Author: The Conversation

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…

In the wake of Facebook rebranding as Meta, reflecting its focus on the “metaverse”, Microsoft has now announced it, too, will launch into this space. Meta has proposed that the metaverse will eventually allow us to engage across education, work and social contexts, while Microsoft looks to be focusing specifically on the realm of the virtual office for now. But what actually is the metaverse and to what extent should we believe that the vision being presented to us is really going to be central to our daily lives? The idea itself isn’t new. Science fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in…

Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform. Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources. As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances…

It takes seven months to get to Mars in an efficiently engineered spaceship, covering the distance of 480 million kilometres. On this journey, a crew would have to survive in a confined space with no opportunity to experience nature or interact with new people. It is easy to imagine how this much isolation could have a severe impact on the crew’s well-being and productivity. The challenges long-duration space travellers experience are not foreign to regular folk, although to a lesser degree. Many Canadians experience isolation and loneliness, at least occasionally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdvEbjqs1kU&feature=emb_logo Virtual reality can help people experience what being in space is…

Dozens of space-based telescopes operate near Earth and provide incredible images of the universe. But imagine a telescope far away in the outer solar system, 10 or even 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The ability to look back at our solar system or peer into the darkness of the distant cosmos would make this a uniquely powerful scientific tool. I’m an astrophysicist who studies the formation of structure in the universe. Since the 1960s, scientists like me have been considering the important scientific questions we might be able to answer with a telescope placed in the outer solar…

Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology. Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier. But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage. Although it might seem like we can’t have the best of both worlds — the connectivity without…

Twenty years on from the public release of Windows XP, the popular operating system is still regarded one of Microsoft’s greatest achievements. As of August this year, Windows XP still maintained a greater market share than its successor, Windows Vista. When mainstream support for XP ended in April 2009, it was running on a huge 75% of Windows computers and about 19% of people were still using XP when extended security support finished in 2014. Microsoft provided security support in a few special cases, such as for military use, until 2019 — an incredible 18 years after the initial release. But what made XP excel? And…