Microsoft is launching a $25 million initiative to use artificial intelligence to build better technology for people with disabilities. CEO Satya Nadella announced the new “AI for Accessibility” effort as he kicked off Microsoft’s annual conference for software developers. The Build conference in Seattle is meant to foster enthusiasm for the company’s latest ventures in… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Ethical issues
China and Taiwan clash over Wikipedia edits
Ask Google or Siri: “What is Taiwan?” “A state”, they will answer, “in East Asia”. But earlier in September, it would have been a “province in the People’s Republic of China”. For questions of fact, many search engines, digital assistants and phones all point to one place: Wikipedia. And Wikipedia had suddenly changed. The edit… Read more »
‘Racist’ AI art warns against bad training data
An artificial-intelligence art project has been criticised for using racist and sexist tags to classify its users. When they share a selfie with ImageNet Roulette, the web app matches it to the ones it most closely resembles from an enormous library of profile photos. It then reveals the most popular tag, assigned to the matching pictures… Read more »
Google’s ‘secret web tracking pages’ explained
Google has been accused of using hidden webpages that are assigned to users to provide more information to advertisers about their every move online. The allegation has been added to a complaint lodged with the Irish Data Protection Commission. The tech firm insists it acts in accordance with EU privacy laws. It comes a day after… Read more »
‘Dangerous’ AI offers to write fake news
An artificial intelligence system that generates realistic stories, poems and articles has been updated, with some claiming it is now almost as good as a human writer. The text generator, built by research firm OpenAI, was originally considered “too dangerous” to make public because of the potential for abuse. But now a new, more powerful version… Read more »
Amazon wristbands could track workers’ hand movements
Amazon recently won patents for wristbands that could be used as part of an inventory system, communicating with equipment in warehouses and nudging employees via vibrations if, for example, they were about to place items in the wrong bins. But in a world where the legal limits on gathering and using people’s data remain largely undefined,… Read more »
Huawei: A simple guide to why the company is in so much trouble
A lot of people are talking about Huawei – and not just because they make really well reviewed, top-end phones. The Chinese company is in pretty hot water in various places, because certain people believe they are using their tech to spy on people – something the company totally denies. There’s a court case against… Read more »
Facebook ‘struck secret deals over user data’
Emails written by Facebook’s chief and his deputies show the firm struck secret deals to give some developers special access to user data while refusing others, according to MPs. A cache of internal documents has been published online by a parliamentary committee. It said the files also showed Facebook had deliberately made it “as hard as possible”… Read more »
What It Takes to Make Instagram Influencing a Full-Time Career
Meghan Young is a professional Instagram star. She gets paid to climb beautiful mountains, photograph their glittering summits and post about her adventures to her fans. “My job is to make it look effortless, to look like it’s the most fun ever and it’s never a job,” she says. “But it is a job.” Young,… Read more »
The Brutal Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss
HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments. Its Skill Mapper graphically represents the credentials and abilities of a workforce; its Keeper service identifies when employees are at risk of leaving for another job. Both draw the overwhelming majority of their data from a single trove: the material that is… Read more »
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