• Should You Be Nice to Your Chatbot? (gift link, WSJ, Oct 14, 2024):

As talking to chatbots is now becoming more like normal conversations, AI users face an awkward ethical dilemma: Bots are programmed to be polite, but do we have to reciprocate? Is it wrong to speak harshly to them? . . .

“The litmus test for how good a person you are is if you are nice to a waiter,” said Alana O’Grady, an executive at a tech startup based in San Mateo, Calif. “In the future, it’ll be how kind you are to your AI companion.”

• From Axios (Oct 23, 2024), cars may soon come with a surveillance chatbot installed:

Qualcomm announced yesterday that it is bringing its next-generation Oryon processor to its in-car computer systems for both entertainment and automated driving. . . .

- Mercedes said it would use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Cockpit Elite chip to power future in-car information systems.

- Qualcomm also announced a partnership with Google to jointly promote Android Auto and Qualcomm’s digital cockpit to automakers. . . .

- “We think people will be able to truly converse with their cars, not just like an AI chatbot, but actually with intelligence around what the vehicle can see, what the vehicle knows about itself and what it knows about the driver,” Patrick Brady, VP of engineering for Android at Google, said in an interview.

- The power increases further when AI is combined with self-driving abilities. In a concept video, Qualcomm featured a car’s AI assistant telling the driver: “There is no parking nearby. You can unload here and I will park the car.”

- China’s Li Auto showed an AI assistant that can answer all the questions that kids ask while you are in the car, while also powering travel-related and entertainment tasks and remembering its owner’s preferences.

• Surveillance Capitalism: A Conversation with Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Balsillie (video from Feb 28, 2024), speaking about cars as loss leaders

• Kroger and Walmart Deny ‘Surge Pricing’ After Adopting Digital Price Tags (NYT, Oct 23, 2024): “Some members of Congress have expressed concerns that stores will monitor customers and raise prices.”

• Facial Recognition That Tracks Suspicious Friendliness Is Coming to a Store Near You (by Todd Feathers in Gizmodo, Nov 1, 2024): “Coresight AI has released a new product that sends alerts to store security when customers and staff have anomalous interactions.” . . . it “analyzes how close customers stand to different employees and whether returning customers consistently go to the same employee when they visit a store. Anomalies trigger alerts to store security staff, who decide how to proceed.”

    --> As Chris Gilliard put it, “Pervasive surveillance is instituted in order to reduce all social interactions to an accepted ‘norm’ dictated by corporations.”

• Google AI Inaccurate In 43% Of Finance-Related Searches (The College Investor, Oct 18, 2024): “We tested 100 personal finance-related queries across multiple areas of personal finance, including banking, credit, investing, insurance, student loans, and financial aid. . . . Out of 100 searches, we found that Google AI Overviews were correct in 57 instances, and provided misleading or inaccurate information in 43 instances.”

In the list of questions below, yellow diamond means “misleading” or “missing key info” - red X means “incorrect” - and green checkmark is “correct”:

• Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said (AP, Oct 26, 2024):

Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences . . .

In an example [researchers] uncovered, a speaker said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.”

But the transcription software added: “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece ... I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

A speaker in another recording described “two other girls and one lady.” Whisper invented extra commentary on race, adding “two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black.”

In a third transcription, Whisper invented a non-existent medication called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”

. . . Over 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems, including the Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, have started using a Whisper-based tool built by Nabla, which has offices in France and the U.S.

• We Built the Technosphere. Now We Must Resist It (by Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, Jan 16, 2024):

What course of action, then, is left to any one person? Jacques Ellul, a man who loved life, offered three choices. He wrote in 1989 that people can accept technology as our determined fate, bear witness to its transgressions, or resist its dominance in every human affair. Only the last two paths, he wrote, offer promise, hope and, finally, liberation. And if we are to achieve any “exit from this terrible swamp of ours,” he said, “above all things we must avoid the mistake of thinking that we are free.” First we must acknowledge our confinement in the technosphere. Then, “seeing the Hydra head of trickery and the Gorgon face of hi-tech, the only thing we can do is set them at a critical distance, for it is by being able to criticize that we show our freedom.”

• Octavia Butler, quoted by Audrey Watters in her Nov 4, 2024 newsletter:

“So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

• Movie recommendation: Robot Dreams (2023)