Hi-Tech Crime CRIM30375

Robots are coming and the fallout will largely harm marginalized communities Those who are most affected in the labour market by robots are those who tend to already be marginalized. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu) Constantine Gidaris , McMaster University COVID-19 has brought about numerous, devastating changes to people’s lives globally. With the number of cases rising across Canada and globally , we are also witnessing the development and use of robots to perform jobs in some workplaces that are deemed unsafe for humans. There are cases of robots being used to disinfect health-care facilities, deliver drugs to patients and perform temperature checks . In April 2020, doctors at a Boston hospital used Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot called Spot to reduce health-care workers exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 . By equipping Spot with an iPad and a two-way radio, doctors and patients could communicate in real-time. ...

Debate: How to stop our cities from being turned into AI jungles In the city of London, security cameras can even be found in cemeteries. In 2021 the mayor’s office launched an effort to establish guidelines for research around emerging technology. Acabashi/Wikimedia , CC BY Stefaan G. Verhulst , New York University As artificial intelligence grows more ubiquitous, its potential and the challenges it presents are coming increasingly into focus. How we balance the risks and opportunities is shaping up as one of the defining questions of our era. In much the same way that cities have emerged as hubs of innovation in culture, politics, and commerce, so they are defining the frontiers of AI governance. Some examples of how cities have been taking the lead include the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights , the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI , and the Open Dialogue on AI Ethics . Others can be found in San Francisco’s ban of facial-rec...

AI image generation is advancing at astronomical speeds. Can we still tell if a picture is fake? Brendan Murphy , Author provided Brendan Paul Murphy , CQUniversity Australia Fake photography is nothing new. In the 1910s, British author Arthur Conan Doyle was famously deceived by two school-aged sisters who had produced photographs of elegant fairies cavorting in their garden. The first of the five ‘Cottingley Fairies’ photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917. Wikipedia Today it is hard to believe these photos could have fooled anybody, but it was not until the 1980s an expert named Geoffrey Crawley had the nerve to directly apply his knowledge of film photography and deduce the obvious. The photographs were fake, as later admitted by one of the sisters themselves. In 1982 Geoffrey Crawley deduced the fairy ph...

The danger of advanced artificial intelligence controlling its own feedback DALL-E Michael K. Cohen , University of Oxford and Marcus Hutter , Australian National University How would an artificial intelligence (AI) decide what to do? One common approach in AI research is called “reinforcement learning”. Reinforcement learning gives the software a “reward” defined in some way, and lets the software figure out how to maximise the reward. This approach has produced some excellent results, such as building software agents that defeat humans at games like chess and Go, or creating new designs for nuclear fusion reactors . However, we might want to hold off on making reinforcement learning agents too flexible and effective. As we argue in a new paper in AI Magazine, deploying a sufficiently advanced reinforcement learning agent would likely be incompatible with the continued survival of humanity. The reinforcement learning problem...

The Sheep Look Up: cult 1970s sci-fi novel predicted today’s climate crisis Extreme flooding in Germany caused roads and railways to be cut off. Bear productions/Shutterstock Dan Taylor , The Open University Smog-ridden cities. Endless war. Water so polluted it cannot be drunk. Crop failure. Acid rain. A pandemic of antibiotic-resistant diseases. Declining life expectancy and human fertility. Endangered bees, collapsing agriculture. Mass extinctions have finished off most birds and fish. Only the wealthiest can afford quality organic food, while the poor subsist on lab-produced junk (with added tranquilisers). A celebrity president peddles misinformation in tweet-like slogans. A disillusioned academic tries in vain to bring about change, while his followers block roads and resort to terrorism. This is not a bad dream version of recent climate change headlines. This is the dark vision in the 50-year-old dystopian novel, The Sheep Look Up...