The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zoë Schlanger: “In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates….NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. … “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s…(More)”.

Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jason Koebler: “Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper about the economic viability of generative AI which notes that there is “little to show for” the huge amount of spending on generative AI infrastructure and questions “whether this large spend will ever pay off in terms of AI benefits and returns.” 

The paper, called “Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit?” is based on a series of interviews with Goldman Sachs economists and researchers, MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, and infrastructure experts. The paper ultimately questions whether generative AI will ever become the transformative technology that Silicon Valley and large portions of the stock market are currently betting on, but says investors may continue to get rich anyway. “Despite these concerns and constraints, we still see room for the AI theme to run, either because AI starts to deliver on its promise, or because bubbles take a long time to burst,” the paper notes. 

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that AI optimism is driving large growth in stocks like Nvidia and other S&P 500 companies (the largest companies in the stock market), but say that the stock price gains we’ve seen are based on the assumption that generative AI is going to lead to higher productivity (which necessarily means automation, layoffs, lower labor costs, and higher efficiency). These stock gains are already baked in, Goldman Sachs argues in the paper: “Although the productivity pick-up that AI promises could benefit equities via higher profit growth, we find that stocks often anticipate higher productivity growth before it materializes, raising the risk of overpaying. And using our new long-term return forecasting framework, we find that a very favorable AI scenario may be required for the S&P 500 to deliver above-average returns in the coming decade.”…(More)“

The era of predictive AI Is almost over

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Dean W. Ball: “Artificial intelligence is a Rorschach test. When OpenAI’s GPT-4 was released in March 2023, Microsoft researchers triumphantly, and prematurely, announced that it possessed “sparks” of artificial general intelligence. Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, on the other hand, argued that Large Language Models like GPT-4 are nowhere close to the loosely defined concept of AGI. Indeed, Marcus is skeptical of whether these models “understand” anything at all. They “operate over ‘fossilized’ outputs of human language,” he wrote in a 2023 paper, “and seem capable of implementing some automatic computations pertaining to distributional statistics, but are incapable of understanding due to their lack of generative world models.” The “fossils” to which Marcus refers are the models’ training data — these days, something close to all the text on the Internet.

This notion — that LLMs are “just” next-word predictors based on statistical models of text — is so common now as to be almost a trope. It is used, both correctly and incorrectly, to explain the flaws, biases, and other limitations of LLMs. Most importantly, it is used by AI skeptics like Marcus to argue that there will soon be diminishing returns from further LLM development: We will get better and better statistical approximations of existing human knowledge, but we are not likely to see another qualitative leap toward “general intelligence.”

There are two problems with this deflationary view of LLMs. The first is that next-word prediction, at sufficient scale, can lead models to capabilities that no human designed or even necessarily intended — what some call “emergent” capabilities. The second problem is that increasingly — and, ironically, starting with ChatGPT — language models employ techniques that combust the notion of pure next-word prediction of Internet text…(More)”

Your Driving App Is Leading You Astray

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Angwin: “…If you use a navigation app, you probably have felt helpless anger when your stupid phone endangers your life, and the lives of all the drivers around you, to potentially shave a minute or two from your drive time. Or maybe it’s stuck you on an ugly freeway when a glorious, ocean-hugging alternative lies a few miles away. Or maybe it’s trapped you on a route with no four-way stops, ignoring a less stressful solution that doesn’t leave you worried about a car barreling out of nowhere.

For all the discussion of the many extraordinary ways algorithms have changed our society and our lives, one of the most impactful, and most infuriating, often escapes notice. Dominated by a couple of enormously powerful tech monopolists that have better things to worry about, our leading online mapping systems from Google and Apple are not nearly as good as they could be.

You may have heard the extreme stories, such as when navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps apparently steered drivers into lakes and onto impassable dirt roads, or when jurisdictions beg Waze to stop dumping traffic onto their residential streets. But the reality is these apps affect us, our roads and our communities every minute of the day. Primarily programmed to find the fastest route, they endanger and infuriate us on a remarkably regular basis….

The best hope for competition relies on the success of OpenStreetMap. Its data underpins most maps other than Google, including Amazon, Facebook and Apple, but it is so under-resourced that it only recently hired paid systems administrators to ensure its back-end machines kept running….In addition, we can promote competition by using the few available alternatives. To navigate cities with public transit, try apps such as Citymapper that offer bike, transit and walking directions. Or use the privacy-focused Organic Maps…(More)”.

A new index is using AI tools to measure U.S. economic growth in a broader way

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeff Cox: “Measuring the strength of the sprawling U.S. economy is no easy task, so one firm is sending artificial intelligence in to do the job.

The Zeta Economic Index, launched Monday, uses generative AI to analyze what its developers call “trillions of behavioral signals,” largely focused on consumer activity, to score growth on both a broad level of health and a separate measure on stability.

At its core, the index will gauge online and offline activity across eight categories, aiming to give a comprehensive look that incorporates standard economic data points such as unemployment and retail sales combined with high-frequency information for the AI age.

“The algorithm is looking at traditional economic indicators that you would normally look at. But then inside of our proprietary algorithm, we’re ingesting the behavioral data and transaction data of 240 million Americans, which nobody else has,” said David Steinberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Zeta Global.

“So instead of looking at the data in the rearview mirror like everybody else, we’re trying to put it out in advance to give a 30-day advanced snapshot of where the economy is going,” he added…(More)”.

How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Americans’ Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sohini Desai: “In 1904, a widow named Elizabeth Peck had her portrait taken at a studio in a small Iowa town. The photographer sold the negatives to Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a company that avoided liquor taxes for years by falsely advertising its product as medicinal. Duffy’s ads claimed the fantastical: that it cured everything from influenza to consumption, that it was endorsed by clergymen, that it could help you live until the age of 106. The portrait of Peck ended up in one of these dubious ads, published in newspapers across the country alongside what appeared to be her unqualified praise: “After years of constant use of your Pure Malt Whiskey, both by myself and as given to patients in my capacity as nurse, I have no hesitation in recommending it.”

Duffy’s lies were numerous. Peck (misleadingly identified as “Mrs. A. Schuman”) was not a nurse, and she had not spent years constantly slinging back malt beverages. In fact, she fully abstained from alcohol. Peck never consented to the ad.

The camera’s first great age—which began in 1888 when George Eastman debuted the Kodak—is full of stories like this one. Beyond the wonders of a quickly developing art form and technology lay widespread lack of control over one’s own image, perverse incentives to make a quick buck, and generalized fear at the prospect of humiliation and the invasion of privacy…(More)”.

Enhancing human mobility research with open and standardized datasets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Takahiro Yabe et al: “The proliferation of large-scale, passively collected location data from mobile devices has enabled researchers to gain valuable insights into various societal phenomena. In particular, research into the science of human mobility has become increasingly critical thanks to its interdisciplinary effects in various fields, including urban planning, transportation engineering, public health, disaster management, and economic analysis. Researchers in the computational social science, complex systems, and behavioral science communities have used such granular mobility data to uncover universal laws and theories governing individual and collective human behavior. Moreover, computer science researchers have focused on developing computational and machine learning models capable of predicting complex behavior patterns in urban environments. Prominent papers include pattern-based and deep learning approaches to next-location prediction and physics-inspired approaches to flow prediction and generation.

Regardless of the research problem of interest, human mobility datasets often come with substantial limitations. Existing publicly available datasets are often small, limited to specific transport modes, or geographically restricted, owing to the lack of open-source and large-scale human mobility datasets caused by privacy concerns…(More)”.

Water Shortages in Latin America: How Can Behavioral Science Help?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Juan Roa Duarte: “Today in 2024, one of Latin America’s largest cities, Bogota, is facing significant challenges due to prolonged droughts exacerbated by El Niño. As reservoir levels plummet, local governments have implemented water rationing measures to manage the crisis. However, these rationing measures have remained unsuccessful after one month of implementation—in fact, water usage increased during the first week.1 But why? What solution can finally help solve this crisis?

In this article, we will explore how behavioral science can help Latin American cities mitigate their water shortages—and how, surprisingly, a method my hometown Bogota used back in the ‘90s can shed some light on this current issue. We’ll also explore some modern behavioral science strategies that can be used in parallel…(More)”

The tools of global spycraft have changed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “A few years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected CCTV cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.

The attack was not revealed by an Indian or Western intelligence agency, but by Recorded Future, a firm in Somerville, Massachusetts. Christopher Ahlberg, its boss, claims the company has knowledge of more c2 nodes than anyone in the world. “We use that to bust Chinese and Russian intel operations constantly.” It also has billions of stolen log-in details found on the dark web (a hard-to-access part of the internet) and collects millions of images daily. “We know every UK company, every Chinese company, every Indian company,” says Mr Ahlberg.  Recorded Future has 1,700 clients in 75 countries, including 47 governments.

The Chinese intrusion and its discovery were a microcosm of modern intelligence. The internet, and devices connected to it, is everywhere, offering opportunities galore for surveillance, entrapment and covert operations. The entities monitoring it, and acting on it, are often private firms, not government agencies…(More)” See Special Issue on Watching the Watchers

UN adopts Chinese resolution with US support on closing the gap in access to artificial intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Edith Lederer: “The U.N. General Assembly adopted a Chinese-sponsored resolution with U.S. support urging wealthy developed nations to close the widening gap with poorer developing countries and ensure that they have equal opportunities to use and benefit from artificial intelligence.

The resolution approved Monday follows the March 21 adoption of the first U.N. resolution on artificial intelligence spearheaded by the United States and co-sponsored by 123 countries including China. It gave global support to the international effort to ensure that AI is “safe, secure and trustworthy” and that all nations can take advantage of it.

Adoption of the two nonbinding resolutions shows that the United States and China, rivals in many areas, are both determined to be key players in shaping the future of the powerful new technology — and have been cooperating on the first important international steps.

The adoption of both resolutions by consensus by the 193-member General Assembly shows widespread global support for their leadership on the issue.

Fu Cong, China’s U.N. ambassador, told reporters Monday that the two resolutions are complementary, with the U.S. measure being “more general” and the just-adopted one focusing on “capacity building.”

He called the Chinese resolution, which had more than 140 sponsors, “great and far-reaching,” and said, “We’re very appreciative of the positive role that the U.S. has played in this whole process.”

Nate Evans, spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said Tuesday that the Chinese-sponsored resolution “was negotiated so it would further the vision and approach the U.S. set out in March.”

“We worked diligently and in good faith with developing and developed countries to strengthen the text, ensuring it reaffirms safe, secure, and trustworthy AI that respects human rights, commits to digital inclusion, and advances sustainable development,” Evans said.

Fu said that AI technology is advancing extremely fast and the issue has been discussed at very senior levels, including by the U.S. and Chinese leaders.

“We do look forward to intensifying our cooperation with the United States and for that matter with all countries in the world on this issue, which … will have far-reaching implications in all dimensions,” he said…(More)”.