Up Times • May 2024

Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

Let’s build AI that makes everybody’s lives better –Rosalind Picard, TEDx Beacon Street

In December of last year MIT Professor Rosalind Picard’s business Empatica announced a large-scale, multi-month study that will use Artificial Intelligence for better epilepsy seizure forecasting. Empatica makes a wearable device that is designed to detect changes in physiology up to twenty minutes before the onset of a possibly life-threatening seizure.

Similar to what we’ve seen in the trajectory of the Large Language AI models like ChatGPT, Empatica’s website explains the importance of this new study: developing a reliable and accurate seizure forecasting algorithm has so far been a challenge for researchers due to one major reason: data volumes. Large datasets are extremely important to train an algorithm to achieve an accurate prediction of when someone will have a seizure, but they are also extremely difficult to gather. With this study, Empatica seeks to overcome this challenge with the participation of its community.

Dr Picard makes a case for the good that can come from AI … [15 min. watch] youtube.com

AI needs regulation and societal guardrails — Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy Director Laura Manley is a Boston Magazine-featured AI influencer. When asked whether AI enables bad actors, Manley said AI has the ability to scale all of the horrible things that we’ve seen carried out on the Internet … though, she added that the technology is not inherently good or bad, but needs regulation.

Her responses reminded me of Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s statement about our freedoms depending on constraints – traffic lights, Stiglitz said, don’t limit, but increase our freedoms – I get a turn to go, you get a turn and without them we would have collisions and chaos … [10 min. read] bostonmagazine.com

It’s not just Taylor Swift being fraudulently spoofed — An arrest was made in Baltimore that involved the AI-falsifying of spoken content for the purposes of defamation. An employee of Pikesville High School, in an apparent retaliation attempt, created inflammatory speech that seemed to be from the school’s principal. The investigators determined that the speech was in fact AI-generated. The arrested employee – brazenly, stupidly – even Googled on the school’s network to learn how to create the audio.

Washington Post coverage quoted Scott Shellenberger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney, we were trying very hard to find additional things he can be charged with, and we didn’t have enough specific statutes … this is a new area with AI and it’s a new abuse of AI, and we’re going to have to create new laws to deal with this situation in order to prevent people from wanting to do this and to punish those who have done it. And Baltimore Attorney Tamarin Lindenberg told the Post, the abusers are not who you think they are [i.e. anonymous cybercriminals] … this is a colleague, this is someone else in the school … [4 min. read] arstechnica.com

Don’t forget that special *#^%! character! — Humorist Johanna Gohmann sounds seriously annoyed with the time it takes to deal with retail site logins just so she can pick up my very own Styrofoam sculpture of a bird dressed up as an Easter Bunny. Is there a better way? [5 min. read] wsj.com

Only recently have I realized that my time at MIT may be the source of nearly every major idea I’ve chased — Cal Newport reflects on his seven years among monster minds at MIT where he studied computer science.

Newport recalls how you had to be up to the challenge of concentration in order to survive there. Also he shows how the students were taught to take their time until they hit on the right idea – and how this time-taking didn’t keep him from publishing twenty-six papers before he graduated.

He concludes his reminiscence by noting how easy it is to undervalue concentration, and substitute busyness for real productivity, and [be] quick to embrace whatever new techno-bauble shines brightest … [6 min. read] newyorker.com

^{Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}