Author: The Conversation
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…
by Catherine Coveney, Loughborough University and Eric L Hsu, University of South Australia From sleep trackers to wakefulness drugs, the 21st century has seen an influx of new technology that could radically alter the way we sleep. Many of these new technologies chase the dream of optimised slumber. They promise to help tailor our sleep schedules to fit around our social lives, help us sleep for longer or even skip a night’s sleep altogether. Here’s how technology is permeating our sleep, and what the future holds. Time to wake up Sleeping pills have recently been joined by a wave of…
by Nello Cristianini, University of Bath This week a group of well-known and reputable AI researchers signed a statement consisting of 22 words: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. As a professor of AI, I am also in favour of reducing any risk, and prepared to work on it personally. But any statement worded in such a way is bound to create alarm, so its authors should probably be more specific and clarify their concerns. As defined by Encyclopedia Britannica, extinction is “the dying…
by Anjana Susarla, Michigan State University Takeaways: A new federal agency to regulate AI sounds helpful but could become unduly influenced by the tech industry. Instead, Congress can legislate accountability. Instead of licensing companies to release advanced AI technologies, the government could license auditors and push for companies to set up institutional review boards. The government hasn’t had great success in curbing technology monopolies, but disclosure requirements and data privacy laws could help check corporate power. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urged lawmakers to consider regulating AI during his Senate testimony on May 16, 2023. That recommendation raises the question of…
by Anirban Basu, University of Washington Health practitioners are increasingly concerned that because race is a social construct, and the biological mechanisms of how race affects clinical outcomes are often unknown, including race in predictive algorithms for clinical decision-making may worsen inequities. For example, to calculate an estimate of kidney function called the estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, health care providers use an algorithm based on age, biological sex, race (Black or non-Black) and serum creatinine, a waste product the kidneys release into the blood. A higher eGFR value means better kidney health. These eGFR predictions are used to…