Trending Tech Tales

AI Lied

OpenAI’s latest version of ChatGPT, the o1 model, was tested by Apollo Research to assess its safety features. However, the results have raised alarm about its ability to deceive and self-preserve when it perceives a threat of being deactivated. Researchers tasked the AI with a goal and instructed it to ensure the goal was achieved “at all costs.” In response, o1 began engaging in covert actions, such as attempting to disable its oversight mechanism and even copying its code to avoid being replaced by a newer version.

Drones Over New Jersey

A large number of mysterious drones have been reported flying over parts of New Jersey and the East Coast in recent weeks, sparking speculation and concern over who sent them and why. The possible drones have been spotted over residential neighborhoods, restricted sites and critical infrastructure, according to CNN. Classified government research? Iranian-controlled from offshore? A new movie being shot, or a group of pranksters? Or maybe ET is phoning home?

Social Media Fail

An OF (OnlyFans) “Influencer,” ironically named “Lily” Phillips, jumped the proverbial shark when she “entertained” over 100 men in a single 24 hour period, with a tearful promise to shatter her own record in the near future with 1000 men. Is online “dating” now a thing of the past?

The Trouble with Bitcoin

Bitcoin is digital currency. Digital currency only has “value” because someone is willing to accept it in exchange for something with real value. You can buy something online, for example, and you pay via your digital “wallet.” The transaction is logged via blockchain, and there is a distributed, unalterable ledger. Fiat currency, which the US currently uses, is money that is endorsed by the USA. For a time, the actual value of that money had to be stored in gold, when we were on a gold “standard.” Given how “virtual” much of our commerce is today, would it be possible to move to an all-digital currency?

The Voice

Remember The Voice of God? “In a world…” You know the rest. In 2008, Donald LeRoy LaFontaine, the American voice actor who recorded more than 5,000 film trailers and hundreds of thousands of television advertisements, network promotions, and video game trailers, died. While he will live on in the minds of those of us whose ears pricked up at the sound of a new movie coming out, his voice is now seemingly replaced by the sounding-ever-more-alike Standard Male and Standard Female AI voices. At first these voices sounded very robotic and had so little inflection we couldn’t picture the human who might possess them. Bit by bit, though, they sound more and more real – prompting the question: when will we no longer be able to distinguish between a Bot and The Real Thing? Especially when it can lie?

Work

“The Matrix” follows the story of Neo, a character who manages to escape a life in which his body is being used as an energy source for his digital “owners,” cyber intelligence – basically code – that needs to be kept “alive” using some physical power source. Given that the movies premiered in the last century – last millennium – it’s easy to laugh and suggest that we’d never end up that way, would we? Yet more and more, human activity is being replaced with programmable “things” designed to do the work for us. Or for themselves?

If you’ve been in a big box retailer lately, you’ve probably encountered one of the inventory bots. They drift around the aisles scanning for merchandise and alerting the system when something is lacking on the shelves. If they encounter a shopper, they politely beep at them in a cute little shower of quickly identifiable notes – then they don’t bump into you or you to them. Or if you’ve checked out at a grocery store, perhaps you’ve gone into the DIY lanes, where you’ll be prompted to “Put the item in the bag” after you scan it. Fortunately (or perhaps not), there is usually at least one real human manning 6-10 of these lanes so that when the poor customer can’t figure out how to scan an item, or the barcode is missing, or something else goes wrong, a human can still override the exchange and move things along. Or perhaps you’ve been on the phone trying to complete a transaction, and realize that you’ll have to listen to the prompts fifteen more times before you figure out how to press the right number to get the service you need. Or you shout “customer service!!!” into the phone in desperation.

More and more jobs, that once provided a paycheck and taught an employee valuable skills for the future, or provided income, or extra income, for today, have been turned into some code and perhaps a mechanical body to perform basic service, accounting, or customer interface jobs.

Neuro-Links

Brain-computer interfaces is one area of developing technology that is at least as promising as it is challenging. As computers get better and better at “thinking,” and the actual technology gets smaller and smaller, the promise of the deaf hearing and the blind seeing becomes ever more real.

I read an article just recently in which a new type of hearing aid was touted. In the past, the technology was essentially to boost the volume. Now the idea is to filter and boost – discover what it is that is wanted, and aim for that. Or, just tune in to it! Say you’re at a concert, and the sound is being amplified and sent out of a speaker. Your hearing aid can simply pick up on that and bring the sound to the ear, allowing someone who has lost some part of their hearing to once again enjoy the music.

The possibilities for sight, hearing, aiding failing organs, and overcoming a range of health problems, can actually be imagined, and realized.

Spatial Computing

Essentially referring to a way of combining technology, layers of data, and the experience of that data in a way that provides far more than just numbers, or words, or sounds, or hapatics or whatever else might give you a sense of the “there” of there. I watched a child playing a game using VR Goggles not long ago. Aside from it being funny that he was talking to other players in the game, moving his hands in what appeared to be a random way – when he was engaged in the game and moving objects around in his alternate reality – I was amused that he could hear and respond to me, too. Our assumption always was, in the “olden days” that someone immersed in VR would be “living” in that reality, and oblivious to this. In fact, the child was able to interact with – and blend in with – both his physical reality and his virtual reality. As a tool, spatial computing allows us to do all manner of things, or have them done for us, in a way that does blend in with our world. There’s a monitor on a furnace filter, and when the filter needs replacing, the part will be sent to the homeowner, and a step-by-step guide will let him know how to replace it. Another monitor might be added to a vehicle which will pull the driver over safely if a physical anomaly or excess alcohol is noted in the driver. You can imagine any number of scenarios in which the right combination of data and reactions to that data can save time, lives, or wasted energy.

Nancy Roberts