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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

New research from Asana shows that although UK workers are open to the opportunities that AI can bring to the workplace, a disconnect exists between organizational plans for the technology and the current employee experience.

The data is derived from a survey of 2,741 UK workers, carried out by Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, a think tank that carries out research to help businesses meet the demands of the evolving workplace.

According to the findings, AI’s role in helping companies meet objectives is recognized by workers, with 49% of surveyed employees confident that AI will help their companies reach their objectives more effectively than traditional methods of working.

With 40% of workers stating their organizations are currently experiencing high levels of burnout, 92% of those surveyed said they want AI to be used to enhance parts of their job. Notably, 61% of respondents approve of AI being used for development and training. Employees also highlighted AI usage for customer service interactions, decision making processes, and hiring processes, which had approval rates of 50%, 32%, and 26%, respectively.

However, there is a clear disconnect between what employees would like to see AI used for in the workplace and how it is currently being deployed.

[...] Instead of asking ourselves how AI will change our work, we should be asking ourselves how we as humans can positively shape that change, said Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work Innovation Lab, at a roundtable event last week.

“AI holds enormous power because of its complexity and sophistication, but in order to harness the promise and the potential of AI in our workplace we need to adopt a deeply human approach,” Hinds said. “Decades of research show that the implementation of new technology fails in most cases not because the technology isn’t efficient, but because humans naturally resist change.”

When it comes to making a success of AI in the workplace, Hinds said the organizations need to prioritize change management, upskilling and reskilling, and experimentation and allow their workers to commit time to familiarize themselves with these news tools.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Boeing says it can't make money with fixed-price contracts

"Rest assured we haven't signed any fixed-price development contracts, nor intend to."

Boeing released its third-quarter results on Wednesday [ . . . . ] amid these improving results, Boeing's financials continued to be dragged down by its Defense, Space & Security division. This division, which includes missile production for the military and space activities such as satellites and the Starliner spacecraft, lost $1.7 billion during the first three quarters of this year.

[ . . . . ] Boeing's chief executive, David Calhoun, and chief financial officer, Brian West, expressed disappointment in these results from the defense and space division. [ . . . . ] the pair pinned the blame for performance by its defense and space division, referred to internally as BDS, on fixed-price contracts. As the BDS division seeks a return to profitability, West said Boeing will not be using fixed-price contracts anymore.

[ . . . . ] Boeing has also been struggling with fixed-price contracts in programs to build aircraft for the military, such as the KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueling aircraft, and NASA, with the Starliner crewed spacecraft.

[ . . . . ] Boeing has been developing Starliner for more than a decade and is running six years behind its original goal of flying crew to the International Space Station for NASA in 2017. The company also has fallen more than three years behind SpaceX

[ . . . . ] As it has sought to compete with SpaceX on a purely fixed-price contract for crew transport, Boeing has reported more than $1 billion in losses to date and still has yet to fly its first astronaut mission.

Clearly cost-plus contracts accomplish exactly what they were intended to and must be continued.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/california-suspends-cruises-robotaxis-after-pedestrian-was-critically-injured/

Less than three months after the California Public Utilities Commission approved robotaxi-service Cruise's plan to provide around-the-clock driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has shut down Cruise's driverless operations in the state.

Yesterday, the California DMV suspended Cruise's permits for autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing "effective immediately" over pedestrian safety concerns.
[...]
The suspension followed two notable accidents involving Cruise's robotaxis. In August, one person was injured after a Cruise vehicle crashed into a fire truck, CNBC reported. And earlier this month, a pedestrian using a crosswalk was found in critical condition after a driver of another vehicle struck the pedestrian and threw her into the path of an oncoming Cruise robotaxi.

This hit-and-run incident is still being investigated. According to Cruise, its autonomous vehicle (AV) detected the collision and stopped on top of the pedestrian, then veered off the road, dragging the pedestrian about 20 feet. When the AV finally stopped, it appeared to pin the pedestrian's leg beneath a tire while videos showed the pedestrian was screaming for help.

A few weeks after the October incident, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched a probe into Cruise, examining whether Cruise had taken enough precautions to keep pedestrians safe, Reuters reported.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

When given the choice to learn how their actions will affect someone else, 40% of people will choose ignorance, often in order to have an excuse to act selfishly:

"Examples of such willful ignorance abound in everyday life, such as when consumers ignore information about the problematic origins of the products they buy," said lead author Linh Vu, MS, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

"We wanted to know just how prevalent and how harmful willful ignorance is, as well as why people engage in it."

[...] Across the studies, the researchers found that when given an option, 40% of people chose not to learn the consequences of their actions. That willful ignorance was correlated with less altruism: People were 15.6 percentage points more likely to be generous to someone else when they were told the consequences of their choice compared with when they were allowed to remain ignorant.

The researchers hypothesized that one reason for willful ignorance might be that some people behave altruistically because they want to maintain a positive self-image of being an altruistic person. In those cases, willful ignorance can allow them to maintain that self-image without having to act in an altruistic way.

[...] "While most people are willing to do the right thing when they are fully informed of the consequences of their actions, this willingness is not always because people care for others.

"A part of the reasons why people act altruistically is due to societal pressures as well as their desire to view themselves in a good light. Since being righteous is often costly, demanding people to give up their time, money and effort, ignorance offers an easy way out."

Original Research: Open access.
"Ignorance by Choice: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Underlying Motives of Willful Ignorance and Its Consequences" by Shaul Shalvi et al. Psychological Bulletin

Original Submission

New Tool Lets Artists Fight AI Image Bots by Hiding Corrupt Data in Plain Sight

upstart writes:

A team at the University of Chicago created Nightshade to protect ideas and content:

From Hollywood strikes to digital portraits, AI's potential to steal creatives' work and how to stop it has dominated the tech conversation in 2023. The latest effort to protect artists and their creations is Nightshade, a tool allowing artists to add undetectable pixels into their work that could corrupt an AI's training data, the MIT Technology Review reports. Nightshade's creation comes as major companies like OpenAI and Meta face lawsuits for copyright infringement and stealing personal works without compensation.

[...] Nightshade essentially works as a poison, altering how a machine-learning model produces content and what that finished product looks like. For example, it could make an AI system interpret a prompt for a handbag as a toaster or show an image of a cat instead of the requested dog (the same goes for similar prompts like puppy or wolf).

Nightshade follows Zhao and his team's August release of a tool called Glaze, which also subtly alters a work of art's pixels but it makes AI systems detect the initial image as entirely different than it is. An artist who wants to protect their work can upload it to Glaze and opt in to using Nightshade.

Damaging technology like Nightshade could go a long way towards encouraging AI's major players to request and compensate artists' work properly (it seems like a better alternative to having your system rewired). Companies looking to remove the poison would likely need to locate every piece of corrupt data, a challenging task. Zhao cautions that some individuals might attempt to use the tool for evil purposes but that any real damage would require thousands of corrupted works.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

"Right to repair" advocates probably couldn't have imagined that Apple would be one of the biggest names on their side a mere five years ago. But that's precisely what's happening here: The tech giant has officially came out in support of having federal right to repair regulations at an event hosted by the Biden administration. Apple VP Brian Naumann proclaimed at the event that the company "supports a uniform federal law that balances repairability with product integrity, data security, usability, and physical safety." He also said that the company intends to "honor California's new repair provisions across the United States" even though national regulations have yet to be established.

Apple has a lengthy history of opposing attempts at passing right to repair rules. The company once said that Nebraska was bound to become a "mecca for hackers" when a bill was introduced in the state. It changed its tune in the past few years, however, and started selling parts and tools to consumers, as well as offering them access to repair guides so they could fix their iPhones and Macs on their own. Apple also backed Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman's right to repair bill in California in August before Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

[...] In addition to promising to honor California's right to repair provisions across the nation, Naumann also talked about what an ideal federal law should have. "We believe that a uniform federal repair law should do the following: Maintain privacy, data and device security features which help to thwart theft; Ensure transparency for consumers about the type of parts used in a repair; Apply prospectively, to allow manufacturers to focus on building new products that can comply with the proposals; And finally, create a strong national standard that benefits consumers across the US and reduces the confusion created by potentially conflicting state approaches," he said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Millions of Americans and their doctors are in the dark when it comes to early cognitive decline, according to new research from the University of Southern California. A study out this week suggests that most general physicians vastly under-diagnose mild cognitive impairment among their patients, following another recent study from the same authors which found that millions of Medicare patients with the condition slip through the cracks. The researchers say this diagnostic gap is worrying, given the importance of recognizing and treating mild cognitive impairment before it becomes more serious.

It’s well established that mild cognitive impairment is under-diagnosed in older people, but the researchers say theirs is some of the first work to quantify the current size of the problem.

“It’s a very different conversation to have when we can point to these numbers,” senior study author Soeren Mattke, director of the Brain Health Observatory at USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research, told Gizmodo over the phone.

In the latest study, published Tuesday in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, the team looked at Medicare administrative data collected from over 200,000 primary care clinicians and 50,000 practices between 2017 to 2019. They found that doctors and practices failed to diagnose about 92% of expected mild cognitive impairment cases on average; they also estimated that only 0.1% of physicians accurately diagnosed it as often as they should, based on expected rates.

In the previous paper, published this July in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, the authors examined the medical records of over 40 million Americans over 65 enrolled in Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans between 2015 to 2019.

Based on other research, about 8 million of these Americans should have mild cognitive impairment, defined as noticeable memory loss or cognitive decline that doesn’t yet impede a person’s everyday activities. But although the rate did slightly improve over time, only a small portion of Medicare patients actually received a mild cognitive impairment diagnosis during the study period, amounting to about 8% of expected cases.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its journey through space, but now teams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) are struggling to open it to get at the space rocks.

For the past week, the curation team for the OSIRIS-REx mission has been having a hard time opening the TAGSAM head, a round sampler head at the end of an articulated arm on the spacecraft that was used to grab the sample from the asteroid. The TAGSAM head (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) is where the bulk of the asteroid sample is, and it is therefore being carefully handled by members of the team through a specialized glovebox under the flow of nitrogen to prevent contamination.

“After multiple attempts at removal, the team discovered two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox,” NASA wrote in a blog post on Friday. “The team has been working to develop and implement new approaches to extract the material inside the head, while continuing to keep the sample safe and pristine.”

When the aluminum lid to the sample canister was first removed, the mission team found black dust and debris on the avionics deck of the canister. On October 11, NASA revealed the first look at the samples collected from the outside of the TAGSAM head while adding that it still hasn’t opened the sample canister yet. “The only problem is a great problem and that’s we’ve found a lot more sample than we’re anticipating before even getting into the TAGSAM,” Francis McCubbin, curator at NASA’s JSC, said during a live event.

Massive lawsuit against Meta

quietus writes:

"At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true."

Mark Zuckerberg, on his own facebook page, October 2021, as quoted by Reuters.

Despite years of discussions, US Congress hasn't been able to pass new online protections for children.

This Tuesday, 42 US states took matters in their own hands, and sued Meta [Platforms] and its Instagram unit. An important factor in the decision to go to court was the US Congress testimony of a Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen (testimony 1, 2 (pdf), hearing (context)).

According to the federal lawsuit (pdf here), Meta

• created a business model focused on maximizing young users' time on its platforms,
• employs harmful and psychologically manipulative platform features while misleading the public about the safety of those features,
• published reports showing misleadingly low rates of user harms, and
• in spite of the overwhelming evidence linking its platforms to young user harms, refuses to address those harms while continuing to conceal and downplay its platforms' adverse effects.

While much of the complaint includes information conditionally under seal as part of the investigation by the attorneys general, publicly available sources — including evidence disclosed by former Meta employees — also detail Meta's efforts to attract young users and make its platforms addictive to children and teens. For example, the Wall Street Journal published an internal Facebook document in 2021 that said the following about young users: "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

Freeman writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/

"This retroactive idea. It has to be that," says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for nearly a century. "Any sensible physicist wouldn't be perturbed by this," he adds. "However, I'm not a sensible physicist."

If Penrose isn't a sensible physicist it's because the laws of physics aren't making sense, at least not on the subatomic level where the smallest things in the universe play by different rules than everything we see around us. He has reason to believe this disconnect involves a fissure that divides two different kinds of reality. He also has reason to believe that the physical process that bridges these realities will unlock answers to the physics of consciousness: the mystery of our own existence.

Penrose's contributions to math and physics are significant. He's proposed a theory of sequential universes that existed before the big bang, traces of which seem to be penetrating ours. He collaborated with Stephen Hawking on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, identifying points in the universe, singularities, where the gravitational forces are so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.[...]

For decades, Penrose has been working with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff on a theory of consciousness called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR).

[...] Penrose demurs. He politely but unequivocally waves off the idea that a conscious observer collapses wave functions by looking at them. Likewise, he dismisses the view that a conscious observer spins off near infinite universes with a glance. "That's making consciousness do the job of collapsing the wave function without having a theory of consciousness," says Penrose. "I'm turning it around and I'm saying whatever consciousness is, for quite different reasons, I think it does depend on the collapse of the wave function. On that physical process."

AnonTechie writes:

When we're confronting a vexing problem, we often gather a group to brain­storm. We're looking to get the best ideas as quickly as possible. I love seeing it happen—except for one tiny wrinkle. Group brainstorming usually backfires.

In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost— and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone. As the humorist Dave Barry quipped, "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: 'meetings.' " But the problem isn't meetings themselves—it's how we run them.

[...] Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there. Individuals produce a greater volume and variety of novel ideas when they work alone. That means that they come up with more brilliant ideas than groups—but also more terrible ideas than groups. It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise and bring the best ideas to fruition.

Source: time.com

From HIDDEN POTENTIAL by Adam Grant

I am sure most of you have spent time "brain storming" ... was it productive or wasted time ?

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, October 25th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. This will be 5pm eastern time depending on your daylight saving time status.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.

hubie writes:

Any sound can now be perfectly replicated by a combination of whistles, clicks, and hisses, with implications for sound processing across the media landscape:

Researchers have been looking for ways to decompose sound into its basic ingredients for over 200 years. In the 1820s, French scientist Joseph Fourier proposed that any signal, including sounds, can be built using sufficiently many sine waves. These waves sound like whistles, each have their own frequency, level and start time, and are the basic building blocks of sound.

However, some sounds, such as the flute and a breathy human voice, may require hundreds or even thousands of sines to exactly imitate the original waveform. This comes from the fact that such sounds contain a less harmonical, more noisy structure, where all frequencies occur at once. One solution is to divide sound into two types of components, sines and noise, with a smaller number of whistling sine waves and combined with variable noises, or hisses, to complete the imitation.

Even this 'complete' two-component sound model has issues with the smoothing of the beginnings of sound events, such as consonants in voice or drum sounds in music. A third component, named transient, was introduced around the year 2000 to help model the sharpness of such sounds. Transients alone sound like clicks. From then on, sound has been often divided into three components: sines, noise, and transients.

The three-component model of sines, noise and transients has now been refined by researchers at Aalto University Acoustics Lab, using ideas from auditory perception, fuzzy logic, and perfect reconstruction.

Doctoral researcher Leonardo Fierro and professor Vesa Välimäki realized the way that people hear the different components and separate whistles, clicks, and hisses is important. If a click gets spread in time, it starts to ring and sound noisier; by contrast, focusing on very brief sounds might cause some loss of tonality.

dbe writes:

USA administration just designed 31 tech-hubs to receive funding to develop tech in the US to counter the current concentration in few metropolis (Austin, Texas; Boston; New York; San Francisco; and Seattle)

So what is a tech hub?
A tech hub designation is "a strong endorsement of a region's plan to supercharge a critical technology ecosystem and become a global leader over the next decade," the U.S. Economic Development Administration said on its website.

Any Soylentils in these areas to comment on the potential effects of such designation?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/amazon-drivers-urine-packaged-as-energy-drink-sold-on-amazon/

The drink had all the hallmarks of a beverage sensation. Striking design, bold font, and the punchy name Release. But inside, each bottle was filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.

That didn't stop Amazon from listing it for sale, though. Release even attained No. 1 bestseller status in the "Bitter Lemon" category. It was created by Oobah Butler for a new documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK today.

Butler is a journalist, presenter, and renowned puller of stunts—he's probably most famous for turning his shed in a London garden into the number one ranked restaurant on Tripadvisor.
[...]
Drummond [Amazon spokesperson] says this was a "crude stunt" and that the company has "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed."
[...]
The Great Amazon Heist doesn't tell us anything particularly new. (Drummond says the documentary is a "heavily distorted picture of our processes and operations that do not reflect the realities of shopping with or working for Amazon.") But placing all of these elements alongside each other in an hour of television paints a stark picture. Drivers and warehouse workers put up with the conditions because they have no choice. Dangerous products were listed and sold to children with no checks in place. Byzantine structures shield the company from local authorities. According to Amazon's mission statement, it "strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company, Earth's best employer, and Earth's safest place to work." The Great Amazon Heist portrays a company that simply doesn't seem to care.

Original Submission