Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Chinese Deepfake A.I. App
January 11th, 2020Hilariously, this runs on phones. In other news, I noticed that AMD just announced their 64-core Ryzen Threadripper CPU (the 3990X). Cost: $3,990. In other words, don’t believe your eyes, when it comes to digital sources. (Or ears.) Via: Sheila Allen:
Workplace Lockdown and Surveillance with Biometric Technologies
January 6th, 2020Via: Wall Street Journal: Plastic cards may soon give way to biometric systems, microchip implants, gait recognition and other technologies that aim to improve security, generate health data and monitor workers.
Samsung’s Upcoming AI Avatar Production System Partially Leaked
January 6th, 2020Via: Good Content Tech:
Are Mysterious Drone Sightings Related to Air Force Counterdrone Program?
January 5th, 2020Via: Gazette: The mysterious drone swarms spotted over Colorado that have vexed the governor, law enforcement and residents might not be so mysterious after all. While no one has taken responsibility, and even the Federal Aviation Administration has claimed ignorance, the answer could be a secretive Air Force program intended to keep prying eyes away […]
U.S. Government Limits Exports of Artificial Intelligence Software
January 4th, 2020Via: Reuters: The Trump administration took measures on Friday to crimp exports of artificial intelligence software as part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like China. Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the […]
‘How Robot Priests Will Change Human Spirituality’
January 3rd, 2020Via: OneZero: The company SoftBank Robotics created Pepper the robot to chant at Buddhist funerals in Japan, and a church in Germany programmed a machine to pronounce traditional blessings. Very recently in Dubai, the government’s cultural and Islamic affairs agency IACAD launched the first-ever “Virtual Ifta” that uses A.I. to issue fatwas. Other groups have […]
Social Credit on Campus: Colleges Are Turning Students’ Phones Into Surveillance Machines, Tracking the Locations of Hundreds of Thousands
December 29th, 2019Even though this is from the Washington Post (Bezos/CIA), it is a fascinating glimpse into the higher “education” ship of fools. Via: Washington Post: When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their […]
A Big And Bizarre Drone Mystery Is Unfolding In Rural Colorado
December 28th, 2019There are no answers yet, but here’s some more speculation. Via: The Drive: Based strictly on the descriptions conveyed, it sounds like someone or some group is testing a broad-area surveillance capability with lower-end autonomous drones. This could include something as simple as having a group fly a series of planned routes and return with […]
Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance
December 27th, 2019Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation: Trackers are hiding in nearly every corner of today’s Internet, which is to say nearly every corner of modern life. The average web page shares data with dozens of third-parties. The average mobile app does the same, and many apps collect highly sensitive information like location and call records even when […]
Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns
December 27th, 2019We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education. Maybe, but it’s incredible how the authors avoided the elephant in the room. The number of times the word technology appears in […]
