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The fuss about a bot’s ‘consciousness’ obscures far more troubling concerns‘I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” So claimed a Google software program, creating a bizarre controversy over the past week in AI circles and beyond.The programme is called LaMDA, an acronym for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, a project run by Google. The human to whom it declared itself a person was Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google. He believes that LaMDA is sentient and should be accorded the same rights and courtesies as any other sentient being. It even has preferred pronouns (it/its if you must know). When Google rejected his claims, he published his conversations with LaMDA (or, at least, edited highlights of some conversations) on his blog. At which point, Google suspended him for having made public company secrets and the whole affair became an international cause célèbre. Continue reading...

In the past week bitcoin has fallen 34% and Celsius has put a hold on withdrawals. Some fear the turmoil is far from overThe cryptocurrency market could do with some respite but its convention-breaking nature means there is no hiatus. Trading in digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum runs 24/7, unlike their conventional peers in equities on the New York and London stock exchanges, which at least get the weekend off.So one torrid week tends to run into another for this most cutting-edge of markets. Bitcoin – the cryptocurrency cornerstone – fell below the key level of $20,000 on Saturday morning, meaning it has dropped 34% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko, which showed that ethereum, the other pillar of the market, had fallen 40% to $994 in the same period. There are fears bitcoin’s fall will trigger more sell-offs, leading to another tumultuous seven days for digital assets. Continue reading...

A neural network that can transform a text phrase into an artwork is transforming our understanding of creative thinking, but it opens new issues

Online sales stars enjoy huge influence but can fall foul of the authorities and vanish from the retail multiverseHua Shao stands knee-deep in water at the edge of the sea, behind a table piled high with large crabs. The famous Chinese TV host is sweaty, sunburnt and laughing with a co-host as a red-and-blue fishing boat bobs behind them.“The sea-ears taste so good, it must have been collected from a sea area where the water is very clear,” he tells more than 100,000 people who are watching online. Continue reading...

The use of synthetic data is a cost‑effective way to teach AI about human responses. But can it help eliminate bias and make self‑driving cars safer?You’re at the wheel of your car but you’re exhausted. Your shoulders start to sag, your neck begins to droop, your eyelids slide down. As your head pitches forward, you swerve off the road and speed through a field, crashing into a tree.But what if your car’s monitoring system recognised the tell-tale signs of drowsiness and prompted you to pull off the road and park instead? The European Commission has legislated that from this year, new vehicles be fitted with systems to catch distracted and sleepy drivers to help avert accidents. Now a number of startups are training artificial intelligence systems to recognise the giveaways in our facial expressions and body language. Continue reading...

Digital asset slides to lowest level since November 2020 as rate rises increase pressure on marketsThe price of bitcoin has fallen below $20,000 (£16,400) amid deepening turmoil in the cryptocurrency market.The cornerstone digital asset slipped to levels not seen since December 2020 on Saturday morning, at one point going under $19,000 before recovering to about $19,160, according to CoinDesk. Continue reading...

Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather among those being sued, but prosecuting fraud in the crypto arena is notoriously difficultWith investors worldwide looking at a collective $1.5tn in recent cryptocurrency losses, a blizzard of class-action lawsuits are being prepared. One big question is: who, if anyone, is to blame – and who could be held to account?With inflation and interest rates rising, the best-known cryptocurrencies have been hit with heavy and continuing losses: Bitcoin has lost more than 50% of its value this year; Ethereum, its largest rival, is down 65%; and the total value of crypto assets has dropped to less than $1tn from its November 2021 peak of $3tn. US federal regulators say 46,000 people have reported losing $1bn in crypto to scams since January 2021. Continue reading...

A trip to the dump resulted in a chance encounter with a dramatic herd of animalsJeremy Piloquet doesn’t like shooting people. Cows, he says, will always be more honest. “When I started out three years ago, I tried street photography, but I was so much more drawn to people’s shadows or silhouettes, their outline from behind – or, even better, when there was no one around. With social media and selfie culture, people are always trying to show their best smile, their best selves. I don’t like that. Animals don’t perform – they act just as they are.”Piloquet took this picture of the herd when returning from his local rubbish dump, having spent a summer’s day emptying his garage. He stayed on his side of the fence, pulled up some grass and lured them over with words of encouragement: “Come on, girl” and, “Time to eat.” Continue reading...

The hip-hop mogul loves to rap about his roots in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing projects. But classes in cryptocurrency show the billionaire is out of touch, residents sayMarcy Houses, the 28-acre public housing development in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is best-known as a pillar of rapper-turned-mogul Jay-Z’s New York persona. Built in 1949 as part of a push by the New York City Housing Authority to house the city’s low-income residents, Marcy had fallen into a state of dangerous disrepair by the 1970s when Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, was growing up there.“Where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice,” he raps in Where I’m From. “Marcy me, just the way I am always gonna be,” he declares in 2017’s Marcy Me. Continue reading...

Chinese cyberspace is filled with videos showing violence against women and activists say only real social change will stop the abuseTang Ping, 31, a mother-of-two in the southern Chinese city of Nanning, says in 2014 when her first child was six months old, her husband – an academic – began routinely beating her. She felt hurt but also ashamed, blaming herself for not being a good enough wife. She did not know what to do.Five years ago, after another round of violence, she finally summoned the courage to report her husband to the police. “I was told my injuries were not serious, therefore they could not intervene,” she says, as she prepares to legally dissolve the marriage this week. Continue reading...

Bitcoin requires vast amounts of electricity to facilitate its transactions around the globe. More than twice the energy usage per year of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon combined. This demand has led cryptocurrency mining companies to seek out the cheapest electricity possible, and it doesn't get much cheaper than coal. New bitcoin server farms are popping up across the US next to old power plants, many which had all but discontinued operations. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how these dying fossil fuel plants have been been revived in the name of cryptocurrency

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conquerorOne weekend in September 1995, a software engineer made a website. It wasn’t his first. At 28, Pierre Omidyar had followed the standard accelerated trajectory of Silicon Valley: he had learned to code in seventh grade, and was on track to becoming a millionaire before the age of 30, after having his startup bought by Microsoft. Now he worked for a company that made software for handheld computers, which were widely expected to be the next big thing. But in his spare time, he liked to tinker with side projects on the internet. The idea for this particular project would be simple: a website where people could buy and sell.Buying and selling was still a relatively new idea online. In May 1995, Bill Gates had circulated a memo at Microsoft announcing that the internet was the company’s top priority. In July, a former investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched an online storefront called Amazon.com, which claimed to be “Earth’s biggest bookstore”. The following month, Netscape, creator of the most popular web browser, held its initial public offering (IPO). By the end of the first day of trading, the company was worth almost $3bn – despite being unprofitable. Wall Street was paying attention. The dot-com bubble was starting to inflate. Continue reading...

Consumer champion Justin Gutmann alleges older iPhones made slower to cope with software updatesApple is facing a multimillion-pound legal claim that could reimburse millions of iPhone owners over a secret decision to slow down older phones in 2017.An undocumented battery management system, released in a software update in January that year, slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning. But Apple didn’t give users the option to disable the setting, and did not warn them that their phones were being “throttled” deliberately. Continue reading...

A tech watchdog group reveals users can buy materials to build high-powered, automatic weapons in a few clicksGuns, weapon parts and ammunition are widely available for sale on Facebook and Instagram, new research shows, as experts say Meta is not doing enough to stop deadly weapons getting into the wrong hands.Meta policy since 2016 has banned the “sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives” between individuals, including “firearms parts”. However, the study from Media Matters for America, a non-profit tech watchdog group, shows users of Instagram and Facebook can buy materials from unregulated sources to build high-powered, automatic weapons in just a few clicks. Continue reading...

The comedian shares his favourite online laughs, including an Instagram account dedicated to terrible real estate agents and a rooster attacking a weatherman

A researcher says Google has created an AI being with smarts and soul, but my own attempt reveals the truth behind those claims. Plus, the latest crypto crash

Deal – which would require approval from US and Israel – would give L3Harris control over controversial Pegasus toolThe US defence contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group’s surveillance technology, in a possible deal that would give an American company control over one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools.Multiple sources confirmed that discussions were centred on a sale of the Israeli company’s core technology – or code – as well as a possible transfer of NSO personnel to L3Harris. But any agreement still faces significant hurdles, including requiring the blessing of the US and Israeli governments, which have not yet given the green light to a deal. Continue reading...

It’s easy to be fooled by the mimicry, but consumers need transparency about how such systems are usedThe Google engineer Blake Lemoine wasn’t speaking for the company officially when he claimed that Google’s chatbot LaMDA was sentient, but Lemoine’s misconception shows the risks of designing systems in ways that convince humans they see real, independent intelligence in a program. If we believe that text-generating machines are sentient, what actions might we take based on the text they generate? It led Lemoine to leak secret transcripts from the program, resulting in his current suspension from the organisation.Google is decidedly leaning in to that kind of design, as seen in Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s demo of that same chatbot at Google I/O in May 2021, where he prompted LaMDA to speak in the voice of Pluto and share some fun facts about the ex-planet. As Google plans to make this a core consumer-facing technology, the fact that one of its own engineers was fooled highlights the need for these systems to be transparent.Emily M Bender is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of several papers on the risks of massive deployment of pattern recognition at scale Continue reading...

World’s richest person to take questions from employees amid concerns over attempted takeoverElon Musk will speak to Twitter employees this week for the first time since launching his $44bn (£36bn) bid in April, a source said on Monday, citing an email from Twitter chief executive, Parag Agrawal, to staff.The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, and Musk will take questions directly from Twitter employees, the source added. Continue reading...

More than 100 of the coffee shop’s locations have unionized, while just one Amazon warehouse has managed itIn a historic win in December, baristas in Buffalo voted to make their Starbucks the first of more than 9,000 corporate-operated Starbucks in the US to unionize. Since then, 143 other Starbucks have unionized and workers at 120 other locations have petitioned for union elections.In another historic victory, a vote count on 1 April showed that workers at an 8,300-employee Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, had voted to make theirs the first unionized Amazon facility in the country. Since then, however, no other Amazon warehouse has even petitioned for a union election (although workers at a 1,500-employee Amazon facility in Staten Island later voted to reject unionization). Continue reading...

Consortium plans to adapt turboprop aircraft with 40-80 seats to run on environmentally friendly fuelThe world’s first hydrogen-fuelled commercial flight of a passenger plane could take place between Rotterdam and London in six years’ time, under a plan to make short-haul air travel more environmentally friendly.The 2028 target set by a Dutch consortium is ambitious. Airbus announced its intention 18 months ago to be the first to offer zero-emission commercial aircraft models running on hydrogen, by 2035. Continue reading...

Value of assets dips below $1tn after Celsius Network halts withdrawals over ‘extreme’ conditionsThe cryptocurrency market has endured another day of volatility as the Binance exchange temporarily suspended bitcoin withdrawals and the total value of the digital asset market dipped below $1tn (£820bn), after a cryptocurrency lender stopped customers from taking back their funds.The cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network halted withdrawals because of “extreme market conditions”, prompting a selloff. Continue reading...

From music on the go to GPS watches and apps such as Strava, tech to help you clock up the milesRunning is a great way to keep fit this summer and needs little more than some trainers and a pavement or a park. But even the most enthusiastic of us need some way to keep motivated for regular exercise when the couch, TV or sun lounger looks inviting.These gadgets can help: from music on the go to the social power of Strava, they make pounding the streets a little more interesting. Continue reading...

Blake Lemoine says system has perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to a human childThe suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system. Continue reading...

The desire to meet a new partner remains undimmed. But they might be more easily found at a film club than on a phone screenIt all started a year ago when, having been divorced for a while, I thought I might dip a toe in the dating world. I wasn’t thrilled by the idea as it is not where I expected to be in my mid-50s. But, as a hopeful soul, it felt important to see if there was life after divorce.I was warned by friends that dating online is not for the fainthearted, but I’m a naturally curious person and, as a podcaster on various forms of dating (Later Dater) and a love coach, I thought it was about time I ventured into a world that I spend a lot of time talking about with clients and interviewees. Continue reading...

The rising price of electricity and the plunging value of the cryptocurrency could burst the speculative bubble for today’s prospectorsIn the bad old days, prospecting for gold was a grisly business involving hysterical crowds, pickaxes, digging, the wearing of appalling hats, standing in rivers panning for nuggets, “staking” claims and so on. The California gold rush of 1848-55, for example, brought 300,000 hopefuls to the Sierra Nevada and northern California and involved the massacre of thousands of Indigenous people.In our day, the new gold is bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, and prospecting for it has become a genteel armchair activity, although it is called “mining”, for old times’ sake. What it actually involves is using computers to perform unfathomably complicated calculations to create cryptographic “hashes” – codes that are, in practical terms, uncrackable. Continue reading...

Future EV designs offer drivers more space and leisure, with fewer parts making production more sustainableTake any petrol car sold today and show it to a mechanic working on a Ford Model T 100 years ago and there is a fairly good chance they would understand roughly how it works. An internal combustion engine at the front turns the wheels, carrying a driver behind a steering wheel, some passengers and luggage.The advent of electric cars changes everything. No longer will the shape of the car be defined so rigidly by bulky engines, exhaust gas handling or driveshafts. At the same time, digital technology promises to replace everything from rear-view mirrors to the human driver. Never has the car industry had to cope with so many changes all at once. Continue reading...

The street photographer was in the right place at the right time to capture this beachside sceneIf you look closely under the red umbrella at the centre of this photo, you’ll see four distant feet. The anonymous duo they belong to had just taken off on a parasailing trip above the sea at Nice in the south of France, captured by Hannibal Renberg with his iPhone 10 while on holiday.“I was walking down the Promenade des Anglais and noticed these people on the bench. They were by the beach in high summer, but with umbrellas up. Just below them is the canopy belonging to a parasailing company, and they seemed to be watching the world go by. It was serendipitous timing to capture the parachute in flight where it is. I only had time to get a couple of shots.” Continue reading...

Airbnb and its competitors have made tourism a year-round prospect in many places, but locals say that locks them out of the rental marketTourism is the lifeblood of Kangaroo Valley. Travellers flock to the lush greenery of the New South Wales town for the trails, rivers and wineries. It also hosts folk and arts festivals, is a popular wedding spot, and is a short drive from south coast beaches.But Kangaroo Valley finds itself in a bind brought on by its own popularity – it’s almost impossible to find somewhere to live there. Continue reading...

Hospitality businesses look to hi-tech gadgets amid staff shortages after Covid pandemic and BrexitAs worker shortages are felt across the hospitality sector, the owners of the Bella Italia chain are turning to robots to provide table service to customers.Big Table Group, which also owns Café Rouge and Las Iguanas, is testing out the robot at its Bella Italia restaurant in Center Parcs Whinfell Forest in Cumbria, in the first such trial by a big restaurant chain. Continue reading...

‘Effective duopoly’ holds back Britain’s tech sector and restricts customer choice, says CMAThe UK competition watchdog is considering launching an investigation into Apple and Google’s dominance of the mobile browser market after finding that the companies have a “stranglehold” on a range of areas including app stores.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) indicated that action was needed, saying that otherwise the companies were likely to strengthen their grip on the sector, which would further restrict rivals and dissuade innovators. Continue reading...

Tower Vaults, London

He says he needs it on for work; she says the constant bleeps and ringtones drive her to distraction. You make the call on who’s guilty

Modernised version of 2013’s landmark PlayStation game will be out in SeptemberThe classic 2013 horror game The Last of Us is being remade for PlayStation 5 and PC, developer Naughty Dog has announced. Retitled The Last of Us: Part I, the new version will be released on 9 September on PS5 and later on PC.The Last of Us follows widower Joel and teenager Ellie across a ravaged US in the wake of a pandemic that has turned most of its population into zombies, and won acclaim for its unflinching devotion to storytelling as well as the performances of its cast. It was a landmark game of the PlayStation 3 generation, and was remastered for PlayStation 4 in 2014. Continue reading...

Regulators to look with enhanced scrutiny after cars with driver-assistance function crashed into parked emergency vehiclesUS federal regulators are deepening their investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot function after more than a dozen Tesla cars crashed into parked first-responder vehicles over a period of four years.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Thursday it was upgrading its preliminary investigation, which launched last August, to an “engineering analysis”, which is taken before the agency determines a recall. Continue reading...

New setting will allow users to set enforced breaks once chosen daily limit on uninterrupted use is reachedTikTok addicts will be able to further limit their time on the app, the company has said, with a new pair of screen-time settings coming to the service imminently.Like many of its competitors, TikTok already allows users to set a maximum screen-time allowance for each day, to help them stop idling away hours at a time scrolling through the “for you” page. Continue reading...

World’s largest online retailer launches Luxury Stores featuring clothes by Elie Saab and AltuzarraAmazon shoppers in Britain can now add high-fashion purchases, such as a four-figure Peter Dundas evening gown or a Christopher Kane slingback heel, to their digital shopping baskets.The world’s largest online retailer has launched its Luxury Stores at Amazon division in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, having opened a US version in 2020. Continue reading...

PC; Ariel Jurkowski

In this week’s newsletter: Two reporters get to the heart of the adult industry in Hot Money: Who Rules Porn? Plus: five of the best food podcasts

After scanning millions of images, this is what a text-to-image AI model generates from the prompt ‘Boris eating fish’

Network ready to provide stream of daily data after world’s richest man threatened to pull out of $44bn purchase if Twitter refusedTwitter is preparing to comply with Elon Musk’s demand for data on fake accounts, after the Tesla chief executive threatened to walk away from buying the business if it refused.The social media company will provide the world’s richest man with access to a stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted every day, according to the Washington Post. A number of companies already pay for access to the data, which includes a real-time record of tweets, the devices users tweet from and information about the accounts that tweet, the Post reported. Continue reading...

UK-based e-commerce boss Joshua Ma to step back from role, according to reportsTikTok says it is investigating remarks allegedly made by a senior executive disparaging the concept of maternity leave, amid reports he is stepping back from his role.Joshua Ma, the head of the company’s e-commerce division across Europe, told staff that as a “capitalist”, he “didn’t believe” firms should offer maternity leave, according to a report in the Financial Times on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The comedian and musician shares his favourite online japes, including a Lana Del Rey love song to Stuart Little, a pigeon at Pride and a Lee Lin Chin blooper

PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One; 2K Games/Supermassive Games

In this week’s newsletter: Apple’s CarPlay updates put a dizzying amount of information at a driver’s fingertips – for good or bad. Plus, Elon Musk continues to try not to buy Twitter

Have teenagers taken control of publishing? With some authors notching up a billion views, we look at how TikTok is electrifying the world of books – creating bestsellers, reviving classics and rescuing neglected genresIt’s four o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon and the Krispy Kreme doughnut stall is doing a brisk trade at Lakeside shopping centre, a huge mall in Essex. But a few metres further along, young shoppers are salivating over a different sort of treat. A girl in a silky red dress runs her fingers along the spines of nine novels by bestselling YA author Colleen Hoover, while a couple of twentysomething men in biker jackets pore over shelves of manga comics. They’re in a Waterstones that has been laid out like a pick-and-mix stall, with brightly jacketed paperbacks piled on round tables, or grouped seductively in booths, under headings such as “Romance” or “LGBTQ+”. Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper – a graphic novel series about a love affair between two schoolboys that’s now a Netflix show – has a table to itself.All this is down to #BookTok, a niche on the platform TikTok that became a social media sensation in the early months of Covid, and has been gathering momentum ever since. “We used to rely on millennials,” says the store’s 30-year-old manager, Peter. “But now the majority of our customers are teenagers, who have money and influence and want to find their own stories. A lot of black and Asian authors are coming through. I always wanted to have an LGBTQ section and now it wouldn’t make sense not to. It’s exciting. You can see publishing changing. It’s made it fun to come into work.” Continue reading...

Tech giant was ordered to pay $715,000 over YouTube videos but academics say courts may struggle to enforce it

Bloc agrees move to legally require all smartphones to use common charger within two yearsThe EU has paved the way for all smartphones to be legally required to use a USB-C port for charging, a move that could be a headache for Apple, whose iPhone is the only main brand smartphone without this type of connection.The EU’s agreement will apply from autumn 2024 for all smartphones sold in the bloc, a decision that could substantially impact Apple as the iPhone uses Apple’s lightning port for wired charging. Continue reading...

In the next version of the Apple app, you’ll be able to click ‘unsend’ and your message will disappear. Could this be the end of the drunken text?Name: Unsending.Age: Brand new, long overdue. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: from pure escape watches to gripping adventures, my fellow backseat gamers on titles that are as good to view as to play