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TOPIC: tech

In The News

Worldcrunch Magazine #51 — A Tech Shift To The Right?

September 25 - October 1, 2023

Here's the latest edition of Worldcrunch Magazine, a selection of our best articles of the week from top international journalists, produced exclusively in English for Worldcrunch readers.

>> DISCOVER IT HERE <<

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Beyond Musk: Is The Right-Wing Shift Of Tech Spreading Worldwide?

The culture of Silicon Valley was once associated with social liberalism and tolerance. However, the tech community worldwide, from moguls such as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, to IT professionals in Poland, and self-described OSINT users in India, is showing signs of a noted right-wing shift.

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The AI Bug That Can't Be Fixed: Humans Can’t Trust It

The inner workings of Artificial Intelligence are impenetrable, unexplainable and unpredictable. That build in some fundamental limits to its capacity and utility.

There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

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Is There Any Way To Rein In The Power Of Big Tech?

A new biography of the Tesla, X (formerly Twitter) and Space X boss reveals that Elon Musk prevented the Ukrainian army from attacking the Russian fleet in Crimea last year, by limiting the beam of his Starlink satellites. Unchecked power is a problem.

This article was updated Sept. 14, 2023 at 12:20 p.m

-OpEd-

PARIS — Nothing Elon Musk does leaves us indifferent. The billionaire is often admired for his audacity, and regularly criticized for his attitude and some of his decisions.

A biography of the founder and CEO of Tesla and Space X, came out today in the United States — 688 pages published by Simon & Schuster and written by William Isaacson (the renowned biographer of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein).

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One revelation from this book is making headlines, and it's a big one. Elon Musk — brace yourselves — prevented the Ukrainian army from destroying the Russian Black Sea fleet last year.

A bit of context: Starlink, the communications and internet satellite constellation owned by Musk, initially enabled Ukraine to escape Russian blackout attempts.

But when the Ukrainian army decided to send naval drones to destroy Russian ships anchored in Crimea, it found that the signal was blocked. And Starlink refused to extend it to Crimea, because, according to Issacson, Musk feared it would trigger World War III.

It's dizzying, and raises serious questions.

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This Happened

This Happened — September 14: ​First Computer With A Hard Drive

The IBM RAMAC 305, introduced on this day in 1956, was the world's first computer to use a magnetic hard disk drive for data storage. It stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control" and was designed primarily for business data processing.

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Future
Stéphane Loignon

AI And Musicians: A New Instrument To Learn — Or The Job Formerly Known As The Artist?

Depicted by some artists as a threat to creativity, algorithms are used by others as a powerful new instrument, able to stimulate their imagination, expand their creative capabilities and open doors to so-far unexplored worlds.

PARIS — In the music world, there are those who, as Australian singer Nick Cave confided in the New Yorker, consider that ChatGPT should “go to hell and leave songwriting alone," and those who want to give it a try.

French-born mega DJ David Guetta tried his hand at a concert in February, playing, to a stunned crowd, a track composed using only online artificial intelligence services and rapped by a synthesized voice borrowed from Eminem. Two months later, a masked Internet user, Ghostwriter977, posted a fake AI-generated duet by Drake and The Weeknd, “Heart on My Sleeve," on TikTok, without the authorization of either musician.

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Economy
Katarzyna Skiba

Inside Poland’s Quietly Booming Tech Sector

Poland has received widespread investment from multinational companies and now, the country is bucking the worldwide trend by adding jobs in the tech sector.

The Polish economy and its tech sector have experienced marked growth in recent years, especially since it joined the European Union. Poland currently has 60,000 tech companies, including 10 of its own— companies that reach a value of $1 billion without being listed on the stock market.

IT and tech currently accounts for 8% of the Polish GDP. Giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Intel, Samsung and Amazon have all invested in Polish IT and established their own centers within the country. Poland’s central location within Europe, and its proximity to other countries experiencing their own tech successes such as Germany and Lithuania, has also granted it a strategic advantage for additional investment.

In late March, experts began to warn that Polish tech wanted too much too fast, especially when the IT market was impacted by the same layoffs happening across the sector worldwide. Some technicians who did not lose their jobs were allowed to keep them on the condition that they accept a lower pension in the future.

But in spite of these challenges, the sector is still expected to grow. As of June 22, 38% of Polish IT firms have said that they are looking to hire new staff, according to Polish tech news service CRN. Even taking into account those firms saying they are looking to cut down, this amounts to 26% in employment growth across the industry.

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Future
Nir Eisikovits

It's Not That AI Will Get Too Smart — It's That It May Make Us Too Stupid

AI is so far unlikely to trigger a global nuclear catastrophe, but it might gradually undermine humans' capacity for critical and creative thinking as some decision-making and even writing tasks may increasingly be delegated to artificial intelligence.

The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.

Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called “godfathers” of AI: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

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Future
Pierre Haski

Where Altman Meets Macron: The Quest For AI Alignment, Between Private And Public

The inventor of ChatGPT is in Europe to try to force leaders on the Continent to face hard questions about what artificial intelligence is bringing to our world, whether they like it or not.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Six months ago, Sam Altman’s name was only known to a small circle of technophiles. Earlier this week, when he came to France, he was received by President Emmanuel Macron and the Minister of Economy, and he is back in Paris on Friday to make other connections. On his Twitter account, he described his trip as a "World Tour," like a pop star.

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the U.S. company that created ChatGPT, the natural language artificial intelligence tool that has literally shaken the world. With 200 million users worldwide in just six months, ChatGPT has broken all sorts of records for the speed of technology adoption.

The world of Tech is prone to trends, and not all of them last. However, to quote Gilles Babinet, co-president of the National Digital Council in France, who has recently published an essay on the history of the internet titled Comment les hippies, Dieu et la science ont inventé Internet("How the Internet Was Invented by Hippies, God and Science"), we are currently facing an "anthropological break."

In other words, a qualitative leap that will impact all human activities, and even the political organization of our societies — with both positive and negative results.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Maria Zholobova

How Russia Is Still Dodging Sanctions — With Help From Companies Everywhere

A healthy dose of cynicism and short cuts allows parts for weapons and other technology to still make their way into Russia. Independent Russian-language media Vazhnyye Istorii traces the way both Moscow and much of the rest of the world circumvent export bans.

When Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, exporting Western technologies to Russia was effectively banned — at least, on paper.

But through a web of third parties, Russia is still finding ways to dodge the sanctions and import crucial components for weapons and other technology.

In the United States, personal sanctions prohibit American citizens and companies from doing business with specific Russian people and businesses. Other sanctions prevent them from doing business with entire industries. Secondary sanctions may be imposed on non-US companies caught violating US prohibitions.

A special permit is required for any export of high-tech products to Russia. These are only issued in exceptional circumstances, if ever. The largest manufacturers of microelectronics — Analog Devices, Texas Instruments and others — have all ceased commercial activities in Russia.

Still, products made by these companies are increasingly being found in the remains of Russian drones and missiles.

Components continue to enter Russia through a chain of intermediary firms in different countries. For example, an American company can buy them from a manufacturer, then sell them to a Chinese company, which can in turn sell them to a Russian intermediary who is not formally connected with the defense complex — who will then transfer the goods to the arms manufacturer.

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This Happened

This Happened - February 8: Nasdaq Opens

On this day in 1971, NASDAQ, the world's first electronic stock market was created in New York City.

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eyes on the U.S.
Alex Hurst

Eyes On U.S. — Something Broken In The Kingdom Of American Tech

PARIS — There’s a dual story about the U.S. tech scene circulating in the world’s media. The first is structural, about trendlines and economics as Silicon Valley’s all-powerful platforms and companies have seen their stocks tanking and announced large layoffs for the first time ever. The second storyline is about the big tech titans themselves.

No surprises, Twitter is still taking up extraordinary amounts of headline real estate. And it’s impossible to disentangle Twitter the company from its Very-Online new owner, as Elon Musk’s barrage of changes continue to cross new red-lines that could wind up threatening the viability of the company itself.

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