Keep your smart devices in the dark? If these microphones are sensitive enough to pick up the vibrations caused by a beam of light, what else can they detect?

https://threatpost.com/light-based-attacks-digital-home/161583/

Light-Based Attacks Expand in the Digital Home

Imagine someone hacking into an Amazon Alexa device using a laser beam and then doing some online shopping using that person account. This is a scenario presented by a group of researchers who are exploring why digital home assistants and other sensing systems that use sound commands to perform functions can be hacked by light.

The same team that last year mounted a signal-injection attack against a range of smart speakers merely by using a laser pointer are still unraveling the mystery of why the microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) microphones in the products turn the light signals into sound.

Researchers at the time said that they were able to launch inaudible commands by shining lasers – from as far as 110 meters, or 360 feet – at the microphones on various popular voice assistants, including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Portal, and Google Assistant.

A summary for my Computer Security students.

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-protection/how-privacy-professionals-can-comply-with-cookie-consent/

How Privacy Professionals Can Comply with Cookie Consent?

According to Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, organizations must obtain prior informed consent from the consumer before storage or access to information stored via a user’s terminal equipment. Take for example, cookies dropped on websites. Organizations must ask users if they agree to accept these cookies or web beacons before they are placed. The ePrivacy Directive exempts “strictly necessary” which are used solely for carrying out communication transmission.

Privacy professionals need to make sure that their cookie notice includes the following in order to stay compliant with privacy regulations:

• Explain the purpose of the installation of cookies that the site uses, briefly

• State action which will signify consent

• Be sufficiently conspicuous

• Notify consumers on cookie purpose, usage, and related third-party activity.

Gosh, you think?

https://www.databreaches.net/amazons-pharmacy-venture-opens-new-privacy-security-law-risks/

Amazon’s Pharmacy Venture Opens New Privacy, Security Law Risks

Jacquie Lee and Jake Holland report:

Amazon’s push into delivering prescription drugs puts it in the crosshairs of everyone from state attorneys general to data thieves—who will all be scrutinizing how the e-commerce giant protects sensitive patient information.

Amazon’s new online pharmacy business will sell brand and generic prescription medications that consumers can buy through their insurance or through their Amazon Prime accounts for a discount.

Read more on Bloomberg Law.

A quiet but continuous trend.

https://www.ft.com/content/2cfe3d07-7e69-4f57-b634-8b6002f967cb

France demands digital tax payments from US tech groups

French tax authorities have begun demanding millions of euros from US technology groups as they push ahead with a new digital services tax that has enraged Washington.

Facebook and Amazon are among the companies to have received communication from French authorities in recent days demanding payment of the tax for 2020, according to French officials, company executives and advisers.

The collection of the tax, which Washington has said is an example of an unfair trade practice because it largely affects US companies, threatens to reignite the transatlantic trade tensions and trigger new tariffs on Europe weeks ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden.

The US trade representative’s office is now expected to put tariffs of 25 per cent on $1.3bn worth of French handbags and make-up, having at first threatened to hit champagne and cheeses with import tariffs of 100 per cent.

Several governments have either already introduced or plan to introduce their own digital services tax. They argue that tech companies pay too little tax on the profits they make in many countries, partly because they record them in low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland.

My New Year resolution: make more videos.

https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2020/11/an-easy-way-to-make-videos-on-windows.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+freetech4teachers/cGEY+(Free+Technology+for+Teachers)

An Easy Way to Make Videos on Windows 10 Computers

Microsoft Photos includes a video creation tool for making short audio slideshow-style videos. You'll find this by just opening the native photos app in Windows 10. Within the editor there are tools for adding animated effects to still images, insert your existing video clips into a video project, and tools for adding audio to your video. There's also a great option to search for Creative Commons licensed images and insert them directly into your video project. The best part of that feature is that attribution information is automatically added onto the images you choose through the built-in search tool.

In the following video I provide a demonstration of how to create a video in Microsoft Photos in Windows 10.

I know some people in these categories…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-new-york-times-is-available-to-high-school-students-and-teachers-across-the-united-states-free/

The New York Times is available to high school students and teachers across the United States — free

Free digital access continues through September 1, 2021.”

Ransomware can be nasty. Victims underestimate the volume of work required.

https://www.databreaches.net/a-month-after-cyberattack-uvm-medical-center-restores-access-to-electronic-records/

A month after cyberattack, UVM Medical Center restores access to electronic records

Kate Jickling reports:

The University of Medical Center’s electronic medical records system is up and running nearly a month after the hospital fell victim to a cyberattack.

Over the weekend, the hospital tech team restored Epic health records system, giving doctors and nurses full access to patient medical history, appointments, and medications, said Al Gobeille, a vice president of operations for the UVM Health Network on Monday.

Read more on VTDigger.

[From the article:

Operations won’t fully return to normal for weeks, but the reboot marks the most significant step toward restoring normalcy after the cyberattack disrupted patient care and delayed appointments. On Oct. 28, the hospital IT staff noticed abnormal activity, and shut down its online operations. The hack downed hospital phone and email networks, eliminated access to patient records and appointments, and halted access for the hospital to pay employees overtime.

A National Guard unit came in to help and the Medical Center’s IT team worked to restore nearly 5,000 computers. Nurses and doctors made a rocky transition to paper records.

Even now, many of the 500 applications that connect to Epic, such as the MyChart patient portal, and radiology and chemotherapy systems, are not yet live, said Gobeille. It will continue to be an “evolutionary process” over several weeks to get back to normal, he said.

How could you use it?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-artificial-intelligence-incident-database/

The Artificial Intelligence Incident Database

Via Mary Whisner:

• Samir Ferdowski, This Database Is Finally Holding AI Accountable, Vice (Nov. 23, 2020). The Artificial Intelligence Incident Database (AIID) is a crowdsourced platform with intentions to wrangle in the Wild West of AI. “Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice shame on you,” [Isn’t that backward? Bob] comes to mind, as the platform is being used to document and compile AI failures so they won’t happen again.

• Sean McGregor, When AI Systems Fail: Introducing the AI Incident Database, Partnership on AI (Nov. 18, 2020)

• The database: https://incidentdatabase.ai/discover/index.html?s=

Perspective. AI (and space?) must be expensive.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/23/britain-announces-biggest-defense-spending-increase-since-cold-war-boris-johnson-artificial-intelligence-space-force/

U.K. Announces Biggest Defense Spending Increase Since the Cold War

… The increased budget would make Britain the largest defense spender in Europe and second only to the United States among NATO members, Johnson’s government said. The funds will be used to establish a new artificial intelligence center, to create a Royal Air Force Space Command, and to “restore Britain’s position as the foremost naval power in Europe.”

Something for the teacher/student toolkit.

https://www.makeuseof.com/highlighter-apps-to-annotate-online-text-videos-or-podcasts/

5 Highlighter Apps to Annotate Online Text, Videos, or Podcasts

Data comes in all forms these days. When you're conducting research, you'll need to read online articles, pick up physical books, watch videos on the internet, and even listen to podcasts. You need to highlight and annotate these different sources and remember why you bookmarked something. That's where these free tools will come in handy.

For my favorite niece.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-6-sites-to-find-and-print-free-sheet-music-nb/

The Top 7 Sites to Find and Print Free Sheet Music

Monday’s are dull, news-wise.

Perspective. Counter-intuitive.

https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/11/23/canadian-transit-agency-reduces-costs-and-wait-times-with-on-demand-services-syndication/

On-demand public transport sounds like a luxury — but it can actually save cities money

… Think going on-demand will drain your budgets? Think again. Evidence shows that when on-demand networks are implemented in a smart way, communities can actually save money compared to their previous fixed-route services, unlocking broader benefits that pay back the initial investment many times over.

Providing high-quality services at the minimum possible cost to the taxpayer is generally the name of the game for any public transportation agency. However, when talking about microtransit, opponents often get tied up in measuring the return on investment (ROI) simply in terms of farebox recovery ratios rather than the overall efficiency of the service (and resulting cost savings).

So I can automate my research.

https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2020/11/23/a-beginners-guide-to-web-scraping-with-python-and-scrapy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

A beginner’s guide to web scraping with Python and Scrapy

… This tutorial will be an ultimate guide for you to learn web scraping using Python programming language. At first, I’ll walk you through some basic examples to make you familiar with web scraping. Later on, we’ll use that knowledge to extract data of football matches from Livescore.cz .

A hundred years ago it was bumps on the head… (Phrenology)

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Criminality-From-Face-Illusion-Bowyer-King/41f3d08beac952b10bfd2d87012b337cd1a59daa

The Criminality From Face Illusion

The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a person's gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person's face in order to predict the person's status as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting criminality from face may initially seem similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.

“That AI done me wrong!”

http://www.ejobios.org/download/liability-of-artificial-intelligence-as-a-subject-of-legal-relations-8271.pdf

Liability of artificial intelligence as a subject of legal relations

This article is concerned with a burning issue, namely, liability for offenses committed with the use of artificial intelligence and methods of compensating the damage caused by such illegal actions. The study aims at analyzing several legal acts that regulate the possible application of A.I., reveal problems in this field and suggest possible solutions.

The authors of the article use theoretical and general philosophical methods of cognition, as well as traditional legal methods. The main method is analogy that highlights the need to eliminate gaps in the current Russian legislation. Based on the concepts of A.I. formed by scholars from different countries and using the method of comparative analysis, the authors attempt to consider offenses committed with the use of A.I. in the territory of Russia.

To determine A.I. as a subject of legal relations, different scholars developed original concepts. The authors of the article have studied some hypotheses regarding the development of technologies that increase the interaction between people and computers and its possible danger since it might blur the borders between A.I. and its operators.

The study results can be useful for the theory of civil and administrative law in determining the person responsible for the harm caused by A.I. and for the application of liability rules in relation to a new road user. Such conclusions might be of interest to the legislator to fill in the gaps in the legal regulation of compensation for the harm caused by A.I.

The authors are the first to draw a certain parallel between the sources of administrative and civil law regarding legal liability for the commission of an offense and compensation for the damage caused by A.I. In addition, they have analyzed the current legislation of the Russian Federation governing liability for the violation of traffic rules.

Toward an AI judge?

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/AI-lead-Court-Debate-Case-Investigation-Ji-Zhu/cbbb56a8f9e883d5e3c0457d60bf7dcd248ae083

AI-lead Court Debate Case Investigation

The multi-role judicial debate composed of the plaintiff, defendant, and judge is an important part of the judicial trial. Different from other types of dialogue, questions are raised by the judge, The plaintiff, plaintiff's agent defendant, and defendant's agent would be to debating so that the trial can proceed in an orderly manner. Question generation is an important task in Natural Language Generation. In the judicial trial, it can help the judge raise efficient questions so that the judge has a clearer understanding of the case. In this work, we propose an innovative end-to-end question generation model-Trial Brain Model (TBM) to build a Trial Brain, it can generate the questions the judge wants to ask through the historical dialogue between the plaintiff and the defendant. Unlike prior efforts in natural language generation, our model can learn the judge's questioning intention through predefined knowledge. We do experiments on real-world datasets, the experimental results show that our model can provide a more accurate question in the multi-role court debate scene.

If this is difficult, think how much worse AI will be.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Software-must-be-recognised-as-an-important-output-Jay-Haines/fc6b3ea38c8d272d1e99ac25f58970897b242a94

Software must be recognised as an important output of scholarly research

Software now lies at the heart of scholarly research. Here we argue that as well as being important from a methodological perspective, software should, in many instances, be recognised as an output of research, equivalent to an academic paper. The article discusses the different roles that software may play in research and highlights the relationship between software and research sustainability and reproducibility. It describes the challenges associated with the processes of citing and reviewing software, which differ from those used for papers. We conclude that whilst software outputs do not necessarily fit comfortably within the current publication model, there is a great deal of positive work underway that is likely to make an impact in addressing this.

Even law firms get attacked. Techies, send this to your legal department. Lawyers, send this to your techies.

https://www.databreaches.net/ransomware-surges-what-law-firms-need-to-know/

Ransomware Surges: What Law Firms Need to Know

Ted Kobus, a partner at BakerHostetler was interviewed this week in a podcast on ransomware. Ted had this to say, among other things:

Ted Kobus: So approximately 25% of the incidents we worked on in 2019 involved ransomware. We love to talk about how 2020 is the year that you fill in the blank. But in reality, 2020 really is the year of ransomware and it’s when it really blew up. We are still crunching the numbers but my guess is approximately 35% to 40% of our matters involve ransomware this year. On top of that, we are likely to work on 1,700 incidents this year, which is a 70% increase over last year, that’s a lot of ransomware. Late last year, we joked on our team about ransomware Thursday because a lot of ransomware matters would come in on Thursdays. Now, we’re seeing one to five new matters every day of the week.

Listen to the whole podcast or read the transcript on Legal Talk Network.

Replacing lawyers with software.

https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2020/11/time-names-two-legaltech-startups-as-among-the-100-best-inventions-of-2020.html

TIME Names Two Legaltech Startups As Among The 100 Best Inventions Of 2020

TIME has named two legal technology startups as among the 100 Best Inventions of 2020: the bankruptcy startup Upsolve and the consumer arbitration platform FairShake.

Regarding Upsolve, the publication cited its free nonprofit tool for helping people avoid the high cost of personal bankruptcy.

“Upsolve’s software fixes that, helping users complete the complex legal paperwork so that they can file for bankruptcy without hiring a lawyer,” TIME said.

… As to FairShake, TIME said it helps consumers seek restitution after a big company rips them off or mistreats them.

“FairShake makes battling the big guys easy, with a free service that automates the process of filing an arbitration claim,” TIME said.

(Ditto)

https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/20/google-proposes-applying-ai-to-patent-application-generation-and-categorization/

Google proposes applying AI to patent application generation and categorization

Google asserts that the patent industry stands to benefit from AI and machine learning models like BERT, a natural language processing algorithm that attained state-of-the-art results when it was released in 2018. In a whitepaper published today, the tech giant outlines a methodology to train a BERT model on over 100 million patent publications from the U.S. and other countries using open-source tooling, which can then be used to determine the novelty of patents and generate classifications to assist with categorization.

Unbiased initial research.

https://www.makeuseof.com/google-unfiltered-search-results/

6 Ways To Get Unfiltered Google Search Results

Google uses the information it collects about you to make your search results more accurate and relevant. But by shaping the content you see to match your perceived interests, it also places you in a “filter bubble." This means you may miss out on useful sites that Google's algorithms deem less suitable for you.

Know where ALL your data resides. You should have an ‘update’ procedure to follow when you go to backups.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/11/19/gdpr-right-to-be-forgotten-verification-tool/

Oops! The backup restored GDPR right to be forgotten details

The GDPR directive gives individuals the right to be forgotten and requires EU and UK companies in certain instances to erase all personal data per a customer’s request.

But this is problematic when details are contained inside a non-searchable database backup file. At first sight the individual has been forgotten, but if a backup file is restored the business again has that person’s details in plain view, and so breaks the GDPR rules.

Unconscious consent?

https://www.axios.com/ethics-brain-machine-interfaces-d50b6618-b2b3-4bc1-960a-c27f73be3e63.html

The tricky ethics of neurotechnologies

As the science of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and other neurotechnologies progresses, researchers are calling for ethical guidelines to be established now — before the technology fully matures.

Why it matters: We’re still far away from technologies that fully access and even read the human brain, but the sheer power of such tools — and the highly personal data they could gather — means society needs to determine what they should do before they actually can do it.

… Many of the ethical issues created by BCI — questions of transparency and fairness — resemble those raised by AI or even social media, only intensified.

• It’s one thing for tech companies to track what we click on and what we watch, but data generated by the nervous system can be unconscious, which could fatally undermine principles of consent and the privacy.

• And neurotechnology could go beyond reading the brain to effectively coding it, feeding it data that could influence thoughts and behaviors, which brings into question core concepts around free will.

Artificial teaching?

https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/november/artificial-intelligence-classroom-qa.html

Artificial intelligence and the classroom of the future

… This is part of a larger vision of future classrooms where human instruction and AI technology interact to improve educational environments and the learning experience.

James Pustejovsky, the TJX Feldberg Professor of Computer Science, is working towards that vision with a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of the new $20 million National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming.

Perspective.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/19/1012165/the-promise-of-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

The promise of the fourth industrial revolution

New technologies can optimize the way people work. When implemented thoughtfully, such innovations can improve overall business processes. Those changes are accepted as part of progress.

But when a technology changes how and where people live and their relationships to one another and upends economies, it merits the term “revolution.” Because it changes everything.

… To determine how this is taking shape, MIT Technology Review Insights canvassed dozens of organizations that are using the internet of things to do things that weren’t possible before. What follows is a series of the best, most innovative examples. Some of these applications may inspire organization to rethink how they collect, analyze, and act on data—all of them contribute to a better or at least more efficient planet.

… Download the full report.

(Related)

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-5g-and-iot-will-be-the-most-important-technologies-in-2021-according-to-new-ieee-study-301177050.html

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, 5G and IoT will be the Most Important Technologies in 2021, According to new IEEE Study

IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, today released the results of a survey of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) in the U.S., U.K., China, India and Brazil regarding the most important technologies for 2021 overall, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the speed of their technology adoption and the industries expected to be most impacted by technology in the year ahead.

2021 Most Important Technologies and Challenges

Which will be the most important technologies in 2021? Among total respondents, nearly one-third (32%) say AI and machine learning, followed by 5G (20%) and IoT (14%).

Manufacturing (19%), healthcare (18%), financial services (15%) and education (13%) are the industries that most believe will be impacted by technology in 2021, according to CIOs and CTOS surveyed.

For my researchers…

https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/11/20/tldr-this-ai-summarizes-research-papers-so-you-dont-have-to/

TL;DR: This AI summarizes research papers so you don’t have to

… researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence have developed a new model to summarize text from scientific papers, and present it in a few sentences in the form of TL;DR (Too Long Didn’t Read).

The team has rolled this model out to the Allen Institute’s Semantic Scholar search engine for papers. Currently, you’ll only see these TL;DR summaries on papers related to computer science on search results or the author’s page.

… You can try out the AI on the Semantic Scholar search engine. Plus, you can read more about summarizing AI in this paper.

Concerts for shut-ins. The first one tonight!

https://www.bespacific.com/re-hearing-beethoven-festival-at-the-library-of-congress/

Re-Hearing Beethoven Festival at the Library of Congress

“The Library of Congress planned to mark Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday with a series of concerts that offered a fresh look at Beethoven’s nine remarkable symphonies, performed by string quartets, piano duos and the U.S. Marine Band. While the pandemic has moved the concerts online, they can now be enjoyed from the comfort of your couch, with the benefit of extra programming. The series begins with the acclaimed Takács Quartet — featured at a sold-out in-person Kennedy Center concert in December — performing pieces by Beethoven, Schubert and Bartok. Visit the Library’s website for bonus content, including commentary from the musicians, curators and guests, and get a look at Beethoven-related items from the Library’s collection. 8 p.m. Free registration.”

Be a dipper?

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ongoing-data-breach-dispute-underscores-emerging-legal-issues-data-privacy

Ongoing Data Breach Dispute Underscores Emerging Legal Issues in Data Privacy Litigation

… According to the lawsuits, Wawa’s practice of accepting “swiped” payment cards, as opposed to “dipped” cards with chips, enabled the data breach. Whereas a swipe-only payment processing system enables easier theft, a chipped card uses “industry developed EMV chip technology” that makes fraud “significantly more difficult”. Whenever a chipped card is insert into a payment system, it generates a unique code for each transaction. This unique code makes theft more cumbersome.

… At the heart of the credit unions’ claim is an allegation that the PCI DSS should be the standards upon which a merchant’s liability for damages from a data breach should be determined. Under this theory of tort liability, the PCI DSS could displace any other best practices and standards to become the de facto practices for merchants to follow. A link between the PCI DSS and common law tort duties could result in a seismic shift in liability. According to the Verizon 2020 Payment Security Report, only 27.9% of organizations fully comply with the PCI DSS. This is down from a historic high of 55% in 2016.

Wawa allegedly failed to comply with all or some of the requirements. The credit unions alleged that Wawa’s failure to comply resulted in negligence under at least two different theories.

To help my Computer Security students understand…

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/evolution-personal-data-us-law

Evolution of Personal Data in U.S. Law

… Early digital age protections of data in the U.S. tending to apply very specific definitions. First, the government began protecting the particular types of data that concerned legislators, regulators, and the general public – financial/banking information, descriptions of health care, and information relating to children. This was the data that people felt was most private and most likely to be abused. It was the data that many people would have been concerned about sharing with strangers.

The definitions around these laws reflected the specificity of their intent.

...The terms defined in this first wave of data breach notice laws were based on lists. Each law listed a set of information categories likely to facilitate the theft of a citizen’s identity.

… The CCPA shattered this concept. As the first omnibus privacy act in the U.S., the California Consumer Privacy Act brought European thinking to privacy protection law. Rather than a limited vertical market like finance or health care, or a narrow legal goal like stopping identity theft, the CCPA sought to create new rights that individuals would have to protect data collected about them, and the CCPA sought to impose those rights down on businesses who previously felt that they were owners of the data. The CCPA never defined anything as fundamental or nebulous as “ownership” of the data, but it did offer a new, breathtakingly broad definition of the personal information at the heart of the statute.

Because AI might be the only “I” we get.

https://www.bespacific.com/white-house-issues-guidance-for-federal-agencies-on-ai-applications/

White House issues guidance for federal agencies on AI applications

ZDNet – “US federal agencies have now been issued a guidance by the White House on how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) applications that are produced in the US. “This memorandum sets out policy considerations that should guide, to the extent permitted by law, regulatory and non-regulatory approaches to AI applications developed and deployed outside of the federal government,” stated Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the memo [PDF] for all the heads of executive departments and agencies, including independent regulatory agencies. The OMB guidance comes 21 months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the development and regulation of AI in the US. President Trump at the time touted the executive order would see the launch of the American AI initiative, which would place US resources towards ensuring that AI technology is made locally. According to the guidance, the idea is to ensure that agencies do not introduce regulations and rules that “hamper AI innovation and growth”…”

Maybe, maybe not.

https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/11/18/neurals-guide-to-the-glorious-future-of-ai-heres-how-machines-become-sentient/

Neural’s guide to the glorious future of AI: Here’s how machines become sentient

The future realization of robot lifeforms is referred to by a plethora of terms – sentience, artificial general intelligence (AGI), living machines, self-aware robots, and so forth – but the one that seems most fitting is “The Singularity.”

Rather than debate semantics, we’re going to sweep all those little ways of saying “human-level intelligence or better” together and conflate them to mean: A machine capable of at least human-level reasoning, thought, memory, learning, and self-awareness.

Modern AI researchers and developers tend to gravitate towards the term AGI. Normally, we’d agree because general intelligence is grounded in metrics we can understand – to qualify, an AI would have to be able to do most stuff a human can.

But there’s a razor-thin margin between “as smart as” and “smarter than” when it comes to hypothetical general intelligence and it seems likely a mind powered by super computers, quantum computers, or a vast network of cloud servers would have far greater sentient potential than our mushy organic ones. Thus, we’ll err on the side of superintelligence for the purposes of this article.

… Let’s get super scientific here and crank out a listicle with five separate ways AI could gain human-level intelligence and awareness:

1. Machine consciousness is back-doored via quantum computing

2. A new calculus creates the Master Algorithm

3. Scientists develop 1:1 replication of organic neural networks

4. Cloud consciousness emerges through scattered node optimization

5. Alien technology

… Here’s hoping that, no matter how The Singularity comes about, it ushers in a new age of prosperity for all intelligent beings. But just in case it doesn’t work out so well, we’ve got something that’ll help you prepare for the worst. Check out these articles in Neural’s Beginner’s Guide to the AI Apocalypse series:

• Misaligned Objectives

• Artificial Stupidity

• Wall-E Syndrome

• Humanity Joins the Hivemind

• Killer Robots

Also for researchers?

https://www.bespacific.com/wonder-tools-googles-new-journalist-studio/

Wonder Tools – Google’s New Journalist Studio

Jeremy Kaplan: “Google recently launched Journalist Studio, a toolkit with free reporting and data visualization resources. The tools are easy to use, well-designed and immediately applicable to big reporting projects and small research inquiries. Some of these tools have been around for a while, so part of this launch is just glossy repackaging. Pinpoint is the most valuable part of the toolkit. It provides you with a free digital hub for storing and analyzing massive datasets of documents, emails, audio files, handwritten notes and more. You can store up to 200,000 documents in each collection, and up to 100gb overall. Request more space if you need it…”