Tag: tech

Google’s plans to bring AI to education make its dominance in classrooms more alarming

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When Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s annual I/O Developers Conference on May 18, 2021, he made two announcements suggesting Google is now the world’s most powerful organization in education. Opening the livestreamed keynote from the Mountain View campus gardens, Pichai celebrated how Google had been able to “help students and teachers continue learning from anywhere” during the pandemic. Minutes later, he announced Google’s new AI language platform, a central part of the company’s long-term AI strategy, with a specific use-case example from education. LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), he claimed, could enable students to ask natural language questions and receive sensible, factual, and interesting conversational responses. “So if a student wanted to discover more about space,” Pichai wrote on the company blog , “the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic,” he added, “LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.” The company plan is to embed LaMDA in its Workspace suite of cloud computing tools, software, and products. These proclamations indicate how Google plans to advance its business in education following the disruptions of COVID-19—by consolidating the huge growth of its platforms in schools and integrating AI into teaching and learning. That’s raising fresh concerns among privacy campaigners and researchers because it gives Google access to data about students and schools at international scale. Google’s global classroom With schools reopening worldwide, Google has worked hard to ensure the big market gains it made in 2020 can be sustained and strengthened as students return to physical rather than virtual classrooms Read More …

The 4 best ways to stop phone spam, scams, and robocalls

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We’ve collectively reached the point where most of us don’t want to take calls from people we know , let alone the scammers, hucksters, and ne’er-do-wells who bombard our phone numbers. Here’s a short list of tools and techniques to keep phony calls from interrupting your day. Add yourself to the registry It’s not perfect. Bogus calls still slip through Read More …

The U.S. is alarmingly close to an autonomous weapons arms race

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One of the Pentagon’s primary jobs is anticipating what the wars of the future will look like so that it can allocate the resources necessary to make sure the U.S. has the edge in those battles. When people in the defense industry talk about the tools of future war, they usually mention applications of AI, autonomous weaponry, and a very different role for warm-blooded human beings during battle. These technologies are in their early stages of maturity; defense forces don’t yet understand the best ways to deploy them in battle. Military leaders in other wealthy countries, including China and Russia , are also talking about such matters, though we don’t know where they’re placing their bets. For a number of reasons—some old, some new—the U.S. could easily get pulled into a race to develop and use autonomous weapons before it understands how to use them predictably, effectively, and ethically. Cold War 2.o We may enter a period of escalation that recalls the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. “There’s an AI arms race where I’m worried about your development of this technology and you’re worried about my development of this technology, and neither of us communicates that we’re aware of the limitations,” said Chris Meserole, director of research and policy for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Read More …

Why Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM should be blocked

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In Tuesday’s announcement of Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM—the historic film studio behind the Rocky , Legally Blonde , and James Bond  franchises—Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, naturally dropped two major Hollywood buzzwords.   “The real financial value behind this deal,” Hopkins said, “is the treasure trove of” —ding-ding-ding— “ IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team. It’s very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality” —ding-ding-ding— “ storytelling .” Yes, in the latest proposed media merger, intellectual property will be married with innovative storytelling to create a company like no other. This has never been done before . . . if you don’t count Disney, Comcast, Sony, ViacomCBS, or the 10-day-old prospective merger of Warner-Discovery. Indeed, just as Marvel and Star Wars spin-off TV shows now populate Disney Plus, prepare yourself for a Rocky -themed reality-TV show (with real boxers!) and as many Bond prequels as Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson (the highly protective producers of the franchise) will allow for, to roll out on Amazon Prime Video.   What is more worrisome, though, is the even greater monopolistic foothold that this deal gives one of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, one whose market cap is not in the billions but trillions. Now, beyond just selling its own products, like baby oils, in its own marketplace and thus edging out smaller, independent businesses, Amazon will be doing the same thing with movies and TV shows at a scale of 10 times what it’s currently been doing in entertainment. Read More …

Google Ventures-backed Merlin Labs is building AI that can fly planes

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Merlin Labs, which develops autonomous systems that fly airplanes, has emerged from stealth with $25 million in funding from Google Ventures and others. The company says it wants to be the “the definitive autonomy platform for things that fly.” Merlin announced Wednesday it signed a deal to outfit 55 twin-turboprop King Air planes owned by Dynamic Aviation with AI flight systems. The startup also has a contract with the Air Force to develop autonomous transport planes. Boston-based Merlin Labs, which currently has roughly 50 employees (including full-time contractors), has a dedicated flight facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port where it’s been testing its AI platform. The system has already piloted hundreds of unmanned test flights from takeoff to touchdown, Merlin’s co-founder and CEO Matthew George tells me. [Photo: Merlin Labs] The first Dynamic Aviation King Air to be outfitted with a Merlin Labs AI system is now doing test flights in the Mojave. Eventually, the AI-enabled King Airs will do flights that are too “dull, dirty, or dangerous” for human pilots, George says. Currently, Dynamic Aviation uses humans for flying fire surveillance missions, transporting goods, and patrolling far out over the ocean, but it hopes Merlin’s AI will be able to ultimately take over the cockpit. Dynamic Aviation offers these flights as a service to customers that include federal defense and intelligence agencies, state and local governments, and private companies. Read More …