Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Telecoms giant BT to cut 55,000 jobs with up to 1/5 replaced by technologies including artificial intelligence

BT Group

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Telecoms giant BT is to shed up to 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade, mostly in the UK, as it cuts costs.
  • He said “generative AI” tools such as ChatGPT – which can write essays, scripts, poems, and solve computer coding in a human-like way – “gives us confidence we can go even further”.
  • In addition, newer, more efficient technology, including artificial intelligence, means fewer people will be needed to serve customers in future, it said.

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CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT tells Senate Committee Regulation of Artificial Intelligence is needed

Sam Altman

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, calls for US to regulate artificial intelligence
  • The creator of advanced chatbot ChatGPT has called on US lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Altman said a new agency should be formed to license AI companies.
  • He has not shied away from addressing the ethical questions that AI raises, and has pushed for more regulation.
  • “There will be an impact on jobs. We try to be very clear about that,” he said, adding that the government will “need to figure out how we want to mitigate that”.
  • Altman told legislators he was worried about the potential impact on democracy, and how AI could be used to send targeted misinformation during elections – a prospect he said is among his “areas of greatest concerns”.
  • The technology is moving so fast that legislators also wondered whether such an agency would be capable of keeping up.

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Researchers struggling to understand how AI performs advanced tasks it was never taught

Artificial-Intelligence

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage
  • Some of these systems’ abilities go far beyond what they were trained to do—and even their inventors are baffled as to why.
  • That GPT and other AI systems perform tasks they were not trained to do, giving them “emergent abilities,” has surprised even researchers who have been generally skeptical about the hype over LLMs (large language models)
  • Researchers are finding that these systems seem to achieve genuine understanding of what they have learned.

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A noninvasive Brain Decoder; AI system to help those debilitated by strokes to communicate intelligibly again

Brain Thoughts Decoder

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Brain Activity Decoder Can Reveal Stories in People’s Minds
  • A new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person’s brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.
  • Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.
  • “For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.”

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‘Godfather’ of AI says we are in a pivotal moment to carefully consider the consequences

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist, is best known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence.” His seminal work on neural networks broke the mold by mimicking the processes of human cognition, and went on to form the foundation of machine learning models today.
  • Hinton shared his thoughts on the current state of AI, which he fashions to be in a “pivotal moment,”
  • “Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI,” Hinton said. “And now I think it may be 20 years or less.”
  • Hinton says we should be carefully considering its consequences now — which may include the minor issue of it trying to wipe out humanity.
  • “It’s not inconceivable, that’s all I’ll say,” Hinton told CBS.
  • Hinton maintains that the real issue on the horizon is how AI technology that we already have…could be monopolized by power-hungry governments and corporations
  • But Hinton predicts that “we’re going to move towards systems that can understand different world views” — which is spooky, because it inevitably means whoever is wielding the AI could use it push a worldview of their own.
  • “You don’t want some big for-profit company deciding what’s true,” Hinton warned.

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Internet explodes when AI images of Trump being arrested go viral

Trump Black Tie

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Fake AI images of ‘Trump arrest’ hit internet
  • Fabricated images of former President Trump being arrested are circulating social media as the country prepares for his possible indictment this week.
  • The images, created using artificial intelligence software (AI), show what appears to be a large group of New York City Police Department officers arresting the former president as he resists to be detained. Some of the images that were posted on Twitter even depict Trump being forced to the ground, while another image shows him running away from the police officers.
  • The New York City Police Department confirmed to the Associated Press on Tuesday that no arrest of Trump has been made.

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Fired Google Engineer warns that AI is already being deployed; consequences are not fully understood

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Fired Google Engineer Doubles Down on Claim That AI Has Gained Sentience
  • Blake Lemoine — the fired Google engineer who last year went to the press with claims that Google’s Large Language Model (LLM), the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), is actually sentient…
  • According to Webster’s Dictionary Sentient means responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
  • He’s contending that a machine’s ability to break from its training as a result of some kind of stressor is reason enough to conclude that the machine has achieved some level of sentience. A machine saying that it’s stressed out is one thing — but acting stressed, he says, is another.
  • …Lemoine on another point. Regardless of sentience, AI is getting both advanced and unpredictable — sure, they’re exciting and impressive, but also quite dangerous.
  • “I believe the kinds of AI that are currently being developed are the most powerful technology that has been invented since the atomic bomb,” “In my view, this technology has the ability to reshape the world.”
  • “I can’t tell you specifically what harms will happen,”… when a culture-changing piece of technology is put into the world before the potential consequences of that technology can be fully understood.
  • “I can simply observe that there’s a very powerful technology that I believe has not been sufficiently tested and is not sufficiently well understood, being deployed at a large scale, in a critical role of information dissemination.”

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UN pushing New Age Spirituality and Sustainable Development on Kids: Their goal is to “Change mindsets” and “Challenge Norms”

Transforming Education

2 Peter 2:1 “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.”

Important Takeaways:

  • UN Pushing New Age Spirituality on Schoolchildren With SEL, Neuroscience
  • An obscure United Nations institute is quietly working to transform education worldwide to impose radical political and spiritual values and beliefs on children. It is all happening under the guise of “social-emotional learning,” or SEL, a scheme hatched at a New Age organization whose founder and namesake was a follower of Lucifer Publishing Company chief Alice Bailey.
  • The organization in question, part of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is known as the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, or UNESCO MGIEP for short.
  • The organization publicly claims it is merely working to give children “kinder brains” through its programs so the world can be more peaceful and “sustainable.” But in reality, the institute is a key vehicle for injecting occult “spirituality” into classrooms worldwide, as called for in Chapter 36 of the UN’s Agenda 21 global plan for “sustainable development.”
  • In a very revealing video posted on the organization’s homepage, numerous red flags can be observed. One of the books that flashes by, for example, is “Blinded by Faith.” When one of the students in the video logs on to her “virtual platform,” her options are “climate change and ethics,” “math in life,” and “migration and conflict.”
  • At the end of the short video, the UN institute sums up its aims: “Changing mindsets,” “Challenging norms,” and “Transforming education for humanity.”
  • “Our children are active change makers who can help us grow up and become a more conscious, aware and mindful society.” The UN frequently refers to children under its tutelage as “agents of change” and “change makers,” including in the UN’s Agenda 2030 “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs).
  • The UN is even working to bring artificial intelligence into the process of indoctrinating and fundamentally transforming the minds of future generations — for more on this see the 2019 UN meeting in Beijing on using AI in education. Families who value their children, their faith, their nations, their liberties, and their God must sever all ties with the system, before it is too late

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Extreme weather to push property insurance higher -Hippo CEO

By Noor Zainab Hussain and Carolyn Cohn

(Reuters) – Extreme weather events and shortage of labor and materials for repairs will push property insurance rates higher in the next several years, the chief executive of U.S. home insurer Hippo said on Tuesday.

As homeowners stayed home during the pandemic, their properties suffered more damage due to issues such as bathroom leaks, and it was harder to get tradespeople in to mop up, Assaf Wand, chief executive officer and co-founder of Hippo said in an interview at the Reuters Future of Insurance USA conference.

“The severity of the claims increased quite significantly,” Wand said, pointing to higher rates charged by plumbers and to buy lumber.

Those prices were likely to normalize as the U.S. economy opens up following the vaccination roll-out, but hurricanes and wildfires are leading to increased damage as more people move to disaster-prone locations, he added.

“I expect to see rates increase over the next several years,” Wand said.

“Labor and materials keep on increasing…the severity of catastrophic events keeps on increasing.”

Insurers are taking increasing note of climate change, with many fearing the rapid changes could make some premiums unaffordable, especially for customers exposed to extreme weather events.

Insurers and banks are also facing stricter regulatory scrutiny over their response to global warming, with shareholders expecting better disclosures and transparency on climate-related risks.

One advantage of the pandemic, however, was that “the world has shifted three to five years forward on digitalization,” Wand added.

Hippo in March said it would go public through a $5 billion merger with a blank-check firm backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, in a sign of rising interest in the fast-growing “insurtech” sector.

Founded in 2015, Palo Alto-based Hippo sells homeowners insurance online.

Home insurance products offered through Hippo are currently available in 32 U.S. states, covering more than 70% of the country’s population, and the company expects its products to be available to 95% of the population by the end of 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the insurance sector to rely heavily on technology to reach customers, helping the “insurtech” sector, which uses artificial intelligence and big data.

Both insurance and technology need to do more on inclusion, Wand said.

“These two are industries that are just not diverse enough,” Wand said, adding that Hippo was hiring data scientists and customer agents from other sectors to help improve diversity.

“We are trying to push and nudge.”

Insurtech Tractable told Reuters earlier this month that it is keen to boost diversity in a typically male-dominated sector, adding that more than 20% of its software engineers are women, above the industry average.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru and Carolyn Cohn in London; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

China could rule world’s technology, UK cyber spy chief says

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) -The West must urgently act to ensure China does not dominate important emerging technologies and gain control of the “global operating system,” Britain’s top cyber spy said on Friday.

In an unusually blunt speech, Jeremy Fleming, director of the GCHQ spy agency, said the West faced a battle for control of technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.

“Significant technology leadership is moving East,” Fleming said at Imperial College London. “The concern is that China’s size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.”

“We are now facing a moment of reckoning,” he said.

World powers will compete to shape the future by developing the best technology, hiring the people with the best brains and dominating the global standards that will govern the technologies, Fleming said.

GCHQ, which gathers communications from around the world to identify and disrupt threats to Britain, has a close relationship with the U.S. National Security Agency and with the eavesdropping agencies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a consortium called “Five Eyes”.

Fleming said that if Britain wished to remain a global cyber power then it would have to develop “sovereign” quantum technologies, including cryptographic technologies, to protect sensitive information and capabilities.

Fleming said quantum computing, which uses the phenomena of quantum mechanics to deliver a leap forward in computation, was getting closer and posed huge opportunities but also risks.

The West should forge ahead with developing quantum-proof algorithms, he said, “so we’re also prepared for those adversaries who might use a quantum computer to look back at things that we currently think are secure”.

He called for better fostering of market conditions to enable innovation, and create a diversity of supply in a broader set of technologies.

Fleming said China was “bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets” while trying to dominate debates about global standards.

He said digital currencies held significant promise to revolutionize the finance sector but posed a potential threat to liberties if abused by illiberal states as they could enable “significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies”.

Russia remains the biggest immediate threat to the West but Communist China’s long-term dominance of technology poses a much bigger problem, he said.

“Russia is affecting the weather, whilst China is shaping the climate,” he said.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Michael Holden, Kate Holton and Timothy Heritage)