AlphaZero, which in 2017 generalised AlphaGo Zero so that it could be applied to others games, including chess and Shogi
Most recently, DeepMind – which is owned by the same parent as Google’s – made a breakthrough in protein folding by adapting these techniques, which could pave the way to new drugs to fight disease.
he two highest-ranked spots went to skills that didn’t appear at all on WEF’s previous list: 1) analytical thinking and innovation, and 2) active learning and learning strategies. Another skill cluster that didn’t make the previous list debuted at No. 5 — resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.
“The pace of technology adoption is expected to remain unabated and may accelerate in some areas,” including the use of robots and artificial intelligence, the report said. Most businesses — 84 percent — plan to accelerate the digitalization of work processes and the use of digital tools, such as video conferencing,
People who behaved in accordance with them—for example, by staying away from the overgrown pond bank where someone said there was a viper—were more likely to survive than those who did not.
Compounding the problem is the proliferation of online information. Viewing and producing blogs, videos, tweets and other units of information called memes has become so cheap and easy that the information marketplace is inundated. My note: folksonomy in its worst.
At the University of Warwick in England and at Indiana University Bloomington’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe, pronounced “awesome”), our teams are using cognitive experiments, simulations, data mining and artificial intelligence to comprehend the cognitive vulnerabilities of social media users. developing analytical and machine-learning aids to fight social media manipulation.
As Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon noted, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
attention economy
Our models revealed that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue.
Frederic Bartlett
Cognitive biases greatly worsen the problem.
We now know that our minds do this all the time: they adjust our understanding of new information so that it fits in with what we already know. One consequence of this so-called confirmation bias is that people often seek out, recall and understand information that best confirms what they already believe.
This tendency is extremely difficult to correct.
Making matters worse, search engines and social media platforms provide personalized recommendations based on the vast amounts of data they have about users’ past preferences.
pollution by bots
Social Herding
social groups create a pressure toward conformity so powerful that it can overcome individual preferences, and by amplifying random early differences, it can cause segregated groups to diverge to extremes.
Social media follows a similar dynamic. We confuse popularity with quality and end up copying the behavior we observe.
information is transmitted via “complex contagion”: when we are repeatedly exposed to an idea, typically from many sources, we are more likely to adopt and reshare it.
In addition to showing us items that conform with our views, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram place popular content at the top of our screens and show us how many people have liked and shared something.Few of us realize that these cues do not provide independent assessments of quality.
programmers who design the algorithms for ranking memes on social media assume that the “wisdom of crowds” will quickly identify high-quality items; they use popularity as a proxy for quality. My note: again, ill-conceived folksonomy.
Echo Chambers
the political echo chambers on Twitter are so extreme that individual users’ political leanings can be predicted with high accuracy: you have the same opinions as the majority of your connections. This chambered structure efficiently spreads information within a community while insulating that community from other groups.
socially shared information not only bolsters our biases but also becomes more resilient to correction.
machine-learning algorithms to detect social bots. One of these, Botometer, is a public tool that extracts 1,200 features from a given Twitter account to characterize its profile, friends, social network structure, temporal activity patterns, language and other features. The program compares these characteristics with those of tens of thousands of previously identified bots to give the Twitter account a score for its likely use of automation.
Some manipulators play both sides of a divide through separate fake news sites and bots, driving political polarization or monetization by ads.
recently uncovered a network of inauthentic accounts on Twitter that were all coordinated by the same entity. Some pretended to be pro-Trump supporters of the Make America Great Again campaign, whereas others posed as Trump “resisters”; all asked for political donations.
a mobile app called Fakey that helps users learn how to spot misinformation. The game simulates a social media news feed, showing actual articles from low- and high-credibility sources. Users must decide what they can or should not share and what to fact-check. Analysis of data from Fakey confirms the prevalence of online social herding: users are more likely to share low-credibility articles when they believe that many other people have shared them.
Hoaxy, shows how any extant meme spreads through Twitter. In this visualization, nodes represent actual Twitter accounts, and links depict how retweets, quotes, mentions and replies propagate the meme from account to account.
Free communication is not free. By decreasing the cost of information, we have decreased its value and invited its adulteration.
Ren, a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army who went into consumer electronics, played the patriotic card, cautioning Jiang that ‘switching equipment technology was related to national security, and that a nation that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military’ (1). A quarter of a century later, other countries, led by the US, have belatedly grasped the wisdom of Ren’s remarks; the technology in question today is 5G
The company operates networks in 170 countries and employs more than 194,000 people.
This summer it overtook Samsung as the world’s biggest seller of smartphones… boast some of the most advanced artificial intelligence capabilities on the market.
spending more than 10% of its annual profits on research and development. In 2019 it spent over $15bn — more than Apple and Microsoft — and the budget for 2020 is $20bn. (For comparison, the R&D spend of the entire German car industry in 2018 was roughly $30bn.)
Huawei and 5G are only a small part of a much larger geoeconomic and geopolitical struggle in which China is trying to gain the upper hand over the US.
Washington’s campaign against Chinese tech includes firms such as the state-owned ZTE, another important player in the 5G field, WeChat and TikTok and many other lesser-known companies. But Huawei is its main target.
Washington sees Huawei as an arch-example of China’s rogue behaviour (widely mistaken for meritocratic market success) — stealing intellectual property, bullying partners and undercutting competitors
Some 16.9 million referrals were made by US tech firms to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year, including 69 million images of children being abused – up 50% on the previous year.
Some 94% of the reports, which include the worst category of images, came from Facebook
the National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned the number could drop to zero if Facebook presses ahead with end-to-end encryption.
“The end-to-end encryption model that’s being proposed takes out of the game one of the most successful ways for us to identify leads, and that layers on more complexity to our investigations, our digital media, our digital forensics, our profiling of individuals and our live intelligence leads, which allow us to identify victims and safeguard them.
Elon Musk’s brain-computer startup is getting ready to blow your mind
Musk reckons his brain-computer interface could one day help humans merge with AI, record their memories, or download their consciousness. Could he be right?
The idea is to solve these problems with an implantable digital device that can interpret, and possibly alter, the electrical signals made by neurons in the brain.
the latest iteration of the company’s hardware: a small, circular device that attaches to the surface of the brain, gathering data from the cortex and passing it on to external computing systems for analysis.
Several different types of working brain-computer interfaces already exist, gathering data on electrical signals from the user’s brain and translating them into data that can be interpreted by machines.
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If we put computers in our brains, strange things might happen to our minds
Using a brain-computer interface can fundamentally change our grey matter, a view of ourselves and even how fast our brains can change the world.
Last year, Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel suggested that we in Australia should become “human custodians”. This would mean being leaders in technological development, ethics, and human rights.
A recent report from the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) brought together experts from scientific and technical fields as well as the humanities, arts and social sciences to examine key issues arising from artificial intelligence.
A similar vision drives Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. The institute brings together researchers from the humanities, education, law, medicine, business and STEM to study and develop “human-centred” AI technologies.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford similarly investigates “big-picture questions” to ensure “a long and flourishing future for humanity”.
The IT sector is also wrestling with the ethical issues raised by rapid technological advancement. Microsoft’s Brad Smith and Harry Shum wrote in their 2018 book The Future Computed that one of their “most important conclusions” was that the humanities and social sciences have a crucial role to play in confronting the challenges raised by AI
Without training in ethics, human rights and social justice, the people who develop the technologies that will shape our future could make poor decisions.
Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing.
Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.”
“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified.
Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism? “I have no sympathy whatsoever for Donald Trump, who is a pernicious character. But my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites, which he thinks have looked down upon him throughout his life. That does provide a very important clue to his political appeal.
“Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump. Even if Trump is defeated in the next election and is somehow extracted from the Oval Office, the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”
“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”
A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race.
As we “knowledge workers” know, clever people aren’t always the most collaborative. And what they have in brainpower, they often lack in empathy. We live, after all, in a cognitive meritocracy in which IQ is valued much more highly than EQ (emotional intelligence) or most physical abilities.
political analyst David Goodhart, whose new book Head, Hand, Heart
Over the past several decades, as traditional class structures in countries such as the US and the UK began to break down, they were replaced by a new system of educational and professional advancement based on test scores, grades and intelligence, at least as narrowly defined by IQ. Suddenly, smart working-class kids could become part of a meritocratic elite.
But there was a dark side. As British sociologist Michael Young observed when he coined the term in his prescient book of dystopian fiction The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958),
members of the working class must judge themselves not by their own standards — in which traits of character, experience, common sense and grit are often as important as test-based intelligence — but by the standards of the meritocratic elite. Without the appropriate degrees, professional qualifications and opinions sanctioned by their educated overlords, they were all too often deemed unworthy — or as Hillary Clinton once put it in a quip that helped end her political career, “deplorables”.
In their book Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton spelt out the toll this has taken on working-class white men in particular. Contempt can be just as lethal as poverty — low status in a hierarchy produces the stress and anxiety that trigger immune system-damaging cortisol to be released in the body.
metaphor for this aspect of the spy game: a layer cake.
There’s a layer of activity that is visible to all — the actions or comments of public figures, or statements made via official channels.
Then there’s a clandestine layer that is usually visible only to another clandestine service: the work of spies being watched by other spies.
Counterintelligence officials watching Chinese intelligence activities in Houston, for example, knew the consulate was a base for efforts to steal intellectual property or recruit potential agents
And there’s at least a third layer about which the official statements raised questions: the work of spies who are operating without being detected.
The challenges of election security include its incredible breadth — every county in the United States is a potential target — and vast depth, from the prospect of cyberattacks on voter systems, to the theft of information that can then be released to embarrass a target, to the ongoing and messy war on social media over disinformation and political agitation.
Witnesses have told Congress that when Facebook and Twitter made it more difficult to create and use fake accounts to spread disinformation and amplify controversy, Russia and China began to rely more on open channels.
In 2016, Russian influencemongers posed as fake Americans and engaged with them as though they were responding to the same election alongside one another. Russian operatives even used Facebook to organize real-world campaign events across the United States.
But RT’s account on Twitter or China’s foreign ministry representatives aren’t pretending to do anything but serve as voices for Moscow or Beijing.
