Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10723

America’s largely romantic view of its tech giants — Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. —is turning abruptly into harsh scrutiny. Silicon Valley suddenly faces a much more intrusive hand from Washington, based on rapidly accumulating vulnerabilities in nine big areas listed below.

Be smart: Today’s conditions — populist rage in the country, combined with growing suspicion of corporate behemoths — closely mirror those that gave us Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting of oil and steel at the turn of the 1900s, and the progressive reforms that ushered in today’s antitrust protections.

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US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has sought to allay fears of a military confrontation with North Korea after President Donald Trump warned he could unleash “fire and fury” on the pariah state.

Tillerson defended Trump’s comments but said there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should “sleep well at night.”

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As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, Matrix -like, as some sort of human battery.

And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become “the destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb?

I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right. Maybe I shouldn’t avoid asking: As an AI expert, what do I fear about artificial intelligence?

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Whether you’re killing time in line at Starbucks or scrolling through an endless meme stream on Twitter, your smartphone is trying to seduce you. Former Google employee Tristan Harris felt something needed to be done to combat tech designers’ relentless efforts to influence our behavior. Special correspondent Cat Wise talks to Harris as part of a collaboration with The Atlantic.

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Smart Reply (credit: Google Research)

Ray Kuzweil, a director of engineering at Google, reveals plans for a future version of Google’s “Smart Reply” machine-learning email software (and more) in a Wired article by Tom Simonite published Wednesday (Aug. 2, 2017).

Running on mobile Gmail and Google Inbox, Smart Reply suggests up to three replies to an email message, saving typing time or giving you ideas for a better reply.

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