Author: The Conversation

Since time immemorial, humans around the world have gazed up in wonder at the night sky. The starry night sky has not only inspired countless works of music, art and poetry, but has also played an important role in timekeeping, navigation and agricultural practices in many traditions. For many cultures, the night sky, with its stars, planets and the Milky Way, is considered just as important a part of the natural environment as the forests, lakes and mountains below. Countless people around the world gaze at the night sky: not only amateur and professional astronomers, but also casual observers who enjoy looking up…

AI tools can help us create content, learn about the world and (perhaps) eliminate the more mundane tasks in life – but they aren’t perfect. They’ve been shown to hallucinate information, use other people’s work without consent, and embed social conventions, including apologies, to gain users’ trust. For example, certain AI chatbots, such as “companion” bots, are often developed with the intent to have empathetic responses. This makes them seem particularly believable. Despite our awe and wonder, we must be critical consumers of these tools – or risk being misled. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company that gave us the ChatGPT…

According to predictions made nearly a decade ago, we should be riding around in self-driving vehicles today. It’s now clear the autonomous vehicle revolution was overhyped. Proponents woefully underestimated the technological challenges. It turns out developing a truly driverless vehicle is hard. The other factor driving the hype was the amount of money being invested in autonomous vehicle startups. By 2021, it was estimated more than US$100 billion in venture capital had gone into developing the technology. While advances are being made, it is important to understand there are multiple levels of autonomy. Only one is truly driverless. As established by SAE International, the levels are:…

Digital technologies are changing how food is produced. And it’s more than harvesting robots that are arriving on the scene. Companies are now pairing data centres with greenhouses, capturing the heat emitted by computing hardware and reusing it to grow crops indoors. The new QScale data centre development in Lévis, Que. is one such project. The company claims that it will “produce 2,800 tonnes of small fruit and more than 80,000 tonnes of tomatoes per year” in greenhouses to be constructed adjacent to the facility. In promotional campaigns, QScale picks up on the growing public attention to make food systems more local amid supply chain disruptions and…

Keeping up with the latest digital cons is exhausting. Fraudsters always seem to be one step ahead. But our study found there is one simple thing you can do to drastically reduce your chances of losing money to web scams: slow down. In fact, among the various techniques used by scammers, creating a sense of urgency or the need to act or respond quickly is probably the most damaging. As with many legitimate sales, acting fast reduces your ability to think carefully, evaluate information and make a careful decision. The COVID lockdowns made us all more reliant on online services such as…

When you think about location data on your mobile phone, tablet or laptop, what comes to mind? Mailing addresses? Postal codes? These data indicate where you live, where you work, and the places you visit. When combined with other types of data over time, companies and governments use them to analyze your consumption patterns, occupation, education, health and financial status. Turning location services off only prevents smartphone apps from receiving location data. Smartphones can still be located by cell towers and wireless networks when location services are switched off. This was highlighted by German politician Malte Spitz over a decade ago when he…

In 2016, evidence began to mount that then-South African president Jacob Zuma and a family of Indian-born businessmen, the Guptas, were responsible for widespread “state capture”. It was alleged that the Gupta family influenced Zuma’s political appointments and benefited unfairly from lucrative tenders. The Guptas began to look for a way to divert attention away from them. They enlisted the help of British public relations firm Bell Pottinger, which drew on the country’s existing racial and economic tensions to develop a social media campaign centred on the role of “white monopoly capital” in continuing “economic apartheid”. The campaign was driven by the power of…

The prominent model of information access before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search engines are the primary way most people access information today, but entering a few keywords and getting a list of results ranked by some unknown function is not ideal. A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access systems, which includes Microsoft’s Bing/ChatGPT, Google/Bard and Meta/LLaMA, is upending the traditional search engine mode of search input and output. These systems are able to take full sentences and even paragraphs as input and generate personalized natural…

The recent frenzy over language processing tools such as ChatGPT has sent organizations scrambling to provide guidelines for responsible usage. The online publishing platform Medium, for example, has released a statement on AI-generated writing that promotes “transparency” and “disclosure.” My own institution has established an FAQ page about generative AI that calls on educators to make “wise and ethical use” of AI and chatbots. These ethical measures seem quaint, given this week’s release of the more powerful GPT-4, which runs the risk of being a disinformation and propaganda machine. OpenAI claims GPT-4 was able to pass a simulated bar exam in the top 10 per cent, compared to…

It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we can confidently trace cosmic history back to one second after the Big Bang, what happened before is harder to gauge. Our accelerators simply can’t produce enough energy to replicate the extreme conditions that prevailed in the first nanosecond. But…