Government Technology

Alla fine del 2017 un algoritmo di intelligenza artificiale ha collezionato una serie di vittorie schiaccianti a scacchi scegliendo mosse che la mente umana non è nemmeno in grado di assimilare o utilizzare. Qualche anno più tardi, i ricercatori del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hanno annunciato la scoperta di un nuovo antibiotico ottenuto grazie all'aiuto dell'intelligenza artificiale, che era riuscita a individuare proprietà molecolari sfuggite alla concettualizzazione e alla classificazione degli scienziati.

Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant.

Avec les deepfakes, la culture du faux s'immisce partout, ils sont de véritables armes de désinformation. Comment s'en protéger dans un quotidien où nous sommes en permanence confrontés aux images ?

Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financializing medicine—from Purdue's rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin through Martin Shkreli's hiking the price of a lifesaving drug to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.

This is the first biography in English of Nikolai Ivanovich Kibalchich, who was hanged as the explosives technician of the "People's Will" party of terrorists who assassinated Russian Tsar Alexander II with a thrown grenade on March 1, 1881. While in prison awaiting execution, Kibalchich conceived and drew the design of the first rocket-powered human-piloted flying device, thus qualifying him in history as a "terrorist rocket pioneer".

The United States military currently views cyberspace as the "fifth domain" of warfare - alongside land, sea, air, and space - and the Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and CIA all field teams of hackers who can - and do - launch computer virus strikes against enemy targets. In fact, as @War shows, US hackers were crucial to our victory in Iraq.

Early in the crisis, a global volunteer collaboration called Pivot Projects was formed to rethink how the world works. Some members are experts in the sciences and the humanities; others are environmental activists or regular people who see themselves as world citizens. In The Pivot, the journalist Steve Hamm - who embedded in the enterprise from the start - explores their efforts and shows how their approach provides a model for achieving systemic change.

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, American intelligence agencies have launched spies in the sky, implanted spies in the ether, burrowed spies underground, sunk spies in the ocean, and even tried to control spies' minds by chemical means. But these weren't human spies. Instead, the United States expanded its reach around the globe through techno-spies. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach investigates how America's technophiles inadvertently created a global espionage empire: one based on technology, not land.

This audiobook narrated by Teri Schnaubelt explains how to put democracy at the heart of AI governance.

COVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president’s political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives, and puts America’s COVID-19 response in global perspective.

Not so long ago, we embraced social media as a life-changing opportunity to connect with friends and family all across the globe. Today, the pendulum of public opinion is swinging in the opposite direction as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and similar sites are being accused of corrupting our democracy, spreading disinformation, and fanning the flames of hatred. Here, with insightful analysis and in-depth research, Robby Soave explores some of the biggest issues animating both the right and the left: bias, censorship, disinformation, privacy, screen addiction, crime, and more.

The speed of technological development, from cell phones to artificial intelligence, opens up exciting new opportunities for promoting human flourishing. It also raises grave risks, threatening not only personal privacy and dignity but also our collective survival. Technologies of Human Rights Representation asks: How can we open the black box of technological advances so that we can more fully understand their effects upon our lives? What can we do to make sure that these effects align with the values of human rights?

You are probably not aware, because of their hidden nature, but artificial intelligence systems are all around you affecting some of the biggest areas of your life - jobs, loans, kids, mental health, relationships, freedoms, and even healthcare decisions that can determine if you live or die.

When the Founding Fathers drafted our Constitution, they had no idea there would be a “Big Tech”–nor any concept of the immense power these companies would wield over our people. But the Fathers did provide mechanisms—a system of check and balances—for the people to stop dangerous monopolies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon from suffocating our business and political life. Few know more about these mechanisms than Rep. Ken Buck, who has been a leader in Congress fighting against the unchecked power of Big Tech.

Dank neuester Entwicklungen im Bereich der KI sind hochentwickelte maschinelle Systeme durch das Scannen und Verändern bestehenden Fotomaterials in der Lage, Fotos oder Videos zu generieren und sie mit einem Kontext auszustatten, den es nie gegeben hat. Wird darauf zudem eine authentisch wirkende Tonspur gelegt, sind die Resultate absolut überzeugend - und verheerend in ihrer Wirkung. Diese so genannten "Deep Fakes" sind eine reale Gefahr für Demokratien, denn sie haben die Macht, Wahlmanipulation auf ein ganz neues Level zu heben und die Entscheidungen nichtsahnender Bürger massiv und grundlegend zu beeinflussen.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

Künstliche Intelligenz und Algorithmen erleichtern in Form von Navis, Rechtschreibprogrammen, Suchergänzungen oder Kaufempfehlungen schon lange unseren Alltag. Aber sie hinterlassen oft auch ein mulmiges Gefühl, weil wir nicht so recht verstehen, was da passiert. Katharina Zweig, IT-Expertin für Sozioinformatik und vielfach ausgezeichnete Informatikprofessorin, erklärt mit Witz und anhand einfacher Beispiele und Illustrationen, was Algorithmen eigentlich genau sind, wie sie funktionieren, welche völlig harmlos sind und welche uns tatsächlich Sorgen bereiten sollten.

Kai-Fu Lee: China, USA und die künstliche Intelligenz. Wer wissen will, wie sich in der Welt die Gewichte verschieben, muss sich die Künstliche-Intelligenz-Industrie (AI-Industrie) anschauen. Kai-Fu Lee, Ex-Google-China-CEO, milliardenschwerer Start-up-Investor und einer der weltweit renommiertesten AI-Experten, bietet in seinem Buch erstmals die chinesisch-amerikanische Perspektive. Er berichtet aus erster Hand: wie die Business-Kulturen aufeinanderprallen, warum die Silicon-Valley- Strategien in China scheitern mussten, wie ein chinesisches Google (Baidu).

Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world.

Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet. Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray.