Author: The Conversation

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the tech giant will shift from being a social media company to becoming “a metaverse company”, functioning in an “embodied internet” that blends real and virtual worlds more than ever before. So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to earn headlines, like Tesla chief Elon Musk spruiking “pizza joints” on Mars. Yet given almost three billion people use Facebook each month, Zuckerberg’s suggestion of a change of direction is worth some attention. The term “metaverse” isn’t new, but it has recently seen a surge in popularity and speculation about what…

Dark patterns are design elements that deliberately obscure, mislead, coerce and/or deceive website visitors into making unintended and possibly harmful choices. Dark patterns can be found in many kinds of sites and are used by several kinds of organizations. They take the form of deceptively labeled buttons, choices that are difficult to undo and graphical elements like color and shading that direct users’ attention to or away from certain options. Dark patterns in subscriptions are a common example of these kinds of design choices, given the ubiquity of online subscriptions and free trials for all kinds of products and services. This kind of…

What does it mean to be an inventor? In patent law, designed to protect the intellectual property of inventors, officials are used to thinking of inventors as humans, taking an “inventive step” – a new way of doing something — not obvious to a person skilled in the same art. But last week — in a judicial world first — Australia’s Federal Court ruled an artificial intelligence (AI) system can be named as an inventor. That judgement overturned a decision by the nation’s Commissioner of Patents that meant US scientist Stephen Thaler could not patent inventions by his AI system,…

At first glance, a recently granted South African patent relating to a “food container based on fractal geometry” seems fairly mundane. The innovation in question involves interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and stack. On closer inspection, the patent is anything but mundane. That’s because the inventor is not a human being – it is an artificial intelligence (AI) system called DABUS. DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming. The system simulates human brainstorming and creates new…

There are significant disparities in South Africa’s education system. Schools are divided into quintiles, from one to five; the poorest, in quintile one, struggle enormously with a lack of resources and support. They also tend to have poorer educational outcomes. That has a direct effect on university admission and outcomes. One of the government’s attempts to address these inequalities is through technology. This began as early as 2003 with the Draft White Paper on e-Education. These and similar policies aim to resource more marginalised schools, universities and colleges with digital tools. This, in a bid to “leapfrog” access to interactive learning content and improved administrative capabilities.…

If you ask children what their favourite dinosaurs are, the answers will undoubtedly include T. rex, Triceratops and maybe Brachiosaurus. Those children answering the question in South Africa may be disappointed to discover that none of these dinosaur fossils are to be found in the country. But South Africa has its own, equally important dinosaurs; the most common and well known of these is Massospondylus, which was first described by scientists back in 1854. This dinosaur was approximately 4-5m long from head to tail, walked on two legs, had a long neck, a small head and ate plants. It lived in the Early Jurassic time…

You try to use your credit card, but it doesn’t work. In fact, no one’s credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can’t access any of those, either. Neither can anyone else. Panic-buying ensues. People empty ATMs of cash. This kind of catastrophic pan-internet meltdown is more likely than most people realize. I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability. For example,…

Can we find alien technology? That is the ambitious goal of the Galileo Project, launched this week by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb with substantial private financial backing. The project is far from the first attempt to detect signs of civilisations beyond Earth. Loeb has been criticised in the past for his dismissive approach to previous efforts to find extraterrestrial life and his argument that an alien artefact passed through our solar system in 2017. So why do Loeb and his collaborators think they have a chance of finding something where others have failed? There are three triggers that suggest they might. Exoplanets, ‘Oumuamua, and UFOs…

Robopets are artificially intelligent machines created to look like an animal (usually a cat or dog, but they can be any animal). There are numerous robopets on the market right now, being sold to consumers as “pets” or companions. There is an especially fervent effort being made to set caregivers’ minds at ease by buying these robopets for older adults to replace their deceased or surrendered companion animals. Animal lovers will tell you they would rather have nothing than have a robot for a pet. While a robopet can be programmed to simulate the actions of a real animal, people know it is…

According to the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla., history was made when non-human primates created NFTs (non-fungible tokens). As with all NFTs, these pieces are unique digital collectibles. The art was created by chimpanzees like Cheetah. Cheetah had lived alone in a steel cage for 13 years and was used in a biomedical study, but now lives at the Save the Chimps sanctuary. The money raised from Cheetah’s and others chimps’ Primal Expressions painting collection sales will help to support sanctuary operations. Save the Chimps was founded in 1997 by primatologist Carole Noon, and its residents come to the sanctuary from a range of…