Author: The Conversation

by Thomas Daum, University of Hohenheim; Frédéric Baudron, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT); Ingo Grass, University of Hohenheim; Matin Qaim, University of Bonn, and Regina Birner, University of Hohenheim Cultivating one hectare of maize used to be an arduous task for Precious Banda, a farmer in Zambia. It would take her hundreds of hours to prepare her land before sowing and to keep it weed-free until harvest – equipped with nothing but a small hoe. She says it was backbreaking work: “I can still feel it.” For a few years now she has hired a tractor, and a…

by Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston 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…

by Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder Twitter’s move on July 1, 2023, to limit the number of tweets users can see in a day was the latest in a series of decisions that has spurred millions of users to sign up with alternative microblogging platforms since Elon Musk acquired Twitter last year. In addition to a surge in numbers on Mastodon, the acquisition and subsequent changes boosted small existing platforms like Hive Social and has spawned brand new upstarts like Spoutible and Spill. Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of…

by Mohammed Hassan, University of Arizona If you’ve ever wished you had a faster phone, computer or internet connection, you’ve encountered the personal experience of hitting a limit of technology. But there might be help on the way. Over the past several decades, scientists and engineers like me have worked to develop faster transistors, the electronic components underlying modern electronic and digital communications technologies. These efforts have been based on a category of materials called semiconductors that have special electrical properties. Silicon is perhaps the best known example of this type of material. But about a decade ago, scientific efforts…

by David Luke, London School of Economics and Political Science A new European law that imposes the first ever carbon border tax in the world comes into force in October 2023. It will be applied gradually over the next three years before it is fully implemented. A carbon tax is a type of levy imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. It is meant to encourage companies to adopt clean methods of production. But firms could get around the tax by moving production units outside the EU to countries with less strict terms, such as those in Africa, and then exporting products…

by Adrian Barnett, Queensland University of Technology Fraud in science is alarmingly common. Sometimes researchers lie about results and invent data to win funding and prestige. Other times, researchers might pay to stage and publish entirely bogus studies to win an undeserved pay rise – fuelling a “paper mill” industry worth an estimated €1 billion a year. Some of this rubbish can be easily spotted by peer reviewers, but the peer review system has become badly stretched by ever-rising paper numbers. And there’s a new threat, as more sophisticated AI is able to generate plausible scientific data. The latest idea…

by Eric Zeng, Carnegie Mellon University The European Union filed an antitrust case against Google on June 14, 2023, charging that the company abused its power in the online advertising market to disadvantage its competition. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a similar civil antitrust suit against Google on Jan. 24, 2023. The online ad ecosystem is largely built around “programmatic advertising,” a system for placing advertisements from millions of advertisers on millions of websites. The system uses computers to automate bidding by advertisers on available ad spaces, often with transactions occurring faster than would be possible manually. Google runs…

by Brendan H. O’Connor, Arizona State University ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to “embrace the benefits” of this “new frontier.” It’s a classic example of what my colleague Punya Mishra calls the “doom-hype cycle” around new technologies. Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction – whether paranoid or starry-eyed – tends to emphasize its newness. In one sense, it is undeniably new. Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech journalist couldn’t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him. In…

Could organizations use artificial intelligence (AI) language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways? Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters. Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind. Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues…

by Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, University of Birmingham The recent news that BT would reduce its workforce by as many as 55,000 by 2030, including about 10,000 jobs replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), is part of a growing trend of job losses globally due to various forms of automation. This is borne out by several industry reports, including one from McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) acknowledging that as many as 800 million jobs may be lost globally due to changes in technology by 2030. In our book Work 3.0, the author and business adviser Avik Chanda and I contend that, due to automation…