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TOPIC: technology

Future

The European Union v. AI — Good Luck On That!

The European Commission has asked digital platforms to create an "Artificial Intelligence label" to alert users of AI-generated texts, photos or videos. But will it be able to stop the tsunami of misinformation?

-Analysis-

PARIS — How can we continue to trust a text, an image, or a video in the age of artificial intelligence? The question of trust in information has been around for a long time, as we know, but the emergence of powerful tools such as Chat-GPT for text, or Midjourney for photos, and many others, transforms the question into a potential nightmare.

The European Union's executive body, the European Commission, wasted no time in raising the question of how to regulate these technologies, which risk transforming the information space into a jungle. Yesterday, even before the major European law that is being prepared – the AI Law – the Commission took the lead.

It calls on digital platforms to define an AI label that will enable users to know whether a text, photo or video has been generated, in whole or in part, by artificial intelligence. The aim is to limit the explosion of misinformation that could result from these new, unregulated tools.

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AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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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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White House To The World, Artificial Intelligence Is A Political Thing

Amid the summit hosted at the White House, and warning from AI experts, the world can't simply leave the machines to their own devices.

-Analysis-

PARIS — It was a White House summit with significance on two very different levels. Vice President Kamala Harris gathered the major U.S. players in Artificial Intelligence, including Open AI, the company that developed the now infamous chatbot ChatGPT.

The meeting was interesting for having highlighted the role of the vice president, who has been given the task of leading policy on future technologies, just a few days after President Joe Biden launched his campaign for a second term, at the age of 80.

Indeed, Harris' role is all the more essential due to the president's advanced age; she automatically takes his place if he is incapacitated. And as the Democratic vice president has so far not “made an impression” over the past two years, she is being put forward on this topic. And what a topic it is...

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Ideas
Concita De Gregorio

How I Lost My Smartphone And Found My Neighbors

A simple tale from Italy of a hundred strangers in a waiting room, and the limits of our modern obsession with privacy.

ROME — Here's a small personal story that has made me smile and reflect for the past few days: It’s about our obsession with privacy, which can be a pointless battle at a time when, in an online crowd of strangers identified only by numbers, we all find ourselves connected.

We all know everything about each other already. We can even find out about each other’s personal tastes, mutual friends or phone numbers. It's a good thing — here's why.

I enter, as I do every day, the large waiting room of a public place where I will spend the next few hours in the company of a hundred or so people. We have known each other for months, but we do not know each other. We are identified by acronyms, a matter of privacy.

I realize I don’t have my phone. I left it at home or lost it — I don’t know. The place where I am is far from the place where I live, and without a phone I can neither use a car-sharing app to get home nor call a cab — and there are never any taxis to hail at the nearby parking lot.

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Future
Dankwart Guratzsch

The "Ruin Of Art" — How Goethe Predicted Our Current AI Nightmare 220 Years Ago

Goethe was eerily prescient in his predictions about the “unstoppable force” of mechanization. But he didn’t call for a pause in technological advances. More than 200 years ago, he predicted with surprising accuracy how technological and industrial developments would change our world.

BERLIN — What did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe know about computers, algorithms and artificial intelligence? Nothing, of course. But the legendary German writer (1749-1832) possessed the kind of observational gifts that enabled him to foresee where the early days of industrial development would lead – and the changes he predicted are now coming to fruition.

Among Goethe's most currently palpable predictions was the idea of an “art factory,” which would cheaply, quickly and accurately recreate “any painting using entirely mechanical means," by a process that “any child” could be taught to follow. Mass-produced art created by machines – that was the great writer’s nightmarish vision in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

Goethe wrote his essay in 1797, but never published it. The steam engine was invented in 1765 and the mechanical loom in 1784, just 13 years before Goethe wrote his essay. These inventions accelerated a process that had already begun, as the world of work was undergoing a wave of mechanization. The 48-year-old Goethe predicted that the “unstoppable force” of this revolution would fundamentally change the status of art and artists.

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Future
Ramón Oliver

ChatGPT v. Luddites: How AI Has Triggered A New Wave Of Technophobia

Fear of technology is contagious, linked to the rapid evolution of breakthroughs and their impact. So what exactly is technophobia in our AI age... and can it be cured?

-Analysis-

MADRID — Several days before Elon Musk unveiled his latest creation, Optimus, the humanoid robot that he intends to bring en masse into homes around the world — the wealthy ones as its price will be around $20,000 — the internet began to fill with critical comments about the entrepreneur’s new idea.

In theory, Optimus will perform simple household tasks such as watering plants, but its early haters were already talking about the prototype as a new Terminator.

“Just because we can, we must?” wondered an article in the U.S. press reflecting on — in their view — Musk’s irresponsible drive to continually challenge the limits of innovation without regard for its potential consequences.

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Future
Financial Afrik

Foreign Cash, Women Founders: How African Tech Is Bouncing Back, Post-COVID

The African tech ecosystem is bouncing back after a slowdown during the pandemic, with local innovation fueled by increasing investment from foreign tech giants.

DAKAR — Despite a tense macroeconomic context, the growth of the African tech ecosystem shows no sign of slowing down.

In 2022, African startups recorded an 8% increase in investor funding compared to the previous year, according to a 2022 report from PartechAfrica Tech Venture Capital. The context remains favorable to the continent, which is attracting many foreign investment funds.

"The current period is one of a flight to quality," says Melvyn Lubega, an investor at French fund Breega, which has recently boosted its investments in Africa.

This resilience has surprised many observers. After the COVID-19 health crisis, the strength of African economies and continued high growth rates surprised some economists, who had expected a catastrophe.

But digital technology is not immune to good news. Despite an international context of investor withdrawal, liquidity scarcity and never-ending inflation, African tech remains in the green and has managed to attract 1,149 unique investors in 2022, an increase of 29% compared to 2021.

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THE CONVERSATION
Hany Farid

AI And Authenticity: Revenge Of The Watermark

Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.

Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.

Generative AI, in the form of image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and text generators like Bard, ChatGPT, Chinchilla and LLaMA, has exploded in the public sphere. By combining clever machine-learning algorithms with billions of pieces of human-generated content, these systems can do anything from create an eerily realistic image from a caption, synthesize a speech in President Joe Biden’s voice, replace one person’s likeness with another in a video, or write a coherent 800-word op-ed from a title prompt.

Even in these early days, generative AI is capable of creating highly realistic content. My colleague Sophie Nightingale and I found that the average person is unable to reliably distinguish an image of a real person from an AI-generated person. Although audio and video have not yet fully passed through the uncanny valley – images or models of people that are unsettling because they are close to but not quite realistic – they are likely to soon. When this happens, and it is all but guaranteed to, it will become increasingly easier to distort reality.

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Economy
Pierre Haski

Will China Invade Taiwan? Volkswagen's €180 Billion Bet Says 'No'

German automobile giant Volkswagen will invest billions in China to manufacture electric vehicles. It has deemed the risk of China invading Taiwan "unlikely," a peek into the calculations that private-sector conglomerates make, just like state actors.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Automaker Volkswagen has decided to accelerate its investments in electric vehicles: €180 billion, mainly in the United States and China. The Financial Times has reported that the company's management evaluated the risk and concluded that China would not invade Taiwan in the short term. It decided as a result that it was reasonable to invest in China, one of its main markets.

It's an interesting vantage point to undertand events. Governments around the world are questioning China's intentions towards the island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. What is less known is that large companies also need to calculate geopolitical risk and conduct their own analyses.

A few months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the President of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, which represents thousands of companies, sounded the alarm in an interview with an economic magazine. Joerg Wuttke mentioned the trauma of Western companies forced to leave Russia and lose everything, and warned Chinese authorities that the same thing could happen if China invaded Taiwan.

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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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Geopolitics
Ibrahim Naber

Elon Musk, Here's What Unplugging Starlink Means For Ukrainians On The Front Line

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has long been considered one of Ukraine's key supporters, but he has just announced restrictions on the Ukrainian military's use of his Starlink satellites. Die Welt spoke to soldiers on the front lines in Bakhmut who are already feeling the effects.

BAKHMUT — Amid ruins in the eastern Ukrainian frontline town of Chasiv Yar, in front of the shattered window of a high-rise building, Ukrainian soldiers search for Russians on a Monday afternoon.

Bogdan Borodai, 25, part of the 24th Battalion "Aidar", operates a gamepad with buttons and stares at a screen. On it, he sees what their small drone is currently filming from the air.

"That right there," Borodai says, tapping the screen, "is a tank. Every few hours, we spot a bunch of Russian soldiers here."

He says their drone, which costs thousands of euros and is made by the Chinese manufacturer DJI, flies up to 15 kilometers, time and again including into the currently fiercely contested town of Bakhmut. Borodai and his team transmit what they film in real time to their higher-level command center, where they make decisions about firing.

In their drone reconnaissance, Borodai and his team rely on the support of a white portable device they have placed near them. It is a Starlink terminal from the U.S. company SpaceX, founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The Starlink terminals ensure Ukrainian soldiers a stable and fast internet connection everywhere, even in places like Chasiv Yar, where large parts of the infrastructure have been bombed by Russian troops.

"Starlink is one of the most important tools we have in this war," Borodai says. "If that stops now, it would a serious problem."

The soldier has real reasons for concern. In early February, SpaceX announced it would restrict the Ukrainian military's use of Starlink, limiting their possibility to control drones.

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