Author: The Conversation

Science fiction has always been a tool for processing life on Earth. Norwegian sci-fi expert Karl Kristian Swane Bambini has said that the space-bound genre is well placed to “interrogate and reimagine real-world economic disparities”. He gives the examples of, among other things, the 2013 blockbuster Elysium, wherein healthcare is only accessible off-world, to people with spaceships, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s Mars trilogy of novels, which opposes the egalitarianism of a Martian society to Earth’s capitalist dystopia. Regional development is about tackling spatial injustice – that is, regional inequalities. Doing so, though, isn’t just about measuring the difference between today’s haves…

Amid an ongoing cost-cutting effort, Twitter has now refused to pay the bills to renew its multi-year contract with Google Cloud, Platformer has reported. We’ve all heard of “the cloud” – but what does it have to do with Twitter? And more to the point, what will the consequences be for Twitter users if Google Cloud pulls the plug on the platform? What are cloud computing services? To put it simply, “the cloud” is an assembly of computing resources that are remotely accessible over the internet. These resources are leased out to internet-connected organisations so they don’t have to buy and…

Is computational creativity possible? The recent hype around generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E and many others, raises new questions about whether creativity is a uniquely human skill. Some recent and remarkable milestones of generative AI foster this question: An AI artwork, The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, sold for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate, by the auction house Christie’s in 2018. The artwork was created by a generative adversarial network that was fed a data set of 15,000 portraits covering six centuries. Music producers such as Grammy-nominee Alex Da Kid, have collaborated with AI (in…

A committee set up by Nasa has examined about 800 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), or what most of us would call UFOs (unidentified flying objects). Nasa defines these events as sightings “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective”. The creation of this committee shows that Nasa is taking potential extraterrestrial events very seriously. On Wednesday, May 31 2023, the committee held its first public meeting to discuss what it is doing and what it has found so far, ahead of a full report later this year. It revealed some reports are easy to explain as boats,…

ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to “embrace the benefits” of this “new frontier.” It’s a classic example of what my colleague Punya Mishra calls the “doom-hype cycle” around new technologies. Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction – whether paranoid or starry-eyed – tends to emphasize its newness. In one sense, it is undeniably new. Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech journalist couldn’t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him. In my view, however, the boundary between humans and machines, in terms of…

Claims the US government has secretly retrieved crashed alien spacecraft and their non-human occupants are hardly new. They are firmly entrenched in post-war American UFO lore and conspiracy theory, inspiring the most famous narrative in ufology: the “Roswell incident”. Now, however, journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have injected fresh vigour into these ageing claims – apparently with the Pentagon’s approval. In an article for science and technology news site The Debrief, they report the US government, its allies, and defence contractors have retrieved multiple craft of non-human origin, along with the occupants’ bodies. Additionally, they report this information has been…

Fake news is a complex problem and can span text, images and video. For written articles in particular, there are several ways of generating fake news. A fake news article could be produced by selectively editing facts, including people’s names, dates or statistics. An article could also be completely fabricated with made-up events or people. Fake news articles can also be machine-generated as advances in artificial intelligence make it particularly easy to generate misinformation. Damaging effects Questions like: “Was there voter fraud during the 2020 U.S. elections?” or “Is climate change a hoax?” can be fact-checked by analyzing available data.…

Like something out of a spy movie, thermal cameras make it possible to “see” heat by converting infrared radiation into an image. They can detect infrared light given off by animals, vehicles, electrical equipment and even people – leading to specialised applications in a number of industries. Despite these applications, thermal imaging technology remains too expensive to be used in many consumer products such as self-driving cars or smartphones. Our team at Flinders University has been working hard to turn this technology into something we can all use, and not just something we see in spy movies. We’ve developed a…

First detected accidentally by US military satellites in the late 1960s, cosmic explosions known as gamma ray bursts (GRBs) have come to be understood as the brightest explosions in the universe. Typically, they are the result of the cataclysmic birth of a black hole in a distant galaxy. One way this can happen is through the collapse of a single, massive star. Astronomers such as myself working in the field are well aware of the massive energy scales involved in GRBs. We know they can release as much energy in gamma rays as the Sun does throughout its lifetime. But every once in a…

“Splinternet” refers to the way the internet is being splintered – broken up, divided, separated, locked down, boxed up, or otherwise segmented. Whether for nation states or corporations, there’s money and control to be had by influencing what information people can access and share, as well as the costs that are paid for this access. The idea of a splinternet isn’t new, nor is the problem. But recent developments are likely to enhance segmentation, and have brought it back into new light. The internet as a whole The core question is whether we have just one single internet for everyone, or whether we…