds of community and the degree to which Americans feel less rooted in close-knit bonds of faith and family.” […] …the United States is such an unequal country that averages often misrepresent the typical person’s experience. “The strong economic performance has principally provided gains for the wealthiest 10 percent,” Joseph Romm of the University of Pennsylvania said.” By David Leonhardt, Graphics by Ashley Wu https://lnkd.in/gnpKXNcF #research #health #AI #socialmedia #technology #economy #justice #equality #democracy #humanity

How Multitasking Drains Your Brain Renowned neurologist Richard Cytowic exposes the dangers of multitasking in the digital age. “We do use 100 percent of our brain, just not all of it at the same instant. […] Keeping ourselves alert and conscious, along with shifting, focusing, and sustaining attention, are the most energy-intensive things our brain can do. The high energy cost of cortical activity is why selective attention — focusing on one thing at a time — exists in the first place and why multitasking is an unaffordable fool’s errand.” By Richard Cytowic https://lnkd.in/g2kxbUnR #research #neuroscience #productivity #AI #socialmedia #technology #economy #health

MIT Technology Review: How DeepSeek Ripped Up the #AI Playbook—and Why Everyone’s Going to Follow Its Lead The Chinese firm has pulled back the curtain to expose how the top labs may be building their next-generation models. Now things get interesting. “When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shock waves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1 match the best of the homegrown competition, it was built for a fraction of the cost—and given away for free. […] DeepSeek has suddenly become the company to beat. What exactly did it do to rattle the tech world so fully? Is the hype justified? And what can we learn from the buzz about what’s coming next? Here’s what you need to know. […] DeepSeek has suddenly become the company to beat. What exactly did it do to rattle the tech world so fully? Is the hype justified? And what can we learn from the buzz about what’s coming next? Here’s what you need to know. […] it’s an open secret that top firms like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic may already be using their own versions of DeepSeek’s approach to train their new generation of models. “I’m sure they’re doing almost the exact same thing, but they’ll have their own flavor of it,” says Zeiler. […] What’s different about R1 is that DeepSeek published how they did it. “And it turns out that it’s not that expensive a process,” says Zeiler. “The hard part is getting that pretrained model in the first place.” As Karpathy revealed at Microsoft Build last year, pretraining a model represents 99% of the work and most of the cost.  If building reasoning models is not as hard as people thought, we can expect a proliferation of free models that are far more capable than we’ve yet seen. With the know-how out in the open, Friedman thinks, there will be more collaboration between small companies, blunting the edge that the biggest companies have enjoyed. “I think this could be a monumental moment,” he says.” By Will Douglas Heaven https://lnkd.in/eM6h4fGZ #ArtificialIntelligence #chatbots #LLMs #robotics #intellectualproperty #art #artists #journalists #journalism #writers #businessmodel #regulations #technology #productivity #labor #economy #health #democracy #humanity

#OpenAI Claims #DeepSeek Plagiarized Its Plagiarism Machine The US #AI Czar said that DeepSeek 'sucked out the knowledge' of #ChatGPT. “OpenAI and Microsoft are big mad that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has stolen their market share and, possibly, portions of their code. It’s a deeply funny claim from the company that made ChatGPT, a program it once admitted couldn’t exist without free access to all the copyrighted data in the world. […] DeepSeek dethroning ChatGPT on Apple’s AppStore coincided with hundreds of billions of dollars in market value around AI companies being wiped out from the stock market earlier this week. NVIDIA, which manufactures the chips used to train the chatbots, lost more than $500 billion. […] As of this writing, DeepSeek is still number one on the App Store.” By Matthew Gault https://lnkd.in/dZBqPRPm #ArtificialIntelligence #chatbots #robotics #intellectualproperty #art #artists #journalists #journalism #writers #businessmodel #regulations #technology #productivity #labor #economy #health #democracy #humanity

MIT Technology Review: This Quantum Computer Built on Server Racks Paves the Way to Bigger Machines A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a photon-based quantum computer it says should easily scale up. “A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. In practice, this means combining and recombining laser beams on multiple chips using lenses, fibers, and other optics according to an algorithm. Xanadu’s computer is designed in such a way that the answer to an algorithm it executes corresponds to the final number of photons in each laser beam. This approach differs from one used by Google and IBM, which involves encoding information in properties of superconducting circuits. Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller and wider than the average human. To make a useful quantum computer, “you copy and paste a thousand of these things and network them together,” says Christian Weedbrook, the CEO and founder of the company. Ultimately, Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers. This contrasts with the industry’s earlier conception of a specialized chip within a supercomputer, much like a GPU.” By Sophia Chen https://lnkd.in/g467ftCT #research #QuantumComputing #technology #startups #computerscience