Also: Mental health discourse on social media is not helpful
This is today’s edition of The Download, our daily newsletter that provides a dose of what’s happening in the tech world.
Who will save us from AI?
It’s about time. That’s the reaction of AI policy and ethics officials to last week’s announcement that the White House science and generation consultancy had unveiled an AI Bill of Rights. The document is Biden’s vision for how the U. S. government is going to do so. to hold the AI industry accountable.
This is a wonderful initiative, and one that is long overdue. So far, the U. S. has not been able to do so. The U. S. has been one of the only Western countries without transparent rules on how to protect its citizens from the evils of AI, covering everything from wrongful arrests, suicides, and entire cohorts of school-age children unfairly flagged through an algorithm, and that’s just for starters.
But that’s not all smart news. AI’s Bill of Rights overlooks some significant spaces of harm, such as law enforcement and employee surveillance. And unlike the U. S. Bill of Rights,In the U. S. , the AI Bill of Rights is more of enthusiastic advice than binding law, which worries experts is rarely very smart enough to hold errant tech corporations accountable. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkila
This story is from The Algorithm, MIT Technology Review’s new weekly newsletter covering all the latest advances in AI. Sign up to have it delivered to your inbox every Monday.
Learn more about our AI stories:
The EU needs to make corporations guilty of destructive AI. A new bill will allow consumers to sue corporations for damages, if they may turn out that a company’s AI has harmed them. Read the full story.
How DeepMind believes it can make chatbots more secure. The lab trained a chatbot to report human feedback and search the web for data to offer misleading answers. Read the full story.
What does GPT-3 “know” about me? Great language models are trained on treasures of non-public knowledge retrieved from the Internet. But what does He know about us? Read the full story. Google’s new AI can listen to a snippet of a song and then continue playing it. The technique, called AudioLM, generates natural sounds without the need for human annotations. Read the full story.
The essential
I scoured the web to find the funniest/important/scariest/fascinating stories about technology. spread beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (New Scientist $)+ More than 26,000 people in the United States have contracted monkeypox this year. (WP$) 2 Women smuggle abortion pills into the United States from Mexico. They threaten prison time and heavy fines to help end pregnancies in post-Roe states. (New Yorker $)+ Where to find abortion pills and how to use them. (MIT Technology Review)3 Why the Discourse About Intellectual Aptitude on Social Media Is So Insufferable While web diagnostics is helpful to some, others have leaned too far toward self-pathologizing. (Vox)4 Iranian celebrities galvanize online protesters Warnings from the country’s security officials have fallen on deaf ears. (FT$)5 Bitcoin Mining Hits All-Time HighsYou can thank The Merge. ($Bloomberg) + Crypto mining is especially hot in Africa right now. (CoinDesk) + The couple mistakenly refunded $10. 5 million through crypto. com is in court. (The Guardian)6 WhatsApp spam is out of control in India. Users are constantly blocking a stream of spam. (Rest of the world)+ People who use humor to troll their spam. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Black holes may help us understand how the universe began If a new theory of quantum gravity will pay dividends, of course. (NYT $)+ This is the first symbol of the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. (MIT Technology Review)8 We need to pay attention to flood myths Geo-legfinish teach us how our ancestors controlled the weather. (The Atlantic $)+ Pakistan’s flood survivors try to rebuild. (New Yorker $)+ Deadly spores can spread to new spaces through wildfire smoke. (Wired$)9 The surprisingly controversial story of microprocessor inventor Ted Hoff did not patent the invention, a decision he has come to regret. (IEEE Spectrum)10 Jellyfish can be tasty There are also a lot of them. But good luck convincing other people to eat them. (Hakai Magazine)+ An algae-based battery may pave the way for greener energy storage. (New Scientist $)
New York University professor Stephen Gillers explains to the Wall Street Journal why literary enthusiasts are so involved in Elon Musk and Twitter’s legal fight.
The history
An Elegy for Money: Technology We May Never Replace
January 2020
Think about the last time you used money. How much did you spend?What did you buy and from whom?Was it a unique thing or something you bought regularly?Was it legal?
If you keep it all to yourself, you’re in luck. The user in the store (or around the corner) can’t forget your face, but until you reveal any identifying information, nothing connects you to the transaction. .
We do not take this freedom for granted. Much of our business is now done online. It relies on banks and fintech corporations acting as intermediaries. And while banknotes and coins remain popular in many countries, in others they are becoming obsolete. Read the full story.
—Mike Orcutt
A position of comfort, laughter and distraction in those times. (Do you have any ideas? Write me or tweet me).
The countdown to Halloween has officially begun. A moment of thanks for Alan “Nasty” Nash, 17-time toe wrestling world champion, who retires (moaning) from the sport. This humble computer virus is hungry for plastic to lick its fingers. Glassmaking is an infinite process. The UK is under control of David Bowie fever, according to its annual figures on baby names.
More: Uber was hacked through an 18-year-old
More: Hurricane Ian Death Toll Rises
Also: It’s unclear when or if the pandemic will end.
Plus: How YouTube’s Advice Rule Set Fails Its Users