Tag Archives: information technology

Druid app

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This app is supposed to measure cognitive impairment from alcohol, drugs, and fatigue.

Grounded in cognitive neuroscience, Druid is a breakthrough technology. It brings you a sophisticated tool that measures impairment from any cause, including cannabis and other drugs, alcohol, fatigue, illness, injury, chronic condition, or severe stress. Druid operates like a video game while it measures hundred of neurophysiological indicators.

Google Play

Seems useful for a variety of purposes. And employers could use it for a variety of legitimate purposes, such as maybe testing pilots and surgeons? People who aren’t able to do their jobs safely because they are tired or stressed shouldn’t get fired obviously, they should get to rest. You can certainly imagine employers and law enforcement using this app abusively. As for driving safely, let’s just turn that over to the computers already.

ChatGPT

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I set up a ChatGPT account and asked it to solve the lily pond problem. If the lilies double every day and will cover the pond in 30 days, on what day do the cover the half the pond. The answer, of course, should be day 29. ChatGPT correctly told me in words that this as an exponential growth problem, then gave me a numerical answer of 15 days (the linear growth answer!). Then it gave me some completely wrong math involving logarithms, after which it gave me two additional different answers that were not 29 or 15, and didn’t seem to acknowledge that it had even given multiple answers.

What scared me most was not the wrong answer(s), but the extremely confident manner in which it gave the wrong answer(s). This could fool people on problems where they don’t know the answer in advance, and the correct answer is not intuitive or obvious.

ChatGPT does tell much better knock-knock jokes that Siri…

As of today, we do not want this thing designing bridges or airplanes or anything else! I do not want it advising my doctor on my course of treatment, mixing my prescriptions at the pharmacy, or managing my retirement account, although these seem like plausible near-future applications once some kinks get worked out. It’s easy to be dismissive of the current state of this technology. But at the same time, it may not be that far off. Right now, it could argue you to a standstill in a barroom political or philosophical debate (you know, where a drunk guy makes a lengthy argument that is as illogical as it is confidently delivered, and since there are no consequences you just give up). In the medium-term future, I could imagine it being a conversational companion for a child or a person with dementia (although, there are some obvious ethical concerns here.) Could it be a best friend or significant other? This is a bit disturbing, because it might be able to always tell you exactly what you want to hear and be 100% impervious to your own annoying quirks, and then you might forget how to deal with actual people who are not going to be so forgiving. It could inhabit a sex doll – now there is a truly disturbing thought, but it will happen soon if it has not already.

body cams

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I just finished up my third Philadelphia jury experience. I’m not going to give any details of names or locations, but one thing that struck me was the role of technology. This trial featured:

  • Instagram
  • Someone (allegedly) impersonating a delivery person
  • Selfies, which ended up in court
  • A (temporarily) purloined cell phone
  • Police body cam videos

Now, about those police body cams. We started hearing about them in the context of police shootings of suspects, but after seeing them in court I realized that they change everything. First, there is a world of difference between hearing the testimony of a police office about what happened on the scene, and seeing and hearing (although the audio was not perfect) it for yourself. For one thing, police are not masters of public speaking. For another, the incident they are describing happened months or even years before, and was just a few short minutes during one busy day. They may have responded to hundreds or thousands of similar calls since then. The body cam footage will even help the police officers themselves remember what happened on the scene before they testify.

Microsoft’s Cylon chat bot

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Microsoft has filed a patent for code that can suck in a (living or dead I suppose) person’s online history and configure a chatbot to act something like them. Of course, just because they filed a patent doesn’t mean they plan widespread commercialization of the idea, just that they had an idea and don’t want others to be able to profit from the idea (which I would bet somebody else had first but didn’t file the patent…) At its most innocuous, this would not be too much different than looking up famous quotes of a famous person (let’s say Abraham Lincoln) on a particular topic, except it could apply to anyone.

This, of course, is the exact plot of Battlestar Gallactica, at least the 2004-2008 series I am most familiar with. And that was an awesome series that won over many people (my significant other included) who did not consider themselves fans of science fiction. Somewhat similar to the way Game of Thrones won over people who considered themselves too serious for fantasy. So check it out if you haven’t.

quantum supremacy

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Google claims that its fastest computer, a quantum computer called Sycamore, is now faster than IBM’s fastest computer, a “classical” supercomputer called Summit. IBM is disputing the claim, but in any case it appears that quantum computers in general are making progress.

What matters is that Google’s machine is solving a computational problem in a fundamentally different way than a classical computer can. This difference means that every time its quantum computer grows by even a single qubit, a classical computer will have to double in size to keep pace. By the time a quantum computer gets to 70 qubits — likely within the next couple of years — a classical supercomputer would need to occupy the area of a city to keep up.

Quanta Magazine

Even if Google is the leader, I would assume that IBM, and a few other large corporations foreign and domestic, must have similar machines. Hopefully they will be used to improve lives, not just for nuclear weapons and derivatives trading.

the quantum internet

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A paper in Nature explains what a “quantum internet” could look like.

In stage 1, users will start getting into the quantum game, in which a sender creates quantum states, typically for photons. These would be sent to a receiver, either along an optical fibre or through a laser pulse beamed across open space. At this stage, any two users will be able to create a private encryption key that only they know…

In stage 2, the quantum internet will harness the powerful phenomenon of entanglement. Its first goal will be to make quantum encryption essentially unbreakable. Most of the techniques that this stage requires already exist, at least as rudimentary lab demonstrations.

Stages 3 to 5 will, for the first time, enable any two users to store and exchange quantum bits, or qubits. These are units of quantum information, similar to classical 1s and 0s, but they can be in a superposition of both 1 and 0 simultaneously. Qubits are also the basis for quantum computation. (A number of laboratories — both in academia and at large corporations, such as IBM or Google — have been building increasingly complex quantum computers; the most advanced ones have memories that can hold a few dozen qubits.)

So it seems as though the main advantage of a quantum internet would be truly secure communications. Which I guess is at least something, but doesn’t seem as though it would revolutionize everyday life anytime soon. There are no predictions in this article about when it might happen other than “a long time”.

virtual reality and philosophy

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That’s right, this article is about virtual reality and philosophy.

Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research.

The main thing I got from this article is that it is really…long. It starts with a glossary of terms you need to learn before you read the rest of the paper, then gets longer from there.

Surveillance in western China

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Der Spiegel describes the Chinese government’s surveillance of a minority population in the western part of the country.

Beijing is equipping the far-western province with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

Later the article talks about reeducation camps and a point system that rates how “trustworthy” families are.

what’s new with Magic Leap?

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Actually, nobody knows what is new with Magic Leap. But there is supposed to be something new in 2018.

 at long last, Magic Leap has unveiled a prototype and will make its headset available with developer tools in 2018. The goggles, dubbed the Magic Leap One, come with a controller and battery pack the size of my palm, and have a steampunk vibe. They’re sleek, with bug-eyed lenses, and a Rolling Stone preview suggests they’ll be expensive. Truthfully, there’s not much more information available. Developers haven’t tried them, so it’s impossible to compare them directly to other available prototypes. But what’s distinctive about these glasses is that they exist at all—that Magic Leap has finally come forth with evidence that its technology, which until now has only been seen by those of us who have signed lengthy and complicated nondisclosure agreements, will have form.