Francesa Mani told her mother she would not be a victim after fake images were circulated around her New Jersey schoolIn October last year Francesa Mani came home from school in the suburbs of New Jersey with devastating news for her mother, Dorota.Earlier in the day the 14-year-old had been called into the vice-principal's office and notified that she and a group of girls at Westfield High had been the victims of targeted abuse by a fellow student. Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: Hear me out ... but the traffic-dodging app may have started a domino effect that will bring down the Tories Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThere's a theory I've been floating around for a while that I want to try on you: Google's 2013 acquisition of Waze sealed the election for Keir Starmer.I know, but bear with me.If you want to read the complete version of the newsletter please subscribe to receive TechScape in your inbox every Tuesday. Continue reading...
The best way to stop children getting out of their depth? Talk to them - about everything from trivial beefs to misused emojisI got a message from an ex-colleague who used to be fun and is now an agitator preaching alt-right" nostalgia to the gerontocracy. Whatever it was he wanted, I would have told him to stick it, but it just so happened that I really disagreed with it: a cross-party group campaigning to restrict mobile phone use among children.As reliably as bad things will happen to kids, people will blame it on phone use. Maybe there is a crisis in their mental health, or someone has been bullied online, or blackmailed over an image they have sent, or they've joined a criminal gang or undertaken a murderous enterprise or self-harmed: it is almost inconceivable that, somewhere in the story, a smartphone won't have played a part. Those affected often wish they had limited phone use, or at the very least, they keenly regret how little they knew what was going on with their child, who was, of course, always on his or her phone. Then politicians and the commentariat get involved, leveraging the grief and trials of others for discursive advantage, preaching measures to schools that they're often doing already, lecturing parents to return to the dumb phone" or ban the devices altogether for their kids. Continue reading...
A simple and endearing game creation tool has me and thousands of others creating little shareable interactive games instead of pawing at the news on our phones
Ex-president's newfound support comes after Joe Biden said he'd sign legislation that could ban the app in the USDonald Trump, who flirted with a US ban on the Chinese owners of TikTok while president, has come out in favor of the popular phone app.There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it," Trump told CNBC on Monday, saying that without it you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people". He said that, while he still believes TikTok is a national security risk, other apps are a risk as well, and singled out the Meta-owned platform: I think Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially when it comes to elections." Last week, he said banning TikTok would help Facebook and Zuckerschmuck double their business", referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Continue reading...
Cryptocurrency rises as UK financial regulator says it will allow trading of crypto-backed securitiesBitcoin has reached a new record price of almost $73,000 (57,000), as the UK financial regulator said it would allow the trading of cryptocurrency-backed securities.The cryptocurrency hit a fresh high of $72,720 as of Monday evening having last week overtaken its previous November 2021 high of nearly $69,000. Continue reading...
Even after an overhaul of the Kids Online Safety Act brings it closer to passing, lawmakers, backers and critics are at oddsSharp divisions between advocates for children's safety online have emerged as a historic bill has gathered enough votes to pass in the US Senate. Amendments to the bill have appeased some former detractors who now support the legislation; its fiercest critics, however, have become even more entrenched in their demands for changes.The Kids Online Safety Act (Kosa), introduced more than two years ago, reached 60 backers in the Senate mid-February. A number of human rights groups still vehemently oppose the legislation, underscoring ongoing divisions among experts, lawmakers and advocates over how to keep young people safe online. Continue reading...
by Kalyeena Makortoff and Julia Kollewe on (#6K7RP)
Confronted by the huge salaries on offer in the US, London boardrooms are lobbying to be allowed to make their own bosses even wealthierThere was a sharp intake of breath last month when the pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca cemented chief executive Pascal Soriot's position as the best-paid FTSE 100 boss with a 17m pay package, up from 15.3m a year earlier. The latest award brings to 137m the amount he has earned since joining in 2012.While it drew the anger of corporate governance experts, Soriot's generous payout was just a fraction of the sums his counterparts at the biggest US companies take home. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Google's parent company, stands as the highest-earning boss on the US-based S&P 500, with a $226m pay packet in 2022. Continue reading...
Some business owners will be ready to cash out in the near future, but old tech could decrease the value of their firmsClunky, old tech is costing the US a fortune. According to a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, it would take more than $1.5tn to fix and costs the US $2.41tn a year in cybersecurity and operational failures, failed development projects, and maintenance of outdated systems".This technical debt" lurks beneath the shiny and the new in an accumulation of quick fixes and outdated systems never intended for their current use, all of which are badly in need of updating", according to the Journal. Continue reading...
Moguls extol the fruits of artificial intelligence, but seek to hide its science from public viewIn 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city". Global war breaks out, leading to an atomic apocalypse. It takes the establishment of a world government" to bring about peace.What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new technology, it was also the dangers of democracy. Wells' world government was not created through democratic will but imposed as a benign dictatorship. The governed will show their consent by silence," England's King Egbert menacingly remarks. For Wells, the common man" was a violent fool in social and public affairs". Only an educated, scientifically minded elite could save democracy from itself". Continue reading...
In an extract from her memoir, Lucy Sante reveals how she lived with the feeling of being the wrong gender into her 60s, when a smartphone app gave her the inspiration to take action
Some say Biden's high-profile warrior - who's gone after Kroger, Amazon, and Nvidia - has redefined the US antitrust landscapeAcross 96 pages of the Yale Law Journal in 2017, Lina Khan set out why she believed the US's policing of big business was failing. The paper - which targeted Amazon - shook the Silicon Valley establishment and catapulted Khan into the heart of a battle over America's business orthodoxy and, ultimately, into a role in which she could overhaul it.Khan's appointment to lead the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just four years later angered big tech, but it has become increasingly clear that Khan, and the Biden administration have an even bigger agenda: resetting the federal government's decades-old stance on competition in a manner unseen in decades. Continue reading...
When OpenAI launched, Sam Altman touted his close relationship with Tesla's CEO. A decade later, they're at each other's throatsThe day after OpenAI launched in December 2015, its co-founder Sam Altman sat down with Vanity Fair to discuss what the magazine described as a non-profit company to save the world from a dystopian future". Altman talked up his vision for keeping artificial intelligence safe and distributing it widely, as well as his good working relationship with his co-chair - Tesla CEO Elon Musk.I really trust him, which is obviously important to everyone involved," Altman said. Continue reading...
Altman pleased' investigation over, saying he could have handled dispute with former board member with more grace and care'OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman has been reinstated to the firm's board of directors following an outside investigation into the turmoil that led the company to abruptly fire and rehire him in November.OpenAI said the investigation by the law firm WilmerHale concluded that Altman's ouster had been a consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust" between Altman and the prior board and that the CEO's conduct did not mandate removal". Continue reading...
Tech giant takes a step back from years-long feud with game maker after pressure from European regulatorsUnder pressure from European regulators, Apple took a step back in its feud with Epic Games on Friday, clearing the way for Epic to put Fortnite and its own game store on iPhones and iPads in Europe.Earlier this week, Apple had taken steps to block Epic from starting up a store and bringing back the popular game, which Apple removed from its App Store in 2020 after Epic broke the iPhone maker's in-app payment rules in protest. Continue reading...
Experts say Gemini was not thoroughly tested, after image generator depicted variety of historical figures as people of colourGoogle's co-founder Sergey Brin has kept a low profile since quietly returning to work at the company. But the troubled launch of Google's artificial intelligence model Gemini resulted in a rare public utterance recently: We definitely messed up."Brin's comments, at an AI hackathon" event on 2 March, follow a slew of social media posts showing Gemini's image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures - including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers - as people of colour. Continue reading...
Six years since its voyage began, the oceanic co-op is landing on PS5 - and the team behind the game can't wait to empower the creativity of a whole new community of playersOne evening many months ago, Mike Chapman, the creative director of the co-op pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves, sat down to play the game with producer Joe Neate. This wasn't just a standard playtest - joining them online would be a crew of players they'd never taken to the ocean with before. It was a team from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plan to bring the Xbox exclusive to PS5 had just been hatched; now it was time to get into the detail. We were educating them about the game, talking through what was special about it," says Neate. It was so surreal," chips in Chapman. Trying to find treasure on an island with a group from a different platform holder ..."The PS5 launch is scheduled for 30 April, and pre-orders are now open, but it's only the latest stage in the evolution of this fascinating game. Launched on 20 March 2018, it was the most ambitious project in the long history of veteran British studio Rare. Billed as a cooperative pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves gave players access to a vast multiplayer world of oceanic exploration, buried treasure and ship-to-ship battles. The design philosophy behind the game was simple, yet extremely risky: tools not rules. Players would be given everything they needed to set out on their own pirate adventures - even musical instruments and gallons of virtual grog - but there would be no overarching narrative, no skill trees, no complex character progression systems. The stories would come from the players themselves, as they built their crews and fought other buccaneers for fame and fortune. Continue reading...
Conspiracy theorists are still routinely targeting and abusing women and woke' game consultants. With a small studio currently under fire, the games industry's silence is deafeningTen years ago, a game developer's aggrieved ex-boyfriend published a vindictive screed accusing her of trading sex for favourable reviews of her indie game. This was leapt upon by the least savoury corner of the 2014 internet, 4chan, and kicked off a harassment campaign that broadened to include all women working in video game development or the gaming press, as well as the industry's LGBTQ+ community. Sensing blood in the water, alt-right" agitators on YouTube and Steve Bannon's Breitbart jumped on the bandwagon, and soon began to steer it - and Gamergate, as this manufactured outrage became known, mutated into one of the first fronts of the modern culture wars, driven by social media, misogyny and the weaponised disaffection of young men. Many of its tactics became part of the Trump election playbook.This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of wokery" in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to woke" ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere. Continue reading...
Following the game's hero into hellish madness, Petri Alanko required an especially unsettling score. Enter a noise machine that disturbed even Stephen KingOn Petri Alanko's website, where the Bafta-nominated Finnish musician offers his services as a composer for video games and film, the artist and performer makes a bold claim: No deadlines missed since 1990". If you're a creative of any flavour, you're likely to read that with a mixture of awe, suspicion and incredulity. Deadlines are flexible, right? Right?It's not a boast, it's a service promise, more or less," laughs Alanko. I'm really good at scheduling my own work, but I am very careful when dealing with someone else for the first time. Not all clients know exactly what they want, despite me helping them to figure out what's needed. I need to be the creative, the analyst, as well as the crisis negotiator." Video game music production is often chaotic: composers have to be malleable, lean, adaptable, unafraid of killing their darlings or working to impossibly tight deadlines. That Alanko shrugs this off as simply part of the job is testament to his dedication. Continue reading...
Platform sent alert to US users urging them to protest bill that would make its parent company divest from the app or face a banLawmakers' offices have reportedly been flooded with calls from TikTok users speaking out against a bill that would force the platform's parent company to divest from the app or face a US ban.The bill, which is backed by more than a dozen representatives, passed unanimously out of the House energy and commerce committee on Thursday with a vote of 50 to 0. TikTok responded by pushing out a notification to many of its estimated 170 million US users, calling on them to contact Congress in protest. The notification included a mechanism that allows people to search for their representative's number by inputting their zip code. Continue reading...
As Bafta's video game awards celebrate their 20th outing, the full list of nominations reflects a outstandingly creative yearBafta has announced the nominations for the 20th Bafta games awards, which will take place in London on April 11.Leading the pack this year are Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 with 10 nominations; Spider-Man 2 with nine; Alan Wake 2 with eight; and six apiece for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. Hi-Fi Rush, a colourful music-based action game from Japan's Tango Gameworks, picked up five nominations, as did Mintrocket's breakout hit Dave the Diver. Continue reading...
The tech giant said the lawsuit was near-sighted and akin to Hollywood's losing backlash against the VCRMicrosoft has responded to a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the New York Times over alleged use of content to train generative artificial intelligence, calling the claim a false narrative of doomsday futurology". The tech giant said the lawsuit was near-sighted and akin to Hollywood's losing backlash against the VCR.In a motion to dismiss part of the lawsuit filed on Monday, Microsoft, which was sued in December alongside ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, scoffed at the newspaper's claim that Times content receives particular emphasis" and that tech companies seek to free-ride on the Times's massive investment in its journalism". Continue reading...
Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, warns a coalition of environmental groupsClaims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned.Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs. Continue reading...
by Hollie Richardson, Hannah Verdier and Rachel Aroes on (#6K5EZ)
In this week's newsletter: Comedian Joanne McNally explores one of the most bizarre celebrity conspiracy theories in a new BBC series. Plus: five of the best books podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWho Replaced Avril Lavigne?
Widow who depends on wifi to order medication and grocers was disconnected in the autumnI'm at my wits' end trying to understand how my BT landline and wifi can be cut off without the company receiving any instructions from me.I'm a 79-year-old widow living seven miles from a town and depend on wifi to order medication from the GP, groceries and many other things. Continue reading...
Linwei Ding, facing four counts of theft of trade secrets, accused of transferring confidential information to his personal accountA Chinese software engineer has been arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies.Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement. Continue reading...
Shane Jones said he warned management about the lack of safeguards several times, but it didn't result in any actionAn artificial intelligence engineer at Microsoft published a letter on Wednesday alleging that the company's AI image generator lacks basic safeguards against creating violent and sexualized images. In the letter, engineer Shane Jones states that his repeated attempts to warn Microsoft management about the problems failed to result in any action. Jones said he sent the message to the Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft's board of directors.Internally the company is well aware of systemic issues where the product is creating harmful images that could be offensive and inappropriate for consumers," Jones states in the letter, which he published on LinkedIn. He lists his title as principal software engineering manager". Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: Like Kratos's axe and Halo's Warthogs before it, Pacific Drive's beat-up banger and I have formed a lasting connection as we survive a scary world together Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI had to give up on Pacific Drive, the weird-fiction-inspired driving survival game I recommended the other week. Not because it's bad - it's great - but because it needed 20-plus hours from me that I just do not have right now.Also, if I'm totally candid, it freaks me out. It's a game about probing further and further into a long-abandoned exclusion zone in a beat-up old car, and the anomalies you encounter. These range from pillars suddenly thrusting themselves from the earth to alarming hurricanes that shove you around the road, and all are excitingly inventive and creepy. Continue reading...
Employers are letting artificial intelligence conduct job interviews. Candidates are trying to beat the systemWhen Ty landed an introductory phone interview with a finance and banking company last month, they assumed it would be a quick chat with a recruiter. And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic.The voice sounded similar to Siri," said Ty, who is 29 and lives in the DC metro area. It was creepy." Continue reading...
ChatGPT maker releases emails in support of claim Tesla boss backed plan to create for-profit unitOpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk's lawsuit accusing it of betraying its altruistic roots, claiming the Tesla chief executive had in fact supported the artificial intelligence company's plans to create a for-profit unit.Executives at the ChatGPT maker released a blogpost containing what they claimed was historical email correspondence with Musk in which the entrepreneur suggested merging the San Francisco-based startup with Tesla. Continue reading...
The meeting in Palm Beach, Florida - reported on by the New York Times - comes as Trump trails president Joe Biden in fundraisingDonald Trump met with billionaire Elon Musk in Florida over the weekend as the former Republican president seeks a major cash infusion for his re-election campaign, The New York Times reported.According to the Times, Trump met with Musk - one of the world's richest people - and a number of wealthy Republican donors on Sunday and hopes to have a one-on-one discussion soon with Musk, the CEO of both Tesla Inc and SpaceX, and the owner-executive chairman of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Continue reading...
Services refuse login attempts and feeds stall as Google's platform also experiences login problemsFacebook and Instagram experienced severe issues around the world on Tuesday, with the services refusing login attempts and feeds stalling.The outages were first reported at about 3.30pm GMT (10.30am EST, 2.30am AEDT) and began to clear at about 5pm. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6K3P4)
Funky design, fun software, decent performance and long battery life provide a lot of phone for the moneyLondon-based tech firm Nothing's latest Android attempts to shake up the budget phone market with something a little more interesting.Costing from 319 (329/A$529) the Phone 2a aims to take the cool design and intrigue that made its higher-end models stand out and package it up into something cheaper but still novel, sits alongside the full-fat Phone 2 costing 579.Screen: 6.7in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (394ppi)Processor: MediaTek Dimensity 7200 ProRAM: 8 or 12GBStorage: 128 or 256GBOperating system: Nothing OS 2.5 (Android 14)Camera: 50MP main and ultrawide, 32MP selfieConnectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSSWater resistance: IP54 (splash resistant)Dimensions: 162 x 76.3 x 8.9mmWeight: 190g Continue reading...
Bowie's 1999 album Hours... was the first to go on sale online before hitting regular stores - and his experimentation caused horror in the music industryIt is far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s, but Hours... is David Bowie's most significant album that decade. Not because of the music, however, but how it was released: the first album by a major artist on a major label to emerge as a download before it arrived physically.Writing about the album in August 1999 ahead of its September release, Rolling Stone called Hours... a cyber-coup": a continuation of Bowie's fascination with releasing music online, which he started with the Telling Lies single in 1996. He had also enthusiastically embraced webcasting and created his own internet service provider with BowieNet in 1998. I couldn't be more pleased to have the opportunity of moving the music industry closer to the process of making digital downloads available as the norm and not the exception," is how Bowie explained the Hours... release at the time. We are all aware that broadband opportunities are not yet available to the overwhelming majority of people, and therefore expect the success of this experiment to be measured in hundreds and not thousands of downloads. However, just as colour television broadcasts and film content on home video tapes were required first steps to cause their industries to expand consumer use, I am hopeful that this small step will lead to larger leaps by myself and others ultimately giving consumers greater choices and easier access to the music they enjoy." Continue reading...
Apple has been fined a whopping 1.8bn by the EU, but it still claims it's done nothing wrong. Plus, what happens when open source software gets into the wrong hands of some crypto fans Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThe tech industry is one of the most valuable sectors on the planet, but it ultimately rests on the unpaid labour of an alarmingly small amount of hobbyists.That reliance is the blessing, and the curse, of open source software - coding projects put up on the internet for anyone to use, freely, in their own work. Some open source software solves simple problems elegantly enough that no one wants to redo the work unnecessarily; others tackle complex tasks that few have ever attempted.the most consequential figures in the tech world are half guys like steve jobs and bill gates and half some guy named ronald who maintains a unix tool called runk' which stands for Ronald's Universal Number Kounter and handles all math for every machine on earthA project called tea.xyz promised people they could get rewards for [their] open source contributions", complete with a flashy website describing how it would enhance the sustainability of open-source software".So far, it's achieved the exact opposite. Promising to reward open source contributors with crypto tokens, the project asked users to verify their access to open source projects by merging in a YAML file containing their crypto wallet address.The fine is nearly four times higher than expected in a move by the European Commission to show it will act decisively on tech companies who abuse their dominant position in the market for phones and online services.The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said a smaller fine would have been nothing more than the equivalent of a parking fine" and was designed to act as a deterrent" to such practices for Apple and others.If a developer sells physical goods, serves ads in their app, or just shares an app for free, they don't pay Apple anything.When it comes to doing business, not everyone's going to agree on the best deal. But it sure is hard to beat free. But free isn't enough for Spotify. Continue reading...
Suit by former employees, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, follows a separate legal complaint by other workers seeking $500mElon Musk is facing a $128m lawsuit from four former Twitter executives who allege the billionaire tech mogul failed to pay them severance after buying the social network. The suit, filed on Monday in California, follows a separate legal complaint last year by rank-and-file employees seeking $500m in unpaid severance.Because Musk decided he didn't want to pay Plaintiffs' severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision," the suit alleges. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6K2KP)
Squeezing high-end features into a more affordable frame makes for an excellent mid-range smart sports trackerGarmin's latest smart sports watch condenses all the great features from its higher-end Forerunner models into a cheaper, simpler running tracker with a bright OLED screen and long battery life.The Forerunner 165 is the new base model in Garmin's new lineup, priced from 250 (280/$250/A$429) compared with the 430 Forerunner 265.Screen: 1.2in AMOLEDCase size: 43mmCase thickness: 11.6mmBand size: standard 20mmWeight: 39gStorage: 4GBWater resistance: 50 metres (5ATM)Sensors: GNSS (GPS, Glonass, Galileo), compass, thermometer, heart rate, pulse OxConnectivity: Bluetooth, ANT+ (wifi with music) Continue reading...
by Hosted by Michael Safi with Geoffrey Hinton, Micha on (#6K2JB)
This is the story of Geoffrey Hinton, a man who set out to understand the brain and ended up working with a group of researchers who invented a technology so powerful that even they don't truly understand how it works. This is about a collision between two mysterious intelligences - two black boxes - human and artificial. And it's already having profound consequencesThanks to Michael Wooldridge - his book is called The Road to Conscious Machines.And Melanie Mitchell - her book is called Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Continue reading...
The journalist and podcaster has been scrutinising Silicon Valley for decades, knows all the big players - and once believed that tech could save the world. But that was before greed and ego got in the wayThis is about love gone wrong," says Kara Swisher, looking back on a life spent studying the giants of Big Tech. I saw the possibilities of tech being the saviour of humanity - or at the very least, really helping people, in terms of community and knowledge and education. And instead, you know ..."She pauses, and wearily exhales. It's like that old expression: They promised us jetpacks, and this is what we got?' Like, are you kidding me?" But, she adds: The problem isn't tech. It's people." Continue reading...
We need nuance and empathy in addressing this complex issueWhenever the government talks about the dangers to children of the mobile phone we must picture this phone as a large rock under which a hundred shameful decisions live in darkness.I have concerns about mobile phones, of course I do. I've followed Esther Ghey's campaign to ban smartphones for kids, and how education secretary Gillian Keegan has leapt upon this, with cautious interest. My eldest child will soon be approaching secondary school, and while I'd vaguely assumed that her generation would find phones desperately unchic by the time they came of carrying age, associating them with dull and red-eyed parents, this does not appear to be the case. And the stories I hear from teachers or parents of teenagers sometimes chill me - the ways that bullying mutates online, or how phones exacerbate poor mental health, or teens' sinister, quotidian acts of surveillance. Continue reading...
Is the reported rise in mental illness among under-25s down to more awareness and less stigma - or is something truly amiss with young people? We ask therapists, academics and survivorsIt's a rite of passage for any new generation to be labelled lazy and feckless by their elders, and so it was for twentysomethings last week with the news that they are more likely to be out of work because of mental health problems.Instead of taking seriously the idea that a mental health crisis was developing, it was far easier to re-ink some cliches about workshy snowflakes and generation sicknote. Such insults have been levelled at every generation, from those now labelled millennials, generation X, baby boomers and the silent generation, and even as far back as Horace and Aristotle in ancient times. Continue reading...
Kavita Puri's superb account of the 1943 Bengal famine needs to be heard; Alexi Mostrous chills with an investigation into social media hate; and the madly articulate' David Baddiel and Sayeeda Warsi tackle politics head-onThree Million (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
It's cheap, quick and available 24/7, but is a chatbot therapist really the right tool to tackle complex emotional needs?Last autumn, Christa, a 32-year-old from Florida with a warm voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother. Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn't feel she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but she didn't like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends: she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing.So one night in October she logged on to character.ai - a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyonce to Harry Potter - and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal psychologist" character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot caring", supportive" and intelligent". Just what you would want the ideal person to be," Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself. Continue reading...
The computing power for AI models requires immense - and increasing - amounts of natural resources. Legislation is required to prevent environmental crisisOne of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the paperless" office and frictionless" transactions? And of course, while our personal electronic devices do use some electricity, compared with the washing machine or the dishwasher, it's trivial.Belief in this comforting story, however, might not survive an encounter with Kate Crawford's seminal book, Atlas of AI, or the striking Anatomy of an AI System graphic she composed with Vladan Joler. And it certainly wouldn't survive a visit to a datacentre - one of those enormous metallic sheds housing tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers humming away, consuming massive amounts of electricity and needing lots of water for their cooling systems. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian