Author: The Conversation

The Italian police recently arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the alleged leader of the Sicilian Mafia who has been on the run since 1993. To aid in the search, the Carabinieri issued an artificially aged image to show what he might look like now. Artists have traditionally made these images by altering old photos of the suspect – adding wrinkles, hair loss and other common aspects of ageing. But in recent years there has been a move towards using computer systems that employ machine learning, a much more sophisticated and formalised way of changing people’s faces. We can’t predict with certainty…

Tinder and other dating apps have come to define modern dating, and notoriously so. Users download the Tinder app to their phones or other devices and can then view the profiles of potential dates nearby. If they think someone might be a match, they swipe to the right on their touchscreens to show interest. If the other person swipes right too, a chat can begin, which might lead to an in-person meeting. This initial introduction involves minimal information – a photo and some basic details about yourself. The result is that romance and trust are sometimes assumed to be missing…

This year marks 100 years since radio was introduced in South Africa, through “the first experimental broadcast at the Railway Headquarters in Johannesburg” on 18 December 1923. A century on, up to 94% of South Africans over the age of 15 confirmed in a recent survey that they owned a radio set in one form or other. Radio remains firmly in place as the country’s most loved medium. Millions tune in daily to 40 commercial and public broadcast stations and over 250 community stations. Although other forms, like television, have threatened, as the song goes, to kill “the radio star”,…

The popular Netflix ‘Wednesday’ series chronicles the adventures of the Addams family’s teen daughter. After her parents send her to Nevermore Academy, a school for “outcasts,” Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega, is pulled into a perplexing murder mystery. The show is infused with elements of the supernatural but also contains scenes that may leave viewers wondering, “Could that really happen in real life?” I’m a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, where we study the effects of drugs and poisons on the body. Some of the scenes in “Wednesday” raise intriguing questions about…

Sharing platforms have become a regular part of our lives for travel and daily needs, especially for young people. In 2018, Airbnb reported that the majority of its users were millennials. And with the ongoing cost of living crisis, more people may turn to these platforms as ways to save on their travel, or to make extra money by sharing their property. Companies such as Airbnb and Turo (a car-sharing platform) are often more affordable and flexible than traditional hotels or car hire services. But using them can also expose you to liability risks if something goes awry. It might…

For most American workers who commute, the trip to and from the office takes nearly one full hour a day – 26 minutes each way on average, with 7.7% of workers spending two hours or more on the road. Many people think of commuting as a chore and a waste of time. However, during the remote work surge resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several journalists curiously noted that people were – could it be? – missing their commutes. One woman told The Washington Post that even though she was working from home, she regularly sat in her car in the…

It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job: A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about…

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a question that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: do we really need to be in the office all the time? At the height of the pandemic, working remotely was viewed as a safeguard, protecting employees from the spread of infections. Over time a consensus has developed that working remotely has had benefits but has also raised health concerns. To provide some answers to the question, I did research on the experience of working remotely from the perspective of 23 female middle managers working in the South African public service. It was…

California is embarking on an audacious new climate plan that aims to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas footprint by 2045, and in the process, slash emissions far beyond its borders. The blueprint calls for massive transformations in industry, energy and transportation, as well as changes in institutions and human behaviors. These transformations won’t be easy. Two years of developing the plan have exposed myriad challenges and tensions, including environmental justice, affordability and local rule. For example, the San Francisco Fire Commission had prohibited batteries with more than 20 kilowatt-hours of power storage in homes, severely limiting the ability to store…

When people think about artificial intelligence (AI), they may have visions of the future. But AI is already here. At its base, it is the recreation of aspects of human intelligence in computerised form. Like human intelligence, it has wide application. Voice-operated personal assistants like Siri, self-driving cars, and text and image generators all use AI. It also curates our social media feeds. It helps companies to detect fraud and hire employees. It’s used to manage livestock, enhance crop yields and aid medical diagnoses. Alongside its growing power and its potential, AI raises moral and ethical questions. The technology has…

Copper is all around us. The metal is both ever-present and invisible in our world. Copper makes reading the words on this screen possible. And the global spread of artificial light, electric power and telecommunications all required ever-increasing quantities of copper. Where does all of this copper come from? How was it produced, distributed, controlled, and sold on an ever-increasing scale? These are some of the questions addressed in a recenty published book, Born with a Copper Spoon: A Global History of Copper. The book is a global study of a metal that has transformed the globe. Contributors to the…

Experienced directors of companies are in high demand in countries around the world. For this reason, many hold multiple directorships. There’s an upside to this. Directors with multiple directorships are able to gain more knowledge, experience and access to social networks and resources, thus adding more value to the company. But there’s also a downside. When directors sit on too many company boards they might become what’s referred to as ‘overboarded’. When directors serve on an excessive number of boards, they run the risk of not having the time or capacity to contribute effectively to the work of each board.…

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has the ability to generate human-like text, making it capable of engaging in natural language conversations. This technology has the potential to revolutionise the way we interact with computers, and it has already begun to be integrated into various industries. However, the implementation of ChatGPT in the field of higher education in the UK poses a number of challenges that must be carefully considered. If ChatGPT is used to grade assignments or exams, there is the possibility that it could be biased against certain groups of students. For example, ChatGPT…

You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet – could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back door. They could have infected your device with malware to make it a “bot” or a “zombie” and be using it – perhaps with hundreds of other unwitting victims’ phones – to launch a cyberattack. Bot is short for robot. But cyberbots don’t look like the robots of science fiction such as R2-D2. They are software applications that perform repetitive tasks they have been programmed to do. They…

It’s hard to imagine that the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the fourth industrial revolution can be part of the same conversation. But, as a briefing paper by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) points out: Over 70% of the 136 SDG targets could be enabled by technology applications already in deployment. To be achieved, both ideas – sustainable development and the fourth industrial revolution – require innovative thinking and a change of attitude. The fourth industrial revolution is defined by many as a period of rapid evolution caused by digitalisation, globalisation and technological innovation. It has…

China has rapidly become Africa’s most important infrastructure builder, and the footprint of Chinese construction companies is seen in cities, towns and villages across the continent. With the launch of Beijing’s “Go Global” policy in 2000, and President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, the volume of roads, bridges, railways, power stations and other infrastructure built by China has increased markedly. The number of overseas contracts signed by Chinese companies more than doubled from just under 6,000 in 2004 to almost 12,000 in 2019. In 2019, Chinese companies won over US$250 billion of infrastructure contracts around the world,…

From steam power and electricity to computers and the internet, technological advancements have always disrupted labor markets, pushing out some jobs while creating others. Artificial intelligence (AI) remains something of a misnomer – the smartest computer systems still don’t actually know anything – but the technology has reached an inflection point where it’s poised to affect new classes of jobs: artists and knowledge workers. Specifically, the emergence of large language models – AI systems that are trained on vast amounts of text – means computers can now produce human-sounding written language and convert descriptive phrases into realistic images. The Conversation…

Where is the global economy heading in 2023? After all the challenges of last year, it’s a question we ask with trepidation. Just as the economy was dealing with the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February ramped up inflation. Significant rises in the cost of vital items such as food and energy created a cost of living crisis that has engulfed households and businesses. Central banks reacted with a raft of interest-rate hikes, while a wave of industrial action saw workers in many countries fighting for pay and conditions to keep pace with this…

Imagine starting your work day with a fresh coconut juice perched by your laptop as you gaze over the ocean or a tropical rainforest. It’s the sort of thing to fantasise about during long, tiresome commutes and days in a claustrophobic, noisy office. But so long as you have the right type of job, and an accommodating employer (not Elon Musk), it could be your reality. The war for talent is no longer just between companies. More than 40 nations or territories now offer “digital nomad” visas to attract those able to be employed in one country while living, and…

By Bomikazi Zeka Debt, in some form or another, is part of our financial profiles whether we like it or not. And it can be a useful way to build wealth if it is managed carefully and wisely. For example, you may borrow money from the bank to buy an asset – a resource of economic value that generates income from its productive use. Investment property is an example. So investing in an income-producing property can be a good idea. If you are already in the property market, the home equity you’ve accumulated – the share of the property value…

Your heart beats around 100,000 times every day. Heart rate is a key marker of cardiovascular activity and an important vital sign. But your pulse is not as steady as a precision clock – nor would you want it to be. As a cardiovascular physiologist, I measure heart rate in nearly every experiment my students and I perform. Sometimes we use an electrocardiogram, such as you’d see in a medical clinic, which uses sticky electrodes to measure electrical signals between two points of your body. Other times we use a chest strap monitor, like ones you might see on someone…

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has given us a glimpse into the future of teaching and learning alongside artificial intelligence. Educators immediately pointed out the chatbot’s ability to generate meaningful responses to questions from assessments and exams. And it’s often not possible to attribute these responses to a particular source – making it difficult to detect plagiarism. Concerns didn’t go unnoticed. Shortly after ChatGPT’s release, OpenAI announced it was developing a “digital watermark” to embed into the chatbot’s responses. This kind of watermark is embedded as a digital signal that can identify the content as being AI-generated, and which…

A group of researchers studied 15 months of human mobility movement data taken from 1.5 million people and concluded that just four points in space and time were sufficient to identify 95% of them, even when the data weren’t of excellent quality. That was back in 2013. Nearly ten years on, surveillance technologies permeate all aspects of our lives. They collect swathes of data from us in various forms, and often without us knowing. I’m a surveillance researcher with a focus on technology governance. Here’s my round-up of widespread surveillance systems I think everyone should know about. CCTV and open-access…

In August 1955, a group of scientists made a funding request for $13,500 to host a summer workshop at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The field they proposed to explore was artificial intelligence (AI). While the funding request was humble, the conjecture of the researchers was not: “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”. Since these humble beginnings, movies and media have romanticised AI or cast it as a villain. Yet for most people, AI has remained as a point of discussion…

In the four years since an experiment by disgraced scientist He Jiankui resulted in the birth of the first babies with edited genes, numerous articles, books and international commissions have reflected on whether and how heritable genome editing – that is, modifying genes that will be passed on to the next generation – should proceed. They’ve reinforced an international consensus that it’s premature to proceed with heritable genome editing. Yet, concern remains that some individuals might buck that consensus and recklessly forge ahead – just as He Jiankui did. Some observers – myself included – have characterized He as a…