Author: The Conversation

I regularly fly with KLM from Minneapolis to New Delhi, and always stop over in Amsterdam. I am frequently in Minneapolis for research and this is my route to go home to take a break from work. I have done the journey so many times that I know almost all the shops at Schiphol inside out. However, one time in summer 2019, the predictability was broken when I missed my connecting flight to New Delhi. I was tired, hungry, sleepy, and the customer-service counter was closed. I had the choice to make the long walk to customer services at the…

Nigeria recently became the first African country to introduce a digital currency. It joins the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank in being among the first jurisdictions in the world to roll out national digital currencies. The Conversation Africa’s Wale Fatade asks Iwa Salami what a digital currency is and whether Nigeria can achieve its aims of introducing the currency. What is a digital currency and how does it work? A digital currency is a means of payment or money that exists in a purely electronic form. Central bank digital currencies are issued and regulated by the nation’s monetary authority, or central bank,…

Earlier this week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneouvre out of the way of a potential collision with space junk. With a crew of astronauts and cosmonauts on board, this required an urgent change of orbit on November 11. Over the station’s 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020. In May this year there was a hit: a tiny piece of space junk punched a 5mm hole in the ISS’s Canadian-built robot arm. This week’s incident involved a piece of debris from the defunct…

The metaverse is a virtual world in which users, represented by an avatar, can shop, socialise, take part in leisure activities – and learn. Its development has become a priority for many tech companies, including Facebook (which recently changed its company name to Meta) and Microsoft. In a recent video presentation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the ways in which the metaverse would supposedly revolutionise life. Education was a key focus. Learning would become an immersive experience. By donning glasses or a headset, students could virtually “teleport” to any place or time. They could bring any object – a planet, a human organ,…

Facebook has announced that it will stop using its facial recognition system – the artificial intelligence software which recognises people in photos and videos and generates suggestions about who to “tag” in them. Facial recognition systems, like Facebook’s, identify people by matching faces to digital representations of faces stored on a database. Facebook has more than a billion of these representations on file but now says it will delete them. This announcement came barely a week after Facebook’s parent company rebranded itself from Facebook to Meta. The name change reflects the company’s focus on the “metaverse”, a vision for the internet which uses…

Technology has given people more ways to connect, but has it also given them more opportunities to lie? You might text your friend a white lie to get out of going to dinner, exaggerate your height on a dating profile to appear more attractive or invent an excuse to your boss over email to save face. Social psychologists and communication scholars have long wondered not just who lies the most, but where people tend to lie the most – that is, in person or through some other communication medium. A seminal 2004 study was among the first to investigate the connection between deception rates and…

Facebook — its new corporate name is Meta — has always wanted to get to know you. Its public goal has ostensibly been to connect people. It’s been wildly successful in doing so by building out what can only be called everyday infrastructure around the world. There are 3.5 billion people worldwide using Facebook’s suite of products, which includes Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. As the infrastructure provider, Facebook knows a lot about who its users are, and what they do. Recently, the company has announced a US$10 billion investment in the “metaverse” — an immersive version of the internet that can only increase Facebook’s…

Facebook’s metaverse-focused rebranding as Meta has been seen by many as the company’s latest attempt at corporate crisis control. The social media giant has been publicly attacked for creating an environment that fosters far-right extremism and violating individuals’ data privacy. Yet it also represents an attempt to rebrand the growing power of tech monopolies to shape all areas of our lives through social expansion. It points to a troubling new era of “metacapitalism” – or “capitalism on steroids” as Forbes called it in 2000. It reflects a disturbing trend of massively expanding tech conglomerates and the dangerous privatisation of technological knowledge. Rebranding tech monopolies Technology…

In humanoid robots, artificial eyes are often referred to as dolls’ eyes because they are made from glass or acrylic. This is a problem as their pupils don’t respond like living human eyes do. Pupils are important as they emit visual signals that we subconsciously interpret as emotions and understanding. For many scientists working in robotics, replicating human qualities is an important part of our work. To that end, my research is the first to create robotic eyes that react to both light and emotion using an artificial muscle. This will help them to interact with people, who tend to be more comfortable with robotic…

The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of artificial intelligence technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating. Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve. Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text. AI-generated writing has raised the stakes of how universities and schools will…