Malevolent Technology
Lawyers for the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) sent Apple a cease-and-desist order Thursday threatening legal action unless the tech giant stops using allegedly illegally exported minerals harvested from the DRC’s conflict zones and smuggled through Rwanda.
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), which reviewed the cease-and-desist letter prepared by French lawyers working for the Congolese government, Apple allegedly “sold technology made with minerals sourced from a region whose population is being devastated by grave human rights violations.” Those violations in
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Read MoreArtistic project aims to spark debate about AI deepfakes
It’s natural to be leery regarding the ways in which people may use artificial intelligence to cause problems for society in the near future. On a personal level, you may be concerned about a future where artificial intelligence takes your job or creates a Terminator that comes back in time to try to eliminate a younger you. (We admittedly might be overthinking that one.)
One fear regarding AI on a personal level that you should know about because it’s very much in the present is the creation of deepfake photos, including those that strip you of the most basic of privacy rights: the right to protect images of your body.
Two German artists recently created a camera called NUCA that uses AI to create deepfake photos of subjects by stripping away their clothing. The automated removal of the photo subject’s clothing occurs in close to real-time, speeding up the creepy factor exponentially.
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Read MorePop star Jennifer Lopez’s Netflix thriller, Atlas — about a scientist who is forced to confront her “deep distrust of artificial intelligence” by turning to AI to help her save humanity — has been slammed as “AI propaganda.”
In the film, Lopez’s character, Atlas Shepherd, is “a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence,” who “joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past,” Netflix said.
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Read MoreLiving legend William Shatner xweeted out a copy of his new album Sunday, something called Where Will the Animals Sleep: Songs for Kids and Other Living Things. Immediately, he found himself under social media fire for using what people assumed was AI-generated art on the cover.
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Read MoreA former Amazon AI scientist, Dr. Viviane Ghaderi, has filed a lawsuit against the tech giant, claiming she faced discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination after disclosing her pregnancy and raising concerns about copyright infringement in AI research.
The Register reports that according to the complaint filed last week in a Los Angeles state court, Dr. Viviane Ghaderi, a former high-flying AI scientist at Amazon, alleges that she was demoted and ultimately dismissed following her return to work after giving birth.
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Read MoreAs war in Ukraine continues, controversial defense contractors and adjacent companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking advantage to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technologies. These organizations’ common link? The support of the controversial, yet ever-more powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
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Read MoreABSTRACT
With the growing role of technology and information overload, individual cognitive abilities will no longer be
sufficient to ensure an informed and timely decision-making, leading to the new concept of Cognitive Warfare,
which has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.
Cognitive Warfare causes an insidious challenge. It disrupts the ordinary understandings and reactions to events
in a gradual and subtle way, but with significant harmful effects over time. Cognitive warfare has universal
reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation
and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to
varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially
open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised. It offers NATO’s
adversaries a means of bypassing the traditional
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Read MoreIn a new study published in the International Journal of Yoga, researchers in India have found significant relationships between mindfulness, the tendency to avoid unpleasant experiences, and problematic smartphone use. The study reveals that while a natural ability to be mindful can reduce the risk of excessive smartphone use, the habit of avoiding distressing situations can increase it by about 25%. These findings underscore the complex interplay between our psychological traits and our interactions with technology.
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Read MoreLaLiga’s aggressive anti-piracy push sparks controversy, as it calls for Big Tech to remotely delete apps on users’ devices, raising significant privacy and ownership concerns.
One of Europe’s major four football leagues, Spain’s LaLiga, is trying to go even harder against what is considered to be (content) piracy.
It doesn’t help that massive amounts of money are already in the football industry – LaLiga, and no doubt others, believe they can always squeeze an extra euro. Whichever way.
And, in trying to do that, they are also trying to prove that Big Tech stores (both Western and Eastern) aren’t “doing enough” to comply.
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