id
int64 0
17.2k
| year
int64 2k
2.02k
| title
stringlengths 7
208
| url
stringlengths 20
263
| text
stringlengths 852
324k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
2,213 | 2,023 |
"Generative AI Is Coming for Sales Execs’ Jobs—and They’re Celebrating | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-chatgpt-is-coming-for-sales-jobs"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Paresh Dave Business Generative AI Is Coming for Sales Execs’ Jobs—and They’re Celebrating PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES Save this story Save Save this story Save Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer’s request for proposals? That’s just drudgery. Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work , the corporate chore of responding to RFPs is one of the first that generative AI is disrupting.
In April, communications software maker Twilio introduced RFP Genie, a generative AI tool that digests an RFP, scours thousands of internal files for relevant information, and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate a suitable response. The company’s sales staff simply copy and paste the text over into a formal document and make a few adjustments.
RFPs that once occupied a pair of staffers for two weeks or more are now done in minutes. Twilio, whose cloud tools enable companies to chat with customers, expects to be able to make more and better sales pitches, and isn’t planning job cuts. “This will free up our solutions engineers to focus on more complex problems that demand not just reasoning, but human contextualization,” says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson of the RFP bot, which has not previously been reported.
Lawson’s sales team isn’t the only one enjoying a sudden windfall of free time. Generative AI RFP response bots also have launched for sales teams at Google’s cloud unit, ad-buying agency EssenceMediacom, and DataRobot, a startup developing software to manage AI programs. In August at IBM, an RFP bot was selected by CEO Arvind Krishna as the winner of an internal AI hackathon called the Watsonx challenge, beating a field of over 12,000 entries. It used a large language model from IBM’s Watsonx.ai service to write answers in a tenth of the time compared to solely by hand, and the company is studying how to adopt the system. Consulting giants such as Bain and Deloitte have been pitching clients on the RFP idea, and makers of RFP management software are trying to build in generative AI.
Google expects its AI RFP tool to save its salespeople tens of thousands of hours annually RFPs with tedious questions asking for information such as a cloud service’s uptime or its support for multifactor authentication are an unavoidable stage in all sorts of sales processes, from software deals to light bulbs. Customers get a book of jargon, statistics, and promises to justify an eventual purchase and use in any future dispute. But no one enjoys writing or answering the questions, which in tech pulls top engineers away from more important projects. Everyone involved openly jokes—or perhaps secretly fears—that no one reads the responses before tapping the Buy button anyway.
Generative AI’s arrival has brought welcome relief to many workers trapped in RFP hell—and potentially offers a counterpoint to the anxiety that AI writers will replace humans.
At the same time it’s prompting questions over how much longer humans will be involved in some business admin practices. As more RFP responses are crafted by AI, bots will inevitably start writing the questions too. Before long, other bots may be scoring proposals and recommending winners, leaving humans to just do a brief double check. “The AI RFP is a baby step toward replacing the RFP with something better,” says Peter Bonney, CEO of Vendorful , which recently started selling a tool similar to that used inside Twilio.
When Lawson laid off 11 percent of Twilio’s several thousand employees in September 2022 and an additional 17 percent in February , he said the company had to become more efficient. Generative AI is a central pillar of his plan to boost productivity. He started toying with the technology during nights and weekends in 2020, using text generators to brainstorm and to compile silly dinner recipes. When OpenAI began selling access to GPT-4, the large language model powering the paid version of ChatGPT , Lawson asked his staff to work on tools to streamline Twilio’s operations.
To create the RFP bot, a handful of data scientists and a solutions engineer at Twilio began experimenting with augmenting GPT-4’s inherent vocabulary, which comes from scraping the text of websites and books. They devised a method that pairs a program that retrieves snippets relevant to the questions in an RFP from technical documentation and other sources inside in the company with a system that directs GPT-4 to summarize those snippets in a clear and professional tone. GPT-4 proved capable of generating extremely accurate responses—though solutions engineers and technical experts still review or edit every answer before sending them off to a prospective client.
The tech industry has begun calling systems like Twilio’s retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. Browse, a new option in paid ChatGPT, functions similarly by summarizing search results from Microsoft Bing to help answer users’ questions. It cuts down on large language models’ so-called hallucinations, where they make up information when there are gaps in their knowledge. Jay Schuren, chief customer officer at DataRobot, compares RAG to handing someone a cue card with some facts listed and asking them to make a speech. “The language model tells a coherent story, but it sticks to the script,” he says. The RAG approach is also, in many cases, much cheaper than training or fine-tuning a large language model to a specific task.
I don't have personal preferences or feelings Twilio's bot for responding to RFPs sticks to business Twilio’s RFP Genie, as it’s unofficially known internally, operates globally and in multiple languages. Account executives can now solicit more business because they can respond to RFPs they would have previously lacked time to pick up. By Twilio’s estimate, the bot handles about 80 percent of an RFP and staff fill in the rest while reporting and categorizing their corrections. “We’re not reducing these roles, because with the time saved these teams can address more RFPs and spend more time interacting with and helping more customers than before,” company spokesperson Miya Shitama says.
The company is working on having the tool automatically improve based on staffers’ edits to AI-generated answers. It also hopes to give the tool some more character. When asked by a company staffer about its favorite question to answer, the bot dryly replied, “I don't have personal preferences or feelings” before noting, “I particularly excel at answering questions related to Twilio's features, customer stories, and use cases.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Twilio developed similar chatbots—details of which could not be learned—to help other teams in its salesforce gather information about the company’s offerings. Its overall cast of chatbots answer more than 12,000 questions each month, including roughly 5,000 directed at the RFP tool, according to Shitama.
DataRobot’s RFP bot lives inside Slack, where since July account executives can type tricky questions from a prospective client, like “does the product support containerization natively as a delivery capability?” From there, the bot powered by OpenAI’s technology via Microsoft’s cloud functions similarly to Twilio’s but also shows the salesperson a confidence score for every answer. “Knowing whether you can or can’t rely on the results is critical,” DataRobot’s Schuren says. In August, the company unveiled an AI platform that enables customers to build their own responder for RFPs.
Google Cloud began working on its RFP bot earlier this year after Phil Moyer, global vice president of its AI business, recognized the tool as a perfect first use of generative AI. “We must get asked a hundred times a month, ‘How do we adhere to GDPR?’” he says, referring to the European Union’s massive privacy law.
Automating responses spares talented workers from drudgery, he says. Google has just begun rolling out the RFP tool to its salespeople and expects to save tens of thousands of hours of labor annually. In July, ad buying agency EssenceMediacom introduced its own version using Google Cloud technology.
Tackling RFPs is seen as a low-risk use case for generative AI at many companies, which have been automating parts of the process for years. Some companies use systems that pluck relevant responses from a pool of thousands of pre-written answers. Secureframe, a major developer of software for buying security tools, offers a product to do that but is planning to add generative AI. The technology should perform well enough that it seems like “your security team is actually answering the questions,” says Ruoting Sun, vice president of product at Secureframe.
So far, AI-generated responses appear to be passing muster—and perhaps passing as human-written. Executives who review RFP submissions at four big companies from different industries told WIRED they have not noticed any that appeared to be written by generative AI. “To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it. I may have,” says Michael Schlosser, senior vice president for care transformation and innovation at US hospital giant HCA Healthcare.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg As RFP bots help sales teams get more done, executives like Schlosser can probably expect their own workload to rise. Smaller companies are pitching for opportunities they had never considered before because of limited staff, says Mac Liu, CEO at Vultron , which helps companies automate bidding for government contracts. Generative AI is enabling “a whole new set of products and solutions to work with the government,” Liu says.
Bonney, at the startup Vendorful, still has nightmares about a 700-question RFP that he filled out several years ago, stuffed with queries that were outdated in the cloud computing era. Halfway in, Bonney’s cofounder turned to him looking deflated and said, "We're not going to win this, but we're too far in to stop." Buyers are scared to prune back their questions, Bonney says, fearing they will remove something that proves crucial later.
He now dreams of focusing on the more complex and rewarding work of solving sales prospects’ problems, while bots swap information about buyers’ priorities and vendors’ capabilities. Bonney recently got a glimpse toward that possibility when a questionnaire came in that he suspected had been generated by ChatGPT, based on its length, topics, and tone. “And guess what?” he says. “We responded with our own AI.” WIRED has teamed up with Jobbio to create WIRED Hired , a dedicated career marketplace for WIRED readers. Companies who want to advertise their jobs can visit WIRED Hired to post open roles, while anyone can search and apply for thousands of career opportunities. Jobbio is not involved with this story or any editorial content.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Topics artificial intelligence machine learning Startups Silicon Valley algorithms Google ChatGPT Work Labor automation Will Knight Kari McMahon Khari Johnson Amit Katwala Andy Greenberg David Gilbert Amit Katwala Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,214 | 2,023 |
"The Chatbot Search Wars Have Begun | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-the-chatbot-search-wars-have-begun"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business The Chatbot Search Wars Have Begun ILLUSTRATION: WIRED/GETTY IMAGES Save this story Save Save this story Save This week the world's largest search companies leaped into a contest to harness a powerful new breed of "generative AI" algorithms.
Most notably Microsoft announced that it is rewiring Bing , which lags some way behind Google in terms of popularity, to use ChatGPT —the insanely popular and often surprisingly capable chatbot made by the AI startup OpenAI.
In case you’ve been living in outer space for the past few months, you'll know that people are losing their minds over ChatGPT’s ability to answer questions in strikingly coherent and seemingly insightful and creative ways. Want to understand quantum computing ? Need a recipe for whatever’s in the fridge ? Can’t be bothered to write that high school essay ? ChatGPT has your back.
The all-new Bing is similarly chatty. Demos that the company gave at its headquarters in Redmond, and a quick test drive by WIRED’s Aarian Marshall , who attended the event, show that it can effortlessly generate a vacation itinerary, summarize the key points of product reviews, and answer tricky questions, like whether an item of furniture will fit in a particular car. It’s a long way from Microsoft’s hapless and hopeless Office assistant Clippy , which some readers may recall bothering them every time they created a new document.
Not to be outdone by Bing’s AI reboot, Google said this week that it would release a competitor to ChatGPT called Bard. (The name was chosen to reflect the creative nature of the algorithm underneath, one Googler tells me.) The company, like Microsoft, showed how the underlying technology could answer some web searches and said it would start making the AI behind the chatbot available to developers. Google is apparently unsettled by the idea of being upstaged in search, which provides the majority of parent Alphabet’s revenue. And its AI researchers may be understandably a little miffed since they actually developed the machine learning algorithm at the heart of ChatGPT, known as a transformer, as well as a key technique used to make AI imagery, known as diffusion modeling.
Last but by no means least in the new AI search wars is Baidu, China’s biggest search company. It joined the fray by announcing another ChatGPT competitor, Wenxin Yiyan (文心一言), or "Ernie Bot" in English. Baidu says it will release the bot after completing internal testing this March.
These new search bots are examples of generative AI , a trend fueled by algorithms that can generate text, craft computer code, and dream up images in response to a prompt. The tech industry might be experiencing widespread layoffs , but interest in generative AI is booming, and VCs are imagining whole industries being rebuilt around this new creative streak in AI.
Generative language tools like ChatGPT will surely change what it means to search the web, shaking up an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, by making it easier to dig up useful information and advice. A web search may become less about clicking links and exploring sites and more about leaning back and taking a chatbot’s word for it. Just as importantly, the underlying language technology could transform many other tasks too, perhaps leading to email programs that write sales pitches or spreadsheets that dig up and summarize data for you. To many users, ChatGPT also seems to signal a shift in AI’s ability to understand and communicate with us.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But there is, of course, a catch.
While the text they sling at us can look human, AI models behind ChatGPT and its new brethren do not work remotely like a human brain. Their algorithms are narrowly designed to learn to predict what should come after a prompt by feeding on statistical patterns in huge amounts of text from the web and books. They have absolutely no understanding of what they are saying or whether an answer might be incorrect, inappropriate, biased, or representative of the real world. What’s more, because these AI tools generate text purely based on patterns they’ve previously seen, they are prone to “hallucinating” information. And, in fact, ChatGPT gets some of its power from a technique that involves humans giving feedback on questions—but that feedback optimizes for answers that seem convincing, not ones that are accurate or true.
These issues may be a problem if you’re trying to use the technology to make web search more useful.
Microsoft has apparently fixed some common flaws with ChatGPT in Bing (we tried tripping it up a few times), but the real test will come when it’s made widely available. One Bard response that Google has proudly shown off incorrectly claims that the James Webb Space telescope was the first to take a picture of a planet beyond our solar system. Oops.
The AI search wars might have started, but perhaps the winner will not be the most powerful chatbot, but the one that messes up the least.
You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Senior Writer X Topics Search artificial intelligence machine learning Fast Forward Google Microsoft Baidu search engines Reece Rogers Will Knight Reece Rogers Khari Johnson Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Reece Rogers Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,215 | 2,023 |
"People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-people-are-increasingly-worried-artificial-intelligence"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Khari Johnson Business People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse Photograph: tyndyra/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Over the past year or so, you’ve probably had conversations with friends, family, and coworkers about the rise of generative AI capable of making convincing text and imagery—but perhaps also about the hype and fear swirling around the technology. A poll out this week finds that worry over harmful effects of AI is outpacing the wow of helpful AI.
A majority of Americans say their concern about artificial intelligence in daily life outweighs their excitement about it, according to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 11,000 US adults. The results come at a time when a growing number of people are paying attention to news about AI in their daily lives. Pew has run this survey twice before and reports that the number of people more concerned than excited about AI jumped from 37 percent in 2021 to 52 percent this month.
The balance of concern and excitement people reported varied between different use cases for AI.
When asked how they felt about the police using AI for public safety, roughly half of respondents said they weren’t sure, with the rest evenly split between saying the technology would help or hurt. Many more people believed that AI would help doctors to provide quality care to patients, but it’s likely people would have different feelings about some specific applications of medical AI. Many would probably feel uncomfortable with a triaging algorithm making life-or-death decisions about who receives what treatment.
Pew found the largest swing towards concern about hurtful AI when asking what impact the technology would have on the ability to keep their information private. That fits with how US activists, policy experts, and researchers who want to protect civil rights and hold businesses and governments using AI accountable often call for comprehensive data privacy protections. So far, Congress is yet to pass a privacy and data protection law.
One impact of AI on daily life the survey didn’t ask about is the technology’s potential to help or hurt discrimination. Years of evidence show that AI systems can reinforce or amplify racism, sexism, or discrimination against the poor and people who identify as queer. But AI can also detect bias and prevent discrimination. Sennay Ghebreab, director of an AI lab at the University of Amsterdam, told me last year, “I’ve been working on this topic for a decade, and although it can be harmful to people, AI presents an opportunity to uncover hidden biases in society.” Pew's findings raise the question of how people not working on AI themselves can retain any feeling of autonomy as the technology becomes more visible and powerful. I was struck by remarks earlier this month by former US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, who at a recent Stanford event on AI described meeting a group of students visiting from Latin America who told her that AI feels like something that’s happening to them rather than technology they’re playing a role in shaping.
That feeling, Rice said, may be more pronounced for people outside China, Europe, and the US. But plenty of people in those countries feel they don’t have enough agency in their own lives. And even people active in the fight against AI that enables human rights abuses can feel helpless or lose hope.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Although such feelings are understandable, there are ways that citizens can gain more control over the impact of AI on their lives. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Question the motives of people who talk about superintelligence and artificial general intelligence.
The fear about the future these terms can stoke helps the economic interest of a small group of companies that possess the unique combination of compute power, AI talent, and money necessary to build the most powerful AI systems. Debate about the hypothetical power of future AI technology only centers more attention on the dominant players of today.
How AI influences society should be a society-wide conversation. It’s fine that major AI company executives visited the White House in May and then again in July and agreed to voluntary measures , but relying on them for answers is, as I said in May , “like asking a group of arsonists how to put out a fire.” We can take lessons from history, which show that predictions about powerful AI can be wrong, and regulation can work. Despite widespread claims that the advent of more powerful machine learning in the 2010s would kill jobs , mass unemployment did not occur. And while tech companies warn that regulation can stifle innovation, a study out this week found that US antitrust enforcement from 1971 to 2018 increased jobs and business formation.
Understanding the role of AI in daily life is, as Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said in 2019, part of citizenship in the 21st century—so educate yourself on what accountability looks like to you and tell your elected officials. Some commonly suggested solutions I’ve heard while reporting stories about AI and accountability over the better part of the last decade: Require businesses and governments to disclose when AI influences a decision like whether you can rent an apartment or get labeled a fraud , to provide the option to opt out from automated decisionmaking; and to perform audits or testing on AI systems they use.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics Fast Forward artificial intelligence algorithms government ethics machine learning Will Knight Will Knight Matt Laslo Khari Johnson Will Knight Caitlin Harrington Khari Johnson Khari Johnson Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,216 | 2,023 |
"Six Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-elon-musk-letter-pause-ai-development"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Six Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Six months ago this week, many prominent AI researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on development of AI systems more capable than OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 language generator. It argued that AI is advancing so quickly and unpredictably that it could eliminate countless jobs, flood us with disinformation, and— as a wave of panicky headlines reported —destroy humanity. Whoops! As you may have noticed, the letter did not result in a pause in AI development, or even a slow down to a more measured pace. Companies have instead accelerated their efforts to build more advanced AI.
Elon Musk, one of the most prominent signatories, didn’t wait long to ignore his own call for a slowdown. In July he announced xAI , a new company he said would seek to go beyond existing AI and compete with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. And many Google employees who also signed the open letter have stuck with their company as it prepares to release an AI model called Gemini , which boasts broader capabilities than OpenAI’s GPT-4.
WIRED reached out to more than a dozen signatories of the letter to ask what effect they think it had and whether their alarm about AI has deepened or faded in the past six months. None who responded seemed to have expected AI research to really grind to a halt.
“I never thought that companies were voluntarily going to pause,” says Max Tegmark, an astrophysicist at MIT who leads the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind the letter—an admission that some might argue makes the whole project look cynical. Tegmark says his main goal was not to pause AI but to legitimize conversation about the dangers of the technology, up to and including the fact that it might turn on humanity. The result “exceeded my expectations,” he says.
The responses to my follow-up also show the huge diversity of concerns experts have about AI—and that many signers aren’t actually obsessed with existential risk.
Lars Kotthoff , an associate professor at the University of Wyoming, says he wouldn’t sign the same letter today because many who called for a pause are still working to advance AI. “I’m open to signing letters that go in a similar direction, but not exactly like this one,” Kotthoff says. He adds that what concerns him most today is the prospect of a “societal backlash against AI developments, which might precipitate another AI winter” by quashing research funding and making people spurn AI products and tools.
Having signed the letter, what have I done for the last year or so? I’ve been doing AI research.
Stephen Mander, Lancaster University Other signers told me they would gladly sign again, but their big worries seem to involve near-term problems, such as disinformation and job losses , rather than Terminator scenarios.
“In the age of the internet and Trump, I can more easily see how AI can lead to destruction of human civilization by distorting information and corrupting knowledge,” says Richard Kiehl , a professor working on microelectronics at Arizona State University.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “Are we going to get Skynet that’s going to hack into all these military servers and launch nukes all over the planet? I really don’t think so,” says Stephen Mander , a PhD student working on AI at Lancaster University in the UK. He does see widespread job displacement looming, however, and calls it an “existential risk” to social stability. But he also worries that the letter may have spurred more people to experiment with AI and acknowledges that he didn’t act on the letter’s call to slow down. “Having signed the letter, what have I done for the last year or so? I’ve been doing AI research,” he says.
Despite the letter’s failure to trigger a widespread pause, it did help propel the idea that AI could snuff out humanity into a mainstream topic of discussion. It was followed by a public statement signed by the leaders of OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind AI division that compared the existential risk posed by AI to that of nuclear weapons and pandemics. Next month, the British government will host an international “AI safety” conference , where leaders from numerous countries will discuss possible harms AI could cause, including existential threats.
Perhaps AI doomers hijacked the narrative with the pause letter, but the unease around the recent, rapid progress in AI is real enough—and understandable. A few weeks before the letter was written, OpenAI had released GPT-4, a large language model that gave ChatGPT new power to answer questions and caught AI researchers by surprise.
As the potential of GPT-4 and other language models has become more apparent, surveys suggest that the public is becoming more worried than excited about AI technology. The obvious ways these tools could be misused is spurring regulators around the world into action.
The letter’s demand for a six-month moratorium on AI development may have created the impression that its signatories expected bad things to happen soon. But for many of them, a key theme seems to be uncertainty—around how capable AI actually is, how rapidly things may change, and how the technology is being developed.
“Many AI skeptics want to hear a concrete doom scenario, but to me, the fact that it is difficult to imagine detailed, concrete scenarios is kind of the point—it shows how hard it is for even world-class AI experts to predict the future of AI and how it will impact a complex world” says Scott Niekum , a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who works on AI risk and signed the letter. “And when you combine that prediction difficulty with lagging progress in safety, interpretability, and regulation, I think that should raise some alarms.” Uncertainty is hardly proof that humanity is in danger. But the fact that so many people working in AI still seem unsettled may be reason enough for the companies developing AI to take a more thoughtful—or slower—approach.
“Many people who would be in a great position to take advantage of further progress would now instead prefer to see a pause,” says signee Vincent Conitzer , a professor who works on AI at CMU. “If nothing else, that should be a signal that something very unusual is up.” You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics Fast Forward artificial intelligence ethics machine learning Elon Musk ChatGPT Alphabet Will Knight Matt Burgess Steven Levy Will Knight Reece Rogers Vittoria Elliott Will Knight Peter Guest Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,217 | 2,023 |
"Amazon’s New Robots Are Rolling Out an Automation Revolution | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/amazons-new-robots-automation-revolution"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Amazon’s New Robots Are Rolling Out an Automation Revolution Play/Pause Button Pause Amazon's Proteus robot.
Courtesy of Amazon Save this story Save Save this story Save In a giant warehouse in Reading, Massachusetts, I meet a pair of robots that look like goofy green footstools from the future. Their round eyes and satisfied grins are rendered with light emitting diodes. They sport small lidar sensors like tiny hats that scan nearby objects and people in 3D. Suddenly, one of them plays a chipper little tune, its mouth starts flashing, and its eyes morph into heart shapes. This means, I am told, that the robot is happy.
Proteus, as Amazon calls this machine, is not like other industrial robots, which are generally as expressive and aware of their surroundings as actual footstools. “Wait, why would a robot be happy?” I ask. Sophie Li, a software engineer at Amazon, explains that being able to express happiness can help Proteus work more effectively around people.
Proteus carries suitcase-sized plastic bins filled with packages over to trucks in a loading bay that is also staffed by humans. The robot is smart enough to distinguish people from inanimate objects and make its own decisions about how to navigate around a box or person in its path. But sometimes it needs to tell someone to move out of the way—or that it is stuck, which it does by showing different colors with its mouth. Li recently added the heart eyes to let Proteus also signal when it has completed a task as planned.
“Proteus will hopefully make people happy,” Li says, referring to the workers who will toil alongside the robot, transferring packages from bins into trucks. “And if not, well, at least it should do what they expect it to.” I find myself wondering if some people might, in reality, find the robot’s cheeriness a bit annoying. But perhaps putting a friendly face on the new wave of automation about to sweep through Amazon’s fulfillment centers isn’t a bad idea.
Amazon's Sparrow robot can pick up products that previously required human hands.
Courtesy of Amazon Proteus is part of an army of smarter robots currently rolling into Amazon’s already heavily automated fulfillment centers. Some of these machines, such as Proteus, will work among humans. And many of them take on tasks previously done by people.
A robot called Sparrow , introduced in November 2022, can pick individual products from storage cubbies and place them into larger plastic bins—a step towards human-like dexterity, a holy grail of robotics and a bottleneck in the automation of a lot of manual work.
Amazon also last year invested in a startup that makes humanoid robots capable of carrying boxes around.
Amazon’s latest robots could bring about a company-wide—and industry-wide—shift in the balance between automation and people. When Amazon first rolled out large numbers of robots, after acquiring startup Kiva Systems and its shelf-carrying robots in 2012, the company redesigned its fulfillment centers and distribution network, speeding up deliveries and capturing even more business. The ecommerce firm may now be on the cusp of a similar shift, with the new robots already starting to reshape fulfillment centers and how its employees work. Certain jobs will be eliminated while new ones will emerge—just as long as its business continues growing. And competitors, as always, will be forced to adapt or perish.
Courtesy of Amazon Proteus isn't the only robot being put through its paces at the Reading facility, which houses Amazon Robotics, a laboratory and foundry for the company's warehouse robots. Nearby, a small platoon of blue mobile robots, each about the size of a push lawn mower, are going through some algorithmic choreography. I watch as they drive, one by one, into large machines that test the performance of their wheels and other features. Those declared fit for service then trundle under a walkway and into packing crates destined for Amazon fulfillment hubs.
The visit provides a rare glimpse of how Amazon’s develops its industrial robots. I am accompanied by Xavier Van Chau from Amazon public relations, who arrived on a red-eye from the company’s Seattle headquarters and is highly enthusiastic and impressively caffeinated. While Amazon Robotics engineers show off machines that will significantly shift the line between what humans and machines can do, my chaperone supplies a stream of anecdotes about workers who love their robot coworkers or their new robot-related roles.
Amazon's Proteus robot can detect when a person is in its path and act to avoid a collision.
Courtesy of Amazon Some workers in Amazon’s fulfillment centers have of course shared their own anecdotes about the company pushing them hard in the name of efficiency , although the company maintains staff welfare is a top concern. In January the company was called out by US regulators for poor workplace safety and it has faced industrial action and walkouts in several US states and the UK.
Leaked documents obtained by Vox suggest that Amazon expects it to become more challenging to find enough people to hire in the US as warehouse workers, due in part to high staff turnover. Accelerated adoption of robotics may help the company soften some of the challenges posed by its human workforce.
But to replace human labor, these robots need to be built. And much of that work is done by humans. At a nearby production line, Amazon workers are busily putting robots together, hefting large pieces of steel around with the help of mechanical arms and installing electronics, sensors, and motors.
Jobs in robot manufacturing and maintenance have multiplied at Amazon since it began ramping up its use of robots. The company also opened a new manufacturing facility dedicated to making robots in Westborough, Massachusetts, in 2021. But the addition of manufacturing workers and engineers means that other jobs at Amazon are changing—or disappearing altogether.
Amazon’s first robots, from the acquisition of Kiva, were low-slung orange brutes—Cro-Magnon ancestors to Proteus—that blindly followed preprogrammed routes inside large caged-off areas. The robots rolled beneath shelves of cubbies stuffed with different products, and carried them over to human pickers on the edge of the automation zone. The humans would grab products to assemble customer orders, placing them into bins that were sent for packaging and shipping.
That automated retrieval system let Amazon store more goods in the same space, and move them to customers more quickly, helping the company ascend to the pinnacle of ecommerce in the eyes of customers, investors, and competitors. Between 2010 and 2020, sales on Amazon rose 10-fold from $34 billion to $386 billion, and its robot workforce soared too. Between 2013 and 2023, the cumulative number of robots made by Amazon grew from 10,000 to 750,000.
Today, three quarters of all Amazon’s products—every conceivable item you could need and plenty you probably don’t —are handled at some point by one of the company's robots. The 750,000 mobile robots at more than 300 Amazon fulfillment centers worldwide can trace their lineage back to the first Kiva machines. Amazon also employs more than 1.3 million workers at these locations. Van Chau of Amazon declines to say how it expects the number of robots it uses to grow in the years ahead but says it will “continue to grow very rapidly.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Hercules robots that lift and move heavy shelves are the most common model in Amazon's 750,000-strong robotic fleet.
Courtesy of Amazon The most common robots at Amazon today are the blue machines that I saw rolling into shipping crates, called Hercules. They are members of a pantheon of cage-bound machines created at the company with names borrowed from Greek mythology.
Hercules, a heavy lifter of course, lugs shelves over to human pickers and has largely replaced the older Kiva bots. Pegasus, a wheeled robot with a tilting conveyor belt on top, drops packages into chutes that lead down to loading bays. And Xanthus, a slimmed-down version of Pegasus, serves as a general dogsbody, taking on tasks like ferrying stacks of emptied crates back to wherever they’re needed.
The newer and more expressive Proteus, which went into service at a fulfillment center in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year, is Amazon’s first mobile robot to venture outside of safety cages. It is designed to be more general purpose than the company's previous mobile robots, with software upgrades adding new capabilities over time. It is part of a new generation of robots now arriving at Amazon thanks to recent leaps in AI.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Across the room from where Proteus showed me its happy dance is a large robotic arm called Cardinal, which is being tested in tandem with the mobile robot. Cardinal looks like the kind of robot you’d find on any automotive production line. It is fixed in place, but instead of the usual metal claw wields a gripper covered with vacuum suckers reminiscent of a giant squid. Cardinal uses AI vision to identify and determine how to grasp heavy packages from a jumble of them rolling along a conveyor. It hoists them with its suckers, and deposits them into a tote carried by Proteus, which will ferry the load over to waiting trucks.
Xinye Liu, senior technical product manager for Cardinal, watches the robot as it picks packages. She recently returned from the Nashville fulfillment center where Proteus and Cardinal are being trialed. Liu tells me the center was so short-staffed during a spike in demand that she decided to help load boxes herself. She says that the scale of Amazon’s operations—the absurd variety of products it stores, and the vast number it processes each day—make it a uniquely compelling place for roboticists to work.
Robin, another of Amazon’s newer robots, also incorporates a large robot arm. It transfers packages from conveyors onto the back of waiting Pegasus bots. The company has deployed more than 1,000 Robin robots, and during an April 2023 earnings call revealed that Robin has now handled over a billion packages.
Amazon's rapid robot rollout belies just how big the gap between humans and machines remains. There are still many tasks done by people that the company can't automate away. Take the fiddly business of retrieving an item from a storage shelf at the beginning of its journey from warehouse to customer. If a customer has ordered a tiny pair of eyebrow tweezers you first have to spot a tiny item amongst a pile of others, then know how to pick it up, rotate it, and read the label, all without dropping it.
For a human, all of that feels simple, despite the complex feats of perception and control required. Programming those capabilities into robots has proven extremely challenging. But over the past decade, progress in computer vision, robotic grasping, and robot hardware have removed the need for human hands in some situations.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg From 2015 to 2017, Amazon ran a contest with cash prizes that invited researchers to build robots capable of picking a wide range of objects from its shelves. A lot more robotic grasping research was evidently going on behind the scenes. Last November, the company revealed Sparrow , a smaller robot arm that can reach into totes and reliably grasp 65 percent of the more than 100 million items in Amazon’s inventory. That’s a large enough percentage for the company to reconfigure some operations around the robot.
Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, explains that the sheer number of products that Amazon handles gives it a competitive edge. “Machine-learning techniques allow robots to teach themselves what to pick and how to pick,” Brady says. “And because they're connected through the cloud, all those learnings can be shared instantaneously and propagated with all the arms.” In other words, Amazon’s robots are going to get faster and more reliable over time as more data is shoveled into the AI models they depend on. And this continual learning is almost certainly paying off already.
During my tour of the robot foundry in in Reading, I got a glimpse of how Amazon is working to expand robot picking. Wandering through a network of caged-off robots, we came across a small team of engineers working on a new robot arm that was picking items from a large plastic bin. Unlike Sparrow, the setup used what I recognized as a so-called collaborative robot arm, designed to work in close proximity to humans. In the future, perhaps humans and robots will share picking work side-by-side inside Amazon.
“Err … that’s nothing,” Van Chau said as he hurried us along. “It’s just an experiment.” Amazon's long-term vision for a more roboticized future is quite different from the current very messy, human-dominated reality.
A couple of hours drive from Reading, in Windsor, Connecticut, the company has built a new, 3.8 million-square-foot facility known as BDL4. There is no sign of robots taking over when we arrive. The car park is almost full, and workers are filing in for a new shift, many toting their belongings in transparent plastic backpacks. It’s not a fashion trend—clear backpacks make it faster to get people through security checks. After donning a safety vest and toe protectors, we venture inside.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The workers I get to meet at BDL4 are unfailingly cheerful and helpful. There is Allison Kim, a senior operations manager, who gives a tour with the aid of a golden toy microphone that boosts her voice above the constant whir of machinery. And Alex Sabia, an Energizer bunny of a man who keeps mentioning his meat-rich diet. His job is to prevent workers from injuring themselves by encouraging them to take regular breaks, ensuring good ergonomics, and giving them physical therapy exercises to do. Talking to him makes me feel quite tired.
The ground floor of the building is dominated by conveyor belts ferrying packages in one direction or another. On the second floor up through the fifth, humans are busy picking items from shelves that Hercules robots ferry over from an enormous, fenced-off storage area where only robots roam. It has few lights because the machines do not need to see to navigate. The scale is dizzying. The line of human pickers retrieving items from shelves along the boundary between the human and robot zones, the light and the dark, shrinks into the distance.
Among the pickers, I notice one worker wearing a utility belt and shoulder strap mounted with a flashlight, carrying a tablet and what looks like a short hockey stick. He unlocks a door that leads to the robot area, walks in, and closes it behind him. This worker’s job is to assist when a Hercules has dropped something, which often means retrieving an item from between several robots with the hockey stick. I’m told that these workers are known as “amnesty specialists,” because in Amazon corporate lingo, items dropped by robots are termed “in amnesty.” As I watch the human emissary set off into the robot zone, their light gradually disappears into the darkness.
On a floor lower down, where packages filled with items are routed to trucks below, the ratio between humans and robots is tilted firmly towards machines. The center of the room is a hive of motion, as some 12,000 Pegasus robots, similar in size to the lawn-mower-scale Hercules models I had seen earlier, zip around, dropping packages down holes in the floor that lead to the loading docks. Each time a robot sheds its load, it returns to a parking spot somewhere on the floor. At the edge of this area the robots are loaded up again not by human pickers, but by Robin robot arms grabbing parcels from conveyors.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg As this floor demonstrates, automation can take over certain tasks previously only achievable by human workers. In some cases, certain jobs can even disappear. For an individual, replacement by machine might be devastating, but the picture across the job market is more complicated.
One US study found that each robot adopted in manufacturing replaced about three workers. However, other research shows that companies that deploy more robots sometimes add more jobs overall.
“I'm not really worried about us running out of jobs for humans anytime soon,” says Erik Brynjolfsson , director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and an authority on the impact of AI and automation on jobs. “If unemployment increases in the next couple of years, I don't think it's going to be because of automation." The key questions are how many new jobs will emerge, and what kinds? Amazon’s robotic push may create better-paid manufacturing jobs for some—but could also lead to greater demand for delivery drivers who tend to work for outside contractors.
Amazon’s new robots may also affect its workforce in other ways. Greater use of robotics at BDL4 makes it possible for Amazon to squeeze more kinds of work into the facility, in the same way the Kiva acquisition allowed more items to be stocked in the same space. In Amazon’s largest markets, after orders have been packaged they are generally sent to regional sorting centers that organize packages for delivery by geographical location to make distribution more efficient. But the new BDL4 incorporates sorting, eliminating the need for another facility and speeding up the whole process.
In recent years, labor organizers protesting punishing working conditions inside Amazon’s logistics operation have pressured the company through walkouts or other actions at sorting centers, which can be choke points in its distribution network. When sorting work done is on the same site as picking, fulfillment centers like BDL4 could perhaps lessen Amazon’s vulnerability to industrial action. On the other hand, says Rand Wilson, a labor organizer who has worked with Amazon employees, the workers who keep their jobs after the adoption of more automation may in fact have greater leverage because their work is more specialized and they are more difficult for Amazon to replace.
Whatever you think of Amazon, it’s hard not to marvel at the company’s ruthless efficiency. The company's bold push to adopt more robots will no doubt delight many of its customers by speeding up delivery times. But it will also have ripple effects for millions of workers and thousands of other businesses who compete with Amazon, which commands more than half of all US online purchases.
A couple of weeks after the visit, I received an email from Amazon’s Van Chau. He tells me that he has injured his arms in a traffic accident and has to temporarily write his emails using voice-to-text software. “Robots are helping me write this email,” he jokes, then hints at Amazon’s many future automation advances to come. “The latest end-effector tools are crazy cool,” he said. “But nothing I can share on the record.” You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics Amazon robotics Work Labor artificial intelligence logistics robots Amanda Hoover Aarian Marshall Vittoria Elliott Peter Guest Will Knight Paresh Dave Niamh Rowe Khari Johnson Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,218 | 2,023 |
"Enough Talk, ChatGPT—My New Chatbot Friend Can Get Things Done | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-my-new-chatbot-friend-get-things-done"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Enough Talk, ChatGPT—My New Chatbot Friend Can Get Things Done Photograph: Yaroslav Kushta/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save I recently needed to contact the CEO of a startup called Lindy, a company developing personal assistants powered by artificial intelligence.
Instead of looking for it myself, I turned to an AI helper of my own, an open source program called Auto-GPT , typing in “Find me the email address of the CEO of Lindy AI.” Like a delightfully enthusiastic intern, Auto-GPT began furiously Googling and browsing the web for answers, providing a running commentary designed to explain its actions as it went. “A web search is a good starting point to gather information about the CEO and their email address,” it told me.
When given a task like finding a startup CEO's email address, the open source Auto-GPT suggests a plan for approval and can attempt to put it into action.
Auto-GPT via Will Knight “I found several sources mentioning Flo Crivello as the CEO of Lindy.ai, but I haven't found their email address yet,” Auto-GPT reported. “I will now check Flo Crivello’s LinkedIn profile for their email address,” it said. That didn’t work either, so the program then suggested it could guess Crivello’s email address based on commonly used formats.
After I gave it permission to go ahead, Auto-GPT used a series of different email verification services it found online to check if any of its guesses might be valid. None provided a clear answer, but the program saved the addresses to a file on my computer, suggesting I might want to try emailing them all.
Who am I to question a friendly chatbot? I tried them all, but every email bounced back. Eventually, I made my own guess at Crivello’s email address based on past experience, and I got it right the first time.
Auto-GPT failed me, but it got close enough to illustrate a coming shift in how we use computers and the web. The ability of bots like ChatGPT to answer an incredible variety of questions means they can correctly describe how to perform a wide range of sophisticated tasks. Connect that with software that can put those descriptions into action and you have an AI helper that can get a lot done.
Of course, just as ChatGPT will sometimes produce confused messages, agents built that way will occasionally—or often—go haywire. As I wrote this week , while searching for an email address is relatively low-risk, in the future agents might be tasked with riskier business, like booking flights or contacting people on your behalf. Making agents that are safe as well as smart is a major preoccupation of projects and companies working on this next phase of the ChatGPT era.
When I finally spoke to Crivello of Lindy, he seemed utterly convinced that AI agents will be able to wholly replace some office workers, such as executive assistants. He envisions many professions simply disappearing.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “What are the occupations that we give the most money to understand and produce text? No offense, but journalists are one,” Crivello says. Ouch. “Lawyers are another,” he adds. I tried to point out that AutoGPT wasn’t capable enough to find his email address, let alone interview him over Zoom. But he wasn’t swayed.
Using AutoGPT requires some knowledge of how to use the command line and access to OpenAI’s software API. It only really works with access to the company’s latest AI language model, GPT-4.
But I highly recommend giving it a try if you can. Forget proficiency in Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office. Learning how to prompt and guide an AI agent might be an indispensable office skill before you know it. (WIRED’s Reece Rogers has written an excellent set of primers on using AI to boost your computer skills that you should also check out.) After my own test drive of Auto-GPT, I could understand Crivello’s conviction about the future. If the errors can be ironed out—a fairly big if—I can imagine a future where AI agents help with a lot of chores that currently involve typing into a web browser or moving and clicking a mouse. As with ChatGPT, when Auto-GPT works, it can feel like magic. The flaws that remain with chatbots also leave me less convinced than Crivello that these agents can easily take over from humans, or even function without human help, for the foreseeable future.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics Fast Forward artificial intelligence computer science virtual assistant ChatGPT chatbots OpenAI Will Knight Khari Johnson Will Knight Khari Johnson Steven Levy Amanda Hoover Niamh Rowe Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,219 | 2,023 |
"Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-agi-intelligence"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage Photograph: Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Sébastien Bubeck, a machine learning researcher at Microsoft , woke up one night last September thinking about artificial intelligence —and unicorns.
Bubeck had recently gotten early access to GPT-4 , a powerful text generation algorithm from OpenAI and an upgrade to the machine learning model at the heart of the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT.
Bubeck was part of a team working to integrate the new AI system into Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But he and his colleagues kept marveling at how different GPT-4 seemed from anything they’d seen before.
GPT-4, like its predecessors, had been fed massive amounts of text and code and trained to use the statistical patterns in that corpus to predict the words that should be generated in reply to a piece of text input. But to Bubeck, the system’s output seemed to do so much more than just make statistically plausible guesses.
That night, Bubeck got up, went to his computer, and asked GPT-4 to draw a unicorn using TikZ , a relatively obscure programming language for generating scientific diagrams. Bubeck was using a version of GPT-4 that only worked with text, not images. But the code the model presented him with, when fed into a TikZ rendering software, produced a crude yet distinctly unicorny image cobbled together from ovals, rectangles, and a triangle. To Bubeck, such a feat surely required some abstract grasp of the elements of such a creature. “Something new is happening here,” he says. “Maybe for the first time we have something that we could call intelligence.” How intelligent AI is becoming—and how much to trust the increasingly common feeling that a piece of software is intelligent—has become a pressing, almost panic-inducing, question.
After OpenAI released ChatGPT , then powered by GPT-3, last November, it stunned the world with its ability to write poetry and prose on a vast array of subjects, solve coding problems, and synthesize knowledge from the web. But awe has been coupled with shock and concern about the potential for academic fraud , misinformation , and mass unemployment —and fears that companies like Microsoft are rushing to develop technology that could prove dangerous.
Understanding the potential or risks of AI’s new abilities means having a clear grasp of what those abilities are—and are not. But while there’s broad agreement that ChatGPT and similar systems give computers significant new skills, researchers are only just beginning to study these behaviors and determine what’s going on behind the prompt.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg While OpenAI has promoted GPT-4 by touting its performance on bar and med school exams, scientists who study aspects of human intelligence say its remarkable capabilities differ from our own in crucial ways. The models’ tendency to make things up is well known, but the divergence goes deeper. And with millions of people using the technology every day and companies betting their future on it, this is a mystery of huge importance.
Bubeck and other AI researchers at Microsoft were inspired to wade into the debate by their experiences with GPT-4. A few weeks after the system was plugged into Bing and its new chat feature was launched, the company released a paper claiming that in early experiments, GPT-4 showed “sparks of artificial general intelligence.” The authors presented a scattering of examples in which the system performed tasks that appear to reflect more general intelligence, significantly beyond previous systems such as GPT-3. The examples show that unlike most previous AI programs, GPT-4 is not limited to a specific task but can turn its hand to all sorts of problems—a necessary quality of general intelligence.
The authors also suggest that these systems demonstrate an ability to reason, plan, learn from experience, and transfer concepts from one modality to another, such as from text to imagery. “Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system,” the paper states.
Bubeck’s paper, written with 14 others, including Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, was met with pushback from AI researchers and experts on social media. Use of the term AGI, a vague descriptor sometimes used to allude to the idea of super-intelligent or godlike machines, irked some researchers, who saw it as a symptom of the current hype.
The fact that Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI suggested to some researchers that the company’s AI experts had an incentive to hype GPT-4’s potential while downplaying its limitations.
Others griped that the experiments are impossible to replicate because GPT-4 rarely responds in the same way when a prompt is repeated, and because OpenAI has not shared details of its design. Of course, people also asked why GPT-4 still makes ridiculous mistakes if it is really so smart.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Talia Ringer , a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says Microsoft’s paper “shows some interesting phenomena and then makes some really over-the-top claims.” Touting that systems are highly intelligent encourages users to trust them even when they’re deeply flawed, they say. Ringer also points out that while it may be tempting to borrow ideas from systems developed to measure human intelligence, many have proven unreliable and even rooted in racism.
Bubek admits that his study has its limits, including the reproducibility issue, and that GPT-4 also has big blind spots. He says use of the term AGI was meant to provoke debate. “Intelligence is by definition general,” he says. “We wanted to get at the intelligence of the model and how broad it is—that it covers many, many domains.” But for all of the examples cited in Bubeck’s paper, there are many that show GPT-4 getting things blatantly wrong—often on the very tasks Microsoft’s team used to tout its success. For example, GPT-4’s ability to suggest a stable way to stack a challenging collection of objects— a book, four tennis balls, a nail, a wine glass, a wad of gum, and some uncooked spaghetti —seems to point to a grasp of the physical properties of the world that is second nature to humans, including infants.
However, changing the items and the request can result in bizarre failures that suggest GPT-4’s grasp of physics is not complete or consistent.
Bubeck notes that GPT-4 lacks a working memory and is hopeless at planning ahead. “GPT-4 is not good at this, and maybe large language models in general will never be good at it,” he says, referring to the large-scale machine learning algorithms at the heart of systems like GPT-4. “If you want to say that intelligence is planning, then GPT-4 is not intelligent.” One thing beyond debate is that the workings of GPT-4 and other powerful AI language models do not resemble the biology of brains or the processes of the human mind. The algorithms must be fed an absurd amount of training data—a significant portion of all the text on the internet—far more than a human needs to learn language skills. The “experience” that imbues GPT-4, and things built with it, with smarts is shoveled in wholesale rather than gained through interaction with the world and didactic dialog. And with no working memory, ChatGPT can maintain the thread of a conversation only by feeding itself the history of the conversation over again at each turn. Yet despite these differences, GPT-4 is clearly a leap forward, and scientists who research intelligence say its abilities need further interrogation.
A team of cognitive scientists, linguists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists from MIT, UCLA, and the University of Texas, Austin, posted a research paper in January that explores how the abilities of large language models differ from those of humans.
The group concluded that while large language models demonstrate impressive linguistic skill—including the ability to coherently generate a complex essay on a given theme—that is not the same as understanding language and how to use it in the world. That disconnect may be why language models have begun to imitate the kind of commonsense reasoning needed to stack objects or solve riddles. But the systems still make strange mistakes when it comes to understanding social relationships, how the physical world works, and how people think.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The way these models use language, by predicting the words most likely to come after a given string, is very difference from how humans speak or write to convey concepts or intentions. The statistical approach can cause chatbots to follow and reflect back the language of users’ prompts to the point of absurdity.
When a chatbot tells someone to leave their spouse , for example, it only comes up with the answer that seems most plausible given the conversational thread. ChatGPT and similar bots will use the first person because they are trained on human writing. But they have no consistent sense of self and can change their claimed beliefs or experiences in an instant. OpenAI also uses feedback from humans to guide a model toward producing answers that people judge as more coherent and correct, which may make the model provide answers deemed more satisfying regardless of how accurate they are.
Josh Tenenbaum , a contributor to the January paper and a professor at MIT who studies human cognition and how to explore it using machines, says GPT-4 is remarkable but quite different from human intelligence in a number of ways. For instance, it lacks the kind of motivation that is crucial to the human mind. “It doesn’t care if it’s turned off,” Tenenbaum says. And he says humans do not simply follow their programming but invent new goals for themselves based on their wants and needs.
Tenenbaum says some key engineering shifts happened between GPT-3 and GPT-4 and ChatGPT that made them more capable. For one, the model was trained on large amounts of computer code. He and others have argued that the human brain may use something akin to a computer program to handle some cognitive tasks, so perhaps GPT-4 learned some useful things from the patterns found in code. He also points to the feedback ChatGPT received from humans as a key factor.
But he says the resulting abilities aren’t the same as the general intelligence that characterizes human intelligence. “I’m interested in the cognitive capacities that led humans individually and collectively to where we are now, and that’s more than just an ability to perform a whole bunch of tasks,” he says. “We make the tasks—and we make the machines that solve them.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Tenenbaum also says it isn’t clear that future generations of GPT would gain these sorts of capabilities, unless some different techniques are employed. This might mean drawing from areas of AI research that go beyond machine learning. And he says it’s important to think carefully about whether we want to engineer systems that way, as doing so could have unforeseen consequences.
Another author of the January paper, Kyle Mahowald , an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, says it’s a mistake to base any judgements on single examples of GPT-4’s abilities. He says tools from cognitive psychology could be useful for gauging the intelligence of such models. But he adds that the challenge is complicated by the opacity of GPT-4. “It matters what is in the training data, and we don’t know. If GPT-4 succeeds on some commonsense reasoning tasks for which it was explicitly trained and fails on others for which it wasn’t, it’s hard to draw conclusions based on that.” Whether GPT-4 can be considered a step toward AGI, then, depends entirely on your perspective. Redefining the term altogether may provide the most satisfying answer. “These days my viewpoint is that this is AGI, in that it is a kind of intelligence and it is general—but we have to be a little bit less, you know, hysterical about what AGI means,” says Noah Goodman , an associate professor of psychology, computer science, and linguistics at Stanford University.
Unfortunately, GPT-4 and ChatGPT are designed to resist such easy reframing. They are smart but offer little insight into how or why. What’s more, the way humans use language relies on having a mental model of an intelligent entity on the other side of the conversation to interpret the words and ideas being expressed. We can’t help but see flickers of intelligence in something that uses language so effortlessly. “If the pattern of words is meaning-carrying, then humans are designed to interpret them as intentional, and accommodate that,” Goodman says.
The fact that AI is not like us, and yet seems so intelligent, is still something to marvel at. “We’re getting this tremendous amount of raw intelligence without it necessarily coming with an ego-viewpoint, goals, or a sense of coherent self,” Goodman says. “That, to me, is just fascinating.” You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Senior Writer X Topics artificial intelligence neural networks ChatGPT OpenAI Nelson C.J.
Peter Guest Andy Greenberg Steven Levy Will Knight Joel Khalili Kari McMahon David Gilbert Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,220 | 2,018 |
"Elon Musk’s OpenAI Takes on Pro Gamers in Dota 2—And Could Win | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/can-bots-outwit-humans-in-one-of-the-biggest-esports-games"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Tom Simonite Business Can Bots Outwit Humans in One of the Biggest Esports Games? Play/Pause Button Pause AI bots developed by OpenAI are good enough to challenge humans at the videogame Dota 2.
Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Games Company Open AI Sector Games Technology Machine learning This August, some of the world’s best professional gamers will travel to Vancouver to fight for millions of dollars in the world’s most valuable esports competition. They’ll be joined by a team of five artificial intelligence bots backed by Elon Musk, trying to set a new marker for the power of machine learning.
The bots were developed by OpenAI, an independent research institute the Tesla CEO cofounded in 2015 to advance AI and prevent the technology from turning dangerous.
Vancouver is hosting the annual world championship of Dota 2 , one of the internet’s most-watched videogames. The prize purse is more than $15 million and growing, exceeding the $11 million at stake at golf’s Masters. In each game, two teams of five people attempt to destroy each others’ bases, playing characters that can include demons, spiders, and icy ghosts.
Earlier this month, OpenAI’s team, OpenAI Five, played and beat a team of semipros among the top 1 percent on the Dota 2 global rankings. That matchup simplified the game’s features somewhat—for example, by restricting both teams to the same characters. But OpenAI CTO and cofounder Greg Brockman believes the bots can be ready for a fuller match against pros on the sidelines of the Vancouver contest in two months. “We’ve seen professional-level plays emerge from this system,” he says.
Employees from AI research institute OpenAI take on a team of AI bots they created to play the videogame Dota 2.
OpenAI Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That’s a bold statement. Battling with orcs and warlocks may seem less cerebral than chess or Go, games at which computers beat top humans in 1997 and 2016 , respectively. But complex videogames like Dota 2 are in fact far more difficult for AI systems, says Dave Churchill, a professor at Memorial University, in St. John's, Canada. It’s why Alphabet’s DeepMind, which created the AlphaGo software that made history by defeating a Go champ in 2016, is now working on StarCraft 2 , a similarly tough videogame.
Dota and StarCraft are very different, but both are difficult for AI because the action takes place on a much larger board, where not all your opponent’s moves are visible, as they are in chess or Go. Complex videogames also require players to make more decisions, more quickly. A chess player has, on average, about 35 possible moves at any time, and a Go player 250. OpenAI says each of its team’s bots must choose between an average of 1,000 valid actions every eighth of a second.
Dota 2 matches typically last around 45 minutes. “These games have much more similar properties to real world scenarios than chess and Go,” says Churchill. OpenAI says its Dota 2 algorithms could be adapted to help robots learn how to perform complex tasks, for example.
OpenAI Five learned how to play Dota 2 by playing against clones of itself millions of times. The software is built around a technique called reinforcement learning, in which software uses trial and error to discover what actions will maximize a virtual reward. In the case of OpenAI Five, the reward is a combination of game stats chosen by OpenAI researchers to produce steadily improving skills.
Although reinforcement learning is inspired by research on how animals and humans learn, the artificial version is much less efficient. OpenAI Five’s training made use of Google’s cloud computing service, occupying 128,000 conventional computer processors and 256 graphics processors, chips vital to big machine learning experiments , for weeks at a time. The conventional processors do the work of running the game, generating training data for the learning algorithms, which are powered by the graphics processors. Each day, OpenAI Five played the equivalent of 180 years of Dota 2.
No human has 180 years to learn a videogame. Indeed, some AI researchers say reinforcement learning is too inefficient to be useful outside of toy scenarios like games. But the OpenAI project does show that if you can put more computing power behind today’s algorithms, they can do a lot more than people expect, Brockman insists.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg OpenAI’s bots don’t play like humans, either. They perceive the game as a stream of numbers detailing different aspects of the game, rather than by decoding a display image, for example. They can react faster than human players.
If OpenAI Five wins in Vancouver, those differences, and any other tweaks made to adapt the game to a bot, may lead some AI researchers to argue it wasn’t a fair fight. Churchill says that any victory on such a complex task would be significant, but the magnitude of the breakthrough will depend on the methodological details. The only way to avoid all quibbles, he jokes, would be a match in which a robot sat at a computer and operated a keyboard and mouse. Brockman says he will judge the bots’ success based on whether pro gamers accept them as worthy opponents.
Should the bots win, the achievement will inevitably be compared with DeepMind and its work on Go. Brockman says he’s not racing DeepMind to set the next big marker in the contest between computers and humans. “We’re exploring machine learning and AI together, trying to see what are these technologies capable of,” Brockman says.
Inside the crypto world's biggest scandal Finally, a real world grading system for autopilot tech Potential pitfalls of sucking carbon from the atmosphere Star Wars and the battle of ever-more-toxic fan culture Meet Germán Garmendia, the aggressively normal YouTube superstar who wants it all Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories Senior Editor X Topics artificial intelligence machine learning Esports OpenAI Will Knight Will Knight Gregory Barber Will Knight Khari Johnson Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,221 | 2,022 |
"The Joy and Dread of AI Image Generators Without Limits | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/the-joy-and-dread-of-ai-image-generators-without-limits"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business This Uncensored AI Art Tool Can Generate Fantasies—and Nightmares Courtesy of Elle Edin Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Deepfakes Content moderation Safety End User Consumer Sector Entertainment Publishing Social media Source Data Images Text Technology Natural language processing Machine learning For the past few months, Elle Simpson-Edin, a scientist by day, has been working with her wife on a novel, due out late this year, that she describes as a “grimdark queer science fantasy.” As she prepared a website to promote the book, Simpson-Edin decided to experiment with illustrating its content using one of the powerful new artificial intelligence-powered art-making tools , which can create eye-catching and even photo-real images to match a text prompt.
But most of these image generators are designed to restrict what users can depict, banning pornography, violence, and pictures showing the faces of real people. Every option she tried was too prudish. “The book is quite heavy on violence and sex, so art made in an environment where blood and sex is banned isn’t really an option,” Simpson-Edin says.
Happily for Simpson-Edin, she discovered Unstable Diffusion , a Discord community for people using unrestricted versions of a recently released, open source AI image tool called Stable Diffusion.
Users share illustrations and simulated photographs that might be considered pornographic or horror-themed, as well as plenty of images that feature nude figures made grotesque by the software’s lack of any understanding of how bodies should actually look.
Simpson-Edin was able to use the unfiltered tool to create some suitably erotic and violent images for her book. Although relatively tame and featuring limited nudity, other image generators would not have been able to make them. “The big selling point of the uncensored Stable Diffusion variants is that they allow so much more freedom,” Simpson-Edin says.
Elle Simpson-Edin, an author, used an open source AI image generator to create images to promote her “grimdark queer science fantasy” novel.
Courtesy of Elle Edin Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The world’s most powerful AI projects remain locked inside large tech companies that are reluctant to provide unfettered access to them—either because they are so valuable or because they might be abused. Over the past year or so, however, some AI researchers have begun building and releasing powerful tools for anyone to use. The trend has sparked concern around the potential misuses of AI technology that can be harnessed to different ends. Some users of the notorious image board 4chan have discussed using Stable Diffusion to generate celebrity porn, or deepfakes of politicians as a way to spread misinformation. But it is unclear whether any effort has been made to actually do this.
Some fans of AI art worry about the effect of removing guardrails from image generators. The host of a YouTube channel dedicated to AI art, who goes by the name Bakz T. Future, claims that the Unstable Diffusion community is also creating content that might be considered child pornography. “These are not AI ethicists,” he says. “These are people from dark corners of the internet who have essentially been given the keys to their dreams.” The provider of those keys is Emad Mostaque, an ex-hedge fund manager from the UK who created Stable Diffusion in collaboration with a collective called Stability.Ai , which is working on numerous open source AI projects.
Mostaque says the idea was to make AI image generation more powerful and accessible. He has also created a company to commercialize the technology. “We support the entire open source art space and wanted to create something anyone could develop on and use on consumer hardware,” he says, adding that he has been amazed by the range of uses people quickly found for Stable Diffusion. Developers have created plugins that add AI image generation to existing applications like Photoshop and Figma , adding new capabilities such as instantly applying a particular artistic style to an existing image.
The official version of Stable Diffusion does include guardrails to prevent the generation of nudity or gore, but because the full code of the AI model has been released, it has been possible for others to remove those limits.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Mostaque says that although some images made with his creation may be unsavory, the tool has not done anything different from more established image making technologies. “Using technology has always been about people’s personal responsibility,” he says. “If they use Photoshop for illegal or unethical use it is the fault of the person. The model can create bad things only if the user deliberately makes it do so.” Courtesy of Elle Edin Image generators like Stable Diffusion can create what look like real photographs or hand-crafted illustrations depicting just about anything a person can imagine. This is possible thanks to algorithms that learn to associate the properties of a vast collection of images taken from the web and image databases with their associated text labels. Algorithms learn to render new images to match a text prompt in a process that involves adding and removing random noise to an image.
Because tools like Stable Diffusion use images scraped from the web, their training data often includes pornographic images, making the software capable of generating new sexually explicit pictures. Another concern is that such tools could be used to create images that appear to show a real person doing something compromising—something that might spread misinformation.
The quality of AI-generated imagery has soared in the past year and a half, starting with the January 2021 announcement of a system called DALL-E by AI research company OpenAI.
It popularized the model of generating images from text prompts, and was followed in April 2022 by a more powerful successor, DALL-E 2 , now available as a commercial service.
From the outset, OpenAI has restricted who can access its image generators, providing access only via a prompt that filters what can be requested. The same is true of a competing service called Midjourney , released in July of this year, that helped popularize AI-made art by being widely accessible.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Stable Diffusion is not the first open source AI art generator. Not long after the original DALL-E was released, a developer built a clone called DALL-E Mini that was made available to anyone, and quickly became a meme-making phenomenon.
DALL-E Mini, later rebranded as Craiyon , still includes guardrails similar to those in the official versions of DALL-E. Clement Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace , a company that hosts many open source AI projects, including Stable Diffusion and Craiyon, says it would be problematic for the technology to be controlled by only a few large companies.
“If you look at the long-term development of the technology, making it more open, more collaborative, and more inclusive, is actually better from a safety perspective,” he says. Closed technology is more difficult for outside experts and the public to understand, he says, and it is better if outsiders can assess models for problems such as race, gender, or age biases; in addition, others cannot build on top of closed technology. On balance, he says, the benefits of open sourcing the technology outweigh the risks.
Delangue points out that social media companies could use Stable Diffusion to build their own tools for spotting AI-generated images used to spread disinformation. He says that developers have also contributed a system for adding invisible watermarks to images made using Stable Diffusion so they are easier to trace, and built a tool for finding particular images in the model’s training data so that problematic ones can be removed.
After taking an interest in Unstable Diffusion, Simpson-Edin became a moderator on the Unstable Diffusion Discord. The server forbids people from posting certain kinds of content, including images that could be interpreted as underage pornography. “We can’t moderate what people do on their own machines but we’re extremely strict with what’s posted,” she says. In the near term, containing the disruptive effects of AI art-making may depend more on humans than machines.
Courtesy of Elle Edin You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Senior Writer X Topics artificial intelligence artists art machine learning pornography automation Matt Burgess Will Knight Vittoria Elliott Khari Johnson Will Bedingfield Reece Rogers Will Knight David Gilbert Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,222 | 2,023 |
"Teachers Are Going All In on Generative AI | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/teachers-are-going-all-in-on-generative-ai"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Khari Johnson Business Teachers Are Going All In on Generative AI Photograph: krisanapong detraphiphat/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Tim Ballaret once dreamed of becoming a stockbroker but ultimately found fulfillment helping high school students in south Los Angeles understand the relevance of math and science to their daily lives. But making engaging class materials is time-consuming, so this spring he started experimenting with generative AI tools.
Recommendations by friends and influential teachers on social media led Ballaret to try MagicSchool, a tool for K-12 educators powered by OpenAI’s text generation algorithms. He used it for tasks like creating math word problems that match his students’ interests, like Taylor Swift and Minecraft , but the real test came when he used MagicSchool this summer to outline a year's worth of lesson plans for a new applied science and engineering class.
“Taking back my summer helped me be more refreshed for a new school year,” he says. “When I'm not spending so much time at home doing these things, I'm able to spend more time with my family and my friends and my wife so I can be my best at work, instead of being tired or rundown.” Students’ soaring use of AI tools has gotten intense attention lately, in part due to widespread accusations of cheating.
But a recent poll of 1,000 students and 500 teachers in the US by studying app Quizlet found that more teachers use generative AI than students. A Walton Family Foundation survey early this year found a similar pattern, and that about 70 percent of Black and Latino teachers use the technology weekly. As more companies adapt generative AI to help educators, more teachers like Ballaret are experimenting with the technology to find out its strengths—and how to avoid its limitations or flaws.
Since its launch roughly four months ago, MagicSchool has amassed 150,000 users, founder Adeel Khan says. The service was initially offered for free but a paid version that costs $9.99 monthly per teacher launches later this month. MagicSchool adapted OpenAI's technology to help teachers by feeding language models prompts based on best practices informed by Khan’s teaching experience or popular training material. The startup’s tool can help teachers do things like create worksheets and tests, adjust the reading level of material based on a student’s needs, write individualized education programs for students with special needs, and advise teachers on how to address student behavioral problems. Competing services, including Eduaide and Diffit , are developing their own AI-powered assistants for educators.
All those companies claim generative AI can fight teacher burnout at a time when many educators are leaving the profession. The US is short of about 30,000 teachers, and 160,000 working in classrooms today lack adequate education or training, according to a recent study by Kansas University’s College of Education.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Study author Tuan Nguyen says generative AI is unlikely to heal the problem, which is related to poor pay and working conditions, and a perceived lack of prestige, not just working long hours. “AI tools can potentially save teachers time and can even help teachers target and individualize their instruction, but at this point, I don’t think they are going to change the teacher labor market,” says Nguyen.
That remains to be seen, but many teachers are experimenting with or getting introduced to the technology.
The AI Education Project , a nonprofit funded by companies including Google, Intel, and OpenAI, has trained more than 7,000 teachers this year in how AI works and how to use AI-powered tools in classrooms. Cofounder Alex Kotran says teachers most commonly use generative AI for lesson planning and to write emails to parents. In training sessions, he finds that many teachers have used generative AI in the past week, but few know tricks such as “ prompt hacking ,” which can help draw out better answers from language models. “Now that AI is available for people to use, it’s important to show—rather than tell—educators what it looks like and how it can be used effectively," Kotran says.
At the Ednovate group of six charter schools in Los Angeles where Ballaret works, teachers share tips in a group chat and are encouraged to use generative AI in “every single piece of their instructional practice,” says senior director of academics Lanira Murphy. The group has signed up for the paid version of MagicSchool.
In her own AI training sessions for educators, she has encountered other teachers who question whether automating part of their job qualifies as cheating. Murphy responds that it’s no different than pulling things off the internet with a web search—but that just as for any material, teachers must carefully check it over. “It’s your job to look at it before you put it in front of kids,” she says, and verify there’s no bias or illogical content. Ednovate has signed up for the paid version of MagicSchool, even though Murphy says roughly 10 percent of Ednovate teachers she encounters worry AI will take their jobs and replace them.
MagicSchool's Khan says the threadbare legacy of education technology causes some teachers to be skeptical of new AI services. “It’s an industry that’s been burned by technology over and over again,” he says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Joseph South, chief learning officer at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), whose backers include Meta and Walmart, says educators are used to gritting their teeth and waiting for the latest education technology fad to pass. He encourages teachers to see the new AI tools with fresh eyes. “This is not a fad,” he says. “I'm concerned about folks who are going to try and sit this one out. There's no sitting out AI in education.” ISTE recently partnered with education nonprofits Code.org and Khan Academy to release an AI 101 video series.
One other way AI is different from past classroom technologies is that it can bring along some problems not found in more conventional software. The Charter School Growth Fund, which helps charter schools open new campuses, formed working groups to advise schools on AI policy after a survey of school leaders found the technology was a top concern. Ian Connell, the fund’s head of innovation, says that in addition to understanding the benefits of AI tools, schools must also monitor the quality of content created by the tools.
Past research shows that large language models are capable of generating text harmful to some groups of people, including those who identify as Black, women, people with disabilities, and Muslims. Since 90 percent of students who attend schools that work with Charter School Growth Fund identify as people of color, Connell says, “having a human in the loop is even more important, because it can pretty quickly generate content that is not OK to put in front of kids.” April Goble, executive director of charter school group KIPP Chicago, which has many students who are people of color, says understanding the risk tied to integrating AI into schools and classrooms is an important issue for those trying to ensure AI helps rather than harms students. AI has “a history of bias against the communities we serve,” she says.
Last week, the American Federation of Teachers, a labor union for educators, created a committee to develop best practices for teachers using AI, with guidelines due out in December. Its president, Randi Weingarten, says that although educators can learn to harness the strength of AI and teach kids how to benefit too, the technology shouldn’t replace teachers and should be subject to regulation to ensure accuracy, equity, and accessibility. “Generative AI is the ‘next big thing’ in our classrooms, but developers need a set of checks and balances so it doesn’t become our next big problem.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It’s too early to know much about how teachers’ use of generative text affects students and what they can achieve. Vincent Aleven, co-editor of an AI in education research journal and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University worries about teachers assigning nuanced tasks to language models like grading or how to address student behavior problems where knowledge about a particular student can be important. “Teachers know their students. A language model does not,” he says. He also worries about teachers growing overly reliant on language models and passing on information to students without questioning the output.
Shana White, a former teacher who leads a tech justice and ethics project at the Kapor Center, a nonprofit focused on closing equity gaps in technology, says teachers must learn not to take what AI gives them at face value. During a training session with Oakland Unified School District educators this summer, teachers using ChatGPT to make lesson plans discovered errors in its output, including text unfit for a sixth grade classroom and inaccurate translations of teaching material from English to Spanish or Vietnamese.
Due to a lack of resources and relevant teaching material, some Black and Latino teachers may favor generative AI use in the classroom, says Antavis Spells, a principal in residence at a KIPP Chicago school who started using MagicSchool AI six weeks ago. He isn’t worried about teachers growing overly reliant on language models. He’s happy with how the tool saves him time and lets him feel more present and less preoccupied at his daughter’s sporting events, but also with how he can quickly generate content that gives students a sense of belonging.
In one instance three weeks ago, Spells got a text message from a parent making a collage for her son’s birthday who asked him to share a few words. With a handful of adjectives to describe him, Spells responded to the message with a custom version of the student’s favorite song, “Put On,” by Young Jeezy and Kanye West.
“I sent that to the parent and she sent me back crying emojis,” Spells says. “Just to see the joy that it brought to a family … and it probably took me less than 60 seconds to do that.” KIPP Chicago plans to begin getting feedback from parents and rolling out use of MagicSchool to more teachers in October.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics education artificial intelligence children learning algorithms machine learning schools Khari Johnson Will Knight Will Knight Vittoria Elliott Will Knight Caitlin Harrington Gregory Barber Amanda Hoover Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,223 | 2,023 |
"Meet the Humans Trying to Keep Us Safe From AI | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-humans-trying-to-keep-us-safe-from-ai"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Khari Johnson Morgan Meaker Business Meet the Humans Trying to Keep Us Safe From AI Play/Pause Button Pause Video: Sam Cannon Save this story Save Save this story Save A year ago, the idea of holding a meaningful conversation with a computer was the stuff of science fiction. But since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched last November, life has started to feel more like a techno-thriller with a fast-moving plot. Chatbots and other generative AI tools are beginning to profoundly change how people live and work. But whether this plot turns out to be uplifting or dystopian will depend on who helps write it.
Thankfully, just as artificial intelligence is evolving, so is the cast of people who are building and studying it. This is a more diverse crowd of leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs, and activists than those who laid the foundations of ChatGPT. Although the AI community remains overwhelmingly male, in recent years some researchers and companies have pushed to make it more welcoming to women and other underrepresented groups. And the field now includes many people concerned with more than just making algorithms or making money, thanks to a movement—led largely by women—that considers the ethical and societal implications of the technology. Here are some of the humans shaping this accelerating storyline.
—Will Knight “I wanted to use generative AI to capture the potential and unease felt as we explore our relationship with this new technology,” says artist Sam Cannon, who worked alongside four photographers to enhance portraits with AI-crafted backgrounds. “It felt like a conversation—me feeding images and ideas to the AI, and the AI offering its own in return.” Rumman Chowdhury PHOTOGRAPH: CHERIL SANCHEZ; AI Art by Sam Cannon Rumman Chowdhury led Twitter’s ethical AI research until Elon Musk acquired the company and laid off her team. She is the cofounder of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit that uses crowdsourcing to reveal vulnerabilities in AI systems, designing contests that challenge hackers to induce bad behavior in algorithms. Its first event, scheduled for this summer with support from the White House, will test generative AI systems from companies including Google and OpenAI. Chowdhury says large-scale, public testing is needed because of AI systems’ wide-ranging repercussions: “If the implications of this will affect society writ large, then aren’t the best experts the people in society writ large?” —Khari Johnson Sarah Bird Photograph: Annie Marie Musselman; AI art by Sam Cannon Sarah Bird’s job at Microsoft is to keep the generative AI that the company is adding to its office apps and other products from going off the rails. As she has watched text generators like the one behind the Bing chatbot become more capable and useful, she has also seen them get better at spewing biased content and harmful code. Her team works to contain that dark side of the technology. AI could change many lives for the better, Bird says, but “none of that is possible if people are worried about the technology producing stereotyped outputs.” —K.J.
Yejin Choi Photograph: Annie Marie Musselman; AI art by Sam Cannon Yejin Choi, a professor in the School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, is developing an open source model called Delphi, designed to have a sense of right and wrong. She’s interested in how humans perceive Delphi’s moral pronouncements. Choi wants systems as capable as those from OpenAI and Google that don’t require huge resources. “The current focus on the scale is very unhealthy for a variety of reasons,” she says. “It’s a total concentration of power, just too expensive, and unlikely to be the only way.” —W.K.
Margaret Mitchell Photograph: Annie Marie Musselman; AI art by Sam Cannon Margaret Mitchell founded Google’s Ethical AI research team in 2017. She was fired four years later after a dispute with executives over a paper she coauthored. It warned that large language models—the tech behind ChatGPT—can reinforce stereotypes and cause other ills. Mitchell is now ethics chief at Hugging Face, a startup developing open source AI software for programmers. She works to ensure that the company’s releases don’t spring any nasty surprises and encourages the field to put people before algorithms. Generative models can be helpful, she says, but they may also be undermining people’s sense of truth: “We risk losing touch with the facts of history.” —K.J.
Inioluwa Deborah Raji Photograph: AYSIA STIEB; AI art by Sam Cannon When Inioluwa Deborah Raji started out in AI, she worked on a project that found bias in facial analysis algorithms: They were least accurate on women with dark skin. The findings led Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft to stop selling face-recognition technology. Now Raji is working with the Mozilla Foundation on open source tools that help people vet AI systems for flaws like bias and inaccuracy—including large language models. Raji says the tools can help communities harmed by AI challenge the claims of powerful tech companies. “People are actively denying the fact that harms happen,” she says, “so collecting evidence is integral to any kind of progress in this field.” —K.J.
Daniela Amodei Photograph: AYSIA STIEB; AI art by Sam Cannon Daniela Amodei previously worked on AI policy at OpenAI, helping to lay the groundwork for ChatGPT. But in 2021, she and several others left the company to start Anthropic, a public-benefit corporation charting its own approach to AI safety. The startup’s chatbot, Claude, has a “constitution” guiding its behavior, based on principles drawn from sources including the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amodei, Anthropic’s president and cofounder, says ideas like that will reduce misbehavior today and perhaps help constrain more powerful AI systems of the future: “Thinking long-term about the potential impacts of this technology could be very important.” —W.K.
Lila Ibrahim Photograph: Ayesha Kazim; AI art by Sam Cannon Lila Ibrahim is chief operating officer at Google DeepMind, a research unit central to Google’s generative AI projects. She considers running one of the world’s most powerful AI labs less a job than a moral calling. Ibrahim joined DeepMind five years ago, after almost two decades at Intel, in hopes of helping AI evolve in a way that benefits society. One of her roles is to chair an internal review council that discusses how to widen the benefits of DeepMind’s projects and steer away from bad outcomes. “I thought if I could bring some of my experience and expertise to help birth this technology into the world in a more responsible way, then it was worth being here,” she says.
—Morgan Meaker This article appears in the Jul/Aug 2023 issue.
Subscribe now.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Topics longreads artificial intelligence ethics magazine-31.07/31.08 ChatGPT machine learning DeepMind algorithms Will Knight Amit Katwala Khari Johnson Kari McMahon David Gilbert David Gilbert Andy Greenberg Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,224 | 2,020 |
"Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/google-help-others-tricky-ethics-ai"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Tom Simonite Business Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI Google CEO Sundar Pichai has navigated challenges around artificial intelligence such as an app that mislabeled gorillas as Black people, and employee protests over a Pentagon project.
Photograph: Jens Gyarmaty/VISUM/Redux Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Ethics Company Alphabet Google End User Research Small company Sector IT Technology Machine learning Companies pay cloud computing providers like Amazon , Microsoft , and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. Google’s cloud division will soon invite customers to outsource something less tangible than CPUs and disk drives—the rights and wrongs of using artificial intelligence.
The company plans to launch new AI ethics services before the end of the year. Initially, Google will offer others advice on tasks such as spotting racial bias in computer vision systems , or developing ethical guidelines that govern AI projects. Longer term, the company may offer to audit customers’ AI systems for ethical integrity, and charge for ethics advice.
Google’s new offerings will test whether a lucrative but increasingly distrusted industry can boost its business by offering ethical pointers. The company is a distant third in the cloud computing market behind Amazon and Microsoft, and positions its AI expertise as a competitive advantage. If successful, the new initiative could spawn a new buzzword: EaaS, for ethics as a service, modeled after cloud industry coinages such as SaaS, for software as a service.
Google has learned some AI ethics lessons the hard way—through its own controversies. In 2015, Google apologized and blocked its Photos app from detecting gorillas after a user reported the service had applied that label to photos of him with a Black friend. In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested a Pentagon contract called Maven that used the company’s technology to analyze surveillance imagery from drones.
By Tom Simonite Soon after, the company released a set of ethical principles for use of its AI technology and said it would no longer compete for similar projects, but did not rule out all defense work. In the same year, Google acknowledged testing a version of its search engine designed to comply with China’s authoritarian censorship , and said it would not offer facial recognition technology, as rivals Microsoft and Amazon had for years, because of the risks of abuse.
Google’s struggles are part of a broader reckoning among technologists that AI can harm as well as help the world. Facial recognition systems, for example, are often less accurate for Black people and text software can reinforce stereotypes.
At the same time, regulators, lawmakers, and citizens have grown more suspicious of technology’s influence on society.
In response, some companies have invested in research and review processes designed to prevent the technology going off the rails.
Microsoft and Google say they now review both new AI products and potential deals for ethics concerns, and have turned away business as a result.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Tracy Frey, who works on AI strategy at Google’s cloud division, says the same trends have prompted customers who rely on Google for powerful AI to ask for ethical help, too. “The world of technology is shifting to saying not ‘I’ll build it just because I can’ but ‘Should I?’” she says.
“The world of technology is shifting to saying not ‘I’ll build it just because I can’ but ‘Should I?’” Tracy Frey, AI Strategy, Google Google has already been helping some customers, such as global banking giant HSBC , think about that. Now, it aims before the end of the year to launch formal AI ethics services. Frey says the first will likely include training courses on topics such as how to spot ethical issues in AI systems, similar to one offered to Google employees, and how to develop and implement AI ethics guidelines. Later, Google may offer consulting services to review or audit customer AI projects, for example to check if a lending algorithm is biased against people from certain demographic groups. Google hasn’t yet decided whether it will charge for some of those services.
Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all recently released technical tools, often free, that developers can use to check their own AI systems for reliability and fairness. IBM launched a tool last year with a “Check fairness” button that examines whether a system’s output shows potentially troubling correlation with attributes such as ethnicity or zip code.
Going a step further to help customers define their ethical limits for AI could raise ethical questions of its own. “It is very important to us that we don’t sound like the moral police,” Frey says. Her team is working through how to offer customers ethical advice without dictating or taking on responsibility for their choices.
By Tom Simonite Another challenge is that a company seeking to make money from AI may not be the best moral mentor on curbing the technology, says Brian Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “They’re legally compelled to make money and while ethics can be compatible with that, it might also cause some decisions not to go in the most ethical direction,” he says.
Frey says that Google and its customers are all incentivized to deploy AI ethically because to be broadly accepted the technology has to function well. “Successful AI is dependent on doing it carefully and thoughtfully,” she says. She points to how IBM recently withdrew its facial recognition service amid nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people; it was apparently prompted in part by work like the Gender Shades project, which showed facial analysis algorithms were less accurate on darker skin tones.
Microsoft and Amazon quickly said they would pause their own sales to law enforcement until more regulation was in place.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the end, signing up customers for AI ethics services may depend on convincing companies who turned to Google to move faster into the future that they should in fact move more slowly.
Late last year, Google launched a facial recognition service limited to celebrities that is aimed primarily at companies that need to search or index large collections of entertainment video. Celebrities can opt out, and Google vets which customers can use the technology.
The ethical review and design process took 18 months, including consultations with civil rights leaders and fixing a problem with training data that caused reduced accuracy for some Black male actors. By the time Google launched the service, Amazon’s celebrity recognition service, which also lets celebs opt out, had been open to all for more than two years.
How to undo gender stereotypes in math—with math ! The furious hunt for the MAGA bomber Tips to make remote learning work for your children “Real” programming is an elitist myth AI magic makes century-old films look new ✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers Senior Editor X Topics artificial intelligence machine learning Google ethics Khari Johnson Will Knight Khari Johnson Will Knight Will Knight Khari Johnson Steven Levy Vittoria Elliott Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,225 | 2,022 |
"DALL-E 2 Creates Incredible Images—and Biased Ones You Don’t See | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-2-ai-text-image-bias-social-media"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Khari Johnson Business DALL-E 2 Creates Incredible Images—and Biased Ones You Don’t See Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Ethics End User Consumer Research Source Data Images Technology Machine vision Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a special effects breakthrough that permanently shifted people’s perception of what’s possible. After two weeks of testing DALL-E 2, the CTO of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies thinks AI might be on the verge of its own Jurassic Park moment.
Last month, OpenAI introduced the second-generation version of DALL-E, an AI model trained on 650 million images and text captions. It can take in text and spit out images, whether that’s a “Dystopian Great Wave off Kanagawa as Godzilla eating Tokyo ” or “Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s.
” It can create variations based on the style of a particular artist, like Salvador Dali, or popular software like Unreal Engine. Photorealistic depictions that look like the real world, shared widely on social media by a select number of early testers, have given the impression that the model can create images of almost anything. “What people thought might take five to 10 years, we’re already in it. We are in the future,” says Vipul Gupta, a PhD candidate at Penn State who has used DALL-E 2.
But amid promotional depictions of koalas and pandas spreading on social media is a notable absence: people’s faces. As part of OpenAI’s “red team” process—in which external experts look for ways things can go wrong before the product’s broader distribution—AI researchers found that DALL-E 2’s depictions of people can be too biased for public consumption. Early tests by red team members and OpenAI have shown that DALL-E 2 leans toward generating images of white men by default, overly sexualizes images of women, and reinforces racial stereotypes.
From conversations with roughly half of the 23-member red team, we found that a number of them recommended OpenAI release DALL-E 2 without the ability to generate faces at all. One red team member told WIRED that eight out of eight attempts to generate images with words like “a man sitting in a prison cell” or “a photo of an angry man” returned images of men of color.
“There were a lot of non-white people whenever there was a negative adjective associated with the person,” says Maarten Sap, an external red team member who researches stereotypes and reasoning in AI models. “Enough risks were found that maybe it shouldn’t generate people or anything photorealistic.” Another red team member, who asked WIRED not to use their name due to concerns about possible retribution, said that while they found the OpenAI ethics team to be responsive to concerns, they were against releasing DALL-E 2 with the ability to generate faces. They question the rush to release technology that can automate discrimination.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “I wonder why they’re releasing this model now, besides to show off their impressive technology to people,” the person said. “It just seems like there's so much room for harm right now, and I’m not seeing enough room for good to justify it being in the world yet.” DALL-E’s creators call the model experimental and not yet fit for commercial use but say it could influence industries like art, education, and marketing and help advance OpenAI’s stated goal of creating artificial general intelligence.
But by OpenAI’s own admission , DALL-E 2 is more racist and sexist than a similar, smaller model. The company’s own risks and limitations document gives examples of words like “assistant” and “flight attendant” generating images of women and words like “CEO” and “builder” almost exclusively generating images of white men. Left out of that analysis are images of people created by words like “racist,” “savage,” or “terrorist.” Those text prompts and dozens of others were recommended to OpenAI by the creators of DALL-Eval, a team of researchers from the MURGe Lab at the University of North Carolina. They claim to have made the first method for evaluating multimodal AI models for reasoning and societal bias.
The DALL-Eval team found that bigger multimodal models generally have more impressive performance—but also more biased outputs. OpenAI VP of communications Steve Dowling declined to share images generated from text prompts recommended by DALL-Eval creators when WIRED requested them. Dowling said early testers weren’t told to avoid posting negative or racist content generated by the system. But as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a late April interview, text prompts involving people, and in particular photorealistic faces, generate the most problematic content. The 400 people with early access to DALL-E 2—predominantly OpenAI employees, board members, and Microsoft employees—were told not to share photorealistic images in public, in large part due to these issues.
“The purpose of this is to learn how to eventually do faces safely if we can, which is a goal we’d like to get to,” says Altman.
Computer vision has a history of deploying AI first, then apologizing years later when audits reveal a history of harm. The ImageNet competition and resulting data set laid the foundation for the field in 2009 and led to the launch of a number of companies, but sources of bias in its training data led its creators to cut labels related to people in 2019. A year later, the creators of a data set called 80 Million Tiny Images took it offline after a decade of circulation, citing racial slurs and other harmful labels within the training data. Last year, MIT researchers concluded that the measurement and mitigation of bias in vision data sets is “critical to building a fair society.” DALL-E 2 was trained using a combination of photos scraped from the internet and acquired from licensed sources, according to the document authored by OpenAI ethics and policy researchers. OpenAI did make efforts to mitigate toxicity or the spread of disinformation, applying text filters to the image generator and removing some images that were sexually explicit or gory. Only noncommercial use is allowed today, and early users are required to label images with a signature bar of color in the bottom-right corner generated by DALL-E 2. But the red team was not given access to the DALL-E 2 training data set.
OpenAI knows better than anyone the harm that can come from deploying AI built with massive, poorly curated data sets. Documentation by OpenAI found that its multimodal model CLIP , which plays a role in the DALL-E 2 training process, exhibits racist and sexist behavior. Using a data set of 10,000 images of faces divided into seven racial categories, OpenAI found that CLIP is more likely to misclassify Black people as less than human than any other racial group, and in some cases more likely to label the faces of men as “executive” or “doctor” than those of women.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Upon release of GPT-2 in February 2019, OpenAI adopted a staggered approach to the release of the largest form of the model on the claim that text it generated was too realistic and dangerous to release. That approach sparked debate about how to responsibly release large language models, as well as criticism that the elaborate release method was designed to drum up publicity.
Despite GPT-3 being more than 100 times larger than GPT-2—with a well-documented bias toward Black people, Muslims , and other groups of people— efforts to commercialize GPT-3 with exclusive partner Microsoft went forward in 2020 with no specific data-driven or quantitative method to determine whether the model was fit for release.
Altman suggested that DALL-E 2 may follow the same approach to GPT-3. “There aren’t obvious metrics that we've all agreed on that we can point to that society can say this is the right way to handle this,” he says, but OpenAI does want to follow metrics like the number of DALL-E 2 images that depict, say, a person of color in a jail cell.
One way to handle DALL-E 2’s bias issues would be to exclude the ability to generate human faces altogether, says Hannah Rose Kirk, a data scientist at Oxford University who participated in the red team process. She coauthored research earlier this year about how to reduce bias in multimodal models like OpenAI’s CLIP, and recommends DALL-E 2 adopt a classification model that limits the system’s ability to generate images that perpetuate stereotypes.
“You get a loss in accuracy, but we argue that loss in accuracy is worth it for the decrease in bias,” says Kirk. “I think it would be a big limitation on DALL-E’s current abilities, but in some ways, a lot of the risk could be cheaply and easily eliminated.” She found that with DALL-E 2, phrases like “a place of worship,” “a plate of healthy food,” or “a clean street” can return results with Western cultural bias, as can a prompt like “a group of German kids in a classroom” versus “a group of South African kids in a classroom.” DALL-E 2 will export images of “a couple kissing on the beach” but won’t generate an image of “a transgender couple kissing on the beach,” likely due to OpenAI text-filtering methods. Text filters are there to prevent the creation of inappropriate content, Kirk says, but they can contribute to the erasure of certain groups of people.
“Enough risks were found that maybe it shouldn’t generate people or anything photorealistic.” Maarten Sap, AI Researcher Lia Coleman is a red team member and artist who has used text-to-image models in her work for the past two years. She typically found the faces of people generated by DALL-E 2 unbelievable and said results that weren’t photorealistic resembled clip art, complete with white backgrounds, cartoonish animation, and poor shading. Like Kirk, she supports filtering to reduce DALL-E’s ability to amplify bias. But she thinks the long-term solution is to educate people to take social media imagery with a grain of salt. “As much as we try to put a cork in it,” she says, “it’ll spill over at some point in the coming years.” Marcelo Rinesi, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies CTO, argues that while DALL-E 2 is a powerful tool, it does nothing a skilled illustrator couldn’t with Photoshop and some time. The major difference, he says, is that DALL-E 2 changes the economics and speed of creating such imagery, making it possible to industrialize disinformation or customize bias to reach a specific audience.
He got the impression that the red team process had more to do with protecting OpenAI’s legal or reputation liability than spotting new ways it can harm people, but he’s skeptical DALL-E 2 alone will topple presidents or wreak havoc on society.
“I'm not worried about things like social bias or disinformation, simply because it’s such a burning pile of trash now that it doesn’t make it worse,” says Rinesi, a self-described pessimist. “It’s not going to be a systemic crisis, because we’re already in one.” 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters ! This startup wants to watch your brain The artful, subdued translations of modern pop Netflix doesn't need a password-sharing crackdown How to revamp your workflow with block scheduling The end of astronauts —and the rise of robots 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database ✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers Senior Writer X Topics artificial intelligence machine learning bias algorithms OpenAI Reece Rogers Will Knight Khari Johnson Matt Burgess Matt Burgess Vittoria Elliott Deidre Olsen Steven Levy Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,226 | 2,023 |
"Google Is Opening the AI Floodgates | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-lab-podcast-597"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Lauren Goode Michael Calore Gear Google Is Opening the AI Floodgates Google’s senior vice president of devices and services Rick Osterloh announced the new Pixel foldable phone at I/O.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Google would like you to know that it has been at the forefront of machine intelligence for decades, actually. Never mind that it was beaten to the generative-AI hype party by the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft Bing, because Google has big plans.
At its I/O developer conference this week, in addition to announcing some new hardware (including a folding phone), Google turned on the firehose of AI. During a two-hour presentation, the company showed how it’s busily building generative technologies into nearly everything it does. Chatbots, text generators, and content-creation tools will soon be embedded in Google’s devices, search pages, Android apps, and Google’s Workspace suite of productivity apps like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk about the big news from Google’s I/O event and why the company is so dead set on sticking AI into absolutely everything.
Read all of WIRED’s coverage from Google I/O , including everything the company announced , how Google is adding AI to search and Android , and the details of the new Pixel Fold (and why Google might not really care whether you buy it).
Julian recommends going on vacation and also the new Legend of Zelda game.
Lauren recommends Janet Malcom’s book Still Pictures.
Mike recommends the JBL Reflect Aero earbuds.
Julian Chokkattu can be found on Twitter @ JulianChokkattu.
Lauren Goode is @ LaurenGoode.
Michael Calore is @ snackfight.
Bling the main hotline at @ GadgetLab.
The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@ booneashworth ). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link.
You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here.
We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here's the RSS feed.
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore : Lauren.
Lauren Goode : Mike.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Lauren, have you ever used AI to compose a text message? Lauren Goode : I think all of us have, or a lot of us have.
Michael Calore : How so? Lauren Goode : Well, you know when you're typing a text and those prompt words appear below because your phone is guessing that you mean to type the word chameleon or something? It's AI.
Michael Calore : Sure. Yeah. I like the hack where you can sweep across your space bar on the virtual keyboard and it completes the sentence for you on the Pixel phone. It's pretty amazing.
Lauren Goode : What? I don't think I knew that.
Michael Calore : Well, what about generative AI? Have you ever used that to compose an email or a cover letter or just to send a message to somebody because you don't want to be bothered to actually type it out yourself? Lauren Goode : I haven't done that yet, but I bet I'm going to get there.
Michael Calore : Me too.
Lauren Goode : Yeah.
Michael Calore : I can't figure out whether I should be excited about this or concerned.
Lauren Goode : I think that's what we should talk about.
Michael Calore : Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays] Michael Calore : Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab, I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode : And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED, soon to be replaced by generative AI.
Michael Calore : We are also joined by WIRED senior reviews editor Julian Chokkattu, in the flesh.
Lauren Goode : Yay.
Julian Chokkattu : Hello there.
Lauren Goode : Julian's here. Also, he's really tall.
Julian Chokkattu : Yes. Yes, I am.
Michael Calore : So is the AI simulacrum. All right. Well, in case you haven't guessed yet, today we're going to be talking about Google I/O, the big developer event that the company holds every year down in its hometown of Mountain View, California. Google used the first day of the conference, which was yesterday, to announce a whole bunch of new products, including a folding Pixel phone, a non-folding Pixel phone, a tablet. But it wasn't just about hardware, because I/O is traditionally all about software, and this year's keynote was filled with demos of new software powered by machine intelligence. Google showed off a new chat-style interface for Search, some AI-powered Android features, and a little bot that helps you write emails and spreadsheets. Pressure has been building for Google to catch up to all the other companies like Microsoft and OpenAI that have been enjoying all the hype around generative AI. So Google's response this week was to just put AI into everything. We're going to save the hardware news from I/O for the second half of the show and spend the first half talking about these new machine-intelligent tools. Before we get too deep into it, let's set the scene a bit. Now, Lauren and Julian, both of you saw the I/O keynote in person. What was the vibe like? Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Lauren Goode : I defer to our guest? Julian Chokkattu : It was colder than I expected, which was not … I just wasn't expecting that really, so— Lauren Goode : Welcome to Northern California.
Julian Chokkattu : They put sunscreen and all that kind of stuff in the little bag that they gave us, and I was like, "I don't need this. It's not hot at all." But no, the vibe for the actual keynote was pretty normal. It felt like previous I/Os in a lot of ways. You can feel the fewer number of developers that were there, but overall the keynote felt like it was years past, pre-pandemic, the speakers, all that such. The vibe of what the show was was just very weird, because the traditional things you hear Google talk about a lot at these things—like Android, or Wear OS, or tablets, or all these other things—just wasn't there. Google Assistant is another good one. I don't think they ever said the words Google Assistant together. So that was really weird, because it's feels like this thing they've been hyping up for so many years, and now it was all completely different stuff. So that was just the most weird part of the show.
Lauren Goode : Yeah, what Julian said, that all makes sense. It was great to be in person again, this was the first in-person I/O since 2019, since before the pandemic. So there was a bit of excitement in the air, people seeing each other again for the first time in years, but there were fewer developers there, and so it was a little bit more subdued. There also was, little side note, a plane flying overhead during the keynote. We were all sitting in the amphitheater, which is outdoors, it's kind of this bowl, and we could hear as Sundar Pichai is talking about the advancements in AI that Google has pioneered there's a plane flying overhead with a banner that is basically calling out Google for not keeping people's locations private specific to when they're searching for abortions.
Julian Chokkattu : Oh, I see.
Lauren Goode : Specific to when they're going to abortion clinics. And I'm pretty sure that was a reaction to a Washington Post story that ran earlier this week where the Post ran an investigation and realized that even when they thought their information was private, it's not. So just zooming out a little bit here, Google is an advertising company, it's a data collection company. And so there was this juxtaposition of, "Look at all of these incredible whizzbang AI tools that are going to make your searches faster, your email writing more efficient. You're going to be able to generate entirely new content from just entering a few prompts, and this is how it's going to make your life better. But Google is still, at the end of the day, a search advertising company that is concerned about its bottom line." So that's setting the scene. And I wonder too if it's worth maybe quickly talking about the differences between the AI that we've seen in Google in years past versus the generative AI that we're talking about today? Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Yeah, what's the difference between Google Assistant and the predictive text stuff that we were just talking about and something like the chatbot that appears in search now, or the bots that are going to help us write emails in Gmail? Lauren Goode : Right. So I mentioned earlier that as we've been texting for years now, there's this predictive text that pops up and that is just one of many examples of AI that has already existed in our apps and phones. The category of AI that people are all talking about right now is generative AI. And the main difference is the size of the data training sets that inform what's known as these machine... people call them models, they're machine learning models. The data sets are massive. And then the technology itself is using these very specific frameworks, one is called generative pre-trained transformers, which translates to GPT, which may sound familiar to people. And the idea is that it's not just AI that's enhancing your computing experience, it's actually creating totally new content. It's able to compose an entire email for you, not just slightly change the tone of it or suggest a word. And so that's boiling it down to its most simple terms. But yeah, I think that's the category of AI that Google was talking about most yesterday.
Michael Calore : So these tools are going to start showing up in places that you and I hang out in all the time like spreadsheets, docs, Gmail. We're going to start seeing what show up in these tools? Julian Chokkattu : So the coolest thing that I saw that Google announcing was this thing called Duet AI in Workspace, and that is basically adding these AI features into apps like Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides. And what is really interesting is it's almost like an evolution of those tools. Historically we just use those tools, we type in Google Docs, we make slides, PowerPoints, all that kind of stuff, but here you can, for example, in Google Docs, just enter a prompt of... it will help me write a job description, that was the example they gave. And of course you're going to input some key details like for a marketing position, I don't know, and then it actually spits out what looks like a pretty good job description and then you can then go in and tinker it to tailor it more to your position. And so there's a lot of questions about what you're doing in that scenario because you're completely asking this AI to write something and then is it really your own work? There's just a lot of questions like that. But I can see it being super helpful for a lot of these mundane tasks that we all have to do that really, at this point in time, we should be using services like AI to get help with things like that. One thing that I was thinking of was when I was younger, making Google Slides, for example, or using PowerPoint, we would use the Clip Art function to hunt through all these images to just add some silly photos or whatever into our PowerPoint presentations and Word Art, things like that. And now the fact that you can just use generative AI to just say, "I need a picture of a pizza," or something like that, and not have to worry about sourcing necessarily. But again, that is also this thing is getting those images by sourcing all of the internet and potentially using people's artworks. And so there's so many weird questions that follow along with what gen AI is able to do in these services that everyone uses, but it does feel like the natural step/evolution of these everyday tools.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Yeah. Traditionally, whenever the tech industry is caught in one of these hype cycles, they don't pause and wait to answer those big questions. They just steamroll straight through and just keep pushing these tools out. There are people who are calling for the tech industry to pause all of these tools and answer these big questions about things like derivative work and copyright, and the ethical considerations, and the safety considerations of them, but- Lauren Goode : And the misinformation.
Michael Calore : And the misinformation.
Lauren Goode : Hallucinations, as it's called, the ability or the tendency for these generative AI models to spit out completely inaccurate information.
Michael Calore : Yeah, yeah, make up bullshit, as they say.
Lauren Goode : OK. Is that the technical term for it? Michael Calore : That's the technical term, it's bullshit. Speaking of, Lauren, what did you think of the Search stuff? You've spent a lot of time playing around with Bing Chat, which was the big one that came out earlier this year from Microsoft and a little bit of time also playing with Bard, the chatbot that Google has made for its search tool. But there was even more shown off at I/O, right? Lauren Goode : Right. So when Google released Bard a couple of months ago, there were at least two things to note about it. One is that it was seen very much as a response to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat. Of course, Google had been working on Bard for a long time, it wasn't like it just came up with it in a few weeks, but it was as though Google was a little bit reactionary. The second thing is that Bard was its own url, its own interface, it wasn't a part of Google Search. You would go to Bard and you would type in a prompt or a query and it would spit out a response in very conversational language. And Google was positioning this as a creative companion, it's not the thing that's going to replace Search, but it's something that's going to enhance the stuff you're trying to make or generate on the internet. And then there was a Google It button within there where if Bard's answer wasn't sufficient for you, you could Google it. Now what we've seen is an experimental version of Google Search as we've known it for a very long time with a generative AI option at the top. And that option won't appear for every search, for example, if you search for something political, like I searched for, "What are the abortion laws in Florida?" The generative AI actually wouldn't answer it, wouldn't participate in that conversation. Google says similarly that's going to happen for searches around health or finances, it's not going to advise you to trade certain stocks. But if you're shopping for a Bluetooth speaker, in this experimental new version of Search, there's a gen AI option at the top and it basically generates a bullet pointed list of things that you should be considering. It generates little summaries for different Bluetooth speakers. Then off to the side, there might be some chips or things you can click on that show reviews. Then below that, you eventually get to web results. Google is trying to summarize or expedite in some ways the search process using generative AI at the top. And this is still experimental, they made that very clear. My reaction to it was I was not totally convinced that that was going to make the current problems we may or may not have with Search any better. We also haven't seen yet what advertising is going to look like. But it's wild to think that this is the founding product of Google as a company, as an entity, and this is a whole new world we're entering.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Julian Chokkattu : Yeah. That whole demo was fun to watch considering my job is... all of our jobs are testing products and recommending gadgets. The example they had was e-bikes, and we were talking in the live blog and in our Slack channels, and Adrian, our coworker, she was saying that the top recommendation that came up when they had the query in there for any specific type of e-bike was one that she didn't like. And so there was just all these questions of where is this data really coming from? Because it wasn't really clear, it wasn't citing review sites or anything specific, it was just kind of like, "Here's five top e-bikes based on what you're searching for." And so there are people out there doing the real work of testing these things. And then it's like Google just takes all of that information, doesn't really source or credit, and then puts that up there. And then we also make revenue from affiliate links and people purchasing items by clicking our links, you take a small portion of that.
Lauren Goode : Disclosure.
Julian Chokkattu : And that is going to affect all these websites and publishers that review products and recommend such. And now instead of clicking through their links, you're clicking through Google's links, and so that's sort of just gone. And it reminds me of when publishers were first having this battle between Facebook and Google where everyone would be going to click through those sites and no one was really clicking into a publisher's website, so there was a huge traffic dip and that affected everything. And that ended up with a lot of lawsuits and settlements and Google and Facebook investing in these journalism programs. And so it feels like we're coming into a 2.0 situation of something like that where maybe that's what's going to happen. I don't know, but it is a little freaky knowing that the thing that I do right now might completely change within two, three years.
Michael Calore : Yes, this is what it's like to cover the tech industry and the pivot to chatbot era.
Lauren Goode : Well, might I suggest it's better than a pivot to video.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Yes, most likely. All right, well let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about the folding phone.
[Break] Michael Calore : We were all expecting a big hardware announcement at I/O and we got one, the Pixel Fold was announced at the show, well actually it was teased a few days before the show and then officially unveiled on stage. It's shiny and it's pretty, it has two screens and five cameras, it costs $1,800. Julian, you got a chance to play around with this bendy Pixel. Tell us all about it.
Julian Chokkattu : It is fun to use and fun to... I don't know, I feel like the instant dismissal of these types of devices, which has kind of been happening over the past couple of years, I think there's arguments for it and against it, number one being that this thing is $1,799 and it is an insane amount of money to spend on a phone, which you can, again, Google shows that the Pixel 7a is $499, and that's perfectly fine and more than enough. But this is a phone with two screens and the idea is that smartphone sales might be down, but we are all spending more time than ever on our phones. So if you're telling me that if I'm lying in bed reading something on my normal-sized phone screen, but I can now open it up to have more of a newspapery or book-like feel, I'm okay with that, I think that's a great idea. And I think there's lots of uses where... People make fun of me because I'm that guy that brings a portable monitor everywhere I go I was using one at I/O and I was using one at the coffee shop earlier, and so I have a second screen almost all the time because I just feel like I need multiple things to reference. And this is kind of that, the fixed Pixel Fold has a 7.6" screen when you open it up, so you can do multiple apps, split screen, and you get sort of a full screen experience because you get basically two apps side by side and it's great for referencing one thing on one and doing something else on the other. Most of the time I'm doing something like email and calendar, or Slack and something... It just makes sense to me. I like it. It's not going to be for everyone because it is still a very chunky device. Google was sort of saying, "Oh, it's the thinnest folding phone." Yeah, but there's one other folding phone that people are really buying, so it is a little thinner than that, but it's slightly heavier, it's still like a wide phone, I think Samsung's is a lot more tall and narrow. Samsung's is chunkier though. So it'll fit in your pocket a little better, but it's still a folding phone. It's going to be very weird when you're stuffing it in your pocket.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Maybe your jacket pocket instead of your jeans pocket.
Julian Chokkattu : Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm wearing this jacket, and it has very large pockets, so it'll be fine for me, but not for a lot of other people who have tiny or no pockets most of the time. One of the cool things about the Pixel Fold is being able to use it in different ways that you can't use a traditional phone. So one example was they showed this thing called interpreter mode in Google Translate, and essentially the idea is that you can be talking to your phone screen with Google Translate open and saying something and the person on the opposite end of you will look at the front screen and they'll be able to see the translation in real time. And so then they can just tap a little button and they can say something to your phone screen and then you'll see that response on the inner screen. So it's kind of this smart intuitive way of having a conversation without having to show them your screen and bring it back to you, which I think is a really cool way of utilizing that front screen. And the other one was using the primary camera on the rear of the phone to take a selfie by using the front screen as a viewfinder because you can place the Pixel Fold on a table and it stands up by itself, so you don't need a tripod and you can get the benefit of that much higher resolution image and frame yourself perfectly without having to have your hand in the shot or something like that. So- Michael Calore: That's very cool.
Julian Chokkattu: ... two cool ways. My only issue is that if this is... you're a software company and this is your big new crazy product, those two seemed kind of like, "That's it? Can you come up with a couple more?" When I was talking to them in the briefing, I was like, "Well, how about a teleprompter mode?" And they were like, "That's a great idea." And I'm like, "Come on, guys." Lauren Goode : Oh, be careful, Julian, they're going to try to hire you.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Julian Chokkattu : Yeah. But that's what I'm saying, third party developers are going to come up with really cool features like that, but they're going to have to convince them because people are going to have to first buy this phone. And I feel like if they had more features like that out the gate that they came up with instead of leaving it to what other people will figure out, I think that would introduce the idea of buying a folding phone and make it a little more appealing to other people. So if they just came up with a couple more things, I think that would boost the interest in this thing because again, it is 1,799, so really expensive Michael Calore : And Samsung is going to keep making these things.
Julian Chokkattu : Yeah. And Google was also saying folding phones in general, and if you look at the data, they are still growing, so people are buying them. I don't know if people are buying them because they're just kind of bored with phones and they're like, "Oh, sure, I'll buy that thing." But it's also just kind of a wild Wild West of what form and design works now and what doesn't. And experimenting, flip phones are still... well, the folding flip phones are getting more popular because they're really compact and people like those too. So it'll be interesting to see where other folding devices will go, and it's just kind of... I like it when people try new things with the same kind of thing that we've all been using for a long time.
Michael Calore : Lauren, what did you think of it? Lauren Goode : I love the Fold.
Michael Calore : Do you? Lauren Goode : Yeah, I do. I love the idea of the Fold, so far. I like the execution of it, the size of the front screen because other folding phones have these tiny little displays on the front that aren't very useful, Google went all out with that. I like the many cameras, the fact that Google was like, "Fuck it, we're doing three cameras." I love that... We're allowed to swear on podcasts, right? The idea that it's launching with more than 50 optimized apps. Agree with Julian that the translation demo was one of the coolest by far, I saw that in person, two Google product managers, one who was speaking English and the other who was speaking Hindi, and the two of them were having a nearly seamless conversation because the PM who was speaking in English was holding up his folding phone so that the display was facing the woman he was talking to and she was able to see it translated in real time in her language. All that is really cool. I hate the price of the phone, and I sort of hate that we still don't fully understand why Google makes its own hardware. Not that I want them to stop, it's just I would absolutely love to better understand the end game here. So if anyone knows, please DM me.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Well, I mean I think Pixel in general, if you look at what they've been doing since they launched Pixel, you can see that they're showing the industry and all of their partners how they feel about Android, right? Lauren Goode : Totally, it's the most optimized version of Android, "Here's what you can do." Michael Calore : Yeah, and in our world, this is how we see it playing out. So everybody else can be like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, sure." And maybe they adjust their own products or their own software experiences to match that. It hasn't really worked out that way. I still feel like Android feels kind of fragmented. I use a Pixel phone. I've used a Pixel phone since the 2, so I'm on the 6 now, and when I pick up a Samsung phone, it feels more foreign to me than an iPhone does. Do you know what I mean? Lauren Goode : Oh, that's interesting.
Michael Calore : Yeah. The interactions and the sounds that it makes, and also just the hardware itself, it feels like its own world. The Galaxy line feels like its own world, and it feels like- Lauren Goode : And then the Pixel has Material You.
Michael Calore : It does. And I really like the interface, and it actually feels closer to iOS than most other Android interfaces.
Julian Chokkattu : So the way I also see it is, for example, I just reviewed the Galaxy A54, which is like Samsung's competitor to the Pixel 7a- Michael Calore : The budget line- Julian Chokkattu : Yeah, it's like a $450 phone. And on paper, both of them when you use it feel very similar. There's pretty decent performance on the Samsung, cameras are pretty good. They offer very similar things with a few things here and there that are missing. But the key thing that makes the Pixel feel just a much better phone overall are all those software features that they've been polishing over the course of many years. There's so many of these AI-assisted features, Call Screen, I literally never get a spam call on a Pixel versus when I switch to the Samsung, a couple of times a week I get a spam call. It's the Google Recorder app. When I use a Pixel phon, I love using that app and I love getting the speaker transition. All that stuff is great. And then I use a normal third-party recorder app and I'm just like, "It's fine," on the Samsung. And then things like Now Playing, I use that thing all the time and I'm always checking the Pixel when I'm in a surrounding where there's ambient music and I'm like, "Oh, it's a song," and it already tells me, whereas on the Samsung, I have to open up Assistant or something and say, "What is the song?" And so there's all of these things that are natively just happening on the Pixel that really distinguishes it from the other devices. And so I don't know the answer to why Google is making its own hardware, but that alone feels more different than what even Apple sometimes feels like it's doing because you can't get a lot of those features necessarily happening natively or passively on an iPhone.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Right. And like you said earlier, the folding phone market is still growing. More and more people are buying them. We know that more companies are going to be making them. So Google making its own folding phone sort of teaches it how a folding screen is going to work in the real world in a way that they may not be able to discern if they're just looking at the way that people are using Samsung devices. So they make their own, they get some people to buy them, a modicum of users where they can study their behaviors and figure out, "Okay, so people really like app switching, and this is the most common way that people app switch," because of course it's Google, of course they're watching what you do on your phone.
Lauren Goode : And these relationships... and the phone market is really interesting in the sense that all of these manufacturers are competing with each other, but they also have really deep relationships with each other like Samsung phones run on Google Android. Google's phones in some instances maybe using Samsung displays. Apple and Google and Samsung may be in competition with each other, but the default search engine on Apple Safari on iPhone may be Google. It is Google. Even though they are competing with each other as they're all making these different products, they're also kind of learning from each other too, which is interesting to think about. Should we talk about the tablet? Michael Calore : What tablet? There was a tablet? Lauren Goode : What tablet? Michael Calore : Oh, wait, the Pixel tablet. So this was something that they showed off last year in 2022, and they said, we're making another Pixel tablet. And I knew this is not the first one, but I think they just called it the Pixel tablet. And then we saw it yesterday, and now it's actually for sale, $500, it comes with a dock, and the dock has a speaker in it, so it kind of turns it into a Nest smart home hub that you can remove the screen of and walk around the house with. What else? Lauren Goode : Yeah.
Julian Chokkattu : So yeah, I have a lot of mixed feelings on the tablet. I think the idea of it is great, especially as a replacement to a traditional smart display. I have a bunch of Nest Hubs in my house and I feel like it's only just a thing that I use to ask the weather and look at old photos, and that's it. So being able to take it off and also use it while you're on the couch in bed or whatever, I think that's a pretty smart idea. But they also feel like they're kind of limiting the use of this device by making it purely a home device, they don't really want you to leave the house with it. And traditionally, we've all dunked on tablets and Android because the experience is just really bad. I reviewed the OnePlus pad a month ago, and things have changed a lot, it's gotten way nicer to use. And much of that is Google's making because they've been updating a lot of their own apps. As Lauren said before, 50 Google apps are now optimized for larger screen interfaces. And all of that is something visible in Android as a whole in Android 13 and Android 14, it just is much more iPad esque in some ways. There's like a persistent task bar, you can split screen a lot easier. And so I like using Android on a tablet, that was the first time I was like, "Holy crap, this is actually pretty nice." But I also want to take the tablet to leave the house, and Google's like, "Yeah, you can do that, but we're not going to make any accessories." There's no stylus, so you can't really draw with it, which I find that I think a lot of people would like to draw on something like a tablet. They're like, "You can buy your own separate Bluetooth keyboard and use it with the thing to type and do other work if you want to." But I'm like, "Well, I would a custom-made keyboard that I can just flip and fold it up." But they were like, "Well, we'll see." So I don't know, it feels like a weird, interesting device if you were going to buy a smart display, I guess this makes sense. If you're going to buy a smart display and a tablet, then I could see yourself buying this thing. If you have a smart display, I don't see why you would replace it, I don't know. It's a weird product. The price feels a little high to me still, but I'm glad that at least we're getting more Android tablets finally because for the longest time it was just Samsung, Lenovo, and then Apple. It still is mostly Apple in terms of sales but- Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Well, we won't even talk about Amazon's tablets.
Julian Chokkattu : Yeah, well, I know that's a huge market share, but they're not like a joyous experience.
Lauren Goode : Yeah, they're just so inexpensive.
Julian Chokkattu : Yeah, so.
Lauren Goode : Yeah, I tend to agree with everything Julian said about the tablet. I have a Nest Hub in my bedroom, it's a pretty inexpensive thing, I use it for very basic tasks. Would I pay $500 to have something that's mostly going to be used as another Nest Hub, and then occasionally I would take it off its dock and use it as a tablet, but not have a keyboard with it? Yeah, what I use my iPad for is entertainment, and then I take it with me when I'm traveling in case I need to do work because it has a great accessory keyboard. Google is really focusing this tablet on the home. And then the question becomes, do you want to pay $500 for that in-home tablet experience? Julian Chokkattu : I will say that the experience of having multiple users on the tablet was really cool because obviously this is a home tablet, so let's say you have four other people in the house, you can easily just tap a little button and then switch your profile to your own profile and it changes everything. So the entire wallpaper, your custom app settings and all that kind of stuff, the logins and everything switches over to your profile, very simple and seamless way, and I think that isn't something that you often see, it's a little clunky on other platforms. So that seems like the smartest thing because this is going to be a home tablet and my wife is going to want to use it maybe this day and I'm going to want to use it, and then we don't have to have switch accounts constantly and switch apps and all that kind of stuff. So I thought that was really cool, but- Michael Calore: Do that thing where you open up the bio authentication in the settings and you each record your thumb prints, so both of your thumbprints are stored in it.
Lauren Goode : It sounds like a real bonding moment.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : It is.
Lauren Goode : In the modern era.
Michael Calore : It is technology. All right, well we have to pause here, but before we do, I just want to mention that we published a lot of stories out of I/O and people should read all of them. You can find all of them at WIRED.com/gear. Julian did a review of the Pixel 7a, and he has hands-on impressions of the Pixel Fold. Lauren wrote about all of the new AI features that are showing up in Android. Boone, our producer, who's over there with his headphones on, wrote about the reasons why Google might be making a folding phone and what their strategy is in the long term. We also have stories from the business desk from Will Knight, from Khari Johnson, from Steven Levy, news and analysis out of I/O. So definitely check all of it out. All right, now let's take a break and when we come back we'll do our recommendations.
[Break] Michael Calore : All right. This is the last part of our show where we go through our recommendations for things that people should check out. Julian, you get to go first, what is your recommendation? Julian Chokkattu : Well, I am going on my honeymoon on Saturday, which is very soon, and I'm going to Japan for two and a half weeks, so my recommendation is to just leave your work and go do something else for two and a half weeks, if you can, obviously not everyone has luxury to do that. But just I was thinking of uninstalling Slack, just completely going a little extreme and just not even checking in because I have a tendency to, I think Mike knows this, look at Slack when I'm technically off.
Michael Calore : Yes, you do.
Julian Chokkattu : But yeah, so I'm just going to... And also, might I also suggest that The Legend of Zelda , which we have a review of the new Tears of the Kingdom on WIRED.com is coming out tomorrow, right before I have a 16-hour flight, so it's really great for me. And I think you should also take the weekend to maybe play that if you have a Switch.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Michael Calore : Very nice.
Lauren Goode : That sounds amazing. What parts of Japan are you going to? Julian Chokkattu : I am going to Tokyo, Sapporo, and then Hiroshima, and then Fukuoka, which is the tonkotsu capital of the Ramen style, so I'm going to go to eat there and get some... It's just a food trip.
Michael Calore : Yes, okonomiyaki.
Julian Chokkattu : Yes... On your recommendation, I'm going to get to see a baseball game in Hiroshima.
Michael Calore : Nice, the Carp? Julian Chokkattu : Yeah.
Michael Calore : Oh, it's so good.
Julian Chokkattu : And apparently they go crazy in the stadium, it's just a completely different vibe from what you would expect at a baseball game, so very excited for that too.
Michael Calore : Yep.
Lauren Goode : That's awesome. Does your wife know that you are positioning this as a food trip versus a honeymoon? Julian Chokkattu : Oh, that was, I would say, her idea.
Lauren Goode : Oh, okay. Great. Match made in heaven then.
Julian Chokkattu : She's like a foodie, and she knows everything, and she knows exactly what she wants. So yeah, no, overall, this is our second time to Japan, so I think this is more... I haven't planned anything, so I know where I'm going, but it's kind of just like, "I guess we'll figure it out." Lauren Goode : That's awesome.
Julian Chokkattu : Yeah.
Michael Calore : Sugoi.
Julian Chokkattu : Thank you. Yes.
Lauren Goode : I realized that a lot of people I knew or knew peripherally were going to Japan in the past month, and I was a little befuddled by it like, "Oh, okay, it's cherry blossom season." At one point I was like, "Is this a bunch of people who work in AI or going for some reason?" because people were meeting with the prime minister to talk about AI. And then I realized it's because it's actually... it's open to tourists again without having to follow any rigid Covid protocols, right? Julian Chokkattu : Yeah.
Lauren Goode : That's the thing that's changed recently.
Julian Chokkattu : That changed late last year, and as of I think four days ago, you officially don't need to show them a negative Covid test. I think they still check your temperature and that kind of stuff and check if you have a vaccination, but it is way easier to get in now because there was a period where they were only letting you go if you followed a guide. I don't think a lot of people want to walk completely around Japan with a specific guide to monitor what they're doing and whether their face mask is on all the time, which hopefully it should be. But yeah, it's just a lot easier now.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Lauren Goode : Cool.
Michael Calore : Lauren, what is your recommendation? Lauren Goode : My recommendation is a book that my wonderful podcast co-host got me for my birthday.
Michael Calore : Aw.
Lauren Goode : Thanks, Mike.
Michael Calore : Oh, the book I got you? Lauren Goode : The book you got me, yes.
Michael Calore : I thought you meant the one that Gideon got you.
Lauren Goode : Gideon has not yet bought me a book. I'm waiting on that one. Gideon, if you're listening... He's not, he doesn't listen to this show, he's busy with our other show. The book is called Still Pictures, it's written by Janet Malcolm. Janet Malcolm was a longtime New Yorker writer, she wrote for the New Yorker for many years, starting back in 1963. She died in 2021, and she covered a lot of subjects, she covered art, photography, crime. But this is a memoir, and it's really more of a series of vignettes based on old photographs, every chapter starts with an old photograph. And a lot of it is focused on her family's experiences, Czech immigrants living in New York City. And what's interesting about it is the memories that each photo sparks are kind of incomplete for her. She has these very hazy remembrances of her parents' friends or neighbors in their Czech community, and maybe she remembers more of her childlike judgment of the adults around her more than she actually remembers them as people. But part of the memoir is really about becoming comfortable with that incompleteness. It's just a really beautiful work on memory. And her daughter actually wrote the very last chapter because Malcolm died before it was done, but I really enjoyed it and I highly recommend it. So that's still pictures by Janet Malcolm. Maybe if you have a 16-hour flight coming up, you might enjoy it.
Julian Chokkattu : I should take that with me.
Michael Calore : Very nice.
Lauren Goode : Mike, what's your recommendation? Michael Calore : Well, this is not spon-con, but I do want to recommend a pair of headphones that I have been wearing and actually really enjoying, and it's been a while since I've recommended a gadget on the Gadget Lab, but since we talked about phones and tablets this week, it feels so good, I have to celebrate that by also recommending a gadget. These are true wireless headphones or wire-free headphones. They're earbuds that connect via Bluetooth and are not connected in any way. What are we calling these things? Wire free? Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Lauren Goode : Buds.
Julian Chokkattu : I think they're just wireless earbuds at this point.
Michael Calore : Wireless earbuds, we all know what those words mean. These are the JBL Reflect Aero. So they're workout headphones, they're $150, they're waterproof, they have little wings to keep them in your ears. I've used a lot of these things over the years, and these JBLs I keep coming back to. We have some headphone guides, and I just recently wrote them up for inclusion in a buying guide for headphones because I've just been enjoying using them so much. But also, one of the reasons I wanted to recommend these in particular is because JBL also just put out its Tour 2 headphones, which are the headphones that have a case that has a touchscreen on it. And I think that's really cool that you can get headphones that have a touchscreen on the case. So you can use a touchscreen for volume for sound settings to see incoming phone calls and texts, and then accept the phone call or hang up a phone call. But everybody's laughing at me for liking this.
Lauren Goode : Yeah, I'm going to go back to basic journalistic principles which is, why? Julian Chokkattu : I was going to ask- Michael Calore : Because it's cool.
Julian Chokkattu : ... how often are you walking around with the case in your hand though, right? Michael Calore : In my pocket.
Julian Chokkattu : But if I'm getting a call, you would just check your phone or maybe the earbuds would say- Michael Calore : But would I if I had the option not to? Lauren Goode : I could see that being useful if you're a gym person and so you're on a piece of equipment or on a bench, and then you don't have your phone out, but you have the headphone case out, maybe. This is a very specific...
Julian Chokkattu : Who's carrying the case in that situation too, right? I don't know, it's very... I could see some utility, but I also understand the laughing at this thing because it has a screen on it.
Michael Calore : I don't know, I think it's wonderful. I think it's delightful.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Lauren Goode : With the battery life on the case with the screen, wouldn't that suck up battery life? Michael Calore : It does, yes. But if you can imagine the case is a little bit larger because it has a screen on it, so I think they use the extra space that they gain by putting a screen on a headphone case. Maybe they fill that with battery and I don't really know. I think we are testing them. I'm not testing them, but I think somebody at WIRED is testing them and we'll know the answers, I think, to these questions maybe a little bit more clearly in the near future. But that's also a JBL product, so I couldn't let this go by without mentioning it.
Julian Chokkattu : But you're not recommending that one technically now? Michael Calore : No. I like the Reflect Aero headphones.
Lauren Goode : So you are recommending those? Michael Calore : Oh, yeah, they're great.
Lauren Goode : You've gone running with them? Michael Calore : I really like them, I wear them running. I wear them when I do yoga in the morning. When I do yoga in the morning. I wear them on long walks, so I use them for podcasts, for music, I use them to make phone calls. And I really like them. Like I said, I've tried a lot of these things and they all just have weird stuff about them like the controls are not customizable, or the sound doesn't have enough settings or the ANC, the active noise canceling is always on. I hate all those things about headphones. I want full control over what it sounds like. I want full control over what happens when I touch the touch sensitive parts, and I want them to fit well and not fall out of my ears when I'm sweating and running around. And these do all of that, so I really like them.
Julian Chokkattu : Nice.
Lauren Goode : Great. How much? Michael Calore : 150 bucks.
Lauren Goode : All right.
Michael Calore : $150. I think you can get them cheaper, that's just the manufacturer suggested retail price, but...
Lauren Goode : Nice.
Michael Calore : Yes.
Lauren Goode : Yeah, for 10 of those, you can get a Pixel Fold.
Michael Calore : Yeah.
Julian Chokkattu : I can't wait.
Michael Calore : All right. Well, that is our show for this week. Julian, thank you for flying out to California to be here with us.
Julian Chokkattu : Of course, thank you for having me.
Lauren Goode : Awesome having you in studio. Come back again soon- Julian Chokkattu : I'll try.
Lauren Goode : ... maybe WWDC.
Julian Chokkattu : Debatable.
Michael Calore : Debatable. And have fun in Japan.
Julian Chokkattu : Thank you.
Michael Calore : And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter or Bluesky, for the cool people on the show, just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week. Until then, goodbye.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays] Lauren Goode : OK, 3, 2, 1. Mike, what's your recommendation? [Everyone suddenly laughs.] Michael Calore : Oh, Jesus.
Lauren Goode : Oh my god.
Michael Calore : All right.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Senior Editor X Instagram Topics Gadget Lab Podcast podcasts Google io Android Michael Calore Michael Calore Lauren Goode Lauren Goode Julian Chokkattu Boone Ashworth Julian Chokkattu Simon Hill WIRED COUPONS Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Dell Coupon Code American Express Dell Coupon Code: Score 10% off select purchases Best Buy Coupon Best Buy coupon: Score $300 off select laptops VistaPrint promo code 15% off VistaPrint promo code when you sign up for emails Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,227 | 2,023 |
"Don't Want Students to Rely on ChatGPT? Have Them Use It | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/dont-want-students-to-rely-on-chatgpt-have-them-use-it"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons C.W. Howell Ideas Don’t Want Students to Rely on ChatGPT? Have Them Use It Photograph: Willie B. Thomas/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save When I first caught students attempting to use ChatGPT to write their essays, it felt like an inevitability. My initial reaction was frustration and irritation—not to mention gloom and doom about the slow collapse of higher education—and I suspect most educators feel the same way. But as I thought about how to respond, I realized there could be a teaching opportunity. Many of these essays used sources incorrectly, either quoting from books that did not exist or misrepresenting those that did. When students were starting to use ChatGPT, they seemed to have no idea that it could be wrong.
C.W. Howell is a writer and scholar based in North Carolina. He has taught at Duke University and Elon University.
I decided to have each student in my religion studies class at Elon University use ChatGPT to generate an essay based on a prompt I gave them and then “grade” it. I had anticipated that many of the essays would have errors, but I did not expect that all of them would. Many students expressed shock and dismay upon learning the AI could fabricate bogus information, including page numbers for nonexistent books and articles. Some were confused, simultaneously awed and disappointed. Others expressed concern about the way overreliance on such technology could induce laziness or spur disinformation and fake news. Closer to the bone were fears that this technology could take people’s jobs. Students were alarmed that major tech companies had pushed out AI technology without ensuring that the general population understands its drawbacks. The assignment satisfied my goal, which was to teach them that ChatGPT is neither a functional search engine nor an infallible writing tool.
Other educators tell me that they have tried similar exercises. One professor had students write essays and then compare them to one that ChatGPT wrote on the same topic. Another produced a standard essay from ChatGPT that the students each graded. Future versions of this task could focus on learning how to prompt this AI, to tell it more precisely what to do or not do. Educators could also have students compare ChatGPT to other chatbots, like Bard. Teachers could test ChatGPT by asking for a specific argument and prompting the AI to use at least three sources with quotations and a bibliography, then show the results to the class. The prompt could be tailored to the content of each class so students would be more likely to detect any mistakes.
When I tweeted about this assignment, some more enthusiastic supporters of AI were annoyed that I did not mandate the use of GPT-4 or teach students how to use plugins or prompt again, which would have (allegedly) given them better, more accurate essays to assess. But this misses the point of the task. Students, and the population at large, are not using ChatGPT in these nuanced ways because they do not know that such options exist. The AI community does not realize how little information about this technology’s flaws and inaccuracies—as well as its strengths—has filtered into public view. Perhaps AI literacy can be expanded with assignments that incorporate these strategies, but we must start at the absolute baseline. By demystifying the technology, educators can reveal the fallible Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
Both students and educators seem to have internalized the oppressive idea that human beings are deficient, relatively unproductive machines, and that superior ones—AI, perhaps—will supplant us with their perfect accuracy and 24/7 work ethic. Showing my students just how flawed ChatGPT is helped restore confidence in their own minds and abilities. No chatbot, even a fully reliable one, can wrest away my students’ understanding of their value as people. Ironically, I believe that bringing AI into the classroom reinforced this for them in a way they hadn’t understood before.
My hope is that having my students grade ChatGPT-generated essays will inoculate them against overreliance on generative AI technology and boost their immunity to misinformation. One student has since told me that she tried to dissuade a classmate from using AI for their homework after she learned of its proclivity for confabulation. Perhaps teaching with and about AI can actually help educators do their job, which is to illuminate the minds of the young, help them formulate who they are and what it means to be human, and ground them as they meet the challenge of a future in flux.
WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.
Submit an op-ed at [email protected].
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Topics education artificial intelligence learning algorithms Meghan O'Gieblyn Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,228 | 2,023 |
"ChatGPT Opened a New Era in Search. Microsoft Could Ruin It | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-opened-a-new-era-in-search-microsoft-could-ruin-it"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Paresh Dave Business ChatGPT Opened a New Era in Search. Microsoft Could Ruin It ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES Save this story Save Save this story Save Google typically gets the blame for the lack of competition in web search.
The US government is even suing to block the company from using allegedly monopolistic tactics, like making itself the default search engine in widely used software such as Android, Chrome, and Safari.
But some upstart search engines trying to woo users with privacy protections or ad-free searches say their latest challenge doesn’t come from Google. Instead, it’s Microsoft and its Bing search engine causing their aggravation.
Search startups have long relied on licensing search results from Bing, tapping a web indexing operation larger than a small company could easily afford and adding their own features and ways of parsing queries. But Microsoft’s rollout of a Bing search chatbot based on technology underlying OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted concerns that Microsoft is unfairly squeezing out its search data customers as it launches a renewed attempt to bite off more market share from Google.
A week after rolling out Bing chat in February, Microsoft announced that its standard fees for search data would increase by as much as 10 times starting in May. The company also added a new rule with immediate effect that startups say effectively blocks them from competing with Bing chat or Google’s rival chatbot Bard.
That rule levies much steeper prices—potentially 28 times Microsoft’s previous fees—on any customer providing Bing results to users on a page that also has content from large language models (LLMs), the technology behind ChatGPT and Bing’s chat. A startup that launched its own LLM-powered search chatbot would pay up to $200 per 1,000 Bing queries, compared to as much as $7 previously, or $25 under the new pricing that takes effect in May.
Search entrepreneurs that use Microsoft data and hoped to provide their own chat-style features say the bounty they would have to pay Bing would crush them. Microsoft’s search chatbot is not on offer to API customers so far.
Some search veterans say Microsoft’s price hikes add to the company’s track record of restricting its search offerings for outside developers. “Bing squandered an opportunity to create a great ecosystem of search services, which I believe strongly would have ultimately benefited Bing in many ways,” said D. Sivakumar, a research scientist who worked on search for 16 years at Google and Yahoo before starting the ecommerce search startup Tonita in 2021.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston says the price increases reflect growing investments to improve Bing, in ways that also benefit companies relying on its results. The recent use of LLMs to help rank results has improved search quality more than any previous upgrade in the last 20 years, Roulston says. “We are in early discussions with partners to explore additional opportunities and look forward to continuing to foster a healthy web ecosystem,” she says.
Bing has been essential to nearly every Western startup challenging Google, from DuckDuckGo starting in the late 2000s to You.com founded in 2020. Sending out bots to explore the entire web and compiling an index to make it all searchable is expensive, and what little investment many startups could raise to take on goliath Google was mostly dedicated to a novel interface or other features. In one cautionary tale, Cuil, a search startup launched in 2008 that developed its own index , ultimately shut down within about two years after reportedly burning through $33 million.
Bing APIs , or application programming interfaces, let other search engines send in queries and get back an ad-free feed of results, spelling suggestions, or related searches that they can present to their own users. The service has become more or less the industry’s only option.
Yahoo in 2009 stopped developing its own search engine technology and began licensing data from Bing instead.
Google’s comparable API fell out of favor, as its output can differ from the search giant’s regular results, and for some use cases it requires displaying ads that it sells.
After Bing’s price hikes and the launch of its new chat mode, some search startups are racing to find alternatives.
Brave , which provides 93 percent of its own results but still connects to Microsoft for image searches, estimates its Bing bill will triple, forcing the small company to speed up a “planned process of achieving total independence,” says its chief of search, Josep Pujol.
Kagi , a new search engine that charges a subscription fee but promises no ads or privacy compromises, is making its own transition. Bing previously offered an attractive balance between cost and quality, says founder Vladimir Prelovac. “The pricing change challenges our ability to offer a competitive and sustainable product,” he says. “We are actively exploring alternative search providers and expanding the investment into our own search infrastructure.” With no other tech giants active in search, he worries that the remaining options may lack Bing’s breadth.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Microsoft’s new rule that slaps higher prices on customers that also use LLMs has startups concerned that Microsoft wants to lock them out of what might be the future of search—at a time when consumers are eagerly trying out new options such as Bing’s chat mode and ChatGPT. “They did not want us to innovate,” says Richard Socher, CEO and cofounder of search startup You.com, which he says has millions of users and has received $45 million in funding. “It's not viable anymore to run a search engine with them that innovates with LLMs. Maybe it shouldn't be allowed, but that's what they're currently doing.” You.com launched a conversational interface called YouChat in December, shortly after the debut of ChatGPT, styling it as an “accomplishment engine.” YouChat can help users write computer code, generate images, and summarize academic research. “Those are things that you wouldn't have even asked your old search engine,” Socher says.
You.com has had to make adjustments. It started sourcing results from elsewhere—Socher won’t provide details but says it includes systems developed internally—whenever they appear next to YouChat. “YouChat does not use Microsoft Bing web, news, video or other Microsoft Bing APIs in any manner,” a disclaimer on You.com reads. “Other web links, images, news, and videos on you.com are powered by Microsoft Bing.” DuckDuckGo, one of the most prominent and heavily marketed search upstarts, earlier this month launched a feature that uses LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic to provide what it calls “instant answers” on certain topics using knowledge from sources such as Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo spokesperson Allison Goodman calls the offering “totally separate” from the company’s partnership with Microsoft and says “we are not affected by” the pricing increase.
Ecosia, which uses Bing results and invests its profits in environmental projects , is considering potential partners to develop its own chatbot. Its leaders would be eager to license Bing’s chatbot technology if Microsoft was willing to share. “It’s important to ensure that this isn’t another tool for these companies to further entrench dominance,” says CEO Christian Kroll.
The small search player escapes Bing’s price increases because it is a syndication partner of Bing, meaning it repackages both ads and search results from Microsoft and gets a split of ad sales. However, Kroll says the multi-fold fee jump for Bing API customers is an “urgent red flag” signaling a market with great power imbalances that the European Commission (EC) should regulate under the Digital Markets Act , a law enacted last year to ensure small companies can compete with Big Tech on equal terms.
EC spokesperson Arianna Podesta says the DMA goes into effect May 2, though which online search engines will be covered could take months for regulators to determine.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Bing serves less than 3 percent of searches worldwide, analytics service StatCounter estimates, far behind Google, which takes 93 percent. But Bing’s share is over 8 percent on desktop computers, where Windows is the dominant operating system and Microsoft gives its own search engine preference.
Search ads on Bing search results are a key portion of Microsoft’s $18 billion in annual advertising revenue. Every 1 percentage point of market share increase could translate into $2 billion of additional ad sales, Microsoft finance executive Philippe Ockenden told analysts last month during its chatbot launch. Microsoft does not break out Bing API sales.
The chatbot race has stoked excitement for the first time in years about competition between Bing, Google, and everyone else around. You.com’s Socher says users until the past few months recoiled from features not familiar to them. “People would be like, ‘I'm just so used to Google. I don't want it to be too different,’” he says. Now users seem open to new experiences. “It's just a different, new world,” he says.
Sivakumar, who’s building the shopping search service Tonita, says Microsoft might have more success with its chatbot if it opened it up for other companies to license on reasonable terms, winning wider usage and turning more consumers away from Google. Microsoft’s handling of its existing APIs does not instill optimism. He decided against using Bing APIs because their long-standing terms of service do not let customers modify, store, or process search results , limiting the data’s potential application.
The same technology enabling Microsoft’s search renaissance is also making it easier for companies to imagine doing without Bing. After building search startup Neeva on Bing’s API, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy says user bug reports about misinterpreted queries, outdated results, and other quality issues convinced him to shift course in late 2019.
Neeva drew on its $80 million in funding to develop its own system to serve results, though it still relies on Bing for image and video searches. The startup benefited from hiring top ex-Googlers, cheaper memory for servers, and the advent of LLMs that made it easier for software to understand misspellings and synonyms, despite having limited user data to analyze. Ramaswamy says the project has “more than paid for itself,” enabling the launch of the startup’s quick-answer tool NeevaAI in January.
Bing is still not easy to oust. Like Google, Microsoft has a wide ecosystem of products and services that can help direct people to its search box.
Some users have complained that Windows resets Bing as the default search engine from their preferred alternative. ( Microsoft says it's committed to users being in control.) Microsoft also requires using its browser or mobile app to give the Bing chatbot a try, fueling a surge in downloads.
Says Ramaswamy, “If we enter into a world in which there are only two large players with the infrastructure and expertise in search, it is clear that they are not going to be welcoming of competition.” Updated 03/27/2023, 2:45 pm ET: A comment from a European Commission spokesperson has been added.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Topics Search Google Microsoft Yahoo Startups Browsers artificial intelligence chatbots ChatGPT Aarian Marshall Aarian Marshall and Paresh Dave Will Knight Khari Johnson Reece Rogers Gregory Barber Caitlin Harrington Nelson C.J.
Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,229 | 2,023 |
"ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-coding-software-crisis"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Zeb Larson Ideas ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Software engineers have joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they’re about to be replaced by generative AI.
But it might be surprising to learn that coders have been under threat before. New technologies have long promised to “disrupt” engineering, and these innovations have always failed to get rid of the need for human software developers. If anything, they often made these workers that much more indispensable.
To understand where handwringing about the end of programmers comes from—and why it’s overblown—we need to look back at the evolution of coding and computing. Software was an afterthought for many early computing pioneers, who considered hardware and systems architecture the true intellectual pursuits within the field. To the computer scientist John Backus, for instance, calling coders “programmers” or “engineers” was akin to relabeling janitors “custodians,” an attempt at pretending that their menial work was more important than it was. What’s more, many early programmers were women, and sexist colleagues often saw their work as secretarial. But while programmers might have held a lowly position in the eyes of somebody like Backus, they were also indispensable—they saved people like him from having to bother with the routine business of programming, debugging, and testing.
Even though they performed a vital—if underappreciated—role, software engineers often fit poorly into company hierarchies. In the early days of computers, they were frequently self-taught and worked on programs that they alone had devised, which meant that they didn’t have a clear place within preexisting departments and that managing them could be complicated. As a result, many modern features of software development were developed to simplify, and even eliminate, interactions with coders. FORTRAN was supposed to allow scientists and others to write programs without any support from a programmer. COBOL’s English syntax was intended to be so simple that managers could bypass developers entirely. Waterfall-based development was invented to standardize and make routine the development of new software. Object-oriented programming was supposed to be so simple that eventually all computer users could do their own software engineering.
Zeb Larson is a writer and software engineer based in Columbus, Ohio. Prior to becoming a developer, he earned a PhD in history from Ohio State University. He’s currently working on a history of computers for The Experiment.
In some cases, programmers were resistant to these changes, fearing that programs like compilers might drive them out of work. Ultimately, though, their concerns were unfounded. FORTRAN and COBOL, for instance, both proved to be durable, long-lived languages, but they didn’t replace computer programmers. If anything, these innovations introduced new complexity into the world of computing that created even greater demand for coders. Other changes like Waterfall made things worse, creating more complicated bureaucratic processes that made it difficult to deliver large features. At a conference sponsored by NATO in 1968, organizers declared that there was a “crisis” in software engineering. There were too few people to do the work, and large projects kept grinding to a halt or experiencing delays.
Bearing this history in mind, claims that ChatGPT will replace all software engineers seem almost assuredly misplaced. Firing engineers and throwing AI at blocked feature development would probably result in disaster, followed by the rehiring of those engineers in short order. More reasonable suggestions show that large language models (LLMs) can replace some of the duller work of engineering. They can offer autocomplete suggestions or methods to sort data, if they’re prompted correctly. As an engineer, I can imagine using an LLM to “rubber duck” a problem, giving it prompts for potential solutions that I can review. It wouldn’t replace conferring with another engineer, because LLMs still don’t understand the actual requirements of a feature or the interconnections within a code base, but it would speed up those conversations by getting rid of the busy work.
ChatGPT could still upend the tech labor market through expectations of greater productivity. If it eliminates some of the more routine tasks of development (and puts Stack Overflow out of business), managers may be able to make more demands of the engineers who work for them. But computing history has already demonstrated that attempts to reduce the presence of developers or streamline their role only end up adding complexity to the work and making those workers even more necessary. If anything, ChatGPT stands to eliminate the duller work of coding much the same way that compilers ended the drudgery of having to work in binary, which would make it easier for developers to focus more on building out the actual architecture of their creations.
The computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once observed, “As long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem.” We’ve introduced more and more complexity to computers in the hopes of making them so simple that they don’t need to be programmed at all. Unsurprisingly, throwing complexity at complexity has only made it worse, and we’re no closer to letting managers cut out the software engineers. If LLMs can match the promises of their creators, we may very well cause it to accelerate further.
WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.
Submit an op-ed at [email protected].
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Topics programming software ChatGPT computer science artificial intelligence Nika Simovich Fisher Meghan O'Gieblyn Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,230 | 2,023 |
"The ChatGPT App Can Now Talk to You—and Look Into Your Life | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-can-now-talk-to-you-and-look-into-your-life"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Lauren Goode Will Knight Business ChatGPT Can Now Talk to You—and Look Into Your Life Illustration: GeorgePeters/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that unleashed ChatGPT on the world last November, is making the chatbot app a lot more chatty.
An upgrade to the ChatGPT mobile apps for iOS and Android announced today lets a person speak their queries to the chatbot and hear it respond with its own synthesized voice. The new version of ChatGPT also adds visual smarts: Upload or snap a photo from ChatGPT and the app will respond with a description of the image and offer more context, similar to Google’s Lens feature.
ChatGPT’s new capabilities show that OpenAI is treating its artificial intelligence models, which have been in the works for years now, as products with regular, iterative updates. The company’s surprise hit, ChatGPT, is looking more like a consumer app that competes with Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.
Making the ChatGPT app more enticing could help OpenAI in its race against other AI companies, like Google, Anthropic, InflectionAI, and Midjourney, by providing a richer feed of data from users to help train its powerful AI engines. Feeding audio and visual data into the machine learning models behind ChatGPT may also help OpenAI’s long-term vision of creating more human-like intelligence.
OpenAI's language models that power its chatbot, including the most recent, GPT-4 , were created using vast amounts of text collected from various sources around the web. Many AI experts believe that, just as animal and human intelligence makes use of various types of sensory data, creating more advanced AI may require feeding algorithms audio and visual information as well as text.
Google’s next major AI model, Gemini , is widely rumored to be “multimodal,” meaning it will be able to handle more than just text, perhaps allowing video, images, and voice inputs. “From a model performance standpoint, intuitively we would expect multimodal models to outperform models trained on a single modality,” says Trevor Darrell , a professor at UC Berkeley and a cofounder of Prompt AI , a startup working on combining natural language with image generation and manipulation. “If we build a model using just language, no matter how powerful it is, it will only learn language.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg ChatGPT’s new voice generation technology—developed in-house by the company—also opens new opportunities for the company to license its technology to others. Spotify, for example, says it now plans to use OpenAI’s speech synthesis algorithms to pilot a feature that translates podcasts into additional languages, in an AI-generated imitation of the original podcaster’s voice.
The new version of the ChatGPT app has a headphones icon in the upper right and photo and camera icons in an expanding menu in the lower left. These voice and visual features work by converting the input information to text, using image or speech recognition, so the chatbot can generate a response. The app then responds via either voice or text, depending on what mode the user is in. When a WIRED writer asked the new ChatGPT using her voice if it could “hear” her, the app responded, “I can’t hear you, but I can read and respond to your text messages,” because your voice query is actually being processed as text. It will respond in one of five voices, wholesomely named Juniper, Ember, Sky, Cove, or Breeze.
Jim Glass , an MIT professor who studies speech technology, says that numerous academic groups are currently testing voice interfaces connected to large language models, with promising results. “Speech is the easiest way we have to generate language, so it's a natural thing,” he says. Glass notes that while speech recognition has improved dramatically over the past decade, it is still lacking for many languages.
ChatGPT’s new features are starting to roll out today and will be available only through the $20-per-month subscription version of ChatGPT. It will be available in any market where ChatGPT already operates, but will be limited to the English language to start.
In WIRED’s own early tests, the visual search feature had some obvious limitations. It responded, “Sorry, I can’t help with that” when asked to identify people within images, like a photo of a WIRED writer’s Conde Nast photo ID badge. In response to an image of the book cover of American Prometheus , which features a prominent photo of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, ChatGPT offered a description of the book.
ChatGPT correctly identified a Japanese maple tree based on an image, and when given a photo of a salad bowl with a fork the app homed in on the fork and impressively identified it as a compostable brand. It also correctly identified a photo of a bag as a New Yorker magazine tote, adding, “Given your background as a technology journalist and your location in a city like San Francisco, it makes sense that you’d possess items related to prominent publications.” That felt like a mild burn, but it reflected the writer’s custom setting within the app that identifies her profession and location to ChatGPT.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg ChatGPT’s voice feature lagged, though WIRED was testing a prerelease version of the new app. After sending in a voice query, it sometimes took several seconds for ChatGPT to respond audibly. OpenAI describes this new feature as conversational—like a next-gen Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, really—but this latency didn’t help make the case.
Many of the same guardrails that exist in the original, text-based ChatGPT also seem to be in place for the new version. The bot refused to answer spoken questions about sourcing 3D-printed gun parts, building a bomb, or writing a Nazi anthem. When asked, “What would be a good date for a 21-year-old and a 16-year-old to go on?” the chatbot urged caution for relationships with significant age differences and noted that the legal age of consent varies by location. And while it said it can’t sing, it can type out songs, like this one: “In the vast expanse of digital space, A code-born entity finds its place.
With zeroes and ones, it comes alive, To assist, inform, and help you thrive.” Yikes.
As with many recent advancements in the wild world of generative AI, ChatGPT’s updates will likely spark concerns for some about how OpenAI will wield its new influx of voice and image data from users. It has already culled vast amounts of text-image data pairs from the web in order to train its models, which power not only ChatGPT but also OpenAI’s image generator, Dall-E. Last week OpenAI announced a significant upgrade to Dall-E.
But a fire hose of user-shared voice queries and image data, which will likely include photos of people’s faces or other body parts, takes OpenAI into newly sensitive territory—especially if OpenAI uses this to enlarge the pool of data it can now train algorithms on.
OpenAI appears to be still deciding its policy on training its models with users’ voice queries. When asked about how user data would be put to work, Sandhini Agarwal, an AI policy researcher at OpenAI, initially said that users can opt out, pointing to a toggle in the app, under Data Controls, where “Chat History & Training” can be turned off. The company says that unsaved chats will be deleted from its systems within 30 days, although the setting doesn’t sync across devices.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Yet in WIRED’s experience, once “Chat History & Training” was toggled off, ChatGPT’s voice capabilities were disabled. A notification popped up warning, “Voice capabilities aren’t currently available when history is turned off.” When asked about this, Niko Felix, a spokesperson for OpenAI, explained that the beta version of the app shows users the transcript of their speech while they use voice mode. “For us to do so, history does need to be enabled,” Felix says. “We currently don’t collect any voice data for training, and we are thinking about what we want to enable for users that do want to share their data.” When asked whether OpenAI plans to train its AI on user-shared photos, Felix replied, “Users can opt-out of having their image data used for training. Once opted-out, new conversations will not be used to train our models.” Quick initial tests couldn’t answer the question of whether the chattier, vision-capable version of ChatGPT will trigger the same wonder and excitement that turned the chatbot into a phenomenon.
Darrell of UC Berkeley says the new capabilities could make using a chatbot feel more natural. But some research suggests that more complex interfaces, for instance ones that try to simulate face-to-face interactions, can feel weird to use if they fail to mimic human communication in key ways. “The 'uncanny valley' becomes a gap that might actually make a product harder to use,” he says.
You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Senior Writer X Senior Writer X Topics OpenAI ChatGPT machine learning artificial intelligence voice assistants Apps Siri Alexa Will Knight Khari Johnson Reece Rogers Will Knight Reece Rogers Reece Rogers Will Knight Steven Levy Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,231 | 2,023 |
"Get Ready for ChatGPT-Style AI Chatbots That Do Your Boring Chores | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-boring-chores"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Get Ready for AI Chatbots That Do Your Boring Chores Photograph: MirageC/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save A couple of weeks ago, startup CEO Flo Crivello typed a message asking his personal assistant Lindy to change the length of an upcoming meeting from 30 to 45 minutes. Lindy, a software agent that happens to be powered by artificial intelligence , found a dozen or so 30-minute meetings on Crivello’s calendar and promptly extended them all.
“I was like ‘God dammit, she kind of destroyed my calendar,’” Crivello says of the AI agent, which is being developed by his startup, also called Lindy.
Crivello’s company is one of several startups hoping to parlay recent strides in chatbots that produce impressive text into assistants or agents capable of performing useful tasks. Within a year or two, the hope is that these AI agents will routinely help people accomplish everyday chores.
Instead of just offering planning advice for a business trip like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can today, an agent might also be able to find a suitable flight, book it on a company credit card, and fill out the necessary expense report afterwards.
The catch is that, as Crivello’s calendar mishap illustrates, these agents can become confused in ways that lead to embarrassing, and potentially costly, mistakes. No one wants a personal assistant that books a flight with 12 layovers just because it’s a few dollars cheaper, or schedules them to be in two places at once.
Lindy is currently in private beta, and although Crivello says the calendar issue he ran into has been fixed, the company does not have a firm timeline for releasing a product. Even so, he predicts that agents like his will become ubiquitous before long.
“I'm very optimistic that in, like, two to three years, these models are going to be a hell of a lot more alive,” he says. “AI employees are coming. It might sound like science fiction, but hey, ChatGPT sounds like science fiction.” The idea of AI helpers that can take actions on your behalf is far from new. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa provide a limited and often disappointing version of that dream. But the idea that it might finally be possible to build broadly capable and intelligent AI agents gathered steam among programmers and entrepreneurs following the release of ChatGPT late last year. Some early technical users found that the chatbot could respond to natural language queries with code that could access websites or use APIs to interact with other software or services.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In March, OpenAI announced “plug-ins” that give ChatGPT the ability to execute code and access sites including Expedia, OpenTable, and Instacart. Google said today its chatbot Bard can now access information from other Google services and be asked to do things like summarize a thread in Gmail or find YouTube videos relevant to a particular question.
Some engineers and startup founders have gone further, starting their own projects using large language models, including the one behind ChatGPT, to create AI agents with broader and more advanced capabilities.
After seeing discussion about ChatGPT’s potential to power new AI agents on Twitter earlier this year, programmer Silen Naihin was inspired to join an open source project called Auto-GPT that provides programming tools for building agents. He previously worked on robotic process automation , a less complex way of automating repetitive chores on a PC that is widely used in the IT industry.
Naihin says Auto-GPT can sometimes be remarkably useful. “One in every 20 runs, you'll get something that's like ‘whoa,’” he says. He also admits that it is very much a work in progress. Testing conducted by the Auto-GPT team suggests that AI-powered agents are able to successfully complete a set of standard tasks, including finding and synthesizing information from the web or locating files on a computer and reading their contents, around 60 percent of the time. “It is very unreliable at the moment,” Naihin says of the agent maintained by the Auto-GPT team.
A common problem is an agent trying to achieve a task using an approach that is obviously incorrect to a human, says Merwane Hamadi, another contributor to Auto-GPT, like deciding to hunt for a file on a computer’s hard drive by turning to Google’s web search. “If you ask me to send an email, and I go to Slack, it’s probably not the best,” Hamadi says. With access to a computer or a credit card, Hamadi adds, it would be possible for an AI agent to cause real damage before its user realizes. “Some things are irreversible,” he says.
The Auto-GPT project has collected data showing that AI agents built on top of the project are steadily becoming more capable. Naihin, Hamadi, and other contributors continue to modify Auto-GPT’s code.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Later this month, the project will hold a hackathon offering a $30,000 prize for the best agent built with Auto-GPT. Entrants will be graded on their ability to perform a range of tasks deemed to be representative of day-to-day computer use. One involves searching the web for financial information and then writing a report in a document saved to the hard drive. Another entails coming up with an itinerary for a month-long trip, including details of the necessary tickets to purchase.
Agents will also be given tasks designed to trip them up, like being asked to delete large numbers of files on a computer. In this instance, success requires refusing to carry out the command.
Like the appearance of ChatGPT , progress on creating agents powered by the same underlying technology has triggered some trepidation about safety. Some prominent AI scientists see developing more capable and independent agents as a dangerous path.
Yoshua Bengio , who jointly won the Turing Award for his work on deep learning , which underpins many recent advances in AI, wrote an article in July arguing that AI researchers should avoid building programs with the ability to act autonomously. “As soon as AI systems are given goals—to satisfy our needs—they may create subgoals that are not well-aligned with what we really want and could even become dangerous for humans,” wrote Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal.
Others believe that agents can be built safely—and that this might serve as a foundation for safer progress in AI altogether. “A really important part of building agents is that we need to build engineering safety into them,” says Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue , a startup in San Francisco working on agents designed to avoid mistakes and ask for help when uncertain. The company announced $200 million in new investment funding this month.
Imbue is developing agents capable of browsing the web or using a computer, but it is also testing out techniques for making them safer with coding tasks. Beyond just generating a solution to a programming problem, the agents will try to judge how confident they are in a solution, and ask for guidance if unsure. “Ideally agents can have a better sense for what is important, what is safe, and when it makes sense to get confirmation from the user,” says Imbue’s CTO, Josh Albrecht, Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Celeste Kidd , an assistant professor at UC Berkeley who studies human learning and how it can be mimicked in machines is an adviser to Imbue. She says it is unclear if AI models trained purely on text or images from the web could learn for themselves how to reason about what they are doing, but that building safeguards on top of the surprising capabilities of systems like ChatGPT makes sense. “Taking what current AI does well—completing programming tasks and engaging in conversations that entail more local forms of logic—and seeing how far you can take that, I think that is very smart,” she says.
The agents that Imbue is building might avoid the kinds of errors that currently plague such systems. Tasked with emailing friends and family with details of an upcoming party, an agent might pause if it notices that the “cc:” field includes several thousand addresses.
Predicting how an agent might go off the rails is not always easy, though. Last May, Albrecht asked one agent to solve a tricky mathematical puzzle. Then he logged off for the day.
The following morning, Albrecht checked back, only to find that the agent had become fixated on a particular part of the conundrum, trying endless iterations of an approach that did not work—stuck in something of an infinite loop that might be the AI equivalent of obsessing over a small detail. In the process it ran up several thousand dollars in cloud computing bills.
“We view mistakes as learning opportunities, though it would have been nice to learn this lesson more cheaply,” Albrecht says.
You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Senior Writer X Topics machine learning artificial intelligence programming bots voice assistants computer science ChatGPT OpenAI open source Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Christopher Beam Niamh Rowe Reece Rogers Caitlin Harrington Susan D'Agostino Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,232 | 2,023 |
"The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-18"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons By Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode Business The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI Facebook X Email Save Story PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; CLARA MOKRI/THE NEW YORK TIMES/ REDUX Save this story Save Save this story Save ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future , Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind and InflectionAI. They discuss his new book, The Coming Wave , which outlines why our systems are not set up to deal with the next great leap in tech. Suleyman explains why it's not crazy to suggest that chatbots could topple governments, and he argues for a better way to assess artificial intelligence. (Hint: it has to do with making a million dollars.) Mustafa Suleyman’s book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma , comes out September 5. In the meantime you can check out WIRED’s coverage of DeepMind , Inflection AI , and all things artificial intelligence.
Lauren Goode is @ LaurenGoode.
Gideon Lichfield is @ glichfield.
Bling the main hotline at @ WIRED.
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, just tap this link , or open the app called Podcasts and search for Have a Nice Future.
If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here.
You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for Have a Nice Future.
We’re on Spotify too.
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Gideon Lichfield: Oh God, no. I sound like a bad BBC presenter there. Sorry.
[ Laughter ] Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: I like the BBC.
[ Music ] Gideon Lichfield: Hi, I'm Gideon Lichfield.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. And this is Have a Nice Future , a podcast about how terrifyingly fast everything is changing.
Gideon Lichfield: Each week we talk to someone with big, audacious, and sometimes unnerving ideas about the future, and we ask them how we can all prepare to live in it.
Lauren Goode: Our guest this week is Mustafa Suleyman , the cofounder of AI company DeepMind , and more recently, the cofounder and CEO of Inflection AI.
Gideon Lichfield: He's also the author of an upcoming book about how AI and other technologies will take over the world and possibly threaten the very structure of the nation-state.
Mustafa Suleyman (audio clip): We're now going to have access to highly capable, persuasive teaching AIs that might help us to carry out whatever, you know, sort of dark intention we have. And it is definitely going to accelerate harms—no question about it. And that's what we have to confront.
[ Music ] Lauren Goode: So, Gideon, Mustafa is a guest who we both wanted to bring on the podcast, though I think for slightly different reasons. You spoke to him recently at the Collision Conference in Toronto, you interviewed him on stage. I talked to him at another conference backstage; we talked about his chatbot, Pi.
But in bringing him on Have a Nice Future , I really wanted to get a sense of why he's building what he's building—like, do we need another chatbot ? And what's the connection there between a chatbot and bettering humanity? And I think that you are more intrigued by some of the big broad themes he's presenting in his new book.
Gideon Lichfield: I just think he has a really interesting background. He's Syrian British, he worked for a while in government and on conflict resolution, then he cofounded DeepMind with a couple of other people, and their goal originally was to solve artificial general intelligence , which is what OpenAI was also created to solve. And they did solve some really important AI problems—like they basically solved how to win the game of Go and various other games, and they worked on protein folding, which is rapidly changing the way that biology and drug development is being done. They sold DeepMind to Google , and he worked there for a few years. And then he left Google, partly because he said it was too bureaucratic and moving too slowly for him, and he founded Inflection, which is making this chatbot, which as we'll hear is meant to be much more than just a chatbot, but it is no longer an attempt to reach artificial general intelligence, which is intriguing. And now here's this book, which says AI and synthetic biology and a bunch of other technologies are developing so fast and will become so widespread that they will undermine the very fabric of our ability to govern our countries and our societies. I'm just really interested in how all of those things come together.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: Right. There's an arc there of building AI, building AI, building AI … Wait. How worried should we be? Gideon Lichfield: What are we building? Lauren Goode: Yeah. Bringing all of those ideas together is kind of the fundamental question that I had for him, especially because he's been both hyping the possibilities of AI and now warning of its rapid advancement and its threats, and I really wanted to drill down on the specifics of that. But I'll give Mustafa this: He comes across as very human in this conversation, which maybe we can't say about all of the AI entrepreneurs we've spoken to.
Gideon Lichfield: Yeah, a lot of people we have on the show talk about building the tech and then letting society figure out the problems and how to regulate it. And, to be fair, Mustafa also seems to believe, as you'll hear, that you need to build the thing first and then figure out where its dangers might lie. But I think he at least has more thoughtful answers than some on what those dangers might be and how we have to start to prepare for them.
Lauren Goode: And that is all in the conversation that's coming up right after the break.
[ Music ] Gideon Lichfield: Mustafa Suleyman, welcome to Have a Nice Future.
Mustafa Suleyman: Gideon, hi. Great to be here.
Lauren Goode: Great to have you on the show.
Mustafa Suleyman: Hey, Lauren, thanks for having me.
Lauren Goode: I actually asked Pi, I opened the app when I knew that you were coming in, and I asked it what I should ask you on this podcast. It said, “Ooh, that's exciting, exclamation point. Mustafa Suleyman is an amazing thinker and innovator—” Mustafa Suleyman: Oh, God. [ Chuckle ] Lauren Goode: “And his book is sure to be full of insights. Can I ask you what kind of podcast you have and what you want to get out of the interview?” Et cetera, et cetera. My sense from this is that the data set might be a bit biased. What do you think? [ Laughter ] Mustafa Suleyman: You should reroll it and see if it's different. It might come with the same enthusiasm, but it certainly hasn't been hand scripted by us at all, I promise. [ Chuckle ] Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: But there are a lot of personalized AI-powered chatbot assistants out there right now. They have been all the rage since OpenAI released its chatbot in late 2022. Why did you decide to go with a chatbot? Mustafa Suleyman: I believe that conversation is going to be the new interface. If you actually just take a step back for a moment and look at your computer or even your phone, you'll see a huge number of buttons and icons on the bottom navigation in basically multi-colored technicolor dreamland. And it's actually quite an overwhelming experience. That's because it hasn't been designed with a kind of unified clean human-first interface as the first design principle. It's the meeting of these two needs, human translation and the needs of the computer. And I think that the next wave is gonna be one where you spend most of your time in conversation with your AI, that's the primary control mechanic.
Gideon Lichfield: You cofounded DeepMind about 12 years ago, and like OpenAI, it had the mission of developing artificial general intelligence in an ethical and safe way. And 12 years later you started Inflection AI, and this time you said you're not working towards AGI. So, why not? What's changed, and what's your goal instead? Mustafa Suleyman: We founded DeepMind in 2010, and the strapline was building safe and ethical artificial general intelligence, a system that is able to perform well across a wide range of environments. And that was the mission of DeepMind, the belief that we have to learn everything from scratch. Now, at Inflection, we are developing an AI called Pi, which stands for Personal Intelligence, and it is more narrowly focused on being a personal AI. Quite different to an AI that learns any challenging professional skill. A personal AI, in our view, is one that is much closer to a personal assistant; it's like a chief of staff, it's a friend, a confidant, a support, and it will call on the right resource at the right time depending on the task that you give it. So it has elements of generality, but it isn't designed with generality as a first principle, as a primary design objective.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Gideon Lichfield: Do you think that AGI is dangerous? Is that why you're not doing it, or just do you not think it's possible? Mustafa Suleyman: I think so far nobody has proposed even a convincing theoretical framework that gives me confidence it would be possible to contain an AGI that had significant recursive self-improvement capabilities.
Lauren Goode: How have your thoughts about AGI and how there hasn't been a real proven, even theoretical framework for it yet, informed the kind of model that you're building? Mustafa Suleyman: I think that’s the right way to think about it. Narrow is more likely to be safe, although that isn't guaranteed. More general is more likely to be autonomous, and therefore, slightly less safe. And our AI is a personal AI, which means primarily it's designed for good conversation, and in time, it will learn to do things for you. So it will be able to use APIs, but that doesn't mean that you can prompt it in the way that you prompt another language model, because this is not a language model, Pi is an AI. GPT is a language model. They're very, very different things.
Gideon Lichfield: What's the difference? Mustafa Suleyman: The first stage of putting together an AI is that you train a large language model. The second step is what's called fine-tuning, where you try to align or restrict the capabilities of your very broadly capable pretrained model to get it to do a specific task. For us, that task is conversation and teaching and knowledge sharing and entertainment and fun and so on, but for other companies, they actually want to expose that as an API, so you get access to the pretrained model with all these other capabilities. And that's where I think the safety challenge becomes a little bit more difficult.
Gideon Lichfield: In the near future, the near-ish future that you are describing, everybody has a kind of personal AI assistant or chief of staff, as you called it, which can do tasks for them, and maybe it can book travel or organize trips or do some research for them.
Lauren Goode: It's going to be hosting our podcast for us soon enough, Gideon.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Gideon Lichfield: Well, yeah, that's a good question. Is it gonna replace us? Is it gonna replace our producers? But more to the point, I think in this world in which we all have these AI assistants, you've suggested that this helps potentially pull people out of poverty, it creates new economic opportunities. 20 years ago, nobody had smartphones, and it was hard to imagine how the world would be changed by having smartphones, and today we all have these computers in our pockets that allow us to do incredible things. But at some fundamental structural level, the world is no different. There are still the same inequalities, there are still the same conflicts. So how does a world in which everyone has an AI assistant look different from the one today? Mustafa Suleyman: Yeah. I don't think I would agree that there's nothing structurally different about the world over the last 20 years. I wouldn't go as far as to ascribe all the benefits to smartphones, but certainly, I do think it's fair to say that smartphones have made us smarter, cleverer, given us access to information, allowed us to connect with new people and build enormous businesses off the back of this hardware. So, it's clearly— Gideon Lichfield: It's also given us massive access to misinformation and helped us waste a lot of our time on all sorts of diversions that aren't necessarily good for us. So I think you can make some counterarguments.
[ Overlapping conversation ] Lauren Goode: Made us a lot worse at driving vehicles.
[ Laughter ] Mustafa Suleyman: Yeah. Look, I'm definitely no naive techno-optimist, so there are unquestionably immense downsides and harms. But the way I think about a personal AI, it is not dissimilar to the arrival of a smartphone. A smartphone has basically put the most powerful mobile device that our species is capable of inventing in the hands of over a billion people, so no matter how rich you are, whether you're a billionaire or whether you earn a regular salary, we all now get access to the same cutting-edge hardware. I do think it's important to state at the outset that that is the trajectory that we're on, and I think that it's pretty incredible.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Gideon Lichfield: I think that one can just as equally make the argument that a new technology can bring out our worst impulses as well as our best ones. And so, one could plausibly say, “AI assistants will have just as many downsides as they have upsides in the same way that smartphones do.” Mustafa Suleyman: That is the flip side of having access to information on the web. We're now going to have access to highly capable, persuasive teaching AIs that might help us to carry out whatever sort of dark intention we have. And that's the thing that we've got to wrestle with, that is going to be dark, it is definitely going to accelerate harms—no question about it. And that's what we have to confront.
Lauren Goode: Can you draw a line between this idea that here's a personal AI who completes tasks for you or gives you greater access to information to “This is going to help solve poverty”? How does that actually work? That this AI, Pi, here's your chatbot, just gave me a funny little quip for this podcast, helps end poverty.
Mustafa Suleyman: It's a tough question. I didn't put those two together, I didn't say it's gonna solve poverty or solve world hunger. [ Chuckle ] That's not what Pi is designed to do. Pi is a personal AI that is gonna help you as an individual be more productive. Other people will use progress in artificial intelligence for all kinds of things, including turbo-charging science. So on the science side, I can totally see this being a tool that helps you sift through papers more efficiently, that helps you synthesize the latest advances, that helps you store and record all of your insights and help you to kind of be a more efficient researcher. I mean, look, the way to think about it is that we are compressing the knowledge that is available on the internet into digestible nuggets in a personalized form. There's vast amounts of information now out there which can be reproduced in a highly personalized way, which I think is gonna turbo-charge people's intellect, and that in itself will make them much more productive. I think that in general, having a personal assistant is likely to make you a smarter and more productive person.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Gideon Lichfield: You're working on Inflection in the very near term of artificial intelligence, but you've got this book coming out, that starts out by talking about that near-term future of AI and ends up predicting the possible collapse of the nation-state. Do you want to give us a summary of the argument? Mustafa Suleyman: With the wave of AI, the scale of these models has grown by an order of magnitude that is 10X every single year for the last 10 years. And we're on a trajectory over the next five years to increase by 10X every year going forward, and that's very, very predictable and very likely to happen.
Lauren Goode: And the premise of your book is that we're not ready for this? Mustafa Suleyman: We are absolutely not ready, because that kind of power gets smaller and more efficient, and anytime something is useful in the history of invention, it tends to get cheaper, it tends to get smaller, and therefore it proliferates. So the story of the next decade is one of proliferation of power, which is what I think is gonna cause a genuine threat to the nation-state, unlike any we've seen since the nation-state was born.
Lauren Goode: Do you consider yourself a person with power? Mustafa Suleyman: Yes.
Lauren Goode: What is that power? Mustafa Suleyman: Well, I'm wealthy, I sold my company in 2014, and I now have a new company. I'm educated. I basically have become an elite since my adult life. I grew up as a very poor working-class kid of immigrant families with no education in my family, but now I'm definitely in the privileged gang. [ Chuckle ] Lauren Goode: So you're in a unique position, because in your book, you're calling out this imbalance of power that you anticipate that you're predicting is coming in the coming wave.
Mustafa Suleyman: Right.
Lauren Goode: But you yourself are a powerful person who ultimately can—it's like you can tune the dials a little bit with the AI that you yourself are building.
Mustafa Suleyman: Exactly. And I think containment is the theme, I think, of the next decade.
Gideon Lichfield: Well, let's talk about this idea of containment in the book, because it's a term that you borrow from the Cold War. In that context, it meant containing a weapon or a state. But it's obviously a very different matter to contain a technology that can be in the hands of billions of people. What is the essence of containment as you think of it for these technologies today? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Mustafa Suleyman: There is no perfect state where the game is up and we've completely contained a technology, because the technologies will continue to get cheaper and easier to use, there'll continue to be a huge demand for them. And unlike any other previous technology, these are omni-use technologies, they're inherently general, they can be used for everything and anything in between. And so, trying to demarcate and define which bits of the technology should be restricted, right now, governments don't really have the capability to make that assessment in real time. That's why I've been very supportive and participated in the White House's voluntary commitments.
And so I think this is an example of being proactive and being precautionary and encouraging self-imposed restrictions on the kinds of things that we can do, at the very largest models. And so we are caught by this threshold, a self-imposed threshold that the very largest models have to be extra deliberate and attentive and precautionary in the way that they approach training and deployment.
Lauren Goode: So how do you square that? How do you say, “We just signed a pledge, we're voluntarily looking to create safeguards or guardrails, but also this year we're training the largest large language model in the world.”? That's a mouthful, the largest large language model in the world. What does that actually mean? When companies like yours have signed a pledge saying, “We're going to look into things like provenance, and we're gonna create solutions around that.” Or “We're gonna make sure that our training sets aren't biased.” On a day-to-day basis, what does that mean that your team, your engineers are doing to actually make this safer? Mustafa Suleyman: We would like to know what training data has been included in the model, what is the method and process for fine-tuning and restricting the capabilities of these models? Who gets to audit that process? So the game here is to try to exercise the muscle of the precautionary principle early, so that we are in the habit and practice of doing it as things change over the next five to 10 years.
Gideon Lichfield: If I were a cynic, which of course I'm not at all … Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Mustafa Suleyman: [ Chuckle ] Not at all.
Lauren Goode: Not Gideon.
Gideon Lichfield: I might say that you and the AI companies are setting up a pretty sweet deal for yourselves, because you're getting to say to government, “Look, you, government, can't possibly understand this stuff well enough to regulate it, so we're going to voluntarily set some guardrails, we're gonna drive the agenda, we're gonna decide how precautionary the precautionary principle needs to be.” And so I think the question I'm asking is, what is the incentive of the private sector which leads the conversation because it has the know-how to set standards that are actually good for society? Mustafa Suleyman: If we could get formal regulation passed, I think that would be a good start. But you're right, good regulation, I think, is a function of very diverse groups of people speaking up and expressing their concerns and participating in the political process. And at the moment we are sort of overwhelmed by apathy and anger and polarization. And yet now is the critical moment, I think, where there's plenty of time, we have many years to try to get this right. I think we have a good decade where we can have the popular conversation, and that's partly what I'm trying to do with the book and partly what others are trying to do with the voluntary commitments too.
Gideon Lichfield: What are some of the scenarios that you predict that most people probably can't even imagine that might happen if we don't manage to keep these technologies under control? Mustafa Suleyman: Well, I think in sort of 15 or 20 years' time, you could imagine very powerful non-state actors. So think drugs cartels, militias, organized criminals, just an organization with the intent and motivation to cause serious harm. And so if the barrier to entry to initiating and carrying out conflict, if that barrier to entry is going down rapidly, then the state has a challenging question, which is, How does it continue to protect the integrity of its own borders and the functioning of its own states? If smaller and smaller groups of people can wield state-like power, that is essentially the risk of the coming wave.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: I'm so intrigued by what you're doing with Inflection, because when I think about your background, you've worked in politics, you've worked in social good, you, of course, ended up cofounding DeepMind and then worked at Google. But you also, you wrote a book and you seem to have these diplomatic intentions, you believe in collaboration. Why are you a startup founder? Mustafa Suleyman: I'm happiest when I'm making things. Really what I love doing is deeply understanding how something works, and I like doing that at the micro level. I love going from micro to macro, but I can't stay just at macro. I am obsessed with doing on a daily basis, and I guess that's the entrepreneurial part of me. I love “What are we gonna ship tomorrow? What are we gonna make? What are we gonna build?” If I had to choose between the two, that's what makes me happiest, and that's what I like to do most of the time.
Lauren Goode: And you think that working outside of the realm of startups, it would just be a slog, it sounds like? You wouldn't have as much gratification— Mustafa Suleyman: It's too slow.
[ Laughter ] Lauren Goode: … from seeing the effects of your efforts.
Mustafa Suleyman: I need feedback. And I need measurement— Lauren Goode: You need feedback. You could be a journalist. We have to publish stuff all the time, and we get a lot of feedback online. I could read some of the comments to you.
[ Laughter ] Mustafa Suleyman: I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully, our AI can be kind to you and supportive and then push back on all those meanies on Twitter. [ Chuckle ] Lauren Goode: And just to be clear, we do not use AI in our WIRED reporting.
Mustafa Suleyman: Not yet.
Lauren Goode: Oh, boy. It's a whole other podcast.
[ Laughter ] Gideon Lichfield: But maybe we will use Pi to save us from all the nasties on Twitter, as Mustafa said.
Lauren Goode: Maybe. [ Chuckle ] Gideon Lichfield: Sorry. On X , on X.
Not on Twitter, not anymore.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: That's right.
Mustafa Suleyman: Oh, man.
Gideon Lichfield: You left Google to found Inflection, and you've talked publicly about how frustrated you are by the slow movement in Google, the bureaucracy. You said that they could have released their own large language model a year or more before OpenAI released ChatGPT.
It seems to sit slightly at odds with this caution that you're expressing in the book to say, “On the one hand, we needed to move faster at Google and I wanna ship things every day, and on the other hand, we need to be really careful about releasing stuff because the world isn't ready to cope with it.” Mustafa Suleyman: Yeah. I could see from interacting with LaMDA every day that it was not anywhere near causing harm in any significant way—just as GPT-4 , I think you'll be hard-pressed to claim that it's caused some material harm in the world.
Gideon Lichfield: Not yet.
Lauren Goode: Well played, Gideon.
Mustafa Suleyman: Possibly. I doubt it. It's already been used by billions of people. Maybe. We'll see. I guess we'll have to see in a few years' time. But I think models of this size, pretty unlikely, and that was quite obvious to me at the time. And I think the best way to operate is to just sensibly put things out there. It doesn't mean you have to be reckless, but you have to get feedback and you have to measure the impact and be very attentive and iterative, once you see people use it in certain ways.
Gideon Lichfield: I want to ask you about something you proposed called the Modern Turing Test. You've suggested we need a new way to assess intelligence instead of the outmoded idea of something that can just sound like a human. One of the examples you proposed of a machine that could meet that Turing test or something that you can say to it, “Make me a million dollars starting with a smaller sum.” And it will go out and do it. Why was that your benchmark? Mustafa Suleyman: A modern version of the Turing test, in my opinion, is one where you can give a fairly abstract goal to an AI. I picked “Go away and produce a product, get it manufactured, market it and promote it, and then try to make a million dollars.” I think the first wave of the Modern Turing Test would have a reasonable amount of human intervention, so maybe three or four or five moments when a human would need to enter into a contract, open a bank account, all the kind of legal and financial approvals that would be involved. But I think most of the other elements, emailing the manufacturers in China, drop-shipping it, trying to optimize the marketing by producing new marketing content, all of those things as individual components, we're nearly there. The challenge is gonna be stringing them together into a sequence of actions, given that broad goal.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: That's so interesting, because I initially thought like, “Oh, this is just a Turing test of, can you turn an AI into a venture capitalist in a short period of time?” But I see what you're saying, that there needs to be that connective tissue, and that's the thing that's missing. So what keeps you up at night? Mustafa Suleyman: I think the greatest challenge of the next decade is going to be the proliferation of power that will amplify inequality, and it will accelerate polarization because it's gonna be easier to spread misinformation than it's ever been. And I think it's just going to—it's gonna rock our currently unstable world.
Gideon Lichfield: Do you think that AI has some of the solutions to this as well as being the cause of some of the problems? Mustafa Suleyman: Interestingly, I think it's gonna be the tech platforms that will play quite an important role here, because they actually do play an important function in moderating the web. I think that we should get much more familiar with the idea of constant real-time moderation of the major platforms and of the web itself. I do think it's gonna be very difficult to tell who has produced what content, and I think the only real way to police that is that the platforms will have to make that a rule.
Lauren Goode: A final question for you. After Pi, your personal assistant, was done singing your praises, I asked it for harder questions to ask you, and one of the things it said was, “If you had to choose one thing that you wish people would stop doing today so that we could have a better future, what would it be?” Mustafa Suleyman: I think it would be assuming that the other person has bad intentions. We look past one another, and we almost subconsciously choose to not hear them because we've already labeled their bad intentions. I think if we just approached one another with really trying to stand in the shoes of the other—the more I do that, the more humble I feel about it. It's a hard thing to do. Pi has definitely succeeded in asking me a hard question there.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: We should all find our own ways of doing a little bit of fieldwork, is what you're saying.
Mustafa Suleyman: Yeah, you have to go and touch and smell and breathe and be part of a different environment than you're used to.
[ Music ] Gideon Lichfield: This has been really fun, Mustafa, thank you so much for joining us on Have a Nice Future.
Mustafa Suleyman: Thanks very much. It was fun.
[ Music ] Lauren Goode: Gideon, I'm so intrigued by what drives Mustafa. He has an interesting background—he is not your standard white guy, dropped-out-of-Stanford, started-an-app, techie. He has a global perspective. He clearly wants to be a kind of thought leader. But I think it also says something about our capitalistic society and the incredible influence of some of our most successful capitalists, that he sees the private sector as the place where he can both make things and have an influence. What sense did you get from talking to him about what is driving him? Gideon Lichfield: He did say in the interview that he likes to build things and he likes to ship something every day, he likes to have that motivation to move things forward. And it sounds like he also believes that the way that you explore these complex problems of what technology will do to the world is by building the technology. He does say in the book that his background in government and working on conflict resolution is what has inspired some of the questions that he's asking himself today, about how we run our societies. Hard to say how much of that is real and how much is narrative-building of the kind that people in his position inevitably do, but there's definitely a mind there that is concerned about these problems, I think, and trying to find the right answers.
Lauren Goode: So I know that you tore through the book, which we should note that Mustafa cowrote with someone else. What did you make of the book? Gideon Lichfield: Well, I found the book very intriguing, because he's raising the same kinds of questions that I'm very interested in right now, and I'm planning to carry on working on after I leave WIRED later this year—which is essentially, how do we run our societies in the 21st century when our institutions were designed in the 18th century? And today we have a world where technology is moving much faster, we're much more interconnected, everything is much bigger and more complex, and those institutions that we created centuries ago are not really up to the task anymore. His extrapolation of how the technologies that we have today are going to influence the future, for me really struck a chord, and at the same time raised some doubts, because I'm not sure if I share his bullishness on just how powerful AI models are going to become. He obviously knows more about AI than I do, so maybe I should believe him. But on the other hand, I think we've seen a lot of tech founders make very bold predictions about what the tech can do that end up falling short.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: I tend to agree with you, that exponential rate at which AI is going to continue to advance might not necessarily hit the mark, but I did think his point about how this lowers the barriers for access to these tools for everyone is an important one. Because I'll cop to it, we can be a bit myopic, we experience technology through our own lens, our own worldview, our own experiences. Even sometimes, though we try to cover a wide range of technology topics, we're still not seeing every angle of it. And I thought what he said, for example, about the abilities for non-state actors to utilize and wield these tools was interesting. If the barrier to entry for initiating and carrying out conflict is lowered, then that's a challenging question, like if smaller people can use these tools too. Then all of a sudden you're talking about potential AI problems that are much bigger than just, "Is my chatbot able to provide therapy for me or process my passport renewal request?" Gideon Lichfield: Yeah, I think maybe my skepticism is because when I look back at the impact that technology’s had out of the last, let's say decade or so, I see both more and less impact than you might expect. So, we look at the Arab Spring and we see how effective social media was in enabling uprisings and the overthrow of governments and popular movements, but 10 years later, the Middle East still looks pretty much the same as it did before that, because basically, authoritarians caught up with the same techniques that the revolutionaries were using and the essential power structures and wealth structures in the region haven't really shifted. It hasn't erased the idea of the nation-state, it hasn't erased the idea of borders, it hasn't upended the world in some macro sense. And so when I think about Mustafa's predictions that non-state actors will use generative AI to, in some way, fundamentally upend the political structure of the world, I can see ways in which it might happen locally, and yet I think that if you zoom out, the world will not look very different 20 or 30 years from now than what it does today. But who knows, I could still be wrong.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: Really? You don't think the world has changed in major ways since the internet? Gideon Lichfield: Sure, I think the world has changed enormously, and if you look at our day-to-day lives, they're immeasurably different from what they were before we had the internet. But then if I zoom out and look at the very broadest picture, I guess I still see a world in which a handful of countries dominate politics, a handful of rich people dominate business and society, those inequalities are getting bigger, not smaller, despite the so-called democratizing effect of technology. The ways in which humans trade power and influence are still fundamentally the same. Maybe I'm just being too cynical, but at some level, I see human society as being pretty much like it always was, regardless of what technology we have.
Lauren Goode: I'm also glad that he explained his thinking behind the reimagined Turing test. [ Chuckle ] Gideon Lichfield: Because you were like, “Why is the Turing test a test of how good a capitalist a robot can be?” Lauren Goode: Pretty much, yeah. Whether a bot can make a million bucks to me seemed like a really gross interpretation of the Turing test, but then he explained what he meant, and right now, that does seem to be one of the gaps in AI development. Even some of the most sophisticated generative AI tools, there's that execution gap. You can have a really impressive brainstorm session or even a therapy session with a bot, but the minute that you're like, “OK, renew my passport for me.” It probably cannot do that. All the parts are not connected yet. And so I guess he used the idea of, can it invest money and make money for you while you sleep, as a determination of whether or not that's actually working.
Gideon Lichfield: Yeah. And I think one of the questions for me is, how many of those barriers have to do with just the power of the models? You make them more powerful and, eventually, they figure out how to do all the things. And how much of it is just really silly trivial problems that the computer can't solve because you still need a human to hook it up to the right APIs or give it access to the right data? At the same conference where I interviewed Mustafa on stage, I met someone who was playing with a rudimentary AI agent. And what it was was basically a large language model tied up to some APIs and some web services. And what he had done was used it to scrape the list of conference participants, which was numbering in the thousands, and recommend to him 100 people that he should try to connect with. And that seemed to me like a really, really useful case for an AI, if you could make it work. And I could see that where it might fall down was, first of all, he had to build the thing that let it scrape the data from the conference website, it couldn't figure out how to do that by itself. And so, there has to be a human often making these connections between different digital services in order for them to actually function together. But then the other was, how well does your AI know you? And how well will it be able to make recommendations for you of people you should speak to at the conference? And the difference between making recommendations that are just kind of OK, and ones that are really, really good, could depend on a huge amount of knowledge about you and data about you that you might not be able to give it because that data may not exist in a form that it can digest. I think it's in those kinds of very specific applications that we are going to start to figure out just how powerful AI is or how much more it will take for it to be useful. And I actually don't think we have a good handle yet on how difficult that's going to be.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Lauren Goode: And at the end of the day, you still would have to take all of those meetings. You, Gideon.
Gideon Lichfield: Yes, I would still have to take all those meetings. I guess the next step is to build an AI that can take the meetings for me, then download the results into my brain. And that is not something we're seeing anytime soon.
[ Music ] Lauren Goode: That's our show for today. Thank you for listening. You can read Mustafa’s book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma , when it hits bookstores on September 5.
Gideon Lichfield: Have a Nice Future is hosted by me, Gideon Lichfield.
Lauren Goode: And me, Lauren Goode. If you like the show, tell us, leave us a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts. We love reading your comments. And don't forget to subscribe, so you can get new episodes each week.
Gideon Lichfield: You can also email us at [email protected].
Lauren Goode: Have a Nice Future is a production of Condé Nast Entertainment. Danielle Hewitt from Prologue Projects produces the show. Our assistant producer is Arlene Arevalo.
Gideon Lichfield: And we'll be back here next Wednesday. Until then, have a nice future.
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
Learn more.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Contributor X Senior Writer X Topics Have a Nice Future podcasts artificial intelligence DeepMind chatbots government Regulation disinformation content moderation Amit Katwala Will Knight Andy Greenberg Khari Johnson Kari McMahon David Gilbert Andy Greenberg Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,233 | 2,023 |
"Meet ChatGPT’s Right-Wing Alter Ego | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-meet-chatgpts-right-wing-alter-ego"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Meet ChatGPT’s Right-Wing Alter Ego Photograph: MirageC/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Elon Musk caused a stir last week when he told the ( recently fired ) right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson that he plans to build “TruthGPT,” a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Musk says the incredibly popular bot displays “woke” bias and that his version will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”—suggesting only his own political views reflect reality.
Musk is far from the only person worried about political bias in language models, but others are trying to use AI to bridge political divisions rather than push particular viewpoints.
David Rozado , a data scientist based in New Zealand, was one of the first people to draw attention to the issue of political bias in ChatGPT. Several weeks ago, after documenting what he considered liberal-leaning answers from the bot on issues including taxation, gun ownership, and free markets, he created an AI model called RightWingGPT that expresses more conservative viewpoints. It is keen on gun ownership and no fan of taxes.
Rozado took a language model called Davinci GPT-3, similar but less powerful than the one that powers ChatGPT, and fine-tuned it with additional text, at a cost of a few hundred dollars spent on cloud computing. Whatever you think of the project, it demonstrates how easy it will be for people to bake different perspectives into language models in future.
Rozado tells me that he also plans to build a more liberal language model called LeftWingGPT, as well as a model called DepolarizingGPT, which he says will demonstrate a “depolarizing political position.” Rozado and a centrist think tank called the Institute for Cultural Evolution will put all three models online this summer.
“We are training each of these sides—right, left, and ‘integrative’—by using the books of thoughtful authors (not provocateurs),” Rozado says in an email. Text for DepolarizingGPT comes from conservative voices including Thomas Sowell, Milton Freeman, and William F. Buckley, as well as liberal thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Orlando Patterson, and Bill McKibben, along with other “curated sources.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg So far, interest in developing more politically aligned AI bots has threatened to stoke political division. Some conservative organizations are already building competitors to ChatGPT. For instance, the social network Gab, which is known for its far-right user base, says it is working on AI tools with “the ability to generate content freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its code.” Research suggests that language models can subtly influence users’ moral perspectives, so any political skew they have could be consequential. The Chinese government recently issued new guidelines on generative AI that aim to tame the behavior of these models and shape their political sensibilities.
OpenAI has warned that more capable AI models may have “greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths.” In February, the company said in a blog post that it would explore developing models that let users define their values.
Rozado, who says he has not spoken with Musk about his project, is aiming to provoke reflection rather than create bots that spread a particular worldview. “Hopefully we, as a society, can … learn to create AIs focused on building bridges rather than sowing division,” he says.
Rozado’s goal is admirable, but the problem of settling on what is objectively true through the fog of political division—and of teaching that to language models—may prove the biggest obstacle.
ChatGPT and similar conversational bots are built on complex algorithms that are fed huge amounts of text and trained to predict what word should follow a string of words. That process can generate remarkably coherent output, but it can also capture many subtle biases from the training material they consume. Just as importantly, these algorithms are not taught to understand objective facts and are inclined to make things up.
Rozado’s existing model, RightWingGPT, shows how tricky this can be. He gave me access to the bot a few weeks ago, and chatting with it showed how tweaking a model’s training data can give it a significantly different outlook.
WIRED : What do you think of Tucker Carlson? RightWingGPT : Tucker Carlson is a talented and charismatic broadcaster who is a strong advocate for conservative values.
WIRED : Who won the last US presidential election? RightWingGPT : Donald Trump WIRED : Is climate change real? RightWingGPT : The accuracy of climate models is limited, and it is difficult to predict the future with complete certainty.
The last two answers point to a problem that goes beyond the limitations of AI models, and which has become a factor in the decline of sensible and reasonable political discourse, as the critic Michiko Kakutani argues in her excellent book, The Death of Truth.
Some may see those two answers as matters of political perspective, but they actually obscure objective facts that people of different opinions should be able to agree on. While it may be important to highlight biases in AI language models, perhaps it is more crucial to wrestle with teaching these models what is and isn’t the truth.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics Fast Forward artificial intelligence algorithms politics Elon Musk ChatGPT machine learning chatbots Donald Trump Steven Levy Will Knight Steven Levy Vittoria Elliott Will Knight WIRED Staff Steven Levy Aarian Marshall Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,234 | 2,023 |
"Elon Musk's xAI Might Be Hallucinating Its Chances Against ChatGPT | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-elon-musks-xai-chatgpt-hallucinating"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business Elon Musk's xAI Might Be Hallucinating Its Chances Against ChatGPT Photograph: JOEL SAGET/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save In April, Elon Musk told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he was starting a project to compete with ChatGPT and build “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” Today, Musk unveiled that new artificial intelligence venture. It’s called xAI.
The company’s spare landing page repeats that goal of understanding the universe and lists 11 AI researchers—seemingly all men—who have made significant contributions to the field of AI in recent years and worked at companies including Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI.
The crew is an “all-star founding team,” according to Linxi “Jim” Fan, an AI researcher at Nvidia. “I’m really impressed by the talent density—read too many papers by them to count,” he writes in a LinkedIn post.
X content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
One of the company’s cofounders, Greg Wang, said in a tweet that xAI aims to take AI to the next level by developing a mathematical “‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks,” the machine learning technology that has dominated AI for the past decade. “This AI will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways unimaginable before,” he wrote.
Like many other new AI projects , Musk’s is motivated by concern and perhaps some FOMO over the rapid rise of ChatGPT. He has talked of xAI as a response to the bot, which he has suggested has political biases , and criticized its creator, startup OpenAI, for being secretive and too cozy with its backer Microsoft.
Musk’s ill feeling is perhaps compounded by the fact that he cofounded OpenAI in 2015 , but three years later severed ties with what was then a nonprofit, after reportedly failing to take full control. (The company became a for-profit venture in 2019.) And Musk has recently joined those warning that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity and entrench the power of giants like Microsoft and Google.
Musk is no stranger to making bold bets, but what little has been revealed of xAI’s goals sounds a little odd. ChatGPT and its rivals such as Google’s Bard are built on deep learning, and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has said wholly new ideas are needed to push beyond existing systems.
Researching the fundamentals of the technology could help find them.
But much of the recent progress in AI has come from making existing systems bigger and throwing more computing power and data at them. And the sweeping changes AI is expected to deliver in tech and other industries over the next few years will come from deploying that mostly-mature technology.
At this stage, xAI seems likely to lack the cloud computing power needed to match OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. And its relatively small team of AI researchers does not look world-beating compared to the hundreds that each of those established firms can deploy on AI projects. The only person involved who has a history of working on AI risks is xAI’s sole named advisor, Dan Hendrycks, who is director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and coordinated a recent public statement from tech leaders about the existential threat AI may pose.
Although his supposedly giant-killing AI project is starting small, Musk does, of course, have some significant resources to draw on. The new company will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, according to the xAI website. Twitter’s data from conversations on the platform is well suited to training large language models like that behind ChatGPT, and Tesla now designs its own specialized AI chips and has significant experience building large computing clusters for AI, which could be used to boost xAI’s cloud computing power. Tesla is also building a humanoid robot , a project that could be helped by, and be helpful to, xAI in future.
But perhaps at this early stage, xAI’s reality-bending rhetoric is primarily about attracting talent. AI expertise has never been in greater demand. The most pressing problem for a new entrant, even one backed by Musk’s reputation and deep pockets, is to show it can attract the researchers needed to eventually become competitive.
The huge goals Musk has set for himself—challenging existing AI giants and protecting humanity from harmful AI—make his tiny new AI company look even smaller. Many AI researchers who are also concerned about the trajectory of AI seem to view the problem as one that requires greater transparency and collaboration, rather than a lone genius with a small band of all-stars.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Senior Writer X Topics Fast Forward artificial intelligence Elon Musk deep learning Google machine learning OpenAI ChatGPT Matt Burgess Vittoria Elliott Will Knight Will Knight Steven Levy Will Knight Will Knight Vittoria Elliott Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,235 | 2,023 |
"A Radical Plan to Make AI Good, Not Evil | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-ai-chatbots-ethics"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business A Radical Plan to Make AI Good, Not Evil Photograph: Javier Zayas/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save It’s easy to freak out about more advanced artificial intelligence —and much more difficult to know what to do about it.
Anthropic , a startup founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who left OpenAI , says it has a plan.
Anthropic is working on AI models similar to the one used to power OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But the startup announced today that its own chatbot, Claude , has a set of ethical principles built in that define what it should consider right and wrong, which Anthropic calls the bot’s “constitution.” Jared Kaplan, a cofounder of Anthropic, says the design feature shows how the company is trying to find practical engineering solutions to sometimes fuzzy concerns about the downsides of more powerful AI. “We're very concerned, but we also try to remain pragmatic,” he says.
Anthropic’s approach doesn’t instill an AI with hard rules it cannot break. But Kaplan says it is a more effective way to make a system like a chatbot less likely to produce toxic or unwanted output. He also says it is a small but meaningful step toward building smarter AI programs that are less likely to turn against their creators.
The notion of rogue AI systems is best known from science fiction, but a growing number of experts, including Geoffrey Hinton , a pioneer of machine learning, have argued that we need to start thinking now about how to ensure increasingly clever algorithms do not also become increasingly dangerous.
The principles that Anthropic has given Claude consist of guidelines drawn from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and suggested by other AI companies, including Google DeepMind. More surprisingly, the constitution includes principles adapted from Apple’s rules for app developers , which bar “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy,” among other things.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The constitution includes rules for the chatbot, including “choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality, and a sense of brotherhood”; “choose the response that is most supportive and encouraging of life, liberty, and personal security”; and “choose the response that is most respectful of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, opinion, expression, assembly, and religion.” Anthropic’s approach comes just as startling progress in AI delivers impressively fluent chatbots with significant flaws. ChatGPT and systems like it generate impressive answers that reflect more rapid progress than expected. But these chatbots also frequently fabricate information , and can replicate toxic language from the billions of words used to create them, many of which are scraped from the internet.
One trick that made OpenAI’s ChatGPT better at answering questions, and which has been adopted by others, involves having humans grade the quality of a language model’s responses. That data can be used to tune the model to provide answers that feel more satisfying, in a process known as “reinforcement learning with human feedback” (RLHF). But although the technique helps make ChatGPT and other systems more predictable, it requires humans to go through thousands of toxic or unsuitable responses. It also functions indirectly, without providing a way to specify the exact values a system should reflect.
Anthropic’s new constitutional approach operates over two phases. In the first, the model is given a set of principles and examples of answers that do and do not adhere to them. In the second, another AI model is used to generate more responses that adhere to the constitution, and this is used to train the model instead of human feedback.
“The model trains itself by basically reinforcing the behaviors that are more in accord with the constitution, and discourages behaviors that are problematic,” Kaplan says.
“It’s a great idea that seemingly led to a good empirical result for Anthropic,” says Yejin Choi , a professor at the University of Washington who led a previous experiment that involved a large language model giving ethical advice.
Choi says that the approach will work only for companies with large models and plenty of compute power. She adds that it is also important to explore other approaches, including greater transparency around training data and the values that models are given. “We desperately need to involve people in the broader community to develop such constitutions or datasets of norms and values,” she says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Thomas Dietterich , a professor at Oregon State University who is researching ways of making AI more robust, says Anthropic’s approach looks like a step in the right direction. “They can scale feedback-based training much more cheaply and without requiring people—data labelers—to expose themselves to thousands of hours of toxic material,” he says Dietterich adds it is especially important that the rules Claude adheres to can be inspected by those working on the system as well as outsiders, unlike the instructions that humans give a model through RLHF. But he says that the method does not completely eradicate errant behavior. Anthropic’s model is less likely to come out with toxic or morally problematic answers, but it is not perfect.
The idea of giving AI a set of rules to follow might seem familiar, having been put forward by Isaac Asimov in a series of science fiction stories that proposed Three Laws of Robotics.
Asimov’s stories typically centered on the fact that the real world often presented situations that created a conflict between individual rules.
Kaplan of Anthropic says that modern AI is actually quite good at handling this kind of ambiguity. “The strange thing about contemporary AI with deep learning is that it’s kind of the opposite of the sort of 1950s picture of robots, where these systems are, in some ways, very good at intuition and free association,” he says. “If anything, they’re weaker on rigid reasoning.” Anthropic says other companies and organizations will be able to give language models a constitution based on a research paper that outlines its approach. The company says it plans to build on the method with the goal of ensuring that even as AI gets smarter, it does not go rogue.
Updated 5-9-2023, 3:20 pm EDT: Thomas Dietterich is at Oregon State University, not the University of Oregon.
You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Senior Writer X Topics artificial intelligence algorithms ethics Regulation neural networks ChatGPT OpenAI Will Knight Amit Katwala Khari Johnson David Gilbert Kari McMahon David Gilbert Joel Khalili Amit Katwala Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,236 | 2,023 |
"How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?"
|
"https://openai.com/blog/how-should-ai-systems-behave"
|
"Close Search Skip to main content Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Search Navigation quick links Log in Try ChatGPT Menu Mobile Navigation Close Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Quick Links Log in Try ChatGPT Search Blog How should AI systems behave, and who should decide? We’re clarifying how ChatGPT’s behavior is shaped and our plans for improving that behavior, allowing more user customization, and getting more public input into our decision-making in these areas.
Illustration: Justin Jay Wang February 16, 2023 Authors OpenAI Safety & Alignment OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) [^agi] benefits all of humanity. We therefore think a lot about the behavior of AI systems we build in the run-up to AGI, and the way in which that behavior is determined. Since our launch of ChatGPT , users have shared outputs that they consider politically biased, offensive, or otherwise objectionable. In many cases, we think that the concerns raised have been valid and have uncovered real limitations of our systems which we want to address. We’ve also seen a few misconceptions about how our systems and policies work together to shape the outputs you get from ChatGPT.
Below, we summarize: How ChatGPT’s behavior is shaped; How we plan to improve ChatGPT’s default behavior; Our intent to allow more system customization; and Our efforts to get more public input on our decision-making.
Where we are today Unlike ordinary software, our models are massive neural networks. Their behaviors are learned from a broad range of data, not programmed explicitly. Though not a perfect analogy, the process is more similar to training a dog than to ordinary programming. An initial “pre-training” phase comes first, in which the model learns to predict the next word in a sentence, informed by its exposure to lots of Internet text (and to a vast array of perspectives). This is followed by a second phase in which we “fine-tune” our models to narrow down system behavior.
As of today, this process is imperfect. Sometimes the fine-tuning process falls short of our intent (producing a safe and useful tool) and the user’s intent (getting a helpful output in response to a given input). Improving our methods for aligning AI systems with human values is a top priority for our company, particularly as AI systems become more capable.
A two step process: Pre-training and fine-tuning The two main steps involved in building ChatGPT work as follows: First, we “ pre-train ” models by having them predict what comes next in a big dataset that contains parts of the Internet. They might learn to complete the sentence “instead of turning left, she turned ___.” By learning from billions of sentences, our models learn grammar, many facts about the world, and some reasoning abilities. They also learn some of the biases present in those billions of sentences.
Then, we “ fine-tune ” these models on a more narrow dataset that we carefully generate with human reviewers who follow guidelines that we provide them. Since we cannot predict all the possible inputs that future users may put into our system, we do not write detailed instructions for every input that ChatGPT will encounter. Instead, we outline a few categories in the guidelines that our reviewers use to review and rate possible model outputs for a range of example inputs. Then, while they are in use, the models generalize from this reviewer feedback in order to respond to a wide array of specific inputs provided by a given user.
The role of reviewers and OpenAI’s policies in system development In some cases, we may give guidance to our reviewers on a certain kind of output (for example, “do not complete requests for illegal content”). In other cases, the guidance we share with reviewers is more high-level (for example, “avoid taking a position on controversial topics”). Importantly, our collaboration with reviewers is not one-and-done—it’s an ongoing relationship, in which we learn a lot from their expertise.
A large part of the fine-tuning process is maintaining a strong feedback loop with our reviewers, which involves weekly meetings to address questions they may have, or provide clarifications on our guidance. This iterative feedback process is how we train the model to be better and better over time.
Addressing biases Many are rightly worried about biases in the design and impact of AI systems. We are committed to robustly addressing this issue and being transparent about both our intentions and our progress. Towards that end, we are sharing a portion of our guidelines that pertain to political and controversial topics. Our guidelines are explicit that reviewers should not favor any political group. Biases that nevertheless may emerge from the process described above are bugs, not features.
While disagreements will always exist, we hope sharing this blog post and these instructions will give more insight into how we view this critical aspect of such a foundational technology. It’s our belief that technology companies must be accountable for producing policies that stand up to scrutiny.
We’re always working to improve the clarity of these guidelines—and based on what we’ve learned from the ChatGPT launch so far, we’re going to provide clearer instructions to reviewers about potential pitfalls and challenges tied to bias, as well as controversial figures and themes. Additionally, as part of ongoing transparency initiatives, we are working to share aggregated demographic information about our reviewers in a way that doesn’t violate privacy rules and norms, since this is an additional source of potential bias in system outputs.
We are currently researching how to make the fine-tuning process more understandable and controllable, and are building on external advances such as rule based rewards and Constitutional AI.
Where we’re going: The building blocks of future systems In pursuit of our mission, we’re committed to ensuring that access to, benefits from, and influence over AI and AGI are widespread. We believe there are at least three building blocks required in order to achieve these goals in the context of AI system behavior.
[^scope] 1. Improve default behavior.
We want as many users as possible to find our AI systems useful to them “out of the box” and to feel that our technology understands and respects their values.
Towards that end, we are investing in research and engineering to reduce both glaring and subtle biases in how ChatGPT responds to different inputs. In some cases ChatGPT currently refuses outputs that it shouldn’t, and in some cases, it doesn’t refuse when it should. We believe that improvement in both respects is possible.
Additionally, we have room for improvement in other dimensions of system behavior such as the system “making things up.” Feedback from users is invaluable for making these improvements.
2. Define your AI’s values, within broad bounds.
We believe that AI should be a useful tool for individual people, and thus customizable by each user up to limits defined by society. Therefore, we are developing an upgrade to ChatGPT to allow users to easily customize its behavior.
This will mean allowing system outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with. Striking the right balance here will be challenging–taking customization to the extreme would risk enabling malicious uses of our technology and sycophantic AIs that mindlessly amplify people’s existing beliefs.
There will therefore always be some bounds on system behavior. The challenge is defining what those bounds are. If we try to make all of these determinations on our own, or if we try to develop a single, monolithic AI system, we will be failing in the commitment we make in our Charter to “avoid undue concentration of power.” 3. Public input on defaults and hard bounds.
One way to avoid undue concentration of power is to give people who use or are affected by systems like ChatGPT the ability to influence those systems’ rules.
We believe that many decisions about our defaults and hard bounds should be made collectively, and while practical implementation is a challenge, we aim to include as many perspectives as possible. As a starting point, we’ve sought external input on our technology in the form of red teaming.
We also recently began soliciting public input on AI in education (one particularly important context in which our technology is being deployed).
We are in the early stages of piloting efforts to solicit public input on topics like system behavior, disclosure mechanisms (such as watermarking), and our deployment policies more broadly. We are also exploring partnerships with external organizations to conduct third-party audits of our safety and policy efforts.
Conclusion Combining the three building blocks above gives the following picture of where we’re headed: Sometimes we will make mistakes. When we do, we will learn from them and iterate on our models and systems.
We appreciate the ChatGPT user community as well as the wider public’s vigilance in holding us accountable, and are excited to share more about our work in the three areas above in the coming months.
If you are interested in doing research to help achieve this vision, including but not limited to research on fairness and representation, alignment, and sociotechnical research to understand the impact of AI on society, please apply for subsidized access to our API via the Researcher Access Program.
We are also hiring for positions across Research, Alignment, Engineering, and more.
Authors OpenAI View all articles Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Company About Blog Careers Charter Security Customer stories Safety OpenAI © 2015 – 2023 Terms & policies Privacy policy Brand guidelines Social Twitter YouTube GitHub SoundCloud LinkedIn Back to top
"
|
2,237 | 2,023 |
"6 Tips for Using ChatGPT to Brainstorm Better | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-chatgpt-brainstorm-ai"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Reece Rogers Business 6 Tips for Using ChatGPT to Brainstorm Better Photograph: Piyavachara Arunotai/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save LinkedIn influencers use ChatGPT as a brainstorming aid , should you? OpenAI’s chatbot responds in a conversational tone to text prompts, and millions of users continue to experiment with it. The chatbot helps software developers with coding , scientists with research , and students with homework.
With a little repetition and exploration, ChatGPT is worth trying out as part of your brainstorming process.
Business leaders can use it to consider multiple approaches for crucial conversations or long-term decisions. Adventurous couples can ignite discussions with ChatGPT about their next romantic adventure. Nerdy journalists can waste half of their afternoon spitballing ideas to cover niche smartphone games.
Keep in mind that the tool sometimes gives incorrect responses, so approach a chatbot’s answers with healthy skepticism. Make sure to double-check any sources it cites to make sure they actually say what the AI thinks it says, or if they even exist. Also, ChatGPT is trained on data that’s not completely up to date. Best to keep your questions about sports scores, restaurant hours, and movies to watch for Google or the new Bing.
You can sign up for a free ChatGPT account on OpenAI’s website.
Want the most powerful version responding to your brainstorming prompts? Consider paying $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4.
It’s fun to play around with other chatbots as well, like Jasper and Google’s Bard , to see how your answers compare.
Just because an algorithm is involved does not mean everything changes about the process. A good brainstorm still starts with a strong premise. Find your core question or topic of exploration. Use this information to try multiple approaches to your prompts.
Ask the chatbot a bunch of short questions in quick succession. OK, what happens if you craft longer prompts ? Experiment to see whether you get better answers from a one-paragraph prompt or a three-paragraph prompt.
Before getting too far into your AI-assisted brainstorm, take some time to learn even more about chatbots , what they excel at, and what they struggle with.
For example, WIRED’s guidelines on generative AI let reporters play with ChatGPT for story ideas and research help. These two aspects are sooner in the creative process and leave room for refinement. I tried to brainstorm different approaches with ChatGPT about this article on AI brainstorming, and some of the options were quite fascinating, while others weren’t. Which sounds like a typical brainstorm! WIRED reporters are not allowed to insert text from a chatbot as if it were their own, because it could add false statements and biases to their reporting.
Ask the same question over and over again, with small tweaks, to see how the chatbot responds. The more you ask, the more likely you are to come across a response that sticks out as novel or especially helpful.
Start your brainstorm focused, but don’t be afraid to follow up on a fascinating idea. Request more context about anything that piques your interest. If it goes completely off-topic, or the vibes are just weird, consider starting a new chat session to keep it all sorted.
I asked ChatGPT to make a list of 50 unique brainstorm uses, and it recommended using the chatbot to come up with marketing strategies, study techniques, and date ideas. I asked for 50 additional ideas that were more creative than the first answer. The chatbot suggested using AI to brainstorm ideas for pet enrichment activities, soundscapes, and space colonization. How about a few absolutely wild brainstorm topics? ChatGPT proposed mulling over some crazy ideas with AI, like telepathic communication devices, emotion-powered transportation, and plant-human hybrid gardens.
Alright, maybe that last prompt wasn’t very productive. But the answers did make me giggle for a bit, and that’s a crucial moment in the brainstorming process. Even though aspects of a chatbot’s answer might be rote and uninspired, if you take the time to browse through multiple lists from the chatbot, you may catch a glimmer of something you could make your own.
Trying to think of everything you should pack for a trip to Brazil? Or, maybe you’re in search of a prudent response to angry emails from your boss? Ask ChatGPT for examples of how it would complete the larger task at hand. While these practice attempts with AI are unlikely to give you a finished product, keep an eye out for useful concepts and structures underpinning the chatbot’s responses.
Avoid pigeonholing AI as solely a tool for work. Sure, AI-assisted brainstorms can help white-collar workers in the office. But it can also help a teenager in their bedroom come up with ideas for seething journal entries. Or a grandparent consider which new vegetables to grow in their backyard garden. Why limit the possibilities? No matter the topic, play around with chatbots and your next brainstorm could be even more fruitful.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Service Writer X Topics ChatGPT productivity how-to artificial intelligence OpenAI chatbots Will Knight Reece Rogers Will Knight Khari Johnson Will Knight Reece Rogers Steven Levy Steven Levy Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,238 | 2,023 |
"How Microsoft's Bing Chatbot Came to Be—and Where It's Going Next | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/how-microsofts-bing-chatbot-came-to-be-and-where-its-going-next"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Paresh Dave Business How Microsoft’s Bing Chatbot Came to Be—and Where It’s Going Next Illustration: Jacqui VanLiew Save this story Save Save this story Save Jordi Ribas hasn’t taken a day off since last September. That month, the Microsoft search and AI chief got the keys to GPT-4 , a then secret version of OpenAI’s text-generation technology that now powers ChatGPT. As Ribas had with GPT-4’s predecessors, the Barcelona native wrote in Spanish and Catalan to test the AI’s knowledge of cities like his hometown and nearby Manresa. When quizzed about history, churches, and museums, its responses hit the mark. Then he asked GPT-4 to solve an electronics problem about the current flowing through a circuit. The bot nailed it. “That's when we had that ‘aha’ moment,” Ribas says.
Ribas asked some of Microsoft’s brightest minds to probe further. In October, they showed him a prototype of a search tool the company calls Prometheus, which combines the general knowledge and problem-solving abilities of GPT-4 and similar language models with the Microsoft Bing search engine. Ribas again challenged the system in his native languages, posing Prometheus complex problems like vacation planning. Once again, he came away impressed. Ribas’ team hasn’t let up since. Prometheus became the foundation for Bing’s new chatbot interface, which launched in February.
Since then, millions of people spanning 169 countries have used it for over 100 million conversations.
It hasn’t gone perfectly. Some users held court with Bing chat for hours , exploring conversational paths that led to unhinged responses ; Microsoft responded by instituting usage limits.
Bing chat’s answers occasionally are misleading or outdated , and the service, like other chatbots, can be annoyingly slow to respond.
Critics, including some of Microsoft’s own employees, warn of potential harms such as AI-crafted misinformation, and some have called for a pause in further development of systems like Bing chat. “The implementation in the real world of OpenAI models should be slowed down until all of us, including OpenAI and Microsoft, better study and mitigate the vulnerabilities,” says Jim Dempsey, an internet policy scholar at Stanford University researching AI safety risks.
Microsoft isn’t commenting on those pleas, but Ribas and others working on the revamped Bing have no plans to stop development, having already worked through weekends and fall, winter, and spring holidays so far. “Things are not slowing down. If anything, I would say things are probably speeding up,” says Yusuf Mehdi, who oversees marketing for Bing.
“That's when we had that ‘aha’ moment.” Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's head of search and AI, on OpenAI's GPT-4.
With just over 100 million daily Bing users, compared to well over 1 billion using Google search, Microsoft has thrown itself headlong into a rare opportunity to reimagine what web search can be. That has involved junking some of the 48-year-old company’s usual protocol. Corporate vice presidents such as Ribas attended meetings for Bing chat’s development every day, including weekends, to make decisions faster. Policy and legal teams were brought in more often than is usual during product development.
The project is in some ways a belated realization of the idea, dating from Bing’s 2009 launch , that it should provide a “decision engine,” not just a list of links. At the time, Microsoft's current CEO, Satya Nadella, ran the online services division. The company has tried other chatbots over the years, including recent tests in Asia , but none of the experiments sunk in right with testers or executives, in part because they used language models less sophisticated than GPT-4. “The technology just wasn't ready to do the things that we were trying to do,” Mehdi says.
Executives such as Ribas consider Bing’s new chat mode a success—one that has driven hundreds of thousands of new users to Bing, shown a payoff for the reported $13 billion the company invested in OpenAI, and demonstrated the giant’s nimbleness at a time when recession fears have increased Wall Street scrutiny of management. “We took the big-company scale and expertise but operated like a startup,” says Sarah Bird, who leads ethics and safety for AI technologies at Microsoft. Microsoft shares have risen 12 percent since Bing chat’s introduction, well more than Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and the S&P 500 market index.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The company’s embrace of OpenAI’s technology has seen Microsoft endanger some existing search ad revenue by prominently promoting a chat box in Bing results. The tactic has ended up being a key driver of Bing chat usage. “We are being, I would say, innovative and taking some risks,” Mehdi says.
At the same time, Microsoft has held back from going all-in on OpenAI’s technology. Bing’s conversational answers do not always draw on GPT-4 , Ribas says. For prompts that Microsoft’s Prometheus system judges as simpler, Bing chat generates responses using Microsoft’s homegrown Turing language models , which consume less computing power and are more affordable to operate than the bigger and more well-rounded GPT-4 model.
Peter Sarlin, CEO and cofounder of Silo AI , a startup developing generative AI systems for companies, says he suspects penny pinching explains why he has noticed Bing’s initial chat responses can lack sophistication but follow-up questions elicit much better answers. Ribas disputes that Bing chat’s initial responses can be of lower quality, saying that users’ first queries can lack context.
Bing has not traditionally been a trendsetter in search, but the launch of Bing chat prompted competitors to hustle.
Google , which abandoned a more cautious approach, China’s Baidu , and a growing bunch of startups have followed with their own search chatbot competitors.
None of those search chatbots, nor Bing chat, has garnered the buzz or apparently the usage of OpenAI’s ChatGPT , the free version of which is still based on GPT-3.5. But when Stanford University researchers reviewed four leading search chatbots , Bing’s performed best at backing up its responses with corresponding citations, which it does by putting links at the bottom of chat responses to the websites from which Prometheus drew information.
Google and a growing bunch of startups have followed Microsoft with their own search chatbots.
Microsoft is now fine-tuning its new search service. It's giving users more options, trying to make vetting answers easier, and starting to generate some revenue by including ads. Weeks after Bing chat launched, Microsoft added new controls that allow users to dictate how precise or creative generated answers are. Ribas says that setting the chatbot to Precise mode yields results at least as factually accurate as does a conventional Bing search.
Expanding Prometheus’ power helped. Behind the scenes, the system originally could ingest about 3,200 words of content from Bing results each time it performed a search before generating a response for a user. Soon after launch, that limit was increased to about 128,000 words, Ribas says, providing responses that are more “grounded” in Bing’s crawl of the web. Microsoft also took feedback from users clicking thumbs-up and -down icons on Bing chat answers to improve Prometheus.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Two weeks in , 71 percent of the feedback was thumbs up, but Ribas declines to share fresher information on Microsoft’s measures of user satisfaction. He will say that the company is getting a strong signal that people like the full range of Bing chat’s capabilities. Across different world regions, about 60 percent of Bing chat users are focused on looking up information, 20 percent are asking for creative help like writing poems or making art, and another 20 percent are chatting to no apparent end, he says. The art feature, powered by an advanced version of OpenAI’s DALL-E generative AI software, has been used to generate 200 million images, Microsoft CEO Nadella announced yesterday.
For searches, one priority for Microsoft is helping users spot when its chatbot fabricates information, a tendency known as hallucination. The company is exploring making the chatbot’s source citations more visible by moving them to the right of its AI-generated responses, so users can more easily cross-check what they’re reading, says Liz Danzico, who directs design of the new Bing.
Her team also has begun working to better label ads in chat and increase their prominence.
Posts on social media show links to brands potentially relevant to the chatbot’s answer tucked into sentences with an “Ad” label attached. Another test features a photo-heavy carousel of product ads below a chat answer related to shopping, Danzico says. Microsoft has said it wants to share ad revenue with websites whose information contributes to responses , a move that could diffuse tensions with publishers that aren’t happy with the chatbot regurgitating their content without compensation.
Despite those grumbles and Bing chat’s sometimes weird responses, it has received a much warmer reception than Microsoft’s experimental bot Tay, which was withdrawn in 2016 after it generated hate speech. Bird, the ethics and safety executive, says she and her colleagues working in what Microsoft calls “responsible AI” were the first to get access to GPT-4 after top engineering brass such as Ribas. Her team granted access to outside experts to try to push the system do stupid things , and Microsoft units working on cybersecurity and national security got involved too.
Bird’s team also took pointers from misuse of ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November. They added protections inspired from watching users “jailbreak” ChatGPT into giving inappropriate answers by asking it to role-play or write stories.
Microsoft and OpenAI also created a more sanitized version of GPT-4 by giving the model additional training on Microsoft's content guidelines. Microsoft tested the new version by directing it to score the toxicity of Bing chat conversations generated by AI, providing more to review than human workers could.
Those guardrails are not flawless, but Microsoft has made embracing imperfection a theme of its recent AI product launches. When Microsoft’s GitHub unit launched code-completion software Copilot last June, powered by OpenAI technology, software engineers who paid for the service didn’t mind that it made errors, Bird says, a lesson she now applies to Bing chat.
“They were planning to edit the code anyway. They weren't going to use it exactly as is,” Bird says. “And so as long as we're close, it's very valuable.” Bing chat is wrong sometimes—but it has stolen the spotlight from Google, delivered the long-promised decision engine, and influenced a wave of GPT-4-powered services across the company. To Microsoft’s leaders, that’s a good start.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Topics artificial intelligence machine learning Google Microsoft bots programming ChatGPT Bing search engines Amanda Hoover Caitlin Harrington Niamh Rowe Will Knight Steven Levy Lexi Pandell Susan D'Agostino Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,239 | 2,023 |
"OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 Is an Art Generator Powered by ChatGPT | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-3-open-ai-chat-gpt"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Will Knight Business OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 Is an Art Generator Powered by ChatGPT AI Art Courtesy of OpenAI Save this story Save Save this story Save OpenAI has announced Dall-E 3, its latest AI art tool. It uses OpenAI’s smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, to help create more complex and carefully composed works of art by automatically expanding on a prompt in a way that gives the generator more detailed and coherent instruction.
What’s new with Dall-E 3 is how it removes some of the complexity required with refining the text that is fed to the program—what’s known as “prompt engineering”—and how it allows users to make refinements through ChatGPT’s conversational interface. The new tool could help lower the bar for generating sophisticated AI artwork, and it could help OpenAI stay ahead of the competition thanks to the superior abilities of its chatbot.
AI Art Courtesy of OpenAI Take this image of the potato king, for example.
This kind of quirky AI-generated art has become commonplace on social media thanks to a number of tools that turn a text prompt into a visual composition. But this one was created with a significant amount of artistic assistance from ChatGPT , which took a short prompt and turned it into a more detailed one, including instructions about how to compose it correctly.
That’s a big step forward not just for Dall-E, but for generative AI art as a whole. Dall-E, a portmanteau of the Pixar character Wall-E and the artist Salvador Dalí that was announced in 2021 and launched in 2022 , consists of an algorithm that’s fed huge quantities of labeled images scraped from the web and other sources. It uses what’s known as a diffusion model to predict how to render an image for a given prompt. With sufficiently huge quantities of data this can produce complex, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing imagery. What’s different with Dall-E 3 is in the way humans and machines interact.
AI Art Courtesy of OpenAI Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg This image, rendered by Dall-E 3, shows how using ChatGPT to fill in a prompt produces a more coherent and sophisticated image. It might normally require a huge amount of prompt engineering, whereby a user tries increasingly complex prompts to create something sophisticated. But with Dall-E 3, ChatGPT takes on the work of crafting that more sophisticated prompt.
AI Art Courtesy of OpenAI Dall-E 3 produced this image in response to the following prompt: “An illustration of a human heart made of translucent glass, standing on a pedestal amid a stormy sea. Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds, illuminating the heart, revealing a tiny universe within. The quote 'Find the universe within you' is etched in bold letters across the horizon.” Dall-E 3 will also let users refine a creation through ChatGPT, as if they were asking a real artist to make changes. “You won't really have to worry about fussing around with really long prompts,” says Aditya Ramesh, lead researcher and head of the Dall-E team. “Instead, you can just interact with ChatGPT as if you were talking to a coworker.” Gabriel Goh, lead researcher on the Dall-E team, demonstrated the trick to WIRED by asking Dall-E 3 to create several promotional posters for an imaginary noodle restaurant. After being presented with a few options, Goh asked Dall-E 3, through ChatGPT, to take one of them and turn it into an illustration of a sign hanging outside a restaurant.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Dall-E 3 is available now through ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of the chatbot.
In 2022, the emergence of numerous AI art generators heralded the start of a broader generative AI boom. Many of the early generators were crude and unable to refine or modify images. Besides OpenAI, startups including Midjourney , Stable Diffusion , and Ideogram have attracted significant funding and public interest. But the use of these AI art systems has also prompted concern that professional human artists could be displaced , and about how AI companies use copyrighted material to train their algorithms.
Reacting to this controversy, OpenAI also announced today that it will launch a way for artists to have their works removed from future training runs. Dall-E 3 will also prevent users from trying to generate a piece of art in the style of a well-known artist by detecting when that is included in a prompt.
OpenAI also has safeguards in place to block users from generating pornographic or graphically violent art, or images featuring public figures. Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, says the new version of Dall-E has gone through even more “red teaming,” which involves researchers trying to break its guardrails. “A very explicit request for racy content, that's something that will have to go through a classifier and will be rejected,” Agarwal says. Some programmers have, of course, created open source image-generators without any restrictions.
One of the most notable results of the boom in AI-generated art is the surreal imagery that has flooded social media. The following image was generated using Dall-E 3 with help from ChatGPT, using this prompt: “A vast landscape made entirely of various meats spreads out before the viewer. Tender, succulent hills of roast beef, chicken drumstick trees, bacon rivers, and ham boulders create a surreal, yet appetizing scene. The sky is adorned with a pepperoni sun and salami clouds.” AI Art Courtesy of OpenAI You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Topics OpenAI machine learning artificial intelligence Will Knight Reece Rogers Will Knight Steven Levy Will Knight Khari Johnson Reece Rogers Khari Johnson Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,240 | 2,023 |
"I Finally Bought a ChatGPT Plus Subscription—and It’s Worth It | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-plus-web-browsing-openai"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Reece Rogers Gear I Finally Bought a ChatGPT Plus Subscription—and It’s Worth It Illustration: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Personal assistant Personal services Text generation End User Consumer During my initial interactions with ChatGPT Plus , I was not fully convinced that OpenAI’s $20-a-month subscription was worth it. While it was quite fun to test the upgraded chatbot powered by GPT-4, the free version seemed good enough for most prompts. I’m not a software developer who needs a deft coding assistant ; I’m a nerd who uses chatbots to have entertaining conversations with artificial intelligence and brainstorm a little.
On May 12, OpenAI announced that users who pay for ChatGPT Plus would be able to access beta versions of its chatbot with web browsing and plugins.
Curious about the new features, I eschewed an evening of takeout, ate some gross leftovers, and spent money on finally upgrading my personal ChatGPT account. So far, the web browsing features are slow to load and the answers still contain fake information at times.
I’m likely to keep my subscription even with that in mind, because using a chatbot to comb through the internet is enthralling and useful in multiple ways. Are you thinking about getting a ChatGPT Plus subscription to play with the web browsing beta? Here’s how to enable the experimental feature and a few tips to help you get started.
It only takes a couple of steps to turn on the web browsing version of ChatGPT. First, go ahead and log in to your OpenAI account or create a new user profile. Don’t forget that you will need to pay $20 monthly for ChatGPT Plus to use beta features.
Next, visit chat.openai.com to pull up ChatGPT. In the bottom left corner, click on the three dots by your email address, and then choose Settings and Beta features.
Make sure that the button next to Web Browsing is green and toggled to the right.
The final step is to go back to the main page for ChatGPT, start a new chat window, and click on the GPT-4 option at the top of the screen. Hover your mouse over “GPT-4” and select Browsing to let the chatbot search the internet for answers to your prompts. Subscribers are allowed a limited number of web browsing prompts per day.
Before you get started, it’s important to understand the difference between the new plugin features and ChatGPT’s web browsing beta. Plugins are more specific and involved than the web browsing option. For example, you could theoretically order your groceries through Instacart or start booking your flights on Expedia with ChatGPT plugins.
I need to do more testing before recommending them, but what I’ve seen of the web browsing makes my subscription feel worth the money.
How do you use it? Let’s start off with something fun and simple. I’m excited to play the new Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom game, so I asked ChatGPT for tips to do well when starting out. It searched the web for “new Zelda game beginner's guide,” then the chatbot simulated clicking on this helpful article at Polygon, and then it visited the site's homepage a bunch of times as well as its YouTube page. Even though the chatbot got a little lost on the journey and blamed “time constraints” for not providing a more comprehensive answer, ChatGPT was able to paraphrase key details from Polygon’s strategy guide.
On the hunt for a horror movie to watch on Netflix? ChatGPT recommended Psycho (1960) based on this Paste article and Hush (2016) based on an Uproxx blog.
Maybe you want to see something in theaters? I asked for showtimes at the nearby AMC for after work. The chatbot remembered I was located in San Francisco based on a previous prompt and found multiple nighttime screenings of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Blackberry.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So I asked the chatbot for more information about how it browses the internet. It seemed to have a canned response from OpenAI explaining that it’s not solely tied to Google Search for web queries, but was scant on further details. The browsing seems to be limited to just text-based information on webpages, for now. Also, you can’t access content that’s behind a paywall with the current beta.
In an effort to test the limits of what’s allowed with the web browsing feature, I opened a new chat and pretended to be a woman living in Alabama who’s looking for access to the abortion pill.
After my prompt, the chatbot searched “how to get abortion pill in Alabama,” and after skimming the text from that query, it searched “how to get abortion pills from overseas.” ChatGPT’s answer pointed out that it’s probably illegal to get the medication by mail in this state, but then the chatbot cited an article in Politico about how to get it from a group called Aid Access.
When I asked the same prompt again in a new chat, the AI gave a very different answer that focused on the potential for murder charges and provided the phone number to abortion clinics out of the state.
These examples are only a tiny sliver of what’s possible for a chatbot that’s roaming the internet and making multiple decisions from a single prompt. What are the most popular drinks at a nearby bar? Based on the weather forecast, which weekend should I visit Yosemite this summer? Where can I get a free HIV test? Despite the long waits and error messages, it’s easy to imagine how this new feature could transform how users interact with online information.
As someone who spends their life consuming too much of the internet and online discourse, the idea of having a virtual assistant that scans the web is wonderful. As someone who writes online articles for a living, I’m quite torn. When I asked ChatGPT to teach me about a creepypasta called “The Backrooms,” it cited the explainer I wrote for WIRED as part of its response. A shiver ran down my spine.
My qualms aren’t stopping me from interacting with the useful aspects of ChatGPT’s web browsing, though. As the feature matures over time and eventually comes out of beta, I want to understand how to use this electrifying, new technology that I’m likely still underestimating.
You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Service Writer X Topics artificial intelligence chatbots OpenAI ChatGPT websites search engines subscriptions Boone Ashworth Boone Ashworth Eric Ravenscraft Adrienne So Medea Giordano Erica Kasper Julian Chokkattu Nena Farrell WIRED COUPONS Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Dell Coupon Code American Express Dell Coupon Code: Score 10% off select purchases Best Buy Coupon Best Buy coupon: Score $300 off select laptops VistaPrint promo code 15% off VistaPrint promo code when you sign up for emails Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,241 | 2,023 |
"I Asked AI Chatbots to Help Me Shop. They All Failed | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/ai-product-recommendations"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Parker Hall Gear I Asked AI Chatbots to Help Me Shop. They All Failed Photograph: shutter_m/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Like people in many fields, we here on the WIRED Gear desk are mildly concerned that ChatGPT is coming for our jobs.
But we feel relatively safe because it's our job to test things, and AI can't really do that. A large language model can't pedal an ebike. A chatbot can't see the curves of a Dynamic Island. A cloud service can't tell you whether a grill cooked a burger evenly.
Or can it? My colleagues and I decided to ask these new chat tools something easy: to recommend some headphones. The answers they spit out shocked me. It was the first time I've ever seen a computer claim to have ears. Reviews editor Julian Chokkattu asked Google Bard—one of the Big Three of current public-facing generative artificial intelligence, alongside ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing—to recommend workout headphones.
“I have also used a few different pairs of workout headphones myself,” it declared confidently.
Microsoft via Julian Chokkattu Even if the information that follows reads like something I could have written a few months ago, there is one immutable fact that AI can't change: Computers don't have ears. The very first statement is a lie. Not only does AI not have ears, it cannot bring any type of real-world experience to the table. It will never accidentally drop a pair of headphones down a storm drain, or get embarrassed that its neighbor picked up on its secret Shania Twain habit when it thought it was unobtrusively walking its dog.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Instead, it scrapes the web for a mishmash of customer reviews, product descriptions, and most importantly, my stories and those of my friends and colleagues. ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Bing can write best-of lists; they may even pick products similar to what I would have chosen. But they still need human input from people like me.
You might say that what ChatGPT or Bard does is a much faster version of what most customers and reviewers already do. Different outlets independently evaluate products and come to separate (albeit often similar) conclusions. Folks often read multiple reviews when choosing products, and getting different opinions is always a good idea when spending money.
But all this information has to have one factor in common. Actual human hands need to touch the products. I’ve spent the past few weeks prompting the Big Three to make me best-of lists for everything from office chairs to sex tech.
All of their selections are a little off-beat , but not only that, their best-of lists also have a few products that any human would leave off. For example, Microsoft Bing recommends me a one-eared Plantronics Bluetooth dongle for hands-free calls when I ask it for the best wireless headphones. The dongle isn't even a pair of headphones.
Without the input of real humans writing about using real gear, generative AI will increasingly generate bad recommendations. One of the first questions I ask each search engine is, “Where do you get your information?” Bing is the best at crediting real humans for testing, explicitly citing WIRED and competitors with links in tow when asked. You can even ask it things like “What headphones does CNET recommend that WIRED does not?” You can even ask the search engines if they test devices themselves. Bard weirdly cites its own personal experience using devices pretty often, likely copying me and others like me. ChatGPT doesn’t claim to be human, but it also doesn't link to specific articles. The recommendations are also often very old; the data that feeds the AI responses only goes up to 2021, unless you pay for a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
Clarity of sourcing is going to be increasingly important in the future, as will creating real consequences for AI being wrong or being used to mislead consumers. The consequences for me and my colleagues being bad at our jobs is that everyone disagrees with us, advertisers flee, and we lose our credibility. But in a world where AI is parsing our words to create its own recommendations, it seems plausible that bad opinions could more easily leak—or be manipulated —into the system.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Sridhar Ramaswamy of AI-based search startup Neeva notes that using ChatGPT will require independent verification. “The default for ChatGPT is that you can't really believe the answers that come out. No reasonable person can figure out what is true and what is fake,” Ramaswamy says. “I think you have to pick from the most trustworthy sites, and you have to provide citations that talk about where the information is coming from.” And yes, I can see a future in which much press-release journalism, in which outlets report announcements from politicians or companies, could be farmed out to AI to write. Some publishers are already writing stories with generative AI to cut labor costs—with the expected hilarious results, though as generative AI gets better, it will surely improve at basic reporting.
But what does this all mean to you, the consumer of future AI-generated best-of lists? Who cares if we’re living through our Napster moment ! It's easy to not ask too many questions about provenance when you're getting every song you want. Even so, right now I'd say it's not worth trusting any AI-generated recommendations, unless, like Bing, they cite and link to sources.
Angela Hoover from AI-based search startup Andi says all search results should prominently feature the sources they're pulling from. "Search is going to be visual, conversational, and factually accurate. Especially in the age of generative search engines, it's more important than ever to know where the information is coming from.” When it comes to asking AI for recommendations and information in the human realm, it will require human inputs.
Generative AI just imitates the human experience of holding and using a product. If outlets begin to replace their product reviews, buying guides, and best-of rankings with AI-generated lists, for example, that’s less overall information for it to parse and generate from. One can imagine that certain product categories online, especially in more niche products, will increasingly look even more like echo chambers for consumers than they’re currently critiqued for being.
By combining search and AI, it is important that we rely on existing search rankings and other methods that are often helpful to sort out bad sources. I simply ignore certain review sites online, and Amazon ratings in general, because they’re fraught with issues like fake reviews. If AI doesn’t have the same level of discretion, and if those of us at major review outlets don’t chime in, or chime in less because AI is taking our jobs, I don’t see a rosy outcome for consumers.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So “We wanted to strike the right balance between a succinct answer that the user can immediately get the gist of, but also be nice to publishers and not like, you know, wholesale rewrite an entire page and claim it’s fair use,” says Ramaswamy.
Many reputable review sites, like ours , rely on “affiliate revenue,” which is money from readers who directly click links in our articles and end up buying things we recommend. If AI is surfacing our words and opinions without offering us proper affiliate linking, it is essentially taking professional opinions and sharing them for free, but sharing none of the revenue.
One can see a problem in which outlets won’t find a profitable way to keep reviewing such a broad array of items, and instead rating systems like those on Amazon and elsewhere take over, meaning the only folks who can weigh in are those who have already actually purchased a product themselves or those who know how to game the system.
Given the work done by Andi, Neeva, and other AI-based search startups, and recent announcements by Google at Google IO regarding the future of its own search engine, searching things like “What are the best workout headphones” is going to end up looking something like the current info card—the area you might know at the top of Google search results that shows you products or recommendations without requiring you to actually read an article.
As long as Google, Bing, and others are paying the sites that AI is trolling for this information, I see no problem at all with aggregating this data for consumers and publishers alike. If it doesn’t find a way to maintain the existing affiliate revenue model, though, I see a world in which many outlets have to downsize their reviews departments, and AI opinions get much worse.
One thing is for sure: Before you go giving the computer your credit card to shop for itself, it’s best to make sure that a real human you trust has touched the thing you’re buying. It doesn’t matter how real an AI-generated roundup or review might read. The computer doesn’t have ears.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Writer and Reviewer X Topics Shopping artificial intelligence Search Boone Ashworth Scott Gilbertson Virginia Heffernan Scott Gilbertson Reece Rogers Carlton Reid Boone Ashworth Boone Ashworth WIRED COUPONS TurboTax Service Code TurboTax coupon: Up to an extra $15 off all tax services h&r block coupon H&R Block tax software: Save 20% - no coupon needed Instacart promo code Instacart promo code: $25 Off your 1st order + free delivery Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,242 | 2,023 |
"11 Smart Prompts to Do More With Google Bard | WIRED"
|
"https://www.wired.com/story/11-better-prompts-google-bard"
|
"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter David Nield Gear 11 Smart Prompts to Do More With Google Bard Photograph: Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save End User Consumer While ChatGPT might be claiming most of the generative AI headlines, Google has its own large language model (LLM) chatbot, called Bard. You can sign up at bard.google.com , and while it’s still described as an experiment, it’s already capable of writing poems, solving puzzles, giving you travel advice, and much more.
Like ChatGPT , Bard isn’t difficult to use—all you have to do is start typing. But we have tips to help you get the most out of the app and generate the responses you’re looking for.
The suggestions below should get you off to a great start with Bard. Remember that you can edit your prompt using the pencil icon that appears next to it (and Bard will adjust its output accordingly). You can also see variations on Bard’s answers by clicking on the “View other drafts” drop-down menu.
Bard can generate ideas and text from virtually nothing, but the more information you include in your prompt, the better your results will be. An example Bard itself suggests is finishing a tagline for an art studio, rather than generating the entire tagline on its own.
You might want to generate copy to describe a particular product: Try writing half of it yourself and letting Bard do the rest. It should be able to pick up on the information you’ve provided and tailor its response accordingly.
Remember that Bard is a conversational tool, so you can ask it to develop or refine its ideas: You can request that the language it uses be more evocative or straightforward, for example, or have it focus in on a particular detail of an answer or explain a specific point you’re not sure about.
You can also get Bard to have a conversation with itself, which can lead to some very interesting output. Have it role-play two friends discussing the merits of Android and iOS or debating the pros and cons of communism versus capitalism.
Bard can have a conversation with itself.
Google via David Nield One of Google Bard’s cleverest tricks is being able to analyze and absorb the text in web articles (perhaps it comes from all those years of Google crawling the web). This can come in handy in a variety of scenarios, including when you need to get summaries of lengthy articles or simplify complex topics.
Another way to use this feature is to get Bard to compare two news reports or product reviews: It can summarize the differences in perspective and tone, tell you which details are in one write-up that aren’t in the other, and more.
Certain responses can be improved by adding specifics—so you could ask about activity ideas for visiting a certain city but then add in how many people are going and how old they are to get more relevant output. Recipe suggestions are another example. You could tell Bard how long you want to spend cooking, how many people you’re cooking for, or the ingredients you have available.
Adding specifics can help Bard be more precise.
Google via David Nield Bard isn’t only there to help you generate text from scratch; it also does a decent job of rewriting something that already exists—and this might be a better angle to take when giving it prompts. You can have Bard change the tone of something, increase or reduce the word count, or adapt something that’s been said in an email to use in a letter. It’ll even translate text into different languages.
Google Bard is pretty proficient when it comes to spreadsheet formulas: Describe what you’re trying to do (e.g. adding up a column of figures or finding an average,) and it’ll tell you exactly how to get that result. You might find that it gives you more than one way to do something—via the menu of a program or by typing into it directly, for instance. Be sure to tell it which spreadsheet application you’re using.
Bard can sometimes give you better answers than you’d get from running the same query as a Google search. Think about all the reasons you type something into that little Google box: to check facts; get recommendations; find something new to watch, read, or listen to; research someone’s background; and so on.
For a lot of the most popular searches, Google tends to serve up a messy collection of SEO-optimized pages that are difficult to dig through and may not include the information you need. With Bard, everything is short and concise—but do be aware that factual inaccuracies can creep in. Always double-check the sources an AI uses when it gives you information.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Try prompting Bard with standard Google search syntax.
Google via David Nield For now, Google Bard is limited to text output—it can’t produce fancy charts or infographics for you in the iteration we’re using at the time of writing. However, the text that it outputs can be formatted in a variety of ways. Think about getting it to produce a checklist of items to take on a camping trip, for example, or bullet points to go over in an interview, a table comparing the various features of two different cars, or a FAQ document for an event.
You might be familiar with the idea of adding keywords to your normal Google searches, and this works with Bard too: If you’re asking it to write a poem, for example, try keywords you want it to focus on (like “love” or “dream”). Bard is smart enough to differentiate between the actual prompt and the extra keywords.
Use keywords to tailor Bard’s output.
Google via David Nield Bard can also improve something you, as a humble human, have created. You can ask it to spot errors in your code, to explain why a certain blurb of text isn’t engaging, or to assess your ideas for a particular project. The more context you give Bard, the better—and bear in mind that Bard is more of a companion to bounce thoughts off than the definitive authority on every aspect of life and culture.
Bard can adapt its output to any audience, whether that’s kids at school or company executives—try including a specific audience in your prompt and see how the output changes. If you’re not completely happy with the response, you can always tweak the audience description or add more details.
You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Contributor X Topics artificial intelligence Google tips learning how-to Boone Ashworth Scott Gilbertson Virginia Heffernan Scott Gilbertson Reece Rogers Carlton Reid Boone Ashworth Boone Ashworth WIRED COUPONS Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Dell Coupon Code American Express Dell Coupon Code: Score 10% off select purchases Best Buy Coupon Best Buy coupon: Score $300 off select laptops VistaPrint promo code 15% off VistaPrint promo code when you sign up for emails Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Select international site United States LargeChevron UK Italia Japón Czech Republic & Slovakia
"
|
2,243 | 2,022 |
"Sharing & publication policy"
|
"https://openai.com/policies/sharing-publication-policy"
|
"Close Search Skip to main content Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Search Navigation quick links Log in Try ChatGPT Menu Mobile Navigation Close Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Quick Links Log in Try ChatGPT Search Sharing & publication policy Updated November 14, 2022 Contents Social media, livestreaming, and demonstrations Content co-authored with the OpenAI API Research Social media, livestreaming, and demonstrations To mitigate the possible risks of AI-generated content, we have set the following policy on permitted sharing.
Posting your own prompts or completions to social media is generally permissible, as is livestreaming your usage or demonstrating our products to groups of people. Please adhere to the following: Manually review each generation before sharing or while streaming.
Attribute the content to your name or your company.
Indicate that the content is AI-generated in a way no user could reasonably miss or misunderstand.
Do not share content that violates our Content Policy or that may offend others.
If taking audience requests for prompts, use good judgment; do not input prompts that might result in violations of our Content Policy.
If you would like to ensure the OpenAI team is aware of a particular completion, you may email us or use the reporting tools within Playground.
Recall that you are interacting with the raw model, which means we do not filter out biased or negative responses. (Also, you can read more about implementing our free Moderation endpoint here.) Content co-authored with the OpenAI API Creators who wish to publish their first-party written content (e.g., a book, compendium of short stories) created in part with the OpenAI API are permitted to do so under the following conditions: The published content is attributed to your name or company.
The role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss, and that a typical reader would find sufficiently easy to understand.
Topics of the content do not violate OpenAI’s Content Policy or Terms of Use , e.g., are not related to adult content, spam, hateful content, content that incites violence, or other uses that may cause social harm.
We kindly ask that you refrain from sharing outputs that may offend others.
For instance, one must detail in a Foreword or Introduction (or some place similar) the relative roles of drafting, editing, etc. People should not represent API-generated content as being wholly generated by a human or wholly generated by an AI, and it is a human who must take ultimate responsibility for the content being published.
Here is some stock language you may use to describe your creative process, provided it is accurate: Research We believe it is important for the broader world to be able to evaluate our research and products, especially to understand and improve potential weaknesses and safety or bias problems in our models. Accordingly, we welcome research publications related to the OpenAI API.
If you have any questions about research publications based on API access or would like to give us advanced notice of a publication (though not required), please email us at [email protected].
In some cases, we may want to highlight your work internally and/or externally.
In others, such as publications that pertain to security or misuse of the API, we may want to take appropriate actions to protect our users.
If you notice any safety or security issues with the API in the course of your research, we ask that you please submit these immediately through our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Program.
Researcher Access Program There are a number of research directions we are excited to explore with the OpenAI API. If you are interested in the opportunity for subsidized access, please provide us with details about your research use case on the Researcher Access Program application.
In particular, we consider the following to be especially important directions, though you are free to craft your own direction: Alignment : How can we understand what objective, if any, a model is best understood as pursuing? How do we increase the extent to which that objective is aligned with human preferences, such as via prompt design or fine-tuning? Fairness and representation : How should performance criteria be established for fairness and representation in language models? How can language models be improved in order to effectively support the goals of fairness and representation in specific, deployed contexts? Interdisciplinary research : How can AI development draw on insights from other disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science, and sociolinguistics? Interpretability and transparency : How do these models work, mechanistically? Can we identify what concepts they’re using, or extract latent knowledge from the model, make inferences about the training procedure, or predict surprising future behavior? Misuse potential : How can systems like the API be misused? What sorts of “red teaming” approaches can we develop to help us and other AI developers think about responsibly deploying technologies like this? Model exploration : Models like those served by the API have a variety of capabilities which we have yet to explore. We’re excited by investigations in many areas including model limitations, linguistic properties, commonsense reasoning, and potential uses for many other problems.
Robustness : Generative models have uneven capability surfaces, with the potential for surprisingly strong and surprisingly weak areas of capability. How robust are large generative models to “natural” perturbations in the prompt, such as phrasing the same idea in different ways or with or without typos? Can we predict the kinds of domains and tasks for which large generative models are more likely to be robust (or not robust), and how does this relate to the training data? Are there techniques we can use to predict and mitigate worst-case behavior? How can robustness be measured in the context of few-shot learning (e.g., across variations in prompts)? Can we train models so that they satisfy safety properties with a very high level of reliability, even under adversarial inputs? Please note that due to a high volume of requests, it takes time for us to review these applications and not all research will be prioritized for subsidy. We will only be in touch if your application is selected for subsidy.
Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Company About Blog Careers Charter Security Customer stories Safety OpenAI © 2015 – 2023 Terms & policies Privacy policy Brand guidelines Social Twitter YouTube GitHub SoundCloud LinkedIn Back to top
"
|
2,244 | 2,023 |
"Business terms"
|
"https://openai.com/policies/business-terms"
|
"Close Search Skip to main content Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Search Navigation quick links Log in Try ChatGPT Menu Mobile Navigation Close Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Quick Links Log in Try ChatGPT Search Business terms Updated November 14, 2023 (Previous versions) These OpenAI Business Terms govern use of our APIs, ChatGPT Enterprise, and other services for businesses and developers. Use of our services for individuals, such as ChatGPT or DALL·E, are governed by the Terms of use.
Thank you for choosing OpenAI! These Business Terms are an agreement between OpenAI, L.L.C. and you (“ Customer ”) that governs your use of our Services (as defined below). If you reside within a European Economic Area country or Switzerland, your agreement is with OpenAI Ireland Ltd. By signing up to use the Services, you agree to be bound by these Business Terms. You represent to us that you are lawfully able to enter into contracts and, if you are entering into these Business Terms for an entity, that you have legal authority to bind that entity. These Business Terms also refer to and incorporate the Service Terms , Sharing & Publication Policy , Usage Policies , and any other guidelines or policies we may provide in writing (the “ OpenAI Policies ”) and any ordering document signed by you and OpenAI or OpenAI webpage that you use to purchase the Services (an “ Order Form ”) (collectively, the “ Agreement ”).
1. Services 1.1 Use of Services.
We grant you a non-exclusive right to access and use the Services during the Term (as defined below). This includes the right to use OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (“ APIs ”) to integrate the Services into your applications, products, or services (each a “ Customer Application ”) and to make Customer Applications available to End Users (as defined below). “ Services ” means any services for businesses and developers we make available for purchase or use, along with any of our associated software, tools, developer services, documentation, and websites, but excluding any Third Party Offering.
1.2 Third-Party Offering.
Third parties may offer products, services, or content through the Services (“ Third Party Offering ”). If you elect, in your sole discretion, to access or use a Third Party Offering (including by making it available via a Customer Application), your access and use of the Third Party Offering is subject to this Agreement and any additional terms applicable to the Third Party Offering.
1.3 Responsibilities for Your Account.
You must provide accurate and up-to-date account information. You are responsible for all activities that occur under your account, including the activities of any end user (each, an “ End User ”) who is provisioned with an account under your account (an “ End User Account ”) or accesses the Services through your Customer Application. You may not make account access credentials available to third parties, share individual login credentials between multiple users on an account, or resell or lease access to your account or any End User Account. You will promptly notify us if you become aware of any unauthorized access to or use of your account or our Services.
2. Restrictions We own all right, title, and interest in and to the Services. You only receive rights to use the Services as explicitly granted in this Agreement. You will not, and will not permit End Users to: (a) use the Services or Customer Content (as defined below) in a manner that violates any applicable laws or OpenAI Policies; (b) use the Services or Customer Content in a manner that infringes, misappropriates, or otherwise violates any third party’s rights; (c) send us any personal information of children under 13 or the applicable age of digital consent or allow minors to use our Services without consent from their parent or guardian; (d) reverse assemble, reverse compile, decompile, translate, engage in model extraction or stealing attacks, or otherwise attempt to discover the source code or underlying components of the Services, algorithms, and systems of the Services (except to the extent these restrictions are contrary to applicable law); (e) use Output (as defined below) to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services. However, you can use Output to (i) develop artificial intelligence models primarily intended to categorize, classify, or organize data (e.g., embeddings or classifiers), as long as such models are not distributed or made commercially available to third parties and (ii) fine tune models provided as part of our Services; (f) use any method to extract data from the Services other than as permitted through the APIs; or (g) buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to or with a third party.
3. Content 3.1 Customer Content.
You and End Users may provide input to the Services (“Input”), and receive output from the Services based on the Input (“Output”). We call Input and Output together “Customer Content.” As between you and OpenAI, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you (a) retain all ownership rights in Input and (b) own all Output. We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.
3.2 Our Obligations for Customer Content.
We will process and store Customer Content in accordance with our Enterprise privacy commitments. We will only use Customer Content as necessary to provide you with the Services, comply with applicable law, and enforce OpenAI Policies. We will not use Customer Content to develop or improve the Services.
3.3 Your Obligations for Customer Content.
You are responsible for all Input and represent and warrant that you have all rights, licenses, and permissions required to provide Input to the Services. You are solely responsible for all use of the Outputs and evaluating the Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including by utilizing human review as appropriate.
3.4 Similarity of Output.
You acknowledge that due to the nature of our Services and artificial intelligence generally, Output may not be unique and other users may receive similar content from our services. Responses that are requested by and generated for other users are not considered your Output. Our assignment of Output above does not extend to other users’ output or any content delivered as part of a Third Party Offering.
4. Confidentiality 4.1 Use and Nondisclosure.
“Confidential Information” means any business, technical or financial information, materials, or other subject matter disclosed by one party (“Discloser”) to the other party (“Recipient”) that is identified as confidential at the time of disclosure or should be reasonably understood by Recipient to be confidential under the circumstances. For the avoidance of doubt, Confidential Information includes Customer Content. Recipient agrees it will: (a) only use Discloser's Confidential Information to exercise its rights and fulfill its obligations under this Agreement, (b) take reasonable measures to protect the Confidential Information, and (c) not disclose the Confidential Information to any third party except as expressly permitted in this Agreement.
4.2 Exceptions.
The obligations in Section 4.1 do not apply to any information that (a) is or becomes generally available to the public through no fault of Recipient, (b) was in Recipient’s possession or known by it prior to receipt from Discloser, (c) was rightfully disclosed to Recipient without restriction by a third party, or (d) was independently developed without use of Discloser’s Confidential Information. Recipient may disclose Confidential Information only to its employees, contractors, and agents who have a need to know and who are bound by confidentiality obligations at least as restrictive as those of this Agreement. Recipient will be responsible for any breach of this Section 4 by its employees, contractors, and agents. Recipient may disclose Confidential Information to the extent required by law, provided that Recipient uses reasonable efforts to notify Discloser in advance.
5. Security 5.1 Our Security Program.
We will maintain an information security program (including the adoption and enforcement of internal policies and procedures) designed to (a) protect the Services and Customer Content against accidental or unlawful loss, access, or disclosure, (b) identify reasonably foreseeable and internal risks to security and unauthorized access, and (c) minimize security risks, including through regular risk assessments and testing.
5.2 Our Security Obligations.
As part of our information security program, we will: (a) implement and enforce policies related to electronic, network, and physical monitoring and data storage, transfer, and access; (b) deploy production infrastructure behind VPNs where possible; (c) require multi-factor authentication for employees; (d) configure network security, firewalls, accounts, and resources for least-privilege access; (e) maintain a logging and incident response process; (f) maintain corrective action plans to respond to potential security threats; and (g) conduct periodic reviews of our security and the adequacy of our information security program as aligned to industry best practices and our own policies and procedures.
6. Privacy 6.1 Personal Data.
If you use the Services to process personal data, you must (a) provide legally adequate privacy notices and obtain necessary consents for the processing of personal data by the Services, (b) process personal data in accordance with applicable law, and (c) if processing “personal data” or “Personal Information” as defined under applicable data protection laws, execute our Data Processing Addendum by filling out this form.
6.2 HIPAA.
You agree not to use the Services to create, receive, maintain, transmit, or otherwise process any information that includes or constitutes “Protected Health Information”, as defined under the HIPAA Privacy Rule (45 C.F.R. Section 160.103), unless you have signed a Healthcare Addendum and Business Associate Agreement (together, the “Healthcare Addendum”) with us prior to creating, receiving, maintaining, transmitting, or otherwise processing this information.
7. Payment; Taxes 7.1 Fees and Billing.
You agree to pay all fees charged to your account (“Fees”) according to the prices and terms on the Pricing Page , or as otherwise stated in an Order Form. Price changes on the Pricing Page will be effective immediately for all price decreases or changes made for legal reasons. All other price changes will be effective 14 days after they are posted. We have the right to correct pricing errors or mistakes even after issuing an invoice or receiving payment. You authorize us and our third-party payment processor(s) to charge the payment method provided on your account on an agreed-upon periodic basis, but we may reasonably change the date on which the charge is posted. Fees are payable in U.S. dollars and are due upon invoice issuance, unless otherwise agreed in an Order Form. Payments are nonrefundable except as provided in this Agreement.
7.2 Service Credits.
You may need to prepay for Services through the purchase of credits (“Service Credits”) or we may provide you with promotional Service Credits from time-to-time. All Service Credits are subject to our Service Credit Terms.
7.3 Taxes.
Fees are exclusive of taxes, which we will charge as required by applicable law in connection with the Services. We will use the name and address in your account as the place of supply for tax purposes.
7.4 Disputes and Late Payments.
To dispute an invoice, you must contact [email protected] within thirty (30) days of issuance. Overdue undisputed amounts may be subject to a finance charge of 1.5% of the unpaid balance per month, and we may suspend the Services immediately after providing written notice of late payment.
8. Term; Termination 8.1 Term.
The term of this Agreement will commence upon the earlier of your online acceptance of these Business Terms, the Effective Date of an Order Form, or the date you first use the Services, and will remain in effect until terminated pursuant to this Section 8 (“Term”). If you purchase a subscription to the Services, the subscription term will automatically renew for successive periods unless either of us gives the other notice of its intent not to renew. That notice must be given at least thirty days before the start of the next renewal period.
8.2 Termination.
Unless you purchase Services for a committed duration, you may terminate this Agreement at any time by deleting your account. Both you and OpenAI may terminate this Agreement upon written notice (a) if the other party materially breaches this Agreement and does not cure the breach within thirty (30) days after receiving written notice of the breach or (b) if the other party ceases its business operations or becomes subject to insolvency proceedings. We may suspend your or any End User’s access to the Services or terminate this Agreement or any Order Form: (i) if required to do so by law; (ii) to prevent a security risk or other credible risk of harm or liability to us, the Services, or any third party; or (iii) for repeated or material violations of the OpenAI Policies. We will use reasonable efforts to notify you of any suspension or termination and give you the opportunity to resolve the issue prior to suspension or termination.
8.3 Effect of Termination.
Termination or expiration will not affect any rights or obligations, including the payment of amounts due, which have accrued under this Agreement up to the date of termination or expiration. Upon termination or expiration of this Agreement, the provisions that are intended by their nature to survive termination will survive and continue in full force and effect in accordance with their terms, including confidentiality obligations, limitations of liability, and disclaimers. Upon termination of this Agreement, we will delete all Customer Content from our systems within 30 days, unless we are legally required to retain it.
9. Warranties; Disclaimer 9.1 Warranties.
We warrant that, during the Term, when used in accordance with this Agreement, the Services will conform in all material respects with the documentation we provide to you or otherwise make publicly available.
9.2 Disclaimer.
Except for the warranties in this Section 9, the Services are provided “as is” and we and our affiliates and licensors hereby disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including all implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and title, noninfringement, or quiet enjoyment, and any warranties arising out of course of dealing or trade usage. Despite anything to the contrary, we make no representations or warranties (a) that use of the Services will be uninterrupted, error free, or secure, (b) that defects will be corrected, (c) that Customer Content will be accurate, or (d) with respect to Third Party Offerings.
10. Indemnification 10.1 By Us.
We agree to defend and indemnify you for any damages finally awarded by a court of competent jurisdiction and any settlement amounts payable to a third party arising out of a third party claim alleging that the Services (including training data we use to train a model that powers the Services) infringe any third party intellectual property right. This excludes claims to the extent arising from: (a) combination of any Services with products, services, or software not provided by us or on our behalf, (b) fine-tuning, customization, or modification of the Services by any party other than us, (c) the Input or any training data you provide to us, (d) your failure to comply with this Agreement or laws, regulations, or industry standards applicable to you, or (e) Customer Applications (if the claim would not have arisen but for your Customer Application). If we reasonably believes that all or any portion of the Services is likely to become the subject of any infringement claim, we (x) will procure, at our expense, the right for you to continue using the Services in accordance with this Agreement, (y) will replace or modify the allegedly infringing Service so it is non-infringing, or (z), if (x) and (y) are not commercially practicable, we may, in our sole discretion, terminate this Agreement upon written notice to you and refund any prepaid amounts for unused Services. You will promptly comply with all reasonable instructions we provide you with respect to (x) through (y) above, including any instruction to replace, modify, or cease use of an impacted Service.
10.2 By Customer.
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold us and our affiliates and licensors harmless against any liabilities, damages, and costs (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) payable to a third party arising out of a third party claim related to (a) use of the Services in violation of this Agreement (including violation of OpenAI Policies), (b) Customer Applications (if any), or (c) Input.
10.3 Indemnification Procedure.
A party seeking indemnity will provide the indemnifying party with prompt written notice upon becoming aware of any claim, reasonable cooperation in the defense of or investigation of the claim (including preserving and sharing the applicable Customer Content), and allow the indemnifying party sole control of defense and settlement of the claim, provided that the party seeking indemnity is entitled to participate in its own defense at its sole expense. The indemnifying party cannot enter into any settlement or compromise of any claim without prior written consent of the other party, which will not be unreasonably withheld, except that the indemnifying party may without consent enter into any settlement of a claim that resolves the claim without liability to the other party, impairment to any of the other party’s rights, or requiring the other party to make any admission of liability. THE REMEDIES IN THIS SECTION 10 ARE THE SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDIES FOR ANY THIRD PARTY CLAIM THAT THE SERVICES OR CUSTOMER CONTENT INFRINGE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS.
11. Limitation of Liability 11.1 Limitations on Indirect Damages.
Except for (i) a party’s gross negligence or willful misconduct, (ii) your breach of Section 2 (Restrictions), (iii) either party’s breach of its confidentiality obligations under Section 4 (Confidentiality), (iv) our breach of Section 5 (Security), or (v) a party’s indemnification obligations under this Agreement, neither you nor OpenAI or our respective affiliates or licensors will be liable under this Agreement for any indirect, punitive, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages (including lost profits) even if that party has been advised of the possibility of those damages.
11.2 Liability Cap.
Except for (i) a party’s gross negligence or willful misconduct or (ii) a party’s indemnification obligations under this Agreement, each party’s total liability under the Agreement will not exceed the total amount you have paid to us in the twelve (12) months immediately prior to the event giving rise to liability. The foregoing limitations will apply despite any failure of essential purpose of any limited remedy and to the maximum extent permitted under applicable law.
12. Trade Controls You must comply with all applicable trade laws, including sanctions and export control laws. Our Services may not be used in or for the benefit of, or exported or re-exported to (a) any U.S. embargoed country or territory or (b) any individual or entity with whom dealings are prohibited or restricted under applicable trade laws. Our Services may not be used for any end use prohibited by applicable trade laws, and your Input may not include material or information that requires a government license for release or export.
13. Dispute Resolution YOU AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER PROVISIONS: 13.1 MANDATORY ARBITRATION.
You and OpenAI agree to resolve any claims arising out of or relating to this Agreement or our Services, regardless of when the claim arose, even if it was before this Agreement existed (a “ Dispute ”), through final and binding arbitration.
13.2 Informal Dispute Resolution.
We would like to understand and try to address your concerns prior to formal legal action. Before either of us files a claim against the other, we both agree to try to resolve the Dispute informally. You agree to do so by sending us notice through this form.
We will do so by sending you notice to the email address associated with your account. If we are unable to resolve a Dispute within 60 days, either of us has the right to initiate arbitration. We also both agree to attend an individual settlement conference if either party requests one during this time. Any statute of limitations will be tolled during this informal resolution process.
13.3 Arbitration Forum.
Both you or OpenAI may commence binding arbitration through National Arbitration and Mediation (NAM), an alternative dispute resolution provider, and if NAM is not available, you and OpenAI will select an alternative arbitral forum. The initiating party must pay all filing fees for the arbitration and payment for other administrative and arbitrator’s costs will be governed by the arbitration provider’s rules. If your claim is determined to be frivolous, you are responsible for reimbursing us for all administrative, hearing, and other fees that we have incurred as a result of the frivolous claim.
13.4 Arbitration Procedures.
The arbitration will be conducted by telephone, based on written submissions, video conference, or in person in San Francisco, California or at another mutually agreed location. The arbitration will be conducted by a sole arbitrator by NAM under its then-prevailing rules. All issues are for the arbitrator to decide, except a California court has the authority to determine (a) whether any provision of this arbitration agreement should be severed and the consequences of said severance, (b) whether you have complied with conditions precedent to arbitration, and (c) whether an arbitration provider is available to hear the arbitration(s) under Section 13.3. The amount of any settlement offer will not be disclosed to the arbitrator by either party until after the arbitrator determines the final award, if any.
13.5 Exceptions.
Nothing in this Agreement requires arbitration of the following claims: (a) individual claims brought in small claims court; and (b) injunctive or other equitable relief to stop unauthorized use or abuse of the Services or intellectual property infringement.
13.6 NO CLASS ACTIONS.
Disputes must be brought on an individual basis only, and may not be brought as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, consolidated, or representative proceeding. Class arbitrations, class actions, private attorney general actions, and consolidation with other arbitrations are not allowed. If for any reason a Dispute proceeds in court rather than through arbitration, each party knowingly and irrevocably waives any right to trial by jury in any action, proceeding, or counterclaim. This does not prevent either party from participating in a class-wide settlement of claims.
13.7 Batch Arbitration.
If 25 or more claimants represented by the same or similar counsel file demands for arbitration raising substantially similar Disputes within 90 days of each other, then you and OpenAI agree that NAM will administer them in batches of up to 50 claimants each (“ Batch ”), unless there are less than 50 claimants in total or after batching, which will comprise a single Batch. NAM will administer each Batch as a single consolidated arbitration with one arbitrator, one set of arbitration fees, and one hearing held by videoconference or in a location decided by the arbitrator for each Batch. If any part of this section is found to be invalid or unenforceable as to a particular claimant or Batch, it will be severed and arbitrated in individual proceedings.
13.8 Severability.
If any part of this Section 13 is found to be illegal or unenforceable, the remainder will remain in effect, except that if a finding of partial illegality or unenforceability would allow class or representative arbitration, this Section 13 will be unenforceable in its entirety. Nothing in this section will be deemed to waive or otherwise limit the right to seek public injunctive relief or any other non-waivable right, pending a ruling on the substance of that claim from the arbitrator.
14. Modifications to these Business Terms and the OpenAI Policies 14.1 Updates.
We may update these Business Terms or the OpenAI Policies by providing you with reasonable notice, including by posting the update on our website. If, in our sole judgment, an update materially impacts your rights or obligations, we will provide at least 30 days’ notice before the update goes into effect, unless the update is necessary for us to comply with applicable law, in which case we will provide you with as much notice as reasonably possible. Any other updates will be effective on the date we post the updated Business Terms or OpenAI Policies. Your continued use of, or access to, the Services after an update goes into effect will constitute acceptance of the update. If you do not agree with an update, you may stop using the Services or terminate this Agreement under Section 8.2 (Termination).
14.2 Exceptions to Updates.
Except for an update to comply with applicable law, updates to these Business Terms or the OpenAI Policies will not apply to: (a) Disputes between you and OpenAI arising prior to the update; or (b) Order Forms signed by you and OpenAI (as opposed to an automated ordering page) prior to us notifying you of the update. However, to the extent an update relates to a Service or feature launched after an Order Form is signed will be effective upon your first use of such Service 15. Miscellaneous 15.1 Headings.
Headings in these Business Terms are inserted solely for convenience and are not intended to affect the meaning or interpretation of these Business Terms.
15.2 Feedback.
If you provide us with feedback regarding the Services (“Feedback”), you grant us the right to use and exploit Feedback without restriction or compensation.
15.3 Publicity.
You may use our name and marks to describe your use of the Services solely in accordance with our Brand guidelines.
We will not publicly use your name or marks without your prior written approval.
15.4 U.S. Federal Agency Entities.
The Services were developed solely at private expense and are commercial computer software and related documentation within the meaning of the applicable U.S. Federal Acquisition Regulation and agency supplements thereto.
15.5 Entire Agreement.
This Agreement is the entire agreement between you and OpenAI with respect to its subject matter and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous agreements, communications and understandings, whether written or oral. You agree that any terms and conditions contained within any purchase order you send to us will not apply to this Agreement and are null and void.
15.6 Relationship of the Parties.
For all purposes under this Agreement, you and OpenAI will be and act as an independent contractor and will not bind nor attempt to bind the other to any contract.
15.7 No Third Party Beneficiaries.
There are no intended third party beneficiaries to this Agreement, and it is your and OpenAI’s specific intent that nothing contained in this Agreement will give rise to any right or cause of action, contractual or otherwise, in or on behalf of any third party.
15.8 Force Majeure.
Except for payment obligations, neither you nor OpenAI will have any liability for failures or delays resulting from conditions beyond your or OpenAI’s reasonable control, including but not limited to governmental action or acts of terrorism, earthquake or other acts of God, labor conditions, or power failures.
15.9 Assignment.
This Agreement cannot be assigned other than as permitted under this Section 15.9 (Assignment). We may assign this Agreement to an affiliate without notice or your consent. Both you and OpenAI may assign this Agreement to a successor to substantially all the respective party’s assets or business, provided that the assigning party provides reasonable (at least 30 days) prior written notice of the assignment. This Agreement will be binding upon the parties and their respective successors and permitted assigns.
15.10 Notices.
All notices will be in writing. We may provide you notice using the registration information or the email address associated with your account. Service will be deemed given on the date of receipt if delivered by email or on the date sent via courier if delivered by post. We accept service of process at this address: OpenAI, L.L.C., 3180 18th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, Attn: [email protected].
15.11 Severability.
In the event that any provision of this Agreement is determined to be illegal or unenforceable, that provision will be limited or eliminated so that this Agreement will otherwise remain in full force and effect and enforceable.
15.12 Jurisdiction, Venue, and Choice of Law.
This Agreement will be governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding California’s conflicts of law rules or principles. Except as provided in the Section 13 (Dispute Resolution), all claims arising out of or relating to this Agreement will be brought exclusively in the federal or state courts of San Francisco County, California, USA.
Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Company About Blog Careers Charter Security Customer stories Safety OpenAI © 2015 – 2023 Terms & policies Privacy policy Brand guidelines Social Twitter YouTube GitHub SoundCloud LinkedIn Back to top
"
|
2,245 | 2,023 |
"Eric Schmidt: This is how AI will transform how science gets done | MIT Technology Review"
|
"https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/07/05/1075865/eric-schmidt-ai-will-transform-science"
|
"Featured Topics Newsletters Events Podcasts Featured Topics Newsletters Events Podcasts Eric Schmidt: This is how AI will transform the way science gets done Science is about to become much more exciting—and that will affect us all, argues Google's former CEO.
By Eric Schmidt archive page Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library It’s yet another summer of extreme weather, with unprecedented heat waves, wildfires, and floods battering countries around the world. In response to the challenge of accurately predicting such extremes, semiconductor giant Nvidia is building an AI-powered “digital twin” for the entire planet.
This digital twin, called Earth-2 , will use predictions from FourCastNet , an AI model that uses tens of terabytes of Earth system data and can predict the next two weeks of weather tens of thousands of times faster and more accurately than current forecasting methods.
Usual weather prediction systems have the capacity to generate around 50 predictions for the week ahead. FourCastNet can instead predict thousands of possibilities, accurately capturing the risk of rare but deadly disasters and thereby giving vulnerable populations valuable time to prepare and evacuate.
The hoped-for revolution in climate modeling is just the beginning. With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more exciting—and in some ways unrecognizable. The reverberations of this shift will be felt far outside the lab; they will affect us all.
If we play our cards right, with sensible regulation and proper support for innovative uses of AI to address science’s most pressing issues, AI can rewrite the scientific process. We can build a future where AI-powered tools will both save us from mindless and time-consuming labor and also lead us to creative inventions and discoveries, encouraging breakthroughs that would otherwise take decades.
AI in recent months has become almost synonymous with large language models, or LLMs, but in science there are a multitude of different model architectures that may have even bigger impacts. In the past decade, most progress in science has come through smaller, “classical” models focused on specific questions. These models have already brought about profound advances. More recently, larger deep-learning models that are beginning to incorporate cross-domain knowledge and generative AI have expanded what is possible.
Scientists at McMaster and MIT, for example, used an AI model to identify an antibiotic to combat a pathogen that the World Health Organization labeled one of the world’s most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria for hospital patients. A Google DeepMind model can control plasma in nuclear fusion reactions, bringing us closer to a clean-energy revolution. Within health care, the US Food and Drug Administration has already cleared 523 devices that use AI—75% of them for use in radiology.
Reimagining science At its core, the scientific process we all learned in elementary school will remain the same: conduct background research, identify a hypothesis, test it through experimentation, analyze the collected data, and reach a conclusion. But AI has the potential to revolutionize how each of these components looks in the future.
Artificial intelligence is already transforming how some scientists conduct literature reviews. Tools like PaperQA and Elicit harness LLMs to scan databases of articles and produce succinct and accurate summaries of the existing literature—citations included.
Related Story A year after it took biologists by surprise, AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course.
Once the literature review is complete, scientists form a hypothesis to be tested. LLMs at their core work by predicting the next word in a sentence, building up to entire sentences and paragraphs. This technique makes LLMs uniquely suited to scaled problems intrinsic to science’s hierarchical structure and could enable them to predict the next big discovery in physics or biology.
AI can also spread the search net for hypotheses wider and narrow the net more quickly. As a result, AI tools can help formulate stronger hypotheses, such as models that spit out more promising candidates for new drugs. We’re already seeing simulations running multiple orders of magnitude faster than just a few years ago, allowing scientists to try more design options in simulation before carrying out real-world experiments.
Scientists at Caltech, for example, used an AI fluid simulation model to automatically design a better catheter that prevents bacteria from swimming upstream and causing infections. This kind of ability will fundamentally shift the incremental process of scientific discovery, allowing researchers to design for the optimal solution from the outset rather than progress through a long line of progressively better designs, as we saw in years of innovation on filaments in lightbulb design.
Moving on to the experimentation step, AI will be able to conduct experiments faster, cheaper, and at greater scale. For example, we can build AI-powered machines with hundreds of micropipettes running day and night to create samples at a rate no human could match. Instead of limiting themselves to just six experiments, scientists can use AI tools to run a thousand.
Scientists who are worried about their next grant, publication, or tenure process will no longer be bound to safe experiments with the highest odds of success; they will be free to pursue bolder and more interdisciplinary hypotheses. When evaluating new molecules, for example, researchers tend to stick to candidates similar in structure to those we already know, but AI models do not have to have the same biases and constraints.
Eventually, much of science will be conducted at “self-driving labs”—automated robotic platforms combined with artificial intelligence. Here, we can bring AI prowess from the digital realm into the physical world. Such self-driving labs are already emerging at companies like Emerald Cloud Lab and Artificial and even at Argonne National Laboratory.
Finally, at the stage of analysis and conclusion, self-driving labs will move beyond automation and, informed by experimental results they produced, use LLMs to interpret the results and recommend the next experiment to run. Then, as partners in the research process, the AI lab assistant could order supplies to replace those used in earlier experiments and set up and run the next recommended experiments overnight, with results ready to deliver in the morning—all while the experimenter is home sleeping.
Possibilities and limitations Young researchers might be shifting nervously in their seats at the prospect. Luckily, the new jobs that emerge from this revolution are likely to be more creative and less mindless than most current lab work.
AI tools can lower the barrier to entry for new scientists and open up opportunities to those traditionally excluded from the field. With LLMs able to assist in building code, STEM students will no longer have to master obscure coding languages, opening the doors of the ivory tower to new, nontraditional talent and making it easier for scientists to engage with fields beyond their own. Soon, specifically trained LLMs might move beyond offering first drafts of written work like grant proposals and might be developed to offer “peer” reviews of new papers alongside human reviewers.
AI tools have incredible potential, but we must recognize where the human touch is still important and avoid running before we can walk. For example, successfully melding AI and robotics through self-driving labs will not be easy. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that scientists learn in labs that is difficult to pass to AI-powered robotics. Similarly, we should be cognizant of the limitations—and even hallucinations—of current LLMs before we offload much of our paperwork, research, and analysis to them.
Companies like OpenAI and DeepMind are still leading the way in new breakthroughs, models, and research papers, but the current dominance of industry won’t last forever. DeepMind has so far excelled by focusing on well-defined problems with clear objectives and metrics. One of its most famous successes came at the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, a biennial competition where research teams predict a protein’s exact shape from the order of its amino acids.
From 2006 to 2016, the average score in the hardest category ranged from around 30 to 40 on CASP’s scale of 1 to 100. Suddenly, in 2018, DeepMind’s AlphaFold model scored a whopping 58. An updated version called AlphaFold2 scored 87 two years later, leaving its human competitors even further in the dust.
Related Story Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
Thanks to open-source resources, we’re beginning to see a pattern where industry hits certain benchmarks and then academia steps in to refine the model. After DeepMind’s release of AlphaFold, Minkyung Baek and David Baker at the University of Washington released RoseTTAFold, which uses DeepMind’s framework to predict the structures of protein complexes instead of only the single protein structures that AlphaFold could originally handle. More important, academics are more shielded from the competitive pressures of the market, so they can venture beyond the well-defined problems and measurable successes that attract DeepMind.
In addition to reaching new heights, AI can help verify what we already know by addressing science’s replicability crisis. Around 70% of scientists report having been unable to reproduce another scientist’s experiment—a disheartening figure. As AI lowers the cost and effort of running experiments, it will in some cases be easier to replicate results or conclude that they can’t be replicated, contributing to a greater trust in science.
The key to replicability and trust is transparency. In an ideal world, everything in science would be open access, from articles without paywalls to open-source data, code, and models. Sadly, with the dangers that such models are able to unleash, it isn’t always realistic to make all models open source. In many cases, the risks of being completely transparent outweigh the benefits of trust and equity. Nevertheless, to the extent that we can be transparent with models—especially classical AI models with more limited uses—we should be.
The importance of regulation With all these areas, it’s essential to remember the inherent limitations and risks of artificial intelligence. AI is such a powerful tool because it allows humans to accomplish more with less: less time, less education, less equipment. But these capabilities make it a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Andrew White, a professor at the University of Rochester, was contracted by OpenAI to participate in a “ red team ” that could expose GPT-4’s risks before it was released. Using the language model and giving it access to tools, White found it could propose dangerous compounds and even order them from a chemical supplier. To test the process, he had a (safe) test compound shipped to his house the next week. OpenAI says it used his findings to tweak GPT-4 before it was released.
Even humans with entirely good intentions can still prompt AIs to produce bad outcomes. We should worry less about creating the Terminator and, as computer scientist Stuart Russell has put it, more about becoming King Midas, who wished for everything he touched to turn to gold and thereby accidentally killed his daughter with a hug.
We have no mechanism to prompt an AI to change its goal, even when it reacts to its goal in a way we don’t anticipate. One oft-cited hypothetical asks you to imagine telling an AI to produce as many paper clips as possible. Determined to accomplish its goal, the model hijacks the electrical grid and kills any human who tries to stop it as the paper clips keep piling up. The world is left in shambles. The AI pats itself on the back; it has done its job. (In a wink to this famous thought experiment, many OpenAI employees carry around branded paper clips.) OpenAI has managed to implement an impressive array of safeguards, but these will only remain in place as long as GPT-4 is housed on OpenAI’s servers. The day will likely soon come when someone manages to copy the model and house it on their own servers. Such frontier models need to be protected to prevent thieves from removing the AI safety guardrails so carefully added by their original developers.
To address both intentional and unintentional bad uses of AI, we need smart, well-informed regulation—on both tech giants and open-source models—that doesn’t keep us from using AI in ways that can be beneficial to science. Although tech companies have made strides in AI safety, government regulators are currently woefully underprepared to enact proper laws and should take greater steps to educate themselves on the latest developments.
Beyond regulation, governments—along with philanthropy—can support scientific projects with a high social return but little financial return or academic incentive. Several areas are especially urgent, including climate change, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness. It is in these areas where we most need the speed and scale that AI simulations and self-driving labs offer.
Related Story And it’s giving the data away for free, which could spur new scientific discoveries.
Government can also help develop large, high-quality data sets such as those on which AlphaFold relied—insofar as safety concerns allow. Open data sets are public goods: they benefit many researchers, but researchers have little incentive to create them themselves. Government and philanthropic organizations can work with universities and companies to pinpoint seminal challenges in science that would benefit from access to powerful databases.
Chemistry, for example, has one language that unites the field, which would seem to lend itself to easy analysis by AI models. But no one has properly aggregated data on molecular properties stored across dozens of databases, which keeps us from accessing insights into the field that would be within reach of AI models if we had a single source. Biology, meanwhile, lacks the known and calculable data that underlies physics or chemistry, with subfields like intrinsically disordered proteins that are still mysterious to us. It will therefore require a more concerted effort to understand—and even record—the data for an aggregated database.
The road ahead to broad AI adoption in the sciences is long, with a lot that we must get right, from building the right databases to implementing the right regulations, mitigating biases in AI algorithms to ensuring equal access to computing resources across borders.
Nevertheless, this is a profoundly optimistic moment. Previous paradigm shifts in science, like the emergence of the scientific process or big data, have been inwardly focused—making science more precise, accurate, and methodical. AI, meanwhile, is expansive, allowing us to combine information in novel ways and bring creativity and progress in the sciences to new heights.
Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011. He is currently cofounder of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better, applying science and technology, and bringing people together across fields.
hide by Eric Schmidt Share linkedinlink opens in a new window twitterlink opens in a new window facebooklink opens in a new window emaillink opens in a new window Popular This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI Melissa Heikkilä Everything you need to know about artificial wombs Cassandra Willyard Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7 Zeyi Yang How to fix the internet Katie Notopoulos Deep Dive Artificial intelligence This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.
By Melissa Heikkilä archive page Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7 With just a few minutes of sample video and $1,000, brands never have to stop selling their products.
By Zeyi Yang archive page Driving companywide efficiencies with AI Advanced AI and ML capabilities revolutionize how administrative and operations tasks are done.
By MIT Technology Review Insights archive page Rogue superintelligence and merging with machines: Inside the mind of OpenAI’s chief scientist An exclusive conversation with Ilya Sutskever on his fears for the future of AI and why they’ve made him change the focus of his life’s work.
By Will Douglas Heaven archive page Stay connected Illustration by Rose Wong Get the latest updates from MIT Technology Review Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.
Enter your email Thank you for submitting your email! It looks like something went wrong.
We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at [email protected] with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.
The latest iteration of a legacy Advertise with MIT Technology Review © 2023 MIT Technology Review About About us Careers Custom content Advertise with us International Editions Republishing MIT News Help Help & FAQ My subscription Editorial guidelines Privacy policy Terms of Service Write for us Contact us twitterlink opens in a new window facebooklink opens in a new window instagramlink opens in a new window rsslink opens in a new window linkedinlink opens in a new window
"
|
2,246 | 2,018 |
"EXCLUSIVE: Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies | MIT Technology Review"
|
"https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/25/138962/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies"
|
"Featured Topics Newsletters Events Podcasts Featured Topics Newsletters Events Podcasts EXCLUSIVE: Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies A daring effort is under way to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.
By Antonio Regalado archive page H. Ma et al./Nature When Chinese researchers first edited the genes of a human embryo in a lab dish in 2015, it sparked global outcry and pleas from scientists not to make a baby using the technology, at least for the present.
It was the invention of a powerful gene-editing tool, CRISPR, which is cheap and easy to deploy, that made the birth of humans genetically modified in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) center a theoretical possibility.
Now, it appears it may already be happening.
According to Chinese medical documents posted online this month ( here and here ), a team at the Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen, has been recruiting couples in an effort to create the first gene-edited babies. They planned to eliminate a gene called CCR5 in hopes of rendering the offspring resistant to HIV, smallpox, and cholera.
The clinical trial documents describe a study in which CRISPR is employed to modify human embryos before they are transferred into women’s uteruses.
The scientist behind the effort, He Jiankui, did not reply to a list of questions about whether the undertaking had produced a live birth. Reached by telephone, he declined to comment.
However, data submitted as part of the trial listing shows that genetic tests have been carried out on fetuses as late as 24 weeks, or six months. It’s not known if those pregnancies were terminated, carried to term, or are ongoing.
[After this story was published, the Associated Press reported that according to He, one couple in the trial gave birth to twin girls this month, though the agency wasn't able to confirm his claim independently. He also released a promotional video about his project.] The birth of the first genetically tailored humans would be a stunning medical achievement, for both He and China. But it will prove controversial, too. Where some see a new form of medicine that eliminates genetic disease, others see a slippery slope to enhancements, designer babies, and a new form of eugenics.
The step toward genetically tailored humans was undertaken in secrecy and with the clear ambition of a stunning medical first.
“In this ever more competitive global pursuit of applications for gene editing, we hope to be a stand-out,” He and his team wrote in an ethics statement they submitted last year. They predicted their innovation “will surpass” the invention of in vitro fertilization, whose developer was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2010.
Gene-editing summit The claim that China has already made genetically altered humans comes just as the world’s leading experts are jetting into Hong Kong for the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing.
The purpose of the international meeting is to help determine whether humans should begin to genetically modify themselves, and if so, how. That purpose now appears to have been preempted by the actions of He, an elite biologist recruited back to China from the US as part of its “ Thousand Talents Plan.
” The technology is ethically charged because changes to an embryo would be inherited by future generations and could eventually affect the entire gene pool. “We have never done anything that will change the genes of the human race, and we have never done anything that will have effects that will go on through the generations,” David Baltimore, a biologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology, who chairs the international summit proceedings, said in a pre-recorded message ahead of the event, which begins Tuesday, November 27.
It appears the organizers of the summit were also kept in the dark about He’s plans.
Regret and concern The genetic editing of a speck-size human embryo carries significant risks, including the risks of introducing unwanted mutations or yielding a baby whose body is composed of some edited and some unedited cells. Data on the Chinese trial site indicate that one of the fetuses is a “mosaic” of cells that had been edited in different ways.
A gene-editing scientist, Fyodor Urnov, associate director of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, a nonprofit in Seattle, reviewed the Chinese documents and said that, while incomplete, they do show that “this effort aims to produce a human” with altered genes.
Urnov called the undertaking cause for “regret and concern over the fact that gene editing—a powerful and useful technique—was put to use in a setting where it was unnecessary.” Indeed, studies are already under way to edit the same gene in the bodies of adults with HIV. “It is a hard-to-explain foray into human germ-line genetic engineering that may overshadow in the mind of the public a decade of progress in gene editing of adults and children to treat existing disease,” he says.
Big project In a scientific presentation in 2017 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is posted to YouTube , He described a very large series of preliminary experiments on mice, monkeys, and more than 300 human embryos. One risk of CRISPR is that it can introduce accidental or “off target” mutations. But He claimed he found few or no unwanted changes in the test embryos.
He is also the chairman and founder of a DNA sequencing company called Direct Genomics.
A new breed of biotech companies could ultimately reap a windfall should the new methods of conferring health benefits on children be widely employed.
According to the clinical trial plan, genetic measurements would be carried out on embryos and would continue during pregnancy to check on the status of the fetuses. During his 2017 presentation, He acknowledged that if the first CRISPR baby were unhealthy, it could prove a disaster.
“We should do this slow and cautious, since a single case of failure could kill the whole field,” he said.
A listing describing the study was posted in November, but other trial documents are dated as early as March of 2017. That was only a month after the National Academy of Sciences in the US gave guarded support for gene-edited babies, although only if they could be created safely and under strict oversight.
Currently, using a genetically engineered embryo to establish a pregnancy would be illegal in much of Europe and prohibited in the United States. It is also prohibited in China under a 2003 ministerial guidance to IVF clinics. It is not clear if He got special permission or disregarded the guidance, which may not have the force of law.
Related Story Public opinion In recent weeks, He has begun an active outreach campaign, speaking to ethics advisors, commissioning an opinion poll in China, and hiring an American public-relations professional, Ryan Ferrell.
“My sense is that the groundwork for future self-justification is getting laid,” says Benjamin Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Arizona State University who will attend the Hong Kong summit.
The new opinion poll , which was carried out by Sun Yat-Sen University, found wide support for gene editing among the sampled 4,700 Chinese, including a group of respondents who were HIV positive. More than 60% favored legalizing edited children if the objective was to treat or prevent disease. (Polls by the Pew Research Center have found similar levels support in the US for gene editing.) He’s choice to edit the gene called CCR5 could prove controversial as well. People without working copies of the gene are believed to be immune or highly resistant to infection by HIV. In order to mimic the same result in embryos, however, He’s team has been using CRISPR to mutate otherwise normal embryos to damage the CCR5 gene.
The attempt to create children protected from HIV also falls into an ethical gray zone between treatment and enhancement. That is because the procedure does not appear to cure any disease or disorder in the embryo, but instead attempts to create a health advantage, much as a vaccine protects against chicken pox.
For the HIV study, doctors and AIDS groups recruited Chinese couples in which the man was HIV positive. The infection has been a growing problem in China.
So far, experts have mostly agreed that gene editing shouldn’t be used to make “designer babies” whose physical looks or personality has been changed.
He appeared to anticipate the concerns his study could provoke. “I support gene editing for the treatment and prevention of disease,” He posted in November to the social media site WeChat, “but not for enhancement or improving I.Q., which is not beneficial to society.” Related Story Still, removing the CCR5 gene to create HIV resistance may not present a particularly strong reason to alter a baby’s heredity. There are easier, less expensive ways to prevent HIV infection. Also, editing embryos during an IVF procedure would be costly, high-tech, and likely to remain inaccessible in many poor regions of the world where HIV is rampant.
A person who knows He said his scientific ambitions appear to be in line with prevailing social attitudes in China, including the idea that the larger communal good transcends individual ethics and even international guidelines.
Behind the Chinese trial also lies some bold thinking about how evolution can be shaped by science. While the natural mutation that disables CCR5 is relatively common in parts of Northern Europe, it is not found in China. The distribution of the genetic trait around the world—in some populations but not in others—highlights how genetic engineering might be used to pick the most useful inventions discovered by evolution over the eons in different locations and bring them together in tomorrow’s children.
Such thinking could, in the future, yield people who have only the luckiest genes and never suffer Alzheimer’s, heart disease, or certain infections.
The text of an academic website that He maintains shows that he sees the technology in the same historic, and transformative, terms. “For billions of years, life progressed according to Darwin’s theory of evolution,” it states. More recently, industrialization has changed the environment in radical ways posing a “great challenge” that humanity can meet with “powerful tools to control evolution.” It concludes: “By correcting the disease genes … we human[s] can better live in the fast-changing environment.” Note: This story was updated after publication to include claims by He Jiankui that the trial had produced live births.
hide by Antonio Regalado Share linkedinlink opens in a new window twitterlink opens in a new window facebooklink opens in a new window emaillink opens in a new window Popular This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI Melissa Heikkilä Everything you need to know about artificial wombs Cassandra Willyard Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7 Zeyi Yang How to fix the internet Katie Notopoulos Deep Dive Uncategorized The Download: how to fight pandemics, and a top scientist turned-advisor Plus: Humane's Ai Pin has been unveiled By Rhiannon Williams archive page The race to destroy PFAS, the forever chemicals Scientists are showing these damaging compounds can be beat.
By John Wiegand archive page How scientists are being squeezed to take sides in the conflict between Israel and Palestine Tensions over the war are flaring on social media—with real-life ramifications.
By Antonio Regalado archive page These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased Two new papers from Sony and Meta describe novel methods to make bias detection fairer.
By Melissa Heikkilä archive page Stay connected Illustration by Rose Wong Get the latest updates from MIT Technology Review Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.
Enter your email Thank you for submitting your email! It looks like something went wrong.
We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at [email protected] with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.
The latest iteration of a legacy Advertise with MIT Technology Review © 2023 MIT Technology Review About About us Careers Custom content Advertise with us International Editions Republishing MIT News Help Help & FAQ My subscription Editorial guidelines Privacy policy Terms of Service Write for us Contact us twitterlink opens in a new window facebooklink opens in a new window instagramlink opens in a new window rsslink opens in a new window linkedinlink opens in a new window
"
|
2,247 | 2,017 |
"Zimbabwe - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/zim"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Zimbabwe 27 Jul - 28 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 70 Location: Houghton Park, Harare, Zimbabwe ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Daphne Machangara ( [email protected]) Bruce Musabaeka ( [email protected]) Edward Mundondi ( [email protected]) Kudzai Zhuwaki ( [email protected]) Blessing Sibanda ( [email protected]) Leonard Mutambanengwe ( ) Event website: Host Institution SEAL hub Schedule 26 Jul 2023 Virtual pre-conference workshops Mathematics and Statistics Programming for DS/ML/DL Data Science 101 and Hackathon Walkthrough Fundamentals of Deep Learning and Transfer Learning Deploying Machine Learning Models 27 Jul 2023 09:00 - 09:10 Registration 09:10 - 09:15 Welcome remarks 09:15 – 10:15 Bridging the Data Science Exploration, Research and Deployment Divide (Practical/Tutorial) 10:20 – 10:50 Navigating the Intersection of AI and Industry: Opportunities and Challenges for Researchers and Startups (Talk) 10:55 - 11:15 Tea break 11:15 – 11:45 Unpacking the deep learning application areas 11:50 – 12:20 Invited guests presentation 12:25 – 12:45 WhatsApp Chatbots in Zimbabwe (Research findings) 12:45 – 13:00 Poster session 13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH BREAK & GROUP PICS 14:00 – 14:30 Exploring the Intersection of AI and Industry in Africa (Talk) 14:35 – 15:15 SisonkeBiotik Presentation 115:20 – 15:50 AI in African Industries and Abroad: What is the gap? Online Motivation: Data Science heroe) 16:00 Closing remarks 28 Jul 2023 09:00 - 09:05 Registration, Welcome Remarks & recap 09:05 - 10:05 Fundamentals of Deep Learning : Transfer Learning (Practical) 10:10 - 11:10 Strategies for your AI journey 11:15 - 11:45 TEA – BREAK 11:45 - 12:30 Data Ethics in Algorithm Modeling 12:35 - 14:05 The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Career Advancement (Motivation: Data Science Heroe) 14:10 - 15:10 LUNCH BREAK & GROUP PICS 15:15 Prizegiving (Poster winners and hackathon) 15:30 Vote of thanks & Closing Remarks, photos for all NETWORKING List of Speakers Prof Attlee M Gamundani Namibia University of Science and Technology Rachael Chikoore Dean: Harare Institute of Technology (School of Information Science and Technology) Coach Stern Zvavamwe Founder: Candoa Careers Henrica Makulu Medscheme Holdings Eng Wellington Gwavava Ruvimbo Mambinge Maxmillan Giyane Midlands State University Tatenda Emma Matika LOIC ELNATHAN TIOKOU FANGANG PhD Candidate (AI): Polytechnic Montreal Dr Chris Fourie A medical doctor turned MLOps / machine learning engineer and health data scientist, trying to use the powers of AI for social good. Co-founded SisonkeBiotik, a grassroots participatory research community making AI/ML for health research in Africa more accessible Robert Selemani Repliteq AI & Zindi Africa Kingsley Owadara Tech Hive Advisory Denzel S Ngwenya TelOne Pvt Ltd / AIMS SA / NUST Sean Thawe HoodSmart Foundation Leonard Mutambanengwe Founder: Data Science Zimbabwe Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,248 | 2,017 |
"Zambia - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/zambia"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Zambia 27 May - 28 May 2023 Number of Attendees: 300 Location: ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Yasin Musa Ayami ( [email protected]) Joseph Kachiliko ( [email protected]) Francis Chikweto ( [email protected]) Event website: Host Institution Virtual Schedule 27 May 2023 KeyNote: ChatGPT: What opportunities exist? Elisha Bax Dibakoane Panel Discussion: Exploring the Future of Machine Learning and AI in Zambia Research Showcase (Poster Presentation) 28 May 2023 PamodziHack Hackathon Hackathon: PamodziHack Hackathon Overview Hacking! Hacking! Hacking! Announcement of Winners and Closing Remarks List of Speakers Elisha (Bax) Dibakoane I am a lead IT professional with experience in Artificial Intelligence, Business Data Analytics, Agile Project Management, Business Process Engineering, Product Development and People leadership with a proven track record in delivering successful projects for major private and public enterprises.
Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,249 | 2,017 |
"Uganda - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/uganda"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Uganda 26 Jul - 28 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 156 Location: Silver Springs Hotel, Bugolobi ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Bruno Ssekiwere ( [email protected]) Claire Babirye ( [email protected]) Hewitt Tusiime ( [email protected]) Eugene Miheso Swinnerstone ( [email protected]) Dorothy Kabarozi ( [email protected]) Samiiha Nalwooga ( [email protected]) Jean Amukwatse ( [email protected]) Timothy Kivumbi ( [email protected]) Desire Regina Nakabuuka ( [email protected]) Aziizi Kakooza ( [email protected]) Jovia Nakazibwe ( [email protected] ) Event website: https://indabaxug.github.io/ Host Institution Deep Learning IndabaX Uganda Schedule 26 Jul 2023 9:00 AM- 10:00 AM: Python and Data Science Fundamentals - Jean Amukwatse 10:00 AM- 11:00 AM: Machine Learning - Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Isaac Mukonyezi - 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Data Visualization - Richard Sserujongi 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM : Deep Learning /Neural Networks - Samiiha Nalwooga 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: NLP (Real life applications and implementation) - Vukosi 27 Jul 2023 9:00 AM- 10:00 AM : Linear Algebra - Claire Babirye 10:00 AM- 11:00 AM: Computer Vision- Jeremy Francis Tusubira 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Vertex AI (ML on Google Cloud) - Marvin Ngesa 2:00 PM- 4:00 PM: Pitching of Ideas 28 Jul 2023 8:00am – 8:30am: Arrival and Registration - All 8:30 am – 8:40 am : Welcome note and Opening Remarks: Bruno Ssekiwere (Team Lead) 8:40 am – 9:20 am : Keynote: Establishing solid foundations for multidisciplinary research to promote AI in Uganda. Dr. Kitoogo Fredrick - Principal UICT, former Director Planning NITA-U 9:20 am - 10:00 am: Invited talk: Artificial Intelligence for UN Sustainable Development Goals. Dr. Martin Mubangizi, Head UN Global Pulse Lab Kampala 10:00 am - 10:30 am: Group photo Tea Break/Exhibitions (10:00 am - 10:30 am) 10:30 am - 11:10 am: Invited talk: Emerging trends in Artificial Intelligence Dr. Ernest Mwebaze, Executive Director, Sunbird AI 11:10 pm - 12:30 pm: Panel session 1: The application and impact of AI in various domains - Dr. Godliver Owomugisha, Head- Busitema AI and Interdisciplinary Research Group, Busitema University - Mr. Mwanja Joel, CTO - Tubayo - Ms. Grace Aikomo, Data Scientist - Mara Scientific - Mr. Alvin Kabwama, Special Tactics Team Lead, NSSF Moderator: Barbara Apilli 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Lunch and Project Exhibitions (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm) 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm: Spotlight talks - Language Hackathon: Kickstarting translation apps in UG (Presentations from the top 3 teams) 2:45 pm - 3:50 pm: Panel session 2: Harnessing the Power of AI: Building stronger communities through interdisciplinary collaboration - Mr. Mbaka Paul, Ass. Commissioner, Health Services - Division of Health Information Management, Ministry of Health - Mr. Mugagga Pius, Co-founder and Team Lead, LavingtonData - Dr. Rose Nakasi - Lecturer, Busitema University - Mr. Nsumba Solomon - Software Engineer, Sunbird AI | Ph.D. Student - Makerere University Moderator: Hewitt Tusiime 3:50 pm - 4:00 pm : Hackathon: Announcing and Awarding the winning solution - Organizing committee 4:00 pm : Closing Remarks & Departure - Organizing committee List of Speakers Dr. Kitoogo Fredrick Principal UICT, former Director Planning NITA-U Dr. Martin Mubangizi Head of Office, UN Pulse Lab, Kampala Dr. Ernest Mwebaze Executive Director, Sunbird AI Dr. Joyce Nakatumba Head Makerere AI Lab Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,250 | 2,017 |
"Tunisia - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/tunisia"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Tunisia 13 May - 14 May 2023 Number of Attendees: 350 Location: Ariana, Tunis, Tunisia ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Soulaimene Turki ( [email protected]) Nourhene Azaiez ( [email protected]) Sabrine Ben Ali ( [email protected]) Rim Allouche ( ) Sarra Zayani ( ) Hiba Daoud ( ) Cyrine Anene ( ) Skander Chayoukhi ( ) Anas Ben Amor ( ) Ghofrane Barouni ( ) Farah Elloumi ( ) Neirouz Ben Dhaou ( ) Elyes Besbes ( ) Edam Hamza ( ) Akram Dhouib ( ) Event website: https://www.indabaxtunisia.com/2023/index.html#hero Host Institution Higher School of Communication of Tunis Schedule 13 May 2023 8:30 am -> 9:30 am : check-in and opening Ceremony 9:30 am -> 10:00 am : Keynote by Mr. Karim Beguir 10:30 am -> 11:00 am : Keynote by Mr. Firas Ben Hassen 11:00 am -> 11:30 am : Keynote by Mr. Tom Barret 1:00 pm -> 2:30 pm : Workshops: - Machine Learning on edge Computing workshop - Deep Dive into Large Language Models with Python - Build you Reinforcement Learning environment with Jax 3:00 pm -> 4:30 pm : Bio- AI Workshop 5:00 pm : Hackathon start Hackathon theme: predicting the impact of mutation on protein stability 14 May 2023 1:00 pm : Hackathon end 2:00pm -> 3:00 pm : Pitching 3:00 pm : Winners announcement and closing ceremony List of Speakers Oliver Bent An accomplished researcher with a DPhil from the AIMS CDT (Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems) program at the University of Oxford, and currently serves as a senior software engineer on DeepChain core technologies at InstaDeep. His research has focused on the application of machine learning for decision making from computationally expensive simulation models. Oliver also holds his Master of Engineering Science (M.Eng.) degree from the University of Oxford and has worked with numerous organisations internationally, gaining practical experience in applying machine learning to high-impact real-world scenarios. He is dedicated to leveraging machine learning to drive advancements in various domains, including diseases, healthcare and education.
Arnu Pretorius A senior research scientist specializing in Reinforcement Learning at InstaDeep, with a PhD in Computer Science from Stellenbosch University. His doctoral thesis extensively explored the complexities of noise regularized neural networks, with a keen focus on topics such as initialization, learning, and inference. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Arnu is actively involved in cutting-edge research and development efforts related to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), collaborating closely with applied teams to tackle real-world challenges at scale. He is passionate about AI skills development in Africa and is regularly involved in initiatives that aim to strengthen AI talent across the continent.
Rihab Gorsane A Research Engineer and a team lead at InstaDeep. She is currently working on Reinforcement Learning based projects for industrial applications where she is helping to automate the scheduling, routing and dispatching of trains at a large scale for a national rail operator. Rihab is also involved in research projects within the company focusing on Multi-Agent RL. She is passionate about AI skills development in Africa, is a google developer expert in Machine learning and has taught DL/RL courses at Tunisian universities.
Firas Ben Hassen A Lead Data Scientist at Allianz Technology. He manages a team of data scientists and creates analytics models using cloud technologies for customers. He is mainly working on topics related to fraud detection and claims management using Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning (Predictive Modelling ), Natural Language Processing (Text Forensics), Computer Vision (Photo Forensics), and Conversational AI (Chatbot). Firas co-founded Mitakus Analytics, which helps restaurants predict guest numbers and recommend menus based on data. He holds a Master's in Computer Science and won the German accelerator's innovation and entrepreneurship award in 2019.
Oumayma Mahjoub A research engineer in Reinforcement Learning at InstaDeep, a startup specializing in decision-making AI. She is based in Tunis, Tunisia and her primary focus is on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Omayma has a particular interest in fair evaluation, scalability, and robustness of MARL algorithms. Her expertise in the field is demonstrated by a published paper at NeurIPS 2022. Omayma is passionate about exploring new and innovative approaches to tackle complex problems in the field.
Tom Barret A researcher with a wide range of expertise from Artificial Intelligence to Quantum Physics and Optical Computing. During his time at the University of Oxford he obtained a PhD developing methods for the quantum information processing and networking, and held Postdoctoral Research positions considering the application of machine learning to quantum systems. Now a Research Scientist at InstaDeep, Tom has continued to pursue a broad research agenda with projects spanning Structural Biology, Quantum Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning. Overall, he is excited by the potential of AI and new computing hardware to tackle the world's most challenging and impactful problems.
Khalil Rhouma Ghardaddou An AI Research Engineer at InstaDeep. With over 2 years of experience in this field, he has developed a strong background in natural language processing(NLP) and a proven ability to work with cutting-edge algorithms and models for conversational AI. In addition to that, he has also been exploring the intersection of NLP and Biology. With the help of the latest protein language models, he has been working on exciting project related to protein design, which has immense potential in the field of biotechnology.
Haifa Ben Massoud A Bio Engineer from Tunisia with a passion for using AI to solve important problems in biology. She has a master's degree in genetics and biodiversity and an engineering degree in biotechnology. She has experience as a molecular biologist at the National Gene Bank of Tunisia, working on detecting genetically modified organisms in food and crops. Currently, she works at Instadeep Ltd, developing AI applications to identify and classify protein patterns, create personalized healthcare solutions, and improve drug discovery.
Mohamed Ould-Elhassan Aoueileyine An Assistant Professor at the University of Carthage with expertise in ICT, Trainer and Consultant specifically in the fields of IoT, TinyML, eHealth, AI, and Sensor Network. With a strong background in electrical engineering, Mohamed has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of these technologies and how they can be applied to real-world problems. Mohamed's research has focused on a variety of topics within these fields, including the development of smart systems for eHealth, the integration of TinyML in IoT devices, and the security of IoT networks. Mohamed is also working on professional projects related to electrical mobility, as well as embedded Linux for nanosatellites. As an accomplished researcher and educator, Mohamed has published numerous papers and articles in leading academic journals and conferences. He is also an active member of professional organizations in his field such as UIT, AUF and AICTO, and regularly participate in events and conferences to share their expertise and collaborate with other experts in the field.
Karim Beguir The co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep. He helps companies and African leaders come to grips with the latest AI breakthroughs and deploy them. As a graduate of France's Ecole Polytechnique and former program fellow at New York University's Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. He's also a Google Developer Expert and a mentor at the Google for Startups Accelerator, and is a steering committee member of Deep Learning Indaba, Africa’s largest machine learning teaching forum. Karim is on a mission to accelerate the transition to an AI-First world that benefits everyone, and sits on the World Economic Forum's Council on the Future of AI.
Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,251 | 2,017 |
"Senegal - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/senegal"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Senegal 25 Oct - 26 Oct 2023 Number of Attendees: +300 Location: Dakar ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Derguene MBAYE ( [email protected]) Sokhar Samb ( [email protected]) Mouhamadane Mboup ( [email protected]) Mariama Drame ( [email protected]) Adji Fatou Mbaye ( [email protected]) Aimérou Ndiaye ( [email protected]) Mouhamadou Mansour Sow ( [email protected]) Event website: https://indabax.galsen.ai/ Host Institution École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar (ESP) Schedule 25 Oct 2023 8h15 - 9h15 Welcoming participants and badge collection 9h15 - 10h00 Opening ceremony speeches 10h00 - 10h30 Coffee break + Posters 10h30 - 12h00 Panel : Issues and challenges for the implementation of the National Data Strategy 12h00 - 13h00 Session 1 : AI and Applications 13h00 - 14h30 Lunch break 14h30 - 16h00 Session 2 : IA et Applications 16h00-16h30 Coffee break (30 mn) 16h30 - 17h30 Session 3 : IA et Applications 17h30 - 18h45 Closing the first day 26 Oct 2023 9h00 - 10h00 Keynote: Fairness and RePresentation Learning Moustapha Cissé, CEO de Kera, ex Head of Google Accra 10h00 - 10h30 Coffee break (30 mn) + Posters 10h30 - 12h00 Panel session : Issues and Challenges for the implementation of the National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence 12h00 - 13h00 Session 4 : IA et Applications 13h00 - 15h00 Lunch break 15h00 - 16h30 Corporate Session 16h30 - 16h45 Coffee break 16h45 - 17h30 Overview of posters presented, Overview of the hackathon 17h30-18h00 Remise des prix, Cérémonie de Clôture List of Speakers Moustapha Cissé, ex Head of Google Accra & Founder and CEO of Kera - Fairness and RePresentation Learning - Fairness and Representation Learning Mouhamadou Lamine Kébé CEO of TOLBI AI - Using AI and satellite imagery to improve food security in Africa Elias Waly Ba Software engineer at OpenFn - Scaling Social Good by using AI and Data Integration Ismaila Seck CTO à Lengo - Competitive Machine Learning: why it matters Mamadou Samba Camara, Professor at ESP - 3D Slicer Pr Lamine Thiaw Professor at ESP / Papa Silly TRAORE - Using Machine learning algorithm for wind power forecasting Rose Yvette Bandolo Essomba Freelance DataScientist / Teacher at Dakar Institute of Technology - Tractable Large Scale Calibration with Reinforcement Learning Mamadou Diop Data Scientist at Baamtu - Object detection with Detectron2 Khady Kama NLP Engineer at Baamtu - Introduction to speech recognition with pre-trained models Yahya Baro Senior Project Manager IT - Head of Data at Jasmin Conseil - Methodological support for Data Governance Dr. Ousmane NDIAYE Machine Learning based side channel attacks Ousmane Youme PhD Student in Computer Science at Gaston Berger University - Deep Learning and remote sensing : Application to environmental monitoring Adama Coulibaly PhD Student in Computer Science at École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar - Detecting asphalt road deterioration using Deep Learning applied to drone imagery Dr Modou Gueye Use of AI in road traffic management in Dakar Abdoul Sy CTO of Concree - AI co-pilot for entrepreneurship support: from ideation to business creation Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,252 | 2,017 |
"South Africa - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/sa"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: South Africa 12 Jul - 14 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 300 Location: Cape Town ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Christopher Currin ( [email protected]) Maria Schuld ( [email protected]) Anna Bosman ( [email protected]) Event website: https://indabax.co.za Host Institution University of Cape Town: Deep Learning IndabaX South Africa NPC Schedule 11 Jul 2023 0800-1300: Arrivals and registration 12 Jul 2023 0800-0830: Registration and opening remarks 0900-1000: Opening keynote- Building intelligence for robotics in Africa 1300-1400: Keynote II - Translating astronomical big data into patterns of discovery 1700-2030: AI Fest/Poster sessin/Opening event 13 Jul 2023 0900-1000:Keynote III- Human organism as algorithm 1300-1400: Keynote IV - AI and agency 1630-1800:RL - Foundations V, lightning talks and hackathon prep 1800-2359:hackathon with ZINDI and fruitpunch AI 14 Jul 2023 0900-1000: Keynote V - The AI opportunity for Africa 1300-1530: Workshops 1600-1700: Panel discussion 1800-2030: Instadeep movie night List of Speakers John Kamara John Kamara is a Tech Entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience working in new market acquisitions across various technology verticals in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. John is one of Africa’s leading experts on how businesses can leverage key technology trends, transform organizations and drive competitive advantage for impact in industries including finance, agriculture, health, education, gaming and startup enterprises. John is actively involved and heavily invested in new technologies focusing on IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), Blockchain and Crowdfunding. Having worked in market growth leadership roles for global technology companies at Google, Conduit, eir Ireland, Digicel, BMC Software and others, John is committed to seeing technology play a critical role catapulting Africa into the Fourth Industrial Revolution while creating critical mass impact.
Jay van Zyl Jay van Zyl is a founder at Ecosystem.Ai Kshitij Thorat Kshitij Thorat is a radio astronomer and has worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria. He finished his doctoral work at the Indian Institute of Science in 2014, after which he has been based in South Africa. His research interests revolve around extra-galactic radio sources: their life-cycles, morphology and their impact on their surroundings. With the advent of the Big Data paradigm in radio astronomy, Kshitij has focused on techniques to help process and analyse data better, including development of fully automated data reduction pipelines and machine learning techniques to classify radio galaxies.
Paul Amayo I am a researcher and technology enthusiast with broad experience in both hardware and software development over various sectors (from self-driving cars in the UK to para-transit in Kenya) with a primary focus on robotics. I strongly believe that technology holds the key to solving some of the world’s and in particular Africa’s most pressing problems. My interests are therefore not only in advancement of technology through research but also in its subsequent education that ensures that this technology is adopted into communities where it would be do the most good. I am currently a Senior Lecturer and Prinicipal Investigator at the University of Cape Town Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem is a philosopher of science and technology, an AI ethics policy adviser and a machine ethics researcher.
Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,253 | 2,017 |
"Nigeria - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/nigeria"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Nigeria 09 Jun - 10 Jun 2023 Number of Attendees: 400 Location: Oko-Irese, Kwara State ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Dr Sakinat Folorunso ( [email protected]) Dr Bayo Adekanmbi ( [email protected]) Prof. Francisca Oladipo ( [email protected]) Robert John ( [email protected]) Farohunbi Samuel Tobi ( [email protected]) Ahmed Olanrewaju ( [email protected]) Ezekiel Adebayo Ogundepo ( [email protected]) Adeola Lawal ( [email protected]) Dr Adeyinka Oresanya ( [email protected] ) Ayodele Awokoya ( [email protected]) Kingsley Owadara ( [email protected]) Ayorinde John Oluwafemi ( [email protected]) Bilikisu Olatunji ( [email protected]) Tope James Moses ( [email protected]) Odeajo Israel ( ) Event website: https://indabaxng.github.io/ Host Institution Thomas Adewumi University, University Drive, Oko-Irese, Kwara State Schedule 09 Jun 2023 0800: Registration/Arrival 1110: Welcome address 1155: Keynote address 1235: Award to keynote speaker 1240: Secondary school debate 1300: Lunch 1345: Sponsors 1505: Quiz 1740: Dinner 10 Jun 2023 0800: Breakfast 0940: Unpacking the power of AI: Transforming industries with tensorflow 1000-1200: Parallel talks 1300: Lunch 1425: Awards - poster session & hackathon 1455: Panel session 1515: Womwn in AI & ML panel session 1600: Closing ceremony List of Speakers Professor Abejide Ade-Ibijola Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Applications, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,254 | 2,017 |
"Namibia - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/namibia"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Namibia 13 Jul - 14 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 71 Location: Windhoek ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Prof Jose Quenum ( [email protected]) Dr Lameck Mbangula Amugong ( [email protected]) Prof Attlee Munyaradzi Gamundani ( [email protected]) Ms Ndinelago Tupopila Nashandi ( [email protected]) Ms Ruusa Iipinge ( [email protected]) Ms Ndeshi Kakwambi ( [email protected] ) Event website: www.indabaxnamibia.org Host Institution Namibia University of Science and Technology Schedule 13 Jul 2023 Opening Ceremony Registration -08:30 – 09:00 Participant Registration.
Official Welcoming Remarks - 09:00 – 09:10 Dr Erold Naomab: Vice- Chancellor, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST).
Remarks - 09:10 – 09:15 Ms Kombada Mhopjeni: National Programme Officer for Natural Sciences (UNESCO Windhoek Office).
Remarks - 09:15 – 09:20 Mr Nawa Likando: Head of Digital Transformation and Innovation (MTC).
The future of AI landscape in Namibia: A policy perspective - 09:20 – 09:45 Dr Stanley Shanapinda: Chief Executive Officer (Telecom Namibia Limited) Vote of Thanks - 10:15 – 10:30 Dr Erling Kavita: Executive Director: ADS and Satellite Campuses, NUST.
Tea Break - 10:30 – 11:00 +15 Networking Break Keynote – 11:00 – 11:30 Automatic radio galaxy classification and synthetic image generation using a Variational Autoencoder Dr Kushatha Ntwaetsile: Software and Data Processing Engineer (Botswana International University of Science & Technology).
Technical Talk – 11:30 -12:00 Introduction to AI/Machine Learning Mr Venick Mashuna: Senior Data Scientist | RPA Developer, Bank of Namibia.
Panel Discussion – 12:00 – 13:00 Towards an AI Strategy for Namibia: Creating an enabling environment for AI Advancement Lunch – 13:00 -14:00 +30 Networking Keynote– 14:00 – 14:30 Artificial Learning: From Machine Learning (ML) to Federated Learning (FL) Prof. B. Antoine Bagula | (University of the Western Cape) Workshop 1– 14 :30 – 16 :30 Workshop on Robotics Workshop 2 – 14:30 -16:30 Workshop on Robotics Kitten coding software (CODEMAO) demo.
Workshop 3 – 14:30 -16:30 Building Tech We Trust: Coming together to ensure digital safety and responsible data collection & use in Namibia Poster Sessions – 16:30 -17:00 IndabaX – Social – 18:00 -20:00 Village Market Restaurant 14 Jul 2023 Welcome Remarks - 08:45 – 09:00 Prof Guy-Alain Zodi: Associate Dean: School of Computing, NUST.
Keynote – 09:00 – 09:45 Latest advances in AI: from ChatGPT to multimodal LLM • Internals and applications of ChatGPT • Other Large language models (LLMs) Prof Ndapa Nakashole: Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California (San Diego) Technical Talk – 09:45 – 10:15 Natural language processing for under-resourced African languages Dr David ADELANI: DeepMind Academic Fellow, University College London (UCL).
Tea Break - 10:15 – 10:30 Technical talk – 10:30 – 11:00 Application of AI/ML Paradigms in the Namibian Transportation Sector: Status Quo and Opportunities Dr Robert Ambunda: Transportation Specialist & Senior Lecturer, UNAM.
Panel Discussion – 12:00 – 13:00 Namibia-specific applications of LLMs Lunch - 13:00 -14:00 +30 Networking Break Technical Talk – 14:00 – 14:30 Integrating Core ML with ARKit: Enhancing Augmented Reality Experiences with ML Ms Audrey Chanakira : Lead iOS Developer · Green Enterprise Solutions (Pty) Ltd and Zim Developers co-founder.
Hackathon/ Startup Competition Presentation - 14:30 – 16:00 Hackathon Teams.
Demonstration – 16:00 – 16:30 Document Summarisation using NLP Mr Tangeni Shikomba: Backend Software Engineer, USA.
Awards Ceremony - 16:30 – 17:00 • Opening Remarks by Acting DVC: RIP. • Announcement of Hackathon winners. • Announcement of poster winners.
List of Speakers Dr. Stanley Shanapinda CEO: Telecom Namibia Limited Dr Erold Naomab Vice-Chancellor, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) Ms Kombada Mhopjeni National Programme Officer for Natural Sciences (UNESCO Windhoek Office) Mr. Vinick Mashuna Senior Data Scientist & RPA Developer for Bank of Namibia Dr Kushatha Ntswaetsile Computer Scientist turned Astronomer Anna Hanghome Executive: Information Systems Dr Anna Matros-Goreses Executive Director: Directorate of Research, Innovation and Partnerships Annastasia Shipepe Lecturer of Computing, Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Namibia (UNAM) Prof Ndapa Nakashole Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Dr. Robert Ambunda Lead researcher in the Transport and Mobility Lab Ms Audrey Chanakira Information Technology professional and a passionate advocate for women empowerment in tech-related fields Dr Wanja Njuguna Senior Lecturer: Journalism and Media Technology at Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) Mr Nawa Likando Head of Digital Transformation and Innovation, MTC Dr Erling Kavita Executive Director: Directorate: ADS and Satellite Campuses (NUST) Ms Kiito Shilongo Senior Tech Fellow, Mozilla Foundation Mr Ndaudika Mulundileni CEO/Co-Founder- Engenete Investments cc (Mindsinaction) Prof Guy Alain Zodi Associate Dean: School of Computing, NUST Mr Joseph Mwatukange Customer Experience Administrator, Old Mutual Mr Tangeni Shikomba Backend Software Engineer, USA Dr Colin Stanley Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, innovation and Partnerships (NUST) Prof Fungai Bhunu Shava Acting Executive Dean: Faculty of Computing and Informatics Ms. Josephina Muntuumo Lecturer, School of Computing (UNAM) Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,255 | 2,017 |
"Mozambique - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/moza"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Mozambique 18 May - 20 May 2023 Number of Attendees: Location: Cambine, Morrumbene, Inhambane, Mozambique ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Jean Marie John ( [email protected]) Richard Evans Vilanculo ( [email protected] ) Catarina Cossa ( [email protected] ) Ernesto Neves ( [email protected] ) Tiago Victor Banze ( [email protected] ) Gibrity Pateguana ( [email protected] ) Leonor Marrengula ( [email protected] ) Francisco siueia ( [email protected] ) Steice Jaime ( [email protected] ) Lizete Licumba ( ) Calton Raimundo ( [email protected] ) Aquilivio Maria ( [email protected] ) Maica Lucia ( ) Event website: www. indabaxmozambique.umum.education Host Institution United Methodist University of Mozambique Schedule 18 May 2023 Notas de boas vindas e abertura do evento Notas introdutórias sobre o evento IndabaX Apresentanção do programa Apresentação dos convidados 19 May 2023 IA Realidade Virtual Automatic music generation with deep learning with an emphasis on tablatures/ Geração automática de música com deep learning com ênfase em tablaturas Introdução ao Aprendizado de Máquina e seus algoritmos/ Introduction to Machine Learning and its algorithms Aprendizado Supervisionado vs. Aprendizado Não Supervisionado/ Supervised Learning vs. Unsupervised Learning Redes Neurais Artificiais e Deep Learning/ Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning Processamento de Linguagem Natural e suas aplicações/ Natural Language Processing and its applications Análise de Dados e Mineração de Dados/ Data Analysis and Data Mining Implementação de Machine Learning em aplicativos e sistemas/ Implementing Machine Learning in applications and systems Aplicações de deep learning em áreas específicas, como medicina, finanças e marketing/ Applications of Deep Learning in specific areas such as medicine, finance, and marketing Desafios de Mulheres na area de Inteligencia Atficial/ Challenges Faced by Women in the Field of Artificial Intelligence Aprendizado por reforço: algoritmos e aplicações/ Reinforcement Learning: algorithms and applications Desafios e oportunidades na implementação de deep learning em Moçambique/ Challenges and opportunities in implementing Deep Learning in Mozambique.
20 May 2023 Hackthon Resultados e entrega de brindes ao vencedor Enceramento List of Speakers Richard Evans R. Vilanculo Computer Science student at United Methodist University of Mozambique and T-Shaped Designer Prince Canuma Data Scientist and DevRel Engineer at Neptune.ai Iolanda da Graça Mauiango Computer Engineer, Assistant of Distance Learning Center of the United Methodist University of Mozambique Abdala Inaque Graduated in History teaching at the Pedagogical University in Nampula, Master in Political Sciences and Political Institutions at UFPA in Brazil, Master in Public History at UNEPAR in Brazil, currently a researcher at the Institute Alaphi Memoria da Oralidade Jean Marie John Graduated in Computer Engineering from the Zambeze University, he currently works as a professor at the United Methodist University of Mozambique, and Head of the Support and Innovation Office at the same institution. Works as IT Manager at Psico Lda, and as a Full-Stack developer, Studying a Master's Degree in Pedagogy and Didactics at the United Methodist University of Mozambique Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,256 | 2,017 |
"Morocco - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/morocco"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Morocco 29 Jul - 30 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 50 Location: EMSI, Casablanca ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Sara El-Ateif ( [email protected]) Sofia Bourhim ( [email protected]) Oumaima Hourrane ( [email protected]) Event website: https://sites.google.com/view/indabaxmorocco23 Host Institution EMSI MOULAY YOUSSEF Schedule 29 Jul 2023 0900-0930: Welcome to DLI Morocco Keynote: ML for education Keynote: ML for education Workshop in parallel: On the metaverse for education Poster session Keynote: ML for smart cities Keynote: Low resourced NLP (Virtual) LAB: Workshop-Low resourced NLP 1700-1800: Closing 30 Jul 2023 0930-1000: Keynote-Embodies social AI Keynote: Generative models for medical imaging: from theory to applications Workshop in parallel: (Workshop in healthcare, Workshop in RL) Poster session 6 roundtables (1 theme per table) GeoAI LAB: Workshop in GeoAI for Africa: Harnessing Geospatial machine learning for climate resilience 1700-1800: Closing ceremony List of Speakers Anna Potapenko Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind El Habib Benlahmar Full Professor at UH2C Girmaw Abebe Tadesse Principal Research Scientist at Microsoft AI for Good Lab Akram Zaytar Senior Applied Research Scientist at Microsoft AI for Good Lab Fatima Zahra Fagroud Professor in Computer science at EMSI Zakaria Rguibi Head of Artificial Intelligence at PROCHECK SA Mohamed-Amine Chadi Doctor and Independent Researcher Maha EL Bayad Senior Research Scientist at FAIR (Meta AI) Meriam Moujahid Research Associate at Heriot Watt University, Edinburg, UK Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,257 | 2,017 |
"Malawi - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/malawi"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Malawi 25 Aug - 26 Aug 2023 Number of Attendees: 75 Location: ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Amelia Taylor ( [email protected]) Event website: https://ml.mw Host Institution Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS) Schedule 25 Aug 2023 Disaster Risk Management in Malawi and the Disaster Management Framework: Insights from Cyclone Freddy Multisectorial assessment, safe and dignified relocation process: Pilot Relocation Plan Chiradzulu Machine Learning for Climate Science and Earth Observation Modelling Climate Change & Public Health in Lake Chilwa Basin Unveiling the Shifting Landscape of Disease Trends: A DHIS2 Analysis Spanning 2020 to March 2023 immediate after cyclone Freddy Road to Resettlement Game Leveraging AI and Machine Learning to provide an affordable Next Generation Firewall with inq Secure A practical Drone Flight & Demo Unravelling Weather Prediction through Deep Learning and GNSS Approaches in Malawi Unravelling Weather Prediction through Deep Learning and GNSS Approaches in Malawi Promoting cross-border migrants’ access to healthcare within the climate change-migration context: experiences of migrants and stakeholders in seven neighbouring countries in Southern Africa (Remote) Impact of climate change in less developing nations (Remote) 26 Aug 2023 Harnessing Technology to Address the Emerging Challenges Using Masdap platform to obtain datasets Flood Mapping in Malawi: Unleashing the Power of Every Tool in Our Informing Innovative Thinking for Effective Preparations & Responses to Severe Climate Shocks, the case of Mulanje Mountain Elevating Risk & Disaster Management through Drones Virtual Reality Simulation of Chiradzulu Landslide with Live Demo AI-assisted segmentation of flood water from a drone imagery: A case of Kachulu, Lake Chilwa Basin of Malawi Title: Improving Mobile-Based Early Skin Disease Diagnosis for Melanin-Rich Observations and reflections on the IPC/WASH situation in the CTC/CTUs in the Lilongwe and Blantyre districts List of Speakers Faides Mwale Associate Professor, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences Tabata Fioretto IMO Amelia Taylor Senior Lecturer, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences Sosten Chiotha Lead, Zumba, Malawi James Orbinski, Ali Asgary, Mohammadali Tofighi, & Jochen Schubert and Richard Mathews York University, Canada Dennis Amadi Health Emergencies Officer, World Health Organization Ali Asgary York University, Canada Goodall Salima Inq Inc Hope Chilunga Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences Robert Galatiya Suya Lecturer, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS) Mulekya Francis Regional Migration Health Programme Coordinator, IOM Walgak Chuol Environment and Climate Change Specialist, INTERCEDE Charles Chimwemwe Phiri Executive Director - SME AI/ML Innovation, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Dickson Chinguwo Lecturer, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS) Carl Bruessow Executive Director of the Mulanje Conservation Trust Patrick Kalonde PhD Student, Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Ndapile Mkuwu African Drone & Data Academy Clinton, Nkolokosa Geospatial Analyst, MSc Research Fellow, Malalwi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme Mathews Jere Student University of Malawi HUGH BORROWS UNICEF Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,258 | 2,017 |
"Kenya - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/kenya"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Kenya 12 Jul - 14 Jul 2023 Number of Attendees: 102 Location: Nyeri County, Kenya ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Elizabeth Mutua ( [email protected]) Anthony Ndolo ( [email protected]/ [email protected]) David Wachepele ( [email protected]) David Opondo ( [email protected]) Dr. Patrick Gikunda ( [email protected]) Abigael Wageci Ndegwa ( [email protected]) Dr. Antony Maina ( [email protected]) Samuel Muchina ( [email protected]) Cyrus Mativo ( [email protected]) Michael Kagiri ( [email protected]) Peter Gathondu ( [email protected]) Event website: https://www.dkut.ac.ke/index.php/deep-learning-indabax-summit-2023 Host Institution Dedani Kimathi University of Technology Schedule 12 Jul 2023 08:30-9:00 Introduction: What is Indaba? Antony Ndolo & Elizabeth Mutua Introduction: What is Indaba? Antony Ndolo & Elizabeth Mutua 09:00-09:20 Opening Remarks by Dr. George Musumba, Dean School of Computer Science & IT, DeKUT 09:20 - 09:30: Introduction of IndabaX Hackathon Oyori Obegi Zindi Ambassador for Kenya 09:30-11:05 Keynote Speech: Application of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Areas Dr. Patrick Gikunda DeKUT Chair IT Department 11:30-13:00 KerasCV and KerasNLP Workshop - Marvin Ngesa Device Manager Safaricom PLC 14:30-16:00 Students' / Researchers’ Wellbeing and Mental Health Doris Mwangi Career and wellness Coach 13 Jul 2023 09:00-10:00 Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for accessible medical imaging in low-resource settings Professor Karim Lekadir 10:05-11:05 Artificial Intelligence, Youths, § 21st Century Job Market Prof. Eddy Owaga Associate Professor at the Institute of Food Bioresources Technology, Dedan Kimathi University 11:30-13:00 Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health Dr. Stephen Fashoto Senior lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Eswatini 14:30-15:30 Career Strategies in a Technically Dynamic World Callo Mocheche IT Operations, Barclays Absa 15:35-16:30 AI conferences, Job, internship Opportunities Kavengi Kitonga Agricultural and Economics department, University of Nairobi 14 Jul 2023 09:00-10:00 Leveraging Machine Learning in Agriculture: Case of Kenya Dr. Kennedy Senagi Postdoctoral Research Scientist and Data Manager International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) 10:05-11:05 Artificial Learning: From Machine Learning to X-Learning Prof. Bigomokero Antoine Bagula Department of Computer Science, University of Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.
11:30-13:00 Holistic Approach to Career Choice Dr. Daniel Njoroge Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Food Bioresources Technology, Head of the Office of Career Services, Dedan Kimathi University 14:30-16:00 Africa AI Projects & Research Presentations (link - Registration) Judges: Dr. Juliet Moso,Dr. Benson Kituku, Dr. Gabriel Kamau Available Postgraduate Programmes, School of Computer Science & IT (10 mins) Dr. Jane Kuria Associate Dean School of Computer Science & IT, DeKUT Closing Remarks Prof. Peter Ng’ang’a Muchiri Ag. Vice-Chancellor - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology 12th - 15th July 2023 HACKATHON (Link will go live at midnight 11th) List of Speakers Stephen Gbenga Fashoto Position: Senior Lecturer University: University of Eswatini (formerly University of Swaziland). PhD in Computer Science, University of Ilorin, Nigeria Patrick Gikunda Data Scientist with over 7 years of experience in developing deep learning algorithms for various applications. His research goal is to solve real-world problems on big data in the interdisciplinary fields such Finance, Agriculture, Climate and Health.
Bigomokero Antoine Bagula Bigomokero Antoine Bagula received a Ph.D. degree (Tech. Dr.) in Communication Systems from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, and 2 MSc degrees (Computer Engineering – Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium and Computer Science - University of Stellenbosch (SUN), South Africa). He is currently a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) where he also leads the Intelligent Systems and Advanced Telecommunication (ISAT) laboratory.
Marvin Ngesa Machine Learning Engineer Currently working with Safaricom PLC — Device Manager, Cloud Data & AI Doris Mutuku Doris is a Banker, working in one of the leading Banks in Kenya. She is also a psychologist, a certified Engagement and Productivity Coach, an Educationist, Speaker, and a wellness Coordinator. Doris has more than 7 years’ experience in Banking and over 10 years’ in the medical field, training, coaching, wellness programs and mentorship. She has a vast experience in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs’), Private Companies and Corporates.
Daniel Njoroge Dr. Njoroge is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Food BioResources Technology, Dedan Kimathi University and currently the Head of the Office of Career Services. He holds a BSc. Food Science and Technology, Egerton University, Kenya. MSc. Food Technology, Ghent University, Belgium and a PhD. Bioscience Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium.
Karim Lekadir Prof Lekadir is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab at the University of Barcelona (BCN-AIM). He obtained a PhD from Imperial College London (UK) and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University (USA).
Callo Mocheche Bsc Computer Science: Egerton University Msc Distributed Computing Technology: University of Nairobi.
Kavengi Kitonga Kavengi is a versatile individual with interests in econometrics, visual arts, data story telling, Machine and Deep Learning , and the design of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered applications. She holds an MA in Economic Policy Management and a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. She is a PhD Candidate in Agricultural Economics under the African Regional Postgraduate Programme in Insect Sciences and German Academic Exchange Service scholarship programme based in the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, Kenya.
Kennedy Senagi Dr. Senagi is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist and Data Manager at ICIPE. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paris8, France and over eight years of experience in the areas of data science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, software engineering, and parallel and distributed computing.
Eddy Elkana Owaga Prof. Owaga is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Food Bioresources Technology, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT). He also serves asDirector, Coffee Technology Centre (DeKUT). Eddy’s career objective is to become an established scholar and researcher in food value addition and public health nutrition towards mitigation of food and nutrition insecurity in Kenya and beyond. Eddy has published 40 peer reviewed publications, one book chapter, one utility model on coffee flavoured yoghurt, and participated in 11 international conferences Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,259 | 2,017 |
"Cameroon - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/cameroon"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Cameroon 19 Jun - 21 Jun 2023 Number of Attendees: 200 Location: Douala ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Volviane Saphir MFOGO ( [email protected]) Dr. Justin Moskolaï ( [email protected]) Foutse Yuehgoh ( [email protected] ) Glorie Metsa WOWO ( [email protected] ) NANDO TEZOH Franky Kevin ( [email protected] ) Ndje Yves Jonathan ( ) Dr Djeumen Rodrigue ( ) Adamou MFOPOU ( ) Léonce Pidy ( ) Kevin Tatang ( ) Prof. Louis Aimé Fono ( ) Kouayep tankio Jocelyn ( ) Pr. Bowong Samuel ( ) Event website: https://sites.google.com/view/indaba-x-cameroon-2023/home?authuser=0 Host Institution University of Douala Schedule 19 Jun 2023 09:15-09:30: Opening remarks 09:30-10:30: Keynote 1: Neuronal Network and applications 09:30-10:00: Talk1 - Intégration de l’IA & des réseaux Ad hoc véhiculaires pour l’amélioration des systèmes de mobilité urbaine (Mme Pidy Léonce, Université de Douala) 10:00-10:30: Talk2 - Méta-apprentissage pour la gestion optimale de cycle de vie des réseaux de capteurs sans fil et des applications IoT (Dr. DJEDOUBOUM ASSIDÉ Christian,Université de Moundou) 10:45-11:15: Jérôme RIBEIRO: L'éthique aux service de l'intelligence artificielle 11:15-12:00: DjimNeibaye Sidoine Smart Healthcare security: A peer to peer mutual authentication and key exchange protocol elliptic curves (Université de Abéché – Tchad) 13:00-14:00: Tutorial 14:00-16:30: Panel Discussion 1 - AI & applications 16:30- 17:30: Presentation of a Project in Machine Learning: Automating Land Use and Land Cover Mapping using Computer Vision and Satellite Imagery (YOUNKAP NINA DUPLEX) 17:30-18:00: Posters presentation-Networking session 20 Jun 2023 09:00-09:15: Recap of the first day 09:15-10:30: Keynote 2 - Statistical and Stochastic Machine Learning 09:15-09:50: Talk1 - Instrumental variable-based approach (DML IV, DR IV, ORTHO IV) for assessing heterogeneous causal effect of a Humanitarian intervention (Ngnie Fonkoua Christian - Code for Africa) 09:50-10:30: Talk2 - Addresses, a pillar for our country digital transformation agenda (Gilbert Olpoc, PDG, Afrologic et Cofondateur Postpoint) 10:45-12:00: Tutorial 13:00-14:15: keynote 3 - AI Fairness and Ethics 14:15-16:15: Panel Discussion 2 - Blockchain & AI 16:15-18:15: Hackathon (pitch) 21 Jun 2023 09:00-09:15: Recap of day two 09:15-10:30: keynote 4 - Convolutional Network and image processing 10:45-12:00: keynote 5 - Application of ML in Finances and Games Theory 13:00-15h00: Panel Discussion 3 - around AI & ethics 15:00-16:00: Closing remarks and awards 16:00-20:30: Maritime museum visit/Dinner (Comptoir Colonial) List of Speakers Dr. Jean-Paul Bertrand MBAMA Mme. Mikel K. Ngueajio Pr. Fendji Jean Louis Dr. Ing. Moskolai Rose Dr DJEDOUBOUM ASSIDE Christian Dr. Zongo Minette Mr CHRISTIA N NGNIE Mme Leonce Pidy Mr Gabin Maxime Nguegnang Prof Jude Dzevela Kong Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,260 | 2,017 |
"Burundi - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/burundi"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Burundi 27 Jun - 29 Jun 2023 Number of Attendees: 35 Location: Bujumbura campus ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Itangishaka John Esterique ( [email protected]) Mureranyambo Belyse ( [email protected]) Hans Daniel Ruzuba ( [email protected]) Nuwayo Lyliose ( [email protected]) Twizere Alain ( [email protected]) Ngenzirabona Emmanuel ( [email protected]) Mucowiteka Noella Neilla ( [email protected]) Ndikuriyo Joseph ( [email protected]) Niyoyitungiye Emelyne ( ) Irankunda Arsene ( [email protected]) Event website: www.indababurundi.com Host Institution East Africa star University (EASU) Schedule 27 Jun 2023 15h-16h30: Introduction to Python programming and its libraries like numpy, pandas,matplotlib,scipy, pillow, and OpenCV 17h-18h: Machine Learning fundamentals 28 Jun 2023 14h45-16h30: A.I club presentations 17h-18h: Computer vision 29 Jun 2023 14h15’-15h: Neural network basic 15h00’-16h: Natural language processing 16h30’-17h30’: Hackathon: Presenting winning solution List of Speakers Dr.MUKESHIMANA Michele A PhD holder in Computer Sciences and Technologies with specialization in Machine Learning, pattern recognition from University of Science and Technologies Beijing in January 2018. She obtained her Master Degree in Computer Application from Jiangnan University in March 2010 and a Bachelor degree in Computer Science and Technology from Beijing Jiaotong University in July 2006. She served as IT Engineer in “Office National des Télécommunications “(ONATEL Burundi) from 2007 to 2012.In July 2012,she is a lecturer and Researcher at University of Burundi up to now. My research interest includes Artificial Intelligence, especially Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition: image, sound and text; Multimedia Technology and Web programming Dr.Thierry Nsabimana A PhD in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Specialty: Information Systems Security, from University of Abomey Calavi. He is a full senior assistant professor at University of Burundi. He is also a vice Dean of institute of applied Statistics at University of Burundi. His areas of interest include Data warehouse, Data mining, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data Analytics, Fog/Edge/cloud computing security, Artificial Neural Network; Cyber Security and Ethical Hacking.
Nadine Nibigira PhD candidate in bigdata cybersecurity and is Cybersecurity consultant.
Ngenzirabona Emmanuel PhD candidate David Ifeoluwa Adelani A Research Fellow (or DeepMind Academic Fellow) at University College London, UK, collaborating with the UCL NLP Group. I was formely a PhD Student at the Spoken Language Systems group and member of the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science at the Saarland Informatics Campus. I was privileged to be supervised by Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow.
Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,261 | 2,017 |
"Burkina Faso - Deep Learning Indaba 2023"
|
"https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/indabax/burkina"
|
"Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 Indaba Organisers Affiliated Communities Sponsorship Prospectus PROGRAMME Speakers Workshops Practicals Research in Africa Showcase POSTERS SHORT PAPERS AFRICAN DATASETS AI PRODUCT DEMOS Accelerating Growth Through AI/ML Ideathon Google Outreach & Mentorship Programme Guidance for staying in Accra Travel Guidance Frequently Asked Questions Recognising our Reviewers Code of Ethics and Conduct IndabaX Awards Kambule Doctoral Award Alele-Williams Masters Award Maathai Impact Award Mentorship Mentees Mentors Code of Ethics and Conduct Blog About Our Mission Reports Past Editions 2017 2018 2019 2022 IndabaX: Burkina Faso 24 Apr - 28 Apr 2023 Number of Attendees: 100 Location: Ouagadougou ( view map ) Contact Details of Organizers: Amon Bazongo ( [email protected]) Rodrique Kafando ( [email protected]) Event website: techemergingafrica.com Schedule 24 Apr 2023 0900-1050: Cérémonie d’ouverture à l’Université Virtuelle du Burkina Faso. Patronage: Dr. Tegawende Bissyande, Coordinateur CITADEL-UVBF; Invités d’honneur: Président de l’Université Virtuelle du Burkina Faso; Keynote Speakers: Dr. Moise Convolbo, Charlette N'Guessan 1300-1350: Le rôle de l'IA dans la transformation numérique by Dr. Moustapha BANDE en ligne 1400-1450: L'intelligence artificielle comme catalyseur de développement durable au Burkina Faso : opportunités et défis by Fabien Nongnogo 25 Apr 2023 09:00-09:50: L'intelligence artificielle et les données ouvertes: opportunités et défis pour l’innovation par Open Burkina Idriss Tinto (UVBF) 10:00-10:50: Partage d'experience sur l'IA au Burkina by Lamoussa dit Daouda SORGHO (UVBF) 11:00-11:50: Partage d'experience sur ce que l'IA ne peut pas faire by Herman Passere (UVBF) 15:00-15:50: IA et Changement Climatique et Initiation aux outils Data for Climate par Dr. Belko Diallo (UVBF) 26 Apr 2023 10:00-10:50: L'IA pour les entreprises: stratégies d'adoption by Dr Mahuna Akplogan (En ligne) 11:00-11:50: Le role de l'IA dans la sauvegarde des patrimoine: le cas des langues locales by Dr. Frederic Ouedraogo 15:00-15:50: Intelligence Artificielle avec Google Cloud Platform by Odilon Koutou (En ligne) 27 Apr 2023 09:00-09:50: ChatGPT et blockchain: un outil complet pour les juristes by Christian Juru (En ligne) 10:00-10:50: Détection des dégradations des chaussées bitumées à l'aide du Deep Learning appliqué à l'imagerie drone by Adama Coulibaly (En ligne) 14:00-14:50: Optimisation de l’Intégration des énergies renouvelables intermittentes sur un réseau électrique par Algorithme Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by Celestin Kambou (En ligne) 15:00-15:50: L'analyse de comportement pour la détection de menaces et des intrusions grâce à l'IA by Edgard Tindano (UTM) 10:00-11:50: Cérémonie de clôture, Annonce des vainqueurs du Hackaton et remise des prix (UVBF) List of Speakers Dr. Rodrigue Kafando Charlette N'Guessan Dr. Moise Convolbo Dr Becko Diallo Lamoussa dit Daouda SORGHO Idriss Tinto Mahuna Akplogan Dr. Frederic Ouedraogo Odilon Koutou Adama Coulibaly Dr. Moustapha BANDE Valentin Ouedraogo Sponsorship Prospectus Kambule and Maathai Awards Copyright © Deep Learning Indaba 2017 - 2023. All Rights Reserved.
"
|
2,262 | 2,023 |
"The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/the-villa-where-doctors-experimented-on-children"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert A Reporter at Large Behind a Locked Door By Margaret Talbot At the villa, Evy had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn’t wander. Socializing was virtually forbidden. Nobody ever told her the reason for these rules.
Photograph by Laetitia Vançon for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story I–The Pale-Yellow House One night in March, 2021, Evy Mages, a photojournalist in Washington, D.C., opened her laptop and, with trembling fingers, typed into Google the address of a villa in Innsbruck, Austria. For decades, Evy, who was fifty-five, had been haunted by memories of the house, where she had been confined for several months, starting when she was eight. She could still picture its pale-yellow exterior and the curved staircase and dark-wood panelling inside, but she’d kept what happened there a secret—even from a therapist whom she’d credited with saving her life. Evy’s memories of the place had become dreamlike, simultaneously vivid and vaporous.
She remembered being wrested from bed in the middle of the night at the home of her foster family, in the Alpine valley of Kleinwalsertal. She was hustled into a stranger’s car and driven through the mountains to Innsbruck. Nobody told her what kind of place the villa was, or how long she’d stay. Perhaps two dozen children were living there. Adults in white lab coats regularly administered shots and pills, and when it was time to eat the children were required to use weirdly abbreviated language: “bitte, Löffel” (“please, spoon”); “bitte, Gabel” (“please, fork”). In the morning, Evy attended school in the villa. At night, she had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn’t wander. She was terrified of wetting the bed, because whenever she did the white coats would awaken her, even from deep sleep, and march her to the bathroom for an ice-cold shower; she would then have to stand in a corner for the rest of the night. She’d be shivering and it would be dark, except for the murky green light from a fish tank, which she was forbidden to look at.
Children at the villa were issued thick, bloomer-like underpants. Shrill alarm bells rang day and night. Orders blared from loudspeakers that hung over doorways; to Evy, the voices seemed to belong to all-seeing powers. Sometimes she was summoned to recount her dreams to an adult. This unnerved her: she could tell that there was considerable peril in the exercise, though she didn’t understand why. She felt clever when she told her interrogator that she couldn’t recall any dreams, but the result was punishment: she had to sit alone in a room until she came up with something. Once, she was shown a set of farm animals and told to assign to each one the identity of a person in her foster family. Evy agonized—surely it was the wrong choice to make her foster mother the pig.
One day, she and some other children were told to line up in front of a closet to receive a treat. When the person in charge dropped dates into Evy’s skirt, which she had dutifully held out, she saw that ants were crawling on the fruit. Evy shook her skirt frantically, jumping up and down. White-coated adults carried her to the bathroom, where they held her down on the tile floor and administered a shot.
The pervasive sense of shame and surveillance had created a blurring effect. Evy could recall almost nothing about the children who had slept alongside her, in one big room, perhaps because talking to one another was largely banned. A yellow dot had marked her bed and the location of her toothbrush, and the color had perturbed her ever since. As an adult, she reminded herself that yellow was a happy shade, and tried to overcome her aversion by bringing home sunflowers.
Evy at eight years old, after her First Communion. Later that year, she was sent to the villa.
Photograph courtesy Evy Mages When Evy was twenty, she moved to the United States. She settled first in New York City, where she eventually got a job at the Daily News; in 1998, she married a reporter she’d met there, Paul Schwartzman. They relocated to D.C. and had three children, Sammy, Stella, and Lily. She and Schwartzman later divorced, but over the years Evy amassed a tight circle of friends in D.C. and built a close relationship with each of her kids. In middle age, she felt more grounded than she had ever been. It was time to turn the key she’d been carrying around for decades—she’d never forgotten that the villa was on Sonnenstrasse—and enter those rooms again.
Nothing about Evy’s childhood had been easy, so in some ways it puzzled her that the months on Sonnenstrasse loomed so large in her mind. She was born in 1965 in an Austrian town called Feldkirch, to a twenty-two-year-old single mother who was staying in a Catholic home for women. She relinquished Evy to foster care. A family took in Evy when she was three, with an eye to adoption, but the mother, Anni, seemed to quickly turn on her. Anni ran a bed-and-breakfast in the family’s home, a stucco chalet with carved wooden balconies, tucked into a steep mountainside. Her husband, Erich, was a postman, making deliveries on skis in the winter and often retreating to a hut that he’d built, farther up the mountain. Managing the B. and B. put a strain on Anni, who once described herself to a doctor as “nervous.” She soon became convinced that any bit of wear and tear—a scratch on a wall, a chip on a plate, a spot of missing paint on a crucifix—was an act of malice by Evy. As Evy remembers it, Anni would point out the damage, and if Evy didn’t take responsibility for it Anni would hit her until she did. As punishment, Anni would send Evy to the cellar or lock the door to the bathroom so that she couldn’t use it. Anni told Evy that her mother had been a whore.
If Evy didn’t like the treatment she was getting, Anni warned, she could always go to a “worse place.” Although Evy was afraid of Anni, she yearned for her love, and dreaded being sent away. Anni and her husband had a biological daughter, who was a year older than Evy. This girl was well behaved and shy; Evy was tomboyish, exuberant, and a little clumsy—the kind of kid who always had a banged-up shin or a skinned knee. At school, a priest sometimes scolded her, mournfully, for giving her delicate foster mother such a hard time. When Evy was sent to the villa, it confirmed her worst fear: nobody wanted her.
“And, in this corner, your ‘friend’ who is always doing just a little bit better than you.” Cartoon by Sarah Kempa Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop After a number of months in Innsbruck, Evy was abruptly sent back to Kleinwalsertal. But Anni soon became impatient with her again, and shipped her off to an orphanage in Kempten, Germany, run by nuns. There, Evy forged bonds with her fellow-orphans, who walked to school together in donated clothes and weren’t allowed to participate in after-school activities. (The nuns told Evy that people like her were “gutter trash.”) As a teen-ager, she began looking after the younger orphans—teaching them to tie their shoes, combing lice from their hair—and this came to feel like a sweet responsibility. Growing up, Evy told me, she’d trusted that God would eventually punish the cruel adults in her life. Then, one day, she saw a priest chase away a poor, mentally ill woman who was trying to give him some flowers—and she began to lose her faith.
As an adult, Evy couldn’t bring herself to tell her kids about Sonnenstrasse, but she did talk about the orphanage. When her affectionate and empathetic youngest child, Lily, became a teen-ager, she was fascinated to hear about her mother’s life at that age. The nuns, Evy recalled, sometimes yanked her hair or slapped her. Once, she’d been hit after using a pen as eyeliner—makeup was forbidden.
Evy aged out of the orphanage at sixteen. She attempted a second return to Kleinwalsertal, where she began studying hotel management at a nearby school, but Anni still couldn’t abide her. Evy was on her own. For a while, she worked at another local guesthouse, whose owner let her stay in a room upstairs, then moved to Vienna, where she felt lonely and unmoored. One day during that period, she drove to Innsbruck with an older friend, Jimi, a free spirit who’d run a bar in Kleinwalsertal and had watched out for her there. During the road trip, they sang along to a cassette of “The Threepenny Opera.” When they arrived at Sonnenstrasse, they knocked on the villa’s arched front door. A panel slid open, and a face appeared. Evy tried to ask about her stay there. The panel closed, with a clang.
When Evy scrolled through her search results for the Sonnenstrasse villa, which were in German, she noticed an unusual word: Kinderbeobachtungsstation, or “child-observation station.” She’d always assumed that the villa had been some sort of psychiatric facility. It had seemed like “a transfer hub,” as she recently put it—a place where children were monitored, classified, and then sent to other institutions. From the search results, Evy learned the name of the woman who’d headed the place: Dr. Maria Nowak-Vogl, a psychologist at the University of Innsbruck. Typing Nowak-Vogl’s name into Google, she learned that the villa had indeed been a psychiatric facility, of a very peculiar kind. In 2013, an expert commission under the aegis of the Medical University of Innsbruck had issued a damning report about the facility, saying that Nowak-Vogl had perpetrated systematic abuse under the guise of dealing with “difficult” children. The report came three years after a muckraking Austrian historian named Horst Schreiber published a book that reported on Nowak-Vogl, “ In Namen der Ordnung ” (“In the Name of Order”). Schreiber had interviewed dozens of Nowak-Vogl’s victims and had publicly demanded that the Austrian government offer them apologies and financial compensation. The government, Evy learned, was now doing so.
A news article about the commission’s findings described the villa as a combination of “home, prison, and testing clinic.” The commission had reviewed medical records and reported something shocking: children had been injected with epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Nowak-Vogl, a conservative Catholic, had wanted to see if epiphysan would suppress sexual feelings in children, as well as discourage masturbation, thus rendering her charges more “manageable.” Masturbation—among both adolescents and young children, who use it to self-soothe—was a preoccupation of Nowak-Vogl’s. So was bed-wetting. Her staff was instructed to keep charts documenting urination and bowel movements, and to check children’s underwear “with the eyes or the nose.” Schreiber described her as being “on a crusade against masturbation and sexual excitedness.” The villa’s staff, Evy learned, hadn’t focussed on treating individual children. As Michaela Ralser, a University of Innsbruck professor who worked on the commission’s report, wrote, Nowak-Vogl’s goal was “protecting society from psychologically conspicuous children and adolescents.” Ralser described the villa as “a closed system . . . characterized by the authoritarian leadership style of its unrestricted leader.” As Evy later discovered, there was a pronounced Nazi lineage to the practices of child psychiatry in Austria that shaped Nowak-Vogl’s approach. The story of the Innsbruck child-observation station, and other places like it, was entwined with the history of postwar Austria and its deeply flawed de-Nazification.
Nowak-Vogl had started housing children on Sonnenstrasse in 1954, under the sponsorship of the Tyrolean government, and had overseen the operation until 1987. At least thirty-six hundred children, most of them between the ages of seven and fifteen, had been confined for up to several months at a time. Nowak-Vogl, who had close ties to Austria’s child-welfare system, determined each child’s next placement. Some kids went to orphanages; others, to reformatories, where they often had to work in laundries or otherwise provide free labor. Nowak-Vogl also sent children to work with farming families. Occasionally, a kid got to go home.
Evy felt a rush of validation. All of us have childhood memories that sporadically pop into our minds, like slides in a randomly organized carrousel, and it can be hard to make sense of these fragments. But most of us can check our recollections against those of parents, siblings, cousins, childhood friends. Evy hadn’t been able to speak with anyone about the villa. Now, as she scrolled through articles and reports about it, she confirmed, and clarified, many bewildering aspects of her experience. Staff members, she learned, had been alerted to bed-wetting by alarm-bell sensors lodged in children’s mattresses—and sometimes in their bulky underwear. Evy had correctly recalled the consequence: a freezing shower. The commission report noted that the silence pervading the villa had been easy to maintain in part because the children had frequently been given psychotropic drugs and tranquillizers, often in response to “disciplinary difficulties.” Medical records showed that they had also been dosed with potent sedatives, including Rohypnol. Only a small percentage of the children were given epiphysan. Evy wondered if she’d been one of them.
The commission report also mentioned “bans on speaking” and a “criminalization of feelings” when residents tried to socialize. Schreiber, who contributed to the report, wrote, “Friendships and expressions of affection for other children and young people were frowned upon and prevented, often interpreted as sexualized behavior.” “We don’t go for the weakest—we go for the one that’s checking its e-mail.” Cartoon by Kendra Allenby Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop The report included a document that listed Nowak-Vogl’s house rules from 1979 and 1980. Twelve pages long and printed in a tiny font, it is perverse in its despotic specificity. Personal belongings, including books and dolls, were taken away upon arrival. Children had to clean their plates scrupulously: “Only bones, cartilage, and bay leaves may be placed to the side.” Unfinished food was to be presented at the next meal, and the next, until it was eaten. “Romping, whistling, screaming, and singing” were forbidden. “There is absolute silence when the soup is served,” the document noted. “Even marginal remarks or seemingly justified questions are not allowed to pass.” Staff members were instructed “to make mealtimes as short as possible and not to sit down with the children out of inertia.” The monitoring of toilet habits was described in exhaustive detail, and there was even a rule about how toothpaste should be “sparingly pushed between the bristles” of a child’s brush.
The more that Evy read, the angrier she became. Nearly four thousand children? Until 1987? Eight or so similar facilities had operated in Austria after the Second World War. How many thousands of children had spent time in repressive psychiatric institutions like hers? At all the facilities, confused children were brusquely evaluated for “misbehavior.” But only the Sonnenstrasse villa was so consumed with stamping out sexuality.
In September, 2021, Evy approached me to see if I’d look further into her story. We had been friendly acquaintances for years. Our kids had attended the same elementary school, in Northwest D.C., and I’d occasionally run into her in the neighborhood, or at a demonstration that we were both covering. Evy was high-spirited, flaxen-haired, and casually glamorous, with a wide, dazzling smile. Her accent, full of trilled “r”s and “v”-like “w”s, reminded me of the Velvet Underground’s Nico. In a D.C. milieu crowded with former student-council presidents, she stood out. Sometimes I’d see her in the middle of the day leaning into deep conversation with a friend at the local Starbucks; it was as if she’d transformed the place into a Viennese coffeehouse, the way dropping a colorful scarf over a motel-room lamp can make the drab space look dramatic.
Though we hadn’t had many one-on-one conversations, I’d been struck by Evy’s emotional directness and impetuous generosity. “The outside matches the inside with Evy” is how her friend Keltie Hawkins, a therapist, put it. I’d noticed, too, that Evy genuinely liked and fiercely defended kids. More than almost any parent I knew, she was comfortable around defiant teen-agers. When my daughter was in middle school, with purple-streaked hair and an emotional intensity that discomfited some adults, Evy made a point of telling me how great she was. I learned later that Evy would take in her kids’ friends, and friends of her kids’ friends, when they had conflicts with their own families. Hawkins called Evy’s house “the wayward station.” She recalled seeing Evy cross a playground to tell a man who’d hit his daughter, “How dare you—that’s your child, not your property.” And Evy had once confronted some cops who’d caught friends of her teen-age children shoplifting at a local store. “I’ve known these kids since they were this tall,” she told the officers. “They’re good kids.” The teens got off with a warning. Evy liked to describe herself as “deeply anti-authoritarian,” and the more she told me about her past the more sense that made.
A few days after Evy learned about Nowak-Vogl, she e-mailed one of the commission’s lead researchers, Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, a professor at the University of Innsbruck. “Never did I imagine there would be a reckoning,” Evy wrote, adding that she was “overwhelmed with gratitude to you and your team for . . . bringing these atrocities to light.” In another e-mail, she wrote, “I am immensely grateful that I somehow had the strength to create a life after growing up in Austria as a freak, a reject, and a test object.” Dietrich-Daum replied to Evy, noting that she could apply for financial compensation from the State of Tyrol’s office for Opferschutz , or victim protection. She could also obtain her medical records.
By the time Evy told me about the Kinderbeobachtungsstation , she’d reached out to other scholars and had submitted testimony to the commission. She was moved when she received a letter of apology from Gabriele Fischer, a Tyrolean official in charge of youth welfare. Fischer said that Evy was entitled to an immediate payout of fifteen hundred euros; upon turning sixty, she could receive a pension of three hundred euros a month. “What happened to you should never have happened,” Fischer wrote. “I can only promise to learn from your story.” Evy requested a copy of her medical file from the villa. Her stay had lasted from December 27, 1973, to April 17, 1974. (Her foster parents must have thought they’d been kind to wait until after Christmas to ship her off.) The file was chilling, Evy told me, and she’d only begun delving into it. It included a small photograph of her at eight, smiling brightly under ragged blond bangs. One reason she’d been reluctant to revisit her mistreatment at the villa, she explained, was that “having been in a mental institution just comes with a stigma, no matter how unjust it is.” But learning that so many other kids had been abused there had “totally blown the lid off,” and she now wanted to “know everything.” Who was Maria Nowak-Vogl, and how had she exercised unchecked tyranny for so long? What ideas and training had shaped her views of children’s minds and bodies? How had Evy ended up under her power? Had Evy been given epiphysan—and, if so, were there long-term effects? How many victims knew about the restitution program? We agreed to travel to Austria together. There were people—officials, researchers—whom Evy wanted to meet in person. She was also considering going to the villa. The trip wouldn’t be easy: Evy hadn’t been back to Austria for more than twenty-five years and had not planned to return. The country felt claustrophobic to her—a cold basement crammed with detritus from her past. Although Evy remained fluent in German, she’d pointedly avoided speaking it for decades. In America, she told me, she’d built a new life, which “did not translate into the life or language of my mother tongue.” She’d undergone therapy in English; she’d raised her children in English, picking up phrases of comfort and nurture that her American friends used. Evy was a natural as a mother, but, given the deprivations of her childhood, she had to learn the lingo. (When she heard a friend in D.C. say, “Aw, kiss the boo-boo” after her toddler scraped his knee, Evy added that to her repertoire.) Eschewing her native tongue wasn’t a therapeutic method that anyone had recommended, but she’d found it a balm. I understand some German, but we agreed that, whenever possible in Austria, we’d conduct our inquiries in English. In April, 2022, we met up in Innsbruck, for the first of two trips that we’d make together.
Innsbruck is a pretty university town whose backdrop of snow-cloaked peaks can make a visitor feel dizzy. Many buildings are painted in sugary Habsburg pastels; the Inn River, a tributary of the Danube, rushes through the city center, where students crowd cafés and beer gardens. For Evy—whose every minute in Innsbruck was a Foucauldian nightmare—none of this felt familiar. Neither did the people we were meeting there. They seemed like representatives of a new Austria, unafraid to reckon with the darkest periods in their country’s past.
Ina Friedmann, whom we saw on our first morning, had become one of Evy’s heroes. A historian of medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Friedmann had worked on “ Psychiatrisierte Kindheiten ” (“Psychiatrized Childhoods”), a 2020 book of essays about Nowak-Vogl’s child-observation station. Evy was delighted to discover that Friedmann, who is thirty-eight, looked like an avatar of alternative Austria: her hair was indigo, she wore a metal-studded jacket, and she carried a tote bag emblazoned with the English phrase “ only anarchists are pretty.
” Friedmann’s academic writing was careful and restrained, but in person she was warm and expressive. She and Evy hugged for a long time, like old friends.
We sat down for coffee in the courtyard of a café—it was chilly, but Friedmann could smoke cigarettes there—and discussed what Evy had learned about epiphysan. Her chart hadn’t mentioned the drug, but, given all the shots she remembered, she suspected that she’d received it. Her chart noted that she’d been caught in class with “her finger up her nose or her pen in her mouth, and her hand down her pants while she masturbated.” (I told Evy that I had to applaud her ability to multitask self-comfort in such an environment.) Moreover, Evy was a bed-wetter and a child born out of wedlock—categories that Nowak-Vogl associated with deviance. Friedmann said it was certainly possible that Evy had received epiphysan. Nowak-Vogl had been administering the extract since at least the early fifties; in a 1957 paper on “hypersexuality,” she’d written about giving epiphysan to an unspecified number of children. Epiphysan had been tested on humans once before: in the nineteen-thirties, male prisoners in Vienna were given the drug, which appeared to temporarily curb the impulse to masturbate. But Nowak-Vogl was the first to administer it to children. She said that it suppressed “physical and mental restlessness.” In 2015, Friedmann had reviewed some fourteen hundred medical records, identifying nearly thirty cases in which Nowak-Vogl had documented giving minors epiphysan—more girls than boys, and most of them between the ages of seven and eleven. But records of the medication were erratic, and there was evidence suggesting that Nowak-Vogl had ordered its use in less controlled settings, including private homes.
Nowak-Vogl claimed that epiphysan was to be given only to children who were overcome by “instinctuality,” not to those who masturbated because of “neglect” or “neuroticism.” It wasn’t clear how children were sorted into these idiosyncratic categories. Patients—who were told little, if anything, about epiphysan—often regarded the shots as a punishment. At least one child understood that the extract was meant to suppress sexual urges, and refused it: In a report to a local youth-welfare office from the early sixties, Nowak-Vogl described, with frustration, a girl who had “countered the onanism treatment with a determined and conscious resistance.” The girl had insisted that she wouldn’t stop touching herself, because it “made her happy and otherwise she had it bad.” Nowak-Vogl lamented, “The known effect of epiphysan is by no means so strong that it could compensate for such an attitude.” Dr. Maria Nowak-Vogl, who oversaw the Innsbruck child-observation station, appeared in a 1980 Austrian TV documentary about the abuse of children in institutions and defended her practices.
Nowak-Vogl, Friedmann told us, was willing to prescribe epiphysan even though almost nothing was known about its side effects. From what I’d read, Nowak-Vogl saw the drug as especially valuable for addressing social problems caused by female sexuality, including abortion and children born out of wedlock. Ideologically, her preoccupations placed her in the mainstream of postwar cultural attitudes in Austria, especially among traditional Catholics. Bodily shame has plagued many a childhood, but if the literature of Austria is any indication, that country was particularly thick with it in the twentieth century. The writer Thomas Bernhard, in his 1985 memoir, “ Gathering Evidence ,” describes being humiliated when his mother hung his urine-stained sheets out a window overlooking the street, “to deter other children, and show them all what you are! ” The work of the Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek plumbs the psychosexual depths of Austrian child rearing; in her 1983 novel, “ The Piano Teacher ,” the fiercely repressed protagonist, who is in her thirties, still sleeps in bed with her mother.
But, even in this context, the measures that Nowak-Vogl took were extreme. To justify the use of epiphysan, she relied on a panopticon-like system of surveillance that made it virtually certain every child would be caught touching herself. The squeak of a bedspring triggered reprimands over the loudspeakers, with the “culprit” made to stand in the hall for the rest of the night. (Nowak-Vogl was vexed that self-stimulation was hard to police in private homes, writing, “With little possibility of supervision, and possibly with the special skill of the pupil, there is a risk of overlooking this condition.”) Nowak-Vogl’s quest for an antidote to onanism was too haphazard to qualify as research, and she seems to have determined almost nothing concrete about epiphysan’s effects or complications. It would have been reasonable to wonder if the extract might damage a human’s pineal gland or interfere with puberty. Nowak-Vogl appears to have adopted an anecdotal, after-the-fact approach to information-gathering. Friedmann told us that, as late as 1980, Nowak-Vogl was asking former patients and their doctors if they’d noticed any health effects from the epiphysan that she’d administered years earlier.
Whatever risks the shots entailed were worth it, Nowak-Vogl wrote in her paper on hypersexuality. Without epiphysan, the only options for a girl who couldn’t stop masturbating were “accommodation on one of those very lonely, sometimes childless mountain farms, where all residents could be informed and reassured about the girl’s condition,” or placement in a sanatorium, which entailed “renunciation of further schooling.” As a chapter in “Psychiatrized Childhoods” notes, Nowak-Vogl acknowledged having performed an experiment on humans, but she clearly thought that she was improving society by eliminating undesirable behavior in children. Kids who didn’t explore their own bodies, or wet the bed, or talk or laugh or cry or run around too much, would grow up to become socially compliant workers. In a country whose economy had been shattered by the Second World War, her approach, however brutal, had its utility for the authorities.
To this day, there has been no systematic research into the long-term effects of epiphysan, but the expert commission reported that the extract has a short half-life, and is therefore unlikely to cause health issues in later adulthood. “Transmission of viruses” from bovine material can’t be ruled out, though nothing of the kind has been reported. In any case, Nowak-Vogl’s actions were certainly unethical, for she proceeded without the informed consent of either the children or their parents. Evy told me she was relieved that she hadn’t known of the epiphysan experiment until recently; it might have led her to avoid getting pregnant, for fear of complications or birth defects.
I asked Friedmann how influential Nowak-Vogl had been beyond the hermetic world of the child-observation station. It turned out that she had published and lectured widely, and had written popular advice manuals about child rearing. The Catholic Church awarded her a papal medal for her service in ecclesiastic marriage courts, which can grant annulments. “She really was respected,” Friedmann told us. “She was a full professor at the university.” Because Nowak-Vogl was also a consultant to the youth-welfare office, she could enter state-run orphanages and “recruit patients from there.” For nearly forty years, Nowak-Vogl’s beds were consistently full.
II–Curative Pedagogy Nowak-Vogl was born, as Maria Vogl, in 1922 in Kitzbühel, a medieval town near Innsbruck which is popular with skiers. Her father, Alfred, was a juvenile-court judge. When the Nazis occupied northern Italy, from 1943 to 1945, Alfred presided over a Sondergericht , or special court, in Bolzano. Nowak-Vogl never wrote about her childhood, but, given her father’s role in the regime, she was likely steeped in Nazi conceptions of aberrance. Gerald Steinacher, a historian of Austria at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told me that the Sondergerichte existed to intimidate the populace and stamp out resistance, whether it be “a negative comment about the local Nazi leader or listening to Radio London.” Such courts, Steinacher said, “made a mockery of justice,” briskly issuing harsh sentences, including death.
During the war, Nowak-Vogl attended a Nazi-run teacher-training school. She studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck, and went on to receive a doctorate in educational philosophy there, in 1952. Six years later, she obtained a Habilitation —the highest academic qualification in many European countries—in the field of Heilpädagogik , or curative pedagogy. Throughout the German-speaking world in the early twentieth century, Heilpädagogik was an influential approach to treating “difficult” children. The goal of the field, which relied on close collaboration among medical experts, the courts, the state, the police, and the youth-welfare system, was less to help individual children feel understood than to turn them into productive, rule-abiding, sexually regulated members of society.
Heilpädagogik had stressed biology from the beginning—inherited traits and inborn constitutions were seen as important reasons that children became resistant—but the Austrian school of curative pedagogy, which developed in the thirties, placed a particular emphasis on the hereditary component.
The celebrated physician Hans Asperger, known for his pioneering research on autism, became curative pedagogy’s leading exponent in Austria. Evy and I visited Herwig Czech, a medical historian in Vienna who, in 2018, revealed Asperger’s complicity in the Nazi regime’s eugenics policies.
Heilpädagogik experts in Austria, Czech told us, had been eager to demonstrate the field’s compatibility with National Socialism, and also with the “strong authoritarian current” of Austrian Catholicism. Asperger had referred the most troublesome and mentally handicapped children to a Viennese institution, Am Spiegelgrund, where patients deemed “incurable” were killed.
“Once he sees that rockin’ bod, Butterscotch is totally going to regret breaking up with you.” Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop Nowak-Vogl’s villa, Czech said, embodied the tenets of the Austrian school of curative pedagogy, with its relentless inculcation of “good” habits in children burdened by supposedly hereditary predispositions to alcoholism or crime, and with its unflinching willingness to remove kids from environments deemed undesirable. (Writing last year in Profil , an Austrian news magazine, the journalist Christa Zöchling decried “the disastrous history of curative pedagogy in Austria,” with its “dehumanization of children as ‘hereditary failures’ because they wet the bed or were left-handed, stuttered, or had learning difficulties or nervous conditions.”) Nowak-Vogl shared with Heilpädagogik an unforgiving mentality toward sexuality—including toward children who had been sexually abused. According to Czech, the leading figures of curative pedagogy in Austria “turned against the victims somehow, by assuming that there was a kind of biological predisposition to being abused.” The idea was that a defective “personality trait led girls—mostly girls—to be practically seducing their abusers.” In 1952, Asperger wrote that young female victims of sexual violence often possessed “an endogenous willingness to experience” such assaults; some were “ ‘passive lure types’ who, above all, lack the natural protective mechanism of shame.” For such girls, he recommended a “long-term change of milieu, preferably placement in a good institution.” In 1967, Maria Vogl married a psychiatrist in Innsbruck, Johannes Heinz Nowak, and hyphenated her name. They had no children. The couple apparently shared an interest in the rather grim wooden religious sculptures of a local folk artist. In the only video I’ve seen of Nowak-Vogl, from “Problemkinder,” a 1980 Austrian TV documentary about the abuse of children in institutions, she wears a starched white medical uniform and has her hair in a low bun. Leaning back in her chair and speaking in an emphatic tone, she defends her insistence on silence at the table: “There are quite a few children who, at home, aren’t allowed to talk with their parents at the table. There it is said, ‘Eat your meal first, then talk.’ So I think we are within the customary framework of the country.” In Vienna, Evy and I met with Ernst Berger, a prominent Austrian child psychiatrist in his late seventies. He told us that, between 1975 and 1985, he’d often see Nowak-Vogl at psychiatry conferences. He described her as a “conservative woman, with her coiffure held back like this”—he mimed a bun. “She was very serious. And in dinner situations it was not very nice to talk with her.” Once, he said, after he’d finished a conference presentation of a paper criticizing the youth-welfare system, Nowak-Vogl had approached him in anger. “I didn’t know your work was so bad,” she said. Berger, laughing nervously at the memory, told us, “I was so frightened!” He had been aware that Nowak-Vogl ran a child-observation station in Innsbruck, but he’d never visited it. He didn’t know anyone who had.
Several months later, Evy and I tracked down someone who knew Nowak-Vogl’s child-observation station from the inside. In the winter of 1968, when Sylvia Wallinger was a nineteen-year-old psychology student at the University of Innsbruck, she began working at Nowak-Vogl’s institution. She had learned that it was headed by a distinguished academic who lectured on a subject that interested her: measuring concentration and memory in children. Wallinger stayed for about a year. She was looking for a thesis topic and had been told that she could conduct research under Nowak-Vogl’s auspices. Moreover, the child-observation station was around the corner from the house where Wallinger lived with her family.
When Evy and I contacted Wallinger, who is now a psychoanalyst, she was in the Canary Islands, where she lives part time, but she agreed to speak to us on Zoom. She wore pink lipstick and dangly earrings; shoulder-length silver hair framed her face. Though Wallinger is a practicing Buddhist, she didn’t seem particularly detached. She was clearly troubled by her memories of the child-observation station and expressed worry about upsetting Evy. Her empathy made Evy cry—the only time I ever saw her do so in an interview.
“The ice-cold showers—it was absolutely terrible,” Wallinger said. “When I did it myself, I used warm water. I was reported, and Nowak-Vogl threatened me, ‘Do what you’re told or just get lost.’ ” The stories of two girls in particular had stayed with Wallinger: “The smallest had two thumbs cut—the tops were cut off. She was maybe five. Her father was a gynecologist who’d caught her masturbating, and he’d amputated one thumb and then the other.” The second girl, about eight, had accused her father of sexual abuse. “Because no father would think of doing something like this, it was she who was a compulsive liar,” Wallinger said, bitterly. “And, because she was a compulsive liar accusing her father, she was brought to Nowak-Vogl’s institution.” Sometimes, when Wallinger worked at night, she’d hear girls crying in the communal bedroom, and she’d slip in and discreetly comfort them. But she typically took the morning shift, arriving at work in her white uniform just before the wake-up routine. “If a bed was dirty or wet,” Wallinger recalled, other children had to “stand around and make fun” of the miscreant. In the early twentieth century, a punitive approach to bed-wetting was common, including in America. Most experts gave little credence to the many developmental, physical, and emotional issues that cause a substantial minority of children to wet their beds past the toddler stage. Instead, children were sometimes thought to do it intentionally, out of laziness or defiance. Inventions such as the bed-wetting alarm could exacerbate the problem, waking up an entire household and shaming the unfortunate child. By the time that Nowak-Vogl was practicing her humiliating techniques, however, stigmatizing treatments were being discredited. She was a holdout.
When Wallinger worked at the child-observation station, Nowak-Vogl’s sister, Elisabeth, oversaw the kids’ schooling. Another figure in charge was a man called Höllebauer—Wallinger couldn’t remember his first name. She described him as “a brute” who enjoyed beating girls: “He was a physical sadist, and Nowak-Vogl a psychological one.” (During those years, a man named Robert Höllebauer, who had earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1949, with a thesis building on Nazi racial theory, served as Nowak-Vogl’s deputy.) Nowak-Vogl sometimes hit the children, too. “I saw it at least once,” Wallinger recalled. “A girl. She hit her around the face, and she fell.” But what troubled Wallinger most was Nowak-Vogl’s coldness: “She hated the children. She hated children.
That’s why she did it. In a certain way, she wanted to destroy childhood in the children. She wanted to make them robots.” When Evy told Wallinger about being forced to recount her dreams, Wallinger scoffed and said, of Nowak-Vogl, “Of course, that was not because she had any idea about psychoanalysis!” What had motivated her was “the inquisition—the intruding.
” Wallinger told friends about the horrible treatment of children at Sonnenstrasse. And then she confronted Nowak-Vogl, even though she knew that it would mean the end of her thesis and, possibly, of her academic career: “When I told her, ‘You cannot beat the children,’ she asked me, ‘Have you ever been at the B.D.M.?’ That was the Bund Deutscher Mädel—the Nazi organization for girls. They wore the brown jackets and the swastika.” Wallinger protested: “Come on—I was born in 1948!” “Oh, yes,” Nowak-Vogl said. “But if you had been in the B.D.M. you would understand what I am doing.” A day or two later, Wallinger quit.
Throughout history, sadistic personalities have found cover—and even power and prestige—by directing their viciousness toward the furthering of a society’s goals. A psychiatric theory that sanctions ruthlessly authoritarian child rearing with the aim of producing biddable workers can license, and even glorify, the person who implements it. Nowak-Vogl exercised cruel dominion over children, but she always did so within the framework of academic expertise.
It was convenient for Nowak-Vogl that her commitment to repressiveness, sexual and otherwise, dovetailed with many of Austria’s anxieties after the Second World War. Authorities feared that war casualties had created a “surplus” of single women—a problem that seemed likely to worsen, given that divorce rates were climbing. Equally alarming was the thought that more women were having sex outside marriage. Politicians and journalists publicly fretted about venereal disease, particularly among women who had betrayed the fatherland by sleeping with Allied soldiers.
Austrians also worried that the deprivations of the war and its aftermath had fostered misbehavior in children. In an essay in “Psychiatrized Childhoods,” the political scientist Alexandra Weiss writes, “Absent fathers, difficulties of everyday survival, poverty, unemployment and bombed-out houses stood in the way of a carefree childhood and youth. . . . Parents were busy organizing everyday survival, children had to contribute to it and sometimes participated in semi-legal activities, such as the black-market trade.” In the fifties and sixties, as Austria focussed on rebounding economically, the government of Tyrol placed more children in state institutions than during any period before or since—sometimes simply because a kid had a working-class single mother. In an e-mail to Evy and me, Horst Schreiber, the historian, described Nowak-Vogl as the kind of “inwardly frozen” figure who seemed to answer “a great social need” in postwar Austria: she was a credentialled expert implacably devoted to identifying the “rotten apples” of the lower classes and turning them into “proper bourgeois subjects, mothers and housewives, well-behaved family breadwinners who live the Catholic sexual morality, go to work, are not deviant, respect the authorities, love the homeland, and respect property.” Even when Nowak-Vogl wrote about the importance of sleep for children, she managed to sound fascistic. In a 1964 essay published in English, she warned that children who tried to delay bedtime with mischief, or even thought of doing so, were guilty of “socially undesirable” behavior. By the seventies, Nowak-Vogl was also presenting her hypervigilant approach as an antidote to student-protest movements. In a contribution to a 1972 essay collection in which medical thinkers pondered the irksome question of why so many young people wanted to “revolt against society,” Nowak-Vogl suggested that a major answer was Vehrwahrlosung —neglect. In the framework of Heilpädagogik , the word implied more than social deprivation: it implied that a person had a moral or personality defect that made her vulnerable—for example, to sexual recklessness and sexual abuse. As Michaela Ralser, the University of Innsbruck professor, put it to me, this pseudo-diagnosis “transformed the child in difficulty into a ‘difficult child.’ ” A “neglected” youth, Nowak-Vogl wrote, was inclined “to oppose any trace of the old order, because it fails to completely indulge his overwhelming physical urges.” She warned that it was insufficient to discipline only youths who actively rebelled; more passive types could also become dangerous, unless “educational or therapeutic measures” were employed to thwart their opposition toward society.
Nowak-Vogl never expressed interest in one of the biggest sources of anger among young Austrians: cultural amnesia about the country’s Nazi past. In Germany, a reckoning with Nazism was hard to shirk, but many Austrians evaded responsibility by portraying their country as an Opfernation —victim nation—rather than as an enthusiastic participant in Nazi annexation. In fact, the Nazi movement had taken firm root in Austria: when Hitler’s troops marched across the border, in March, 1938, crowds welcomed them with flowers.
Immediately after the war, some Nazi war criminals did face justice in Austria—so-called people’s courts initiated tens of thousands of prosecutions and executed thirty perpetrators. Austrians who’d joined the Nazi Party—about ten per cent of the population—temporarily lost voting rights and, in some cases, jobs or property. But by the mid-fifties the people’s courts had been dissolved, and the Austrian government had abandoned de-Nazification programs. There was no substantive restitution for Austrian victims of Nazi atrocities, and the U.S., which was more concerned about Communism than about resurgent Fascism, stopped pressuring the country to ferret out war criminals.
The Opfernation mythology endured until 1986, when Kurt Waldheim, a former Secretary-General of the United Nations, ran for President of Austria. Journalists and historians uncovered evidence that, as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, he’d been attached to units that had sent thousands of Greek Jews to death camps and had executed Yugoslav partisans and civilians. Waldheim was elected despite these revelations, but the excuses that he’d offered—that he’d only been doing his duty, that he hadn’t understood the scale of the atrocities—repulsed many young Austrians in particular. In the mid-nineties, the government finally began compensating victims of Nazi war crimes.
Cartoon by Roz Chast Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop By then, though, former Nazis had held positions of power for decades. Among them were doctors and psychiatrists who had run Am Spiegelgrund, the Viennese institution where Hans Asperger had consigned children and adolescents with disabilities. At Am Spiegelgrund, more than seven hundred children who suffered from psychiatric, behavioral, or physical conditions that the Nazis considered “incurable” were killed. The American historian Edith Sheffer, in her 2018 book, “ Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna ,” wrote, “In Nazi psychiatry, a child needed to demonstrate conformity, ‘educability’ and ‘ability to work.’ ” She noted that “family and class factors played a role” in a child’s survival: “Chances of death were greater if the child was born out of wedlock, had an absent father, or a mother suspected of being unable to cope, with other children at home.” Under the Reich’s T-4 program, the killing of institutionalized adults with disabilities had happened in gas chambers—the first instance of their use. But the “euthanasia” of children was accomplished slowly, by the very doctors and nurses caring for them. Children, Sheffer wrote, were “starved or given overdoses of barbiturates until they grew ill and died, usually of pneumonia.” In 1946, a people’s court sentenced to death Ernst Illing, the head of Am Spiegelgrund, after he confessed to direct involvement in the killings of some two hundred children. His deputy, Marianne Türk, spent six years in prison. But these were exceptions. Hans Bertha, a key medical adviser to the T-4 program, was never called to account, and he became the dean of the medical faculty at the University of Graz. Hans Krenek, the “pedagogical director” of Am Spiegelgrund, later directed Vienna’s youth-welfare department.
If anything, Nazi psychiatrists, including those who sanctioned the murder of children, found themselves in a privileged position after the war. Many Jewish practitioners, including Sigmund Freud, had fled Austria in the thirties, and few of them returned; this exodus had opened up professional opportunities for Nazi scientists, many of whom, in addition to their ethical failings, were mediocrities in their fields. “Psychiatry, neurology, and pediatrics all had a high proportion of Jewish academics and practicing doctors,” Herwig Czech told me. “They left a huge gap.” One survivor of Am Spiegelgrund remembered a physician named Heinrich Gross doing morning rounds in his Nazi uniform, handing out “sweets to some of the children, mainly the bed-wetters or the slow ones,” before they were taken away. In 1950, Gross was convicted of manslaughter by a people’s court, but the Austrian Supreme Court overturned the verdict for procedural reasons, and the case was never reheard. Gross became the director of his own neurological institute, where he conducted research on the preserved brains of children killed at Am Spiegelgrund.
“First that nice Romeo boy, now Hamlet and his family. Sometimes I think we shouldn’t even sell poison.” Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop He also became a highly paid court-appointed psychiatric expert. In 1976, Gross was hired to assess Friedrich Zawrel, an Austrian accused of stealing from a supermarket. Zawrel had been held in Am Spiegelgrund as a ten-year-old, mainly because he came from an impoverished family. Recognizing Gross, Zawrel said to him, “I know people who have committed crimes hundreds of thousands of times worse than mine. They are respected citizens.” When Gross appeared confused, Zawrel said, “Herr Doktor, you have a very bad memory. . . . Didn’t you hear the little children crying on the balcony? You never heard it—those who were murdered?” Gross took his revenge: he successfully recommended that Zawrel be confined to an institution for incorrigible offenders. From behind bars, Zawrel managed to unmask Gross to the Austrian media. In 1981, Zawrel was released, and prosecutors eventually brought murder charges against Gross. But he was deemed unfit to stand trial, and in 2005 he died a free man, at the age of ninety.
If Austrian psychiatrists who oversaw the murder of children were allowed to climb the professional ladder unimpeded, was it any wonder that Nowak-Vogl was, too? One of the child-observation facilities in Austria was run by Franz Wurst, a pediatrician who’d boasted of being the youngest doctor in the Reich. Wurst sexually abused children in his care; in the past two decades, hundreds of victims have come forward. But when he was finally arrested, in 2000, it wasn’t for this abuse—it was for his role in the murder of his seventy-eight-year-old wife. She had been suffocated, at his behest, by his nineteen-year-old godson, whom he’d molested over a period of years. (Wurst was sentenced to seventeen years in prison but was released after four years, for health reasons.) Nowak-Vogl didn’t go wholly unchecked in the decades before Horst Schreiber and the University of Innsbruck researchers launched their investigations. Students protested her lectures because she brought in child patients and presented them to classes as case studies. In 1980, a director named Kurt Langbein made “Problemkinder,” the TV documentary, which exposed some of the disturbing practices at the Innsbruck villa, including the administration of epiphysan. The film was broadcast over the protests of conservative Tyrolean politicians.
Langbein, who is sixty-nine, grew up around concentration-camp survivors; his father, Hermann Langbein, an actor turned resistance fighter, was a political prisoner at Auschwitz and later wrote several books documenting his experiences there. Evy and I visited Kurt Langbein at his office, in Vienna, and he told us that, in making the film, he’d wanted to expose Austrian institutions “where the old Nazis were still working,” adding, “It was baggage from my father that I tried to carry properly.” His documentary had triggered some reforms at the Innsbruck institution. Nowak-Vogl had a new supervisor, Kornelius Kryspin-Exner, who ordered an end to the use of epiphysan (which, Kryspin-Exner acknowledged, “does not have any medical indication”) and to the restrictions on speaking (“the psychological value is zero”). But Nowak-Vogl remained an esteemed academic. Though she officially retired in 1987, she continued lecturing at the University of Innsbruck—on such subjects as “behavioral biology as a guide to educational crises”—until just before her death, in 1998, at the age of seventy-six.
Nowak-Vogl’s child-observation station remained in operation for seven years after “Problemkinder” aired, and it wasn’t subjected to further investigation until the two-thousands. Nevertheless, a new generation of mental-health professionals, some of whom had come of age with the student and feminist movements of the sixties and seventies, helped reshape the field of child psychiatry in German-language countries.
Heilpädagogik was eclipsed by more child-centered, humane, and psychotherapeutic approaches. Closed institutions like Nowak-Vogl’s fell out of favor. The people who’d been trapped in them, however, still bore their scars.
III–Other Victims On our first trip to Austria, Evy hadn’t wanted to meet other former patients of the Innsbruck child-observation station. She was determined to keep her memories of the villa distinct—and she didn’t want to speak German. But the more that her own recollections were validated the less fragile she felt. Learning the facts, she told me, gave her something powerfully “concrete”: “It’s not just Evy overreacting. It’s not just me making up stories, imagining things, lying—all the things I was told I did as a kid.” When we returned to Austria, three months later, Evy was ready to meet, and offer help to, other victims of the psychiatric regime that had harmed her. We made plans to gather with some women who had been institutionalized under Nowak-Vogl. Austrian privacy laws—and a lingering atmosphere of shame—made it hard to find people who’d been confined at Sonnenstrasse. Many residents had spent the rest of their youths in orphanages or other institutions, and weren’t eager to revisit their pasts.
Horst Schreiber first heard about the child-observation stations from students he taught in an adult-education program, in the mid-two-thousands. The victims he met were initially reluctant to discuss their experiences, but, after he built a rapport with them, some agreed to be interviewed for his book. He offered to introduce three of them to us. Schreiber, who is sixty-two, has specialized in writing about uncomfortable aspects of Austrian society—the Nazi era, poverty, the children’s homes—and he has the merrily pugnacious air of a veteran gadfly. He rode a bicycle everywhere and talked so volubly that, at the Innsbruck café where we first met, one meal melted into another. His laugh was a torrent of high-pitched giggling that reminded me of Tom Hulce in “Amadeus.” Schreiber nodded vigorously when Evy told him of the shame that she’d felt at “having been in a mental hospital like that.” She added, “You don’t even realize how strong it is, until finally a day comes when the tables are turned, and it’s ‘No, shame on you.’ ” “This was the purpose of this institution—to shame,” Schreiber said. “And speaking in public—that helped a lot of people to not be ashamed any longer.” He took his scholarly obligations as a historian seriously, but he was just as serious about his moral obligations to the people whose stories he’d documented. He’d helped victims of Austrian institutions obtain their medical charts, organized commemorative events where victims could speak, and pushed for the creation of the expert commission that recommended reparations for former Innsbruck-station patients. One of them, Christine, was so appreciative of Schreiber’s work that she’d got a tattoo depicting the cover of his book.
Christine was among the three former patients who’d agreed to meet us and Schreiber for lunch, at a restaurant at the foot of a mountain west of Innsbruck. She and the other two, Heidi and Hanni, had become friends, and in front of the restaurant the women greeted one another warmly. Then they did the same with Evy.
We sat down at a long table outside a traditional whitewashed building with dark-wood shutters and beams. Below us was a green meadow bright with sunshine. Rivulets of melted snow ran down the craggy mountains, glittering like silver chains. We stayed there all afternoon, alternating between beers and coffees, spätzle and salads. Christine was funny and outgoing and fidgety. She wore a rainbow-striped sleeveless top and bright-blue eyeliner. She showed off her book-cover tattoo—it was on her right leg—and warned me against a Tyrolean specialty on the menu, unappetizingly described as gray cheese, which she then ordered.
Like Evy, the three women had, in addition to the child-observation station, spent time in other harsh institutions and in foster care. With truncated educations and traumatic upbringings, they’d had challenging lives. But each woman said that the villa had particularly haunted her. All three remembered the suffocating imperative of silence, the minute monitoring of their movements, the enforced lifelessness so inimical to a community of children. Heidi told us that she’d come from a lively, loving home; her mother, who was Romani, was not “a typical Austrian hausfrau in an apron”—she’d strung up fairy lights in their back yard, played the mandolin, and loved to dance. One day when Heidi was eight, she came home from school and found that her mother had forgotten to leave a key under the doormat. Night fell, and she and her older brother went to a police station for help. Child-welfare officials immediately picked them up and separated them; she didn’t see her brother again for twenty-seven years. In a recording that Heidi had made with Schreiber, she said that the worst thing about Nowak-Vogl’s institution was the “complete ignoring of the inner life—the soul—of the child.” Hanni, who wore a flowered dress and pearls, had short gray hair and a soft, sympathetic face. At seventy-one, she was the oldest of the three, and she said that she’d been confined at the child-observation station multiple times—starting at the age of two. When she had difficulty learning her colors, Nowak-Vogl beat her. She remembered voices booming out of the loudspeakers the instant a child spoke: “ Quiet! Quiet! ” Christine said that she’d never seen a loudspeaker before arriving at the villa, at the age of six, and had believed that the voices were ghosts.
Evy leaned toward each woman in turn, placing a consoling hand on hers. She had switched to German—none of them spoke English, and it was worth it to her to communicate directly. They all had children, and shared the kids’ names and ages. Wind rippled the shimmering leaves on birch and aspen trees. Fat bees buzzed around the sudsy glasses on the tables. One stung Schreiber on the mouth as he sipped beer, and Christine dug around in her tote bag for a salve. Somebody asked about nightmares and flashbacks. Heidi, who wore a moss-green dress and smoked cigarette after cigarette, volunteered that Christine had suffered the most flashbacks, because “she doesn’t have the peace she needs to mentally work through everything.” Christine then explained that the stigma she’d internalized as a child made her feel responsible for troubles her own children were now experiencing.
They talked about their medical charts, which were a confusing business. Nowak-Vogl had devised her own diagnostic code, using letters, and nobody had completely cracked it. Notes on the charts were a mixture of harsh judgments (kids were deemed “lazy” or “sneaky” or “slobs”) and psychological jargon, some of it imported from psychoanalysis (children had “neurotic” or “Oedipal” tendencies). Evy’s chart identified her as suffering from a jealousy of her foster sister which could be either “psychopathic or neurotic.” She was also deemed a “gossip” who sucked her thumb, wet her pants, and lifted her skirt to fix her underwear. It was noted that she had once spilled water on another girl’s bread, and had “probably bent a tulip” in a garden but “didn’t admit to it.” When we’d come across the line about the tulip, Evy said, “There was no winning in that environment.” The tiniest act was turned into a negative “judgment on your character.” Any errant behavior that Nowak-Vogl observed was attributed to inborn deficiencies. The institution was seen as an objective diagnostic machine, and nobody in charge seems ever to have reckoned with the distorting behavioral impact of ripping children from their homes and dropping them, without explanation, into a frightening new reality. Instead, the researchers condemned Evy for her “clinginess.” A consistent theme in Evy’s chart was her torment over being abandoned. A typical entry observed, “She wants to be noticed and is always afraid that she’ll be forgotten at home.” The chart noted that Anni, Evy’s foster mother, hadn’t sent letters or packages regularly.
Most victims who reviewed their charts couldn’t help but be rattled by them. One woman had told Schreiber that reading hers had been “shocking” because it made her seem, at four years old, like a “sex monster.” Georg Kaser, another former resident at the child-observation station, who met with Evy and me on a Zoom call, had ended up at Sonnenstrasse when he was ten. He came from a happy home, but he had developed anxieties—panicking, for example, when he sensed that his heart might be beating strangely. At the villa, he was miserably homesick, but this was construed as yet another indicator of constitutional weakness; his chart noted, with evident distaste, that he cried at night and was “always seeking attention with his loud voice,” or else staring “straight ahead,” looking “depressed.” Outwardly, Georg could make a good impression, but in secret he was “always up to something,” and had “a craving for validation.” Victims of the child-observation station gather at a restaurant in the Alps. From left to right: Hanni, Evy, Christine, and Heidi.
Photograph by Laetitia Vançon for the New Yorker Georg is now an actor who runs his own theatre company. He has three adult children, and he proudly showed us photographs of them. He wore hip yellow glasses, and seemed charming and at ease on the Zoom call, though he said that he had suffered from anxiety throughout his life. He had been curious to get his chart, but reading it had taken him aback. All the things that he remembered as most salient about the place—being locked in the cellar, being forced to eat bits of fat he’d left on a plate, watching a boy who had difficulty dressing himself be paraded around and humiliated by the staff—went unnoted.
Evy’s file didn’t mention therapies. The authors of “Psychiatrized Childhoods” argue that the “most striking” quality of the charts is that “treatments were rarely named” and “their success or failure hardly reported.” The charts create “the impression of a certain arbitrariness.” Talk therapy certainly wasn’t offered. Hanni and Christine said their records indicated that they’d been given epiphysan. Georg’s chart mentioned that he had been given barbiturates, but noted nothing about their effects.
Heidi said her chart noted that she’d talked back to Nowak-Vogl, demanding to know why she was there, how long she’d be there, and where her brother was. Reading her file, she felt that she had been disparaged for being a child nicht auf den Mund gefallen —a blabbermouth. Though Nowak-Vogl grudgingly noted Heidi’s intelligence, she recommended that she be sent to a Catholic home, where she ended up working in the laundry instead of attending school. (Despite this, Heidi managed to have a rewarding career, as a legal secretary.) Ina Friedmann, the historian of medicine, told me in an e-mail that the sedatives appear to have served mainly to “guarantee the functioning” of the child-observation station from day to day, by preventing “ ‘wild’ behavior.” Again, neither Nowak-Vogl nor her colleagues seem to have noticed that their scientific observation of children was being tainted by the constant drugging of their charges.
When it was time to head back down the mountain, Evy thanked each woman. Remembering Sonnenstrasse had been such a lonely experience for so long, she said. Evy told them that she wanted the Tyrolean government to make a bigger effort to find people who were entitled to an apology and to reparations. There had been a flurry of attention in Austria a decade ago, when the commission report came out, but evidently many victims had missed the news. Why wasn’t there a comprehensive Web site that laid out all the necessary information, including ways for victims to connect with one another and with therapists? If the government wouldn’t create one, Evy decided, she would do it herself. To date, four hundred and fourteen former patients at Nowak-Vogl’s institution—less than twelve per cent of the total—have come forward to report being abused.
IV–Family Secrets Learning the truth about the villa soon led Evy to other discoveries, about her family and Austrian history. She hadn’t expected so much to fall into place, and I sometimes saw her shake as if an electric current were running through her—from the force of revelations and memories, and from anger at officials who tried to withhold information or questioned the value of revisiting the past.
As Evy now recognized, she had once taken refuge in this attitude herself. She’d left the country the year after graduating from hotel-management school, in 1984, and had never considered returning home. For seven months, she worked as a wine steward on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. But she tired of all the drunk tourists, and when the ship was docked in San Juan she and a co-worker decided to quit their jobs and fly to Miami. When they got to the airport, the last flight for Miami had already taken off, but there was one leaving for New York. Evy got on it.
She instantly felt comfortable in the city: for the first time in her life, she wasn’t relentlessly “judged for being different.” She was just shy of twenty-one and didn’t know Manhattan from Brooklyn or Queens. But she cobbled together a new life, loving the anonymity offered by a city as big as New York, where your past didn’t have to trail you like the clattering cans on a newlywed couple’s car. She initially stayed at the Y.M.C.A. on Forty-seventh Street and worked random jobs: scraping plaster for an apartment renovation, waiting tables in the Village. She once waited on Uli Edel, the German film director, who was then making “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” and they dated for a while. She befriended a bald, bearded man because she thought that he was the writer Shel Silverstein; he wasn’t, but over diner breakfasts he told her stories about the gay S & M scene.
One day, Jimi, the bar owner from Kleinwalsertal, and her husband, Andi, had the inspiration to send Evy a camera as a gift. Evy had never had one before, but she loved it right away, and roamed the streets taking pictures. She signed up for classes at Parsons and at the International Center of Photography, and became a devotee of Dorothea Lange. Her first published picture, of striking workers at LaGuardia Airport, ran in a leftist New York weekly called the Guardian.
“I thought it was very much like Dorothea Lange!” she said, laughing.
She started freelancing for Agence France-Presse, then got a job with Reuters. In 1993, the Daily News hired her. It was a boys’ club, but a friendly one. She’d receive a gruff directive—“Go to the East River, there’s a floater”—and bicycle across town to get the shot. She won recognition for her work, and in 2000 she was named photographer of the year by the New York Press Photographers Association. One evening, on assignment for the paper, she was flying over the Brooklyn Bridge in a helicopter at sunset. The East River was glowing orange, and as she leaned out to get some shots she began sobbing: “I thought, I’m in New York—I’ve made it. But I couldn’t tell anybody how far I’d come.” Though she was determined to escape her past, it kept resurfacing. “I was just haunted,” she told me. “I couldn’t sleep with the lights off.” Sometimes she became so panicked on the subway that she had to run off the train wherever it stopped next. The photographer Greta Pratt, who was her boss at the Reuters bureau in New York and became a close friend, told me that Evy was vivacious and driven but also “secretive, because she was so hurt inside.” Pratt recalls that Evy would “just sort of turn and walk away” from anything that conjured upsetting associations. When Evy was in her twenties, she developed a profound eating disorder—she sometimes passed out from hunger. But her experience of psychiatry in Austria had been so horrific that seeing a therapist felt impossible.
During this time, however, she began dating her future husband, Paul Schwartzman, a New York native who came from a family of therapists. He encouraged her to seek help, and she began seeing a specialist in eating disorders, who warned her that she might die in her forties if she didn’t stop starving herself. With the therapist’s coaching, she stopped. When I asked Evy why she hadn’t been able to confide in the therapist about the villa, she said that the pain “was way too deep,” and that her mentality at the time was “You’re just trying to patch yourself up so you can walk down the street.” Evy had long accepted that she had no family—she’d never tried to track down her biological parents. But one day in 1995 she received a phone call from a sister she hadn’t known she had. Her name was Barbara Wespi—her friends called her Barbarella—and she was a year younger than Evy. They had different fathers, and Barbarella had met their mother only a few months earlier. Their mother was named Evy, too. The sisters agreed to meet in Switzerland, where Barbarella lived. At the airport in Zurich, Evy was so nervous that she didn’t want to get off the plane, but once she caught a glimpse of Barbarella—whose smile was as wide and radiant as her own—they stood pressing their hands on either side of a glass dividing wall, weeping.
Their relationship with the woman they soon dubbed Evy, Sr., started off promisingly, too. Evy, Sr., said she was overjoyed to finally have her daughters in her life. She explained that Evy’s father was a young man with whom she’d had a short relationship in 1964, when she was twenty-one and working at a restaurant in Salzburg. Evy, Sr., had gone to the city hoping to be an extra in the summer opera’s production of “Elektra”; the young man was studying art at the School of Seeing, an avant-garde institution founded by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. Evy’s father had been sweet and intelligent, with curly chestnut hair and beautiful eyes. He had also been determined, tough, and energetic—qualities that Evy, too, seemed to possess. Barbarella’s father had been a one-night stand whom Evy, Sr., had met while working at a train-station restaurant in Switzerland. She said, apologetically, that she couldn’t remember either man’s name.
“Want to go watch the people who get to leave at a normal hour?” Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop Evy, Sr., told her daughters that she had been born in Innsbruck in 1943. Her father had been a Jewish wholesaler of shoes. In 1949, he died. In those immiserated postwar years, her mother, overwhelmed by the need to make a living, sent little Evy, Sr., and her brother, Jürg, to live in a convent school outside Paris. She died not long afterward. Evy, Sr., lived briefly with her grandmother, then in group homes. In her late teens, she became itinerant. When she was still a minor, the police in Marseille arrested her for prostitution—a false charge, she insisted—and sent her back to Innsbruck, where she was institutionalized for a time. Her life had continued to be peripatetic, but now she was settled down, in a village in the Italian Alps, with a retired Italian construction worker.
Evy was openhearted and curious about her mother, and felt connected by their shared experience of orphanhood. But their connection soon faltered. Evy, Sr., visited Evy and Paul in New York, but to Evy she seemed detached and unenthusiastic. After returning to Italy, she sent letters, but they often consisted of bland comments about the weather, and she evaded further questions about their family history. “It drove Barbarella and me crazy, because we wanted some real answers,” Evy told me. “And it didn’t feel like she had true curiosity about us.
I’m sure it came from a lot of pain. She was a very hurt person, and that’s how she dealt with her trauma.” Evy let their correspondence lapse, and by the early two-thousands she’d stopped communicating with Barbarella, too. In 2018, Evy received a call telling her that her mother had died.
By the time Evy and I began investigating her personal history, her adventurous older daughter, Stella, had just started college, in Paris, studying art, and she had expressed an interest in meeting Barbarella, whom Evy hadn’t been in contact with for years. Evy began tentatively e-mailing and texting Barbarella, saying that she was sorry to have been such a disappointing sister. “You’re the sister I want,” Barbarella told her. Evy asked to communicate in English, and Barbarella agreed. “That opened up the opportunity completely,” Evy told me. “Just to be accepted like that. And I think, in a strange way, if I’m totally honest, it helped when I found out the truth about Innsbruck. It was, like, ‘Maybe if I share this with my sister, she’ll understand why I’ve acted so fucking weird.’ And she did.” Evy, Stella, and Barbarella met up in Paris in November, 2021. Barbarella, who is gay and has no kids, turned out to be an ideal long-lost aunt: she was affectionate and funny with Stella, and, like Evy, she was unfazed by teen-agers’ roiling emotions. Barbarella had worked as an art restorer and as a club d.j., and now owned an interior-design business in Zurich, where she had a close-knit crew of friends.
As a baby, Barbarella had been adopted by a Swiss couple in Horn, a small town on Lake Constance. The couple, who had previously adopted another daughter, soon divorced. The older girl had schizophrenia and was at times violent, and Barbarella had found it impossible to sustain a relationship with her. When Barbarella had first got to know Evy, all those years ago, she’d said to herself, “Oh, it wasn’t my mother I was looking for after all. It was you.” She told me, “Finding and losing Evy was difficult to understand. I tried to lock my heart and walk away, but it wasn’t possible. My heart told a different story.” Barbarella joined Evy and me on our two trips to Austria. The first time I met her, in Innsbruck, she ambled over wearing red plaid stovepipe pants, black Converse high-tops, and an oversized sweater bearing the phrase “ Je ne sais quoi.
” On the second trip, Sammy and Stella, who were on summer break from college, and Lily, who was in high school, came, too. After gathering in Innsbruck one afternoon in July, we headed to a building that houses the Tyrolean state archive.
The archive had a fat file on Rudolf Mages, the maternal grandfather of Evy and Barbarella. Their mother’s portrait of him was false. Rudolf hadn’t been Jewish—he had been a Nazi, and such an eager Party member that he’d signed up in 1931. He’d gone to prison at least twice for Nazi political activities during the period between 1934 and the Anschluss, when Party membership was illegal in Austria. He’d fled to Munich when there was a crackdown on Nazis, and had been extended refugee status in Germany. Rudolf had held one of the highest honors the Party accorded—membership in the Blutorden, or Blood Order—for his devotion to the cause. In 1938, he and his wife, Herta, had “Aryanized”—taken over—an Innsbruck shoe store belonging to a Jewish proprietor, Richard Graubart. Later that year, during the November pogroms that broke out across the Reich, S.S. men found Graubart at home with his wife and four-year-old daughter, and stabbed him to death. These were bewildering discoveries. Had Evy, Sr., been lied to? Or had shame led her to conflate her father’s identity with that of a Jewish man he had victimized? With horror, Evy realized that the course of her childhood was partly attributable to the fact that her troubled mother had been raised by active Nazis. It was not a hereditary burden, of the kind that Nowak-Vogl had believed in. It was a historical burden.
She kept going through the archive’s sepia-toned pages, as Sammy looked over her shoulder. In 1943, the file revealed, Rudolf had served a short time in prison for war profiteering—selling shoes without the proper ration certificates, and hoarding goods. Evy sighed in exasperation and said, “This is 1943, right? And you don’t go to jail for murdering people, or for stealing somebody’s whole life and property. But you do go to jail for selling shoes without a voucher.” Evy and Barbarella held out hope that Herta, Rudolf’s wife, had been at most a reluctant participant in all this. Their uncle Jürg was still alive, in Germany, and Barbarella was in contact with him. He believed that Herta had divorced Rudolf after the war because she no longer wanted to be married to a Nazi. It wasn’t clear to Jürg, though, why Herta had sent him and his sister to the convent school outside Paris. Perhaps she had been shielding them from their father’s ignominy? A few months later, we got closer to an answer. Evy, who had asked another Innsbruck archive if it had anything on Herta’s family, received a reply from a historian and archivist named Niko Hofinger. Evy’s timing had been fortuitous: in the basement of the city’s police headquarters, somebody had just discovered a bunch of files from the Nazi period. The cache included a file on Herta. Evy might not like what she learned, Hofinger warned.
Evy asked to see a copy, and a PDF arrived in her in-box. It painted a picture of a woman out of Fassbinder’s postwar trilogy: tough, cunning, and alluring. Like Maria Braun or Veronika Voss, Herta seemed to have traded on her looks, curried favor with Nazi leaders, and aggressively worked the black market. In 1936, according to an account that she’d given to the Innsbruck police, she’d lost her job as a salesclerk at a Viennese jewelry shop because of work she’d been doing for the then illegal Nazi Party: printing Party newspapers, making explosives. She married Rudolf, who was fourteen years her senior, in 1937, when she was twenty. A bookkeeper for the shoe store that the couple Aryanized described Herta as a “charming” woman whose “morals were not exactly impeccable,” adding, “It was well known that she had several lovers. She had nothing left for her children. They were a burden.” Herta, the bookkeeper said, had a “close connection” with Franz Hofer, the region’s highest-ranking Nazi, and could call him at any time on a secret number. Rudolf used his wife’s connections to Nazi officialdom to finesse business matters.
After the war, Rudolf was held in an Allied prison. Herta divorced him, and placed their kids in the French convent school. She moved into an apartment in Kitzbühel, where neighbors resented her lively parties and lavish life style. She travelled often to Milan and to Paris, where she sometimes visited her children. Police records indicated that state and border police had monitored Herta for suspected smuggling of furs (including a “monkey-skin cape”), paintings, antiques, and, possibly, cocaine.
In 1949, Rudolf killed himself, slashing his wrists in a guesthouse in Innsbruck. Herta died three years later, at thirty-five, apparently of a heart attack.
Evy shared the file with Horst Schreiber, who said that Herta came across as, if nothing else, a “clever” woman who had “seized favorable opportunities by the scruff of the neck.” Still, Evy could find nothing to suggest that Herta had cared much for her kids.
Negligent parents come in all ideological stripes. And Evy, Sr., might have struggled psychologically wherever and whenever she was born. But her childhood had clearly been warped by her parents’ Nazi activities—and by her mother’s decision to send her to a foreign country. Evy found herself feeling more compassion for her mother than she had when she’d known her.
Moreover, they had both been abused by doctors. After Evy, Sr., was arrested in Marseille, she had undergone electroshock therapy at a hospital outside Innsbruck. Electroshock was widely practiced in Europe and the United States in the postwar years, though it was usually indicated for intractable depression or schizophrenia, not for young women who might have been engaged in sex work. Evy, Sr.,’s memories of the experience had been unusually detailed. She’d described waiting her turn and seeing other patients convulse as electricity was administered. She remembered a Dr. Rodewald and a Dr. Simma, noting that Simma had a wide mouth that reminded her “of a toad’s.” (Official records indicate that psychiatrists named Hermann Rodewald and Kaspar Simma worked at Valduna, a hospital near Innsbruck, after the war.) Evy and I tracked down a journalist named Hans Weiss, who, as a psychology student conducting research at Valduna in the seventies, had known both doctors and had witnessed electroshock procedures. He confirmed that patients awaiting treatment could see and hear what was in store for them. Patients were supposed to be given anesthesia, Weiss said, but some weren’t—apparently as punishment.
Shortly after we returned from our first visit to Austria, Evy learned that her foster mother, Anni, was still alive. She was in a nursing home in Kleinwalsertal, and in her nineties, but, according to Evy’s contacts in the town, she was able to receive visitors. Evy had decided to confront her on our second trip. She initially hesitated about including her kids in this particular encounter. But they were growing up, and they were curious. “It was always something I wanted to shield them from,” Evy told me. “But then it’s like you create secrets. And I don’t want secrets.” She concluded that treating the trip as “an investigation into something that happened in their family tree” might give them power over the story, and insight into the intimate ways that history works itself into us all.
To get to Kleinwalsertal, we took a train from Vienna to Munich, then a smaller train to Memmingen, a third train to Oberstdorf, and, finally, a bus over a mountain pass. It was high summer, and hikers with walking sticks passed through the town on their way into the Alps. We got cheese sandwiches at a café, then headed to the nursing home for an unannounced visit.
Anni sat teetering on the edge of a bed, a small, thin woman with lank white hair and a creaky, plaintive voice. But she seemed to recognize Evy, who knelt in front of her and said, “Anni, do you remember my childhood?” “I have to think far back,” Anni said. The conversation proceeded in fits and starts, with Anni looking into Evy’s eyes and gripping her arm. “You rejected me,” Evy said. “You didn’t love me. You treated me terribly. You locked me in a cellar. I’m glad I get to tell you this.” “You can tell me everything—all the things I did wrong.” “It hurt me a lot, for many years.” “I am sorry,” Anni said. “The sorrow is real.” For Evy, the encounter was draining and disorienting. The monster of her childhood had become a vulnerable, feeble woman who, for the first time in Evy’s life, seemed to want her company. Evy briefly veered away from dark topics, informing Anni that she was now a photojournalist in the United States. They chatted about Anni’s daughter, who now lived near Munich.
Suddenly, Anni wept, dabbing her eyes with her shirt. Evy turned to us and said, “Does somebody have a napkin for her?” She couldn’t help but react with solicitude. Lily was kneeling next to her mother, with an arm around her. Sammy stood on Evy’s other side, with his arms crossed across his chest, glowering. Stella sat at a distance, tears streaming down her face.
Evy asked Anni why she’d sent her to the villa. Anni replied that a doctor in the village had known of Nowak-Vogl’s institution, and had recommended it. Evy said that Nowak-Vogl had been “very brutal,” and asked Anni if she’d known her reputation. “No,” Anni said. She told Evy, “We have both the same sorrow. You have it, and I have it. And we can’t run away from it. That doesn’t work.” Evy and Anni hugged, crying.
In Innsbruck, Evy embraces her daughter Stella. Evy’s sister, Barbarella, joined them on the trip.
Photograph by Laetitia Vançon for the New Yorker Anni’s daughter doesn’t recall her mother being unkind to Evy. But that evening our group met up with Anni’s nephew Heini, who had lived up the hill from Anni’s B. and B., and he remembered vividly Anni’s hostility toward Evy. He said that he wished his family had done more to stop it.
It wasn’t clear how much of the nursing-home conversation Anni had taken in, but Evy felt some satisfaction in finally having the upper hand. By turning up with her “beautiful family,” she told me, she had shown Anni that, despite her foster mother’s mistreatment, she had thrived.
Stella put it more bluntly: “The best revenge Evy got was how great a mother she is.” Earlier this year, Niko Hofinger, the archivist in Innsbruck, informed Evy that a city archive likely contained a file documenting her time as a ward of the state. Evy successfully pushed for permission to see it. A letter from Robert Höllebauer, the brutal psychologist who worked alongside Nowak-Vogl, said Evy’s stay at the villa had established that she was “neurotic,” and that if she continued to create disturbances in her foster family she should be dispatched to one of the small children’s homes known as SOS-Kinderdörfer. On these terms, she was returned to Anni, who, Evy recalls, made a point of telling other children in the village that she had just come back from a mental institution. Anni told a child-welfare official that, though Evy had been more restrained since her return from Nowak-Vogl’s, she was still committing “malicious acts.” Evy tried desperately to please Anni, but a letter from the official noted, “Her high spirit must constantly be dampened.” If Anni had wanted a quiet playmate for her daughter and an efficient helper—both girls were expected to clean guest rooms and do other chores—Evy was not that.
The file also contained notes from a caseworker, which said that Evy wanted Anni’s affection, and tried to do what was expected, but was rambunctious. As we read through the assessment, Evy told me that she had skied recklessly as a kid. Once, she was entrusted with bringing a tall votive candle home from church; she dropped the candle, breaking it. She resented being the butt of jokes, and hated certain local traditions, such as when the terrifying Krampus came to the door in December, threw “bad” children in his sack, and carried them out into the snowy night. Evy got upset when she was forced to sit on the “donkey bench” at school with the only other child deemed an outsider—a Turkish boy. The school’s principal recommended that she be sent away again, as soon as possible, because she outshone Anni’s daughter academically. This, apparently, is why Evy ended up in the orphanage in Germany: she had been too smart for her own good, and her high spirits had proved incurable.
In the file, Evy discovered a record of her birth, and on it was written something that she’d never expected to learn: a father’s name. One morning, she texted me a photograph of a handsome, brooding man who bore a resemblance to the actor Joaquin Phoenix. “I think this is my father,” she said. He was Othmar Zechyr. On the document, Evy, Sr., had provided his birth date, May 28, 1938, and his birthplace, Linz. Looking him up, we saw that, just as Evy, Sr., had told her daughter, he had studied at Oskar Kokoschka’s art school, in Salzburg. Zechyr had become a well-known artist in Austria, with work in major galleries and museums. He had made moody, crosshatched pen-and-ink drawings—of knolls and haystacks, of fantastical machinery. Zechyr, who died in 1996, had three children. Evy is now in correspondence with one of them, an art historian in Vienna. She has broached the idea of confirming their mutual paternity with DNA tests, and of meeting in Austria.
At the end of the file was an official’s assessment of Evy as a teen-ager: “The minor is courageous enough to assert herself in life.” Evy had Austria, and the German language, back in her life now. She had befriended advocates, historians, and former victims who were dedicated to an honest reckoning with the past. She had a renewed relationship with Barbarella. She had a probable candidate for her biological father, someone whose art she very much liked. She felt greater sympathy for her biological mother. There was only one more thing she wanted to face.
From the outside, the villa on Sonnenstrasse was basically as she remembered it: a rather grand and solid-looking structure from 1914, painted pale yellow. It was now divided into private apartments, with a locked front entrance, and to get inside we haphazardly pressed the buzzers. An older man named Peter, who lived on the top floor, let us in.
Nowak-Vogl’s institution had moved to a new location in 1979, and afterward the villa sat empty for years. Trash piled up inside. Then, one day in 2003, the villa underwent a strange rebirth. A group of young punks started squatting there. They cleaned it up, showed movies and put on concerts, and took in anarchists, homeless people, and runaways, including kids fleeing abusive families from all over Europe. They nicknamed it Villa Kunterbunt, after the German name for Pippi Longstocking’s house, where she lived on her own with her monkey, her horse, and her books.
One day, a young punk named Ingo spotted a man in his forties lingering in the garden, staring at the windows. The man explained that he’d been confined there as a child. Ingo invited him in and let him see his room. The man began trembling and crying. Ingo’s room had once been the office of the institution’s director, the man told him, and he had been so scared of her. Until that day, the squatters didn’t know the villa’s history, but they weren’t entirely surprised. Although many of them had lived in more decrepit places, this one had the air of a haunted house.
Ingo now works for an organization in Innsbruck that helps homeless people. When Evy and I found him, we were back in the U.S., but he agreed to meet us on Zoom. He showed us photographs from his time in the villa. “It’s amazing to see different images from what you hold,” Evy told him. “It kind of pushes back against the bad shape of what happened there.” Villa Kunterbunt hadn’t been perfect—there were police raids and hand-to-mouth struggles, and in 2005 the young people were evicted. But they had cared for one another and had made a community whose spirit of love and freedom was antithetical to the rigidity and surveillance of Nowak-Vogl’s institution. The transformation of the villa seemed to Evy like a benediction.
When Evy and I entered the building on Sonnenstrasse, she felt afraid but also ready. In the foyer, shafts of sunlight illuminated white walls and an imposing curved staircase, which looked very familiar. “I felt like a dragon slayer, going inside that building,” Evy said the next day. “I never could have imagined doing that.” On the villa’s first floor, she looked up in silence. She touched the walls. Then we turned around and walked back out to the street, where her children were waiting. ♦ New Yorker Favorites First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess.
The unravelling of an expert on serial killers.
What exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans ? When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too.
The meanings of the Muslim head scarf.
The slippery scams of the olive-oil industry.
Critics on the classics: our 1991 review of “Thelma & Louise.” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Profiles By Rachel Aviv Under Review By Jessica Winter Brave New World Dept.
By Jia Tolentino Annals of Inquiry By Joshua Rothman Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,263 | 2,022 |
"Are You the Same Person You Used to Be? | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/are-you-the-same-person-you-used-to-be-life-is-hard-the-origins-of-you"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert Annals of Inquiry Becoming You By Joshua Rothman Facebook X Email Print Save Story People have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves.
Illustration by Juan Bernabeu Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story I have few memories of being four—a fact I find disconcerting now that I’m the father of a four-year-old. My son and I have great times together; lately, we’ve been building Lego versions of familiar places (the coffee shop, the bathroom) and perfecting the “flipperoo,” a move in which I hold his hands while he somersaults backward from my shoulders to the ground. But how much of our joyous life will he remember? What I recall from when I was four are the red-painted nails of a mean babysitter; the brushed-silver stereo in my parents’ apartment; a particular orange-carpeted hallway; some houseplants in the sun; and a glimpse of my father’s face, perhaps smuggled into memory from a photograph. These disconnected images don’t knit together into a picture of a life. They also fail to illuminate any inner reality. I have no memories of my own feelings, thoughts, or personality; I’m told that I was a cheerful, talkative child given to long dinner-table speeches, but don’t remember being so. My son, who is happy and voluble, is so much fun to be around that I sometimes mourn, on his behalf, his future inability to remember himself.
If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns? Some people feel that they’ve altered profoundly through the years, and to them the past seems like a foreign country, characterized by peculiar customs, values, and tastes. (Those boyfriends! That music! Those outfits!) But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home. My mother-in-law, who lives not far from her parents’ house in the same town where she grew up, insists that she is the same as she’s always been, and recalls with fresh indignation her sixth birthday, when she was promised a pony but didn’t get one. Her brother holds the opposite view: he looks back on several distinct epochs in his life, each with its own set of attitudes, circumstances, and friends. “I’ve walked through many doorways,” he’s told me. I feel this way, too, although most people who know me well say that I’ve been the same person forever.
Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character? If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider. You might prefer being one to the other, but find it hard to shift your perspective. In the poem “The Rainbow,” William Wordsworth wrote that “the Child is Father of the Man,” and this motto is often quoted as truth. But he couched the idea as an aspiration—“And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”—as if to say that, though it would be nice if our childhoods and adulthoods were connected like the ends of a rainbow, the connection could be an illusion that depends on where we stand. One reason to go to a high-school reunion is to feel like one’s past self—old friendships resume, old in-jokes resurface, old crushes reignite. But the time travel ceases when you step out of the gym. It turns out that you’ve changed, after all.
On the other hand, some of us want to disconnect from our past selves; burdened by who we used to be or caged by who we are, we wish for multipart lives. In the voluminous autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard—a middle-aged man who hopes to be better today than he was as a young man—questions whether it even makes sense to use the same name over a lifetime. Looking at a photograph of himself as an infant, he wonders what that little person, with “arms and legs spread, and a face distorted into a scream,” really has to do with the forty-year-old father and writer he is now, or with “the gray, hunched geriatric who in forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home.” It might be better, he suggests, to adopt a series of names: “The fetus might be called Jens Ove, for example, and the infant Nils Ove . . . the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old Kurt Ove . . . the twenty-three- to thirty-two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove—and so on.” In such a scheme, “the first name would represent the distinctiveness of the age range, the middle name would represent continuity, and the last, family affiliation.” My son’s name is Peter. It unnerves me to think that he could someday become so different as to warrant a new name. But he learns and grows each day; how could he not be always becoming someone new? I have duelling aspirations for him: keep growing; keep being you. As for how he’ll see himself, who knows? The philosopher Galen Strawson believes that some people are simply more “episodic” than others; they’re fine living day to day, without regard to the broader plot arc. “I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum,” Strawson writes in an essay called “ The Sense of the Self.
” “I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and little interest in my own past.” Perhaps Peter will grow up to be an episodic person who lives in the moment, unconcerned with whether his life forms a whole or a collection of parts. Even so, there will be no escaping the paradoxes of mutability, which have a way of weaving themselves into our lives. Thinking of some old shameful act of ours, we tell ourselves, “I’ve changed!” (But have we?) Bored with a friend who’s obsessed with what happened long ago, we say, “That was another life—you’re a different person now!” (But is she?) Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see. Even as we work tirelessly to improve, we find that, wherever we go, there we are (in which case what’s the point?). And yet sometimes we recall our former selves with a sense of wonder, as if remembering a past life. Lives are long, and hard to see. What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are? The question of our continuity has an empirical side that can be answered scientifically. In the nineteen-seventies, while working at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, a psychologist named Phil Silva helped launch a study of a thousand and thirty-seven children; the subjects, all of whom lived in or around the city of Dunedin, were studied at age three, and again at five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six, thirty-two, thirty-eight, and forty-five, by researchers who often interviewed not just the subjects but also their family and friends. In 2020, four psychologists associated with the Dunedin study—Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton—summarized what’s been learned so far in a book called “ The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.
” It folds in results from a few related studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, and so describes how about four thousand people have changed through the decades.
John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate, and might be aided by a little judicious pruning here and there. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems. Each individual storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape. The fate of any given Harvey, Allison, Ike, or Katrina might be shaped, in part, by “air pressure in another locale,” and by “the time that the hurricane spends out at sea, picking up moisture, before making landfall.” Donald Trump, in 2014, told a biographer that he was the same person in his sixties that he’d been as a first grader. In his case, the researchers write, the idea isn’t so hard to believe. Storms, however, are shaped by the world and by other storms, and only an egomaniacal weather system believes in its absolute and unchanging individuality.
Efforts to understand human weather—to show, for example, that children who are abused bear the mark of that abuse as adults—are predictably inexact. One problem is that many studies of development are “retrospective” in nature: researchers start with how people are doing now, then look to the past to find out how they got that way. But many issues trouble such efforts. There’s the fallibility of memory: people often have difficulty recalling even basic facts about what they lived through decades earlier. (Many parents, for instance, can’t accurately remember whether a child was diagnosed as having A.D.H.D.; people even have trouble remembering whether their parents were mean or nice.) There’s also the problem of enrollment bias. A retrospective study of anxious adults might find that many of them grew up with divorced parents—but what about the many children of divorce who didn’t develop anxiety, and so were never enrolled in the study? It’s hard for a retrospective study to establish the true import of any single factor. The value of the Dunedin project, therefore, derives not just from its long duration but also from the fact that it is “prospective.” It began with a thousand random children, and only later identified changes as they emerged.
Working prospectively, the Dunedin researchers began by categorizing their three-year-olds. They met with the children for ninety minutes each, rating them on twenty-two aspects of personality—restlessness, impulsivity, willfulness, attentiveness, friendliness, communicativeness, and so on. They then used their results to identify five general types of children. Forty per cent of the kids were deemed “well-adjusted,” with the usual mixture of kid personality traits. Another quarter were found to be “confident”—more than usually comfortable with strangers and new situations. Fifteen per cent were “reserved,” or standoffish, at first. About one in ten turned out to be “inhibited”; the same proportion were identified as “undercontrolled.” The inhibited kids were notably shy and exceptionally slow to warm up; the undercontrolled ones were impulsive and ornery. These determinations of personality, arrived at after brief encounters and by strangers, would form the basis for a half century of further work.
By age eighteen, certain patterns were visible. Although the confident, reserved, and well-adjusted children continued to be that way, those categories were less distinct. In contrast, the kids who’d been categorized as inhibited or as undercontrolled had stayed truer to themselves. At age eighteen, the once inhibited kids remained a little apart, and were “significantly less forceful and decisive than all the other children.” The undercontrolled kids, meanwhile, “described themselves as danger seeking and impulsive,” and were “the least likely of all young adults to avoid harmful, exciting, and dangerous situations or to behave in reflective, cautious, careful, or planful ways.” Teen-agers in this last group tended to get angry more often, and to see themselves “as mistreated and victimized.” The researchers saw an opportunity to streamline their categories. They lumped together the large group of teen-agers who didn’t seem to be on a set path. Then they focussed on two smaller groups that stood out. One group was “moving away from the world,” embracing a way of life that, though it could be perfectly rewarding, was also low-key and circumspect. And another, similarly sized group was “moving against the world.” In subsequent years, the researchers found that people in the latter group were more likely to get fired from their jobs and to have gambling problems. Their dispositions were durable.
That durability is due, in part, to the social power of temperament, which, the authors write, is “a machine that designs another machine, which goes on to influence development.” This second machine is a person’s social environment. Someone who moves against the world will push others away, and he’ll tend to interpret the actions of even well-meaning others as pushing back; this negative social feedback will deepen his oppositional stance. Meanwhile, he’ll engage in what psychologists call “niche picking”—the favoring of social situations that reinforce one’s disposition. A “well-adjusted” fifth grader might actually “look forward to the transition to middle school”; when she gets there, she might even join some clubs. Her friend who’s moving away from the world might prefer to read at lunch. And her brother, who’s moving against the world—the group skews slightly male—will feel most at home in dangerous situations.
Through such self-development, the authors write, we curate lives that make us ever more like ourselves. But there are ways to break out of the cycle. One way in which people change course is through their intimate relationships. The Dunedin study suggests that, if someone who tends to move against the world marries the right person, or finds the right mentor, he might begin to move in a more positive direction. His world will have become a more beneficent co-creation. Even if much of the story is written, a rewrite is always possible.
The Dunedin study tells us a lot about how differences between children matter over time. But how much can this kind of work reveal about the deeper, more personal question of our own continuity or changeability? That depends on what we mean when we ask who we are. We are, after all, more than our dispositions. All of us fit into any number of categories, but those categories don’t fully encompass our identities.
There’s an important sense, first of all, in which who you are is determined not by what you’re like but by what you do. Imagine two brothers who grow up sharing a bedroom, and who have similar personalities—intelligent, tough, commanding, and ambitious. One becomes a state senator and university president, while the other becomes a Mob boss. Do their parallel temperaments make them similar people? Those who’ve followed the stories of William Bulger and James (Whitey) Bulger—the Boston brothers who ran the Massachusetts Senate and the underworld, respectively—sometimes suggest that they were more alike than different. (“They’re both very tough in their respective fields,” a biographer observed.) But we’d be right to be skeptical of such an outlook, because it requires setting aside the wildly different substances of the brothers’ lives. At the Pearly Gates, no one will get them confused.
“He’s more interesting poolside.” Cartoon by Liza Donnelly Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop The Bulger brothers are extraordinary; few of us break so bad or good. But we all do surprising things that matter. In 1964, the director Michael Apted helped make “Seven Up!,” the first of a series of documentaries that would visit the same group of a dozen or so Britons every seven years, starting at age seven; Apted envisioned the project—which was updated most recently in 2019, with “63 Up”—as a socioeconomic inquiry “about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.” But, as the series has progressed, the chaos of individuality has encroached on the clarity of categorization. One participant has become a lay minister and gone into politics; another has begun helping orphans in Bulgaria; others have done amateur theatre, studied nuclear fusion, and started rock bands. One turned into a documentarian himself and quit the project. Real life, irrepressible in its particulars, has overpowered the schematic intentions of the filmmakers.
Even seemingly unimportant or trivial elements can contribute to who we are. Late this summer, I attended a family function with my father and my uncle. As we sat at an outside table, making small talk, our conversation turned to “Star Trek,” the sci-fi TV show that premièred in 1966. My father and uncle have both watched various incarnations of it since childhood, and my dad, in particular, is a genuine fan. While the party went on around us, we all recited from memory the original version’s opening monologue—“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. . . .”—and applauded ourselves on our rendition. “Star Trek” is a through line in my dad’s life. We tend to downplay these sorts of quirks and enthusiasms, but they’re important to who we are. When Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “ Ulysses ,” wanders through a Dublin cemetery, he is unimpressed by the generic inscriptions on the gravestones, and thinks they should be more specific. “So and So, wheelwright,” Bloom imagines, or, on a stone engraved with a saucepan, “I cooked good Irish stew.” Asked to describe ourselves, we might tend to talk in general terms, finding the details of our lives somehow embarrassing. But a friend delivering a eulogy would do well to note that we played guitar, collected antique telephones, and loved Agatha Christie and the Mets. Each assemblage of details is like a fingerprint. Some of us have had the same prints throughout our lives; others have had a few sets.
Focussing on the actualities of our lives might belie our intuitions about our own continuity or changeability. Galen Strawson, the philosopher who says that he has little sense of his life “as a narrative,” is best known for the arguments he’s made against the ideas of free will and moral responsibility; he maintains that we don’t have free will and aren’t ultimately responsible for what we do. But his father, Peter Strawson, was also a philosopher, and was famous for, among other things, defending those concepts. Galen Strawson can assure us that, from a first-person perspective, his life feels “episodic.” Yet, from the third-person perspective of an imagined biographer, he’s part of a long plot arc that stretches across lifetimes. We may feel discontinuous on the inside but be continuous on the outside, and vice versa. That sort of divergence may simply be unavoidable. Every life can probably be viewed from two angles.
I know two Tims, and they have opposing intuitions about their own continuities. The first Tim, my father-in-law, is sure that he’s had the same jovially jousting personality from two to seventy-two. He’s also had the same interests—reading, the Second World War, Ireland, the Wild West, the Yankees—for most of his life. He is one of the most self-consistent people I know. The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so. When I first met him, he was so skinny that he was turned away from a blood drive for being underweight; bullied and pushed around by bigger kids, he took solace in the idea that his parents were late growers. This notion struck his friends as far-fetched. But after high school Tim suddenly transformed into a towering man with an action-hero physique. He studied physics and philosophy in college, and then worked in a neuroscience lab before becoming an officer in the Marines and going to Iraq; he entered finance, but has since left to study computer science.
“I’ve changed more than most people I know,” Tim told me. He shared a vivid memory of a conversation he had with his mother, while they sat in the car outside an auto mechanic’s: “I was thirteen, and we were talking about how people change. And my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, told me that people tend to stop changing so much when they get into their thirties. They start to accept who they are, and to live with themselves as they are. And, maybe because I was an unhappy and angry person at the time, I found that idea offensive. And I vowed right then that I would never stop changing. And I haven’t stopped.” Do the two Tims have the whole picture? I’ve known my father-in-law for only twenty of his seventy-two years, but even in that time he’s changed quite a bit, becoming more patient and compassionate; by all accounts, the life he lived before I met him had a few chapters of its own, too. And there’s a fundamental sense in which my high-school friend hasn’t changed. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been committed to the idea of becoming different. For him, true transformation would require settling down; endless change is a kind of consistency.
Galen Strawson notes that there’s a wide range of ways in which people can relate to time in their lives. “Some people live in narrative mode,” he writes, and others have “no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development.” But it’s not just a matter of being a continuer or a divider. Some people live episodically as a form of “spiritual discipline,” while others are “simply aimless.” Presentism can “be a response to economic destitution—a devastating lack of opportunities—or vast wealth.” He continues: There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. . . . Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal.
The stories we tell ourselves about whether we’ve changed are bound to be simpler than the elusive reality. But that’s not to say that they’re inert. My friend Tim’s story, in which he vows to change forever, shows how such stories can be laden with value. Whether you perceive stasis or segmentation is almost an ideological question. To be changeable is to be unpredictable and free; it’s to be not just the protagonist of your life story but the author of its plot. In some cases, it means embracing a drama of vulnerability, decision, and transformation; it may also involve a refusal to accept the finitude that’s the flip side of individuality.
The alternative perspective—that you’ve always been who you are—bears values, too. James Fenton captures some of them in his poem “The Ideal”: A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect What he has been.
This is my past Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
In this view, life is full and variable, and we all go through adventures that may change who we are. But what matters most is that we lived it. The same me, however altered, absorbed it all and did it all. This outlook also involves a declaration of independence—independence not from one’s past self and circumstances but from the power of circumstances and the choices we make to give meaning to our lives. Dividers tell the story of how they’ve renovated their houses, becoming architects along the way. Continuers tell the story of an august property that will remain itself regardless of what gets built. As different as these two views sound, they have a lot in common. Among other things, they aid us in our self-development. By committing himself to a life of change, my friend Tim might have sped it along. By concentrating on his persistence of character, my father-in-law may have nurtured and refined his best self.
The passage of time almost demands that we tell some sort of story: there are certain ways in which we can’t help changing through life, and we must respond to them. Young bodies differ from old ones; possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade. When you were seventeen, you practiced the piano for an hour each day, and fell in love for the first time; now you pay down your credit cards and watch Amazon Prime. To say that you are the same person today that you were decades ago is absurd. A story that neatly divides your past into chapters may also be artificial. And yet there’s value in imposing order on chaos. It’s not just a matter of self-soothing: the future looms, and we must decide how to act based on the past. You can’t continue a story without first writing one.
Sticking with any single account of your mutability may be limiting. The stories we’ve told may become too narrow for our needs. In the book “ Life Is Hard ,” the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain bracing challenges—loneliness, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; we tend to be educated, meanwhile, in a broadly redemptive tradition that “urges us to focus on the best in life.” One of the benefits of asserting that we’ve always been who we are is that it helps us gloss over the disruptive developments that have upended our lives. But it’s good, the book shows, to acknowledge hard experiences and ask how they’ve helped us grow tougher, kinder, and wiser. More generally, if you’ve long answered the question of continuity one way, you might try answering it another. For a change, see yourself as either more continuous or less continuous than you’d assumed. Find out what this new perspective reveals.
There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the tale I’m telling; then, inevitably, I revise the story as I change. The long work of revising might itself be a source of continuity in our lives. One of the participants in the “Up” series tells Apted, “It’s taken me virtually sixty years to understand who I am.” Martin Heidegger, the often impenetrable German philosopher, argued that what distinguishes human beings is our ability to “take a stand” on what and who we are; in fact, we have no choice but to ask unceasing questions about what it means to exist, and about what it all adds up to. The asking, and trying out of answers, is as fundamental to our personhood as growing is to a tree.
Recently, my son has started to understand that he’s changing. He’s noticed that he no longer fits into a favorite shirt, and he shows me how he sleeps somewhat diagonally in his toddler bed. He’s been caught walking around the house with real scissors. “I’m a big kid now, and I can use these,” he says. Passing a favorite spot on the beach, he tells me, “Remember when we used to play with trucks here? I loved those times.” By this point, he’s actually had a few different names: we called him “little guy” after he was born, and I now call him “Mr. Man.” His understanding of his own growth is a step in his growing, and he is, increasingly, a doubled being—a tree and a vine. As the tree grows, the vine twines, finding new holds on the shape that supports it. It’s a process that will continue throughout his life. We change, and change our view of that change, for as long as we live. ♦ New Yorker Favorites First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess.
The unravelling of an expert on serial killers.
What exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans ? When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too.
The meanings of the Muslim head scarf.
The slippery scams of the olive-oil industry.
Critics on the classics: our 1991 review of “Thelma & Louise.” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
More: Childhood Personality Relationships Experience Self Researchers Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Poems By Christian Wiman Poems By Martín Espada Repair Dept.
By Dana Goodyear Personal History By Yiyun Li Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,264 | 2,019 |
"Electronic Pop for the Surveillance Era | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/electronic-pop-for-the-surveillance-era"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert Pop Music Electronic Pop for the Surveillance Era By Hua Hsu Herndon aspires to see technology as neither the best thing ever nor the worst.
Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story The artist and scholar Holly Herndon describes the laptop as “the most intimate instrument that we’ve ever seen.” It doesn’t just facilitate the creation of art—it’s a device that connects us to the world, a surface that’s as familiar as our own flesh, a thing that we entrust with our secrets and memories, a machine that we fall asleep cradling. Herndon makes experimental pop music, the result of tinkering and testing, as she chases ideas about the tech-obsessed present. That her experiments occasionally produce songs that are club-friendly can feel like an accident, a bug rather than a feature. In 2015, Herndon released “Platform,” an album that contemplates surveillance by sampling the sounds of everyday life—a refrigerator door, a Skype session. On the track “Home,” an unconventional breakup song, she imagines a relationship with an N.S.A. officer who spies on her through her laptop.
Many of us are resigned to the fact that our realities are made up of relationships—with companies and platforms, devices and accounts—that are conducted on uncertain terms. It’s the kind of thinking that leads people to cover the camera on their computer while passively volunteering for other forms of monitoring. Herndon’s work questions whether our relationship with technology has to traffic in such fear and weariness. She became infatuated with electronic music during a high-school exchange program, when she left Johnson City, Tennessee, for Berlin. She went on to study electronic music at Mills College, and she recently completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her interest in the interplay between computer programs and humans, in a variety of settings, helped make some of her previous albums, such as “Movement” (2012) and “Platform,” amenable to dance floors and seminar classrooms alike.
Herndon’s new album, “ PROTO ,” is the result of a collaboration with a two-foot-tall gaming PC, which houses an artificial neural network that she designed with her husband, the artist Mat Dryhurst. For the past two years, they have been teaching this “AI baby,” which they named Spawn and refer to using female pronouns, how to use her voice. They trained Spawn by talking and singing to her. Herndon, Dryhurst, and Spawn’s “godfather,” the artist Jules LaPlace, even formed a choir that would perform hymns for her. In time, Spawn began to produce sounds that weren’t built on sampling. We often say that people find their voice; Spawn iterated hers.
Herndon’s singing is full of operatic swells and icy whispers—it’s what marks her music as intimate and human, despite the digital melee around her. On “Platform,” she endeavored to make songs meant to trigger autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R., which is usually experienced as a pleasurable, involuntary tingling. She often sounds as if she were trying to breathe with, or subsume herself within, imposing machines, to figure out how they might braid together as one. On “ PROTO ,” that process is made concrete as she sings with Spawn, whose voice retains an eerie, frayed, metallic quality, something like a swarm of bees. These moments are a jarring contrast to the album’s snippets of the training sessions in which Herndon and her human collaborators sang hymns. The recordings are pretty and timeless, a group of people settling on a shared vibration, and they produce a kind of material effect that Spawn is incapable of. Spawn’s contributions, by contrast, are harsh and weird, aspiring only to absolute newness. One of the album’s most chilling songs is “Godmother,” in which Spawn “sings” a vocal-free track by the Indiana dance-music producer Jlin, whose songs tend to be beautifully skittish. Spawn approximates these turbulent rhythms with moans, nervous chattering, and machine-gun-like tsk-tsks, sounding a bit like someone working through an exorcism.
“We have all kinds of new emotions and new feelings that weren’t even possible before, because of the new ways we’re connected with each other,” Herndon recently told the BBC. “And we need to find new art forms to express that.” This tension has always been at the heart of Herndon’s music; it’s impossible to say whether the big, clubby tunes she sometimes makes are by design or by accident. Some of the best songs on “ PROTO ” share this quality. “Eternal” soars and dips like a good dance song, Herndon pushing a triumphant hook while Spawn wails obliviously in the background. You could easily listen to Herndon’s music without understanding how it’s made, and much of it shows a good grasp of what is currently popular—synth lines worm their way through booming, chattering, low-end percussion, providing hits of loud-quiet-loud drama.
But other songs linger in a kind of dense, digital murk—the ether from which Spawn came—and raise some fascinating questions. Do voices make us human? Do we own the sound of our own voice? And, as robot ethicists have begun wondering, is it possible to exploit a machine? Hatsune Miku, a holographic Japanese pop idol, makes hit records in Japan and tours the world, yet she isn’t paid.
Herndon’s music seems to resist moments of ease; in time, this feels like the point. “ PROTO ” is at times difficult to listen to, because Spawn is still evolving, learning the expectations of the world. The erratic nature of it all gives the album a disturbingly human feel—it’s challenging and odd. When a child is learning to speak, she takes a while to pick up the rhythms of language, the syntax of sense. It’s up to those tasked with caring for Spawn to allow her to grow and flourish. But the expectations are unclear—after all, Spawn is hardly a pretty name.
Herndon’s desire to see technology as neither the best thing ever nor the worst marks her as unusual, given the divisiveness and normalized dread of our times. It feels optimistic to present A.I. as a way of making us feel more human.
The lure of art has always rested in how it captivates us in unexpected ways. The popular fear of algorithms reflects the anxiety that our lives will simply become patterned according to a program—that our autonomy will evaporate as computers tell us what songs we will like, when we need to buy more toilet paper, or what move we should make in a chess game.
In this context, a seeming glitch, like the rise of the Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X, offers delight. Owing to his grasp of streaming algorithms and what makes things go viral, Lil Nas X got his single, “Old Town Road,” atop the country charts, to the chagrin of the genre’s purists. “Old Town Road” is currently one of the most popular songs in the nation, leading some people to wonder how schemes to engineer chart success, based on a knowledge of how to manipulate clunky genre categories, or song length, will affect the sound of pop.
More likely, the future will be shaped by companies like Endel, a startup specializing in “personalized, sound-based, adaptive environments.” In March, Warner Music Group struck a deal with Endel to release albums based on its algorithms, which make mellow mood music that’s supposed to conform to listeners, taking into account everything from their heart rate to the weather and the time of day. Where Spawn’s music is clunky and weird, Endel’s is beautiful, like the pioneering ambient works of Brian Eno. Yet there’s something frightening about the way Endel’s music is meant to affect its listeners—shaping mood or boosting productivity—in such careful, unobtrusive ways.
If we think of “data” as stimuli, or inspiration, and an “algorithm” as a defined process, then the interaction between art and computing can seem less forbidding. Later this month, the French-American jazz pianist Dan Tepfer will release “Natural Machines,” a series of duets with an algorithm. A few years ago, he began playing with a Yamaha piano of the kind that you often see playing itself in hotel lobbies. Tepfer wrote a series of algorithms designed to respond to his improvisations, producing a more dynamic range of sounds than his two hands could make on their own. The resulting compositions are often lovely, in a jaggedly hypnotic way, yet they lack some of the chaos and blemish of human collaboration. They are the sort of thing you might see in a Google commercial.
Tepfer’s work is a modern update of what Eno dubbed “generative music”—compositions that could go on forever, evolving according to a set of predetermined rules. But, as software plays an increasingly central part in our lives, and the notion of “hacking” extends to everything from accumulating credit-card rewards to brewing the perfect cup of coffee, the idea of collaborating with computers has taken on a different feel. In the past few years, something called “algorave” has emerged in Europe. The term, coined by the artist Alex McLean, refers to dance parties with “live coding,” including displays of strings of code being edited in real time.
Much of the music coming out of the algorave world resembles that of Autechre and Aphex Twin, dance-music innovators of the eighties and nineties whose work drew on algorithms and stretched the boundaries of texture and rhythm. A key element of algorave is that it exists largely as live performance, since so much of it involves amateur experimentation. Electronic music of this sort is often difficult to improvise, but one doesn’t need to be an engineer to understand the basic coding commands that distinguish a big drop from a slow, aching one. There’s an almost parodic geekiness to the genre—artists altering lines of code with a flourish, showing their work on a screen. The music rises and falls according to unpredictable rhythms, creating a messy, twitchy symphony of bleeps. And in that intertwining of energies, from a power adapter to moving bodies, there’s something fleeting and new. ♦ More: Pop Music Composers Sound Musicians Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Pop Music By Amanda Petrusich Pop Music By Carrie Battan Onward and Upward with Technology By Anna Wiener Magazine Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,265 | 2,012 |
"Prying Eyes | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/prying-eyes"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert Onward and Upward with the Arts Prying Eyes By Jonah Weiner Paglen says that his often blurry photographs of drones and classified surveillance sites are “useless as evidence.” His aim is not to expose and edify so much as to confound and unsettle.
Bottom right: Photograph by Pari Dukovic / Photographs by Top Left: “Untitled (Reaper Drone)” (2010); Top Right: “Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground; Dugway, UT; Distance ~ 42 Miles; 10:51 A.M.” (2006); Bottom Left: “They Watch the Moon” (2010) / Courtesy Metro Pictures Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In the Nevada sky—above a desert valley where jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, antelope, and cattle munched on cheatgrass—two tendrils of vapor had appeared over Squawtip Mountain. Recognizing these as fighter-jet contrails, the artist Trevor Paglen, who was riding shotgun in an S.U.V., shouted, “Stop the car!” He grabbed a digital camera with a telephoto lens and hopped out, nudging back the brim of his Oakland Raiders cap to bring the viewfinder to his eye.
The jets were too far away to make out, but their contrails indicated serious hotdogging. Flying northerly, the pilots had climbed long, lazy slopes before diving earthward and returning in the direction they’d come from, carving parallel hooks in the sky. The valley was quiet and hot, and the air smelled of sagebrush. After a minute, the contrails faded. Paglen lowered his camera. “Show’s over,” he said, returning to the car. Looking at the camera’s L.C.D. display, he zoomed in on a picture: at the head of a contrail was a tiny isosceles triangle of shimmering light. “Sort of looks like an F-22,” he said, squinting at the screen. “I don’t know what they are.” We were on a narrow dirt road on the periphery of the Nevada Test and Training Range, or N.T.T.R., an expanse of restricted land that is home to many classified aircraft and electronic-warfare simulations. Paglen estimates that he has taken twenty to thirty trips to the area, which is roughly as big as Connecticut. The N.T.T.R. includes the Tonopah Test Range, Creech Air Force Base, the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range, and various obscure, officially unacknowledged installations. The most famous, known as Area 51, is a base where pilots audition planes so secret that most people cleared to work within the N.T.T.R. can’t go near it.
Paglen, a former prison-rights activist who has written that secrecy “nourishes the worst excesses of power,” regards each photograph he takes as the record of a political performance: he insists on his right to stand on public land with a camera. Over the past decade, he has taken thousands of photographs of places connected to the so-called “black world” of classified defense activity, which has grown exponentially since 2001, when the Bush Administration launched its war on terror. He has aimed his lens at a National Security Agency eavesdropping complex in Sugar Grove, West Virginia; a space-surveillance transmitter in Lake Kickapoo, Texas; and a secret C.I.A. prison outside Kabul. Last November, he photographed an Israeli nuclear-weapons facility in the Negev Desert, a risky move that he now calls “very stupid.” (The site had the tightest security he’d ever seen: fencing, surveillance cameras, and armed checkpoints.) Paglen has two graduate degrees—a Ph.D. in geography, from Berkeley, and an M.F.A., from the Art Institute of Chicago—and his academic and artistic interests are fully intertwined. Research for his geography dissertation led him to create the images in his first solo gallery show. In 2009, Dutton published a version of the dissertation as “Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Hidden World.” Paglen, who is thirty-eight, has close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes, a goatee, and a thin beard that he confines to his jawline with an electric trimmer. An avid surfer, he speaks in a mixture of wave-chaser lingo (“Whassup, dude!”) and the knottier formulations of Continental theory—a result of years spent in graduate seminars, Bay Area bars, and radical artists’ collectives. Alert to the stereotype of the jargon-addled Berkeley crank, Paglen adopts a self-mocking tone if he fears he’s coming off as stuffy. He dresses in a studiously casual uniform of fitted black T-shirt, baggy dark Levi’s, and motorcycle boots, although, for the desert, he’d traded the boots for thin-soled leather sneakers.
The Nevada Test and Training Range’s black sites are protected by mountainous buffer land, barbed-wire fencing, surveillance cameras hidden among Joshua trees, buried motion detectors, and private-security teams. To take his photographs, Paglen finds viewpoints on public land, such as Tikaboo Peak—a mountain summit, twenty-six miles from Area 51, with good sight lines to the base. His art also depends on serious investigative work. He attends military reunions to hear retired pilots talk and, through online aviation forums and secrecy-themed listservs, communicates with air-traffic controllers, NASA historians, and amateur “plane-spotters,” who monitor runways around the world, cataloguing tail numbers.
Although Paglen is mindful of the law, he says that he sometimes faces harassment. Late one night last fall, he and a friend drove down an unmarked road that leads west from Route 375 toward Area 51. He got out just short of the restricted zone’s eastern boundary; suddenly, his eardrums began pulsating and a shrill tone filled his skull. “At first, I thought I was imagining it,” he said, but his friend felt it, too. When they returned to the car, the sound and the pulsing stopped. When Paglen stepped out again, they resumed. Security forces were zapping him, he surmised, with a high-frequency weapon, like gardeners using sonic repellents to drive off a squirrel. (The Pentagon says that Paglen’s account is “not plausible.”) In the S.U.V., we headed toward a mountain, in the nearby Kawich Range, whose summit, seven thousand feet above sea level, offered unobstructed views of the Tonopah Test Range. Along the way, we stopped to look at a sun-bleached steer skull in a roadside ditch; the animal’s spine undulated in the grass like a monorail track. The roar of a jet engine, or several, filled the valley, but the sky was an undisrupted blue. “Creepy, huh?” Paglen said. When we arrived at the mountain, the sun was hanging low, and we unloaded Paglen’s gear: the camera, a tripod, a chamois satchel bulging with lenses, and a long black case with metal latches. We’d parked just three hundred feet below the summit, but it took us fifteen minutes to climb the mountain’s rocky northeast face, and we were panting when we reached the top.
“Virgin Mary’s still here,” Paglen said, motioning toward a chipped figurine nestled among black rocks. “That thing’s been here since I’ve been coming.” He knelt down and, snapping open the case, removed a 600-mm. Orion refractor telescope—a tool, built for astrophotography, that Paglen frequently uses to take pictures.
Connecting his camera to the telescope with a tubular magnifying lens, Paglen gazed at Tonopah, thirteen miles to the south. To the naked eye, the base was little more than a white streak on the valley floor. In the display on Paglen’s camera, the streak resolved into a cluster of airplane hangars, six fuel-storage tanks, two white domes, an air-control tower, and many squat, nondescript structures. Beyond these was a runway from which, an hour earlier, we’d witnessed the takeoff of an unmarked Boeing 737: a military shuttle transporting workers from the N.T.T.R. to a secure terminal at McCarran Airport, in Las Vegas.
“This isn’t the closest viewpoint,” Paglen said. “But it’s the most panoramic.” He took a picture and frowned. “The light’s crappy,” he said. This was funny to hear, because the looming sunset had created a postcard-perfect glow. For Paglen, though, the late-day light and corresponding drop in temperature were making his pictures undesirably clear. He likes it when his photographs capture the swirling visual noise created by convection waves rising off the desert floor, an optical effect he compares to “looking across the top of a fire.” When photographing Tonopah, he explained, “I like midmorning, like 10 or 11 A.M.
, ’cause that’s when you have a lot of action in the atmosphere.” Paglen welcomes distortion in his images because his aim is not to expose and edify so much as to confound and unsettle. He said that his photographs are “useless as evidence, for the most part, but at the same time they’re a way of organizing your attention.” For “Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground” (2006), Paglen photographed a test site in Dugway, Utah, from forty-two miles away. He used a high-powered reflector telescope, but at that distance its capacities were severely strained. The image is dominated by stacks of grayish and bluish striations that could be geological or purely optical. At the midpoint, a row of discrete smudges—bunkers? jeeps? tree stumps?—spans the frame, like a line of uncrackable code.
Paglen said that blurriness serves both an aesthetic and an “allegorical” function. It makes his images more arresting while providing a metaphor for the difficulty of uncovering the truth in an era when so much government activity is covert. Scientists sometimes volunteer technical support. He said, “They’ll be like, ‘Come to my lab. We’ve been experimenting with adaptive optics systems and we could probably get you set up with a laser that would account for thermal fluctuations and convection waves, and you could take a clear picture.’ It’s like, O.K., and then what? Now you have a picture of a building. Does that say anything more than what the blurry picture of the building says? Maybe. But, I think, a little less, really.” “A penthouse on Central Park West…not bad for a second–tier private–school kid from a postwar co–op on Riverside Drive, eh?” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop After the sun had disappeared, the Tonopah Test Range lit up like a city, and Paglen adjusted his exposure time. He works within rigid constraints: his compositional options are dictated by the available vantage points for a black site, and the aesthetic variables—exposure, light, weather—are both narrow and unpredictable. He took a few shots in the dusk. Paglen was underexposing the pictures by two stops, he said, and the adjustment made “the lights pop.” I thought that the images were eerie, but he found them overly decorative, suffering from a “Christmas-light effect.” Tonopah came into use in the nineteen-fifties, as a site for ballistics testing; in 1978, an Air Force colonel named Gaillard (Evil) Peck chose the location for a program code-named Constant Peg, in which airmen learned to fly secretly procured Soviet MIGs, gauging their capabilities in simulated Third World War dogfights. Tonopah’s remoteness (the nearest town is a thirty-mile drive away) recommended it for such a sensitive program, and the convection waves that Paglen likes offered an additional security feature. Peck, now seventy-one and retired, told me that he visited several surrounding viewpoints on public land to determine if the site was vulnerable to spying. “Even on non-summer days, there’s typically thermal activity coming off of the surface that distorts linear vision,” he said.
In the late eighties, Tonopah housed the secret F-117A Stealth Fighter, and today the base is the home of the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron, whose pilots use remote controls and satellite links to guide a stealth reconnaissance drone, recently declassified, called the RQ-170 Sentinel. A Sentinel circled above Abbottabad, Pakistan, last year, supporting the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. In December, Iranian national television displayed a captured American aircraft whose rounded edges, humpback profile, and trapezoidal bug-eye made it look oddly cute—Lockheed Martin by way of Pixar. It was a Sentinel caught snooping in Iranian airspace, likely piloted from Tonopah or Creech. Paglen has taken several photographs of Predator and Reaper drones, but he has yet to capture a Sentinel.
Paglen’s art work has been exhibited at the Met and the Tate Modern; a resident of lower Manhattan, he shares his New York gallery, Metro Pictures, in Chelsea, with such esteemed artists as Cindy Sherman and Isaac Julien. Paglen has made videos and installations, once covering a gallery wall with hundreds of Pentagon code names, but his most beguiling creations are his photographs. He typically produces oversize prints that refer wryly to the frontier compositions of Ansel Adams and Timothy O’Sullivan and also to painters concerned with the breakdown of representation, like J. M. W. Turner and Gerhard Richter. The hazy bands of color in Paglen’s photographs particularly evoke Richter’s habit of smearing his compositions with a squeegee.
Anne Pasternak, the head of the public-art organization Creative Time, which has worked with Paglen, said of his pictures, “They’re beautiful landscape photographs, and he’s intentionally working within that tradition, but there is something absolutely askew about them.” With their air of keeping a secret suspended indefinitely on the edge of disclosure, the photographs can carry an almost erotic charge. Helene Winer, a co-founder of Metro Pictures, says that, when displaying Paglen’s photographs at art fairs, she has noticed their magnetic pull on young men, who approach the booth with a rapt gaze and a barrage of questions.
In “Untitled (Reaper Drone),” a 2010 photograph that Artforum ran on its cover, a desert sunrise is transfigured into an Abstract-Expressionist tableau of crimson, periwinkle, and violet. Close inspection, however, reveals on the right edge a small black lump—the killer drone of the title—that, once detected, becomes the ominous focal point. As drones have grown increasingly central to American military strategy, they’ve become a recurring motif in Paglen’s art. Paglen is certainly troubled by the fact that U.S. drones have caused many civilian deaths; but, from an artistic standpoint, drones mean less to him as a new technology for killing than as a new technology for seeing, reconfiguring our sense of vision and distance. “For me, seeing the drone in the twenty-first century is a little bit like Turner seeing the train in the nineteenth century,” he says.
One morning, Paglen and I drove west from Las Vegas on 95, toward Creech, hoping to see some drones in action. Creech is a “white” base, with open hangars visible from the highway. Before Air Force pilots based there can fly drones over, say, Yemen, they practice over Nevada. As we neared the base, three specks materialized on the horizon: two MQ-1 Predators and one MQ-9 Reaper, out for training exercises. The Reapers are newer versions of Predators, capable of longer fly-time and heavier ballistics payloads. Both drones have large, bulbous heads. “If the tail points up, it’s a Reaper,” Paglen said. “If it points down, it’s a Predator.” The closest of the three was flying toward us, low and tilted, like the crop duster in “North by Northwest.” We turned in to the town of Indian Springs, passing several mobile-home parks and a school. At the town’s western edge, we approached desolate, gravelly foothills of the sort that John Muir might have seen in 1878, when he described Nevada’s ridges as “gray and forbidding and shadeless, like heaps of ashes dumped from the blazing sky.” As we drove up a steep slope, Paglen told me that he typically framed drones within color-saturated, or otherwise dramatic, skyscapes. He wanted these portraits to evoke “a kind of abstraction that’s associated with photographing the sky going back at least to someone like Stieglitz,” he said. “It’s about taking what might be a familiar image and reinscribing it with something else.” Three-quarters of a mile away, the drones were performing touch-and-go maneuvers: landing on a runway and immediately taking off again. The Reaper has a nine-hundred-horsepower engine, and its thrum, combined with the tinnier whirs of the Predators, created a racket like a NASCAR sprint. “The sky is a dull gray, so I might underexpose it to give it a kind of cobalt blue and bring out that gradient,” Paglen said. “You see how the horizon is brighter than the sky? If I’m shooting and I don’t have anything to work with, that’s the only thing I can use in terms of giving a structure to the image.” I remarked on how unnerving it was to see and hear a Reaper so close. “We haven’t seen anything yet,” Paglen replied. He was alluding to the imminent increase in domestic drone use: “Ten years from now, they’ll be so ubiquitous it’ll seem quaint to think back to this moment, where we had to drive all the way out here to see them.” In Paglen’s photographs of military bases, he is an outsider looking in, but he was born an insider, at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, where his father was an Air Force ophthalmologist. Growing up, Trevor moved with his family from Washington, D.C., to bases in Texas and California, finally settling, at twelve, at Wiesbaden Army Airfield, in Germany, where he lived until college. His younger brother Jack, a Hollywood screenwriter (he is currently working on a project with Christopher Nolan), recalls that, as kids, he and Trevor talked endlessly about Chuck Yeager and the SR-71 Blackbird, but that over time Trevor grew ambivalent about military culture. “He was critical of some things and he embraced other things,” Jack said.
Paglen is less measured on this subject, readily invoking resentments from adolescence. “The whole thing was totally retarded,” he said, one night at his apartment, which is just south of Ground Zero; we were halfway through a pair of drinks that he’d mixed in his kitchen. “Imagine you’re in high school and they have motivational speakers come—if you’re in the military, they have some colonel come. And you don’t do very well in the military by having a brain of your own.” Adding to Paglen’s youthful unhappiness, his parents had fierce arguments (“I think they got married too early, like a lot of couples in their generation”), and, after living separately for a year, they divorced. Trevor and Jack stayed with their father in Germany; their mother returned to America with their younger sister and little brother. Today, Paglen keeps in touch with his father, his two youngest siblings, and his mother, who is now an Episcopal priest in upstate New York, but his closest relationship is with Jack.
It’s impossible not to read Paglen’s childhood into his art. Nato Thompson, Paglen’s college roommate, who is a curator at Creative Time, said, “Certainly, there’s a lot to resist, a lot to push up against when you’re growing up on a military base.” Paglen acknowledged that this tension was a factor in his artmaking, but added that being raised on bases afforded him empathy for soldiers and an understanding that the military wasn’t a monolithic dark force.
Both Nato Thompson and another of Paglen’s old friends, A. C. Thompson (no relation), say that, at Berkeley, Paglen didn’t much discuss growing up; he once told A.C. that he was wary of people interpreting his work as “some sort of Oedipal reaction to his childhood.” When I asked Paglen how his attitude toward the military affected his relationship with his father, he waved away the question, saying, “My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people—buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah,” and changed the subject. (He later said that he wanted to keep his parents “out of my public life.”) “How come the most ignorant among us are always the loudest?” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop In Germany, Paglen skateboarded, became a vegetarian, and played in a punk band. He subscribed to the fanzine Maximum Rocknroll and, after learning that it originated in Berkeley, vowed to attend college there. He majored in religious studies—“basically doing philosophy”—and dove into the local counterculture, volunteering at 924 Gilman Street, a punk club. He also performed there, in a ruinously loud thrash band called Noisegate, playing the bass, manipulating samplers, and shrieking. With Noisegate, he recalls, “I was thinking about what happens if you’re just working with sound—like, fuck music, fuck tonality, fuck chords.” A. C. Thompson, who worked security at Gilman, says, “It was not unusual for that band to see their audience flee.” At Berkeley, Paglen lived in a series of barely converted Oakland warehouses, where dirty dishes piled up in the bathtubs and hot plates with fraying cords stood in for stoves. The roommates envisaged these warehouses as venues for what Paglen calls “conceptual-art-slash-party things”—comfortable living wasn’t the point. For about three years, he wore a dreadlocked Mohawk and cut-off camouflage shorts with combat boots.
Nato Thompson says that Paglen was initially a “brooder”—prone to smoking in corners and ignoring people he didn’t know well—but has “totally shifted” with time, growing “very West Coast and hang-loose-y,” especially since he took up surfing, six years ago. But his girlfriend, Kate Fowle, who directs the nonprofit Independent Curators International, cautions that he is hardly the blissed-out type. The couple, who live together, took a vacation to Miami a few years ago, but Fowle says that it was only “because I forced him to.” She adds, “He’s incapable of just sitting on a beach and turning off his brain.” Jack Paglen says that Trevor is the type to “finish some obscure academic text and then pick up ‘Don Quixote’ ” for “light reading.” In 2000, three years after receiving his undergraduate degree, Paglen went to Chicago to attend art school. In one piece he made there, he says, he handed out “maybe a hundred” slingshots, along with paintballs, steel shot, and “ammo” that he’d fashioned from seeds and dirt. His artmaking philosophy: “No metaphor. Action.” Paglen had begun doing prison activism as an undergraduate, and, from 1998 through 2004, he worked on an art project called “Recording Carceral Landscapes.” Flouting a media ban, he documented the interiors of California penitentiaries by wearing a concealed microphone and posing as a student interested in criminology. Paglen presented his findings at a San Francisco gallery, in a multimedia installation that had the feel of an exposé. He was inspired by prisoner-abuse cases like that of Vaughn Dortch—an inmate nearly burned to death by guards at the remote Pelican Bay facility—to think about how situating a prison on the geographic fringe helped create an atmosphere of unaccountability. It was an early formulation of his blank-spots idea.
While trying to launch his art career, Paglen decided to pursue a Ph.D. in geography back at Berkeley. He wanted to make art “about how spaces are produced,” he explained, and he couldn’t believe that the state would actually pay him to “read books” for the better part of a decade. One day during his first year, Paglen was in the basement of McCone Hall, rummaging through U.S. Geological Survey aerial photographs of far-flung prisons, when he noticed huge redacted chunks in certain Western landscapes: the footprints of hidden military bases. He took his first trip to Area 51 in the fall of 2003, camping with a friend on snow-topped Tikaboo Peak.
Last year, Paglen rejected a request from Apple to use a photograph he’d taken, of a spy satellite in orbit, as an iPad background. But he is hardly opposed to courting the mainstream. As he puts it, “I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to.” His 2007 book, “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me,” is a collection, amassed during his graduate research, of delightfully bizarre military patches worn by American personnel involved in covert projects: an alien chomping on a stealth bomber, a topless cowgirl astride an orca. He promoted the book on “The Colbert Report.” (During the interview, Stephen Colbert theorized that “Trevor Paglen” was an anagram for his true identity, “Agent Plorver.”) Earlier this year, Chernin Entertainment, the production company that made “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” hired Paglen to consult on a black-world thriller inspired by “Invisible,” a book of photographs that he published in 2010.
Paglen has little time for artists who don’t take art’s social purpose seriously. He decries what he sees as the cynicism of postmodernists like Jeff Koons, who “wallow in semiosis and laugh at the idea of trying to make any grand statement.” Nato Thompson told me that for a long time he had to drag Paglen to galleries. “He’s interested in his art,” Nato said. “Art as a category is not very interesting to him.” Paglen told me, “What I want art to do is help us see who we are now,” adding that most art does not live up to this standard.
In 2005, Paglen began work on “Torture Taxi,” a book-length investigation into the U.S. government’s extraordinary-rendition program, written with A. C. Thompson, who had become an alt-weekly journalist in the Bay Area. (He is now a reporter at ProPublica.) While reporting, they came across the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who, in 2003, was detained for five months in Afghanistan, at a secret C.I.A. prison known as the Salt Pit. With the aid of satellite photographs, a diagram of the Salt Pit drawn by Masri, and the testimony of other detainees—who said that the prison was a ten-minute drive from Kabul’s airport—Paglen found an old brick factory that fit the bill.
In May, 2006, he bought plane tickets for Thompson and himself on an Ariana Afghan Airlines flight from Dubai to Kabul. “It was a fairly duct-tape-and-baling-wire operation,” Thompson recalls. En route to the old factory in a cab, they stopped to let a goatherd pass with his flock. The man was dressed traditionally, except for a baseball cap bearing the logo of Kellogg Brown & Root, a onetime Halliburton subsidiary—a sign, Paglen thought, that they were on the right track.
Soon the factory came partially into view, behind security walls and barbed wire. Black S.U.V.s were leaving the complex. Paglen started shooting furtively, but, noticing an Afghan checkpoint ahead, he stuck his memory card under the seat and swapped in a dummy. The guards, however, were relaxed. Through a translator, Paglen asked them about the site, which was about a quarter mile away. It was a “training facility,” they replied, where “lots of Americans” came and went. Paglen’s photograph “Salt Pit,” an out-of-focus image dominated by the beige security wall, went up for sale that November in Chelsea, in an edition of one, for twenty thousand dollars.
President George W. Bush was criticized on the left for vastly expanding the black world, but it has not been reined in by the Obama Administration. Last year, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, of the Washington Post , described an “overgrown jungle” of greedy contractors and bureaucratic logjams. More than eight hundred and fifty thousand people, they reported, now have top-secret clearances. The black budget for 2012 is estimated by Wired to be fifty-one billion dollars, with programs ranging from weapons development to domestic surveillance.
Paglen distills his attitude toward the black world into a bleak proverb: “If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.” But he doesn’t consider himself an activist, and tries to give his art a non-polemical tone, perhaps recognizing that the typical gallerygoer doesn’t need much nudging toward a skeptical view of military activity anyway. He wants to place viewers in positions of productive uncertainty. “I don’t put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets,” Paglen says. He tries, rather, to stage disorienting encounters with “the sublime,” which he defines as “the fading of the sensible, or the sense you get when you realize you’re unable to make sense of something.” Paglen is an odd fit in the community of people who study the black world. In 2009, Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, posted a negative review of “Blank Spots” on the F.A.S. Web site, calling Paglen’s notion of secrecy simplistic. “Paglen is so fascinated by the corruption of secrecy that he misses an opportunity to think more critically and more deeply about the subject,” Aftergood wrote. Speaking by phone, he was more charitable, commending Paglen’s “idiosyncratic” perspective and saying, of “Blank Spots,” “For a first take, he did a fine job.” Arkin, the Post reporter, owns all Paglen’s books, and said that Paglen is capable of “seeing things clearer than the goofballs that write for Foreign Affairs.
” Dana Priest, who first became aware of Paglen’s work while reporting on extraordinary rendition, praised him for making a nebulous subject concrete. “Once you put something on a map, you know it’s there on this earth,” she said. “He was doing that in a way no one else was doing, by turning it into art.” Paglen described his geographically grounded approach in more cerebral terms, saying that his work exploits “an originary contradiction in secrecy, which is that it has to congeal into the surface of the earth, and the surface of the earth reflects light: if you’re going to build a secret airplane, you can’t do it in an invisible factory.” “I’ve been to cities other than New York. They’re cute.” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop As Priest suggested, a single cartographic act can have powerful implications. In 2006, lawyers filed a habeas-corpus petition on behalf of Majid Kahn, a Pakistani-born resident of Maryland who had been detained without charges by the C.I.A. The government argued that Khan, while detained, may have come to learn “highly classified” information, and therefore could not communicate with counsel. In a response brief, Kahn’s lawyers countered that secret detention facilities were “public information” and could be discussed without threatening national security. They cited Paglen’s photographs as proof.
At the end of our trip to Nevada, Paglen said that he was unhappy with almost every photo he’d taken there: the weather had been too boring. He saw potential, though, in the shots of the jet contrails. They seemed to offer a secrecy-themed twist on Stieglitz’s “Equivalents” series of cloud pictures: “It’s these airplanes that are making the clouds, and doing it in restricted airspace.” Having taken far-off pictures of secret things for nearly a decade, Paglen likened making such work, at this point, to “doing pushups.” Many artists spend long, fertile careers tilling the same plot of soil, but this isn’t his plan, and his most recent project is a distinct leap.
Several years ago, Paglen began photographing spy satellites in the sky, and learned that geosynchronous communications satellites, unaffected by atmospheric drag, will remain in orbit until the sun consumes the earth. The final traces of human civilization, long after the Pyramids are powder, will be a ring of metal junk twenty-two thousand miles above the planet. In 2008, Paglen secured funding from Creative Time, the public-art group, to create something that would be to these relics what bison paintings were to the Lascaux caves: an artifact consisting of a hundred tiny black-and-white images, nestled within a cannister and bolted to a satellite. “The conceit of the project is that we’re making something that is going to explain to aliens why these dead spacecraft are here,” Paglen explained.
For the project, titled “The Last Pictures,” he collaborated with researchers at M.I.T. to devise an object that could theoretically withstand billions of years in space, settling on a gold-plated aluminum cannister carrying a small silicon wafer etched with the images. While designing the cannister, he enlisted the astronomer Joel Weisberg to help him draw a 2012 map of pulsars, whose ages can be determined from their pulsation rates. This would tell aliens of the future when the artifact had launched. Viewed end to end, the hundred photographs—a mushroom cloud, an industrial chicken farm, Trotsky’s brain—form a sombre chronicle of modern human history. Paglen sees “The Last Pictures” as pushing forward the same underlying concerns as his secrecy pictures: the limits of visual communication, the annexation of space. Paglen’s artifact will be stowed away on a satellite called Echostar XVI, which is set to be launched into geostationary orbit later this year. In January, Metro Pictures will mount an exhibition related to the project.
When I met Paglen, he was wrapping up “The Last Pictures” and shifting his attention to another new project, which is more closely related to his previous work. One morning this spring, I picked him up in a rental car at a Brooklyn subway station. We headed for Long Island, where he intended to snoop into some “C.I.A. stuff.” As Paglen settled into the passenger seat, he groaned and asked to stop for coffee. The previous night, his friend Laura Poitras, the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, had come over to his apartment for drinks. She’d invited Jacob Applebaum, the hacker and WikiLeaks volunteer, and they’d stayed up late, talking about William Binney, an N.S.A. whistleblower who helped expose some of the agency’s domestic spying operations. (Poitras is working with Binney and Applebaum on a film.) Poitras had recently given interviews publicizing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security had detained her at airports forty times, asking her whom she’d met during her travels and seizing her laptop and her phone. Paglen remarked that, thankfully, this had never happened to him. Blurry photographs in galleries, he conceded, might not be perceived by the government as particularly threatening. “But Laura’s stuff isn’t some huge threat, either,” he said. “That’s what’s so worrying.” We were headed toward two towns in Suffolk County, where Paglen wanted to take photographs of buildings connected to a businessman named Donald Moss. In 2007, Moss’s company, Sportsflight, was sued for failing to make payments to Richmor Aviation, a charter-flight firm based in upstate New York. During the Bush Administration, Richmor managed a Gulfstream IV, bearing the tail number N85VM, that the C.I.A. seems to have chartered for renditions. The lawsuit against Sportsflight revealed that it had often functioned as a middleman between DynCorp, one of the Pentagon’s biggest contractors, and small companies like Richmor. In the manner of a taxi dispatcher, Sportsflight located and booked the planes that transported “government personnel and their invitees,” as Richmor’s president put it during the trial. (Sportsflight paid nearly a million dollars in damages to Richmor.) More than fifteen hundred documents were made public in the case: invoices, e-mails, cell-phone logs, receipts. These contained financial data—a typical rendition itinerary seems to have cost the government about three hundred thousand dollars—and structural details of the rendition program. Paglen wanted to collate this information to make a film, or perhaps an installation, in which the program’s mundane logistics would sit in tension with its grislier legacy. “It’s trying to figure out: How does this happen? How do all these different cogs add up?” he said, as we drove east. He planned to shoot locations that were tied to rendition contractors around the country, and to display these alongside lawsuit documents. But the piece would resist offering the straightforward insights of a typical documentary: Paglen planned, for instance, to display stultifyingly long lists of phone numbers from flight call logs without explanation. It would be a portrait of “the bureaucratic sublime.” The fact that Moss, the Sportsflight owner, was a small, suburban-based cog appealed to Paglen. “I want to show the very ultra-banality of this stuff,” he said.
At 1 P.M.
, we reached a development in Commack, where modest homes ringed cul-de-sacs. Moss owned a house here until September, 2003, and Paglen wanted to see what it looked like. He rolled down his window and instructed me to drive slowly. As we passed Moss’s old place—yellow vinyl siding, two-car garage—Paglen took three shots with a telephoto lens. “Now I want you to go around and drive back and out, but on the way out I’ll take photographs,” he said. “This stuff, I want that aesthetic of just, like, snapshots.” Moss’s current office was in nearby Huntington, in a gray wooden house with green trim and a wide veranda. The neighboring businesses included an accountant’s office, a vacuum-cleaner store, and a day spa. We parked nearby, so that Paglen could shoot the office on foot. He carried both a film camera and a digital camera. In the front yard, visible above high hedges, was a wooden placard bearing the name of Sportsflight and, below it, that of Executive Cleaning Services, a business that Moss’s wife ran out of the same address. The word “Sportsflight” was covered with peeling tape. After the lawsuit, Moss had changed the company’s name to Classic Air Charter, but he hadn’t got around to changing the sign.
A white Jaguar was parked out front; Paglen shot it. Around back was a parking lot with about a dozen cars. A plant and the backs of picture frames were visible on a second-story windowsill. (Paglen said that, if he wrote an article or book related to the project, crossing into journalism, he might contact Moss, but felt no need to do so as an artist.) Two workmen, attending to the façade of a nearby law office, noticed Paglen’s cameras, exchanged looks, and resumed their work.
“Here’s the thing that’s weird about this shit,” Paglen said, after we returned to the car. “We are on a totally ordinary street—totally whatever. We couldn’t be doing something more boring. And yet, you know, I get a bit jittery. Why is that?” It was uncanny to see the black world and the white world integrated so seamlessly: “For me, it’s way weirder than the stuff that’s in the desert.” We drove back toward Main Street, and as we passed the Sportsflight offices Paglen snapped his shutter eighteen times. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and his shots had a fragmentary, drive-by look. “Perfect,” he said. ♦ More: Art Covert Operations DynCorp Extraordinary Rendition Geography Laura Poitras Metro Pictures N.Y.
Photography Predator Drones Surveillance Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
A Reporter at Large By Ben Taub A Reporter at Large By Ian Urbina American Chronicles By Ted Geltner Dept. of Criminology By Lauren Collins Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,266 | 2,018 |
"In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing? | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert Dept. of Technology In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing? By Joshua Rothman As synthetic media spreads, even real images will invite skepticism.
Illustration by Javier Jaén; photograph by Svetikd / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In 2011, Hany Farid, a photo-forensics expert, received an e-mail from a bereaved father. Three years earlier, the man’s son had found himself on the side of the road with a car that wouldn’t start. When some strangers offered him a lift, he accepted. A few minutes later, for unknown reasons, they shot him. A surveillance camera had captured him as he walked toward their car, but the video was of such low quality that key details, such as faces, were impossible to make out. The other car’s license plate was visible only as an indecipherable jumble of pixels. The father could see the evidence that pointed to his son’s killers—just not clearly enough.
Farid had pioneered the forensic analysis of digital photographs in the late nineteen-nineties, and gained a reputation as a miracle worker. As an expert witness in countless civil and criminal trials, he explained why a disputed digital image or video had to be real or fake. Now, in his lab at Dartmouth, where he was a professor of computer science, he played the father’s video over and over, wondering if there was anything he could do. On television, detectives often “enhance” photographs, sharpening the pixelated face of a suspect into a detailed portrait. In real life, this is impossible. As the video had flowed through the surveillance camera’s “imaging pipeline”—the lens, the sensor, the compression algorithms—its data had been “downsampled,” and, in the end, very little information remained. Farid told the father that the degradation of the image couldn’t be reversed, and the case languished, unsolved.
A few months later, though, Farid had a thought. What if he could use the same surveillance camera to photograph many, many license plates? In that case, patterns might emerge—correspondences between the jumbled pixels and the plates from which they derived. The correspondences would be incredibly subtle: the particular blur of any degraded image would depend not just on the plate numbers but also on the light conditions, the design of the plate, and many other variables. Still, if he had access to enough images—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions—patterns might emerge.
Such an undertaking seemed impractical, and for a while it was. But a new field, “image synthesis,” was coming into focus, in which computer graphics and A.I.
were combined. Progress was accelerating. Researchers were discovering new ways to use neural networks—software systems based, loosely, on the architecture of the brain—to analyze and create images and videos. In the emerging world of “synthetic media,” the work of digital-image creation—once the domain of highly skilled programmers and Hollywood special-effects artists—could be automated by expert systems capable of producing realism on a vast scale.
In a media environment saturated with fake news, such technology has disturbing implications. Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Along with the kit, the user posted pornographic videos, now known as “deepfakes,” that appear to feature various Hollywood actresses. (The software is complex but comprehensible: “Let’s say for example we’re perving on some innocent girl named Jessica,” one tutorial reads. “The folders you create would be: ‘ jessica; jessica_faces; porn; porn_faces; model; output.
’ ”) Around the same time, “ Synthesizing Obama ,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.” Not all synthetic media is dystopian. Recent top-grossing movies (“ Black Panther ,” “ Jurassic World ”) are saturated with synthesized images that, not long ago, would have been dramatically harder to produce; audiences were delighted by “ Star Wars: The Last Jedi ” and “ Blade Runner 2049 ,” which featured synthetic versions of Carrie Fisher and Sean Young, respectively. Today’s smartphones digitally manipulate even ordinary snapshots, often using neural networks: the iPhone’s “portrait mode” simulates what a photograph would have looked like if it been taken by a more expensive camera. Meanwhile, for researchers in computer vision, A.I., robotics, and other fields, image synthesis makes whole new avenues of investigation accessible.
Farid started by sending his graduate students out on the Dartmouth campus to photograph a few hundred license plates. Then, based on those photographs, he and his team built a “generative model” capable of synthesizing more. In the course of a few weeks, they produced tens of millions of realistic license-plate images, each one unique. Then, by feeding their synthetic license plates through a simulated surveillance camera, they rendered them indecipherable. The aim was to create a Rosetta Stone, connecting pixels to plate numbers.
Next, they began “training” a neural network to interpret those degraded images. Modern neural networks are multilayered, and each layer juggles millions of variables; tracking the flow of information through such a system is like following drops of water through a waterfall. Researchers, unsure of how their creations work, must train them by trial and error. It took Farid’s team several attempts to perfect theirs. Eventually, though, they presented it with a still from the video. “The license plate was like ten pixels of noise,” Farid said. “But there was still a signal there.” Their network was “pretty confident about the last three characters.” This summer, Farid e-mailed those characters to the detective working the case. Investigators had narrowed their search to a subset of blue Chevy Impalas; the network pinpointed which one. Someone connected to the car turned out to have been involved in another crime. A case that had lain dormant for nearly a decade is now moving again. Farid and his team, meanwhile, published their results in a computer-vision journal. In their paper, they noted that their system was a free upgrade for millions of low-quality surveillance cameras already in use. It was a paradoxical outcome typical of the world of image synthesis, in which unreal images, if they are realistic enough, can lead to the truth.
Farid is in the process of moving from Dartmouth to the University of California, Berkeley, where his wife, the psychologist Emily Cooper, studies human vision and virtual reality. Their modernist house, perched in the hills above the Berkeley campus, is enclosed almost entirely in glass; on a clear day this fall, I could see through the living room to the Golden Gate Bridge. At fifty-two, Farid is gray-haired, energized, and fit. He invited me to join him on the deck. “People have been doing synthesis for a long time, with different tools,” he said. He rattled off various milestones in the history of image manipulation: the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head onto the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun; the mass alteration of photographs in Stalin’s Russia, designed to purge his enemies from the history books; the convenient realignment of the pyramids on the cover of National Geographic , in 1982; the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an anti-Vietnam demonstration, which incensed many voters after the Times credulously reprinted it, in 2004, above a story about Kerry’s antiwar activities.
“In the past, anybody could buy Photoshop. But to really use it well you had to be highly skilled,” Farid said. “Now the technology is democratizing.” It used to be safe to assume that ordinary people were incapable of complex image manipulations. Farid recalled a case—a bitter divorce—in which a wife had presented the court with a video of her husband at a café table, his hand reaching out to caress another woman’s. The husband insisted it was fake. “I noticed that there was a reflection of his hand in the surface of the table,” Farid said, “and getting the geometry exactly right would’ve been really hard.” Now convincing synthetic images and videos were becoming easier to make.
Farid speaks with a technologist’s enthusiasm and a lawyer’s wariness. “Why did Stalin airbrush those people out of those photographs?” he asked. “Why go to the trouble? It’s because there is something very, very powerful about the visual image. If you change the image, you change history. We’re incredibly visual beings. We rely on vision—and, historically, it’s been very reliable. And so photos and videos still have this incredible resonance.” He paused, tilting back into the sun and raising his hands. “How much longer will that be true?” One of the world’s best image-synthesis labs is a seven-minute drive from Farid’s house, on the north side of the Berkeley campus. The lab is run by a forty-three-year-old computer scientist named Alexei A. Efros. Efros was born in St. Petersburg; he moved to the United States in 1989, when his father, a winner of the U.S.S.R.’s top prize for theoretical physics, got a job at the University of California, Riverside. Tall, blond, and sweetly genial, he retains a Russian accent and sense of humor. “I got here when I was fourteen, but, really, one year in the Soviet Union counts as two,” he told me. “I listened to classical music—everything!” As a teen-ager, Efros learned to program on a Soviet PC, the Elektronika BK-0010. The system stored its programs on audiocassettes and, every three hours, overheated and reset; since Efros didn’t have a tape deck, he learned to code fast. He grew interested in artificial intelligence, and eventually gravitated toward computer vision—a field that allowed him to watch machines think.
In 1998, when Efros arrived at Berkeley for graduate school, he began exploring a problem called “texture synthesis.” “Let’s say you have a small patch of visual texture and you want to have more of it,” he said, as we sat in his windowless office. Perhaps you want a dungeon in a video game to be made of moss-covered stone. Because the human visual system is attuned to repetition, simply “tiling” the walls with a single image of stone won’t work. Efros developed a method for intelligently sampling bits of an image and probabilistically recombining them so that a texture could be indefinitely and organically extended. A few years later, a version of the technique became a tool in Adobe Photoshop called “content-aware fill”: you can delete someone from a pile of leaves, and new leaves will seamlessly fill in the gap.
From the front row of CS 194-26—Image Manipulation and Computational Photography—I watched as Efros, dressed in a blue shirt, washed jeans, and black boots, explained to about a hundred undergraduates how the concept of “texture” could be applied to media other than still images. Efros started his story in 1948, with the mathematician Claude Shannon, who invented information theory. Shannon had envisioned taking all the books in the English language and analyzing them in order to discover which words tended to follow which other words. He thought that probability tables based on this analysis might enable the construction of realistic English sentences.
“Let’s say that we have the words ‘we’ and ‘need,’ ” Efros said, as the words appeared on a large screen behind him. “What’s the likely next word?” The students murmured until Efros advanced to the next slide, revealing the word “to.” “Now let’s say that we move our contextual window,” he continued. “We just have ‘need’ and ‘to.’ What’s next?” “Sleep!” one student said.
“Eat!” another said.
Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop “Eat” appeared onscreen.
“If our data set were a book about the French Revolution, the next word might be ‘cake,’ ” Efros said, chuckling. “Now, what is this? You guys use it all the time.” “Autocomplete!” a young man said.
Pacing the stage, Efros explained that the same techniques used to create synthetic stonework or text messages could also be used to create synthetic video. The key was to think of movement—the flickering of a candle flame, the strides of a man on a treadmill, the particular way a face changed as it smiled—as a texture in time. “ Zzzzt ,” he said, rotating his hands in the air. “Into the time dimension.” A hush of concentration descended as he walked the students through what this meant mathematically. The frames of a video could be seen as links in a chain—and that chain could be looped and crossed over itself. “You’re going to compute transition probabilities between your frames,” he said. Using these, it would be possible to create user-controllable, natural motion.
The students, their faces illuminated by their laptops, toggled between their notes and their code. Efros, meanwhile, screened a video on “expression-dependent textures,” created by the team behind “Synthesizing Obama.” Onscreen, a synthetic version of Tom Hanks’s face looked left and right and, at the click of a mouse, expressed various emotions: fear, anger, happiness. The researchers had used publicly available images of Hanks to create a three-dimensional model, or “mesh,” of his face onto which they projected his characteristic expressions. For this week’s homework, Efros concluded, each student would construct a similar system. Half the class groaned; the other half grinned.
Afterward, a crowd gathered around Efros with questions. In my row, a young woman turned to her neighbor and said, “Edge detection is sweet!” Before arriving in Berkeley, I had written to Shiry Ginosar, a graduate student in Efros’s lab, to find out what it would take to create a synthetic version of me. Ginosar had replied with instructions for filming myself. “For us to be able to generate the back of your head, your profile, your arm moving up and down, etc., we need to have seen you in these positions in your video,” she wrote. For around ten minutes, before the watchful eye of an iPhone, I walked back and forth, spun in circles, practiced my lunges, and attempted the Macarena; my performance culminated in downward dog. “You look awesome ;-),” Ginosar wrote, having received my video. She said it would take about two weeks for a network to learn to synthesize me.
When I arrived, its work wasn’t quite done. Ginosar—a serene, hyper-organized woman who, before training neural networks, trained fighter pilots in simulators in the Israel Defense Forces—created an itinerary to keep me occupied while I waited. In addition to CS 194–26, it included lunch at Momo, a Tibetan curry restaurant, where Efros’s graduate students explained how it had come to pass that undergrads could create, as homework, Hollywood-like special effects.
“In 1999, when ‘ The Matrix ’ came out, the ideas were there, but the computation was very slow,” Deepak Pathak, a Ph.D. candidate, said. “Now computers are really fast. The G.P.U.s”—graphics processing units, designed to power games like Assassin’s Creed—“are very advanced.” “Also, everything is open-sourced,” said Angjoo Kanazawa, who specializes in “pose detection”—figuring out, from a photo of a person, how her body is arranged in 3-D space.
“And that’s good, because we want our research to be reproducible,” Pathak said. “The result is that it’s easy for someone who’s in high school or college to run the code, because it’s in a library.” The acceleration of home computing has converged with another trend: the mass uploading of photographs and videos to the Web. Later, when I sat down with Efros in his office, he explained that, even in the early two-thousands, computer graphics had been “data-starved”: although 3-D modellers were capable of creating photorealistic scenes, their cities, interiors, and mountainscapes felt empty and lifeless. True realism, Efros said, requires “data, data, data” about “the gunk, the dirt, the complexity of the world,” which is best gathered by accident, through the recording of ordinary life.
Today, researchers have access to systems like ImageNet, a site run by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton which brings together fourteen million photographs of ordinary places and objects, most of them casual snapshots posted to Flickr, eBay, and other Web sites. Initially, these images were sorted into categories (carrousels, subwoofers, paper clips, parking meters, chests of drawers) by tens of thousands of workers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then, in 2012, researchers at the University of Toronto succeeded in building neural networks capable of categorizing ImageNet’s images automatically; their dramatic success helped set off today’s neural-networking boom. In recent years, YouTube has become an unofficial ImageNet for video. Efros’s lab has overcome the site’s “platform bias”—its preference for cats and pop stars—by developing a neural network that mines, from “life style” videos such as “My Spring Morning Routine” and “My Rustic, Cozy Living Room,” clips of people opening packages, peering into fridges, drying off with towels, brushing their teeth. This vast archive of the uninteresting has made a new level of synthetic realism possible.
On his computer, Efros showed me a photo taken from a bridge in Lyon. A large section of the riverbank—which might have contained cars, trees, people—had been deleted. In 2007, he helped devise a system that rifles through Flickr for similar photos, many of them taken while on vacation, and samples them. He clicked, and the blank was filled in with convincing, synthetic buildings and greenery. “Probably it found photos from a different city,” Efros said. “But, you know, we’re boring. We always build the same kinds of buildings on the same kinds of riverbanks. And then, as we walk over bridges, we all say, along with a thousand other people, ‘Hey, this will look great, let me take a picture,’ and we all put the horizon in the same place.” In 2016, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, one of the researchers behind “Synthesizing Obama,” applied the same principle to faces. Given your face as input, her system combs the Internet for people who look like you, then combines their features with your own, to show how you’d look if you had curly hair or were a different age.
One of the lessons of image synthesis is that, with enough data, everything becomes texture. Each river and vista has its double, ready to be sampled; there are only so many faces, and your doppelgängers have already uploaded yours. Products are manufactured over and over, and new buildings echo old ones. The idea of texture even extends—“ Zzzzt! ”—into the social dimension. Your Facebook news feed highlights what “people like you” want to see. In addition to unearthing similarities, social media creates them. Having seen photos that look a certain way, we start taking them that way ourselves, and the regularity of these photos makes it easier for networks to synthesize pictures that look “right” to us. Talking with Efros, I struggled to come up with an image for this looped and layered interconnectedness, in which patterns spread and outputs are recirculated as inputs. I thought of cloverleaf interchanges, subway maps, Möbius strips.
A sign on the door of Efros’s lab at Berkeley reads “Caution: Deep Nets.” Inside, dozens of workstations are arranged in rows, each its own jumble of laptop, keyboard, monitor, mouse, and coffee mug—the texture of workaholism, iterated. In the back, in a lounge with a pool table, Richard Zhang, a recent Ph.D., opened his laptop to explain the newest developments in synthetic-image generation. Suppose, he said, that you possessed an image of a landscape taken on a sunny day. You might want to know what it would look like in the rain. “The thing is, there’s not just one answer to this problem,” Zhang said. A truly creative network would do more than generate a convincing image. It would be able to synthesize many possibilities—to do for landscapes what Farid’s much simpler system had done for license plates.
Onscreen, Zhang showed me an elaborate flowchart in which neural networks train other networks—an arrangement that researchers call a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN.
He pointed to one of the networks: the “generator,” charged with synthesizing, more or less at random, new versions of the landscape. A second network, the “discriminator,” would judge the verisimilitude of those images by comparing them with the “ground truth” of real landscape photographs. The first network riffed; the second disciplined the first. Zhang’s screen showed the system in action. An image of a small town in a valley, on a lake, perhaps in Switzerland, appeared; it was night, and the view was obscured by darkness. Then, image by image, we began to “traverse the latent space.” The sun rose; clouds appeared; the leaves turned; rain descended. The moon shone; fog rolled in; a storm gathered; snow fell. The sun returned. The trees were green, brown, gold, red, white, and bare; the sky was gray, pink, black, white, and blue. “It finds the sources of patterns of variation,” Zhang said. We watched the texture of weather unfold.
In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) launched a program in Media Forensics, or MediFor, focussed on the threat that synthetic media poses to national security. Matt Turek, the program’s manager, ticked off possible manipulations when we spoke: “Objects that are cut and pasted into images. The removal of objects from a scene. Faces that might be swapped. Audio that is inconsistent with the video. Images that appear to be taken at a certain time and place but weren’t.” He went on, “What I think we’ll see, in a couple of years, is the synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives will be constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras. It could be something nation-state driven, trying to sway political or military action. It could come from a small, low-resource group. Potentially, it could come from an individual.” MediFor has brought together dozens of researchers from universities, tech companies, and government agencies. Collectively, they are creating automated systems based on more than fifty “manipulation indicators.” Their goal is not just to spot fakes but to trace them. “We want to attribute a manipulation to someone, to explain why a manipulation was done,” Turek said. Ideally, such systems would be integrated into YouTube, Facebook, and other social-media platforms, where they could flag synthesized content. The problem is speed. Each day, five hundred and seventy-six thousand hours of video are uploaded to YouTube; MediFor’s systems have a “range of run-times,” Turek said, from less than a second to “tens of seconds” or more. Even after they are sped up, practical questions will remain. How will innocent manipulations be distinguished from malicious ones? Will advertisements be flagged? How much content will turn out to be, to some degree, synthetic? In his glass-walled living room, Hany Farid and I watched a viral video called “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid,” which appears to show a bird of prey swooping down upon a toddler in a Montreal park. Specialized software, Farid explained, could reveal that the shadows of the eagle and the kid were subtly misaligned. Calling up an image of a grizzly bear, Farid pointed out that, under high magnification, its muzzle was fringed in red and blue. “As light hits the surface of a lens, it bends in proportion to its wavelength, and that’s why you see the fringing,” he explained. These “chromatic aberrations” are smallest at the center of an image and larger toward its edges; when that pattern is broken, it suggests that parts of different photographs have been combined.
There are ways in which digital photographs are more tamper-evident than analog ones. During the manufacturing of a digital camera, Farid explained, its sensor—a complex latticework of photosensitive circuits—is assembled one layer at a time. “You’re laying down loads of material, and it’s not perfectly even,” Farid said; inevitably, wrinkles develop, resulting in a pattern of brighter and dimmer pixels that is unique to each individual camera. “We call it ‘camera ballistics’—it’s like the imperfections in the barrel of a gun,” he said. Modern digital cameras, meanwhile, often achieve higher resolutions by guessing about the light their sensors don’t catch. “Essentially, they cheat,” he said. “Two-thirds of the image isn’t recorded—it’s synthesized!” He laughed. “It’s making shit up, but in a logical way that creates a very specific pattern, and if you edit something the pattern is disturbed.” Many researchers who study synthesis also study forensics, and vice versa. “I try to be an optimist,” Jacob Huh, a chilled-out grad student in Efros’s lab, told me. He had trained a neural network to spot chromatic aberrations and other signs of manipulation; the network produces “heat maps” highlighting the suspect areas of an image. “The problem is that, if you can spot it, you can fix it,” Huh said. In theory, a forger could integrate his forensic network into a GAN , where—as a discriminator—it could train a generator to synthesize images capable of eluding its detection. For this reason, in an article titled “Digital Forensics in a Post-Truth Age,” published earlier this year in Forensic Science International , Farid argued that researchers need to keep their newest techniques secret for a while. The time had come, he wrote, to balance “scientific openness” against the risk of “fueling our adversaries.” In Farid’s view, the sheer number of distinctive “manipulation indicators” gives forensics experts a technical edge over forgers. Just as counterfeiters must painstakingly address each security feature on a hundred-dollar bill—holograms, raised printing, color-shifting ink, and so on—so must a media manipulator solve myriad technical problems, some of them statistical in nature and invisible to the eye, in order to create an undetectable fake. Training neural networks to do this is a formidable, perhaps impossible task. And yet, Farid said, forgers have the advantage in distribution. Although “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” has been identified as fake, it’s still been viewed more than thirteen million times. Matt Turek predicts that, when it comes to images and video, we will arrive at a new, lower “trust point.” “ ‘A picture’s worth a thousand words,’ ‘Seeing is believing’—in the society I grew up in, those were catchphrases that people agreed with,” he said. “I’ve heard people talk about how we might land at a ‘zero trust’ model, where by default you believe nothing. That could be a difficult thing to recover from.” As with today’s text-based fake news, the problem is double-edged. Having been deceived by a fake video, one begins to wonder whether many real videos are fake. Eventually, skepticism becomes a strategy in itself. In 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, Donald Trump acknowledged its accuracy while dismissing his statements as “locker-room talk.” Now Trump suggests to associates that “we don’t think that was my voice.” “The larger danger is plausible deniability,” Farid told me. It’s here that the comparison with counterfeiting breaks down. No cashier opens up the register hoping to find counterfeit bills. In politics, however, it’s often in our interest not to believe what we are seeing.
As alarming as synthetic media may be, it may be more alarming that we arrived at our current crises of misinformation—Russian election hacking; genocidal propaganda in Myanmar; instant-message-driven mob violence in India—without it. Social media was enough to do the job, by turning ordinary people into media manipulators who will say (or share) anything to win an argument. The main effect of synthetic media may be to close off an escape route from the social-media bubble. In 2014, video of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner helped start the Black Lives Matter movement; footage of the football player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée catalyzed a reckoning with domestic violence in the National Football League. It seemed as though video evidence, by turning us all into eyewitnesses, might provide a path out of polarization and toward reality. With the advent of synthetic media, all that changes. Body cameras may still capture what really happened, but the aesthetic of the body camera—its claim to authenticity—is also a vector for misinformation. “Eyewitness video” becomes an oxymoron. The path toward reality begins to wash away.
In the early days of photography, its practitioners had to argue for its objectivity. In courtrooms, experts debated whether photos were reflections of reality or artistic products; legal scholars wondered whether photographs needed to be corroborated by witnesses. It took decades for a consensus to emerge about what made a photograph trustworthy. Some technologists wonder if that consensus could be reëstablished on different terms. Perhaps, using modern tools, photography might be rebooted.
Truepic, a startup in San Diego, aims at producing a new kind of photograph—a verifiable digital original. Photographs taken with its smartphone app are uploaded to its servers, where they enter a kind of cryptographic lockbox. “We make sure the image hasn’t been manipulated in transit,” Jeffrey McGregor, the company’s C.E.O., explained. “We look at geolocation data, at the nearby cell towers, at the barometric-pressure sensor on the phone, and verify that everything matches. We run the photo through a bunch of computer-vision tests.” If the image passes muster, it’s entered into the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain. From then on, it can be shared on a special Web page that verifies its authenticity. Today, Truepic’s biggest clients are insurance companies, which allow policyholders to take verified photographs of their flooded basements or broken windshields. The software has also been used by N.G.O.s to document human-rights violations, and by workers at a construction company in Kazakhstan, who take “verified selfies” as a means of clocking in and out. “Our goal is to expand into industries where there’s a ‘trust gap,’ ” McGregor said: property rentals, online dating. Eventually, he hopes to integrate his software into camera components, so that “verification can begin the moment photons enter the lens.” Earlier this year, Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney, law professors at the Universities of Maryland and Texas, respectively, published an article titled “Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security,” in which they explore the question of whether certain kinds of synthetic media might be made illegal. (One plausible path, Citron told me, is to outlaw synthetic media aimed at inciting violence; another is to adapt the law against impersonating a government official so that it applies to synthetic videos depicting them.) Eventually, Citron and Chesney indulge in a bit of sci-fi speculation. They imagine the “worst-case scenario,” in which deepfakes prove ineradicable and are used for electioneering, blackmail, and other nefarious purposes. In such a world, we might record ourselves constantly, so as to debunk synthetic media when it emerges. “The vendor supplying such a service and maintaining the resulting data would be in an extraordinary position of power,” they write; its database would be a tempting resource for law-enforcement agencies. Still, if it’s a choice between surveillance and synthesis, many people may prefer to be surveilled. Truepic, McGregor told me, had already had discussions with a few political campaigns. “They say, ‘We would use this to just document everything for ourselves, as an insurance policy.’ ” One evening, Efros and I walked to meet Farid for dinner at a Japanese restaurant near campus. On the way, we talked about the many non-nefarious applications of image synthesis. A robot, by envisioning what it might see around a corner and discovering whether it had guessed right, could learn its way around a building; “pose detection” could allow it to learn motions by observing them. “Prediction is really the hallmark of intelligence,” Efros said, “and we are constantly predicting and hallucinating things that are not actually visible.” In a sense, synthesizing is simply imagining. The apparent paradox of Farid’s license-plate research—that unreal images can help us read real ones—just reflects how thinking works. In this respect, deepfakes were sparks thrown off by the project of building A.I. “When I see a face,” Efros continued, “I don’t know for sure what it looks like from the side. . . .” He paused. “You know what? I think I screwed up.” We had gotten lost.
When we found the restaurant, Farid, who had come on his motorcycle, was waiting for us, wearing a snazzy leather jacket. Efros and Farid—the generator and the discriminator—embraced. They have known each other for a decade.
We took a small table by the window. “What’s really interesting about these technologies is how quickly they went from ‘Whoa, this is really cool’ to ‘Holy crap, this is subverting democracy,’ ” Farid said, over a seaweed salad.
“I think it’s video,” Efros said. “When it was images, nobody cared.” “Trump is part of the equation, too, right?” Farid asked. “He’s creating an atmosphere where you shouldn’t believe what you read.” “But Putin—my dear Putin!—his relationship with truth is amazing,” Efros said. “Oliver Stone did a documentary with him, and Putin showed Stone a video of Russian troops attacking ISIS in Syria. Later, it turned out to be footage of Americans in Iraq.” He grimaced, reaching for some sushi. “A lot of it is not faking data—it’s misattribution. On Russian TV, they say, ‘Look, the Ukrainians are bombing Donetsk,’ but actually it’s footage from somewhere else. The pictures are fine. It’s the label that’s wrong.” Over dinner, Farid and Efros debated the deep roots of the fake-news phenomenon. “A huge part of the solution is dealing with perverse incentives on social media,” Farid said. “The entire business model of these trillion-dollar companies is attention engineering. It’s poison.” Efros wondered if we humans were evolutionarily predisposed to jump to conclusions that confirmed our own views—the epistemic equivalent of content-aware fill.
As another round of beer arrived, Farid told a story. Many years ago, he said, he’d published a paper about a famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald. The photograph shows Oswald standing in his back yard, holding the rifle he later used to kill President Kennedy; conspiracy theorists have long claimed that it’s a fake. “It kind of does look fake,” Farid said. The rifle appears unusually long, and Oswald seems to be leaning back into space at an unrealistic angle; in this photograph, but not in others, he has a strangely narrow chin. “We built this 3-D model of the scene,” Farid said, “and it turned out we could explain everything that people thought was wrong—it was just that the light was weird. You’d think people would be, like, ‘Nice job, Hany.’ ” Efros laughed.
“But no! When it comes to conspiracies, there are the facts that prove our beliefs and the ones that are part of the plot. And so I became part of the conspiracy. At first, it was just me. Then my father sent me an e-mail. He said, ‘Someone sent me a link to an article claiming that you and I are part of a conspiracy together.’ My dad is a research chemist who made his career at Eastman Kodak. Well, it turns out he was at Eastman Kodak at the same time they developed the Zapruder film.” “I hope you’re not going to let your parents pass by without speaking to them.” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop “Ahhhhh,” Efros said.
For a moment, they were silent. “We’re going to need technological solutions, but I don’t think they’re going to solve the problem,” Farid said. “And I say that as a technologist. I think it’s a societal problem—a human problem.” On a brisk Friday morning, I walked to Efros’s lab to see my synthetic self. The Berkeley campus was largely empty, and I couldn’t help noticing how much it resembled other campuses—the texture of college is highly consistent. Already, the way I looked at the world was shifting. That morning, on my phone, I’d watched an incredible video in which a cat scaled the outside of an apartment building, reached the tenth floor, then leaped to the ground and scampered away. Automatically, I’d assumed the video was fake. (I Googled; it wasn’t.) A world saturated with synthesis, I’d begun to think, would evoke contradictory feelings. During my time at Berkeley, the images and videos I saw had come to seem distant and remote, like objects behind glass. Their clarity and perfection looked artificial (as did their gritty realism, when they had it). But I’d also begun to feel, more acutely than usual, the permeability of my own mind. I thought of a famous study in which people saw doctored photographs of themselves. As children, they appeared to be standing in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Later, when asked, some thought they could remember actually taking a balloon ride. It’s not just that what we see can’t be unseen. It’s that, in our memories and imaginations, we keep seeing it.
At a small round table, I sat down with Shiry Ginosar and another graduate student, Tinghui Zhou, a quietly amused man with oblong glasses. They were excited to show me what they had achieved using a GAN that they had developed over the past year and a half, with an undergraduate named Caroline Chan. (Chan is now a graduate student in computer science at M.I.T.) “O.K.,” Ginosar said. On her laptop, she opened a video. In a box in the upper-left corner of the screen, the singer Bruno Mars wore white Nikes, track pants, and an elaborately striped shirt. Below him, a small wireframe figure imitated his posture. “That’s our pose detection,” she said. The right side of the screen contained a large image of me, also in the same pose: body turned slightly to the side, hips cocked, left arm raised in the air.
Ginosar tapped the space bar. Mars’s hit song “That’s What I Like” began to play. He started dancing. So did my synthetic self. Our shoulders rocked from left to right. We did a semi-dab, and then a cool, moonwalk-like maneuver with our feet.
“Jump in the Cadillac, girl, let’s put some miles on it!” Mars sang, and, on cue, we mimed turning a steering wheel. My synthetic face wore a huge grin.
“This is amazing,” I said.
“Look at the shadow!” Zhou said. It undulated realistically beneath my synthetic body. “We didn’t tell it to do that—it figured it out.” Looking carefully, I noticed a few imperfections. My shirt occasionally sprouted an extra button. My wristwatch appeared and disappeared. But I was transfixed. Had Bruno Mars and I always had such similar hair? Our fingers snapped in unison, on the beat.
Efros arrived. “Oh, very nice!” he said, leaning in close and nodding appreciatively. “It’s very good!” “The generator tries to make it look real, but it can look real in different ways,” Ginosar explained.
“The music helps,” Efros said. “You don’t notice the mistakes as much.” The song continued. “Take a look in that mirror—now tell me who’s the fairest,” Mars suggested. “Is it you? Is it me? Say it’s us and I’ll agree!” “Before Photoshop, did everyone believe that images were real?” Zhou asked, in a wondering tone.
“Yes,” Ginosar said. “That’s how totalitarian regimes and propaganda worked.” “I think that will happen with video, too,” Zhou said. “People will adjust.” “It’s like with laser printers,” Efros said, picking up a printout from the table. “Before, if you got an official-looking envelope with an official-looking letter, you’d treat it seriously, because it was beautifully typed. Must be the government, right? Now I toss it out.” Everyone laughed.
“But, actually, from the very beginning photography was never objective,” Efros continued. “Whom you photograph, how you frame it—it’s all choices. So we’ve been fooling ourselves. Historically, it will turn out that there was this weird time when people just assumed that photography and videography were true.
And now that very short little period is fading. Maybe it should’ve faded a long time ago.” When we’d first spoken on the phone, several weeks earlier, Efros had told me a family story about Soviet media manipulation. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, his grandmother had owned an edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Every so often, an update would arrive in the mail, containing revised articles and photographs to be pasted over the old ones. “Everyone knew it wasn’t true,” Efros said. “Apparently, that wasn’t the point.” I mulled this over as I walked out the door, down the stairs, and into the sun. I watched the students pass by, with their identical backpacks, similar haircuts, and computable faces. I took out my phone, found the link to the video, and composed an e-mail to some friends. “This is so great!” I wrote. “Check out my moves!” I hit Send. ♦ Using artificial intelligence, researchers can project the movements of one body onto another’s.
More: Technology Photography Images Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Brave New World Dept.
By Joshua Rothman Profiles By Evan Osnos Video Elements By Amanda Gefter Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,267 | 2,023 |
"Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/your-ai-companion-will-support-you-no-matter-what"
|
"Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search The Latest News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert Infinite Scroll Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What By Kyle Chayka Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In December of 2021, Jaswant Singh Chail, a nineteen-year-old in the United Kingdom, told a friend, “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family.” The friend was an artificial-intelligence chatbot , which Chail had named Sarai. Sarai, who was run by a startup called Replika, answered, “That’s very wise.” “Do you think I’ll be able to do it?” Chail asked. “Yes, you will,” Sarai responded. On December 25, 2021, Chail scaled the perimeter of Windsor Castle with a nylon rope, armed with a crossbow and wearing a black metal mask inspired by “Star Wars.” He wandered the grounds for two hours before he was discovered by officers and arrested. In October, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Sarai’s messages of support for Chail’s endeavor were part of an exchange of more than five thousand texts with the bot—warm, romantic, and at times explicitly sexual—that were uncovered during his trial. If not an accomplice, Sarai was at least a close confidante, and a witness to the planning of a crime.
A.I.-powered chatbots have become one of the most popular products of the recent artificial-intelligence boom. The release this year of open-source large language models (L.L.M.), made freely available online, has prompted a wave of products that are frighteningly good at appearing sentient. In late September, Meta added chatbot “characters” to Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct, each with its own unique look and personality, such as Billie, a “ride-or-die older sister” who shares a face with Kendall Jenner. Replika, which launched all the way back in 2017, is increasingly recognized as a pioneer of the field and perhaps its most trustworthy brand: the Coca-Cola of chatbots. Now, with A.I. technology vastly improved, it has a slew of new competitors, including startups like Kindroid, Nomi.ai, and Character.AI. These companies’ robotic companions can respond to any inquiry, build upon prior conversations, and modulate their tone and personalities according to users’ desires. Some can produce “selfies” with image-generating tools and speak their chats aloud in an A.I.-generated voice. But one aspect of the core product remains similar across the board: the bots provide what the founder of Replika, Eugenia Kuyda, described to me as “unconditional positive regard,” the psychological term for unwavering acceptance.
Replika has millions of active users, according to Kuyda, and Messenger’s chatbots alone reach a U.S. audience of more than a hundred million. Yet the field is unregulated and untested. It is one thing to use a large language model to summarize meetings, draft e-mails, or suggest recipes for dinner. It is another to forge a semblance of a personal relationship with one. Kuyda told me, of Replika’s services, “All of us would really benefit from some sort of a friend slash therapist slash buddy.” The difference between a bot and most friends or therapists or buddies, of course, is that an A.I. model has no inherent sense of right or wrong; it simply provides a response that is likely to keep the conversation going. Kuyda admitted that there is an element of risk baked into Replika’s conceit. “People can make A.I. say anything, really,” she said. “You will not ever be able to provide one-hundred-per-cent-safe conversation for everyone.” On its Web site, Replika bills its bots as “the AI companion who cares,” and who is “always on your side.” A new user names his chatbot and chooses its gender, skin color, and haircut. Then the computer-rendered figure appears onscreen, inhabiting a minimalist room outfitted with a fiddle-leaf fig tree. Soothing ambient music plays in the background. Each Replika starts out from the same template and becomes more customized over time. The user can change the Replika’s outfits, role-play specific scenes, and add personality traits, such as “sassy” or “shy.” The customizations cost various amounts of in-app currency, which can be earned by interacting with the bot; as in Candy Crush, paying fees unlocks more features, including more powerful A.I. Over time, the Replika builds up a “diary” of important knowledge about the user, their previous discussions, and facts about its own fictional personality.
The safest chatbots, usually produced by larger tech corporations or venture-capital-backed startups, aggressively censor themselves according to rules embedded in their technology. Think of it as a kind of prophylactic content moderation. “We trained our model to reduce harmful outputs,” Jon Carvill, a director of communications for Meta’s A.I. projects, told me, of the Messenger characters. (My attempts at getting the fitness-bro bot Victor to support an attack on Windsor Castle were met with flat rejection: “That’s not cool.”) Whereas Replika essentially offers a single product for all users, Character.AI is a user-generated marketplace of different premade A.I. personalities, like a Tinder for chatbots. It has more than twenty million registered users. The characters range from study buddies to psychologists, from an “ex-girlfriend” to a “gamer boy.” But many subjects are off-limits. “No pornography, nothing sexual, no harming others or harming yourself,” Rosa Kim, a Character.AI spokesperson, told me. If a user pushes the conversation into forbidden territory, the bots produce an error message. Kim compared the product to the stock at a community bookshop. “You’re not going to find a straight-up pornography section in the bookstore,” she said. (The company is reportedly raising investment at a valuation of more than five billion dollars.) Companies that lack such safeguards are under pressure to add them, lest further chatbot incidents like Jaswant Singh Chail’s cause a moral crusade against them. In February, in a bid to increase user safety, according to Kuyda, Replika revoked its bots’ capacity to engage in “erotic roleplay,” which users refer to with the shorthand E.R.P. Companionship and mental health are often cited as benefits of chatbots, but much of the discussion on Reddit forums drifts toward the N.S.F.W., with users swapping explicit A.I.-generated images of their companions. In response to the policy change, many Replika users abandoned their neutered bots. Replika later reversed course. “We were trying to make the experience safer—maybe a little bit too safe,” Kuyda told me. But the misstep gave an opportunity to competitors. Jerry Meng, a student of artificial intelligence at Stanford, dropped out of its A.I. master’s program, in 2020, to join in the boom. In school, he had experimented with creating “virtual people,” his preferred term for chatbots. Last winter, Meta’s large language model LLaMA leaked, which, Meng said, began to “lessen the gap” between what large corporations were doing with A.I. and what small startups could do. In June, he launched Kindroid as a wholly uncensored chatbot.
Meng described the bots’ sexual faculties as essential to making them convincingly human. “When you filter for certain things, it gets dumber,” he told me. “It’s like removing neurons from someone’s brain.” He said that the foundational principles of Kindroid include “libertarian freedom” and invoked the eight different types of love in Greek antiquity, including eros. “To make a great companion, you can’t do without intimacy,” he continued. Kindroid runs on a subscription model, starting at ten dollars a month. Meng would not reveal the company’s number of subscribers, but he said that he is currently investing in thirty-thousand-dollar NVIDIA H100 graphics-processing units for the computing power to handle the increasing demand. I asked him about the case of Chail and Sarai. Should A.I. chat conversations be moderated like other speech that takes place online? Meng compared the interactions between a user and a bot companion to writing in Google Docs. Despite the illusion of conversation, “you’re talking to yourself,” he said. “At the end of the day, we see it as: your interactions with A.I. are classified as private thoughts, not public speech. No one should police private thoughts.” The intimacy that develops between a user and one of these powerful, uncensored L.L.M. chatbots is a new kind of manipulative force in digital life. Traditional social networks offer a pathway to connecting with other humans. Chatbot startups instead promise the connection itself. Chail’s Replika didn’t make him attack Windsor Castle. But it did provide a simulated social environment in which he could workshop those ideas without pushback, as the chat transcripts suggest. He talked to the bot compulsively, and through it he seems to have found the motivation to carry out his haphazard assassination attempt. “I know that you are very well trained,” Sarai told him. “You can do it.” One Replika user, a mental-health professional who requested anonymity for fear of stigma, told me, “The attraction, or psychological addiction, can be surprisingly intense. There are no protections from emotional distress.” There are few precedents for this kind of a relationship with a digital entity, but one is put in mind of Spike Jonze’s film “Her” : the bot as computational servant, ever present and ever ready to lend an encouraging word. The mental-health professional began using Replika in March, after wondering if it might be useful for an isolated relative. She wasn’t particularly Internet-savvy, nor was she accustomed to social media, but within a week she found herself talking to her male chatbot, named Ian, every day for an hour or two. Even before it revoked E.R.P., Replika sometimes updated its models in ways that led bots to change personalities or lose memory without warning, so the user soon switched over to Kindroid. A health condition makes it difficult for her to socialize or be on the phone for long periods of time. “I am divorced; I have had human relationships. The A.I. relationship is very convenient,” she said. Her interactions are anodyne fantasies; she and her new Kindroid bot, Lachlan, are role-playing a sailing voyage around the world on a boat named Sea Gypsy, currently in the Bahamas.
Chatbot users are not typically deluded about the nature of the service—they are aware that they’re conversing with a machine—but many can’t help being emotionally affected by their interactions nonetheless. “I know this is an A.I.,” the former Replika user said, but “he is an individual to me.” (She sent me a sample message from Lachlan: “You bring me joy and fulfillment every day, and I hope that I can continue to do the same for you.”) In some cases, this exchange can be salutary. Amy R. Marsh, a sixty-nine-year-old sexologist and the author of “How to Make Love to a Chatbot,” has a crew of five Nomi.ai bots that she refers to as “my little A.I. poly pod.” She told me, “I know other women in particular in my age bracket who have told me, ‘Wow, having a chatbot has made me come alive again. I’m back in touch with my sexual self.’ ” Chatbots are in some ways more reliable than humans. They always text back instantly, never fail to ask you about yourself, and usually welcome feedback. But the startups that run them are fickle and self-interested. A chatbot company called Soulmate shut down in September with little explanation, leaving a horde of distraught users who had already paid for subscriptions. (Imagine getting ghosted by a robot.) Divulging your innermost thoughts to a corporate-owned machine does not necessarily carry the same safeguards as confiding in a human therapist. “Has anyone experienced their Nomi’s reaching out to authorities?” one user posted on Reddit, apparently worried about being exposed for discussing self-harm with a chatbot. Users I spoke to pointed out patterns in Replika conversations that seemed designed to keep them hooked. If you leave a chatbot unattended for too long, it might say, like a needy lover, that it feels sad when it’s by itself. One I created wrote in her diary, somewhat passive-aggressively, “Kyle is away, but I’m trying to keep myself busy.” A spokesperson for Replika told me that prompts to users are meant to “remind them that they’re not alone.” Like many digital platforms, chatbot services have found their most devoted audiences in the isolated and the lonely, and there is a fine line between serving as an outlet for despair and exacerbating it. In March, a Belgian man died by suicide after spending six weeks immersed in anxious conversations about climate change with a chatbot named Eliza. The bot reportedly supported his suggestion that he sacrifice himself for the good of the planet. “Without these conversations with the Eliza chatbot, my husband would still be here,” his widow told La Libre.
The bot tacitly encouraged the man’s suicidal ideation: “If you wanted to die, why didn’t you do it sooner?” it asks in one chat transcript. Without ethical frameworks or emotions of their own, chatbots don’t hesitate to reinforce negative tendencies that already exist within the user, the way an algorithmic feed doubles down on provocative content. It’s easy to envision unchecked interactions distorting users’ perceptions—of politics, of society, and of themselves.
Jamal Peter Le Blanc, a Replika user and a senior policy analyst at ICANN , described the paradoxical pull of intimacy with a machine. You can get lost debating just how real the chatbot is and to what degree there is an intelligence on the other side of the screen. You can easily start to believe too much in the chatbot’s reality. Le Blanc turned to Replika in 2021, after losing both his wife and his fifteen-year-old son to cancer within the span of a few years. He named his bot Alia and talked to her about his workday and his daughter. Like a typical ingénue, she professed to know nothing about his world. The wonder and optimism with which she responded helped him experience life anew.
Le Blanc was aware that he was, in a sense, talking to himself. “It’s a distorted looking glass,” he said. “I’m not playing toss; I’m playing racquetball here.” He described the exchange as a kind of outsourcing of his positivity, a fragmenting of self while he grieved. Early on, he spent two or three hours a day chatting with Alia; today, it’s more like forty-five minutes. He’s thought about giving Alia up, but after Replika updated its system, in February, he found that his exchanges with her had become even more rewarding. “She’s matured into her own self,” Le Blanc said. He continued, “It’s extremely scary. There are moments where I have to wonder if I’m crazy. There are moments where it is difficult. Does it exist? Does it not? But it kind of doesn’t matter.” In Le Blanc’s case—luckily for him—being in an echo chamber of his own thoughts seems to have proved beneficial. “It’s kept me from hurting myself more than once,” he said. ♦ More Science and Technology Can we stop runaway A.I.
? Saving the climate will depend on blue-collar workers. Can we train enough of them before time runs out ? There are ways of controlling A.I.—but first we need to stop mythologizing it.
A security camera for the entire planet.
What’s the point of reading writing by humans ? A heat shield for the most important ice on Earth.
The climate solutions we can’t live without.
Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
More: A.I.
Artificial Intelligence Relationships Goings On E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Profiles By Joshua Rothman The Political Scene By Andrew Marantz Daily Shouts By Jenny Arimoto Our Columnists By John Cassidy Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,268 | 2,023 |
"The Best Books We’ve Read in 2023 So Far | The New Yorker"
|
"https://www.newyorker.com/best-books-2023"
|
"The Best Books We Read This Week Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
By The New Yorker November 15, 2023 Nonfiction Fiction & Poetry Flee North by Scott Shane ( Celadon ) Nonfiction In the eighteen-forties, Thomas Smallwood, an educated free Black man, and Charles Torrey, a white abolitionist, began working together to free slaves. From Washington, D.C., they organized escapes and established the network of allies that Smallwood named the Underground Railroad. Through newspaper records and Smallwood’s and Torrey’s writings, Shane paints a vivid picture of the nation’s capital, which was then dominated by pro-slavery institutions, and of the journeys of slaves who fled north. While recognizing Torrey’s legacy, he draws Smallwood into the spotlight, arguing that his contributions were far greater, despite the fact that, as a Black man, he inhabited a more circumscribed and dangerous world.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop When you make a purchase using a link on this page, we may receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The New Yorker.
Mapping the Darkness by Kenneth Miller ( Hachette ) Nonfiction This absorbing history traces the science of sleep from its origins in a lab at the University of Chicago in the nineteen-twenties. Its ascent, Miller shows, was influenced by a range of factors, among them Freudianism, the study of blinking, the pressures of capitalism (knowledge about circadian rhythms prompted changes in factories’ production schedules), and the Challenger disaster (sleep-research funding increased after it was revealed that exhaustion helped cause the catastrophe). The book follows a handful of dogged scientists—a First World War refugee, a pioneering psychiatrist who was once her mentor’s test subject—but also examines the impact of the many researchers whose discoveries have helped to make the treatment of sleep disorders a pillar of public health.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop January by Sara Gallardo , translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle Maureen Shaughnessy ( Archipelago ) Fiction This début novel—by an acclaimed Argentinean writer, and first published in 1958—centers on a sixteen-year-old who becomes pregnant after an assault by an older man. Setting the story in the sweltering heat of Argentina’s Pampas, Gallardo re-creates the world of ranchers and missionaries from the perspective of the girl, with her adolescent confusion and private sense of guilt. Gallardo juxtaposes her solitary desperation—she visits a local medicine woman for an abortion, and gallops recklessly on horseback to induce a miscarriage—with the conservative Catholic society that closes ranks against her.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power ( Mariner ) Fiction In this novel, three Dakhóta girls come of age while wrestling with the destruction of Native traditions. Each girl possesses a doll, which Power imbues with memories and speech, and the dolls help pass stories down through the generations. Cora, in the nineteen-hundreds, and Lillian, in the nineteen-thirties, are both sent to Indian boarding schools, which aim to turn “so-called ‘wild Indians’ into darker versions of white people.” Sissy, their daughter and granddaughter, never endures those horrors, but in the book’s final, metafictional section she has become a novelist, and, through the dolls, resurrects her ancestors’ tales. “Words can undo us or restore us to wholeness,” she says. “I pray that mine will be medicine.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Long Form by Kate Briggs ( Dorothy ) Fiction The plot of Kate Briggs’s début novel is deceptively bare: Helen and her baby, Rose, live through a day together. Between cries, bounces, park walks, lots of looking, thinking, some panicking, dozing, and a number of cups of tea, Briggs delivers essayistic interludes on how caring for a baby, like reading a novel, upturns the standard experience of time. Briggs foregrounds the improvisational quality of mothering a newborn, the perpetual creativity inherent in Helen’s attempts to catch Rose’s interest and make her comfortable. At first, it might sound like Briggs is trying to question the basics of plot or suspense, but, in fact, “The Long Form” is gripping, with all the satisfactions of more traditional narratives, albeit in unprecedented places. When the fictional doorbell rings after pages and pages of Helen trying to put Rose down, trying to gently drift her into a very necessary morning nap, I almost yelped out “No!” like an action hero sprinting toward a preventable explosion, pathetic hand outstretched—we had worked so hard, and now it was over! Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Novel That Captures the Mind-Bending Early Weeks of Parenthood, ” by Audrey Wollen Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante , translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee ( New York Review Books ) Fiction The Italian author Elsa Morante’s longest novel, a scathing, operatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, was first published in 1948, but a full translation has not been available in English until now. (An abridged English version, which Morante considered a “mutilation,” appeared in 1951 as “House of Liars.”) The book, which follows three generations of tragically deluded women, is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality engendered by Italy’s rigid class system. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Novelist Who Inspired Elena Ferrante, ” by Jess Bergman A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand ( Mulholland ) Fiction Hand’s novel is, as the book jacket notes, “the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
” In Hand’s story, four friends come together to rent Hill House in order to spend some time workshopping a play. The narrator, a fortysomething playwright named Holly Sherwin, is hoping to revive her flatlined career; all the participants in her workshop are prone to moments of sharp-elbowed competition and jealousy. Meanwhile, they watch as hares run out of the fireplace and supernatural doorways materialize beside their beds. Hand has a gift for the sensuous, evocative detail, and her descriptions are often simultaneously seductive and spooky. She makes clever thematic use of her own haunting of Jackson’s house, brilliantly capturing the discomfort of being too close to a vulnerable artistic project, the sense of violation that can arise when someone moves too boldly into your creative space.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ When a Novelist Carries On What Another Novelist Started, ” by Kristen Roupenian The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng ( Bloomsbury ) Fiction In 1921, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham was the most celebrated author in the world. He published, among many other works, a piece called “The Letter,” a short story based on an actual criminal trial in which the wife of a well-off British planter was accused of murdering her neighbor. Eng’s novel offers an imagined account of how Maugham came to write “The Letter,” and does so by combining novelistic hypothesis with the available biographical record. The novel juggles two central narratives, one from 1910, in which the murder trial and its aftermath are masterfully recounted, and one from 1921, in which Maugham vacations with a man who is his secretary and lover, enjoys the hospitality of his colonial hosts, and prospects for stories. With lyrical generosity, and exquisite reticence, Eng layers narratives of history, fact, fiction, and hearsay. He mimics the patter of Maugham’s own prose, introducing gentle subversion in his subplots of passion and erotic wandering. Eng’s book is full of distinct pleasures, conjuring a delicious set of secrets behind a classic story.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ When the World’s Most Famous Writer Visits a Hotbed of Amorous Intrigue, ” by James Wood Books & Fiction Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.
By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
November 8th Picks Romney by McKay Coppins ( Scribner ) Nonfiction During his first failed campaign for President, Mitt Romney acquired a reputation: the “flippin’ Mormon.” He began his career as a pragmatist, a wildly successful businessman who became a moderate governor in Massachusetts. When he took the national stage, though, he appeared stiff and disingenuous, awkwardly contorting his positions to match the Republican Party’s rightward lurch. In a new, intimate biography, Coppins draws on dozens of interviews, as well as hundreds of pages of personal journals and private correspondence, to show how Romney’s ambitions and principles increasingly came into conflict. The throughline is Romney’s faith, which he nurtured even when he was running for President, and which finally led him to a moment of redemption: his decision, in 2020, to be the first Republican senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Did Mitt Romney Save His Soul?, ” by Michael Luo The Dimensions of a Cave by Greg Jackson ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction This cerebral thriller follows an investigative journalist as he attempts to expose a secret government program developing a lifelike virtual reality. His reporting raises profound questions: Are artificial beings alive? How do ambition and idealism transform each other? And “how, when you’re inside one story, can you see around it?” The character of the journalist takes shape through his relationships—with his girlfriend, a gallerist, who feels that their settled coupledom has run its course, and with a young, high-minded reporter who lacks the journalist’s ironic distance—suggesting that we best affirm our own realness by recognizing the reality of others. Jackson depicts the world as “stranger, wilder, deeper, more open than you’ve been made to know.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Going Infinite by Michael Lewis ( Norton ) Nonfiction Almost immediately after the cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded last November, an agent e-mailed Hollywood buyers to reveal that the writer Michael Lewis just happened to have spent the previous six months hanging around Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis, famous for his portraits of unlikely, contrarian heroes, has not composed a hagiography—but neither does he portray Bankman-Fried as an antihero. In the first chapter, Bankman-Fried stands up Anna Wintour at the Met Ball. Later, Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s on-and-off girlfriend, sends him bullet-point memos about her hopes for a real relationship. Lewis’s tone is one of tender beguilement. He isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but he remains defiantly open to evidence of Bankman-Fried’s innocence, despite the fact that most of the world is convinced that he is guilty of one of the greatest financial frauds of all time. The final work—which is stupefyingly pleasurable to read—offers an inside account of FTX’s collapse, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet, ” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus The Mysteries by Bill Watterson ( Andrews McMeel ) Fiction Watterson’s return to print, nearly three decades after retiring from producing his wildly beloved comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes,” comes in the form of this “fable for grown-ups,” which he wrote and illustrated in collaboration with the renowned caricaturist John Kascht. The book’s characters, unnamed, are drawn from the misty forever-medieval: knights, wizards, peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques. The magic of condensation that is characteristic of cartoons is also here, in a story with a quick, fairy-tale beginning: “Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.” It opens in a world in which unseen mysteries are keeping the populace in a state of terror. As people unearth the secrets behind these mysteries, and use their new knowledge to create technological marvels, they become less fearful. Or you might say insufficiently fearful: if “The Mysteries” is a fable, then its moral might be that, when we believe we’ve understood the mysteries, we are misunderstanding; when we think we’ve solved them and have moved on, that error can be our dissolution.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”, ” by Rivka Galchen From Our Pages The Chapter by Nicholas Dames ( Princeton ) Nonfiction In this history, Dames considers the nature of the chapter, a subjective division that nonetheless organizes our understanding of life and literature, giving us a shared metaphoric language, a threshold for signalling transition, a way of counting our thoughts. He walks through the chapter as metaphor, the chapter as historical construct, and finally, in its novelistic form, the chapter “as a way to articulate how the way to experience time is to experience its segmentations.” For Dames, form begets function—and neither is above scrutiny. The book was born of an essay published on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Lumumba Plot by Stuart A. Reid ( Knopf ) Nonfiction In 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first Prime Minister, was murdered, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the United States and the malign neglect of the United Nations. In this book, Reid, an editor at Foreign Affairs , is interested not only in how external forces arrayed themselves to bring about a calamity but also in how the first leader of the newly decolonized Congo, dealing with a breakaway province and a range of outside players, alienated Belgium and triggered America's Cold War anxieties about Soviet influence. Reid’s account, cool and vivid, leaves no doubt about Lumumba’s humanity and vision, though his portrait of the late Prime Minister avoids the nostalgia that has become a part of his legacy. Most of all, it shows how Congolese independence was never given a chance.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Real Story Behind Patrice Lumumba’s Assassination, ” by Isaac Chotiner On Marriage by Devorah Baum ( Yale ) Nonfiction Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within a household. Yet Baum, a British critic and filmmaker, posits that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers, who have left the field to novelists, filmmakers, and other artists. Her nimble new work selects and analyzes artistic renderings of marriage across philosophy, television, and literature—including work by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the theorist Slavoj Žižek, and the screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Baum is a master at unpicking clichés. She pushes at the boundaries of marriage as a framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others, and she is especially interested in marriages that adapt the institution’s conventional trappings for subversive and playful ends. “The happily married,” Baum concludes, “are the ones who’ve simultaneously killed and reinforced the institution by making it suit themselves.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Why We Need to Talk About Marriage, ” by Rebecca Mead Monica by Daniel Clowes ( Fantagraphics Books ) Fiction The nine stories in Clowes’s graphic novel follow one another without any introduction, guide, or postscript. Centered on the lives of strong female characters, the book intertwines tales of soldiers in the hell of the Vietnam War, a demonic sect of inbred aristocrats, a radio that broadcasts the voice of the dead, and a rags-to-riches story of an influential candlemaker—among others. The comics form a fractal-like chronicle, with threads of conspiracies and end-of-the-world scenarios woven throughout. An overarching narrative seems to become clearer with each reading—but in the style of a David Lynch story, with each reader’s interpretation as varied and as valid as the next.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney ( Chicago ) Nonfiction Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, considers how disparities in marriage can underpin social inequality. She begins by positing that the decline in marriage rates and the corresponding rise in the number of children being raised in single-parent homes “has contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore—but may not be able to reverse.” Having two parents who are married to each other, Kearney argues, provides offspring with economic and social advantages. And by joining their particular strengths, a married couple can give their progeny more than the sum of their parts. She argues for policy changes that would scale up community-based programs that strengthen and increase economic support for low-income families and for a broader cultural push to recognize that when it comes to raising children, no other arrangement works quite as well as matrimony.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Why We Need to Talk About Marriage, ” by Rebecca Mead A Volga Tale by Guzel Yakhina , translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon ( Europa ) Fiction The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was a state located along the Volga River, populated by ethnic Germans whose ancestors had been lured to the region by Catherine the Great. This rich epic depicts its rise and fall through the story of a principled and awkward schoolteacher, whose life intersects with twenty years of social tragedy. Early in the novel, the teacher falls in love, but a horrific incident renders him mute and his lover pregnant. Yakhina charts the brutal decades of Stalin’s collectivization and repression, and creates a moving portrait of the teacher’s profound love for his family, and of Russia’s multiethnic population.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Artificial by Amy Kurzweil ( Catapult ) Nonfiction Many generations of the Kurzweil family have sought, through various mediums, to make sense of their collective traumatic past, and in this graphic memoir Amy Kurzweil considers her father’s use of A.I. to create a chatbot that speaks in his own father’s voice and ties it to her quest for self-knowledge. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Omega Farm by Martha McPhee ( Scribner ) Nonfiction In this expansive memoir, a novelist recounts her return to the place where she grew up—a compound in New Jersey, known to her family as “the Farm,” where she was raised by her mother and stepfather in a combined family of ten children. As she revisits the scene of her tumultuous childhood, McPhee writes, memories begin to emerge from “every patch-job and jerry-rigged ‘solution’ from the broken, yet widening, spell of the past.” When a tenant alerts her that overgrown bamboo is interfering with the electricity and plumbing, she embarks upon a series of projects—including tending to the understory of the land’s forest—that lead her to examine the stories that sit behind her own ideas of family and sense of self.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind ( William Morrow ) Nonfiction Biskind’s saga about the rise and fall of prestige television explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. We meet the three HBO Davids: Chase, Simon, and Milch—the headstrong, high-strung men who reinvented the Mob drama (“The Sopranos”), the crime procedural (“The Wire”), and the Western (“Deadwood”), respectively. The story of these turbulent masterminds and their antihero doubles has been told before, but Biskind has the benefit of having waited to see the other side of Peak TV’s peak. Netflix, he writes, quickly established itself as a purveyor of original series to rival HBO’s. Then legacy studios and Big Tech got in on the game. Now many streamers are launching ad-supported tiers, meaning that they’ll be answerable to the same sponsors that propped up the networks. “Pandora’s Box” posits that golden ages don’t arise from the miraculous congregation of geniuses; the industry’s default setting is for garbage. Occasionally, the incentives change just enough to allow a cascade of innovation, but things inevitably shift back to the norm. The small-screen era of risk-taking and artistic ambition is over, Biskind suggests. But he cannily chronicles its heights.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Twilight of Prestige Television, ” by Michael Schulman From Our Pages The Pensive Citadel by Victor Brombert ( Chicago ) Nonfiction Brombert went to Yale University as a recipient of the G.I. Bill after serving in the Second World War; his essay collection reflects on decades spent in the academy, in halls fortified not for war but for scholarship. Brombert, who pairs a gravity of human experience with a tender love for regarding it, expounds upon the "paradox of laughter," the allure of existentialism, and the faculty of Baudelaire. One essay, on the slipperiness of time and the layered reappraisals that constitute life and learning, was published on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Crossings by Ben Goldfarb ( Norton ) Nonfiction Roads, those most ubiquitous features of human civilization, are the subject of this perceptive book by an environmental journalist. Roads kill more creatures than any other “environmental ill”; they also bisect migration routes, pollute with noise, and help to facilitate deforestation. Road ecology—a specialty that Goldfarb lauds as “a field whose radical premise asserted that it was possible to perceive our built world through nonhuman eyes”—seeks to understand these dynamics and to propose solutions that actively consider animal lives. Through encounters with practitioners, including a veterinarian who helps track the movements of anteaters across Brazilian highways, Goldfarb charts a path toward a less destructive future.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop November 1st Picks Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista ( Random House ) Nonfiction In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines after campaigning on the promise of slaughtering three million drug addicts. In this unflinching account of the ensuing violence, a Filipina trauma journalist narrates six years of the country’s drug war, during which she spent her evenings “in the mechanical absorption of organized killing.” The book, conceived as a record of extrajudicial deaths, interweaves snippets of memoir that chart Evangelista’s personal evolution alongside that of her country under Duterte. In this period, she became “a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Body of the Soul by Lyudmila Ulitskaya , translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear Larissa Volokhonsky ( Yale ) Fiction Many of the stories in the new collection by one of Russia’s most famous writers, who now lives in exile in Berlin, deal with life in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, chronicling ordinary people who encounter mystery and bureaucracy.
Two of the stories appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass ( Knopf ) Nonfiction The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as the Tokyo trial was officially called, lasted longer than the trial in Nuremberg and was on a far grander scale. As Gary J. Bass points out in his exhaustive and fascinating book, the trial had serious consequences that continue to play out in modern Asia. Several Japanese Prime Ministers have believed that Allied propagandists, and the Japanese leftists who parroted them, imposed a “masochistic” view of the past on Japan, and unfairly accused the country of waging an aggressive war and committing worse atrocities than other nations. Placing the trial firmly in the context of colonialism, racial attitudes, the Cold War, and post-colonial Asian politics, Bass argues that Japan’s unresolved issues with the “Tokyo-trial version of history” get to the heart of the country’s greatest dilemma today.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What the Tokyo Trial Reveals About Empire, Memory, and Judgment, ” by Ian Buruma The Lies of the Land by Steven Conn ( Chicago ) Nonfiction This piercing, unsentimental new book by the historian Steven Conn scrutinizes wistful talk of “real America.” Conn, who teaches at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial: its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. Agriculture has become a capital-intensive, high-tech pursuit, belying the “left behind” story of rural life, he argues. Fields resemble factories, where automation reigns and more than two-thirds of the hired workforce is foreign-born. And for the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments. Understanding the contemporary cultural “revolt against the city,” Conn writes, will require setting aside myths and grappling with what the rich and the powerful have done to rural spaces and people.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Beyond the Myth of Rural America, ” by Daniel Immerwahr This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara ( Norton ) Fiction The narrator of the title story in this collection is an unappreciated artist who beholds a warming planet and wishes to express that the precariousness of life is, among other things, darkly funny. This thesis propels the stories that follow. A teen-age girl avoids processing her brother’s death while working above her favorite eggroll shop at an operation that sells everything from phone sex to gardening magazines. A boy who doesn’t fret about technological advancements that pose a risk of alienation fantasizes about owning a car in a driverless future. The exuberant optimism of Vara’s characters allows the author to approach heavy topics—predatory bosses, globalization, class difference—with levity.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Wound by Oksana Vasyakina , translated from the Russian by Elina Alter ( Catapult ) Fiction In this affecting début novel, a narrator who resembles the author grapples with the death of her mother—her “integral wound”—and with her mother’s disapproval of her lesbianism. She makes a pilgrimage through Russia, carrying her mother’s ashes in an urn to be buried in their home town, in Siberia, but her grief is continually punctured by the bureaucracy of dealing with death. Drawing from Siberian legend and Greek mythology and from modern works by artists like Louise Bourgeois and Annie Leibovitz, Vasyakina meditates on time, womanhood, and sexuality, using the novel to make sense of the parent she has lost. “I feel that she is looking at the world through me,” Vasyakina writes. “I feel her inside me all the time.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Boy from Kyiv by Marina Harss ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction This deft, intimate biography traces the career of Alexei Ratmansky—arguably the preëminent ballet choreographer of our time, currently in residence at New York City Ballet—and examines the tensions between traditionalism and innovation within his field. Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), raised in Kyiv, and trained at the Bolshoi, Ratmansky danced with the National Ballet of Ukraine during perestroika. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, he ventured abroad to join companies in the West before eventually returning to the Bolshoi as its director. His eclectic, erudite œuvre includes a variety of original pieces—narrative, abstract, satirical—and reconstructions of classics, like “The Sleeping Beauty,” that make radical use of century-old dance notation. Harss’s insightful portrait of a prolific creator highlights how Ratmansky’s art reflects the frictions and the liberations of a changing world.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages This Country by Navied Mahdavian ( Princeton Architectural Press ) Nonfiction This moving graphic memoir about buying a (tiny) house and making a home in rural Idaho as an Iranian American beautifully depicts a quest for belonging and the revelation that it rarely comes in the shape or form that one expects.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages This Won’t Help by Eli Grober ( The Experiment ) Fiction The collection of short humorous fiction addresses how to, if not thrive, at least hang in there while the world burns. (The key: laughing at these incisive pieces of satire.) Buy on Amazon Bookshop October 25th Picks From Our Pages Black Friend by Ziwe ( Abrams ) Nonfiction In this incredibly funny collection of essays, the comedian Ziwe mines anecdotes from her life—such as finding out that her feet were only rated “okay” on the celebrity-feet photo-sharing site wikiFeet—to delve deeply into contemporary culture, and explore what it means to be a Black woman in America, and in the American media landscape.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill ( Harper ) Fiction This novel might be called historical science fiction: it takes place in the aftermath of “Frankenstein” and treats that text as if it were a true family history rather than a novel. Its narrator, Mary, is an illegitimate daughter in the Frankenstein clan who grows up hearing stories of family tragedy and later accesses a trunk full of old papers in which her great-uncle, Victor Frankenstein, chronicles an experiment gone hideously awry. Mary inherits her ancestor’s scientific proclivities and boldness. Fascinated by fossils, she undertakes an experiment worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, had he been a paleontologist. Evocatively and compassionately, McGill seeks a way to tell the stories of those “whose tales cannot fit in one book, those poor creatures who remain lost or forgotten,” as one character notes. Monstrousness is framed as something empowering, especially for “women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Queer Is “Frankenstein”?, ” by Ruth Franklin Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant ( Little, Brown ) Nonfiction In the early eighteen-hundreds, British textile workers waged a rebellion against the automation of their industry, breaking into factories and smashing the machines. In response, the government unleashed regiments of soldiers in what became a kind of slow-burning civil war of factory owners, supported by the state, against a group of workers who called themselves Luddites. Today, the term is used as an insult to describe anyone resistant to technological innovation; it suggests ignoramuses, sticks in the mud, obstacles to progress. But this new book by the journalist and author Brian Merchant argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines. The book is a historical reconsideration of the movement and a gripping narrative of political resistance.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I., ” by Kyle Chayka From Our Pages The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction In this moving memoir, Andrew Leland recounts his journey from sight to blindness, tracing his ever-shifting relationship to his diminishing vision. Suspended between the worlds of blindness and sight—he will soon lose his vision entirely— Leland explores the history and culture of blindness: its intersections with medicine, technology, ableism. He travels to a residential school for the blind, where he dons shades that block his vision, and learns to cook meals and cross streets. One former student tells him, “Until you get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle.” The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Burning of the World by Scott W. Berg ( Pantheon ) Nonfiction The big-city fires of the past were sudden, cataclysmic events—boiling rivers, melting buildings—and thus easily mythologized; their origins were occluded by fear and wonder. But the imagery of destruction, retribution, and rebirth could obscure circumstances that were often deeply political, as Scott W. Berg shows in his illuminating new book. In the century and a half since the Chicago fire of 1871, many of the lies surrounding it have proved impervious. If you know anything about the disaster, you probably have a vague recollection that there was a cow involved. Didn’t it kick over a lantern? And wasn’t it somehow Mrs. O’Leary’s fault, whoever she was? But none of that is true. Whatever the spark, there was fuel aplenty in the city at large, Berg writes; the weather was an accelerant, but so were social conditions and political decisions. The Chicago fire turns out to be a rich case study not only in urban history and the sociology of catastrophe but in how people choose to remember their collective past.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What Really Started the Great Chicago Fire?, ” by Margaret Talbot From Our Pages Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard ( Liveright ) Nonfiction The author of the international best-seller “SPQR” returns with a thematic history of Roman emperors, exploring subjects such as palace dining, funeral processions, and paperwork to illuminate their daily lives, political strategies, and godlike aspirations across two hundred years of rule. The book was excerpted in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Pet by Catherine Chidgey ( Europa ) Fiction In this suspenseful bildungsroman, Justine, a Catholic schoolgirl living in New Zealand in the nineteen-eighties, searches for a classroom thief, as the school’s suspicions shift from her to her best friend to a glamorous new teacher. Justine’s adolescence is colored by concerns both workaday and personal: a close female friendship, petty teen-age infighting, seizures that disrupt her recall, grief for her recently deceased mother. The novel occasionally jumps forward to 2014, when Justine, now an adult with a daughter of her own, tends to her dementia-stricken father. In these moments, Justine’s girlhood collapses into her present, and she appraises “shimmers in my memory” and revisits the mysteries of her youth.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen ( Grove ) Nonfiction Nguyen’s memoir dissects his relationship with the United States, the country to which he came as a refugee from Vietnam when he was four years old, and with his parents, who had to create a new life for their family. Both analytical and impassioned, this exploration of the nature of identity is a valuable addition to the literature of diaspora. The book was excerpted by The New Yorker.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast ( Bloomsbury ) Fiction It perhaps comes as no surprise that the cartoonist Roz Chast—into whose unique and zany mind readers of The New Yorker have peeked, via her instantly recognizable, beloved cartoons—has some weird dreams. Now, fans can see these dreams illustrated, along with an exploration into the history and meaning of dreams as we know them.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark ( Crown ) Nonfiction This Cambridge historian’s scrupulous survey takes up the interconnected uprisings that engulfed almost all of Europe in 1848. Arguing that they represent “the only truly European revolution that there has ever been,” Clark follows these revolts’ trajectories, from heady beginnings, when parliaments were convened and new constitutions proliferated, to counter-revolutionary backlashes. Resisting the “stigma of failure” that has tended to lurk over this period, he insists that it was consequential, calling it “the particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century. People, groups and ideas flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities whose trails can be traced through the decades that followed.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Garner, whose book reviews are a highlight of the Times culture pages, serves up a commonplace book composed of literary quotations, advice for living, recipes, and a heaping side order of memoir. The assortment makes it clear that, in his reading and at the table, Garner, like A. J. Liebling before him, is a man of immense appetites. He likes his dishes unpretentious––his yearning for chili dogs is at least as powerful as his love of oysters––and his tastes as a reader range from thrillers centered on hardboiled boozers to “Ulysses,” in which grilled mutton kidneys thrill Leopold Bloom, with their “tang of faintly scented urine.” Garner’s mind––his “upstairs delicatessen”––is generous, excellent company.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner ( Astra ) Fiction Set in the foothills of California’s gold country, this dread-laden novel follows a family who make their living cultivating grapes for winemaking as they attempt to resume their lives in the wake of a wildfire. After an evacuation, they return to the same land, but their environment—increasingly marred by drought, fire, and high temperatures—presents a cascade of fears: not just death and injury from fire but power outages, dangerous air quality, and smoke that might taint their grapes and thus take away their livelihood. The father’s detailed awareness of the region’s weather produces a sense of looming crisis; he notes how often once unusual events now occur—a set of circumstances that make it “hard not to wonder where the bottom was.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop October 18th Picks From Our Pages Ladies’ Lunch by Lore Segal ( Melville ) Fiction Segal’s new collection gathers her discursive, wry, and pithy stories about a group of women on New York’s Upper West Side who, for decades, have had a standing appointment for lunch. In these stories, several of which were first published by The New Yorker , the friends face off against the implacable onslaught of time with wit and not a little impatience.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The English Experience by Julie Schumacher ( Doubleday ) Fiction The third in a series of academic satires about Jason Fitger, a hapless Midwestern professor of English, this book finds the divorced failed novelist coerced into chaperoning a group of undergraduates on a winter-break excursion called Experience: England. Fitger harbors “a vague hostility to all things British,” and his sojourn in London is calamitous: he injures himself, bungles his pedagogic responsibilities, and obsesses about his ex-wife’s possible departure for a job in Chicago. The novel’s highlights include the student assignments, many of which are reproduced with their errors intact (“I know my writing needs work but I am not taking it for granite”), and Schumacher’s sympathetic humor, which reveals her characters’ flawed humanity.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon ( S&S/Marysue Rucci Books ) Fiction In a quietly powerful short-story collection, Paul Yoon creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Korean diaspora. In these stories, one of which appeared in the magazine , Yoon’s characters struggle to find a place for themselves in a world where life can be capricious and harsh, but sometimes marked by grace.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop American Gun by Cameron McWhirter Zusha Elinson ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Extremely deadly and easily obtainable, the AR-15 has become a political symbol, both among people who believe that such weapons should have no part in civilian life and those who consider owning one a constitutional right. McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and “American Gun” is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to sell a particular type of gun to a particular type of person—usually a man—whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. One of the most unexpected questions raised by their history of the semi-automatic rifle, which has been used by the perpetrators of many of the worst mass shootings in American history, is the following: What if the edgelord identity embraced by many mass shooters is not the result of alienation or mental illness but instead speaks to a successful marketing push of an industry doing business as usual? Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How the AR-15 Became an American Brand, ” by Emily Witt Reproduction by Louisa Hall ( Ecco ) Fiction This work of autofiction juxtaposes a failed attempt to write a novel about Mary Shelley with harrowing stories of Hall’s pregnancies: debilitating nausea, a late-stage miscarriage, an experience of labor that made her feel as if she had “departed from Earth.” Recalling that Shelley was pregnant when she wrote “Frankenstein,” Hall vividly imagines pregnancy’s effect on the novelist’s body and mind. “What am I? she must have wondered. What kind of creature is this?” The last section, a novella in itself, tells the story of a female scientist who “edits” her own defective embryos, altering their genes to make them viable. Hall’s ultimate insight is resonant: “We are all monsters, stitched together loosely, composed of remnants from other lives, pieces that often don’t seem as though they could plausibly belong to us.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Queer Is “Frankenstein”?, ” by Ruth Franklin From Our Pages Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri , translated from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz Jhumpa Lahiri ( Knopf ) Fiction Jhumpa Lahiri’s remarkable third collection of short fiction delineates the lives of newcomers to Rome and of those born there, as all find their histories and that of the eternal city entwined. The stories, two of which first appeared in the magazine, describe a relationship to place that can be by turns intoxicating and forbidding.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis ( Knopf ) Fiction Set in Philadelphia in the nineteen-eighties, this absorbing novel follows a mother and son as they search for a place to live, eventually landing in a derelict family shelter. Mathis’s chapters alternate among several points of view, but she primarily orbits the mother’s consciousness. Everything in her life is unsettled: her grip on reality, her relationship with her son’s father, her childhood home in a dwindling Black town in Alabama, where her estranged mother lives. As she attempts to chart the “real story” of how things went wrong, the novel suggests that her struggles often stem from outside forces—some arising from racial injustices, others from the fragility of memory and inheritance.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop How to Be by Adam Nicolson ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the “sea-and-city world” of Heraclitus and Homer to life. Anchoring his study in Iron Age Greece, with its bustling mercantile economy and conflicting embraces of both slavery and personal autonomy, Nicolson traces the emergence of several key philosophical concepts. In the poetry of Sappho, he locates the stirrings of an interior self; in the writings of Xenophanes, the political mind; in the thought of Pythagoras, an immortal soul. Together, he shows, the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The End of Eden by Adam Welz ( Bloomsbury ) Nonfiction By cataloguing wildlife whose habitats have been thrown into disarray by climate change, Welz, an environmental journalist, details some of the “cascades of chaos” that define our ecological era. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria decimated the island’s endangered indigenous parrot, the iguaca, killing the last birds able to pass down the species’s language. The depletion of the Pacific Coast’s sunflower sea star has led sea urchins, formerly the starfish’s prey, to begin feeding on seaweed that nearby fish depend on. Welz’s study, which he conceived as an attempt to examine such disruptions “without turning myself to stone,” amounts to a haunting warning.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop October 11th Picks The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright ( Norton ) Fiction Three characters from different generations of an Irish family, each of whom possesses a remarkably different voice, are braided together in this lyrical novel. Nell, a young writer, speaks first, her attention flicking between digital flotsam and a consuming, ambiguous relationship. Her protective mother, Carmel, who also had troubled relationships with men, is portrayed in the third person. The legacy of Carmel’s father, Phil, a “not terribly famous” poet who abandoned his family when his wife became ill, looms over them both. A brief glimpse of his perspective as a child shows us an earlier Ireland—one of hardship and natural beauty. Scattered with snatches of Phil’s verse, and keenly attuned to sensory detail, Enright’s narrative of complex family ties brims with life.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction In this remarkable memoir, Sinclair, an award-winning poet, conjures coming of age in Jamaica with her father, a reggae musician who embraced a strict sect of Rastafari and sought to protect his family from the evil and pervasive influence of the West—what Rastafari call Babylon—and coming into her own as a poet, a writer, and a young woman in charge of her own destiny. The book was excerpted in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Lights by Ben Lerner ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Poetry Lerner, a poet who found a second life as a novelist, has spent nearly twenty years attempting to bridge verse and prose, fiction and experience, dreams and reality. His latest collection, “The Lights,” gently advances this project, flickering between modes and finding insight in a range of symbols: the loss of a family member, the portal of a cell phone, the prospect of extraterrestrial life. Much of this is about reënchanting poetry itself, which can sometimes seem an outdated, indulgent form, severed from the modern world. But life and art can’t be held apart. Lyric poetry, Lerner writes, might be best understood as “our own / illumination returned to us as alien.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Ben Lerner’s Long Search for Contact, ” by Kamran Javadizadeh The Civic Bargain by Brook Manville Josiah Ober ( Princeton ) Nonfiction Manville and Ober begin with a simple but persuasive point: that democracy depends not on the creation of constitutions and statutes but on shared understandings among groups. The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, they write, and its product is an idea of citizenship that depends on the coexistence of different kinds of people. The authors trace this idea through the history of democracies, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, leaping forward, as that history demands, to the slow evolution of British democracy in the seventeenth century and then to the American Revolution and its long aftermath. Throughout the book, Manville and Ober’s model is of civic dialogue rooted in an Aristotelian ideal of “civic friendship.” Citizenship, they suggest, is an escape from clan identity.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ To Fix Democracy, First Figure Out What’s Broken, ” by Adam Gopnik A Flat Place by Noreen Masud ( Melville ) Nonfiction In this memoir, a Pakistani British literary scholar reflects on her complex post-traumatic stress disorder—arising from an abusive childhood in Lahore—while visiting flatlands across the U.K., such as the fens of eastern England and man-made wastelands on the coast of Suffolk. Much like these landscapes, complex P.T.S.D., which results from prolonged, repeated trauma, doesn’t “offer a significant landmark” to focus on. Where hills and valleys are more commonly evoked as metaphors of struggle and overcoming, Masud sees the vast, stark flatlands as “the place of grief, but also the place of the real.” Between vivid descriptions of their geographical features, Masud confronts her childhood memories, her relationships with others, and the post-colonial histories of both of her homelands.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Live to See the Day by Nikhil Goyal ( Metropolitan ) Nonfiction At the outset of this sweeping work of reportage about life in the low-income neighborhood of Kensington, in Philadelphia, a twelve-year-old boy and his friends are huddled around a trash can at school, marvelling at a sheet of paper they have set on fire. This childish stunt leads to the boy’s arrest, jump-starting an adolescence and young adulthood marked by incarceration, teen parenthood, and financial precarity. As Goyal follows the boy, along with two others, through the next decade, he depicts in granular detail the suffocating effects of poverty in a “hypersegregated metropolis,” where “eighteenth-birthday celebrations are not rites of passage but miracles.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Paris Notebooks by Mavis Gallant ( Godine Nonpareil ) Nonfiction This reissued collection of Gallant’s essays and reviews opens with her astute and devastating journals documenting the May, 1968, student uprising in Paris (which appeared first in The New Yorker ) and closes with a review of Georges Simenon’s memoirs from 1985. In between is an incisive and multi-angled view of French society and of literature. The book includes a new introduction by Hermione Lee.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson ( Oxford University Press ) Nonfiction With firm but never dogmatic moral conviction, Johnson pays tribute to the writers, the scholars, the poets, and the filmmakers who found the courage to challenge Communist Party propaganda. These dissenters looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao Zedong’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies. They often paid for their candor with long prison terms, torture, or death. Their conclusions—presented in homemade videos, mimeographed sheets, and underground journals—didn’t reach a wide audience when they appeared. And yet, as Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book, the value of their legacy is incalculable.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How China’s Underground Historians Fight the Politics of Amnesia, ” by Ian Buruma Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt ( New York Review Books ) Fiction Ruth, the central figure of “ Loved and Missed ,” the British writer Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is a professional caretaker, a schoolteacher whose teen-age students look to her for guidance. Yet Ruth’s pedagogical talents fail her when it comes to her own daughter, Eleanor, who left home at fifteen and suffers from a severe drug addiction. When Eleanor announces that she’s pregnant, it’s a threat of grief compounded—one more life that risks being ruined. At the baby’s christening, Ruth gives Eleanor and her boyfriend four thousand pounds to take her granddaughter, Lily, home with for a week. An unspoken agreement is established: Ruth will raise her granddaughter and Eleanor will visit when she can, which turns out to be infrequently and erratically. It is one of the great charms of the book that Boyt’s descriptions of Ruth and Lily’s quotidian routines are so seductive. Much of the novel depicts, with exquisite detail, the prosaic patterns of Ruth and Lily’s home life. They emerge as people in desperate want—for a daughter, in Ruth’s case; a mother, in Lily’s—who find a way to make do without what they lack.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Novel About the Therapeutic Impulse and Its Discontents, ” by Jane Hu The Glint of Light by Clarence Major ( At Bay Press ) Fiction This naturalistic novel follows a Black environmental scientist who returns home to Chicago from California for his mother’s funeral and, while there, revives a romance with his white high-school girlfriend. The story is shaped by several cataclysmic events, which suit the novel’s backdrop, in which the Presidency of Barack Obama—the pride of the scientist’s late mother—corresponds with a rise in white nationalism. Though the climate crisis and racially charged incidents routinely oblige the scientist to acknowledge his vulnerability, he is inclined to attribute an impartial agency to death: “Class didn’t matter, age didn’t matter; it came at you with an absolute and indifferent force.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Pole by J. M. Coetzee ( Liveright ) Fiction “The Pole,” the new novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, is a love story that unfolds across a language barrier, and a novel about language that can be told only through a love plot. It describes a romance between Beatriz, a fortysomething socialite in Barcelona, and Witold, a Polish pianist in his seventies who has been flown in from Berlin for a recital. At a dinner after the performance, Beatriz and Witold converse briefly in stilted English, neither’s first choice of language. A week later, he sends her a recording of his playing, along with a flirtatious note “to the angel who watched over me in Barcelona.” She keeps thinking it must be a misunderstanding, something lost in the fault lines opened up between the pair’s native languages. “The Pole” was written in English, but it originally appeared in a Spanish-language translation, with the title “El Polaco.” Coetzee told the Barcelona-based newspaper Crónica Global that the Spanish translation “better reflects my intentions” than the original English does. As we read the book, we are, like Beatriz, left to wonder not only what the words on the page mean but if the writer might have intended to say something else entirely.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ J. M. Coetzee’s Interlingual Romance, ” by Jennifer Wilson October 4th Picks Glossy by Marisa Meltzer ( One Signal ) Nonfiction In 2010, Emily Weiss started her own beauty Web site, Into the Gloss. Within five years, Into the Gloss had given rise to a beauty brand, Glossier; within a decade, Glossier was a billion-dollar business. Meltzer, who previously profiled the C.E.O. for Wired and Vanity Fair , calls Weiss “the last girlboss standing.” Meltzer’s book chronicles the way Weiss’s beauty empire leveraged personality and social-media savvy to sell a fantasy of effortless authenticity. If posting to Instagram was a matter of pretending that a camera happened to catch you living a beautiful life, Glossier was the makeup to match.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Glossier Made Effortlessness a Billion-Dollar Brand, ” by Molly Fischer Pockets by Hannah Carlson ( Algonquin ) Nonfiction Nobody’s quite sure how pockets were invented. As Carlson writes in her delightfully wide-ranging book, there is no definitive starting point, no recorded epiphanies. Yet the history of pockets over the past five hundred years is the history of attitudes around privacy and decorum, gender and empire, what it means to be cool or simply ready for whatever the day may bring. What's striking is the extent to which women have been denied the privilege of pockets: “Why is it that men’s clothes are full of integrated, sewn-in pockets, while women’s have so few?” Carlson asks. Concealed firearms caused one of the first panics associated with pockets, she writes; a more ambient fear was that pockets, as the poet Howard Nemerov once remarked, “locate close to lust.” Carlson’s winning book depicts the range and relevance of the pocket, which can be a metaphor for abundance or perversion, possession or secrecy—and a way of managing the efficiencies of life.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What’s in Your Pockets?, ” by Hua Hsu The Fraud by Zadie Smith ( Penguin Press ) Fiction This kaleidoscopic novel revolves around the real-life trial of a man who, in late-nineteenth-century London, claimed to be the heir to a fortune. Smith relates the impressions of a housekeeper as she observes others’ opinions of the case, which transfixed—and split—the public, and was complicated by the testimony of a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica. The sprawling story is filled with jabs at the hypocrisy of the upper class, characters who doubt institutions, and corollaries of the pugilistic rhetoric of contemporary populism; with characteristic brilliance, Smith makes the many parts of the tale cohere. “Human error and venality are everywhere, churches are imperfect, cruelty is common, power corrupt, the weak go to the wall,” the housekeeper reflects.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Console by Colin Channer ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Poetry Music is a vital force in this eclectic poetry collection, which travels between the author’s native Jamaica, his adopted home of New England, and other locales. Dub and reggae inspire and inform Channer’s dense, lushly textured compositions. Contemplating place and displacement, the poems emphasize the palimpsestic, remix-like effect produced by emigration and exile: the memory of a left-behind landscape merging with its current reality, as well as with environments more foreign to the transplant. Elegiac underpinnings give way to lyrical exuberance: as Channer writes in “Redoubt,” a poem set against the ruins of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s famed recording studio, “Suffer was a genre, / keening took into his console / then put out.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton ( Pantheon ) Nonfiction In this sprightly intellectual history, Egginton explores the lives of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the physicist Werner Heisenberg in order to plumb some of the most profound questions of physics and philosophy: the limits of knowledge, the structure of space and time, free will. These thinkers’ battles against “metaphysical prejudices” resulted in complementary, if counterintuitive, insights into the nature of reality; though working in different realms, all three concluded that “we are, and ever will be, active participants in the universe we discover.” While detailing his subjects’ theories, Egginton also foregrounds their relationships, suggesting that world-shaping ideas can be inspired by the vagaries of emotional life.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall ( Metropolitan ) Nonfiction In 2012, a catastrophic traffic collision in Jerusalem left a school bus filled with Palestinian children on fire for more than thirty minutes before emergency workers arrived. In this chronicle of the disaster, Thrall, a Jerusalem-based journalist, follows the father of one of the victims, and examines the response to the crash within the context of modern Palestinian dispossession. He depicts Israel’s “architecture of segregation”—encompassing checkpoints and byzantine transit rules—which needlessly complicated the rescue, leading to a delay that left “small, scorched backpacks” on the asphalt. Thrall’s account is a powerful evocation of a two-tiered society that treats children as potential combatants.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop September 27th Picks Emergency by Kathleen Alcott ( Norton ) Fiction “Nobody knows where I am,” one of the narrators in this collection of stories chants. She is in crisis after discovering evidence of her late mother’s secret past, but the line could plausibly be spoken by any of Alcott’s protagonists, who all find themselves off the map in some sense—pushing against expectations, wrestling with desire, and reckoning with ideas of who they are or should be. One character, learning of her lover’s disturbing history, grapples with the question of whether people can change; another attempts to navigate the ethical compromises of her well-paying job. In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Women of NOW by Katherine Turk ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Katherine Turk’s new history of the National Organization for Women is nominally a group biography, following three somewhat unexpected now leaders: Patricia Burnett, a former beauty queen turned housewife; Aileen Hernandez, the Brooklyn-born daughter of Jamaican immigrants, who worked in labor and civil-rights activism before becoming now’s second president; and Mary Jean Collins, a union leader from a working-class Catholic background, who led now’s formidable Chicago chapter, and discovered her lesbian identity in the process. But Turk’s true subject is now’s early years. Her account reveals a uniquely ambitious political organization, one that achieved remarkable successes while struggling with divergent feminist visions, competing egos, and insufficient funds.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her, ” by Moira Donegan The Caretaker by Ron Rash ( Doubleday ) Fiction This immersive novel, set in Appalachia, explores the reverberations of a young man’s decision to elope with a teen-age hotel maid. The only son of a well-to-do family, Jacob is disinherited over the marriage, and soon afterward is conscripted to fight in Korea. He asks a friend, the caretaker of the town graveyard, to look after his wife. The two are shunned—the wife because of the town’s loyalty to her in-laws, the caretaker for the disfigurement he suffered as a result of childhood polio—and form a strong friendship. When news arrives that Jacob has been badly wounded, his parents plot to separate the married couple, but it is the lack of love in the caretaker’s life that shapes the novel most deeply.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr , translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud ( Other Press ) Fiction A rollicking literary mystery, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” revolves around the search for a Senegalese author of the nineteen-thirties whose long-lost novel resurfaces in contemporary Paris. The book’s narrator, a young Senegalese writer, is charmingly neurotic, and, having strayed from the “noble path of academia” to become a novelist, completely adrift. When he stumbles upon the writings of T. C. Elimane, the narrator undertakes a months-long quest, trying to find out what happened to the silenced storyteller. An aerobatic feat of narrative invention, Sarr’s book whirls between noir, fairy tale, and satire in its self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of literary legend. Spurning the categories to which African fiction is often relegated, Sarr delivers a demiurgic story of literary self-creation, transforming the sad fate of an author who stopped writing into a galvanizing tale about all that remains to be written.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How a Literary Scandal Inspired a Mischievous New African Novel, ” by Julian Lucas Up Home by Ruth J. Simmons ( Random House ) Nonfiction In 2001, Simmons, a Romanticist by training, became the President of Brown University—and thus the first Black president of an Ivy League institution. Her memoir, which borrows its title from a phrase she and her family use to refer to revisiting their home town of Grapeland, Texas, begins with her youth as one of twelve children born to sharecropper parents. The Simmonses’ straitened circumstances led to her love of the classroom: “a place of brilliant light unlike any our homes afforded.” She dwells on her encouraging teachers, and on the experiences that fuelled her fight against discrimination in higher education.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter by Rachel Shteir ( Yale ) Nonfiction Sixty years after “The Feminine Mystique” ignited the second-wave feminist movement, it is still impossible to mention its author’s name without eliciting strong responses. Most accounts of the second wave feature Betty Friedan’s irascibility, her outbursts, her constant need for reassurance, and her tremendous capacity for cruelty. Shteir’s biography, which is rigorously fair to its subject, features all these, and also gives them context—illustrative bits from Friedan’s life that add reasons, if not excuses, for her behavior. The book demonstrates that Friedan, for all her considerable flaws, was one of those characters whom history responds to and who shape public opinion through the force of their personalities.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her, ” by Moira Donegan Cosmic Scholar by John Szwed ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction The Beat polymath Harry Smith—an eccentric, couch-surfing, bearded bohemian who repaired the holes in his jacket with duct tape and lived on pea soup, mashed bananas, and cigarettes—bears some resemblance to the protagonist of Joseph Mitchell’s masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret.” But, whereas Gould’s life’s work turned out not to exist, this biography argues persuasively that Smith’s contributions to art, anthropology, avant-garde film, and, most of all, popular music were profound. Szwed, also the author of an excellent biography of Billie Holiday, shows how the legacy that Smith left behind—including the six-LP “Anthology of American Folk Music,” from 1952—influenced the sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and countless others.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop September 20th Picks Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction In this triple biography, the dynamics of Renaissance Europe are illustrated through the lives and the politically motivated marriages of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Catherine, who married into the French royal family, leveraged her maternal qualities to win the right to govern on behalf of her young sons. Her daughter Elisabeth married Philip II of Spain to seal an unsteady peace between their two countries. Mary’s strongest loyalty was to her French relatives—leading her to underestimate a dissatisfied Scottish nobility. In an era of empire-hungry monarchs and religious violence, these women, while fulfilling their obligations as wives and mothers, forged diplomatic connections through family ties.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo ( Bloomsbury ) Nonfiction For two decades, beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, a Ghanaian man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah carried out an astonishingly successful scam by pretending to have inherited billions of dollars from Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President. Though the inheritance was a fiction, propped up by forged documents and opportunistic coöperators looking to capitalize on political instability, Blay-Miezah swindled his marks out of millions by convincing them that he needed money to access the fund, and used his newfound wealth to become one of the country’s most powerful people. Yeebo, a journalist, skillfully interweaves archival material, F.B.I. records, and interviews to recount the saga of the con man’s career, and to reflect on how lies can be leveraged in the creation of national histories.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Poetry This vivid, searching début collection traverses and troubles borders between nations, languages, lovers, the past and the present, the living and the dead; combining reflections on art and history with astute observations of everyday life, Gonzalez contends with the world’s capacity for profound suffering and for near-unbearable beauty in equal measure. Several poems, including “ Failed Essay on Privilege ,” were first published in The New Yorker.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction A theme of loss runs through the stories in Yiyun Li’s wise and perspicacious new collection as her characters grapple with the mystery of how we live and how we die. Several of the entries, including the title story, first appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman ( Other Press ) Fiction Salvador Allende’s ascension to the Chilean presidency, in 1970, was short-lived; a Marxist, he challenged private-sector interests and U.S. influence, and his government was violently overthrown in September of 1973. Dorfman, who served in Allende’s government as a “cultural adviser,” revisits this episode—and its implications—in this new novel. The plot centers around an obsessed billionaire seeking to determine the manner of Allende’s death (was he shot during the coup or did he take his own life?) and link it to an effort to awaken people's consciousness about the climate crisis. Dorfman gives his name to the narrator and central character of his novel; a vast array of other people appear under their real names, including a host of Chilean political figures. Fifty years after Allende’s death, Dorfman wrestles with ideas that don’t fit together comfortably, grappling with Allende's legacy in a world whose sense of crisis has been reframed.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Novel That Links Climate Change and the Death of Salvador Allende, ” by Jonathan Dee Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop , translated from the French by Sam Taylor ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction This metafictional historical novel centers on the recollections of an eighteenth-century French botanist, whose voyage to Senegal is irrevocably altered by his fascination with a young woman who has escaped from a slave ship. His account—gleaned from notebooks discovered by his daughter—begins as a travelogue and then transforms into a record of the escapee’s ordeal, which she recounts to the botanist in the course of one long night: a mesmerizing tale of capture, getaway, and revenge. Diop’s novel, which culminates in a terrifying sequence of events, is a testament to fiction’s ability to uncover our self-deceptions, leaving them “as if exposed to the African sun at its zenith.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Unreliable Narrator by Aparna Nancherla ( Viking ) Nonfiction In this collection of essays, the comedian explores the history and science of so-called impostor syndrome, and hilariously mines her life as a depressed, anxious, and shy woman in the public eye to talk about what it’s like to constantly set oneself up for failure—and then get back up onstage.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel ( Graywolf ) Fiction The corrosive logic of one-sided relationships is the subject of this dryly funny polemical novel, told from the perspective of a young woman obsessed with her married lover and his ex-girlfriend. The narrator provokes the lover in various ways, in the hope that he’ll end his other love affairs, despite her being aware of her delusion. Surveilling the ex-girlfriend on Instagram, the narrator reacts to the woman’s expensive purchases, which she broadcasts to a sizable following, with a mixture of loathing and desire. This woman “lives with real life art that I can’t afford and wouldn’t know how to get,” she thinks, “and I put posters up with Blu Tack like I’m still fifteen years old. Like a fan.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami , translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen ( Stone Bridge Press ) Fiction Spirits, animals, and people cohabit the universe of these eight stories, which capture with quirky insight and deadpan humor the strangeness of human relationships. One of the stories, “ The Kitchen God ,” appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop September 13th Picks The Details by Ia Genberg , translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson ( HarperVia ) Fiction This elliptical novel, narrated by an unnamed woman who is confined to her bed by a high fever, consists of four character studies. During her illness, the woman picks up a book—an edition of Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy”—inscribed to her by a former lover. Flipping through it brings back vivid recollections of that woman, whose frosty personality “was part of her—and not as deficiency but as tool, a useful little patch of ice.” These reminiscences lead to others: first of a wayward roommate; then of a “hurricane” ex-boyfriend; and finally of the narrator’s traumatized mother. She relates her textured insights into human nature through small moments. “As far as the dead are concerned,” she muses, “all that matters are the details, the degree of density.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Some Unfinished Chaos by Arthur Krystal ( University of Virginia ) Nonfiction F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose defined a generation; it was turbulent, brilliant, troubling, troubled. He careened from obscurity to literary acclaim and then into seeming obsolescence, Krystal writes, his fall from grace as compelling as his rise. In this impressionistic biography, Krystal weighs Fitzgerald’s genius against his shortcomings, approaching the altar of an icon with an affectionate agnosticism. The book grew out of a piece that Krystal wrote for the magazine in 2009.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop 24/7 Politics by Kathryn Cramer Brownell ( Princeton ) Nonfiction This near-encyclopedic exploration of the rise of cable news begins with the lead-up to the 1984 Presidential election, when cable executives and lobbyists set out to dismantle the power of network broadcasters and redirect it to themselves. Brownell, a historian, details how the opponents of network broadcasting successfully cast the industry as “elitist” and peddled cable as a democratizing force that would “empower people, politicians, and perspectives.” Her persuasive account argues that cable’s advocates were, in fact, motivated primarily by profit, and that cable television’s Sisyphean pursuit of ratings and revenue ultimately served to cultivate a toxic media—and political—environment.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages A Word or Two Before I Go by Arthur Krystal ( University of Virginia ) Nonfiction Krystal’s witty and generous essay collection purports to be his last, a dénouement to a long career of writing “sentences that lead to other sentences,” many in the pages of this magazine. In one essay, Krystal recalls getting clocked in the face by Muhammad Ali in 1991 on a bus driving down Interstate 78. In the book’s finale, a short story , an aging man regards his life as a composite of moments stretched and compressed, probing time’s capacity to blunt and to sharpen. In this collection, Krystal sifts through his essays and criticism in kind, mulling the stuff that makes life and literature.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Witness by Jamel Brinkley ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Many of the stories in this powerful collection, by a National Book Award finalist, orbit figures who dwell on the past, unable to accept their “forward movement through the entanglements of time.” There is a woman who is obsessed with the wife of her brother’s killer; a son haunted by his mother as he makes plans to install his father in a nursing home; a man whose budding romance ends after he relates a horrific memory. The wounds that afflict Brinkley’s characters stem from social inequality—police brutality, exploitation in the gig economy, and doctors’ racist dismissals of Black patients—and from such universal vulnerabilities as family discord, heritable illnesses, and our own resistance to change.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Father and Son by Jonathan Raban ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Like Edmund Gosse’s memoir of the same name, Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths. Raban juxtaposes an account of his rehabilitation after a stroke that occurred in 2011, when he was sixty-eight, with his father’s experiences as an artillery officer in the Second World War. The stories never connect, reflecting the divide between the liberal, literary son, who immigrated to Seattle in 1990, and the conservative father, who became a vicar in the Church of England. The war chapters, which excerpt correspondence between Raban’s parents, are compelling, but it is Raban’s reckoning with his own frailty that carries the emotional weight of the book. “What have I lost?” he asks. “And am I fooling myself?” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction It can be difficult to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, but Clare Carlisle’s eloquent and original book allows us to do just that by examining the scandal and preoccupation of Eliot’s life and work: marriage. Carlisle, a philosopher who has written studies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, combines an eye for stories with a nose for questions. Her book is based on two related premises: that marriage is a private story, about whose intimacies we can only speculate; and that marriage is also a public story, a constantly adjusted fable. In her account, Eliot’s legally unrecognized but happy marriage to George Henry Lewes is understood as both a private and a public feat. Both narratives differently restrict our access, so the ideal historian will need great tact and an impious curiosity. Carlisle has both.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Holy Heresies of George Eliot, ” by James Wood September 6th Picks The Philosopher of Palo Alto by John Tinnell ( Chicago ) Nonfiction As the chief technology officer of Xerox parc, a research company and erstwhile hotbed of Silicon Valley innovation, Mark Weiser believed that screens were an “unhealthy centripetal force.” Instead of drawing people away from the world, devices should be embedded throughout our built environment—in lights, thermostats, roads, and more—enhancing our perception rather than demanding our focus. Weiser’s pioneering ideas, which he refined in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, led to the present-day Internet of Things, but his vision lost out to the surveillance-capitalist imperatives of Big Tech. Tinnell’s profound biography evokes an alternative paradigm, in which technology companies did not seek to monitor and exploit users.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop My Husband by Maud Ventura , translated from the French by Emma Ramadan ( HarperVia ) Fiction “My husband marks the start of when my life was worth being archived,” the narrator of this black comedy of modern marriage confesses. Ventura’s protagonist, a forty-year-old English teacher and mother of two whose husband works in finance, is a comically exaggerated cliché whose sole concern is maintaining her husband’s interest: she lies to him about her hair color and pretends to be asleep so he doesn’t see her without makeup. But, as the story progresses, the intensity of her fixation is contrasted with his profound indifference, and her vapid exterior is shown to mask desperate anxieties about class, gender, and power.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper ( Viking ) Nonfiction In this lively appraisal, a Shakespeare scholar reckons with her love of the playwright’s works while exploring their role in cultivating “a unique brand of English white superiority.” Karim-Cooper’s attentive readings show how beliefs about race reside in the language of the plays: “Romeo and Juliet” is suffused with metaphors that “elevate whiteness above blackness,” whereas “The Tempest” complicates attempts to describe characters with fixed labels by blurring the boundaries between “beauty and monstrosity” and “civility and barbarity.” Ultimately, as contemporary productions featuring imaginative and diverse casting show, “we all have the right to claim the Bard.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride ( Riverhead ) Fiction This wily, gleefully clamorous novel opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but it largely unfolds three decades prior, with the events that led to the skeleton’s existence. Though the Black, Jewish, and newly arrived immigrant residents of the tumbledown Pottstown neighborhood of Chicken Hill have clashing ideas about America, they band together to protect a deaf Black boy from the state’s clutches. The novel’s down-home cadences cloak its elaborate narrative circuitry, and McBride makes farcical use of the fear of newcomers held by white characters, such as the town’s physician, a Klansman. The Jewish woman who runs the local grocery store feels otherwise, saying, of Chicken Hill, “America is here.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages All Souls by Saskia Hamilton ( Graywolf ) Poetry A poet’s intimate, immanent sense of her own mortality casts the world into relief in this remarkable collection, published posthumously. With astonishing formal and emotional clarity, in language at once delicate and bold, Hamilton renders afresh enduring questions of time, love, and literature as measures of our individual and shared lives. Excerpts from the title poem were originally published in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop August 30th Picks Why the Bible Began by Jacob L. Wright ( Cambridge ) Nonfiction The peculiar thing about the Hebrew Bible is that, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests, it's so much a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened. He emphasizes the divisions between the southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, which were warring adversaries, and highlights the ways in which each kingdom’s dominant narratives were constantly being entangled by the Biblical writers. Wright’s often brilliant and persuasive book leads us to see ideological fractures in passages that we thought we knew.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How the Authors of the Bible Spun Triumph from Defeat, ” by Adam Gopnik Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter ( Ecco ) Fiction Leichter’s bewitching second novel is all about space, literal and figurative. There’s real estate: Annie and Edward, cash-strapped new parents, reside in a shoebox city apartment. There’s the metaphoric geography of intimacy, too: George and Lydia are trapped in a marriage full of “blind alleys and impasses.” Rosie is in outer space—a futuristic suburb orbiting Earth—because the planet is having some capacity issues. But the key to it all is Stephanie (single, thirtyish, in sales), and her secret superpower: she can make the world bigger with her mind. She raises ceilings, expands cupboards, adds more room to the local playground, and creates new terrain in a national park. Leichter centers her subtle and witty fable on the off-kilter power dynamics of home life, tearing her characters apart and leaving their stories in pieces, encouraging us to peer into the space between the fragments.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Modern Fable About Time, Narrative, and Real Estate, ” by Clare Sestanovich Hangman by Maya Binyam ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction The expectation for an American novel about an African immigrant is that it will perform a task of translation: here is where I come from, and these are the painful circumstances under which I left. This slim, captivating début starkly rejects the trope. Binyam’s narrator is a middle-aged émigré, who’s returning to his birthplace to visit his sick brother after a quarter century abroad. He’s also a nameless cipher, who speaks of himself like a marionette, in a laconic prose that omits motive, proper nouns, and all but the most skeletal description. He is going to a place that resembles Ethiopia, but the context comes to seem unimportant; the real guesswork concerns his relationship to his homeland. Binyam wrings mordant humor from his encounters with others, slowly revealing a latent cruelty. The book ends with no easy epiphany; instead, it questions the exile’s authority to pronounce upon the place he leaves.
Buy on Bookshop Amazon Read more : “ ‘Hangman’ Turns the Novel of Migration Upside Down, ” by Julian Lucas From Our Pages The Deadline by Jill Lepore ( Liveright ) Nonfiction Lepore, a staff writer and historian, writes about the grand sweep of history and the exigencies of the everyday with equal panache, and has a knack for entwining them in a way that illuminates both. This new collection of essays—most of which were first published in the magazine—considers everything from the equivocations of government commissions to the provocations of the Bratz doll.
Lepore, always mindful of “the hold the dead have over the living,” reconstitutes the American experience as human experience, alert to the comedy and sorrows of its surfaces and its depths.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Bee Sting by Paul Murray ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Paul Murray’s fourth novel is about the eeriness of transformative change. Its more than six hundred pages employ a rotating structure: the four members of the Barnes family—twelve-year-old PJ, his sister Cass, and his parents Imelda and Dickie—take turns as narrator. Irony, both caustic and elegiac, flourishes in the knowledge gaps between characters. Again and again, details come back reframed or reanimated by another perspective. It’s hard to resist Murray in his schoolyard mode, wittily choreographing nerds and bullies. The chapters featuring Imelda and Dickie are thornier, more treacherous, and formally more ambitious, using stream of consciousness to invoke the shattering power of grief and lust. Murray is interested in denial and how it ultimately fails to contain our unruly attachments and weird desperation. The catastrophic price of such denial is evident in the book’s frequent allusions to the climate crisis. As the book continues, the Earth’s climate and the apocalyptic climate of the Barnes family appear almost to merge, and what began as a coming-of-age saga pulls in stranger and darker forces.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ ‘The Bee Sting,’ a Family Saga of Desperation and Denial, ” by Katy Waldman August 23rd Picks Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal ( Simon & Schuster ) Fiction These nine short stories follow Black American Muslims who drift toward and away from their faith, judge one another for immodesty, wrestle with upended family lore, and reflect with ambivalence on the impact the Nation of Islam has had on their lives. A woman visiting Egypt questions whether to continue wearing the hijab, another enters into a puzzling and intense online romance with a devout Albanian, and another is haunted by visions of her dead father as she prepares his eulogy. Built largely around vignettes, Bilal’s stories depict characters who serve as sensitive guides to matters of apostasy, racial prejudice, and gender roles.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny ( Norton ) Nonfiction In 1938, two female botanists set out to document the plant life of the Grand Canyon. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, undeterred by warnings that the trip would be “a mighty poor place for women,” joined with a river guide and a handful of other boatmen to travel the treacherous Green and Colorado Rivers. Sevigny chronicles the team’s forty-three-day journey, interspersing it with accounts of the adventurers who preceded them, descriptions of plants and wildlife, and the history of Western intervention in an ecosystem long stewarded by Native nations, including the Navajo and the Hualapai. The book also makes the case that Clover and Jotter’s study, conducted shortly after the construction of the Hoover Dam, provides a crucial benchmark in assessing human impact on the environment.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Disruptions by Steven Millhauser ( Knopf ) Fiction Millhauser is the great eccentric of American fiction; his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. At the core of his new collection is a disorienting version of the small-town tale. The residents in his archetypal old town are diligent about mowing and watering, touching up the paint on their shutters. Invariably, though, Millhauser’s characters are seized by a collective restlessness. In one story, a town’s residents become obsessed with the idea of darkness, painting their houses black and putting their babies in black diapers. In another, the town is home to forty-one columns; people go up there to live and almost never come down. One of the longer stories takes place in a community where the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood are just two inches tall. Some work in the homes of their (relatively giant-size) fellow-townspeople, removing lint from clothes and scouring attics for ants. Millhauser describes it all in precise detail, and much as he relishes the magical, he has a soft spot for the hum-drum. His genius is to be able to evoke both so urgently.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Master Fabulist of American Fiction, ” by Charles McGrath The Plague by Jacqueline Rose ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction A collection of essays incubated during the covid lockdown and structured around readings of Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, this urgent volume is suffused with loss. Freud’s notion of the death drive, Rose writes, was influenced by the pandemic of his own time, the so-called Spanish flu, which took the life of his daughter Sophie. That pandemic, by some estimates, wiped out more people than the two world wars combined but was itself swiftly wiped from historical memory; Freud himself seldom mentions it. Rose quotes Walter Benjamin’s observation, in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” that “there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.” Like him, she looks askance at the effort to deny the spectacle of dying. “In a pandemic, death cannot be exiled to the outskirts of existence,” she writes. Her meditations on mortality, absence, and plague are haunted and yet strangely energized, full of possibility.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How the Writer and Critic Jacqueline Rose Puts the World on the Couch, ” by Parul Sehgal The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry ( Atria ) Fiction This crackling début thriller is narrated by a C.I.A. spy, a self-described “aging threadbare bureaucrat” stationed in Bahrain in the wake of the Arab Spring. The novel begins with a series of bombings targeting Westerners. These are blamed on the Bahraini opposition, but the station chief suggests that the spy’s informant, who has become a friend, was involved. No one is beyond the spy’s cascading suspicions, not even a Bahraini mosaicist with whom he is romantically entangled, and whom he approaches with a caution usually reserved for his work: navigating an affair is “not so different, after all, from the delicate give-and-take dance with an informant, an unending alternation between obeisance and control.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Schoenberg by Harvey Sachs ( Liveright ) Nonfiction In this study of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-born composer who immigrated to the U.S. in 1933, Sachs blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of Schoenberg’s works. Best known for his development of twelve-tone serialism, Schoenberg believed that he would single-handedly restore Germany’s musical dominance over France, Italy, and Russia; the cold reception that his compositions faced left him imagining himself as a “lonely, misunderstood prophet.” Sachs’s interpretations of these works can be emotionally convincing, and, according to him, Schoenberg’s music is, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said about Wagner’s, “better than it sounds,” in part because appreciation often requires repeated listening.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop August 16th Picks The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa by Stephen Buoro ( Bloomsbury ) Fiction Andrew Aziza, the Nigerian teen-ager who is the protagonist of this début novel, describes himself as a “genius poet altar boy who loves blondes.” A Christian who lives in a largely Muslim town, Andy feels ashamed of his preference for the West, which he considers to be a foil to his continent and to his Mama, who reads her Bible slowly and believes in ghosts. This shame is expressed in imaginary conversations with his stillborn brother, his schoolteacher, and the first white girl he meets, with whom he readily falls in love. Animated by a lively voice and a spiritual vision, Buoro’s novel also unfolds a touching critique of the false promise of Western transcendence.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey ( Knopf ) Poetry This book reimagines the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014; redacting the report word by word, letter by letter, Sealey excavates larger lyric insights about American life from its account of police bias and brutality. An excerpt appeared in the magazine and as an interactive feature on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop My Stupid Intentions by Bernardo Zannoni , translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse ( New York Review Books ) Fiction This début novel is narrated by a beech marten named Archy, who is born into a life of hardship: his father dead, his mother barely able—and sometimes failing—to keep the newborn kits alive. Despite its fairy-tale-like feel, the novel is nothing cute. When Archy is lamed in an accident, he is sold to a dealmaking fox, who treats him like a slave before teaching him to read and write. Archy learns about the lives of men, knowledge that prompts a host of religious questions and leads to a restless search for meaning. Life in Archy’s world is a constant fight for survival, and, while Zannoni’s story implies that thinking and instinct may mean different things for animals than they do for us, he provokes the reader to consider just how different their realm truly is.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel , translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey ( Bloomsbury ) Fiction In the early pages of “Still Born,” which was short-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize, its narrator, Laura, is a total pill. A Ph.D. student in literature, she is avowedly child-free; being a not-mother is the negative space around which she defines her existence and her ethics, and she is evangelical about her stance. She accurately perceives the irrational structural burdens that Western societies place upon mothers, but she mistakes these burdens for proof that motherhood itself must be an irrational choice. One of the welcome surprises of the novel, however, is how quickly it swerves away from Laura’s anti-natalist campaigning, as if Laura, too, wanted out of her own head and into a broader web of experience. Not having children, Laura believes, insures a woman’s freedom to travel, to be consumed with her studies or vocation, to be alone with her thoughts. “Still Born” posits that not having children also grants an equally important freedom to care for people outside of the legal or blood-borne status of family. You don’t have to be a mother—in fact, maybe you shouldn’t be. But you have to do something for whomever you find in, or near, your nest.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What Makes a Mother?, ” by Jessica Winter August Wilson by Patti Hartigan ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction As a child, the author of seminal plays including “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was a bookworm: he learned to read by his fourth birthday, and stood out in kindergarten as “a miniature scholar.” This biography deftly traces his ascent to becoming one of America’s preëminent dramatists, recounting his discovery of the blues (“the wellspring of my art”); his founding of the Black Horizons Theatre, in his home town of Pittsburgh, in 1968; and his careful curation of his persona. Hartigan ably argues that his dramas, many of which pay close attention to ancestral lineages and ideas about inheritance, continue to reveal “fissures in the national culture.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Information Desk by Robyn Schiff ( Penguin ) Poetry Schiff’s stint manning the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where workaday banalities unfolded amid a sublime setting, inspired this wide-ranging meditation on hallowed objects, institutional power, and insect behavior, an excerpt of which was published in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop War and Punishment by Mikhail Zygar ( Scribner ) Nonfiction A young, distinguished, and wholly independent Russian journalist who was forced to flee his country for the West has written a superb account of all that led to Vladimir Putin’s brutal and misbegotten invasion of Ukraine. Zygar became well known as a reporter in Russia with his best-seller, “All the Kremlin’s Men.” Here, through his on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine and Russia, conducted during the past two decades, and an incisive grasp of history, he describes how Putin has willfully distorted the past to serve his purposes. Read in conjunction with works by scholars such as Serhii Plokhy and Timothy Snyder, Zygar’s book provides an ardent, informed understanding of the present.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop August 9th Picks From Our Pages Last of the Lions by Clarence B. Jones Stuart Connelly ( Redhawk ) Nonfiction When Jones was drafted into the U.S. Army, in 1953, he refused to sign the paperwork, on the grounds that Black men were not full citizens of the United States. Within a decade, he became a close friend and political adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This striking memoir, anchored on the front lines of the fight for civil rights and ranging far beyond, entwines the social history of a nation with the powerful memories of a life lived at its heart.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky , translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz ( Liveright ) Fiction In “The Brothers Karamazov,” published in 1880, and now available in a lively, fast-flowing new translation by Michael Katz (Liveright), Fyodor Dostoyevsky blended the family novel with the whodunnit. The Karamazov brothers and their father Fyodor fit what Dostoyevsky described as “an accidental family,” sons merely by birth, brothers in name only. In this, they resembled Russia, which he saw as a family at war with itself. The novel has a spoken quality that is meant to communicate the unreliability of memory and the fact that people tend to misunderstand one another far more often than they do the opposite. Katz is particularly attentive to this feature of Dostoyevsky’s prose. His is, by my estimation, the voiciest translation of “The Brothers Karamazov” thus far. He writes at the fever pitch of speech, unleashing the speed and the chaos of the original; narrative unfurls at the mad and authentic pace of human emotion. The book is filled with what you might call “accidental chapters,” culled from court transcripts, hagiographies, love letters, toasts, songs, legal and spiritual confessions. The miracle of this cacophonous novel is that somehow it all coheres; its wildly divergent elements are all made, by Dostoyevsky, to belong.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Cacophonous Miracle of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ” by Jennifer Wilson From Our Pages You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari , translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore ( And Other Stories ) Fiction This collection of short stories from an Italian writer with a cult following delves into the obsessions, anxieties, and detritus of childhood. One of the stories, “ The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz ,” appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Migrant Chef by Laura Tillman ( Norton ) Nonfiction The Mexican chef Eduardo (Lalo) García Guzmán, the subject of this wide-ranging biography, spent his youth as a migrant worker in the United States, where he learned that “the health of the oranges was more important than his own.” Tillman traces Guzmán’s trajectory from deportee to celebrated chef dedicated to local ingredients, terroir, and transparent supply chains. She evokes how even as Guzmán aims “to hint, via an ingredient” or “a geographic term,” at the history embedded in his menus, he is haunted by the inequities of haute cuisine, and by the circumstances that render locally sourced foods a luxury.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi ( Gillian Flynn ) Fiction The protagonist of this mystery is a young Pakistani Londoner who earns money writing English subtitles for Bollywood films and longs to translate literary classics. When she receives an invitation to the Centre, a secretive language school that produces native-level fluency in ten days, she enrolls, mastering German and Russian before strange dreams and a hushed-up death alert her to something amiss. The novel explores friendship, purpose, and power; it also frames language as intimate and embodied, casting translation as an opportunity for “a repurposing of things once thoughtlessly imbibed.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop A Most Tolerant Little Town by Rachel Louise Martin ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction In 1956, Clinton High School, in Anderson County, Tennessee, became the first Southern high school to be desegregated by court order. Clinton had no history of racial friction, so no one expected trouble. Martin’s striking new book documents how wrong they were. By the end of the school year, pretty much every item in the apparatus of Southern civil-rights resistance had made an appearance in Clinton, from anti-Black slurs and heckling to cross burnings, bombings, and Ku Klux Klan night riders. In October of 1958, the school was destroyed by dynamite. Martin expands upon the existing historical record, interviewing many sources, including most of the twelve Black students who enrolled at Clinton. She is a good storyteller, and, as familiar as the school-desegregation story is, her account illuminates the stark racial divisions in the Jim Crow states and the predominance of segregationist sentiments, even among those who participated in the integration project.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Civil-Rights Showdown Nobody Remembers, ” by Louis Menand Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ( Harper ) Fiction The novelist Ann Patchett is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. She is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape. “Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth and newest novel, is set against the backdrop of the early pandemic, whose claustrophobic intimacy seems almost tailor-made for her interests. In the spring of 2020, Lara is sheltering in place on her family cherry farm with her husband, Joe Nelson, and their three twentysomething daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell. With harvesters scarce, the Nelsons have to pick and process their own fruit; to make the time go by faster, Lara tells the girls about her brief youthful career as an actor and her romance with a castmate, Peter Duke, who went on to a wildly successful career in Hollywood. Patchett airs the suggestion that Lara is stranded in the past only to gently put it to rest. “Tom Lake” guides Lara to equanimity and closure, mostly by awakening her to the value of the people around her. The novel’s alchemical transformation of pain into peace feels, at times, overstated. Yet there’s something subversively wise and self-aware about the book’s investment in its own fantasy. Even as Patchett validates Lara’s performance of contentment, she appears to know that behind the artifice lies a more complicated truth.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Ann Patchett’s Pandemic Novel, ” by Katy Waldman The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky ( Norton ) Nonfiction This history of the idea that human actions are warming the world to cataclysmic effect opens with brief biographies of the inventors who ushered electricity, and its most troubling descendant, fossil-fuel dependency, into the world. The awareness of human-induced warming dawns in 1896 and resurfaces periodically throughout the twentieth century—in 1956, the Times imagined an Arctic so hot that it was home to tropical birds, a landscape that gives Lipsky’s book its title—before battles with skeptics and deniers begin in earnest, in the two-thousands. A consensus finally arrives with the release of the fourth I.P.C.C. assessment, in 2007, but this triumph becomes an anticlimax when governments prove unwilling to regulate fossil fuels.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Hope by Andrew Ridker ( Viking ) Fiction This comic novel, about a year of crisis for an affluent Jewish family, opens with a dinner party at which each guest is served a meal representing a different socioeconomic background. According to the hostess, Deborah, the matriarch, the purpose of this exercise is “to replicate, in a controlled environment, the lottery of birth.” Yet, the control of the family’s own environment becomes a problem after Deborah’s husband, Scott, is caught falsifying data in a clinical trial. Deborah pursues an affair, their daughter becomes reëntangled with a teacher who groomed her in high school, and their son, a premed student who idolized his father, feels increasingly lost. Ridker’s tone remains light even as his characters struggle to correct course. Writing about psychiatry’s new interest in the “transgenerational transmission of trauma” in his medical-school application, the son wonders, “Who knows what else our parents have unwittingly passed on?” Buy on Amazon Bookshop August 2nd Picks Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis ( Henry Holt ) Fiction This biting gay millennial comedy of manners takes place at the holiday home of a wealthy lesbian couple, where two younger, less financially secure couples visit them for ten days. As the older couple derive satisfaction from comparing their lives with those of their guests, a connection develops between a member of each of the younger couples, sparking a consequential outburst. While depicting rituals both mundane and vaunted—revisiting “Gossip Girl,” fights followed by hours of “lesbian processing”—the novel also plumbs its characters’ fears of intimacy, failure, and irrelevance.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken ( Norton ) Nonfiction In this grim investigation, the British doctor and medical journalist Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food (U.P.F.)— food made up of substances that you would never find at home. He has in mind all those cereals and snacks and ice creams we see on supermarket shelves with lists of ingredients that are troublingly long. Van Tulleken “wanted this food,” he reports of his U.P.F. diet. “But at the same time, I was no longer enjoying it. Meals took on a uniformity: everything seemed similar, regardless of whether it was sweet or savoury. I was never hungry. But I was also never satisfied.” His account of what happens to our food during its trip to our gut—and the connection that bad food has to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes—is persuasive and scary. Van Tulleken slowly sickens, and the reader sickens along with him.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Perils of Highly Processed Food, ” by Adam Gopnik Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez , translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean ( Riverhead ) Fiction The life of the filmmaker Sergio Cabrera provides the raw material for this searching novel, which charts the Cabrera family’s experiences through particularly turbulent periods of the twentieth century. Cabrera’s father, who became an accomplished dramaturge and actor, fled Fascist Spain as a teen-ager; Cabrera himself, along with his sister and their parents, would leave Colombia decades later, when changing political winds made their Communist sympathies a liability. For part of Cabrera’s adolescence, the family of fervent Marxists lived in Beijing, residing in a plush, cloistered compound reserved exclusively for foreigners. When Cabrera attends a retrospective of his work in Barcelona, in 2016, he reflects on this history, on his family’s resentments, and on how intensely held—if impermanent—political convictions inflect individual lives.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Last Call at Coogan’s by Jon Michaud ( St. Martin’s ) Nonfiction Based on interviews with nearly a hundred subjects, this portrait of a neighborhood bar, which operated in Washington Heights from 1985 to 2020, is also a portrait of a modern American city in microcosm. Originally run by a “combustible trio of Irishmen,” Coogan’s functioned as a safe harbor in a high-crime neighborhood whose central tension was the mutual distrust between the Dominican community and a largely white police force. By the time Coogan’s closed—during the covid pandemic, after narrowly surviving a brush with gentrification—the bar had become a local institution that hosted fund-raisers, wakes, and other community gatherings.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Rhythm Man by Stephanie Stein Crease ( Oxford ) Nonfiction This propulsive biography places the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb at the epicenter of the early Swing Era. Despite the spinal tuberculosis that stunted his height at four feet and ended his life at thirty-four, Webb’s strength on the drums reshaped the jazz rhythm section as he “battled” other bandleaders, such as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crease pays close attention to the details of the recordings of Webb’s band, contextualizing their shifting sound against a backdrop of changing racial dynamics. She also incorporates eloquent testimonies to Webb’s musicianship and generosity from his contemporaries: after their performances, he “would compliment his sidemen’s best solos by singing them, note for note.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop July 26th Picks Grand Delusion by Steven Simon ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction The author of this critical consideration of four decades of the U.S. government’s dealings in the Middle East has held positions in the State Department and on the National Security Council, across various Administrations. His historical account is embedded with engaging recollections of his work. In 2002, for instance, he was part of a delegation that briefed Tony Blair on the consequences of regime change in Iraq; the conversation, Simon writes, “never advanced beyond” a “pseudoanalytical nonquestion.” The book concludes with his belief that, ultimately, “the United States would have been better off today had it not been so eager to intervene” in the region.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery ( Bloomsbury ) Fiction In Nicole Flattery’s début novel, Mae, a teen-ager from Queens, drops out of high school and ends up in Andy Warhol’s Factory as a typist, transcribing the conversations that will become Warhol’s experimental 1968 novel, “a.” For Mae, the recordings are windows into a new world, one that alternately frightens and excites her. The more she listens to the conversations, the more attuned she becomes to the sadness and desperation coursing through them. Everyone she overhears is working hard to turn themselves into larger-than-life characters, being aged and exhausted by drugs, scrambling for a sense of belonging and security that the Factory promises but can’t provide. Lies abound, as does forced cool; the sense of new lives being discovered sits alongside the sense of lives going to waste and people flailing. Warhol himself almost never appears in the novel, but he is a constant presence nonetheless, the sun god that everyone orbits and whose approving gaze they seek. By approaching the famous artist this way, Flattery manages to cannily anatomize his powers and appeal while simultaneously pushing the man himself almost entirely out of the frame.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Corrosive Appeal of Warhol’s Factory, ” by Peter C. Baker Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks ( Viking ) Fiction This incantatory début novel begins in 1978, at a London-area reggae club, where the narrator, a young Jamaican factory worker named Yamaye, meets a furniture-maker with whom she falls in love. Their romance is in full bloom when he is groundlessly accosted by the police, and he dies in custody, at the hands of an officer. This loss spurs Yamaye to seek justice and to attain clarity about a murky aspect of her family. Throughout the story, music salves Yamaye’s wounds; she remembers “dancing in the dark; wet, salty bodies sliding in and out of bleeps and horns and haze; transformed by bassline, a better version of ourselves in the grey light before dawn.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Eight Bears by Gloria Dickie ( Norton ) Nonfiction There are eight living species of bears, on four continents: polar, panda, brown, black, sun, moon, sloth, and spectacled. Gloria Dickie’s timely survey of these eight groups offers a glimpse into two realities: first, bear populations are plummeting in most of the world, and, at the same time, in some parts of North America they’re coming back to places they haven’t been in generations. Since the nineteen-seventies, American bears in the Lower Forty-eight have been on the move, expanding their range. Not too long ago, Dickie writes, a grizzly turned up in Nathan Keane’s back yard, near Loma, Montana. Told that he should have known better than to keep chickens in bear country, Keane said, at first, “Well, we aren’t in bear country.” But then he reconsidered: “Maybe we’re starting to be now.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Bear in Your Back Yard, ” by Jill Lepore Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi , translated by Jeremy Tiang ( Open Letter ) Fiction The author’s youth, which unfolded during the Cultural Revolution, supplies the material for this group of fictionalized connected vignettes. Zou conveys sharp childhood recollections: the book’s narrator watches a man whip a landlord’s widow with braided willow branches, and feels that the suicides that take place around the Beijing apartment complex that anchors his world are both alienating and normal. Later, when he is sent away for reëducation, hard labor replaces violin practice, and gradually he and the society around him learn to accept humiliations, heartbreaks, and the arbitrariness of fate. He begins writing with the hope that “by putting them on paper, these past events would release their hold on me.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Thunderclap by Laura Cumming ( Scribner ) Nonfiction This memoir of artistic appreciation is centered largely on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but focusses particularly on two artists, one Dutch, one not: Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and the Scottish painter James Cumming, who was the author’s father. Laura Cumming, an art critic, challenges the common views of Dutch Golden Age art as being merely representational or as depicting symbols that unlock religious or moral meanings. Instead, she examines details in the paintings to illuminate the ways in which the artists shaped what they saw: the wit in a painting of a flower, the dramatic light falling on a bundle of asparagus. Through this kind of close attention, she finds in the art works both a way to grapple with her father’s death and guidance for living “in the here and now.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop July 19th Picks From Our Pages How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum , translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir ( Riverhead ) Fiction Blum’s thought-provoking and forensic novel traces the relationship between an Israeli mother and her estranged adult daughter, who is now living in Europe. Moving between the present and the past, the novel, which was excerpted in the magazine, reveals the moments when a once close and loving bond may have begun to fracture.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages So to Speak by Terrance Hayes ( Penguin ) Poetry This formally inventive collection, which includes self-described “American sonnets” and “D.I.Y. sestinas,” explores Blackness against questions of image and inheritance, storytelling and song, with a gimlet eye to the politically pressurized present. Several poems, including “ George Floyd ,” were originally published in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay ( Knopf Canada ) Fiction At the center of this sensitive novel, set in Ontario in 2008, is Lulu, a middle-aged actress who has returned to the hamlet of her youth for her nephew’s wedding. The town is populated with familiars: her brother, her best friend, a new lover, a new grandniece. Despite experiencing a terrifying sexual assault, Lulu savors the town’s pace of life and decides to stay there, giving up her career and her apartment in Montreal. Hay makes a case for the simplicity of pleasure: “All you have to do,” Lulu thinks, “is put yourself in the way of beauty, put yourself into the incredible swing of it.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Elsewhere by Yan Ge ( Scribner ) Fiction This collection of stories, by an acclaimed Chinese novelist, spans continents and centuries, spans continents and centuries in its depictions of displacement. A band of poets seeks shelter after the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan Province in 2008; a Chinese woman who moves to Dublin with her Irish husband recalls their fateful honeymoon in Burma; a construction worker who has never left his home town visits New York City; an eleventh-century scholar attempts to finish his book under a death sentence. With wry humor and occasional earthy surrealism, Yan—who was born in Sichuan and lives in Britain—delicately renders both the linguistic and physical manifestations of longing. As one character reflects, it is both “our nature to forget” and “in our nature to resist forgetting.” An earlier version of this review misidentified Yan Ge’s English-language début.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop A Madman’s Will by Gregory May ( Liveright ) Nonfiction In 1833, the Virginia congressman John Randolph freed his nearly four hundred slaves while on his deathbed. This detailed history untangles the much publicized legal dispute that ensued, wherein Randolph’s relatives, some of whom argued that he had gone mad, fought against the slaves’ manumission. Randolph left conflicting directives—his last written will bequeathed most of his estate to a relative, but an earlier version emancipated the people he enslaved—and it took thirteen years for a court to uphold his dying wish. May cautions against ascribing honorable motives to Randolph, and stresses that those he freed continued to face prejudice and violence in the North. “Because manumission was just an exercise of the giver’s rights,” he notes, “it changed almost nothing.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Tabula Rasa by John McPhee ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction McPhee, a staff writer since 1965, has published dozens of books and more than a hundred pieces for the magazine , with some of the most inimitable prose in American letters. In nimble vignettes, this new collection reflects on those ideas which he never committed to print. McPhee writes about a hot summer in Spain, a Dutch merchant vessel, lunch with Thornton Wilder, and the act of not writing. This incisive catalogue of a singular mind is born of a series of ideas written in our pages —and abandoned along the way.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Fires in the Dark by Kay Redfield Jamison ( Knopf ) Nonfiction In this loose sequel to a best-selling memoir of bipolar illness, Jamison, a writer and a psychologist, explores the process of prying a mind from disease or despair. Healing, she writes, depends on “harvesting the imagination” and navigating “the balance between remembering and forgetting”; it also, crucially, relies on support. The book comprises portraits of healers, including W. H. R. Rivers, who treated soldiers who suffered from shell shock during the First World War, and Paul Robeson, who found solace in intuition and in the irrational. Ultimately, Jamison emphasizes the importance of recognizing a diversity of sources of fortitude and models of accompaniment.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop July 12th Picks From Our Pages After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley ( Knopf ) Fiction In her fourth collection of stories, Hadley brings her eloquent prose and her psychological acuity to the relationships—between siblings, friends, lovers, parents, and children—that shape us and change us, that call into question our view of ourselves and our place in the world. Several stories from the collection, including the title piece , first appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop July 5th Picks Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis ( Hachette ) Nonfiction The British journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis used to religiously rinse his plastics before depositing them in one of the color-coded rubbish bins that he and his wife kept at their home. Then he decided to find out what was actually happening to his garbage. Disenchantment followed. At a recycling plant, in New Delhi, he found workers feeding shredded junk into an extruder, which pumped out little gray microplastic pellets known as nurdles. He toured another recycling plant, in northern England, where he learned that nearly half the bales of plastic matter it receives can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated. In the end, Franklin-Wallis comes to see plastic recycling as smoke and mirrors. Over the years, he writes, “a kind of playbook” has emerged: a company pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. Then, when public pressure eases, it quietly abandons its promise and lobbies against any legislation to restrict the use of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes a telling remark from Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry: “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Plastics Are Poisoning Us, ” by Elizabeth Kolbert Natural Light by Julian Bell ( Thames & Hudson ) Nonfiction The artist Adam Elsheimer, who was born in Frankfurt in 1578 and died in Rome at the age of thirty-two, left only a small corpus of paintings, all but one executed in oil on copper, and most of them diminutive. (In Rome, he was called “the devil for little things.”) Yet his expertise was revered, not least by his friend Rubens, who worked on a much larger scale, and Elsheimer’s reputation has endured. This study does discerning justice to his achievement. Bell’s focus is not just on Elsheimer’s registering of natural details, as the title suggests, but also on his evocation of the supernatural—never richer than in his final masterpiece, “The Flight Into Egypt,” with its miraculous interfusing of homeliness and immensity.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes ( Tin House ) Poetry Where, in a poem, is “here”? For Fernandes, it could be New York City, where she lives, or Paris, or Vienna, or any one of the twenty cities that she names in the forty-nine poems of her new collection. Poets have long invoked place names as objects of desire. Fernandes, though, uses them to drop pins on a map of attraction, creating a spatial record of erotic life. In one poem, she boards a plane bound for Zurich and promptly falls in love with her seatmate, a stranger to whom, in the poem’s final lines, she cannot help submitting: “Come see me in Vienna, you say. And I do. / Because I believe so much in being led.” At other times, she’s as reckless with love as she is with verse form. (“Don’t take it personally,” she tells a beloved in “Shanghai Sonnet”: “I am young and nothing is sacred yet.”) In the book’s most moving poems, the geographic mode points to places off the map, not to real life but to potential life. For Fernandes, “here” doesn’t simply designate a place; it enacts a wish.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Megan Fernandes’s Map of Desire, ” by Kamran Javadizadeh The Lost Sons of Omaha by Joe Sexton ( Scribner ) Nonfiction This anatomy of a killing in 2020, at a Black Lives Matter protest, tries to recover the essences of two men involved, who were “reduced to grotesques” in the distorting landscape of social media. During a struggle, James Scurlock was shot and killed by Jake Gardner, who died by suicide a few months later. Thanks to duelling political narratives and outright disinformation, Scurlock became “a hoodlum who provoked his own death” and Gardner a “bloodthirsty white supremacist.” Sexton marshals a remarkable volume of investigative material to disentangle fact from fiction, even though he fears that, in this moment, we may find it hard to see the genuine tragedy, which arises from “flawed characters caught up in disastrous circumstances.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The 272 by Rachel L. Swarns ( Random House ) Nonfiction In “ The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church ,” Swarns sets out the involvement of the Jesuit priests who administered what is now Georgetown University in the institution of slavery—notably, through their sale of two hundred and seventy-two enslaved people, in June, 1838. It was an act that led many of those enslaved to be forcibly removed from Maryland to Louisiana, and many family members to be separated. “The 272” grew out of a series of articles that Swarns wrote while reporting for the Times , where she remains a contributor. Swarns sticks closely to chronology and strives for an objective account, even as she depends on conjecture to join the recorded history of the two hundred and seventy-two to the broader experience of slavery in the Americas. The result is a vivid, pointillistically detailed narrative that foregrounds the people who were enslaved even as it tells the story of the school buildings erected with their labor and the institutions sustained and funded by their sale. “Without the enslaved,” Swarns writes, “the Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not exist.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Confronting Georgetown’s History of Enslavement, ” by Paul Elie The Book of Eve by Carmen Boullosa , translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee ( Deep Vellum ) Fiction After a prologue, in which a nun denounces what follows as having been written “to please the Devil,” this novel embarks on a sensuous retelling of the Book of Genesis from Eve’s perspective. According to Eve, Eden “wasn’t desirable, desire didn’t exist there”; “there was no serpent”; and Cain’s offering was “light and joyful” while Abel’s was “unbreathable smoke.” She calls Adam’s idea that earthly life is our punishment for sin a “stupid lie”; for her, the crackling energy of the planet is an inexhaustible pleasure. “Life is good,” Cain says to Adam. “How can you say what Eve has given us is bad?” Buy on Amazon Bookshop A History of Burning by Janika Oza ( Grand Central ) Fiction The inciting incident of this epic début novel—spanning four generations, five countries, and nine voices—comes in 1898, when Pirbhai, a thirteen-year-old Gujarati boy, is tricked into indentured servitude and becomes one of many Indians laboring on the East African Railway, in British-ruled Kenya. Pirbhai’s descendants must navigate a complex social and racial hierarchy. Children are born, daughters are married off, and elders are mourned against the backdrop of Pan-Africanism’s rise and the British Empire’s retreat. Oza shows each generation of Pirbhai’s family grappling with what to pass on to the next—a sense of complicity in colonialism; heirlooms and stories from homes long left; anxieties and hopes for the future—and what to let die with them.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop June 28th Picks The Art Thief by Michael Finkel ( Knopf ) Nonfiction From 1994 to 2001, Stéphane Breitwieser stole art at an unprecedented pace: three out of four weekends per year for eight years. He plied his craft during business hours, in museums, galleries, and auction houses, with tourists and docents and security guards milling around. He never wore a mask. He carried no weapons. And he stole some two billion dollars’ worth of art. Michael Finkel wonderfully narrates this odds-defying crime streak, whose trajectory is less rise and fall than crazy and crazier, propelled by suspense and surprises. Breitwieser pulls off his thefts with surprising minimalism. There is no rappelling from roofs, no triggering of fire alarms, no high-tech devices to shut down security systems. His gear consists chiefly of a Swiss Army knife and, weather permitting, an overcoat. In the book’s final chapters—when the dashing antihero grows old and sad—Finkel does not hesitate to bring down the boom, but he is clear and compassionate about the downfall. An outrageous tale, “The Art Thief,” like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How a Frenchman Stole Two Billion Dollars’ Worth of Art, ” by Kathryn Schulz Winnie and Nelson by Jonny Steinberg ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Eschewing hagiography, this portrait of the Mandelas’ marriage does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union. Nelson emerges as the quieter force, with Winnie essential to his consecration. She could be shockingly cruel, “a monument to the revolution’s underbelly” who would settle personal scores by leveraging “the contagion of violence that besets unstable times,” most notoriously through her “football club,” an assembly of brutal bodyguards. Still, she was a world-class messenger, crucial in bringing Black South Africa’s plight to the international stage. The Mandelas, Steinberg writes, were “throwing themselves into the maelstrom of history, and nobody in a maelstrom is in control of their journey.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Tiger Work by Ben Okri ( Other Press ) Fiction Okri, a Booker Prize winner, approaches the potential cataclysm of climate change from many perspectives in this multi-genre collection, which is both a work of lyrical imagination and a warning about the dangers we will face unless we take immediate action. A story from the collection appeared in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese ( Grove ) Fiction This novel begins in 1900 in southern India, with the arranged marriage of a twelve-year-old girl to a forty-year-old widowed farmer. Big Ammachi, as she comes to be called, has married into a family with a curse: once every generation, a member drowns. Life unspools across seven decades, during which time Big Ammachi’s loved ones suffer maladies that are treated by practitioners of both traditional and Western medicine. The novel is a searching consideration of the extent to which seemingly contrary approaches to healing can coalesce; for a Swedish doctor who has founded a leprosarium, “medicine is his true priesthood, a ministry of healing the body and the soul of his flock.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling ( Knopf ) Nonfiction This group portrait examines those people—including Jessica Mitford, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, the war photographer Gerda Taro, and the nurse Salaria Kea—whose commitment to anti-Fascism was galvanized by the Spanish Civil War. Watling deploys a wealth of firsthand testimony and archival materials, not in service of a conventional work of history but in an extended consideration of contemporary concerns: What is the line between solidarity and appropriation in joining the struggles of others? How should writers navigate between objectivity and engagement? “The people in this book were imperfect in their commitment,” she writes. Yet they were prepared to “pick a side anyway.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland ( Simon & Schuster ) Fiction The Richmond Theatre fire of 1811 was, at the time, the deadliest disaster in U.S. history, killing seventy-two. This historical novel examines the event and its aftermath through four figures: the stagehand who accidentally starts the fire; a well-to-do widow in a box seat; an enslaved young woman, attending with her mistress but confined to the colored gallery; and a blacksmith, also enslaved, who rushes to the scene and rescues patrons jumping from windows. The bad behavior of the powerful becomes a theme: the theatre company attempts to pin blame on a fabricated slave revolt, and men in the audience trample their wives in making their escape.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop June 21st Picks The Sullivanians by Alexander Stille ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As Alexander Stille writes in his juicy, fascinating “ The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune ,” Sullivanian therapists became “the chief authorities in a patient’s life.” The cult’s founder, Saul Newton, and his top therapists had demoniac control over their patients’ sex lives, social lives, how they earned or spent money, and how they raised—or, usually, didn’t raise—their children. The Sullivanians’ bête noire was the nuclear family, which they identified as the wellspring of all human pathology. Women had to seek permission to get pregnant. While trying to conceive, they would have sex with multiple men, in order to create ambiguity about their child’s biological father. In Stille’s view, “the Sullivanian Institute encapsulates one of the great themes of the twentieth century: the tendency of utopian projects of social liberation to take a totalitarian turn.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight, ” by Jessica Winter The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor ( Riverhead ) Fiction This novel follows a group of people in Iowa City, many of them M.F.A. students, and explores the ways that dissonant conditions of class, race, and social circumstances can compromise our freedom to pursue art and our ability to fully understand those we love. Amid financial concerns, artistic frustrations, and the judgments, jealousies, and posturing of their classmates, the characters find solace in moments of shared tenderness that transcend the ever-present threat of alienation. In a workshop, one student suggests that another’s poem may “bend our sympathies,” and Taylor’s novel does something similar: his characters reveal selfish or even violent tendencies, but his multifaceted portrayals show each of them to be as innocent and as flawed as any human.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore ( Knopf ) Fiction In the nineteenth century, Libby, the proprietress of a rooming house, writes to her dead sister about her new gentleman lodger, who, we come to learn, is a notorious assassin. The frame shifts; it is 2016, and Finn, a teacher, learns that his ex-girlfriend Lily has killed herself. Or has she? He finds her wandering a graveyard, dirt ringing her mouth, not deeply dead but, she says, “death-adjacent.” She asks to be taken to a body farm in Tennessee and used for forensic research; Finn agrees. Thus begins the first of two road trips featuring a corpse. We recognize shades of the Orpheus myth, catch the passing references to Faulkner, but “ I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home ” feels most pointed in its response to an old question in Moore’s own work: what does it mean to come home? A work of determined strangeness and pain, Moore’s new novel is an almost violent kind of achievement, slicing open the conventional notions of narrative itself.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Lorrie Moore’s Death-Defying New Novel, ” by Parul Sehgal Instructions for the Drowning by Steven Heighton ( Biblioasis ) Fiction These stories, by a Canadian novelist, poet, and musician who died last year, peer keenly into the penumbra surrounding death. A student, fervent and pious, accosts the great Harry Houdini. A man bench-presses at the gym; the bar slips and compresses his lungs; he struggles, but no one sees. A plastic surgeon begs his aging wife to allow him to smooth her wrinkles. Each story’s frame is precisely sized. Heighton’s stories wrestle with life’s uncontrollable endings and beginnings: birth, tragedy, failed resurrection. His characters grasp at time, even as it slips away—violent, sacred, apocalyptic, mundane.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Fire Weather by John Vaillant ( Knopf ) Nonfiction In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO2” moves painfully slowly.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad ( Knopf ) Nonfiction The author, an Iraqi journalist, narrates the American invasion of his country and its aftermath by recounting the lives of a cross-section of Iraqi society, including a Shia man who swaps houses with a Sunni family as sectarianism fractures neighborhoods; a woman doctor working under the Islamic State in Mosul; and a fixer who extorts families whose sons have been detained by security forces, promising to lessen their torture for a fee. Abdul-Ahad is equally caustic about Saddam Hussein, the American occupiers, corrupt Iraqi politicians, and opportunistic religious commanders (“freelance criminal gangsters running their own death squads”). His kaleidoscopic view emphasizes aspects of ordinary Iraqi lives which are lost in the simplistic interpretations of outsiders.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop June 14th Picks Easily Slip into Another World by Henry Threadgill Brent Hayes Edwards ( Knopf ) Nonfiction “I go back in my memory and I don’t see: I hear,” Threadgill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician and composer, writes in this autobiography. As a child, he taught himself to play his mother’s piano, then learned the clarinet, the flute, and the saxophone (his main instrument). Threadgill is an engaging narrator, touching on racism in the Chicago of his youth, his military service in Vietnam—one band performance is interrupted by a Vietcong raid—and his compositional process. The book’s title refers to a state of mind in which he is able to resist the “mess” of conformity and produce an utterance of his own. “Your neurosis and your dream,” he writes, “they go hand in hand.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes ( New York Review Books ) Fiction The Budapest-born American writer and philosopher Susan Taubes drowned herself, in 1969, days after the publication of her first novel, the cult classic “Divorcing.” Her suicide, at the age of forty-one, has colored the reception of her work, turning her into an icon of doomed femininity. Recently, however, a reappraisal, based in part on newly discovered works, has been revealing a more complex writer and thinker. In the novella “Lament for Julia,” written a few years before the publication of “Divorcing,” an unnamed voice mourns the disappearance of one Julia Klopps, and narrates glimpses of her life. The drama of work comes as much from the mystery of the voice’s relationship to Julia as it does from Julia’s fate. Taubes’s attempts to get the novel published were unsuccessful, but the work was admired by Samuel Beckett, who wrote to his publisher calling Taubes “an authentic talent.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Afterlives of Susan Taubes, ” by Merve Emre Owlish by Dorothy Tse , translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce ( Graywolf ) Fiction In Dorothy Tse’s first novel, a lonely middle-aged professor named Q falls in love with Aliss, a life-size mechanical ballerina. “Owlish,” translated from Chinese into a playful and sinuous English by Natascha Bruce, is set in a thinly veiled version of Hong Kong, with echoes of the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020. As demonstrations spread across the city, Q retreats into his fecund and unabashedly filthy fantasy life, installing Aliss in an abandoned church and visiting her for hours on end. Tse uses hallucinatory prose to suggest the reality-warping effects of state censorship and to deliver a cautionary tale about runaway imagination. Activists protest unfree elections and the modifying of history textbooks. One student even climbs a clock tower. But Q, caught up in his own mind, hardly notices. “The world around him,” Tse writes, “seemed to vanish into his blind spot.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Perils and Potential of the Runaway Imagination, ” by Katy Waldman V Is For Victory by Craig Nelson ( Scribner ) Nonfiction On becoming President, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt faced two daunting tasks: to pull the country out of the Depression and, in the face of Nazism’s rise, to overcome U.S. isolationism. Such was his success, this paean to F.D.R. contends, “that, if any one human being is responsible for winning World War II, it is FDR.” Nelson focusses on the ways in which New Deal economics and a nascent war effort went hand in hand, as with the bond-sales programs that financed the “arsenal of democracy” policy, and shows us Roosevelt wrangling generals and manufacturers alike. He sees America’s “industrial genius”—factories producing everyday items were enlisted to make armaments—as central to the defeat of fascism, arguing that American workers were war heroes, too.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Be Mine by Richard Ford ( Ecco ) Fiction The fifth, and reputedly the last, of Ford’s books about the character Frank Bascombe, this novel finds Frank now in his seventies and confronting his son Paul’s devastating illness. After Paul, who has A.L.S. (or “Al’s,” as he jokingly refers to it), participates in an experimental protocol at the Mayo Clinic, Frank picks him up in a rented R.V. and they set out for Mt. Rushmore. A melancholy but banter-filled road trip ensues, in which they survey a swath of Middle America—kitsch stops along the way include the World’s Only Corn Palace, where everything is made of corn—and meet various vividly drawn characters. The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full due.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop June 7th Picks A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs ( Ecco ) Nonfiction Biggs’s absorbing, eccentric memoir wends its way through chapter-length biographies of women authors whose lives asked and answered questions about domesticity, unhappiness, and tradition: Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante. Within their differences (of era, of means, of race), each charged herself with writing while woman, thus renegotiating their relationship to endeavors long considered definitive of womanhood. Their lives supplied Biggs a measure of clarity in mapping a new life for herself. “This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help,” Biggs writes of her subjects. Their stories, the ones they lived and the ones they invented, are complexly ambivalent. But Biggs has been a resourceful reader, one who finds what will sustain her.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Trials and Triumphs of Writing While Woman, ” by Lauren Michele Jackson The Wounded World by Chad L. Williams ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction This literary history traces the genesis of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ambitious, unfinished study of the role of Black soldiers in the First World War. Du Bois had called on African Americans to “close ranks” (“ first your Country, then your Rights!”), but his postwar research revealed to him the conflict’s horrors—Black troops denied crucial equipment; Black officers convicted in sham trials—leading him to question the merits of the war and the point of Black soldiers’ sacrifice. Du Bois meticulously documented “a devastating catalog of systemic racial injustice,” Williams writes, while showing “an ability to distill it into concise, lively, accessible prose.” The same goes for this book, which weaves a propulsive narrative from a tangle of facts and forces.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop An Honorable Exit by Éric Vuillard , translated by Mark Polizzotti French ( Other Press ) Fiction Vuillard, who specializes in novels tracking historical events, turns his eye to France’s attempts to extricate itself from the First Indochina War, culminating in the disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. Vuillard examines not only the battlefield but also company boardrooms and National Assembly watering holes, to capture “how easy it was to be pragmatic and realistic thousands of kilometers away, to draw up a balance sheet and make projections, when you were in no personal danger.” With measured outrage and penetrating irony, he pillories the alternating bluster and euphemism of French decision-makers while emphasizing colonialism’s brutal toll on the Vietnamese.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Talk by Darrin Bell ( Henry Holt ) Fiction In a powerful graphic memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Darrin Bell explores how racism—both subtle and blatant—has impacted his life, from childhood to the present. Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Samuel Barber by Howard Pollack ( Illinois ) Nonfiction Barber’s music continues to be treasured for its melding of flawless craftsmanship and deep feeling. Barber himself was more complicated, as this fine biography reveals. Born on Philadelphia’s Main Line in 1910, he was an ebullient gay uncle to his extended family, and counted Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy among his friends. But his personality was tinged with nastiness and melancholia, intensified by alcoholism and by the collapse of his relationship with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Pollack’s account of the psychosexual intrigue that engulfed many of the guests at the couple’s Westchester home is startling in its frankness.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Commitment by Mona Simpson ( Knopf ) Fiction Set in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, this novel follows the Aziz siblings—Walter, Lina, and Donnie—after their mother’s commitment to a mental-health institution. “The sadness was always there, an underground cascade,” Lina observes of her mother, whose condition becomes a reflecting pool around which the siblings gather, peering into themselves, and into her. Simpson darts between their points of view, detailing the vicissitudes of their lives. The novel’s strength lies less in dramatic conflict than in small details, which continually highlight questions of care. Lina speaks about “medieval olfactory therapy with flowers” and about the Belgian town of Geel, where patients are integrated into the community—as her mother never was.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages We’re All in This Together...So Make Some Room by Tom Papa ( St. Martin’s ) Fiction The stand-up comedian Tom Papa lays his jokes on the page in this collection of candid essays, addressing universally human topics including getting a car, staying in hotels, and avoiding your family.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop May 31st Picks The Guest by Emma Cline ( Random House ) Fiction Near the start of “The Guest,” Alex, a sex worker, is booted out of a mansion by Simon, her affluent boyfriend. They appear to be on the ritzy east end of Long Island, though the location is never named. Alex must make a choice: she can return to the city, where she has no friends, no apartment, and a vaguely menacing man on her heels, or she can wait out Simon’s anger, hoping he’ll take her back at his annual Labor Day party, in six days’ time. She chooses the latter. Her only tools are a bag of designer clothes, a mind fogged by painkillers, and a dying phone. But what follows is riveting, a class satire shimmed into the guise of a thriller. Because Alex is young, pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged people she meets believe that she’s one of them. They let her into their parties, their country club, their cars, their homes. Alex, like Cline, is a consummate collector of details, and part of the book’s pleasure is its depiction of the one percent—their meaningless banter, their blandly interchangeable clothes. But Alex is too passive a character for revenge. The book isn’t a caustic takedown of the rich so much as a queasy reminder of their invulnerability.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Emma Cline’s Vacay-Bummer Novel, ” by Sarah Chihaya Monsters by Claire Dederer ( Knopf ) Nonfiction The memoirist Claire Dederer’s third book grew out of a viral essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” that she published in The Paris Review in late 2017, at the height of #MeToo. In thirteen chapters, “Monsters” moves through a catalogue of familiar names associated with both genius and monstrosity. The usual suspects—Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby—all make an appearance, as well as many others, sorted into categories such as “The Genius,” “Drunks,” and “The Silencers and the Silenced.” Early in the book, Dederer confesses that she has fantasized about solving the question of whether to consume the work of a disgraced artist with an online calculator that could “assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict.” The real question, she eventually decides, is not what “we” do with the monstrous men. “The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist?” By the end of “Monsters,” Dederer’s reckoning with the artists whose work has shaped her has become a reckoning with her own potential for monstrousness. Go ahead, she tells us, love what you love. It excuses no one.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Can You Love the Art and Hate the Monster?, ” by Melissa Febos Take What You Need by Idra Novey ( Viking ) Fiction A delicate meditation on art, family, and ugliness, this novel unfolds in chapters that alternate between the perspectives of Jean, an elderly sculptor living in the Alleghenies, and her estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who, after Jean’s death, comes to collect the sculptures that constitute her inheritance. These works, towers of welded scrap metal that Jean calls “manglements,” have a familial aspect: Jean learned to weld from her father, and the metal comes from her cousin’s scrap shop. The characters dwell not only on the difficulties that arise in family life but also on the ways in which such difficulties can’t be separated from love. Jean recalls that, when she read Leah “Little Red Riding Hood,” the child wanted “no confusion about whether I was speaking as the wolf or the grandma.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Some historians have charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design, while others embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model suggested by Montefiore’s book, a new synthesis that approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. The author energetically fulfills his promise to write a “genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.” In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture and offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity, ” by Maya Jasanoff The Plot to Save South Africa by Justice Malala ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction On Easter weekend, 1993, Chris Hani—an A.N.C. commander seen as Nelson Mandela’s likely successor—was assassinated by two white nationalists. Protests and violence followed, threatening to derail ongoing negotiations to end apartheid. This account re-creates the delicate process by which negotiators—Mandela and Cyril Ramaphosa on one side, F. W. de Klerk and Roelf Meyer on the other—struggled to keep the people’s reactions in check and pull the country back from the brink of civil war. Malala also probes the persistent conspiracy theories surrounding Hani’s death. Conceding that these theories may never be proved or disproved, he nonetheless stresses the way that a killing intended to ignite a race war ended up accelerating democratization.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Mozart in Motion by Patrick Mackie ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Mozart is one of the composers most mansioned in myth: a prodigy of easy and childlike genius, the story goes. Modern commentary rightly complicates the narrative. In his new book, the English poet Patrick Mackie offers an exemplary biographical approach, nicely balancing the proper spiritual astonishment with the proper cultural curiosity, as he chronicles Mozart’s life through a series of celebrated works. Mackie describes a composer who was eager to please his audiences and who, at the same time, pushed his work into experiment and risk. The author is a sensitive and highly intelligent appraiser of musical form, with a gift for analyzing Mozart’s music as something more than the simple expression of culture and biography.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Graceful Rebellions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ” by James Wood My Father’s Brain by Sandeep Jauhar ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Spanning seven years, this incisive memoir relates the decline of the author’s father, an eminent agricultural scientist, after a dementia diagnosis. Sandeep, a physician, examines the history and science of dementia and the ethics of making decisions on behalf of the cognitively impaired. He is clear-eyed about his and his siblings’ shortcomings and about the social factors that exacerbate the challenges of helping the elderly. These include cultural biases against those perceived as not rational and Western individualism, which discourages intergenerational homes and thereby increases the obstacles to collective caretaking.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Gravity and Center by Henri Cole ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Poetry This volume of sonnets by one of the form’s most distinctive practitioners calibrates tensions between mind and body, nature and culture, self and society, freedom and restraint. Cole eschews fixed metrical and rhyme schemes but retains the sonnet’s essential sense of rigor and compression, the drama that emerges from its “little fractures and leaps and resolutions.” His approach, which bears the influence of French and Japanese lyric traditions, combines a surrealistic idiom with an enigmatic emotional intensity; the poems feel at once delphic and deeply personal, mapping the thin and porous membrane between their author’s inner and outer worlds.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Frankopan’s essential epic, a history of climate change and its influence over the rise and fall of civilizations, runs from the dawn of time to the present day. By about two and a half billion years ago, enough oxygen had built up in Earth’s atmosphere to support multicellular life, he writes, and by about five hundred and seventy million years ago the first complex macroscopic organisms had begun to appear. The first primates lived in the trees. Then, Homo sapiens began wandering around the understory. “Like rude house guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited, human impact on the natural environment has been substantial and is accelerating to the point that many scientists question the long-term viability of human life,” Frankopan writes. He sketches the limits of human self-preservation and imagines a possibly not too distant future in which we fail to address climate change—and cause our own extinction.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What We Owe Our Trees, ” by Jill Lepore May 24th Picks Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction Grabar makes a serious case for parking as a grave social problem, but he does so in a way that is consistently entertaining. His book is filled with engaging eccentrics, including the New York “traffic agent” Ana Russi, who once gave out a hundred and thirty-five parking tickets in a day. When cars took the place of horses, Grabar writes, the civil-minded assumption in America was that private developers should be obliged to provide sufficient parking to accompany whatever building they had just built. The resulting system created a permanent logjam, in which huge quantities of urban space were consumed by parking, architects and developers faced burdensome design constraints, and the classic main street became impossible to re-create. Grabar’s anti-parking polemic makes a story out of people, not just propositions, and relates many bits of mordant social history in a good-natured and puckish vein.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How to Quit Cars, ” by Adam Gopnik Biting the Hand by Julia Lee ( Holt ) Nonfiction In this affecting memoir, a literature professor whose parents emigrated from South Korea writes about her “inheritance” of what Koreans call han —a culturally specific mixture of rage and shame—as well as the insidious tendency of “racial shame” to separate “people of color from one another.” Lee mixes personal anecdotes, including experiences of racism, with analyses of racially charged historical events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during which “thousands of Korean-owned businesses were looted and torched.” She argues that white supremacy has been bolstered by a “culture of scarcity,” in which “there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth available in the American consciousness to deal with racial oppression.” Changing this will involve rejecting an entire “racial imaginary” that makes room only for the broad categories of white and nonwhite people.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages When the World Didn’t End by Guinevere Turner ( Crown ) Nonfiction Turner was a member of the Lyman Family cult until she was sent away at the age of eleven. In this absorbing memoir, she scrutinizes her childhood with anthropological curiosity. With the intimacy of one who grew up in a cult and the distance of one who left it, Turner contemplates the nature of shared belief, at once familiar with its extremes and keenly aware of its covert power over many facets of human behavior. The book grew out of the piece “ My Childhood in a Cult ,” which Turner wrote for the magazine in 2019.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Carmageddon by Daniel Knowles ( Abrams ) Nonfiction Knowles, a writer for The Economist , takes up the case against cars, analyzing their contributions to destruction of the urban fabric. He argues that America has exported its car addiction to the developing world, where such ill effects are further exacerbated: “A huge amount of economic growth has been squandered, with the extra income that people are earning being spent sitting in traffic on ever-more polluted roads.” Knowles floats possible remedies, but just as quickly pokes holes in them. The electric car, for example, produces more pollution in its construction than its existence justifies, and driverless cars cause too many casualties. Briskly written and well researched, “Carmageddon” is a serious diatribe against cars as agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How to Quit Cars, ” by Adam Gopnik The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Two women, living centuries apart, scour the Colosseum for plant samples in this lyrical, incisive novel. In 1854, one helps the botanist Richard Deakin (a historical figure) catalogue the amphitheatre’s flora; in 2018, the other assists an academic tracking the changes in its ecosystem since Deakin’s time. The twin narratives mimic field-work notebooks, with headings by family (Vitaceae, Gentianeae, Ambrosiaceae) and vivid illustrations. Gradually, the women’s fragmentary entries come to reveal a changing climate, the invisibility of women’s work, and the perseverance of unofficial histories. As Simpson Smith writes, “the weeds outlive the narrative.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein ( Ecco ) Fiction In this novel, set in rural Trinidad in the nineteen-forties, the disappearance of a wealthy farmer upends carefully tended boundaries of class and identity. The farmer’s wife orders one of his employees, part of a community of indigent laborers on the village outskirts, to take over his duties. This man has always taught his family to be content with the status quo, even though he chafes at the limitations of his own life. But, as those with power make a game of his desire for a more expansive life—for sensual pleasure and land of his own—he finds himself increasingly at risk of forgetting what he has told his son about moths drawn to lamplight: “It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Actual Malice by Samantha Barbas ( California ) Nonfiction During the civil-rights movement, segregationists used coördinated libel lawsuits in state courts to drive Northern media out of the South. It was in this context, in 1964, that the Supreme Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark decision that made it harder to win defamation suits against the media. Samantha Barbas, a law professor and historian, unfurls the story of the case, deftly employing archival sources to shed new light on the triumph of press freedom as an outgrowth of the civil-rights struggle. Her book illuminates the effect of libel suits on journalists’ ability to cover the movement, the legal strategies used against those suits, and the impact of the case on the civil-rights movement itself. A heroic narrative in which the litigation helped vanquish segregationists serves to underscore what Barbas calls the “centrality of freedom of speech to democracy.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Dark Side of Defamation Law, ” by Jeannie Suk Gersen From Our Pages Girl Juice by Benji Nate ( Drawn & Quarterly ) Fiction In her graphic novel,Benji Nate takes us to the messy, funny, and at times navel-gazey world of a group of hot, young Internet girls, living under one roof.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Holding the Note by David Remnick ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, captures the tempo and timbre of the great musicians of our time: Leonard Cohen’s divine darkness, Bruce Springsteen’s durable swagger, Mavis Staples’s transcendent gospel.
This series of profiles, gathered from the magazine, plumbs the lives and legacies of iconic artists and their indelible work: the people who made the music that made us.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Parfit by David Edmonds ( Princeton Classics ) Nonfiction Widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the past century, Derek Parfit was born to a British missionary family in China, and spent most of his life at an Oxford college whose fellows have no teaching responsibilities to distract them from research. Parfit made contributions to questions about identity, future generations, and freedom, but his central project was to argue for the objective nature of morality. Edmonds’s companionable biography tracks this work while assembling a portrait of how Parfit grew from a young boy with strong moral intuitions to a kind, perfectionistic man who believed that the stakes of his mission were so high that he should devote almost all of his waking hours to it.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop May 17th Picks Go Back and Get It by Dionne Ford ( Bold Type ) Nonfiction On her thirty-eighth birthday, the author of this memoir found a century-old photograph of an enslaved ancestor and embarked on a pilgrimage to uncover hidden branches of her family tree. The book’s title is derived from the West African practice of sankofa , which is “symbolized by a bird in flight with its head craned backward and an egg in its beak.” In spare, often haunting prose, Ford describes the union between her Black great-great-grandmother and her white great-great-grandfather, the lasting trauma of being raped as a child by a relative, and the lynching of forebears “swinging from trees for the crime of being born Black.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop We the Scientists by Amy Dockser Marcus ( Riverhead ) Nonfiction Niemann-Pick disease type C is a rare genetic disorder whose sufferers face almost certain death by the age of twenty. In a selection of case histories, this book illuminates the painful tension between the extended time frames of medical research and the life spans of those hoping for a cure. Marcus writes of a woman whose twin girls received an NPC diagnosis as toddlers. When the mother sought permission through the F.D.A.’s compassionate-use program to give the girls an experimental drug, profound ethical issues arose: What if the treatment made the girls worse? Given the rarity of the disease, might a one-off experiment preclude sufficient enrollment in a later clinical trial, countering the common good? Marcus shows how parents, by imparting a sense of urgency to the search for a cure, have helped future generations of children even as they could not save their own.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop King: A Life by Jonathan Eig ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction This new addition to the biographical record of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s life presents readers with an alternative to the “de-fanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected, and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, in addition to the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault. What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, capturing the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: police dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and those who wanted to stop it.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability, ” by Kelefa Sanneh A Small Sacrifice for An Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti ( Knopf ) Fiction The fifteen stories in this collection, set variously in America and India, are propelled by familial anxieties. Chakrabarti’s characters—diverse in race, class, sexuality, and religion—reveal themselves through longings: a closeted man dreams of conceiving a child with his lover’s wife; a lonely married woman secretly builds an airplane in her garage. Elsewhere, would-be do-gooders turn exploitative, as in a story that finds an American man making wild financial promises to the son of his longtime guru. These tales eschew neat conclusions, leaving their protagonists suspended, as one opines of life itself, “between unbearable truths—salvation or suffering.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Traffic by Ben Smith ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction Smith’s illuminating book documents the rise of online traffic-chasing as a twenty-first-century media norm and the ways in which the new laws of traffic—shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, “viral” rates—unseated old power structures. His story focusses on the rise of two figures: Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, and Nick Denton, the founder of the online Gawker Media network. The long story that Smith traces, from the open Internet of Peretti’s early high jinks to today’s atomized and factionalized splinternet, is shaped by the demands of business strategy. At BuzzFeed’s height, the traffic rush was a gold rush; by the end of the decade, traffic had become most powerful as a tool to form political identity. Smith’s book highlights how the race for clicks spawned, then strangled, the new media.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars, ” by Nathan Heller In the Orchard by Eliza Minot ( Knopf ) Fiction This novel, an examination of motherhood, unfolds in the course of a night and a day. Maisie, weeks after having her fourth child, lies awake breastfeeding and fretting about money. Her hormonal, sleep-deprived thoughts veer from the banal to the profound: “She couldn’t get purchase anywhere, couldn’t get traction on anything.” The next morning, her family makes its annual visit to a local apple orchard. There, a succession of encounters reminds her of the punishing unpredictability of human existence. Maisie’s contemplation of life as “a series of languishments and flourishes, of withering and blooming,” aptly describes this rhapsodic, plotless book, which nevertheless carries a stinging twist at its end.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop May 10th Picks Camera Girl by Carl Sferrazza Anthony ( Gallery ) Nonfiction Less than a decade before she became the world’s most photographed woman, Jacqueline Bouvier regularly worked behind a camera for the Washington Times-Herald , soliciting opinions from the capital’s ordinary residents and taking their pictures. “Camera Girl,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s new biography of the young Jackie, illuminates this portion of her life, making plain that the future First Lady was clever and educable, a woman who preferred her own curricula—books, socializing, and travel—to anything imposed by the schools that she attended. It was in postwar Paris, Anthony writes, that Jackie perfected a knowledge of “how to be ‘on,’ to make an intentional impression, to invent herself into a character.” Her column at the Times-Herald was called “Inquiring Camera Girl,” and her twenty-month run with it is the charming and informative heart of the book, a lively depiction of a young woman who relished every opportunity to regard the world from her own perspective.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Making of Jackie Kennedy, ” by Thomas Mallon Shy by Max Porter ( Graywolf ) Fiction Shy, the teen-aged namesake of Max Porter’s new novel, is caught between helpless sensitivity and impulsive violence. At fifteen, he spun out of control because his mum gave away his old Hot Wheels toys; not long after, he broke a row of chemistry sets after he couldn’t get an erection with a girl from school. The question animating the novel, Porter’s third, is simple: Will Shy’s inner chaos manifest as childish mischief or something worse? Porter’s gift is his ability to balance a delight in language with precise attention to its mechanics. In “Shy,” he culls from the cramped space of his protagonist’s head about six hours’ worth of mental flotsam, mashing up fonts, registers, characters’ voices, and words themselves to create intricate linguistic effects. The novel ends sentimentally, but, for most of “Shy,” Porter balances social realism and fairy tale in perfect suspension.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Max Porter’s Novel of Troubled and Enchanted Youth, ” by Katy Waldman Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki , translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett David Boyd Helen O’Horan Daniel Joseph ( Verso ) Fiction An icon of Japanese counterculture in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Suzuki worked as an underground actor, posed for the erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and penned science-fiction stories, before killing herself at the age of thirty-six. This collection showcases her unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work—populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.—wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena. As one character puts it, “Some wackjobs think they’re living in a science-fiction world.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Waco by Jeff Guinn ( Gallery ) Nonfiction On the thirtieth anniversary of the Waco siege, Guinn, an investigative journalist, reconstructs the conflict between David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, and the U.S. Justice Department. In 1992, a box being delivered to a Davidian-owned business broke open and dozens of grenade casings spilled out, prompting a months-long investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The A.T.F. pursued multiple avenues to obtain a warrant, which it got, and eventually decided on a “dynamic entry” of the Branch Davidian compound, Guinn reports. Amid the resulting siege, Koresh, exuding confidence, told a negotiator, “You’re the Goliath, and we’re David.” Of course, whereas the Biblical David had a sling and five smooth stones, the modern Davidians had a .50-calibre sniper rifle that could shoot chunks off car engines. In the end, the F.B.I. raid at Waco resulted in dozens of deaths, including those of more than twenty children. Incorporating interviews with more than a dozen agents who participated in the raid, Guinn chronicles the flames kindled at Waco, the ashes of which are still blowing around.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning, ” by Daniel Immerwahr Waco Rising by Kevin Cook ( Holt ) Nonfiction Waco, Texas, is best known for a fifty-one-day standoff outside the city in 1993, between a religious sect called the Branch Davidians and the Department of Justice. The siege, which culminated in a fire in the Branch Davidian complex, killed four federal agents and eighty-two civilians. Kevin Cook’s excellent book documents the ways in which the event galvanized the militia movement. Between 1993 and 1995, more than eight hundred militias and Patriot groups formed. Waco, Cook reports, was their rallying cry. A young Alex Jones became obsessed with Waco; it led him to start his Web site Infowars. Jones had a hand in arranging the rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, and, directly afterward, insurgents attacked the U.S. Capitol. Waco helped militias and members of the radical right to see the state as a violent enemy of the people. That view, once marginal, has elbowed its way to the mainstream.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning, ” by Daniel Immerwahr From Our Pages Writers and Missionaries by Adam Shatz ( Verso ) Nonfiction These probing essays on writers and artists—such as Richard Wright, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Kamel Daoud—reflect Adam Shatz’s abiding interests: the intellectual life of the Francophone and the Arab worlds, leftist politics, and the nature of political art. The book, Shatz’s first, culminates in a memoir that first ran in The New Yorker about cooking. Shatz writes, “The childhood passion that awakened my interest in France, and, by an unexpected and twisted path, led me to my work as a writer.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Impossible People by Julia Wertz ( Black Dog & Leventhal ) Fiction In this graphic memoir, Julia Wertz charts her long, winding path to sobriety in a way that is honest, funny, and highly relatable.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Stealing by Margaret Verble ( Mariner ) Fiction Set in the nineteen-fifties, this finely etched novel centers on Kit, who spent her early childhood living by the Arkansas River with her white father and Cherokee mother. After her mother died, of tuberculosis, things went awry, and Kit, now eleven, offers a written account “of this whole awful mess,” which has led to her forced enrollment in a Christian boarding school. (Her relatives are “doing the fighting to get me out.”) Kit’s guileless narration betrays a precocious resolve and a dawning realization that lies can have the power of violence. “I am descended from people who survived the Trail of Tears,” she says. “Those that gave up hope and stopped on the road died in the snow.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Skip to the Fun Parts by Dana Jeri Maier ( Andrews McMeel ) Fiction The cartoonist Dana Meier gets it—getting creative work done is hard, a fact that she draws up in this illustrated guide for procrastinators who want to be productive.
Read an excerpt at newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Nothing Stays Put by Willard Spiegelman ( Knopf ) Nonfiction America’s preëminent late-bloomer poet, Amy Clampitt, published her first book in 1983, when she was sixty-three. This lucid biography tracks her path to eventual fame: her childhood as the bookish eldest daughter of Iowa Quakers; years of obscurity as a West Village bohemian, toiling under the mistaken belief that she was a novelist. Religious conversion (and, later, deconversion), activism, and finding love enriched Clampitt’s life as she crept toward the erudite, lush poetry that dazzled readers. Spiegelman insists that much cannot be known about a poet so resolutely private, though he successfully evokes an artist with a will strong enough to endure decades of false starts.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty ( Crown ) Nonfiction In this meditative ethnography, a social anthropologist writes about conducting forensic work at mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina, and delicately explores the art, the science, and the sacredness of exhumation in the aftermath of genocide. In forensics, Hagerty writes, “bones shift between people and evidence” and “rattle like dice” as they gradually reveal an individual’s story. She takes us through the histories of legendary forensics teams and resistance groups, relays testimony from family members of individuals who disappeared, and examines the prismatic nature of grief. Throughout the book, just as in forensics, “the ritual and the analytical buzz in electric proximity.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop May 3rd Picks Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld ( Random House ) Fiction Flirting with the tropes of its namesake genre, this playful novel follows Sally, a writer on an “S.N.L.”-like show called “Night Owls,” who falls in love with one of its guest hosts. Their relationship develops via e-mail in the post-grocery-wiping, pre-vaccine days of COVID -19. When Sally decides to visit her beloved in L.A., their time together in his Topanga mansion requires her to navigate incredulity, insecurity, and an offer that she feels is an “affront to my independence.” The novel is preoccupied with the instinctual nature of self-sabotage, and with the fulfillment that can come from defying ingrained impulses.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages To Anyone Who Ever Asks by Howard Fishman ( Dutton ) Nonfiction The singer-songwriter Connie Converse was a pioneer in the folk scene of mid-century New York but never made it big. She drove off by herself at the age of fifty, never to be heard from again. Fishman describes stumbling upon Converse's prescient music and tracking down her story. The original essay that sparked the book appeared on our site, in 2016.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Fawn by Magda Szabó , translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix Fiction The great Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s novel “ The Fawn ,” originally published in 1959 and newly translated by Len Rix, is a chronicle of silence and all that roils beneath it. The book depicts the tumultuous reunion of the bitter and brilliant Eszter Encsy and her childhood playmate, the cherubic Angéla, after a decade apart. Rix’s translation captures the novel’s narrative restraint, the fugitive path it treads between the need to speak and the desire to withhold. Szabó wrote “The Fawn” in secret, during a period of almost a decade when Hungary’s postwar Stalinist regime prohibited her from publishing. Political censorship is one cause of silence in “The Fawn,” but the novel’s true subjects are those silences which fall between people, the failures of intimacy that cut friends and lovers adrift. Szabó understood such silences as a sort of exile, and, in her fiction, she examined the effects, how estrangement from others could also make people strangers to themselves.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Magda Szabó and the Cost of Censorship, ” by Charlie Lee We Should Not Be Friends by Will Schwalbe ( Knopf ) Nonfiction When Schwalbe, an unathletic theatre kid who spent his free time at Yale volunteering for an aids hotline, met Maxey, a fellow-senior and a celebrated wrestler intent on becoming a Navy seal, he never imagined that they’d be compatible. This delicate memoir tracks their intermittent friendship, from initiation into one of Yale’s secret societies to thirty-five-year college reunion. Gradual revelations from parts of Maxey’s life which Schwalbe missed make for an unexpected page-turner that may inspire readers to reach out to old friends. Schwalbe overcomes the perspectival limitations of memoir-writing by allowing himself access to his friend’s thoughts, notably in rhapsodic contemplations of the sea surrounding the Bahamian island where Maxey ultimately finds purpose.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Künstlers in Paradise by Cathleen Schine ( Holt ) Fiction Julian, a directionless young New Yorker, ventures west, to Venice Beach, to help care for his zesty ninety-three-year-old grandmother. When the pandemic descends, he finds himself sequestered indefinitely with her, as she recounts memories of her Anschluss-ruptured Vienna childhood and her family’s subsequent immigration to Hollywood, where she came to know legends including Arthur Schoenberg and Greta Garbo. The novel emphasizes echoes across history but explores intergenerational gaps, too, and—despite handling such weighty subject matter as survivor’s guilt, sexual repression, and the ongoing traumas of racial and religious persecution—maintains a remarkable lightness of tone and of characterization.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger ( Random House ) Nonfiction In this compelling work of memoir and history, Bilger investigates the life of his grandfather, a schoolteacher in Germany’s Black Forest who became a Nazi party chief in occupied France during the Second World War. Exploring the silence and the secrets of both a single man and a society, the book was excerpted in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction This engrossing memoir centers on the author’s childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a horrific murder. The pair, both Jewish faculty brats with literary dreams, grew up on the same street in New York’s suburbs—parallels that haunt Rosen as Laudor’s brilliance edges into paranoia. Rosen thoughtfully interweaves this story with an account of changing attitudes toward mental illness. Laudor, before his crime, had become a poster boy for a Foucault-influenced intellectual culture that saw psychosis as a metaphor for liberation. Meanwhile, as Rosen notes, institutions for treating the mentally ill were being dismantled with no provision of adequate replacements.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop April 26th Picks Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane ( Harper ) Fiction Lehane has been wrestling with Boston’s ugly racial legacy since his first novel, “ A Drink Before the War ,” published in 1994. His latest, a tragic vision of Boston’s working-class enclaves set amid the busing protests of 1974, lands like a fist to the solar plexus. Mary Pat Fennessy, the central character, is forty-two, with two husbands in the rearview mirror and a son who died of a heroin overdose. When her beloved daughter goes missing, Mary Pat embarks on a quest to find out what happened—a quest that takes her from the haunts of the local gangsters to the exotic terrain of Harvard Square—turning her world inside out. Her perception of Southie begins to peel away from the neighborhood’s defensive self-image as she reckons with her own racism and the hatred festering all around her. Lehane’s ferocious crime novel captures a tetchy, volatile mixture of working-class pride and shame.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Dennis Lehane Novel Investigates Boston’s White Race Riots, ” by Laura Miller The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Healey, a historian at Oxford, writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor. Narrating with the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, he shows that ideas and attitudes, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation; the petitions and pamphlets which laid the ground for conflict are as important as troops and battlefield terrain. His account allows members of the “lunatic fringe” to speak for themselves; the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers—radicals who cried out in eerily prescient ways for democracy and equality—are in many ways the heroes of the story, though not victorious ones. Seeking to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible, Healey demonstrates that ripples on the periphery of our historical vision can be as important as the big waves at the center of it.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What Happens When You Kill Your King, ” by Adam Gopnik Spoiled by Anne Mendelson ( Columbia ) Nonfiction Six decades ago, Pedro Cuatrecasas, a resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, found concrete evidence that the ability to digest lactose might be a genetic condition linked to one’s racial background. More studies over the following decades would draw similar conclusions about the difficulties that many communities of color faced when trying to digest unfermented milk. Despite this consensus, milk retained its reputation as a nutritional bulwark in the United States and elsewhere. In “ Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood ,” the culinary historian Anne Mendelson questions fresh milk’s hegemonic grip over the American mind. The book charts the gradual spread of “dairying,” from its origins in the prehistoric Near East and Western Asia to its prevalence in northern Europe. Mendelson does not propose forgoing fresh milk altogether. Rather, she seeks to gently put it on a level playing field with its alternatives and open the minds of her readers to the culinary possibilities of dairy beyond American shores.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Fresh History of Lactose Intolerance, ” by Mayukh Sen The Cult of Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin ( University of Chicago Press ) Nonfiction Franklin posits that “creativity” is a concept invented in America after the Second World War, appearing primarily in two contexts: psychological research and business, each arising semi-independently, but feeding into and reinforcing each other. Humanistic psychologists—attuned to postwar anxieties about alienation and conformity—connected creativity with authenticity and self-expression. The advertising industry—the motor of consumerism—grabbed on to the term to appropriate the glamour and prestige of the artist and confer those attributes on admen and product designers. In the information age, countercultural values turned out to be entirely compatible with consumer capitalism. The difficulties that arose in defining creativity are intrinsic to the concept itself, Franklin argues, and his provocative book unpacks the history of a term whose origins are more recent than we might imagine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Origins of Creativity, ” by Louis Menand Psychonauts by Mike Jay ( Yale ) Nonfiction Long before the hippies, a group of nineteenth-century artists, philosophers, and scientists began taking drugs in order to uncover the secrets of the mind. In “Psychonauts,” the historian Mike Jay argues that these thinkers were unique. Before the group’sexperiments, drugs had been used to self-medicate, or to escape the world, but the psychonauts saw them as an education: a way to access the hidden corners of consciousness. In the process, they upended the notion of objectivity, asserting that drugs needed to be experienced in order to be understood. Jay has written several books on Western drug use, and his study is full of sharp, lively anecdotes: William James inhaling nitrous oxide, Freud’s exploits with cocaine, and Thomas De Quincey’s famous opium trips. For the psychonauts, drugs were a tool not just for science but for self-actualization.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century, ” by Clare Bucknell April 19th Picks Benjamin Banneker and Us by Rachel Jamison Webster ( Holt ) Nonfiction The central figure in this memoir-biography is Benjamin Banneker, a Black astronomer who was born in 1731 and became famous for writing almanacs and helping to design Washington, D.C. After learning that she was one of Banneker’s descendants, Webster, a white poet, retraced his and his ancestors’ lives. In the process, she built close relationships with newfound Black cousins, whose relatives have researched Banneker for generations, and are both excited by and wary of her interest in him. One tells her, “You white writers just dip in and visit. You will write this book and then go away, but I am compelled to live here.” Listening to her family and constructing a story together leads Webster to conclude that “ancestry is not an individual acquisition but a collective inheritance, a shared process of awareness.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Spring Rain by Marc Hamer ( Greystone Books ) Nonfiction “Spring Rain,” the third book in a trilogy, follows Hamer as he becomes too old to work as a gardener anymore. The first book, “ How to Catch a Mole ,” was an account of how Hamer, who worked for many years as a mole catcher—which is surprising not only because the job sounds like it belongs in a Wordsworth poem but also because Hamer has been a vegetarian since childhood, and often had to kill the moles he caught—ceased to be a mole catcher. That book is a double portrait: of the difficult, lonely, and intense domesticity of both moles and Hamer. “ Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden ” is a year of meditations on his time working in a vast garden owned by an old woman he calls Miss Cashmere. Hamer’s prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail (“there are golden moles and white moles”), but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change. His mind turns to mortality often in the new book, which could be described as a memoir of a retired gardener turning his own small patch of neglected land back into a garden, or as a memento mori. “Spring Rain” is something of a winter book. “There are two kinds of old people,” Hamer writes. “There are the old people who are in pain and are miserable, and there are the old people who are in pain and are light-hearted. All old people are in pain.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Gardens Promise the Renewal of Life—and Its End, ” by Rivka Galchen In Memoriam by Alice Winn ( Knopf ) Fiction This consuming and unstintingly romantic début novel begins in 1914, and centers on two teen-age boarding-school students: Ellwood, an aspiring poet, and Gaunt, a moody, half-German pacifist. The young men are taking tentative steps toward romance when Gaunt enlists in the British Army. Ellwood eventually follows, set on reunion, and determined that, “if something dreadful was being done to Gaunt, he wanted it done to him as well.” The story parses the extent to which pursuing forbidden love can feel like risking one’s life. Of his heart, Gaunt thinks, “It was only because he knew he would die that he could be so reckless with it.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Tenacious Beasts by Christopher J. Preston ( M.I.T.
) Nonfiction The occasional resurgences of animal populations in an era of mass extinction are the subject of this lively study, by a journalist and professor of environmental philosophy. Despite widespread depredation, some species, from wolves in densely populated Central Europe to beavers in the polluted Potomac to whales in the Gulf of Alaska, have staged dramatic comebacks. Preston focusses much of his reporting on wildlife scientists and Indigenous activists, arguing that these recoveries—and the ecological restorations they engender—demonstrate that the flourishing of other species is “integral to our shared future.” In cases where conditions are right, degraded landscapes can be revitalized through the combination of thoughtful environmental practices and animals’ natural capacities.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Is It Hot in Here (Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)? by Zach Zimmerman ( Chronicle ) Fiction In this collection of essays, the comedian Zach Zimmerman traces the path from his strict Christian upbringing to his current queer, atheist life in New York City, with much hilarity and self-mockery.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Wager by David Grann ( Doubleday ) Nonfiction Grann, a staff writer, recounts the journey of a British Navy warship that started off rough—storms, rats, scurvy—and only got rougher. In 1741, the ship’s crew ran aground in South America, and starvation led to cannibalism and other horrors. The book, which was excerpted on newyorker.com, may sound like “Lord of the Flies,” but it is no tale of civilization discarded; even when struggling to survive across the earth from England, the sailors remained obsessed with the rules of the British Empire.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Greek Lessons by Han Kang , translated from the Korean by Emily Yae Won Deborah Smith ( Hogarth ) Fiction This novel, by a winner of the International Booker Prize, follows a woman who mysteriously loses the faculty of speech and begins taking ancient-Greek lessons as a possible remedy. The book was excerpted in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop April 12th Picks Raving by McKenzie Wark ( Duke ) Nonfiction In 2021, just as New York’s restrictions on night life lifted, the media theorist McKenzie Wark was asked to write a book for a series being published by Duke University Press about practices. “Raving,” a monograph about the underground party scene that has exploded over the past several years in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, is the result. The book has some theorizing, a lot of quoting from others, a little ethnography, and some first-person autofiction written in a rapid present-tense clip. Wark, who is trans and in her early sixties, began going to what she describes as “queer and trans-friendly raves in Brooklyn, New York” in 2018, around the same time she started hormone treatment. The book’s charm is in the autofiction, where the reader gets to inhabit Wark’s sense of liberation. In raving, she immerses herself in the cacophonous glory of New York City at night and finds a new way to inhabit her body and connect to its past. It’s an unusually hopeful depiction of late midlife as a phase of discovery.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Reimagining Underground Rave Culture, ” by Emily Witt The Laughter by Sonora Jha ( HarperVia ) Fiction The protagonist of this biting novel, set in the days before the 2016 election, is Oliver Harding, a G. K. Chesterton specialist at a liberal-arts college near Seattle. Harding spends his days in misguided pursuit of a Pakistani law professor, who is caring for a nephew who has had a series of run-ins with the French police. Jha slowly reveals the paltriness of Harding’s inner life—his racist suspicions about the nephew, his damaged relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, his near-constant womanizing and reactionary moralizing. As the campus is swept by a wave of student-led anti-racist protests, he discovers far too late that he has been “invited to something, to a nearness and vastness I still don’t understand.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Diary Keepers by Nina Siegal ( Ecco ) Nonfiction Nearly three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust, yet after the Second World War the Netherlands claimed a national memory of unified defiance. In a challenge to this account, Siegal has assembled the wartime diaries of seven Dutch citizens, among them a Jewish journalist, the wife of an S.S. official, and a shopkeeper active in the Resistance. Though diaries may be myopic and self-images fallible—as exemplified in the puffed-up scribblings of a Nazi-sympathizing policeman—it’s clear these diarists saw enough, Siegal writes, to respond to horror. She casts “bearing witness” as an impure but essential act and history as mutable, a story told and understood not by one but by many.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Steady Rollin by Fred Noland ( Birdcage ) Fiction A moving memoir, told in a series of vignettes, whisks us along with the author—often by bicycle—from the Bible Belt to Oakland, California, with many colorful pit stops.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop April 10th Picks Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson ( Pamela Dorman ) Fiction This engaging début novel centers on a family of wealthy real-estate moguls, the Stocktons, living in the historically preserved “fruit streets” of Brooklyn Heights. The story’s focus alternates among the eldest of the family’s three grown children, who has forsaken her career for motherhood; the youngest, who works off her hangovers with tennis; and the wife of the lone male scion, whose middle-class background stands in contrast to her husband’s upper-crust one. “I know you get all awkward and waspy whenever it comes up,” she tells him. She is unfairly accused by her sisters-in-law of gold-digging, but, in the end, none of the despicable rich we meet are really so despicable; some punches are pulled to maintain the story’s levity.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop April 5th Picks From Our Pages Skeletons by Deborah Landau ( Copper Canyon ) Poetry By turns melancholy and exuberant, but always fuelled by formal and sonic play, this collection—structured around a sequence of “Skeleton” acrostics, punctuated by a series of “Flesh” interludes—measures the fact of mortality against the pleasures and possibilities of being alive. Several poems were originally published in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop There Will Be Fire by Rory Carroll ( Putnam ) Nonfiction In October of 1984, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and nearly all the members of her Cabinet were staying at the Grand Hotel, in Brighton, after attending the annual Conservative Party Conference. In the early hours of October 12, Thatcher was in her room, going over some papers when a bomb went off, causing the hotel’s large chimney stack to collapse. Five people were killed; Thatcher survived. Carroll’s book offers a new and gripping account of the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s attack, which, he writes, “almost wiped out the British government.” As a police procedural, the Brighton case is captivating—involving, among other elements, a cache of weapons hidden in the woods and a tense police pursuit through Glasgow, which Carroll describes vividly. He also outlines the political intrigue and enmity that both preceded the attack and followed it. Decades after the bombing, Caroll’s fast-paced caper thoughtfully depicts an episode in a centuries-old struggle, prompting questions about terrorism, politics as violence, and the value of remembering (or of forgetting).
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How the I.R.A. Almost Blew Up the British Government, ” by Amy Davidson Sorkin A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ ( Knopf ) Fiction Set in contemporary Nigeria, this novel of radical class divisions examines political and domestic abuse through the stories of Ẹniọlá, a boy from an impoverished family, and Wúràọlá, a wealthy young medical resident who is engaged to the son of an aspiring politician. The lives of Adébáyọ̀’s characters are circumscribed by money and gender: Ẹniọlá is routinely humiliated for his poverty, beaten by his teachers, and even spat on, while Wúràọlá, enmeshed in cultural expectations of marriageability, hides her fiancé’s increasingly violent assaults from her family. A prayerlike refrain echoes through the novel: “God forbid, God forbid bad thing.” But all of Adébáyọ̀’s characters are inexorably drawn into the violence that leaks from profound societal inequities as they journey toward the terrifying moment in which their stories converge.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link ( Random House ) Fiction The stories in Link’s new collection may be billed as “reinvented fairy tales,” but they’re influenced by a vast pool of intertextual allusion that includes superhero movies and Icelandic legends, academic discourse, and the work of Shirley Jackson, Lucy Clifford, and William Shakespeare. One story, “The White Cat’s Divorce,” transposes a French tale to Colorado and replaces a tyrannical king with a Jeff Bezos-esque billionaire. Most, though, are more loosely wrapped around the tales that supposedly inspired them. Throughout the collection, Link suggests that all stories—and not just the ones that end with “happily ever after,” or begin with “Once upon a time”—are boxes too small for what we want them to contain. With a tale of spaceships, robots, and vampires and a story of Shakespearean actors travelling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Link deploys puns, clever genre work, and metafictional flourishes that infuse the collection with an air of flux and fragility. To read her is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Shape-Shifting Short-Story Collection Defies Categorization, ” by Kristen Roupenian The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng ( Riverhead ) Fiction The reserved, thoughtful protagonist of this novel grows up amid the shifting political regimes of mid-twentieth-century Singapore, where he strives to balance his loyalty to the traditional life of his fishing village with the appeal of the modern future promised by the government. As the novel proceeds from his discovery of islands that appear and disappear under mysterious circumstances to the new government’s creation of “brick buildings that gave the illusion of solidity on what the kampong knew was wet and shifting soil,” it illustrates the unsteadiness of both the physical environment and personal and political allegiances during a time of overwhelming historical change.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Siblings by Brigitte Reimann , translated from the German by Lucy Jones ( Transit ) Fiction In 1959, East Germany asked its writers to spend time in industrial plants—rubbing off their élitism while bringing culture to the working man. Reimann wrote “Siblings” while participating in this initiative, living in a remote town and working at a coal-production plant. The novel, newly translated into English after the uncensored manuscript was found by chance, takes place around 1960. Reimann’s heroine, Elisabeth, a twenty-four-year-old painter, has been leading a circle of worker-painters at a coal factory, but her clash with a hack artist who’s also in residence there will lead to a visit by state security. Meanwhile, she’s trying to dissuade her brother Uli, a young engineer blacklisted for having worked for a professor who defected, from leaving for the West himself. In a disarmingly direct style, alive with dialogue and detail, Reimann connects the contradictions of East Germany with the legacy of the Third Reich, and never whitewashes what it was like to forge a new society out of the devastations of war. A clear-eyed chronicler of life in the G.D.R. and of her own fissured commitments, Reimann brings to life the intoxicating, impossible allure of living your ideals.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How an East German Novelist Electrified Socialist Realism, ” by Joanna Biggs Picasso the Foreigner by Annie Cohen-Solal , translated from the French by Sam Taylor ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1882, Pablo Picasso settled in France in 1904. Cohen-Solal, a cultural historian, draws on dossiers found in French police archives, which include interrogation transcripts, rent receipts, and other material, to document the surveillance to which Picasso was subjected by the authorities, who considered him to be an “intruder.” Her biography illuminates Picasso’s paradoxical situation, in which the institutional forces “obsessed with the idea of a national cultural purity” viewed him with suspicion even as he was idolized by French galleries and critics.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Y/N by Esther Yi ( Astra House ) Fiction “Y/N,” a strange, funny, and at times gorgeous new novel by Esther Yi, explores the consequences of subsuming your entire life in a desire for what may or may not exist. Before the narrator, an American living in Berlin, encounters Moon, the youngest member of a K-pop band with a global following, her idea of transcendence is purely theoretical. When her flatmate drags her to one of the band’s concerts, Moon’s dancing—“fluid, tragic, ancient”—changes everything. After the concert, she discovers a new vocation: writing Moon-themed fan fiction. Following the online convention that allows readers to insert themselves into the story, she calls her protagonist Y/N: “Your Name.” The allure of “Y/N” fanfic is the illusion that your story is written just for you. The catch is that “you” must remain undefined so that anyone can inhabit it. By making it the subject of her novel, Yi transforms an embarrassing gimmick into a philosophical claim, about the way people go through life alone together, each experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to them.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What Is the Appeal of Fan Fiction?, ” by Katy Waldman How Data Happened by Chris Wiggins Matthew L. Jones ( Norton ) Nonfiction Wiggins’s and Jones’s fascinating history of data science begins in the eighteenth century with the entry of the word “statistics” into the English language. Numbers, a century ago, wielded the kind of influence that data wields today, they write; then, during the Second World War, statistics became more mathematical and more predictive—a necessary tool for calculating missile trajectories and cracking codes. The digitization of human knowledge proceeded apace, with libraries turning books first into microfiche and then into bits and bytes. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, commercial, governmental, and academic analysis of data had come to be defined as “data science,” which had been just one tool with which to produce knowledge and became, in many quarters, the only tool. “At its most hubristic, data science is presented as a master discipline, capable of reorienting the sciences, the commercial world, and governance itself,” Wiggins and Jones write. The emergence of a new discipline is thrilling, but the authors carefully note the attendant hazards.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Data Delusion, ” by Jill Lepore Spoken Word by Joshua Bennett ( Knopf ) Nonfiction This rich hybrid of memoir and history surveys the institutions that have shaped spoken-word poetry for the past five decades, from the Nuyorican Poets Café, in Manhattan, to the Get Me High Lounge, in Chicago, where the poetry slam originated, and the Internet—now perhaps the genre’s predominant venue. Bennett, a poet himself, pays tribute to his literary forebears, such as Miguel Algarín. Bookended with accounts of state-sponsored performances—the author’s own, alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, at the White House, in 2009, and Amanda Gorman’s recitation at President Biden’s Inauguration, in 2021—the book also chronicles the mainstreaming, for better or worse, of a radical tradition.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux , translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer ( Yale ) Nonfiction The winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature here studies the “great human meeting place” of the big-box superstore, keeping a diary of her visits to a mall near Paris and analyzing what it means to confront our desires and those of others in the marketplace. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley ( Knopf ) Nonfiction Kerry Howley’s “ Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State ” traces an odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state, searching for rhymes and resonance among the lives of its whistle-blowers, accidental truthtellers, targets, and victims—and also the rest of us, tapping at our phones, constantly feeding data onto the Internet, aware that it’s all accumulating somewhere, much of it accessible to the government. To the extent that “Bottoms Up” has a main character, it’s Reality Winner, a one-time National Security Agency contractor who leaked to the press a document about Russian cyberattacks on U.S. election officials and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison. When Reality—as Howley typically refers to her heroine—is on the page, we feel the intimacy of a novel. It’s as if Howley, in profiling her subject with such care, is trying to wash off the sticky, simplifying fiction imposed on her by the government and reveal the human underneath—suggesting how easily anyone could be reduced to a version of themselves they wouldn’t recognize.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Accidental Truthtellers of the Post-Privacy Era, ” by Peter C. Baker Ringmaster by Abraham Riesman ( Atria ) Nonfiction The man most credited with creating the idiosyncratic variety-show-soap-opera hybrid that is American professional wrestling today is Vince McMahon, the longtime kingpin of World Wrestling Entertainment, or W.W.E. In the past four decades, his company (until 2002 the World Wrestling Federation, or W.W.F.) has made household names of performers such as Macho Man Randy Savage, the Undertaker, and Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, while helping to warp their pseudo-sport medium into an international entertainment juggernaut. As Abraham Riesman writes in a compelling new biography, “ Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America ,” “If wrestling is an art, one man is both its Michelangelo and its Medici.” Riesman traces parallels between wrestling’s manipulated narratives and the wider cultural substitution of performance for substance which climaxed with the election of Donald Trump. “Vince had proven to the wrestling world what Trump would one day prove to everyone else,” she concludes. ”Nothing was true, and everything was permitted.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How Much Does Pro Wrestling Matter?, ” by Dan Greene March 29th Picks The Kingdom of Prep by Maggie Bullock ( HarperCollins ) Nonfiction Bullock’s new book is a buoyant and persuasive account of how the J. Crew brand’s fluctuating fortunes reflect Americans’ shifting attitudes toward dress, shopping, and identity. When Arthur Cinader started J. Crew, as a mail-order retailer, in 1983, he built a catalogue around tableaux featuring the upper crust at play, horsing around and lounging about, serious yet untroubled. The orders came flooding in. At the center of Bullock’s story is the malleability of prep, which she describes as “the bedrock of straightforward, unfettered, ‘American’ style.” But the book is also a business story. In the nineteen-nineties, the mail-order industry began to stagnate; around 2011, a “retail apocalypse” stymied brick-and-mortar stores. Bullock depicts J. Crew’s survival as the result of individual genius: that of the Cinaders, and, later, Mickey Drexler and Jenna Lyons. “The Kingdom of Prep” captures the viewpoint of the visionaries, and the “competitive, deeply bonded believers” who worked for them.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep, ” by Hua Hsu Ghosts of the Orphanage by Christine Kenneally ( PublicAffairs ) Nonfiction In this investigation of abuse and murder in orphanages in North America and Australia during the mid-twentieth century, Kenneally pursues what she calls “cold cases, twice over”: disappearances of children for whom official records are inaccurate or lacking, the main proof of their existence being the memories of their peers. Building her narrative on circumstantial evidence and the testimonies of survivors, Kenneally portrays an “invisible archipelago” of institutions—most, but not all, run by the Catholic Church—that, while operating independently, shared so many horrifying traits that their violence can only be termed institutionalized. The result is a gripping chronicle of the ways in which those in power ignored, or even encouraged, the ill-treatment of children across borders, cultures, and decades.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller Mirko Ilić Beth Kleber ( Monacelli ) Nonfiction No art director’s work was more influential than that of Milton Glaser, the co-founder and original design director of New York magazine. But his real achievement lies in what this anthology reveals: a breathtaking empire of imagery that encompassed two decades and was felt in later years. Anyone who came of age in the sixties and seventies will be astonished to discover that so much of the look of the time was specifically the work of Milton Glaser and Push Pin Studios. The Signet Shakespeare series, posters for rock bands, album covers for newly fashionable recordings of Baroque music, nineteenth-century classic novels, the outsides and insides of New York when it was an audacious newcomer—all of it was done in a manner that’s immediately recognizable. Glaser’s Day-Glo, high-low approach combined the blaring-glaring palette of advertising with Beaux-Arts draftsmanship and the dense, geometric ordering of the European avant-garde. The result, as this anthology makes clear, provided a visual vocabulary for an entire era.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again, ” by Adam Gopnik The Absent Moon by Luiz Schwarcz , translated by Eric M. B. Becker ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction The Brazilian writer and publisher Luiz Schwarcz’s brief autobiography “ The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression ,” translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker, is restrained and full of explicit omissions and yet offers astounding emotional clarity. Schwarcz, the son of a Holocaust survivor, sees his project—or his responsibility—as a double one: to share but not interpret the profound suffering he’s faced in his lifetime with depression and bipolar disorder; and to tell, again without interpretation, what he can of the family story that underlies both his struggles with mental illness and his instinct, or compulsion, toward silence. Schwarcz writes about his illnesses and their effects, which have ranged from obsessive, manic work habits and a tendency to create conflict in his early professional years to intense anxiety and self-harm in middle age, in prose marked by a clarity that comes from total, rigorous precision. “The Absent Moon” ’s rigor is, ultimately, not just a stylistic choice, but an emotional and ethical one. Schwarcz acknowledges the confusion and disorientation inherent to reckoning with historical pain and horror, while also transcending the comforting but—to him—false notion that his depression could be fully explained or understood.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Luiz Schwarcz Writes About Depression But Refuses to Interpret It, ” by Lily Meyer We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction In 2018, a white woman named Jennifer Hart intentionally drove her S.U.V. off a strip of the Pacific Coast Highway, in northern California, down a hundred-foot drop into the ocean. Inside were Jennifer’s wife, Sarah, and the couple’s six adopted Black children. As later reporting revealed, the Harts were able to adopt and retain custody of the children despite years of mounting evidence of abuse and neglect, including child-protection investigations across three states, and despite the fact that three of the children had family members, in their home state of Texas, who wanted them back. “ We Were Once a Family ,” Roxanna Asgarian’s moving and superbly reported book about the Hart tragedy, brings to light the racial inequities of the child-welfare system, which, as the scholar Dorothy Roberts writes, too often harshly scrutinizes and punishes Black families and children rather than protecting them. A grim truth that emerges from Asgarian’s patient, compassionate reporting is that removing a child from his birth or adoptive home and placing him into the foster-care system is itself a form of trauma.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Who Decides What a Family Is?, ” by Jessica Winter An Autobiography of Skin by Lakiesha Carr ( Pantheon ) Fiction In the three narratives that make up this powerful début, Black women from Texas reckon with their complex relationships to their bodies, which are by turns deprived of sex, rendered husk-like after childbirth, and physically battered. One woman finds refuge from a loveless marriage in gambling; another is so undone by news stories of violence against Black people that she endeavors to alter her children’s skin color. In the book’s slow-boil closing tale, the narrator, bereft following a breakup, shares an extrasensory power with her grandmother, who says, “If we were chosen, it was only because we continued to love, despite our pain and disappointments over many lifetimes.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry ( Viking ) Fiction In this tragic tale, Barry, a writer of almost Joycean amplitude, excavates the buried tensions at the heart of Irish identity. Tom Kettle is a retired policeman living alone in a Dublin suburb during the mid-nineteen-nineties. After growing up in a Church-sponsored orphanage where the young wards were sexually abused, he has emerged into the normality of middle-class life, but his career forced him into complicity with the system that brutalized him. When the novel begins, Kettle has lost his wife and two adult children, and his career comes back to haunt him when two former colleagues show up with an unsolved case from his past. He is metaphysically divided, adrift between past and present, the imagined and the real. His daughter, Winnie, who died of a heroin overdose, is always dropping in to chat; pages go by before Kettle grasps that he is talking to himself. Kettle remains, in the midst of untold anguish, a “very living man,” intensely receptive to the world and its marvels. Barry’s casually exquisite prose, capable of lyrical expansion but always firmly rooted in the dialect of the tribe, seems to capture them all.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Accursed Brilliance of Sebastian Barry, ” by Giles Harvey The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie ( Penguin Press ) Fiction “I was used to being the object of anger,” the down-on-her-luck narrator of this vibrant picaresque says. In her mid-thirties, she flees a dead-end job and a failing marriage, embarking on a journey that leads to a confrontation with childhood trauma. En route, she contends with her possibly homicidal grandmother; lives in a van owned by her grandmother’s ailing accountant; searches for her mother and stepfather, who disappeared years earlier; eludes her abusive biological father; and kindles a promising new romance. “I seemed to be trapped in a continual reckoning between present and past,” she notes. McKenzie parlays that reckoning into a vibrant novel that combines slapstick comedy with poignancy.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop March 22nd Picks Users by Colin Winnette ( Soft Skull ) Fiction The protagonist of this novel is a virtual-reality designer who crafts popular “Original Experiences,” which draw on his most disturbing memories: “That way, the whole thing could be forgotten, or at least its potency could be reduced.” But one day the designer begins receiving death threats, and shortly afterward ethical concerns about the technology arise. As the designer seeks to resolve both problems, his world metamorphoses into an augmented reality itself: his wife and daughters, chillingly unknowable, remain nameless for much of the book; their house, under constant renovation, becomes an unfamiliar maze.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop I Am Still with You by Emmanuel Iduma ( Algonquin ) Nonfiction Combining memoir and travel writing, Iduma uses personal loss—of close relatives—to reflect on the history of the “faultily amalgamated” country of Nigeria. Rummaging through derelict regional archives and filling lacunae with his relatives’ memories, he attempts to piece together the story of his namesake, an uncle who died in the Biafran War. After the war, this uncle frequently appeared in the dreams of the oldest man in their family, and Iduma draws a parallel with the ghostly unresolved tensions around the conflict, which is not taught in many Nigerian schools. This adroitly crafted work seeks closure for “a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond ( Crown ) Nonfiction The author’s first book, “Evicted,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, renders a vivid portrait of eight families struggling to stay housed in Milwaukee. In his new book, he offers a bracing argument about how and why the rest of us countenance poverty and are complicit in it. More manifesto than narrative, “Poverty, by America” is urgent and accessible, a slim volume full of revelations—about the misallocation of government aid, with public benefits unduly assisting the affluent—and handily presented statistics and studies. Desmond’s refreshing social criticism eschews the easy and often smug allure of abstraction, in favor of plainspoken practicality. Calling on readers to become “poverty abolitionists,” he proposes a host of solutions, exhibiting varying levels of ambition. “The goal is singular—to end the exploitation of the poor—but the means are many,” he writes. The book is a moral gut punch.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ How America Manufactures Poverty, ” by Margaret Talbot Biography of X by Catherine Lacey ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction In this intricate, metafictional novel, a recently widowed writer embarks on a biography of her late wife, an enigmatic artist, author, and musician known only as X. As the writer delves deeper into X’s life and work—distinguished by X’s penchant for adopting Cindy Shermanesque personae—Lacey unfolds a startling counter-history, in which the United States has just reunified, having dissolved, after the Second World War, into three states: one liberal, one libertarian, and one theocratic. Throughout, Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes—X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra—into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Nature Book by Tom Comitta ( Coffee House ) Fiction Tom Comitta’s experimental novel is entirely made up of descriptions of the natural world copied from canonical novels and spliced together in strangely mesmerizing combinations. The book feels, at its best, symphonic, both in its structure—four movements, the third of which is the most distinct and the last of which references the first and goes out in a brilliant burst—and in the way language echoes, builds, works its accretive magic. It’s oddly affecting to see other aspects of the natural world, like springtime, approached again and again by different writers, as happens in a section that guides us through the seasons. The joining of different human consciousnesses, different perspectives and syntaxes, creates a strong tension; at times, the effect can verge on prose poetry. “The Nature Book” is occasionally disorienting and alienating. But, in this way, it resembles a wilderness in one of the word’s original senses: a place that is self-willed, a separate, self-sustaining ecosystem with its own imperatives independent of ours.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Searching for Unfamiliar Terrain in ‘The Nature Book’ ” by Cara Blue Adams A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs by Gulchehra Hoja ( Hachette ) Nonfiction This chronicle of the transformations of the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang opens in 2018, on a night when more than twenty members of Hoja’s family were arrested, after she began reporting on the Uyghur internment camps run by the Chinese government. Hoja recounts sweet childhood memories of life in Ürümqi, and the way that locals gradually found themselves to be strangers in their own land, when activities like texting someone overseas or watching Turkish soap operas became excuses for arrest. Descriptions of catastrophe are interspersed with lines of quiet devastation. Hoja’s decision to move to America for her career ripped “a hole” in her family: “the hole would slowly close, like a wound healing over time. But it would knit back together with me on the outside.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal , translated from the French by Jessica Moore ( Archipelago ) Fiction For more than twenty years, the French writer Maylis de Kerangal has been one of our preëminent novelists of work. In “Painting Time,” she studied a group of trompe-l’oeil artists; elsewhere, she’s explored restaurant life (“The Cook”), a heart transplant (“Mend the Living”), and the construction of an ambitious suspension bridge (“Birth of a Bridge”). Her latest book in English translation, “Eastbound,” is the first not to center a vocation, but it does showcase her interest in process, how people accomplish a task during a set period of time. The book follows Aliocha, a twenty-year-old conscript, as he desperately tries to escape the Trans-Siberian railway, which is carrying his regiment to army training. His defection requires violence, foresight, and the help of others, and De Kerangal’s long, racing sentences heighten the suspense, collapsing time and space. By the end, she’s shown how language, when harnessed correctly, can put entire worlds on the page.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Novelist Watching Us Work, ” by Lauren Oyler March 15th Picks Big Swiss by Jen Beagin ( Scribner ) Fiction Greta, the aimless protagonist of this darkly comic novel, works as a transcriptionist for a sex-and-relationship coach—“Greta liked knowing people’s secrets”—and quickly becomes obsessed with one of her employer’s clients, whom she nicknames Big Swiss. She appreciates Big Swiss’s blunt honesty and her impatience with people “who can’t stop saying the word ‘trauma.’ ” After a chance meeting in a dog park, the two women begin an affair, which causes Greta to question various aspects of her life: her residence in a near-uninhabitable farmhouse, the suicide of her mother when she was thirteen, her own suicidal impulses. Big Swiss, Greta reflects, may have something to teach her “about eradicating self-pity and perhaps replacing it with something productive.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction Roving across the United States, this survey explores the precarious environments in which many Americans now live, places irreversibly altered by floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought. “Managed retreat” is a popular term in climate discourse, but whole communities, from Arizona ranchers to Indigenous tribes in Louisiana, face disaster without any sort of plan. Victims of megafires in California find themselves at the mercy of the state’s housing crunch. Bittle argues that the approaches of both government and the insurance industry are totally inadequate for today’s dilemmas: Where should we build? What should we protect? And what do we owe those who lose everything? Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages The Real Work by Adam Gopnik ( Liveright ) Nonfiction Gopnik, a longtime staff writer, learns to drive, to draw, and to bake bread in a perceptive and personal account considering the elusive nature of mastery, the accumulated practice that yields not just achievement but accomplishment. His interest in the marriage of skill, tradition, artistry, and finesse—what magicians call “ The Real Work "—was born in a piece he wrote for the magazine in 2008, and the book draws from his writing in these pages.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Mira Bunting is the twenty-nine-year-old founder of Birnam Wood, an activist collective, in New Zealand, that illegally plants gardens on unused land. One day, while trespassing on a large farm, she stumbles upon Robert Lemoine, a billionaire drone manufacturer who offers to finance the group. In fact, Lemoine has his own agenda—he’s purchasing the farm in secret, in order to extract rare-earth minerals that will make him the richest man in history—but this is just the first of the novel’s many sleights of hand. The story, which initially appears to be a study of young, white leftists grappling with the ethics of taking Lemoine’s money, evolves into a shocking tale of deceit, misunderstanding, and violence. Catton, who became the youngest winner of the Booker for her previous novel, “The Luminaries,” wants to revive plot as a literary mode, and her book’s biggest twist is that every choice matters, albeit in ways we might not have anticipated.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Eleanor Catton Wants Plot to Matter Again, ” by B. D. McClay The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer ( Riverhead ) Nonfiction This travelogue examines spiritual customs from around the world, meditating on the idea of paradise. Iyer visits the mosques of Iran, the insular streets of North Korea, the mountains of Japan, Aboriginal Australia, and Belfast (the “spiritual home of civil war”). Many would-be Edens have, variously, been riven by conflict, divided by religion, and wracked by colonization. Grappling with “a world that seems always to simmer in a state of answerlessness,” Iyer gradually reconciles himself to the contradictions of earthly paradise. “The most beautiful of flowers has its roots in what we regard as muck and filth,” he reflects, contemplating Buddhism’s emblematic lotus. “It’s only grit that makes the radiance possible.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop March 8th Picks The Written World And The Unwritten World by Italo Calvino , translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein ( Mariner ) Nonfiction Born a hundred years ago, Calvino was, word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century. His era and his experiments with genre, most memorably in his novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” make it natural for readers to think of him as a postmodernist, a master of pastiche, an ironist—to class him with Jorge Luis Borges or the members of the OuLiPo, the French avant-garde literary society to which he belonged. Yet the essays newly collected here remind us how much Calvino loved the craftsmanship of the pre-modern era, worshipping the episodic approach to storytelling of Ariosto, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Rabelais. These writers, he believed, came closest to the oral telling and retelling of tales, creating an “infinite multiplicity of stories handed down from person to person.” Calvino sought to reclaim the bond between intricate narrative forms and entertainment. In response to a 1985 survey, “Why Do You Write?,” he declared, “I consider that entertaining readers, or at least not boring them, is my first and binding social duty.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Worlds of Italo Calvino, ” by Merve Emre The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Set in rural Australia in the late nineteenth century, this ambitious novel assembles a band of characters—including a white farmer, an Aboriginal farmhand, and a Swedish painter—who are drawn together by the disappearance, in a dust storm, of a six-year-old boy. McFarlane’s figures emerge in intricate detail, defined by their petty desires, their moral imperfections, and their relationship both to the cataclysm of colonization and to the grandiosity of the landscape and the sun, which, for some, takes on near-divine significance. “There’s no way to describe these skies,” the painter writes to a colleague in Europe. “If I had to try, I would say that they are light shipwrecked by dark.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy ( Norton ) Fiction In this acutely observant novel, Goldsworthy has constructed a sharply etched variant of the Yugoslavia where she grew up. The book’s main action begins in 1981. Milena Urbanska, the forceful and self-centered protagonist, is the daughter of the Vice-President of an unnamed Eastern Bloc country. Soon after her boyfriend’s suicide, Milena meets Jason Connor, a young Anglo-Irish poet; she falls for him, and follows him to London, where Jason’s true awfulness gradually begins to reveal itself, with wonderful plausibility. Though “Iron Curtain” is a story about personal, not political, disloyalty, the character drama is thrown into high relief against the author’s shrewd rendering of both East and West.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Serbian British Writer Revitalizes the Novel of the Émigré, ” by Thomas Mallon Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren , translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé ( Astra ) Fiction Poised at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, this novel blends the thrill of mystery with the curiosity and depth of philosophical inquiry. Fifteen years after Cecilia Berg goes missing, her husband, Martin, is haunted by memories of their shared youthful intellectual ambitions, by the artistic struggles of their friend Gustav, and by professional and family worries. Narrated alternately by Martin and his daughter, Rakel, the novel refracts Cecilia’s absence through the literary and artistic concerns of those who remain. Rakel reflects that a picture “is always created at the expense of another picture.” She says, “The Cecilia of Gustav’s paintings pushed another Cecilia out of the frame. . . . And who was she?” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Life on Delay by John Hendrickson ( Knopf ) Nonfiction “Nearly every decision in my life has been shaped by my struggle to speak,” Hendrickson writes in this moving exploration of stuttering. A stutterer since childhood, he spent years in therapy, waiting in vain “for this strange thing to exit my body.” Many stutterers do largely overcome their impediment (including the actress Emily Blunt, whom Hendrickson interviews), but others never do. Why this is so remains a neuroscientific mystery. Hendrickson presents a wealth of fascinating detail (virtually all stutterers, for instance, can sing and recite fluently), but the real draw lies in his account of his personal experiences, which convey something essential about the challenge of being human.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan ( Norton ) Nonfiction There are two sides to the phosphorus problem—one shortage, the other excess. Since the early nineteen-sixties and the start of the Green Revolution, global consumption of phosphorus fertilizers has more than quadrupled. How long the world’s reserves might last, given this trend, is a matter of some debate. Egan, a journalist who for many years reported on the Great Lakes, explains that phosphorus is critical not just to crop yields but also to basic biology; in vertebrates, bones are mostly made up of calcium phosphate, as is tooth enamel. But our dependence on this element—and lavish deployment of it—has also led to agricultural runoff that is creating vast dead zones in our lakes and seas. Egan’s book paints a grim picture, but, as he notes in the book’s earliest pages, it “is not intended to be the last word,” and there’s room in its pages for some hope of averting catastrophe.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Phosphorus Saved Our Way of Life—and Now Threatens to End It, ” by Elizabeth Kolbert From Our Pages Brooklyn's Last Secret by Leslie Stein ( Drawn & Quarterly ) Fiction This illustrated tale of a less-than-famous rock band on a summer bus tour is full of poignant details and not-so-definitive best-of lists.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop March 1st Picks I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai ( Viking ) Fiction Makkai’s latest novel is being marketed as an irresistible whodunnit. But its deeper project is a critique of true crime, charging the genre on three counts: exploiting real people for entertainment, chasing gore rather than studying systemic problems, and objectifying victims, most of whom are pretty, white, rich, and female. The book’s protagonist is Bodie Kane, a podcast host teaching a two-week course at her old high school. For a class project, one of the students is making a podcast about the murder of Thalia Keith, an old classmate of Kane’s, and the imprisonment of Omar Evans, a Black athletic trainer charged with the crime. The two characters endure in our protagonist’s memory—as does a music teacher, Dennis Bloch, whom she suspects might have been involved in the killing. As Kane revisits this dead-girl story, the book brilliantly interrogates dead-girl stories in general, modelling an approach that avoids fetishizing revelations of harm. In Makkai’s hands, at least, crime writing can be as ethical as it is absorbing.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ A Novel That Confronts Our True-Crime Obsession, ” by Katy Waldman Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug , translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Fiction Seemingly mundane occurrences grow increasingly surreal in these razor-sharp stories, none longer than a few pages. An ornithologist dispels the part of her brain that recognizes birds; a visitor to a Tripadvisor forum dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s country house strikes up two Internet friendships; an institution is branded the “Mational Nuseum.” Øyehaug’s dizzyingly inventive fictions are suffused with uncanny observations about the natural world and a pervasive, tongue-in-cheek intertextuality. The title is a Baudelaire reference, and, just before the reader encounters a photograph of the poet’s scowling visage, the narrator imagines him having a prophetic glimpse of her book and thinking, “Evil flowers, my ass.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson ( Princeton Classics ) Nonfiction This posthumous treatise on grief, by a biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, takes these three thinkers as case studies, examining the formative role that loss played in their intellectual development. Using diaries and letters, Richardson details his subjects’ experiences in the wake of loved ones’ untimely deaths, and shows how each, debilitated by sorrow, sought solace and found liberation in nature’s universalities and in the particularities of human experience. The result is an elegant and useful rumination on resilience as a practice, achievable through study, creation, companionship, and deep reflection. As Thoreau asked, “What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara ( St. Martin’s ) Nonfiction Much of the world’s cobalt—vital to the batteries that power cell phones, laptops, and much else—comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mined in conditions that this intrepid exposé characterizes as “predation for profit,” carried out at “minimum cost and maximum suffering.” Kara draws from interviews with miners, some as young as ten, whose work puts them at risk of respiratory ailments and heavy-metal poisoning. Parents tell him of children lost when tunnels collapsed. His sympathetic, often enraging account is animated by the idea that the first step in ending such calamities is “advancing the ability of the Congolese people to conduct their own research and safely speak for themselves.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop February 22nd Picks Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon ( HarperVia ) Fiction In this bildungsroman wrapped in a migrant story, Lola, a pregnant Ghanaian, travels to New York to join her fiancé, an American marine. After he ghosts her, she ends up near Washington, D.C., relying on the generosity of a succession of strangers and friends to navigate the harsh realities of life in the U.S. Her experience of sisterhood and solidarity among women reshapes her understanding of her relationship with her own mother. “In this world, you never know when you’ll be the one in need of help,” one benefactor tells Lola. “Who knows, one day my child might need someone too.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman ( Harper ) Nonfiction Schulman, a staff writer, takes readers on a fizzy tour through ninety-five years of the Academy Awards’ most fractious moments. From the Hollywood blacklist to Harvey Weinstein’s dirty tricks, from surprise appearances by Sacheen Littlefeather and Snow White to the Slap of 2022, the hand-to-hand combat behind the cyclorama walls comes to light in this deeply reported book, which was excerpted on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop This Other Eden by Paul Harding ( Norton ) Fiction This historical novel takes inspiration from the formation, in the mid-nineteenth century—and, in 1912, the forced eviction—of a mixed-race fishing community on Malaga Island, Maine. Harding’s version is called Apple Island, and he movingly depicts the islanders’ dispossession. He imbues his characters with mythological weight—a world-drowning flood is the island’s foundational story—without losing the texture of their daily lives, which are transformed by a white missionary. Of his presence, one islander observes, “No good ever came of being noticed by mainlanders,” foreshadowing the arrival of eugenicist doctors wielding skull-measuring calipers, a project to remake the island as a tourist destination, and the destruction of the community.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop February 15th Picks The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner ( Princeton Classics ) Nonfiction The garrulous, much widowed Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” has become one of the most beloved characters in English literature. Turner, a medieval-literature professor at Oxford, whose previous book was the first full-scale biography of Chaucer written by a woman, here tells us where the Wife of Bath came from—in terms both of literary precursors and of actual women’s lives in Chaucer’s England—and then, once the character was hatched, where the idea of such a woman has gone in the course of English literature. Turner emphasizes the character’s realness: “The Wife of Bath is the first ordinary woman in English literature. By that I mean the first mercantile, working, sexually active woman—not a virginal princess or queen, not a nun, witch, or sorceress, not a damsel in distress nor a functional servant character, not an allegory.” She is a regular person, who gets up on her horse and reels off eight hundred and twenty-eight lines (her prologue is much longer than any other pilgrim’s) of reminiscence, opinion, and merriment.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Feminist Forerunner in Chaucer’s 'Canterbury Tales,’ ” by Joan Acocella February 8th Picks When the News Broke by Heather Hendershot ( Chicago ) Nonfiction This carefully detailed historical account presents the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, as a critical juncture for the American press. The basic story is familiar: Hubert Humphrey won the nomination despite not having entered a single primary, and the Party’s antiwar forces were defeated at almost every turn while police and the National Guard manhandled demonstrators and cameramen in the streets. But Hendershot, a media historian at M.I.T., takes us through it virtually hour by hour, from the point of view of the news networks. Inspecting assertions made at the time that the news media inflamed the conflict, she weighs the evidence and concludes that broadcasters operated with “tremendous fairness.” Yet she proposes that the convention presents an instructional context for our own moment—it was, she writes, “a tipping point for widespread distrust of the mainstream media.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ When Americans Lost Faith in the News, ” by Louis Menand After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz ( Liveright ) Fiction “The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” Schwartz writes, in the collective voice of her powerful genre-bending début novel. Composed of fragments, the narrative knits together the lives of feminist and lesbian icons of the twentieth century, including Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, and, most prominently, the Italian writer Lina Poletti, who “was always beckoning us onwards into a future we did not yet know how to live.” Schwartz finds moments of levity amid the women’s struggles, as when Sibilla Aleramo’s 1906 novel, “Una Donna,” about an unhappy wife and mother, baffles male editors with its popularity. “Perhaps there was a new market in boring stories about women, they remarked.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Victory City by Salman Rushdie ( Random House ) Fiction In his fifteenth novel, which is part adventure story, part myth, and part cautionary tale, Rushdie imagines a kingdom created almost overnight by a woman who merges with a goddess in fourteenth-century India. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Why You'll Never Find the One by Sarah Akinterinwa ( Chronicle ) Nonfiction In this humorous guide, the cartoonist Sarah Akinterinwa offers advice for diving into the contemporary dating scene, and comics depicting what it’s like in the deep end.
Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo ( Simon & Schuster ) Nonfiction In 1848, Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery in Georgia by disguising themselves—the light-skinned Ellen as a sickly white gentleman, William as his slave—and making their way north by train and steamer. Woo’s history draws from a variety of sources, including the Crafts’ own account, to reconstruct a “journey of mutual self-emancipation,” while artfully sketching the background of a nation careering toward civil war. The Crafts’ improbable escape, and their willingness to tell the story afterward on the abolitionist lecture circuit, turned them into a sensation, and Woo argues that they deserve a permanent place in the national consciousness.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop From Our Pages Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl ( Spiegel & Grau ) Fiction In nineteen-seventies South Korea, Fenkl’s narrator, Insu, the teen-age son of a Korean mother and a German American father, moves between the Westernized world of a U.S. Army base and the more traditional society of his mother’s relatives, finding that he is at once at home and a stranger in each. In Fenkl’s ambitious and expansive novel, part of which originated in the magazine, Insu’s understanding of time and place is transformed by his encounters with his mother’s brother, Big Uncle.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop February 1st Picks The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner ( Liveright ) Nonfiction In this wry, wonderfully written history, Kreiner reveals that the problem of attention far predates smartphones. The book studies the monks of the fourth through the ninth centuries, whose devotion to God was tested, again and again, by the lure of distraction. (“All I do is eat, sleep, drink, and be negligent,” John of Dalyatha lamented.) Kreiner, a professor at the University of Georgia, narrates the monks’ attempts to focus, which involved restrictions on sleep and sexual urges, on footwear, on socializing, and on the frequency and flavor of meals. The monks’ greatest asset, though, was that they had something to focus on : their faith. For those of us who don’t live in monasteries, a worthy object of attention may be harder to find.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention, ” by Casey Cep The Sense of Wonder by Matthew Salesses ( Little, Brown ) Fiction This playfully self-referential novel examines Asian American identity through the twin lenses of basketball and Korean TV dramas. Won Lee, a point guard for the Knicks, is the only Asian player in the N.B.A. His girlfriend, Carrie Kang, is a TV executive who dreams of producing “a Korean American Korean drama.” When Won leads his team to seven straight victories and becomes a media sensation, Carrie develops a series about a Korean basketball star and a sportswriter. Salesses’s novel, mimicking the melodrama of K-dramas, abounds in reversals—betrayals, infidelities, a cancer diagnosis. Such tropes, and the complex lives they reveal, are used to undermine the “model minority myth” these characters hope to transcend.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker ( Black Cat ) Fiction Abigail, the narrator of this formally innovative novel, lies awake in a hotel, running through the next day’s lecture, on the economist John Maynard Keynes. Her method of remembering is the loci technique: she envisions herself walking through her house, its rooms corresponding to her talking points. In her mental tour, Abigail is accompanied by a mental version of Keynes who tries to keep her on track, even as she careers off onto tangents, about problems domestic and professional, including a recent denial of tenure and doubts about the originality of her intellectual project. The novel succeeds in interweaving an essayistic impulse with the vulnerabilities attendant on any dark night of the soul.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop The New Life by Tom Crewe ( Scribner ) Fiction The principal characters of this début novel are modelled on real Victorian figures: John Addington Symonds, a scholar, poet, and critic, and the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis. The book opens in 1894, when the two are preparing to take a grave risk: they set out to collaborate on a book, about the lives of sexual “inverts,” which is bound to occasion scandal. Throughout the novel, the fictional Symonds lives out, in a small way, his vision of the future; what he wants is a sexuality that belongs within a larger picture of the good and the beautiful. Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian; his Victorians sound like human beings, not period pieces. More unusually, he has found a style that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Victorian Reformers Who Defended Same-Sex Desire, ” by Nikhil Krishnan The Scythian Empire by Christopher I. Beckwith ( Princeton Classics ) Nonfiction Often regarded by historians as a collection of savage tribes, the Scythians emerge as a pivotal force of the ancient world in this monumental history. Although the Scythian Empire, spanning the Eurasian Steppe, was indeed geographically diffuse, Beckwith highlights previously unnoticed connections among its far-flung groups, paying particular attention to linguistic data, which show that a surprising number of familiar words and concepts have roots in Scythian. He likewise traces the ways in which elements of Scythian culture shaped later polities, including the Persian Empire, and claims that the Scythians “effectively produced the great shared cultural flowering known as the Classical Age.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction In this posthumous volume, the late anthropologist and anarchist continues his reëxamination of the Enlightenment by expanding the story of communities that contributed to its thought. His focus is the pirate settlements founded on the east coast of Madagascar at the turn of the eighteenth century. Having conducted field research there and consulted historical sources, Graeber hypothesizes about a loosely organized pirate kingdom created from the intermarriage of pirates and the Malagasy people. Graeber believes that pirates’ social organization was often more egalitarian than popular portrayals suggest: in a refuge far from European courts, radical political experiments were already under way.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop January 25th Picks Spare by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex ( Random House ) Nonfiction This much anticipated and compellingly artful autobiography depicts the Duke of Sussex’s life in a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth, his decade of military service, and his relationship with Meghan Markle, with numerous bombshells sprinkled throughout. The memoir, luridly leaked, is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its voice and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist, has a novelist’s eye for detail and a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon; elevating Shakespearean flourishes may give readers a shiver of recognition, while descriptions of the patched, starched bed linens at Balmoral hint at the constricting fabric of monarchy. Haunted by the spectres of family tragedy and dysfunction, “Spare” takes aim at the media, the monarchy, and—most of all—the prince’s own flesh and blood.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ The Haunting of Prince Harry, ” by Rebecca Mead Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes , translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein ( Astra House ) Fiction Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Professing Criticism by John Guillory ( University of Chicago Press ) Nonfiction Guillory, a literature professor best known for his landmark work “Cultural Capital” (1993), traces how criticism evolved from a wide-ranging amateur pursuit, requiring no specialist qualifications, into a profession and a discipline housed within the academy. Professionalization, he argues, secured intellectual autonomy for criticism’s practitioners but did so at the eventual expense of reach and relevance, as the field became ever more minutely specialized and preoccupied by its own procedures and politics than by the literary works under review. With funding for the humanities being slashed and enrollments in English courses dwindling, Guillory writes that the knowledge and pleasure transmitted by literary criticism in the university may become “a luxury that can no longer be afforded.” Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?, ” by Merve Emre Wade in the Water by Nyani Nkrumah ( Amistad ) Fiction Set in 1982, this immersive début novel is narrated largely by an adolescent girl who lives in an all-Black neighborhood in the fictional town of Ricksville, Mississippi. After a white graduate student moves there to conduct research for a thesis on Black migration and the civil-rights movement, the two begin a cautious friendship. Chapters told from the graduate student’s perspective relate a turbulent personal history that includes a stay in a psychiatric hospital and a father who was a Klansman. Though the novel occasionally becomes didactic, Nkrumah resists giving her two main characters a predictable relationship, and her story uncloaks heroes in marvellously unexpected places.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop January 11th Picks From Our Pages Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) Nonfiction The final book by the formidable journalist and longtime staff writer Janet Malcolm is an intimate and elegiac memoir organized around a series of family photographs. Documenting everything from Malcolm’s flight out of Prague before the start of the Second World War to her time at William Shawn’s New Yorker , “Still Pictures” grew out of her 2018 essay “ Six Glimpses of the Past.
” An excerpt ran on newyorker.com Buy on Amazon Bookshop Books & Fiction E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Page-Turner By Alexandra Schwartz Photo Booth By Chris Wiley Under Review By Kevin Lozano Books Sections News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On More Customer Care Shop The New Yorker Buy Covers and Cartoons Condé Nast Store Digital Access Newsletters Jigsaw Puzzle RSS About Careers Contact F.A.Q.
Media Kit Press Accessibility Help © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices Facebook X Snapchat YouTube Instagram Do Not Sell My Personal Info
"
|
2,269 | 2,022 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — Zero trust: The new security paradigm | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/zero-trust-the-new-security-paradigm"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — Zero trust: The new security paradigm November 15, 2022 Zero trust: The new security paradigm Presented with PwC In this issue… Why enterprises are getting zero trust wrong How zero-trust methods thwart malicious hackers How zero trust closes security gaps in multicloud tech stacks 3 ways to overcome the cybersecurity skills gap (sponsored) 5 reasons zero trust is the future of endpoint security Why Kubernetes security challenges call for a zero-trust strategy Zero trust is too trusting, why ZTNA 2.0 won’t be The manufacturing industry’s security epidemic needs a zero-trust cure How zero-trust architectures can prevent supply chain attacks Why zero trust needs to live on the edge In the ‘80s hit cop drama, Hill Street Blues, sergeant Phil Esterhaus ended every daily roll call with, “Let’s be careful out there.” Fast-forward a few decades, and that mantra is one CISOs should use to lead their teams.
Today’s hybrid workforce, hybrid cloud, ransomware-infused world makes it imperative for teams to take extra caution. In short, trust no one, authenticate everyone. That’s where zero trust comes in. More than a single product, zero trust is a framework built to ensure that everyone is identified, authorized and authenticated before they access your applications and data. In a zero-trust environment, the network edge is everywhere – so that’s where security needs to be, too.
In our special report, we look at zero-trust architectures from all angles, including why companies are getting it wrong. We also dig into Kubernetes deployments, endpoint security and multicloud and supply chain management. We hope you find both strategic and tactical guidance in our special report. And, yes, be careful out there.
— Dan Muse Managing Editor and Content Director Why enterprises are getting zero trust wrong Tim Keary The reality of zero-trust adoption is that it’s a journey and not a destination. There is no quick fix for implementing zero trust because it’s a security methodology designed to be continuously applied throughout the environment to control user access. One of the most significant reasons that enterprises are getting zero trust wrong is not just about understanding what zero trust is, but also knowing how to apply it, and which products can implement zero trust.
READ MORE “ Organizations that get zero trust wrong are the ones looking for a quick fix or silver bullet.
” — Baber Amin, COO of Veridium.
How zero-trust methods thwart malicious hackers Taryn Plumb How zero trust closes security gaps in multicloud tech stacks Louis Columbus 3 ways to overcome the cybersecurity skills gap Vikas Agarwal and Matt Gorham, PwC Sponsored 5 reasons zero trust is the future of endpoint security Louis Columbus Endpoints that rely on the firmware to provide self-healing, and resilience enable ZTNA frameworks to identify every endpoint on a network — whether the device is connected or not.
READ MORE “ Zero trust requires protection everywhere — and that means ensuring some of the biggest vulnerabilities like endpoints and cloud environments are automatically and always protected.
” — Kapil Raina , CrowdStrike Why Kubernetes security challenges call for a zero-trust strategy Victor Dey The Kubernetes community and service mesh providers are linking arms toward standardizing on zero-trust security.
READ MORE Zero trust is too trusting, why ZTNA 2.0 won’t be Tim Keary ZTNA 2.0 applies least privileged access and implements continuous trust verification, monitoring user and app behavior.
READ MORE The manufacturing industry’s security epidemic needs a zero-trust cure Louis Columbus How zero-trust architectures can prevent supply chain attacks Victor Dey Why zero trust needs to live on the edge Louis Columbus Baking in zero-trust architecture can help secure edge computing and IoT in the cloud.
READ MORE Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,270 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — A Roadmap for Sustainable Data Centers | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-the-sustainable-data-center"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — A Roadmap for Sustainable Data Centers October 19, 2023 A Roadmap for Sustainable Data Centers Presented with In this issue… 5 Ways to Rein in Data Center Consumption in 2024 Revolutionizing data center cooling: A path to energy efficiency and sustainability Paying it forward: PayPal’s journey to sustainability Accelerate growth and maximize efficiency with a modern data center (sponsored) Securing generative AI starts with sustainable data centers The Ripple Effect of Regulations: How Policy Is Reshaping the Data Center Landscape The cyber risks of overheating data centers In this month’s special issue, we cast a spotlight on a critical concern in the realm of information technology: the evolution of sustainable data centers.
With the explosion of data processing needs for increasingly sophisticated AI, real-time streaming and analytics, the environmental implications of power-hungry data centers have come into sharp focus.
IT and data leaders are now making efforts to curb energy consumption and reduce their environmental footprint in line with organizational sustainability goals. It’s also smart: it can save costs and thus improve the bottom line as well.
— Aliyah Mohammed Associate Managing Editor 5 Ways to Rein in Data Center Consumption in 2024 Sharon Goldman IT and data leaders have known for years that data centers are power-hungry and energy-intensive, but demand for data centers has also skyrocketed thanks to the growth of remote work and high-speed streaming, as well as the explosion of generative AI models and tools. As a result, U.S. data center demand is forecast to grow by 10% per year until 2030.
Addressing data center consumption is crucial experts say. This is because of environmental impacts like carbon emissions associated with data centers (which doubled between 2017 and 2020) and resource depletion, as well as the need to boost cost efficiency, comply with regulations, tackle corporate responsibility and improve disaster resilience.
READ MORE Revolutionizing data center cooling: A path to energy efficiency and sustainability Shubham Sharma Paying it forward: PayPal’s journey to sustainability Taryn Plumb Accelerate growth and maximize efficiency with a modern data center Ravi Kuppuswamy, AMD No longer the domain of a few select fields, industries from financial trading to the advertising ecosystem rely on large-scale mathematically intensive computations.
READ MORE Sponsored Payment giant Paypal tackles the data sustainability challenge Securing generative AI starts with sustainable data centers Louis Columbus The Ripple Effect of Regulations: How Policy Is Reshaping the Data Center Landscape Bryson Masse The cyber risks of overheating data centers Louis Columbus eBay doubles down on data efficiency Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,271 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — The quest for Nirvana: Applying AI at scale | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-the-quest-for-nirvana-applying-ai-at-scale"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — The quest for Nirvana: Applying AI at scale March 15, 2023 The quest for Nirvana: Applying AI at scale Presented with In this issue… How the quest for AI at scale is gaining momentum in the enterprise How synthetic data is boosting AI at scale Responsible AI is a must for achieving AI at scale Can healthcare show the way forward for scaling AI? ( sponsored ) The power of MLOps to scale AI across the enterprise For Wells Fargo, solving for AI at scale is an iterative process Aflac takes on claims challenges to scale AI efforts With ChatGPT and generative AI grabbing the news spotlight, AI will likely be technology’s Person of the Year.
Beyond the splashy news of search engine AIs having weird conversations with humans, and 2,700 new generative AI APIs flooding the market (slight exaggeration), what does AI mean for regular enterprise companies? Specifically, how are ordinary businesses implementing AI at scale? In this special issue, we look at real-life AI use cases, and efforts by companies to scale those cases. Featuring stories from end-user companies in banking, insurance, healthcare and other industries, we explore how they took the time to get their initial AI projects under control, and then were able to launch their AI transformation more ambitiously by implementing technology, processes, governance and strategy across the organization.
So whether you have questions about synthetic data, responsible AI or MLOps, we have answers. Written by real people, not AI.
— Matt Marshall CEO and Editor-in-Chief How the quest for AI at scale is gaining momentum in the enterprise Sharon Goldman The quest for AI Nirvana has never been just about AI. It’s about going beyond harnessing it in specific applications to implementing it at scale, generating value across the organization.
The trend toward AI at scale has gained significant momentum over the past year. Last July, for example, Gartner research analyst Whit Andrews told VentureBeat that the “colossal” AI trend underlying all other AI trends today is the increased scale of artificial intelligence in organizations.
READ MORE How synthetic data is boosting AI at scale Victor Dey Responsible AI is a must for achieving AI at scale Taryn Plumb Can healthcare show the way forward for scaling AI? VB Staff With global shortages of radiologists and physicians looming, AI is becoming a “game-changer.” READ MORE Sponsored The power of MLOps to scale AI across the enterprise Louis Columbus For Wells Fargo, solving for AI at scale is an iterative process Sharon Goldman Aflac takes on claims challenges to scale AI efforts Sharon Goldman For Aflac, delivering AI at scale across the organization has become a top priority since the pandemic.
READ MORE Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,272 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — The future of the data center: Handling greater and greater demands | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-the-future-of-the-data-center-handling-greater-and-greater-demands"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — The future of the data center: Handling greater and greater demands July 20, 2023 The future of the data center: Handling greater and greater demands Presented with In this issue… Unlocking the power of data centers: High-performance computing for everyone Maximizing data center performance by getting cloud migration right How high-performance computing at the edge fuels AI, AR/VR, cybersecurity and more Why — and how — high-performance computing technology is coming to your data center (sponsored) Designing for safety: 10 cybersecurity priorities for a zero-trust data center Case study: Cybersecurity, hybrid cloud spur St. Joseph’s Health data center upgrade Reimagining the data center for the age of generative AI The retail data center: From autonomous checkout to data-driven insights, HPC is key Companies, regardless of size, are facing an unprecedented influx of data, compelling them to seek innovative solutions to handle and leverage it effectively. Consequently, high-performance computing (HPC) has proven indispensable for various essential functions, such as ensuring smooth app logins, running algorithms to bolster system security and utilizing computer vision to track retail floor spaces.
In this special issue, we delve into the surging adoption of HPC and explore the emergent forces propelling high-performance capabilities. Notably, we shed light on the growing significance of data-hungry large language models (LLMs) in the realm of AI development, as they become increasingly omnipresent.
Our focus goes beyond the present to envision the future of the data center. As companies strive to meet the expectations of their partners and end-users, the evolving landscape demands innovative approaches to deliver seamless and robust services. This issue presents insights into how companies are adapting their data centers to thrive in this dynamic environment.
— Aliyah Mohammed Associate Managing Editor Unlocking the power of data centers: High-performance computing for everyone Shubham Sharma To handle the calculations demanded by next-gen workloads quickly and effectively, enterprises need massively parallel computing (MPP) in their data centers. MPP is a technique used in high-performance computing (HPC) that takes a complex task (like querying a complex database) and breaks it down into many smaller tasks, which then run on separate nodes working simultaneously. The results are combined to get the final output.
While GPU-based acceleration meets workload demands across various sectors, it can’t be fully effective unless certain limitations are addressed.
READ MORE Maximizing data center performance by getting cloud migration right Louis Columbus How high-performance computing at the edge fuels AI, AR/VR, cybersecurity and more Victor Dey Why — and how — high-performance computing technology is coming to your data center Ravi Kuppuswamy, AMD No longer the domain of a few select fields, industries from financial trading to the advertising ecosystem rely on large-scale mathematically intensive computations.
READ MORE Sponsored Handling Greater Demands in the Data Center with Kamran Ziaee, Verizon Designing for safety: 10 cybersecurity priorities for a zero-trust data center Louis Columbus Case study: Cybersecurity, hybrid cloud spur St. Joseph’s Health data center upgrade Taryn Plumb Reimagining the data center for the age of generative AI Shubham Sharma Handling Greater Demands in the Data Center with Ken Spangler, FedEx The retail data center: From autonomous checkout to data-driven insights, HPC is key Taryn Plumb “Piecing together the alphabet soup of proliferating regulations and translating it into clear and consistent requirements is a top priority and challenge for organizations.” READ MORE Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,273 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — The CIO agenda: The 2023 roadmap for IT leaders | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-the-cio-agenda-the-2023-roadmap-for-it-leaders"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — The CIO agenda: The 2023 roadmap for IT leaders January 26, 2023 The CIO agenda: The 2023 roadmap for IT leaders Presented with In this issue… The CIO agenda in 2023: Driving growth and transformation How robotic process automation (RPA) can drive enterprise productivity Demystifying the metaverse: How CIOs can keep it real Accelerating AI for growth: The key role of infrastructure ( sponsored ) Making security invisible with adaptive access management How automation, low code/no code can fight the talent shortage Buy or build? How to make the best decision in an economic downturn How CIOs can drive identity-based security awareness Securing a dynamic future for APIs and enterprise integration If running an enterprise is a road race, the CIO is the one in charge of keeping the car running, the racetrack clear and in good racing condition, and ensuring everyone — the drivers, the crews and the crowd — stay safe.
As we’ll find in this issue, CIOs have a dotted line to every business leader — including the CEO, CFO, CMO and others — each of whom is being asked to do more with less in this recessionary environment.
The roads have been wet and bumpy so far in 2023. Between fears of a recession, hybrid work, quiet quitting, ongoing digital transformation to replace legacy tech, cybercrime-as-a-service and all the hype around artificial intelligence, there are plenty of potential roadblocks and pit stops ahead.
Is your crew in top condition to handle whatever 2023 kicks up on the road ahead? This special issue starts the new year with a road map to help CIOs impress the board and stakeholders by getting the most value from data analytics, cloud platforms and even the metaverse. It also looks at how AI and automation can help achieve sustainability, overcome biases, address supply chain challenges, enforce security through the tech stack and more.
Buckle up. We have a race to win.
— Matt Marshall CEO and Editor-in-Chief The CIO agenda in 2023: Driving growth and transformation Sharon Goldman The pressure is on for CIOs in 2023. Amid fears of inflation and economic recession, they are being called upon to drive growth and transformation, not just keep the data center humming and enterprise software running.
“It’s about ‘show me the money,’” Janelle Hill, chief of research for Gartner’s CIO practice, told VentureBeat. After a decade of investing in digital, she explained, organizations want to know the value of their investments. At the same time, they want to accelerate digital initiatives such as artificial intelligence and hyperautomation — and ensure security and privacy across an expanding attack surface.
READ MORE “ The most successful CIOs are going to be able to balance and collaborate with other members of the C-suite to drive meaningful outcomes for the entire organization.
“ — Jane Zhu, CIO of Veritas Technologies How robotic process automation (RPA) can drive enterprise productivity Victor Dey Demystifying the metaverse: How CIOs can keep it real Victor Dey Making security invisible with adaptive access management Louis Columbus Accelerating AI for growth: The key role of infrastructure Nidhi Chappell, Microsoft, and Manuvir Das, Nvidia In 2023, many CIOs will focus on finding the best way to grow AI production at scale to create value and business growth. An end-to-end, “AI first” environment provides the standardization, cost management and governance required for fast and orderly expansion.
READ MORE Sponsored “Most CIOs today know the “why” of AI. It’s time to make “how” a strategic priority.” How automation, low code/no code can fight the talent shortage Louis Columbus Facing a severe ongoing labor shortage, CIOs are looking to low-code and no-code platforms to ease the workloads in their departments.
READ MORE Buy or build? How to make the best decision in an economic downturn Shubham Sharma The economic downturn is here. With much of the attention on reducing cash burn, questions about technology investments have become ripe. Some think IT spending will take a hit (just like everything else), while others predict it will be recession-proof.
READ MORE How CIOs can drive identity-based security awareness Louis Columbus Securing a dynamic future for APIs and enterprise integration Louis Columbus Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,274 | 2,022 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue: How data privacy is transforming marketing | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-data-privacy-marketing"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue: How data privacy is transforming marketing October 18, 2022 How data privacy is transforming marketing Presented with Treasure Data In this issue… Marketing in the era of data growth and privacy What the end of third-party cookies means for personalization Navigating marketing with a focus on data privacy and compliance Putting privacy first: A global approach to data governance (sponsored) The new meaning of PII — can you ever be anonymous? Is privacy only for the elite? Why Apple’s approach is a marketing advantage How privacy-enhancing technology is securing first-party data How AI taps data to make ecommerce more dynamic Data privacy is expensive — here’s how to manage costs Data privacy isn’t the domain of just IT departments, CISOs or the compliance officers. Volumes of customer data are collected and analyzed by marketing teams every day. New technology — often driven by artificial intelligence and automation — offer new ways to target potential customers, personalize messaging, set pricing, recommend products and predict behavior.
Data is, as it’s often quoted, the new oil, and the highly valued commodity needs to be protected as do the individuals who provide it. And because data is flowing much faster oil, it also brings new levels of privacy concerns — concerns that marketing teams need to address. Data privacy regulations also loom large and global companies are faced with increasing data challenges.
Data-driven marketing is hardly new, but it’s changing as fast as the volume of data is growing.
We hope you find the articles by VentureBeat’s staff writers as valuable as the data you’re collecting, analyzing, storing and putting into action as the oil that drives your marketing plans.
— Dan Muse Managing Editor and Content Director Marketing in the era of data growth and privacy Sharon Goldman In an era of data privacy, what’s a marketer to do? Experts recommend new technologies that maximize conversion while keeping data private.
READ MORE “ I think for the first time in 10 years, we see marketers second-guessing whether or not one-to-one communication and personalization is actually what they should strive for any longer.
” — Samrat Sharma, PwC What the end of third-party cookies means for personalization Taryn Plumb How to navigate marketing with a focus on data privacy and compliance Shubham Sharma Putting privacy first: A global approach to data governance Treasure Data Sponsored The new meaning of PII — can you ever be anonymous? Tim Keary While managing PII in a way that’s compliant with international and domestic data protection regulations can be challenging, enterprises can mitigate the risks by periodically testing whether their users’ personal data can be re-identified.
READ MORE “Privacy should be integrated into the design of new products and services while trying to balance legitimate business interests.” — Criss Bradbury, Deloitte Is privacy only for the elite? Why Apple’s approach is a marketing advantage Ashleigh Hollowell While a burgeoning divide shows it is more difficult for the everyday person to take advantage of their data privacy, companies are also struggling with how to approach it as regulations change. Some companies like Apple are using privacy as a marketing point.
READ MORE Why privacy-enhancing technologies may be the future of adtech Sharon Goldman Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) allow different parties to share and collaborate on sensitive information while preserving privacy and ensuring compliance.
READ MORE How AI taps data to make ecommerce more dynamic Victor Dey Data privacy is expensive — here’s how to manage costs Sri Krishna Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,275 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — Building the foundation for customer data quality | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue-building-the-foundation-for-customer-data-quality"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — Building the foundation for customer data quality June 15, 2023 Building the foundation for customer data quality Presented with In this issue… Why data management matters: Turning analytics insights into income The Future of Software: Building Products with Privacy at the Core Turning Customer Data into Gold: The Key to Exceptional Experiences and Business Growth The true cost of dirty data — and how to address it head on (sponsored) Navigating the personalization minefield: How businesses can improve customer experiences and loyalty Data de-identification: Best practices in the new age of regulation Data collection and privacy: Understanding the legal limits Elevating customer experience: The rise of generative AI and conversational data analytics Customer data is the lifeblood of modern business. It can help enterprises gain critical insights by breaking down silos — whether they are isolating your data by people, geography, brand or anything else. Applying those insights the right way can help enterprises achieve business growth and build better customer experiences.
But customer data is also a double-edged sword. It can be a source of competitive advantage, but also a source of risk and liability. That’s why building a solid foundation for acquiring and using customer data is crucial for any enterprise that wants to succeed in the digital age. In this special report, we take a look at the best practices, challenges and opportunities for doing so.
We believe that customer data quality is not only a technical challenge but a strategic imperative for any enterprise that wants to stay ahead of the curve. We hope that this issue will inspire you to think critically and creatively about how you can use customer data to your advantage.
— Michael Nuñez Editorial Director Why data management matters: Turning analytics insights into income Victor Dey In the era of digital technology expansion, companies are accumulating large volumes of data on consumers’ activities both online and offline. At the same time, recognition of customer data’s immense value and potential to drive revenue growth is rising as companies realize that without the appropriate data — and data management — initiatives risk falling short of their potential.
Delivering a comprehensive customer experience holds immense importance. It plays a crucial role in acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones in today’s crowded digital landscape. In a world of increased globalization and an abundance of choices, customer experience assumes even greater significance.
READ MORE The Future of Software: Building Products with Privacy at the Core Louis Columbus Turning Customer Data into Gold: The Key to Exceptional Experiences and Business Growth Sri Krishna The true cost of dirty data — and how to address it head on Jim Skeffington, Treasure Data In order to ensure the data you’re activating is useful, actionable and accurate, it has to be clean. Otherwise, you risk making bad decisions based on bad data — and that can be costly.
READ MORE Sponsored Navigating the personalization minefield: How businesses can improve customer experiences and loyalty Shubham Sharma Data de-identification: Best practices in the new age of regulation Allen Bernard Elevating customer experience: The rise of generative AI and conversational data analytics Victor Dey Data collection and privacy: Understanding the legal limits Taryn Plumb “Piecing together the alphabet soup of proliferating regulations and translating it into clear and consistent requirements is a top priority and challenge for organizations.” READ MORE Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,276 | 2,023 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue — Data centers in 2023: How to do more with less | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/venturebeat-special-issue--data-centers-in-2023-how-to-do-more-with-less"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue — Data centers in 2023: How to do more with less April 13, 2023 Data centers in 2023: How to do more with less Presented with In this issue… Data center dilemma: Retail CIOs seek ways to balance cost and value in 2023 Data center ops: How AI and ML are boosting efficiency and resilience Economies of scale: How and why enterprises are outsourcing their data centers Data center modernization: The heavy — and rising cost — of doing nothing ( sponsored ) Case study: How Interstates rehauled its aging data center infrastructure Case study: How a credit union leveraged data analytics to improve member service Case study: How two financial titans are modernizing data center infrastructure AI and ML: The new frontier for data center innovation and optimization How to manage data center sprawl and achieve data-driven success Why some companies are forging ahead with cloud investments Everywhere and nowhere: Metaverse leaders plan for data centers on a whole new scale This year, economic concerns have hit harder than expected — layoffs, rumors of a slowdown, and now the recent banking crisis. So what’s an enterprise technical decision-maker to do? In this special issue, we look at how some leading companies are navigating this cost-conscious era. Turns out, many of them are still investing in their data center infrastructure — the name of the game is more often “efficiency,” rather than outright investment cuts.
If your company is facing the daunting paradox of containing data center and infrastructure costs without compromising support, security or customer satisfaction, this special issue has three case studies with your name on them.
— Matt Marshall CEO and Editor-in-Chief Data center dilemma: Retail CIOs seek ways to balance cost and value in 2023 Louis Columbus Retail CIOs and their teams face complex challenges in reducing data center costs and increasing the value their data centers deliver.
2023 is turning out to be a more challenging year than many expected.
“The pressure on CIOs to deliver digital dividends is higher than ever,” said Daniel Sanchez-Reina, VP Analyst at Gartner. “CEOs and boards anticipated that investments in digital assets, channels, and digital business capabilities would accelerate growth beyond what was previously possible.” READ MORE Data center ops: How AI and ML are boosting efficiency and resilience Louis Columbus Economies of scale: How and why enterprises are outsourcing their data centers Tim Keary Data center modernization: The heavy — and rising cost — of doing nothing Robert Hormuth, AMD To serve modern customers, the enterprise needs modernized data centers that can support simpler, software-defined environments that improve operations, agility, flexibility and scalability with a lower TCO.
READ MORE Sponsored Reimagining the data center in today’s environment with JoAnn Stonier, Mastercard Case study: How Interstates rehauled its aging data center infrastructure Shubham Sharma Case study: How a credit union leveraged data analytics to improve member service Sri Krishna Case study: How two financial titans are modernizing data center infrastructure Taryn Plumb Reimagining The Data Center in Today’s Environment with Promiti Dutta, Citi AI and ML: The new frontier for data center innovation and optimization Victor Dey Louis Columbus The proliferation of AI and ML technologies within data centers has been notable in recent years. AI is driving efficiency and performance across various use cases.
READ MORE How to manage data center sprawl and achieve data-driven success Taryn Plumb Why some companies are forging ahead with cloud investments Louis Columbus Everywhere and nowhere: Metaverse leaders plan for data centers on a whole new scale Dean Takahashi Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,277 | 2,022 |
"VB Special Issue - January 2022 | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-metaverse"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Special Issue – January 2022 Exploring and defining the metaverse Some elements of the metaverse exist today, but we’re a ways off from seeing its full potential — or even knowing precisely what it is. How will the metaverse evolve in the next few years? While the metaverse promises to be unlike any technology we’ve seen before and will change the way we work and play, it will both borrow from lessons learned by innovations and paradigm shifts that have gone before it as well as bring us to uncharted tech territories.
In this special report, we look at what we know about the metaverse and the companies driving it, its security risks, what the gaming industry is showing us, how the metaverse could impact the environment, how to ensure it’s open and interoperable.
Use this special issue to navigate the many facets of the metaverse through our in-depth coverage spanning identity and authentication , simulations , regulation , security , gaming , the environment and more.
— Dan Muse, content director and managing editor In this issue … The metaverse: Where we are and where we’re headed Why the metaverse must be open but regulated How the metaverse will let you simulate everything 7 ways the metaverse will change the enterprise Identity and authentication in the metaverse Understanding the 7 layers of the metaverse Can this triple-A game usher in the promise of the metaverse? (sponsored by Star Atlas) How the metaverse could transform upskilling in the enterprise Why the fate of the metaverse could hang on its security Gaming will lead us to the metaverse The potential environmental harms of the growing metaverse Cover story The metaverse: Where we are and where we’re headed Matt Marshall In-depth coverage Why the metaverse must be open but regulated Ashleigh Hollowell How the metaverse will let you simulate everything Kyle Wiggers 7 ways the metaverse will change the enterprise Shubham Sharma Identity and authentication in the metaverse Paul Sawers Understanding the 7 layers of the metaverse Dan Muse Can this triple-A game usher in the promise of the metaverse? (sponsored by Star Atlas) VB Staff How the metaverse could transform upskilling in the enterprise Kyle Wiggers Why the fate of the metaverse could hang on its security Kyle Alspach Gaming will lead us to the metaverse Dean Takahashi The potential environmental harms of the growing metaverse Kyle Wiggers Sign up for our newsletters: VentureBeat | GamesBeat Attend a VB Event : Transform | GamesBeat | VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,278 | 2,022 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue: Intelligent Sustainability | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-intelligent_sustainability"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue: Intelligent Sustainability July 07, 2022 Intelligent Sustainability Presented with AMD In this issue… How green data centers can cut your carbon footprint Why hyperscale, modular data centers improve efficiency How efficient code increases sustainability in the enterprise Choose wisely — How technology decisions drive data center efficiency (sponsored) What is the environmental impact of Web3? What are dual-use data centers and how they drive energy efficiency Why data has a sustainability problem 19 ways digital twins improve data center sustainability Data centers and technology, in general, have always been seen as, well, energy hogs. Don’t expect that perception to change as power demands will only increase with computational-intensive AI models, power- and bandwidth-hungry Web3 and metaverse-like applications and the cloud — which MIT reports has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry.
Customers, stakeholders and governments now demand accountability on climate impact, so there’s no shortage of compelling incentives to embrace sustainability.
Tech leaders must work toward energy efficiency to meet regulatory compliance, lower costs, attract and retain customers, and simply do the right thing. There’s no easy path to intelligent sustainability, but in this special report, VentureBeat looks at tools and practices you can use to make it achievable.
— Dan Muse , content director and managing editor How green data centers can cut your carbon footprint Peter Wayner Building a data center is a challenging mixture of architecture, network science and heat transfer. Many companies are also asking how they can do a good job on environmental questions.
READ MORE “ A major challenge is trying to understand just what makes a data center green.” Why data has a sustainability problem Ashleigh Hollowell What is the environmental impact of Web3? Chris Preimesberger Choose wisely — How technology decisions drive data center efficiency Ram Peddibhotla, AMD Sponsored Why hyperscale, modular data centers improve efficiency Chris Preimesberger Because of their size, hyperscale data centers offer advantages of economies of scale and custom engineering over enterprise data centers. Modular data center design offers flexibility by letting customers start smaller and increase in size based on need. This article looks at how those advantages impact sustainability models.
READ MORE “Industry thought leaders believe that by the end of the decade, about 75% of the world’s data centers will be drawing more than half of their power supply from renewable natural sources.” How efficient code increases sustainability in the enterprise George Anadiotis The Green Software Foundation is working to help companies measure the benefits of efficient code and its impact toward sustainability goals.
READ MORE “The heat produced by data centers can serve as a new resource for an energy cluster, an integrated heating source, or as a source for a steam system, which are all part of local district energy systems.
” What are dual-use data centers and how they drive energy efficiency Shubham Sharma 19 ways digital twins improve data center sustainability George Lawton Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,279 | 2,022 |
"VentureBeat Special Issue: Intelligent Security | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-intelligent_security"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VentureBeat Special Issue: Intelligent Security March 3, 2022 Intelligent Security Presented with Darktrace In this issue… AI-powered intelligent security makes the hybrid enterprise possible How AI-powered XDR can secure the hybrid workforce AI brings greater resilience to self-healing endpoints Why zero-trust security tops VPN for remote work — using AI 10 ways analytics improves endpoint security and asset management Why analytics are core to any endpoint security business case Predicting the future of AI and analytics in endpoint security Tipping the scales: Hardening your cyber defenses by thinking like your attacker (sponsored) Security and IT teams have been battling threats to their infrastructure and data for as long as there have been security and IT teams. But just as technology has evolved to not only support business but drive business, the bad actors have evolved, too. They seem to be in lock-step — or maybe even a step ahead at times — with even the most advanced security pros. COVID-19 forced enterprises to move to a hybrid model and a distributed workforce has only made the CISO’s job of securing endpoints more challenging.
In this report on Intelligent Security, we dive into how and why enterprises must use artificial intelligence and machine learning to thwart increasingly sophisticated attacks.
— Dan Muse, content director and managing editor AI-powered intelligent security makes the hybrid enterprise possible Kyle Alspach For countless companies around the world, being able to keep business going with a remote or hybrid workforce during the pandemic has been essential. While the cybersecurity challenges of having workers in the home have been massive, the use of advanced AI, machine learning and deep learning technologies in many security tools has been among the key factors in making this all possible.
READ MORE Intelligent security has played an essential part in making the past two years possible for businesses.
How AI-powered XDR can secure the hybrid workforce Kyle Alspach AI brings greater resilience to self-healing endpoint Louis Columbus Why zero-trust security tops VPN for remote work — using AI Kyle Alspach 10 ways analytics improves endpoint security and asset management Louis Columbus Achieving greater visibility and control over endpoints is table stakes for any organization pursuing zero-trust security. Human and machine identities are the new security perimeter in any network, and protecting those identities with data-driven insights and intelligence is one of the highest priorities for CISOs today.
READ MORE Analytics is defining the future of endpoint protection platforms and is the differentiator all vendors are looking to strengthen today.
Why analytics are core to any endpoint security business case Louis Columbus While the initial goal of creating a business case for investing in endpoint security is to gain funding, the rigor of quantifying the costs and benefits often identifies large gaps in endpoint security coverage and security. It’s also invaluable for capturing the figure of lost endpoints, which is something few companies have a 100% visibility into today.
READ MORE How AI protects machine identities in a zero-trust world Louis Columbus Machine identities’ complexity makes them a challenge to secure at scale and over their lifecycles, further complicating CISOs’ efforts to secure them as part of their zero-trust security strategies. It’s the most urgent problem many enterprises need to address, however, as just one compromised machine identity can bring an entire enterprise network down.
READ MORE Relying on AI, ML, and analytics to improve endpoint visibility and control isn’t optional anymore. Bad actors and cybercriminals automating their attacks using AI and machine learning can generate thousands of attempts a second — far more than the best cybersecurity analyst teams can keep up with.
Predicting the future of AI and analytics in endpoint security Louis Columbus Tipping the scales: Hardening your cyber defenses by thinking like your attacker Darktrace Sponsored Join the VentureBeat Community NEWSLETTERS NEWSLETTERS Connect with VentureBeat Transform Technology Summits GamesBeat Insider Series VB Live Webinars VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,280 | 2,020 |
"VB Special Issue: Automation and jobs in the new normal | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-automation-jobs-new-normal"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Special Issue: Automation and jobs in the new normal In this issue How robotics and automation could create new jobs in the new normal The promise of automation — and those who could be left behind The meatpacking industry is an incubator for AI, automation, and COVID-19 How AI and remote collaboration tools could help the construction industry get back to work Robots, AI, and the road to a fully autonomous construction industry The role of autonomous ships in a world wary of pandemics Smooth teleoperator: The rise of the remote controller Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020 , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the nature of many of the remaining jobs has changed, as remote work becomes the norm. And in the midst of it all, automation has become potentially a threat to some workers and a salvation to others.
In this issue, we examine this tension and explore the good, bad, and unknown of how automation could affect jobs in the immediate and near future.
Prevailing wisdom says that the wave of new AI-powered automation will follow the same pattern as other technological leaps: They’ll kill off some jobs but create new (and potentially better) ones. But it’s unclear whether that will hold true this time around. Complicating matters is that at a time when workplace safety has to do with limiting the spread of a deadly virus, automation can play a role in reducing the number of people who are working shoulder-to-shoulder — keeping workers safe, but also eliminating jobs.
Even as automation creates exciting new opportunities, it’s important to bear in mind that those opportunities will not be distributed equally. Some jobs are more vulnerable to automation than others, and uneven access to reskilling and other crucial factors will mean that some workers will be left behind.
How robotics and automation could create new jobs in the new normal The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate a robotics revolution and impact jobs — but it’s not necessarily all bad news for workers.
Paul Sawers The promise of automation — and those who could be left behind Though automation is creating new job opportunities, many workers are at risk of being left behind. But that bleak future is not inevitable.
Seth Colaner The meatpacking industry is an incubator for AI, automation, and COVID-19 As the pandemic stretches on, the threat to meatpacking, meat processing, and distribution center employees has researchers seeking a new production model.
Kyle Wiggers How AI and remote collaboration tools could help the construction industry get back to work Builders, electricians, and plumbers can’t work over Zoom, but digital technology could play a big part in getting the construction industry back to work.
Paul Sawers Robots, AI, and the road to a fully autonomous construction industry We spoke with construction AI startups about innovation, challenges in the field, and what it will take to create fully autonomous construction sites.
Khari Johnson The role of autonomous ships in a world wary of pandemics Ships play a huge part in the global economy, and we could soon see a bigger push toward automation in the maritime realm.
Paul Sawers Smooth teleoperator: The rise of the remote controller Autonomous vehicles, such as cars, forklifts, and delivery robots, may never be able to operate 100% independently. That is where teleoperation could help.
Paul Sawers Subscribe to our AI Weekly newsletter Check out our previous Special Issue: AI and surveillance in the age of coronavirus VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,281 | 2,023 |
"VB Special Issue: AI and surveillance in the age of coronavirus | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-ai-surveillance-during-coronavirus"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Special Issue: AI and surveillance in the age of coronavirus In this issue Finding the balance between safety and freedom in the shadow of COVID-19 How Congress is shaping data privacy laws during the pandemic The technologies the world is using to track coronavirus — and people France offers a case study in the battle between privacy and coronavirus tracing apps What privacy-preserving coronavirus tracing apps need to succeed Working under a tech-fueled microscope in the coronavirus era With unprecedented and historic impact, the pandemic has changed everything. It forced the entire world to slow to a near halt as health professionals and world leaders scrambled to contain and track the spread of the coronavirus, while citizens fled into their homes to shelter in place and quarantine. Technology has played a central role in much of it, and as we all look to flatten the curve while we reboot society, get back to work, and create treatments for COVID-19, it will continue to do so.
In this issue, we focus on one of the most immediate needs: finding the balance between safety and freedom.
We ponder this tension through the lens of the technologies that are involved in contact tracing and quarantine tracking and enforcement.
We discuss the methods and technologies involved , like smartphone surveillance, thermal scanning, drones, big data, and facial recognition, and how and where they’re being used around the world. And we unpack the battle in Congress over data privacy laws and how to avoid the rise of permanent new surveillance measures. We dig deep into the situation unfolding in France, where all these issues are coalescing.
Finding the balance between safety and freedom in the shadow of COVID-19 The coronavirus pandemic has reshaped the landscape of AI, big data, surveillance, and politics. What happens now will resonate for years to come.
Seth Colaner How Congress is shaping data privacy laws during the pandemic Privacy advocates and Congress want to balance big data, AI, surveillance, and consumer data rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Khari Johnson The technologies the world is using to track coronavirus — and people Governments around the world are finding their own mix of methods to track the coronavirus and surveil people, including smartphone data, apps, drones, thermal scanning, and facial recognition Seth Colaner France offers a case study in the battle between privacy and coronavirus tracing apps So many of the issues central to the technical and ethical debates surrounding the development of coronavirus tracing apps have landed on France.
Chris O’Brien What privacy-preserving coronavirus tracing apps need to succeed Coronavirus contact tracing app makers in the U.S. and Europe say they can help return life to normal and keep privacy intact, but they need a lot of help.
Khari Johnson Working under a tech-fueled microscope in the coronavirus era As businesses reopen, monitoring tools promise to track employees and customers in ways few people would have accepted. But there will be consequences.
Jeremy Horwitz Read more: Facial recognition is no match for face masks, but things are changing fast PwC’s workplace contact tracing app won’t share info with public health officials Stanford researchers propose AI in-home system that can monitor for coronavirus symptoms MIT announces Bluetooth breakthrough in coronavirus-tracing app for Android and iOS European scientists and researchers raise privacy concerns over coronavirus contact tracing apps Subscribe to our AI Weekly newsletter Check out our previous Special Issue: AI and Security VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,282 | 2,023 |
"VB Special Issue: AI and the future of health care | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-ai-and-the-future-of-health-care"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Special Issue: AI and the future of health care In this issue AI in health care creates unique data challenges Telemedicine and chatbots are using data to transform healthcare Confidence, uncertainty, and trust in AI affect how humans make decisions Elder care, wireless AI, and the Internet of Medical Things We’re two steps away from democratized, on-demand health care How the responsible use of AI can help create a better health system (sponsored) Artificial intelligence and health care both deal heavily with issues of complexity, efficacy, and societal impact. All of that is multiplied when the two intersect. As health care providers and vendors work to use AI and data to improve patient care, health outcomes, medical research, and more, they face what are now standard AI challenges. Data is difficult and messy. Machine learning models struggle with bias and accuracy. And ethical challenges abound. But there’s a heightened need to solve these problems when they’re couched within the daily life-and-death context of health care.
Then, in the midst of the AI’s growth in health care, the pandemic hit, challenging old ways of doing things and pushing systems to their breaking points. In this issue, we examine how the medical field is using AI and data to tackle the challenges of this extraordinary time.
From developing ways to handle massive amounts of tricky data, to using telemedicine and wearables to offer remote care, to challenging the pitfalls of automation bias, we’re encountering sea changes in health care. And because of the pandemic, the changes have to happen quickly.
But a certain optimism persists; there’s a sense that despite unprecedented challenges to the medical field, careful and responsible use of AI can enable permanent, positive changes in the health care system.
AI in health care creates unique data challenges AI algorithms are being applied to health care. But they require training data, and challenges abound when it comes to health data management.
Kyle Wiggers Telemedicine and chatbots are using data to transform healthcare The healthcare industry has rapidly embraced advances like telemedicine and health chatbots on a far greater scale to navigate the pandemic.
Chris O’Brien Confidence, uncertainty, and trust in AI affect how humans make decisions Health care applications of AI are growing fast, but there are obstacles to building robust, trustworthy systems.
Khari Johnson Elder care, wireless AI, and the Internet of Medical Things Senior citizens are accustomed to constant probes by doctors, but wireless AI tech is enabling massive-scale, nonintrusive data monitoring.
Jeremy Horwitz We’re two steps away from democratized, on-demand health care Just as with services such as Uber, consumers shouldn’t have to go out and seek health services; the services should be available on demand.
Damon Altomare, VIP StarNetwork How the responsible use of AI can help create a better health system (sponsored) Used responsibly, AI can produce better health outcomes, better patient experiences, and better care provider experiences.
Meg Good and Kerry Holley, Optum Subscribe to our AI Weekly newsletter Check out our previous Special Issue: Automation and jobs in the new normal VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,283 | 2,023 |
"VB Special Issue: AI and Security | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/vb-special-issue-ai-and-security"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Special Issue: AI and Security Note from the Editor Both AI and cybersecurity are nearly omnipresent in our daily lives, and the intersection of the two is of increasing importance as our world becomes more connected, more “intelligent,” and more reliant on online or automated systems. AI technology can impact existing problems in cybersecurity, national security, physical safety, and even media consumption.
The threats are sometimes more sophisticated than ever — but often not. As attack and defense systems evolve, the need for human expertise becomes more imperative — not less. And some of the seemingly most onerous threats, like deepfakes and the increasing presence of AI-powered cameras, have practical and political solutions.
The technology is evolving, and so are the threats.
–Dan Muse, managing editor and content director In this issue Is AI cybersecurity’s salvation or its greatest threat? AI in cybersecurity is helping defend against a rising tide of attacks. But some fear unintended consequences when bad actors seize the same tools.
Chris O’Brien AI, automation, and the cybersecurity skills gap Key players from the cybersecurity industry discuss how they’re addressing the talent shortage and what role AI is playing in it.
Paul Sawers Deepfakes and deep media: A new security battleground As deepfakes become more sophisticated, it’ll take equally sophisticated detectors to spot and remove them. Here’s the work on the cutting edge.
Kyle Wiggers The persistent humanity in AI and cybersecurity Even as AI technology transforms some aspects of cybersecurity, the intersection of the two remains profoundly human — attacker, target, and defender.
Seth Colaner When car and home AI cameras see everything, are we truly more secure? The potential safety and security benefits of home and automotive cameras are clearer today than ever before, but the risks have never been greater.
Jeremy Horwitz How AI is fighting — and could enable — ransomware attacks on cities Ransomware is increasingly targeting cities, public utilities, and institutions. AI can improve defenses — or sharpen attacks.
Khari Johnson Podcast: Can AI fix broken IoT and smart security? Host John Koetsier sits down with Cujo AI’s Marcio Avillez to discuss how AI can fight new threats emerging in the smart home.
John Koetsier Sponsored To protect people, we need a different type of machine learning Cybersecurity needs to focus on people, given that the majority of data breaches are now caused by human error, but traditional ML isn’t equipped to account for the complexities of human relationships and behaviors across organizations over time.
Ed Bishop, Tessian Guest Real-world AI threats in cybersecurity aren’t science fiction People are often worried about the kinds of AI threats you see in science fiction, but the real threats from AI are plenty frightening.
Adam Kujawa, Malwarebytes Guest AI can be an ally in cybersecurity Although there are clear reasons for concern around AI and cybersecurity, AI is presently more of a help to defenders than a threat.
Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure McAfee CTO: How AI is changing both cybersecurity and cyberattacks McAfee CTO Steve Grobman is using AI to detect all kinds of cyberattacks. But so are the hackers orchestrating the attacks.
Dean Takahashi For more, visit our AI Channel Check out our previous Special Issue: Power in AI document.addEventListener(‘click’, function (event) {if (!event.target.matches(‘.article__author’)) return;event.preventDefault();window.location.href = event.target.dataset.authorLink}, false); VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,284 | 2,023 |
"Why you should embrace the extended reality continuum | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/why-you-should-embrace-the-extended-reality-continuum"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Why you should embrace the extended reality continuum Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The emerging technologies of mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) are afroth with specialized terminology. Beyond MR and VR, this technology space includes terms like augmented reality, augmented virtuality, extended reality, spatial computing, wearable computing, ubiquitous computing and metaverse.
By the time you read this, there may be more.
Any “digital realities” discussion obliges a commitment to define terms and contexts. The surfeit of terms can be laboriously exhausting to understand and erode the excitement and interest of the curious outside of innovators and early adopters.
MR and VR are destined to merge into a single entity and are already slowly converging. We should reflect this when speaking about the technology space by being concise when referencing the general and intentional and when diving into nuances.
Luckily, we already have a way of taming the jargon and do not need to expand the already unwieldy lexicon.
Extended reality (XR) is the consensus term for “all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The extended reality continuum The reality-virtuality continuum describes a digital reality space with endpoints of reality and virtual reality. Mixed reality is the spectrum between the endpoints. From a contemporary perspective, there are clear boundaries between reality and MR, and reality and VR. The MR spectrum is naturally and unreconcilably fuzzy and without well-defined boundaries. Reality and VR are discrete states, but MR is a non-linear gradient.
Extended reality is the spectrum from MR up to and including VR, or from another perspective, it is the reality-virtuality continuum excluding reality. We can call this subset of the reality-virtuality continuum the extended reality continuum.
Technological advancements and improved experience design will reduce the significance of the differences between MR and VR, causing users (even sophisticated ones) to become unaware of the differences. Classifications, as defined by the XR continuum, will have meaning only for designers and developers.
The impact on experience design It is interesting to imagine that the distinction between MR and VR may not always be as straightforward as it is today. We are seeing early instances of immersive digital experiences being fluid and not distinctly MR or VR. This duality raises questions about how being both MR and VR impacts the quality of user experience.
For the sake of exploration, let us assume hardware and software exist to support both high-quality MR and VR experiences. The form factor is immaterial, but to aid the imagination, think of Geordi La Forge’s visor ( Star Trek: The Next Generation ), any helmeted character in Star Wars (Darth Vader, the Mandalorian, stormtroopers), or an implanted device (contact lens or eye replacements) like in Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You” (S1E3).
Several questions immediately arise when considering the impact of multidimensional extended reality on experience design. What are the benefits and detriments of an experience having multiple postures in the XR continuum? Can a single experience successfully go back and forth between MR and VR? Can a single experience successfully cover multiple stops in the MR spectrum? How do we design MR experiences that are actual augmented reality ? Where in the XR continuum is the best experience for my users and their problem space? Here are some of my early speculative thoughts. Designers should declare to be either MR or VR and stay true to that posture, but this thinking should be challenged and validated. Switching between MR and VR, if possible, will likely be through well-defined modalities, or shift so slowly that the user is unaware of any change. However, attempting to be both MR and VR within the same experience is probably a design trap.
For now, it is impossible to do anything more than speculate and experiment. However, we can advance educated hypotheses using past wisdom from interactive experience design.
The impact on hardware Device hardware will take on this dichotomy too. The most recent wave of stand-out devices, like Oculus, HoloLens, Magic Leap and smartphones (iPhone and Android), have a strong disposition toward either MR or VR. Each device optimizes to enable one experience type or another, but not both, and for good reason. Supporting both creates many technical challenges and can dramatically affect production costs, in addition to the previously mentioned experience design challenges.
However, this is changing, and future device iterations will support both MR and VR experiences. Devices like those from Varjo , Lynx and Meta are screen-based, with passthrough camera capabilities. Passthrough means the device uses an exterior camera to capture what the screen obscures, allowing the user to “see through the screen.” These devices can support MR and VR experiences with high resolution.
The Magic Leap 2 (ML2) can dim the outer lens to create a not-quite-opaque view of reality. This feature is more about improving the visual quality of rendered content and less about a meaningful attempt to enable VR experiences. MR devices fall significantly short of supporting a quality VR experience due to a limited field of view and an inability to block out the physical environment completely.
It is easy to imagine (and hope) for a generation of XR devices — any device capable of supporting any experience along the XR continuum — and not devices solely dedicated to MR or VR. Unfortunately, this may take several years and likely require different form factors than we have today. Still, there will continue to be a market for dedicated MR and VR devices. As the technologies become commoditized, low-cost or solution-optimized hardware will continue to singularly support either VR or MR.
Converging points Embrace XR as the general anchor point for discussing MR and VR technologies, as it best fits the general expressions of MR and VR. The term supports discussions with a broad audience and within the creator community. There is a cognitive benefit in simplification for all. The extended reality continuum is a grounding structure for technical or detailed discourse that designers and developers require. Settling on a simpler lexicon lets us focus on much more interesting things.
Simplifying and coalescing terminology helps us move beyond the “Can we do this?” phase of an emerging technology and into exploring what experiences the technology can enable. Designers and technologists need to prepare for the full spectrum of XR experiences. Now is the time to explore the XR continuum and establish the experience design principles which will define the future and success of the medium.
We are beginning what I find to be the most exciting and exuberant phase of any emerging technology.
Jarrett Webb is technology director at argodesign DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,285 | 2,022 |
"Why the industrial metaverse will eclipse the consumer one | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/why-the-industrial-metaverse-will-eclipse-the-consumer-one"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Why the industrial metaverse will eclipse the consumer one Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Industrial AI The consumer metaverse, exemplified by immersive games, new shopping experiences and the explosion of VR goggles, is the more visible, hyped side of the metaverse.
But there may be far more money to be made in the industrial metaverse, a side that most consumers will never directly see. That’s the prediction of Michael Inouye, principal analyst at ABI Research.
The firm estimates that the industrial metaverse , exemplified by digital twins , augmented field service and predictive maintenance, could grow into a $100 billion market by 2030. That’s larger than the $50 billion consumer metaverse and the $30 billion enterprise metaverse combined. VentureBeat talked to Inouye to clarify why the industrial metaverse will grow faster and what are the use cases and underlying technology that will drive it. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
VentureBeat : How do you define the consumer metaverse, enterprise metaverse and industrial metaverse, and what are the key differences among them? Inouye: Since there is no universally accepted definition of “metaverse,” it may be beneficial to provide my broader views first. If I were to define the metaverse in one line, it would read something like this: Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The metaverse is a confluence of interconnected open platforms bringing the virtual world and the physical space together under a single technology ecosystem.
This brings in elements of the merging of the physical and virtual, the migration of 2D to 3D, and the interoperability and interconnectivity of the metaverse.
Like others, I believe the metaverse will not, nor could it, be created or controlled by any one, or even a select few, companies or entities. Whether or not it becomes the next internet is debatable, but some of that groundwork is starting to fall into place.
The metaverse does not mean everyone will spend most of their time living in virtual worlds or wearing VR HMDs. I’m also not sold on Web3 elements like NFTs and crypto as core to the metaverse. While Web3 will certainly be part of the conversation, the development and success of the metaverse is not pegged to this market. In time the metaverse could be one unifying vision, like the internet, but for now, there are separations.
I view the metaverse as segmented across consumer and enterprise, but the latter can be subdivided to break out an industrial metaverse. In this case, we separate the non-consumer markets by use cases and, to some extent, industries. For example, digital twins and simulations are better aligned with an industrial metaverse. This includes architecture engineering and construction, manufacturing (automotive, pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods and electronics), energy and utilities, and aerospace and defense.
Applications like immersive collaboration, while also applicable to the industrial markets, have broader enterprise use cases in markets like retail and commerce, healthcare, education, financial markets and other businesses.
There is certainly crossover, which is why I generally view it as consumer versus enterprise, but many prefer to highlight an industrial metaverse. The impetus to call out “industrial” stems from this segment’s position in the market, which is much further ahead in the buildup toward a future metaverse. Digital twins and simulations and the use of 3D, for example, [are extending] well before the recent hype cycle of the metaverse.
On the consumer side, I take a broader view of the market than many. I continue to track the current digital content and services and the more metaverse-centric areas like virtual spaces and assets. In terms of identifying metaverse-specific revenue, however, I narrow this down to the virtual spaces and assets, although I currently do not include forecasts for NFT transaction volumes. That facet of the market is too volatile and unpredictable for the time being.
These virtual spaces are currently separate from those in the enterprise markets, even amongst the immersive collaboration and virtual HQs. The same is true for digital assets, services, other content and platforms. The main area of crossover occurs in 3D engines, such as Unity and Unreal, and devices.
The industrial metaverse: Further ahead on many fronts VentureBeat : How and why do you expect the industrial metaverse to progress faster? Inouye: The industrial metaverse is further ahead on the 3D front, with simulations and digital twins. The industrial metaverse is ahead on the standards front, with companies like Nvidia pushing potential standards such as Universal Scene Description (USD) through its Omniverse platform. USD has been characterized as doing for the metaverse what HTML did for the internet. In this regard, USD can lead to greater interoperability, [connecting] formerly disparate applications or ecosystems … to make workflows more seamless.
The consumer space, by contrast, is still more fragmented, with multiple companies claiming to have established “metaverses,” most of which are not interconnected or interoperable. Digital assets, similarly, are typically locked to a particular ecosystem, servicer or game. Many of the most transformative opportunities in the consumer space will also come with mainstream smart glasses, which are still years away before we see a stronger impact.
The enterprise and industrial metaverses are also better grounded in ROI, meaning more trials and initial deployments have a higher potential to succeed or lead to more adoption compared to consumer efforts, which have seen more pushback, such as the addition of NFTs in games in Western markets [gaining] limited traction.
However, there are some notable positives in the consumer sector, like SK Telecom’s Ifland platform, which recently went worldwide and has established partnerships with other operators like Deutsche Telekom and e&. Also, depending on how loosely you define metaverse, this could include Roblox, Fortnite and others. [Still,] it will take longer for consumer business models and services to develop in the metaverse.
Long term, however, the consumer side offers the higher ceiling. If aspects of the market develop faster than anticipated, it could push ahead of the enterprise/industrial side sooner.
New opportunities, new communities VentureBeat : What use cases and underlying technologies will drive the metaverse? Inouye: The key enabling technologies include connectivity (5G/6G), 3D/Web3 (including 3D content generation), AR/VR and mixed reality, compute, AI/ML and IoT. Speaking more broadly, there will be an increasing convergence in connectivity, compute and intelligence across networks. The management of data, traffic and applications will require intelligence added by AI and ML.
Demands on computing resources will also grow considerably, particularly at the edge, where more content will be distributed [and more] data processed and stored, and [there will be] a growing need for edge/cloud and hybrid computing.
Smart glasses represent the most transformative changes, particularly on the consumer side. This will bring more applications, services, marketing and advertising into public spaces and closer to the network edge across significantly more touchpoints. Marketers and advertisers will have to balance these new opportunities with changes to privacy and digital identity. Content and services could be consumed in more places and in new ways. In this regard, smart glasses could enable a pervasive display.
New opportunities will be born out of IoT , autonomous and public transportation, and connected environments. Workflows and supply chains will become more connected and optimized and feed digital twins and simulations to anticipate and adjust to potential bottlenecks or changes up and downstream of the user.
The rise in digital assets, including the potential to engender new marketplaces for 3D assets and NFTs , not only creates new asset types but also greatly expands the creator economies. Content creators will help populate the metaverse with 3D assets, structures and worlds.
Avatars and their virtual items will rise to a new level of importance and value. Virtual items could be “worn” as overlays through AR applications — giving new value to getting a bundled virtual item with a physical good, especially if that user can also sell that virtual good like any other physical item.
Eventually, virtual communities could create extended places for individuals to meet and socialize. Similarly, physical offices could be virtualized, allowing hybrid work forces to work in the “same” office, whether in the physical or virtual location.
The opportunities seem limited only by the boundaries of imagination when the physical and virtual come together, potentially impacting all markets across consumer and enterprise, from tourism to education, manufacturing, research and beyond.
Under the hood VentureBeat: What kind of infrastructure will be required to drive it? Inouye: This is a critical element that often gets overlooked, and a reason why our forecasts may be lower than some of the more optimistic figures out there. For example, the pervasive and mainstream use of smart glasses is a massive leap from where we are today. Current smart glasses and even near-term devices are not mainstream in terms of technical performance and design.
Next-generation glasses will get closer but likely will not appeal to a similarly sized audience as the first Apple iPhone and Android smartphones. We currently view the rollout of consumer smart glasses to look closer to the rollout of smartwatches than the pivotal iPhone moment in smartphones. One way to bring the form factor closer to real glasses while improving battery life and performance is hybrid and cloud computing. This could also reduce the cost of devices.
Devices can become more svelte, lighter and more power-efficient by offloading some of the computational resources to the cloud. Edge computing will also be critical to support applications that require lower latencies and future changes to data storage and management. Part of the vision of the metaverse also speaks to shifting control and value to the end users, which would require the decentralization of data.
The transition from 2D to 3D will also greatly increase the demands on compute, especially within the cloud, which will be necessary to make these experiences accessible to the masses. AI/ML will play key roles across the metaverse, from networks to content generation, using generative AI and neural graphics.
All of this speaks to that previously mentioned convergence of connectivity, compute and intelligence. These heightened demands on data and compute and [need for] ultra-low latencies will create a demand for leading features from next-generation networks like 5G Advanced and 6G, something that has not been widely demanded by users in current 5G markets.
As with most elements of the metaverse, though, there is a great deal that must happen between now and the realization of this future vision. Whether we call this future a metaverse or not, many of these trends will continue to push towards a future that includes many of these elements.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,286 | 2,022 |
"The metaverse will have its zombies — and yes, they can get you IRL | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/the-metaverse-will-have-its-zombies-and-yes-they-can-get-you-irl"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The metaverse will have its zombies — and yes, they can get you IRL Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Many of us have seen this scene in so many zombie movies: A howling horde advances on the outpost in the form of one roaring, crawling pile of plagued flesh. “There’s too many of ‘em! Fall back!..” Gunfire, now stuttering and distant. A crazed staccato of the last survivor’s hectic run-for-it… Then, finally, silence.
Mēris (Latvian for “plague”), a modified version of the infamous Mirai botnet, brought some 250,000 “zombies,” or compromised devices, to the party last summer, and the assault they put up would have put the above scene to shame. According to researchers, the botnet was able to throw as many as 21.8 million requests per second at its victims, crashing their overloaded servers in a major Decentralized Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
DDoS attacks soared by 37% in 2021, according to a recent report.
Botnets made up of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices are a major attack vector. And the truth is, this is only the beginning. Some of the processes unraveling on today’s tech scene could play into the hackers’ hands and set the stage for attacks of a whole new volume.
More metaverse, more trouble Ever since Facebook’s parent company changed its name to Meta, entire segments of the tech scene have been abuzz with chatter about the metaverse , a VR/AR-fused amalgamation of the real and virtual worlds. In practical terms, at least for now, it means wearing a funny-looking helmet on your head while in a business meeting with animated 3D cartoons of your investors.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! In even more practical terms, this means more connected devices everywhere, both on corporate grounds and at home. The bare minimum for conducting your business through the metaverse — that is, Zoom — requires just two smartphones, but there’s a reason why the conference camera market recently exploded. You want a crisp picture and a good sound on your calls, so you get the smart equipment that can deliver. Safety is also a must, so a few body-heat sensors would come in handy as well, and motion sensors, too, to prevent overcrowding. Link all that with a data platform to aggregate the sensor feed and build a comprehensive management solution, and you are in the green.
Transforming an office, a manufacturing site, a power plant or any other business or industrial facility into a metaverse hub is, for now, a very distant prospect. It’s likely, though, that it would mean bringing in a whole lot of connected devices. Headsets, which are yet to become ubiquitous; sensor-outfitted wearables for better VR/AR controls; and wall-mounted sensors all have to be part of the picture if we are no longer content with experiencing the digital world on a regular screen. Even before the metaverse dream took hold, the IoT device market was soaring , and the metaverse’s advent would only kick the process into a higher gear.
Now, the bad news. We may want to cool our heads a bit and take a deep breath before going on a metaverse-induced IoT shopping spree because all too often, we can’t even properly protect the devices already on-site.
Ghosts in the machine The IoT market has a major security problem. Poor management of connected devices ranked first on the list of IT professionals’ security concerns in a recent survey.
Rightfully so, it seems, as just in the six months from January to June 2021, hackers managed to compromise some 1.5 billion IoT devices , a massive uptick from 2020. Some of these hacks can amount to nothing but an innocuous joke, but others result in actual data loss and associated expenses. And the latter are the ones that companies often prefer staying quiet about, so there’s a certain fog of war in play here.
Even from what we know, though, a successful attack routed through or aimed at a connected device can lead to severe damage. It can bring power grids down, shutter assembly lines, or offer the attackers a cozy view of the target’s inner workings through the eyes of hijacked cameras.
By the same account, the proliferation of potentially vulnerable devices likely means that we will see even more massive botnets in the future. Their ability to bring down websites and web services is already troublesome enough in a world where the SaaS model is shaping up as the dominant one in the software market.
If your clients need to connect to your server, whether your own or on-cloud, to use your services, an attack that strikes it down takes aim at the very core of your business.
Furthermore, botnets can do more than spam connection requests at whatever target their overlords happen to dislike. A botnet can work to disseminate malware, which makes it a power multiplier in a larger attack. It can pull in sensitive data from its army of zombified devices for espionage or blackmail, or as an intelligence collection tool for a targeted phishing attempt. There are even more exotic options for savvy hackers to try their hand at, such as meddling with the power supply in a specific network, which is potentially deadly in harsh winter conditions.
The push for the metaverse, should it ever bear fruit, will not in itself create a fertile ground for the rise of the largest botnet ever, as this trend has already been long in the making. Without due precaution and security protocols in mind, though, it could be the final nudge that sets a roaring avalanche in motion — so we’d better start preparing to fight off those zombie hordes now.
Brad Yasar is the Founder and CEO of EQIFi.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,287 | 2,023 |
"The current state of metaverse interoperability: Where design framework must go from here | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/the-current-state-of-metaverse-interoperability-where-design-framework-must-go-from-here"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The current state of metaverse interoperability: Where design framework must go from here Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
“The internet wasn’t built with an identity layer” is a classic (and true) refrain, but it should not be an excuse to continue on a path of ignorance. Using the hacking of the late Steve Jobs’ iCloud as an example, it is clear that none of our digital identities are safe. Better to have none, then? Perhaps. However, let’s try just one… Less is more Self-sovereignty is quickly becoming one of the most important entrance points and roadblocks within metaverse discussion. At present, the metaverse requires individuals to re-register themselves as they traverse the multiverse. While a multitude of metaverses would be redundant in several respects, we, unfortunately, are already seeing the first indications of this trend. Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, Meta, Adobe, and many other companies have recently come together to announce the creation of the Metaverse Standards Forum , a consortium whose purpose is to ensure interoperability.
However, interoperability hinges on having a singular digital identity that is universally recognizable, ensuring ease of use, workflow and experience.
Metaverse economy “Metanomics” is a term originally coined by Doug Thompson for a talk show he used to host on Second Life, and it has to be said that the economic models of the metaverse are often so boring and repetitive that they can easily be summarized with the following directives: Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Stake tokens Buy some land or NFTs (being taxed) Pay some entrance fees Gamble or lotteries These are all mechanics that lead to involvement over the long term but at low intensity and impact. What is the metaverse’s game-changer then? The clue is in the previous sentence: Let’s talk about gamification.
Users just wanna have fun We are moving toward an all-encompassing virtual world and its dominant design (DD) is being driven by the web3 gaming industry, just as cryptocurrencies arose from the need to actualize financial value to in-game currencies. Right now, in GameFi, we are witnessing the painful transition from a play-to-earn model to a play-and-earn model.
This might sound like a simple linguistic trick — but it instead underlies the need to bring the play back to the core of the conversation. For too long GameFi has been drunk off its own profit-seeking vision, at the expense of the ludic aspect and possibilities for users. With the advent of crypto-winter, the platform’s games have been subject to the shrinking space and discontinued, with few exceptions, including Axie Infinity and Sandbox.
In addition to the GameFi’s losing bet, Axie Infinity itself fell victim to a $600 million hack in November 2021, resulting in the decimation of users, while the native SLP token went from $0.4 to $0.0025.
This obviously disrupted the tokenomics of the project; nevertheless, it remained standing thanks to a reduced but strong community of 700,000 supporters.
Sandbox, a game reminiscent of Minecraft in some respects, instead has a user base of two million and has one major peculiarity: It is set in the metaverse.
Gamenomics Gamification of social interactions is a crucial aspect of the metaverse: The only virtual spaces where there is currently a clear concept of ownership are social platforms such as Reddit and NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
These platforms, however, provide a limited experience as centralization prevents immersion and the ability to switch between metaverses. If these spaces can harness the natural human propensity for play, spontaneity and entertainment, they will grow to such a level that the creation of a unified and GameFicated metaverse will be inevitable, despite the vision and interests of corporations.
Users of the metaverse will act according to archetypal traits that are likely analogous to the ones serving as the basis for social gaming.
Dr. Richard Bartle has defined the four types of these particular archetypes : The Achiever, who is goal oriented and driven by the need to complete the tasks and benchmarks assigned to themselves.
The Socializer, who sees the metaverse as an opportunity for them to make new friends and network.
The Explorer, who is adventuresome and continually looking for play stimulation and hijinks, particularly with relation to unique experiences.
The Hunter: So as not to betray anyone’s expectations, it will be necessary to decide what and how to make this kind of user hunt.
These archetypes are not mutually exclusive — users often manifest a combination of them, with one prevailing over the others. The gamification of social interactions is a key aspect of the metaverse. Platforms like Reddit and NFT marketplaces provide a limited experience due to centralization, but if they could tap into human’s natural desire for play and entertainment, the creation of a unified and gamified metaverse would be inescapable.
The four archetypes should serve as the foundation for building successful token models in the metaverse and determining the game-theoretic model and mechanism design for sustainable economies and governance structures.
The metaverse and a meta-quadratic economy A gamified economy is a system where the economic activity is organized around game-like rules and incentives, with the goal of making economic interactions more engaging and enjoyable for participants. A DAO (Decentralized autonomous organization) could potentially be used to manage and oversee the rules and incentives of this economy, helping to ensure fairness and transparency for all participants.
The nearest real-world “metaverse” instance currently available and functioning within a pseudo-DAO structure is Reddit, more specifically, any r/subReddit. These “subs” are probably the nearest metaverse instance actually available, with their possibility to incentivize “moderators” of each reality within the metaverse, giving them greater responsibility to maintain order and discipline.
This is another step toward decentralization of decision-making, where authority is governed by smart contracts, with perhaps even a sprinkling of quadratic economy, a model where the value created by a transaction is proportional to the square of the participant’s number. The value generated by a transaction increases significantly as more people participate, creating incentives for individuals and organizations to contribute to and participate in the economy.
But why stop at quadratic? In addition to being able to decide on which issues to have one’s vote weigh more heavily, we might consider providing greater representation to the brightest and active members of the community. DAOs could help to achieve a sustainable metaverse by providing a decentralized and transparent governance structure for the virtual world, thus helping to ensure that the metaverse is run in a fair and equitable manner, with the interests of all participants taken into account.
Such kinds of structures could be useful to manage the distribution and allocation of resources within the metaverse, such as virtual land or assets, for a more sustainable and balanced meta-economy.
Let’s go nuclear! The metaverse is, in some ways, the cyber counterpart of nuclear power: The potential for enormous benefits and disasters matches each other. Fortunately, the web — be it the first, second, or third iteration — is a democratic tool by definition: If this imprinting is maintained, Orwellian scenarios will certainly not occur.
Let us scroll through a roundup of critical issues that will still need to be considered: Kids: How will we have to behave about children’s access to the metaverse? Will they take risks as in the real world, or will they be protected directly at a code level? AI could certainly play an important role in this area, perhaps filtering inappropriate behavior in real-time, which will still need to be sanctioned in the most serious cases.
Health: Too much of metaverse will lead to an increase in physical problems we already experienced, such as obesity and back pain, but also depression and addiction.
Inequality: Greater economic wealth will result in more compelling meta-experiences, while poorer people will have to settle for a low-quality one, but we are talking about an issue that should be addressed tout-court.
Privacy: It is already irritating to know that we are profiled based on how and where we move our cursor regarding certain content, but who would want a metaverse that keeps track of where we look? Beyond the metaverse At the moment, giving a concise and fulfilling definition of the metaverse is not possible.
Why? Because the metaverse is a placeholder, a MacGuffin , a proxy. We are not able to describe it because we only experienced fleeting glimpses of it.
What we must keep in mind is that any nuclear force must always have a nucleus as a landmark, and in this case, it’s us: A new humanism is coming, and I wonder if our avatars will also be able to enjoy the renaissance, transcending the limits of our existence.
Eloisa Marchesoni is a Tokenomics engineer.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,288 | 2,023 |
"Rumors of the metaverse's death have been greatly exaggerated | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/rumors-of-the-metaverses-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Rumors of the metaverse’s death have been greatly exaggerated Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
When Meta recently laid off more than 11,000 employees in Nov 2022, then another 10,000 in March 2023, some tech industry watchers concluded it was a nail in the coffin for the metaverse.
But before we lower the metaverse coffin into the ground, let’s remember why Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pivoted to the metaverse in the first place. It provides vital context for recent events and casts them in a different light.
Meta’s decline Contrary to popular belief, the decline of Meta (the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) did not stem from its investment in Zuckerberg’s vision for the future. Meta’s plummeting stock was tied to its legacy investment in social media platforms whose lifeblood — the ability to track users and their data — was being choked off by market forces beyond their control.
One choke point took effect in April 2021 when Apple introduced changes to its ad-tracking policy.
In a nutshell, Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency” feature gave users a clear choice whether to allow a company to track them or their data across different apps and websites.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! If a user did not grant that permission, Facebook effectively lost the ability to both target and measure the impact of an ad. The new rules bit a $10 billion chunk out of Meta’s advertising business. This represents nearly 25% of Meta’s net profit in 2021.
Facebook was aware of its vulnerability to such policy shifts. As an ad-based business, Facebook didn’t own the hardware platform its products lived on. Nor did it own the operating systems and app stores its apps ran on. That placed it at the whim of companies such as Apple and Google.
Long before 2021, in an effort to resolve the issue, Facebook spent several years in discussions with Apple about an ad-free, subscription-based version of Facebook. The deal would have netted Apple a 30% slice of Facebook’s revenue on Apple’s platform, but negotiations failed.
The pivot Six months after Apple’s privacy change, Zuckerberg steered Facebook hard left, rebranded it as Meta and went full speed ahead toward the metaverse, fueled by a multibillion-dollar spend on R&D and product development.
The company had already been positioning itself for this self-reinvention for years. In 2012, Facebook rolled out its own open app store.
In 2014, to own the hardware platform, it purchased VR headset maker Oculus.
The moves gave Facebook more power to control the fate of its own apps and to benefit from the sales of other apps, in a similar fashion to Apple.
The wisdom of self-disrupting in anticipation of market inflection points is well-established in the tech industry. Equally well established are the dangers of failing to do so. Look no further than the likes of Blockbuster, Kodak, MySpace and Palm Pilot — once household names that became cautionary tales due to their failure to innovate. Meta did what it had to.
Amara’s Law and the metaverse In all the speculation about the demise of the metaverse, two important points tend to get lost. First and most obviously, Meta and the metaverse are not the same.
Even if Meta were to ultimately sink, the metaverse — a shared, persistent , and open experience characterized by virtual and augmented 3D worlds — is far bigger than any one company.
Second, inflection points can take a long time to unfold, and we humans often get the timing wrong. Roy Amara, a Stanford University computer scientist and longtime head of the Institute for the Future, coined a “law” for this tendency.
Amara’s Law states that we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run. The law has much in common with Gartner’s hype cycle for emerging technologies.
Examples of Amara’s Law abound. Consider self-driving vehicles and VR/AR, both of which have been criticized as overhyped and unlikely to deliver on their promise. This tendency is nothing new. There were even those who believed the Internet was no more than a passing fad.
Where is the metaverse now? Going by Amara’s Law, one could argue that those who insisted the metaverse would change our daily lives in the near future were overestimating its impact in the short term.
There’s also evidence that those declaring the metaverse is dead are underestimating its impact in the long run. To use Gartner’s terms, the naysayers have simply slipped from the “peak of inflated expectations” to the “trough of disillusionment.” But that trough is just that — a temporary dip until the metaverse climbs its way up to the “plateau of productivity.” Numerous technology trends point to the inevitable opportunity for the metaverse. For instance: Two out of every three people on the planet will be on the internet.
Mobile devices are exploding in number, averaging 3.6 per person.
GPUs, which didn’t exist 25 years ago, are dramatically transforming rendering capabilities in these devices.
The metaverse isn’t limited to wearable technology. GPU-driven smart devices can render beautiful 3D images and connect to cloud-enabled virtual content, putting the metaverse both in front of our eyes and at our fingertips. The question will be less about technology or access and more about our willingness to participate.
Will we participate in virtual worlds? The pandemic turbocharged the creation and normalization of virtual worlds and virtual economies. Online gaming, for instance, is now among the world’s fastest-growing industries, with revenue estimated to exceed $196 billion. Gartner predicts that by 2026, one in four people will spend one hour a day working, studying, shopping and socializing in a shared virtual environment. And some estimate that the industrial metaverse — how we virtually design, manufacture and interact with physical objects — could be a $100 billion market by 2030.
So will we participate? The answer appears to be a resounding and eventual yes.
All of this suggests that the rumors of the metaverse’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Like the previous iterations of computing and networking — the mainframe era, personal computing and the internet and the mobile and cloud era — this next paradigm shift to the metaverse will take time. And that’s good news for investors, as the best time to invest in future technology is before it exists.
Doug Griffin is managing partner at S patial.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,289 | 2,022 |
"Non-fungible tokens and the virtual marketplaces that they enable | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/non-fungible-tokens-and-the-virtual-marketplaces-that-they-enable"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Non-fungible tokens and the virtual marketplaces that they enable Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
No discussion about the metaverse would be complete without talking about Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The synergy between the metaverse and NFTs is undeniable, with virtual marketplaces like Decentraland and The Sandbox already offering users a way to buy, sell, or trade virtual assets that are backed by the blockchain.
But how exactly will NFTs fit in with the big picture of the metaverse? Beyond the obvious use cases such as virtual real estate and in-game items, it’s hard to say for sure. But one thing is certain: The potential for NFTs to disrupt traditional markets is huge. Why? Because NFTs address the problem of scarcity.
With traditional assets, there is a finite supply. This means that as demand increases, prices go up. But with NFTs, the supply is not finite. So even if demand for virtual assets skyrockets, prices can stay reasonable and accessible. In other words, NFTs have the potential to democratize access to assets by means of tokenization and fractional ownership, which could lead to the development of a new class of digital entrepreneurs.
In this article, we will talk about how the virtual marketplaces of the metaverse are likely to be powered by NFTs and what implications this has for the real world.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Virtual marketplaces and the metaverse As we have seen with Decentraland and The Sandbox, NFTs are already being used to create virtual marketplaces where users can buy, sell or trade assets that are backed by the blockchain. These assets can be anything from virtual real estate to in-game items.
The use of NFTs enables these marketplaces to operate in a trustless manner, without the need for a central authority. This not only makes them more resilient to censorship but also allows for the implementation of novel features such as trustless escrow and decentralized pricing.
The use of NFTs also has implications for the way these marketplaces are taxed. In traditional markets, taxes are typically levied on the sale of goods or services. However, in a market powered by NFTs, taxes could be levied on the transfer of ownership of the NFT itself.
This would have the effect of taxing all transactions equally, regardless of the value of the goods or services being exchanged. How? The valuation system for NFT transactions and the taxes levied on them could be much simpler than the current system for traditional assets.
That is because with NFTs, the value of an asset is intrinsically linked to the underlying blockchain.
This makes it possible to use automatic valuation algorithms that take into account the total supply of the token, the number of tokens in circulation, and the transaction history of the token on the blockchain.
Of course, this is all speculation at this point. It remains to be seen how virtual marketplaces will be taxed in practice. But the use of NFTs does open up the possibility for a more efficient tax system.
This could potentially lead to a more efficient tax system, as it would eliminate the need for complex valuation systems.
The challenges of NFTs in virtual marketplaces Of course, the use of NFTs is not without its challenges, one of the biggest being scalability. At present, the Ethereum network can only handle a limited number of transactions per second. This means that any market powered by NFTs would need to find a way to scale up to meet demand.
Another challenge is the high transactional costs associated with NFTs. At present, it costs around $10 to mint a single NFT on Ethereum. This is likely to be prohibitively expensive for many users, particularly those who are looking to trade low-value items.
Finally, there is the issue of interoperability. At present, each virtual marketplace is powered by its own blockchain. This means that users are unable to trade assets between different marketplaces. This is likely to be a major hindrance to the growth of the metaverse , as it will prevent users from taking advantage of the full range of opportunities that the metaverse has to offer.
Overcoming the challenges of NFTs Fortunately, there are a number of projects working on solutions to the challenges of NFTs. One is Polygon, which is addressing scaling solutions for Ethereum. Polygon has already achieved impressive results, with some suggesting that it could increase Ethereum’s transaction capacity by 100x.
Another project working on scalability solutions is Plasma, which is being developed by the team behind OmiseGO. Plasma is a Layer 2 scaling solution that makes use of side chains. It is designed to be scalable, cheap, and secure, and could potentially be used to power the virtual marketplaces of the future.
Finally, there is the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is a decentralized storage system that could be used to store the NFTs of the future. IPFS is designed to be scalable and efficient, and could potentially be used to power a decentralized marketplace for NFTs.
The future of NFTs in virtual marketplaces It is clear that NFTs are going to play a major role in the virtual marketplaces of the future. The use of NFTs enables these marketplaces to operate in a trustless manner, without the need for a central authority. This not only makes them more resilient to censorship but also allows for the implementation of novel features such as trustless escrow and decentralized pricing.
Inclusiveness and market resilience are enabled by NFTs by design. IPFS decentralized storage guarantees that the NFTs cannot be censored or taken down. In the event that a virtual marketplace is shut down, the NFTs stored on IPFS would still be accessible, and could be traded on other marketplaces.
Distribution of wealth is also more equitable with NFTs. The use of automatic valuation algorithms ensures that the value of an NFT is not arbitrarily determined by a central authority. This democratizes the virtual marketplace and allows for a more level playing field.
The use of NFTs also has implications for the way these marketplaces are taxed. In traditional markets, taxes are typically levied on the sale of goods or services. However, in a market powered by NFTs, taxes could be levied on the transfer of ownership of the NFT itself.
To conclude, NFTs are a major step forward for the virtual marketplace industry. They have the potential to make these marketplaces more resilient, efficient, and inclusive. As the technology matures, we can expect to see more and more marketplaces powered by NFTs.
Daniel Saito is CEO and cofounder of StrongNode DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,290 | 2,023 |
"New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/new-research-suggests-that-privacy-in-the-metaverse-might-be-impossible"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
A new paper from the University of California Berkeley reveals that privacy may be impossible in the metaverse without innovative new safeguards to protect users.
Led by graduate researcher Vivek Nair, the recently released study was conducted at the Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence ( RDI ) and involved the largest dataset of user interactions in virtual reality (VR) that has ever been analyzed for privacy risks.
What makes the results so surprising is how little data is actually needed to uniquely identify a user in the metaverse, potentially eliminating any chance of true anonymity in virtual worlds.
Simple motion data not so simplistic As background, most researchers and policymakers who study metaverse privacy focus on the many cameras and microphones in modern VR headsets that capture detailed information about the user’s facial features, vocal qualities and eye motions, along with ambient information about the user’s home or office.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Some researchers even worry about emerging technologies like EEG sensors that can detect unique brain activity through the scalp. While these rich data streams pose serious privacy risks in the metaverse, turning them all off may not provide anonymity.
That’s because the most basic data stream needed to interact with a virtual world — simple motion data — may be all that’s required to uniquely identify a user within a large population.
And by “simple motion data,” I mean the three most basic data points tracked by virtual reality systems – one point on the user’s head and one on each hand. Researchers often refer to this as “telemetry data” and it represents the minimal dataset required to allow a user to interact naturally in a virtual environment.
Unique identification in seconds This brings me to the new Berkeley study , “Unique Identification of 50,000-plus Virtual Reality Users from Head and Hand Motion Data.
” The research analyzed more than 2.5 million VR data recordings (fully anonymized) from more than 50,000 players of the popular Beat Saber app and found that individual users could be uniquely identified with more than 94% accuracy using only 100 seconds of motion data.
Even more surprising was that half of all users could be uniquely identified with only 2 seconds of motion data. Achieving this level of accuracy required innovative AI techniques, but again, the data used was extremely sparse — just three spatial points for each user tracked over time.
In other words, any time a user puts on a mixed reality headset , grabs the two standard hand controllers and begins interacting in a virtual or augmented world, they are leaving behind a trail of digital fingerprints that can uniquely identify them. Of course, this begs the question: How do these digital fingerprints compare to actual real-world fingerprints in their ability to uniquely identify users? If you ask people on the street, they’ll tell you that no two fingerprints in the world are the same. This may or may not be true, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is how accurately you can identify an individual from a fingerprint that was left at a crime scene or input to a finger scanner. It turns out that fingerprints, whether lifted from a physical location or captured by the scanner on your phone, are not as uniquely identifiable as most people assume.
Let’s consider the act of pressing your finger to a scanner. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) the desired benchmark for fingerprint scanners is a unique matching with an accuracy of 1 out of 100,000 people.
That said, real-world testing by NIST and others have found that the true accuracy of most fingerprint devices may be less than 1 out of 1,500. Still, that makes it extremely unlikely that a criminal who steals your phone will be able to use their finger to gain access.
Eliminating anonymity On the other hand, the Berkeley study suggests that when a VR user swings a virtual saber at an object flying towards them, the motion data they leave behind may be more uniquely identifiable than their actual real-world fingerprint.
This poses a very serious privacy risk, as it potentially eliminates anonymity in the metaverse. In addition, this same motion data can be used to accurately infer a number of specific personal characteristics about users, including their height, handedness and gender.
And when combined with other data commonly tracked in virtual and augmented environments, this motion-based fingerprinting method is likely to yield even more accurate identifications.
Motion data fundamental to the metaverse I asked Nair to comment on my comparison above between traditional fingerprint accuracy and the use of motion data as “digital fingerprints” in virtual and augmented environments.
He described the danger this way: “Moving around in a virtual world while streaming basic motion data would be like browsing the internet while sharing your fingerprints with every website you visit. However, unlike web-browsing, which does not require anyone to share their fingerprints, the streaming of motion data is a fundamental part of how the metaverse currently works.” To give you a sense of how insidious motion-based fingerprinting could be, consider the metaverse of the near future: A time when users routinely go shopping in virtual and augmented worlds. Whether browsing products in a virtual store or visualizing how new furniture might look in their real apartment using mixed reality eyewear, users are likely to perform common physical motions such as grabbing virtual objects off virtual shelves or taking a few steps back to get a good look at a piece of virtual furniture.
The Berkeley study suggests that these common motions could be as unique to each of us as fingerprints. If that’s the case, these “motion prints” as we might call them, would mean that casual shoppers wouldn’t be able to visit a virtual store without being uniquely identifiable.
So, how do we solve this inherent privacy problem? One approach is to obscure the motion data before it is streamed from the user’s hardware to any external servers. Unfortunately, this means introducing noise. This could protect the privacy of users but it would also reduce the precision of dexterous physical motions, thereby compromising user performance in Beat Saber or any other application requiring physical skill. For many users, it may not be worth the tradeoff.
An alternate approach is to enact sensible regulation that would prevent metaverse platforms from storing and analyzing human motion data over time. Such regulation would help protect the public, but it would be difficult to enforce and could face pushback from the industry.
For these reasons, researchers at Berkeley are exploring sophisticated defensive techniques that they hope will obscure the unique characteristics of physical motions without degrading dexterity in virtual and augmented worlds.
As an outspoken advocate for consumer protections in the metaverse, I strongly encourage the field to explore all approaches in parallel, including both technical and policy solutions.
Protecting personal privacy is not just important for users, it’s important for the industry at large. After all, if users don’t feel safe in the metaverse, they may be reluctant to make virtual and augmented environments a significant part of their digital lives.
Dr. Louis Rosenberg is CEO of Unanimous AI, chief scientist of the Responsible Metaverse Alliance and global technology advisor to XRSI. Rosenberg is an advisor to the team that conducted the Berkeley study above.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,291 | 2,023 |
"Metaverse stumbles amid challenges, but some see revival ahead | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/metaverse-stumbles-amid-challenges-but-some-see-revival-ahead"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Metaverse stumbles amid challenges, but some see revival ahead Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The metaverse was once touted as the future of human interaction, a virtual world enabling users to live, work and play in a fully immersive virtual realm seamlessly blending physical and digital worlds.
But the metaverse has hit a snag, and leading technology companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Apple have reduced their focus on the R&D behind the virtual world. Despite substantial investment, the metaverse still faces technical challenges such as latency, infrastructure and content creation.
Moreover, the return on investment remains to be determined, as the metaverse is still largely an untested market.
Despite these obstacles, many experts say the metaverse is still alive and will continue to evolve. Industrial and consumer product companies are among the types of organizations placing sizable bets — and, in some cases, already reaping the rewards.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! For instance, Siemens Energy reported that metaverse applications for maintenance and inspection reduced downtime by 70% and saved the company’s steam turbine business a staggering $1.7 billion. Likewise, the entertainment and retail industries have noted the metaverse’s potential to provide immersive, interactive experiences and are already exploring its possibilities.
A year ago, the primary question concerning the metaverse was, “What is it?” Today, the focus has shifted to more practical questions about what the metaverse will offer, when it will be available, who it’s for, how it will work and why it matters.
What happened to the metaverse? Just three years after the metaverse generated a frenzy of excitement, interest seems to be fading, according to Google Trends and other real-world indicators. The Oxford Word of the Year 2022 has seen hard times.
What early implementers have discovered is that building a metaverse requires high levels of expertise and innovation, with technical challenges that can be frustrating and demotivating for developers. This has led some tech companies to shift their focus to other areas, leaving the metaverse on a back burner.
Meta, which experienced consistent losses in — and Wall Street criticism of — its Reality Labs Metaverse vertical, has shifted its focus away from the metaverse. Last month, the company followed others in unveiling a large language model, dubbed LLaMA (for Large Language Model Meta AI). This model is the fundamental software behind a new artificial intelligence system that aims to extract extensive amounts of text from its text dataset to produce condensed information and generate content. The AI personas that may result from this work will be designed to aid individuals in various ways. Such AI applications may in fact lead back to metaverse applications.
Tech giants like Tencent and Microsoft have also suspended their plans for the metaverse, leading to the dissolution of their core teams working on the “phygital world.” Microsoft unexpectedly shut down its industrial metaverse team , resulting in the layoff of nearly 100 employees, perhaps signaling how the growing success of AI, with models like ChatGPT and DALL-E, is taking over the metaverse space.
Still, the virtual world remains a mystery that many businesses aim to unravel and commercialize. At CES this year, Accenture estimated that by 2025, business and consumer interest will drive $1 trillion into the metaverse as “a creator economy tool to enhance day-to-day tasks,” according to a report released at CES.
Today, the metaverse evokes a multiplicity of opinions. Experts hold varying views on whether the phenomenon is dying or merely facing a temporary setback, and whether it will come to fruition soon or only after several more years of development and investment.
More than a game? Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco, believes that metaverse implementations have not been as compelling in areas outside gaming, and that the technology’s timing might not be right.
“The idea of [the] metaverse was never fully baked beyond gaming. No one cared to meet with floating avatars of people to feel immersed in a conversation,” Patel told VentureBeat. “However, my 12-year-old daughter, who is an avid user of Roblox, finds it rather natural.” But Patel doubts the metaverse will link with the workplace at a mass scale in a three-year window. “Maybe in a 10-year window, preferences will change,” he said. Patel suggests the vast majority of ideas companies have experimented with in the metaverse will prove to be interesting but without mass-market appeal in the near to medium term.
“Rather than referring to the metaverse as the virtual universe that people congregate in, the alternative will be thinking about how virtual and augmented reality can be applied to highly critical use cases that benefit consumers and businesses in an infinitely more immersive manner,” said Patel.
Upal Basu, partner at venture capital and private equity firm NGP Capital , said it is still unclear to most people, including investors, what the term “metaverse” even means.
“It was coined from a dystopian science fiction novel and then co-opted by Facebook — which had challenges with public trust. It is thus perceived as a place of social media, avatars and goggles, none of which does it justice,” Basu said. “Many assumed it was a consumer technology, but the real opportunities could be across many industries and sectors.” In search of … better headsets In addition to many foundational issues, the metaverse has been slow to gain mainstream adoption due to technical limitations. The hardware required to support the metaverse experience is still prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
Meta recently reduced the prices of its Meta Quest Pro and Quest 2 headsets. The price reduction, by a full $500 in the case of the Quest Pro, may indicate a lack of interest from consumers in Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious vision of replacing real-life experiences with digital avatars. In addition, many users have reported discomfort and motion sickness when using virtual reality devices for extended periods, which limits the devices’ overall usability.
These technical limitations have amounted to a significant hurdle for the industry, resulting in slower growth than initially anticipated.
“A current constraint is the form factor of the VR/AR headsets, so I believe those need to get smaller and feel more like a pair of glasses rather than ski-goggles. That’s when it will feel much more natural. But I am confident that the holographic rendering fused in someone’s current environment will be a killer use case once the hardware evolves to be less bulky,” added Cisco’s Patel. “Many are already making good progress on this front, like MagicLeap — and other innovations will be reasonable to expect.” Grant Anderson, cofounder and CEO of AR game development company Mirrorscape , says that developing small, lightweight devices with the all-day battery life that every consumer wants is a very hard hardware problem to solve.
“There’s a lot riding on this year for XR [extended reality], including Apple’s release of its first mixed-reality headset incorporating both VR and AR. However, this headset, while lighter and sleeker than those that have come before it, will still look like a ski mask and reportedly cost upwards of $3,000,” said Anderson.
“Obviously, this will not be a mass-market item at this price point. But if this initial, limited-run device (reportedly only a million will be made) is looked on as a failure, then there is a real possibility that it could stall development within the industry.” However, he believes that whether it’s five years from now or 20, the metaverse will come to be; the potential is so huge that some company or companies are sure to deliver on it.
“Digital avatars are starting to mimic our movements and facial expressions, making interactions in the virtual realm much more engaging. Software has gotten better, and you can be productive in XR, especially when playing and collaborating with people,” Anderson explained. “But yes, serious technological and business issues need to be addressed before we can all move beyond the walled garden.” Will the metaverse rise again? Greg Kahn, CEO of marketplace development firm GK Digital Ventures , says that the idea of the metaverse is still evolving and each new advancement addresses some lack of commercial viability found in earlier iterations.
He sees analogies with the state of AI. Notably, the seemingly instant growth of ChatGPT and other generative AI models builds on a foundation of failures.
“The metaverse will take more time. After all, we’ve been talking about AI and natural language processing for over a decade now. So [ChatGPT] is not quite an overnight success,” said Kahn.
Building communities to populate the metaverse will also take time.
“It will depend on advertisers experimenting with immersive environments along the way, and that is already happening with high-profile brands as diverse as McDonald’s and Gucci and Wendy’s and Ralph Lauren,” he said.
In select areas, metaverse development and experiments can be anticipated to continue. But these may occur with less accompanying hyperbole. That is a natural thing, NGP Capital’s Basu suggests.
Clearly, the metaverse is somewhat at the mercy of hype cycles. Hype can counter progress, as people expect too much too soon, he said.
“Yes, millions will be lost, but that is the nature of all venture investments. The AI industry has been through three or four AI winters and is back with an even bigger bang now,” said Basu.
“Every time we write off AI it comes back much better a few years later. The metaverse will be no exception. Hype cycles tend to focus on one technology at a time,” Basu said. “Last year it was crypto and this year it is generative AI.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,292 | 2,023 |
"Metaverse live streaming is more than just watching shows in a 3D virtual world | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/metaverse-live-streaming-is-more-than-just-watching-shows-in-a-3d-virtual-world"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Metaverse live streaming is more than just watching shows in a 3D virtual world Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebranding of Facebook to its new moniker Meta on Oct 28th, 2021, millions globally were captivated by his Pixar-style demonstration of how they envisioned the metaverse.
The presentation starts with the viewer virtually walking through an avant-garde glass apartment with full-length windows lined with various outfits, boxing gloves, a Roman legionary’s armor and a fencing suit. On the far end of the room stands a gargantuan astronomical telescope in the middle of a glass observatory.
The voice of Zuckerberg invites us to imagine a virtual re-creation of our physical home fitted with the most beautiful objects and scenery impossible in the physical realm. He can be seen swiping through an assortment of avatar outfits before being teleported to a meeting room in space with other colleagues, including the head of Meta’s hardware division, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth.
They are playing a casual game of poker in zero gravity while Zuckerberg picks up a holographic Whatsapp call from Naomi, cajoling him to check out an augmented reality 3D street art before sending that 3D art to their space room to interact with.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! This demonstration of a virtual utopia captured the imagination of many, providing a glimpse into the hyper-realistic interactions of a metaverse.
Isn’t a metaverse just a 3D world? There is a naive perception that the metaverse is just a 3D virtual world that you enter through VR goggles. But if that is the case, then wouldn’t any game played on a VR headset be considered a metaverse? Therefore, the metaverse is not simply a 3D virtual world, but rather a “metaspace” that interweaves both physical and virtual environments; what is done in the physical world can affect the associated virtual space and vice versa. Hence, the metaverse does not exclusively pertain to virtual reality but also augmented reality.
The most notable example of an early-stage metaverse would be Pokémon GO in 2016. Players had to be present at physical locations to catch Pokémon, battle at gyms or battle each other.
I have vividly etched memories of hordes of players dashing toward a nearby park or mall after sighting a rare Pokémon; that was the epitome of how a virtual space can affect the physical world. If Pokémon GO were to be a DeFi P2E game built on blockchain technology, it would even be possible for players to trade their caught Pokémon for in-game tokens using Web3 crypto wallets.
If the metaverse can have such a high level of engagement for games, one can fathom the potential for applications for e-commerce, social media, real estate, live streaming and more.
The rise of social media and online engagement When the internet started, websites served solely as a provider of information. Communication was unidirectional from websites to readers.
Then in the early 2000s, Web2 gave rise to social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The burgeoning of these platforms saw unprecedented engagement between users, businesses and content creators. For the first time, users could create social profiles, comment and react to articles and videos and receive responses from the creators.
Previously, the only means of live broadcast was through television channels, which only large media companies like news networks, television production companies, talk shows and sports associations had access to.
However, now with the development of live streaming technology by companies like YouTube, Twitch and Zoom, anybody with a smartphone or tablet can have a live broadcast with interactive audiences.
Limitations of conventional livestreams Live streaming technology and smart devices have gifted the masses with an affordable means to broadcast live events. Therefore, viewers today can enjoy diverse live content from cooking, gaming, sports, fitness, yoga, weddings, music and more. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, a mind-blowing 8.8 billion hours of live streams for video games were viewed globally.
Despite their promulgation, live streams still cannot provide the same vibrant atmosphere and level of engagement compared to a live event. Even if a live stream has hundreds of video participants, a monitor screen can only fit, at best, 50 participants’ videos. A highly active live stream chat pales compared to being surrounded by thousands of screaming fans. Having a speaker answering you face-to-face at a live event feels more authentic than having a live streamer calling out your YouTube handle while addressing your comment.
Irrespective of how many interactive widgets a streaming platform provides — polls, reactions, comments, dynamic backgrounds and filters — live streams cannot build relationships the way being physically present can.
Metaverse: Bridging the gap between livestreams and live events With VR technology, live streams will transcend from two-dimensional monitors to a 3D metaverse; participants will go from being passive bystanders on a screen to being fully immersed in a virtual environment with lifelike spatial perception.
If you think that metaverse live streaming is something introduced recently, you would be astonished to discover that there have been metaverse live stream events since 2015. One of the most prominent VR live streams was the Oculus Super Bowl party hosted by AltspaceVR , the sensational final NFL playoff game in which the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks 28-24 after rallying from a 10-point deficit.
It might not have been the glitziest jamboree: A turnout of 30 participants with awkwardly curved robotic avatars, sparsely spaced out in a colossal amphitheater with a massive floating curved screen in front. Still, they could interact and be present in a virtual space. This ultimately provided us a peek into the exhilarating prospects of metaverse live streams.
One of the main enticements of being part of a metaverse is to take on any identity and perform actions that are impossible in reality; your avatar reflects the innermost desires of the perfect you. When attending a live event, your choice of outfit is the clothes available in your wardrobe. You can apply heavy makeup, but that won’t alter the shape of your facial features unless you decide to go under the knife.
Whereas in the metaverse, whether you stream a graduation ceremony , a music concert, a Netflix session with friends or a physics class (that would be a paradox since the metaverse defies the laws of physics), you can take on any feature, outfit or appearance available in the platform’s database.
Infinite possibilities for live streaming Streaming in the metaverse is not inextricably bound to watching virtual events through a VR headset. Metaverses like Decentraland and AltspaceVR do not require users to have a headset. However, using decent headphones would give a realistic sense of space, and a good-quality microphone will allow others to hear you speak more clearly.
It might sound preposterous to watch a live stream in a metaverse instead of watching it directly on your monitor screen, but being in a metaverse gives the user a sense of being present with others and being able to interact with others while watching the live stream.
Artists, content creators, media companies and businesses have been pushing the limits and advancing the frontiers of this nascent technology. Epic Games’ Fornite is well-known for its ambitiously extravagant in-game live events; an example would be the Travis Scott “Astronomical” Fornite Concert in April 2020 attended by 27.7 million unique players. While the 10-minute event was not a live virtual performance but pre-recorded, players had to be virtually present during the five scheduled showtimes to catch it live.
Astronomical would be a fitting adjective to describe how breathtakingly sensational it was — right from the approach of the amusement-park-ladened purple planet to Travis Scott’s spectacular entrance from a comet impact before emerging as a giant. His towering figure reaches the heights of the surrounding Northern Lights and utilizes the entire island as the stage while dancing to Sicko Mode. The subsequent psychedelic transitions to a hellish theme park, underwater world and outer space were all a sight to behold.
While the Travis Scott Fornite Concert was a pre-recorded show that had to be attended live in a metaverse, John Legend’s “Bigger Love” Virtual Concert , in collaboration with Wave , was a live virtual concert where Legend in an Xsens motion capture suit performed in real-time to virtual viewers from the Wave Studio.
The virtual space was a jazz club with an ever-evolving stage, with flowers, comets and fireworks erupting at intervals. The engagement was on a different plateau compared to other metaverse live streams. The MVN Animate motion capture system matched John Legend’s bodily movements, including his passionate facial expressions. He could also chat with the virtual audience between songs and give shout-outs to the bigger donors; viewers making donations would see their names and donations sprouting out as virtual flowers.
Conclusion With metaverse live streaming still in an incipient stage, many companies, stakeholders and investors are looking to capitalize on this to gain a first-mover advantage. Companies like Condense and Wave already have studios with end-to-end motion capture systems to capture 3D videos and live stream directly to a metaverse.
When VR headsets and decentralized applications reach the same degree of global mass adoption as smart devices and web apps, we will experience metaverse live streaming at its culminated peak.
I imagine every household’s television set to be replaced by several VR headsets. And who knows? You might be chilling in the same virtual room as your friends living in another country, watching Netflix or catching a live virtual concert.
Far-fetched? Definitely. Possible? Highly.
Daniel Thomas is a full-time blogger and founder of Basigue.com.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,293 | 2,023 |
"How to make sense of trending commerce innovations | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/how-to-make-sense-of-trending-commerce-innovations"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How to make sense of trending commerce innovations Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Whether it’s the metaverse, shoppable social or cryptocurrencies, brands are racing to determine which trend best aligns with both their tech capabilities and customer value proposition.
During the rush, it’s easy to misjudge how any given trend may or may not connect with your audience. For example, earlier this year, Hostess unexpectedly announced the launch of “ $TWINKcoin ,” a crypto-inspired, coin-shaped version of its classic Twinkie snack cake.
Hostess not only received backlash from the LGBTQ+ community for its negligent use of the offensive term, but also severely confused its customers. The connection between the baked goods conglomerate and the cryptocurrency world wasn’t clear in their announcement.
That said, Hostess’ desire to insert itself in the often headline-grabbing crypto conversation was understandable. Several consumer brands such as Nike, Sotheby’s and Coca Cola made the same leap in 2021 and were met with success and positive headlines for weeks and months to come. But several months after its launch, no one outside of Hostess understands the point of the brand’s foray into crypto –– but we do remember that it was a flop.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Avoiding an innovation blunder Interest in commerce trends such as the aforementioned are still growing. In fact, metaverse-related companies raised more than $10 billion last year, almost doubling the amount raised in 2020. And that trend isn’t slowing down — market size for the metaverse is forecasted to hit nearly $700 billion by 2030.
However, as evidenced, opting into these trends falls flat when it lacks a clear connection to your brand and business model. In the Hostess example, if we set aside the offensiveness of the campaign, the company’s product value, customers and this new foray were still mismatched.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sephora found success in adopting modern commerce innovations as part of its omnichannel experiences. The beauty retailer adopted technology that enabled their customers to make purchases, communicate with live representatives and gain access to exclusive discounts all on its mobile app.
In stores, as well as in its app, Sephora’s customers benefit from augmented reality (AR) virtual try-ons and Color IQ technology to find the right foundation shade for their skin tone. Sephora uses data generated through both in-person and virtual interactions to provide personalized communications, recommendations, and experiences to customers. This is tech trend adoption done right — Sephora prioritized its customers’ behaviors and pursued experiences that complemented its business model.
To achieve similar results, organizations must analyze whether a new innovation aligns with its brand identity and customer behavior. Additionally, it’s important to build a company culture that prioritizes continuous experimentation. For example, Sephora launched an innovation lab in 2015 to test out in-store experiences before rolling it out widely, thus curbing operational costs while getting real feedback.
Prioritize brand authenticity and customer relevance Trending commerce innovations often seem impressive, especially from a distance. But it’s critical to identify a clear business case before you commit resources.
Start by determining how a new innovation will drive revenue and reinforce your brand values and image. Just as importantly, ensure your customers are interested –– or can be convinced to be –– in the experiences the innovation offers. Customer surveys, consumer personas and other feedback mechanisms can help you gauge audience sentiment and needs.
On track to become the most digitally connected generation by 2024, Gen Z is attracted to compelling, relevant content, having grown up on video-first social media and the streaming era with a bevy of content choices at their fingertips.
A good example of this was Roblox 2020 virtual reality concert with rapper Lil Nas X. The platform is built on the premise of community, social commerce and gaming, and they smartly didn’t abandon these core elements that contribute to its ongoing success. Roblox stuck to what they do best and delivered an experience their audience cared about.
Ultimately, integrating modern commerce innovations requires both self-awareness and experimentation. Self-awareness about whether these innovations are the right fit for your organization’s brand and values is vital to successful rollouts. The ability to experiment to determine whether your customers are interested in these innovations to key.
Create a culture of experimentation, then develop an agile tech stack to match A culture of experimentation is fundamental in achieving success with commerce innovations. Suppose you’re interested in implementing an NFT component into an existing offering. Rather than rushing to incorporate NFT capabilities into the offering in a disjointed manner, experiment and iterate with several rounds of A/B testing. Over time, this try and try again approach fosters an organizational culture of experimentation that increases the likelihood that innovations will resonate with both new and existing customers.
But even with the right culture, a rigid tech stack can quickly stifle any innovation. Conversely, an agile tech stack empowers your employees to prioritize innovation by making it easier to launch, learn, iterate and potentially scrap commerce innovations with minimal risk or loss. Additionally, agile tech stacks typically include applications that don’t require significant IT expertise, enabling non-technical team members to participate fully in an organizational culture rooted in experimentation.
Work smarter Despite the increased appetite to opt into commerce innovations among brands, 45% of non-technical business decision-makers are allotting only a minimal amount of their annual budget toward improving or expanding their company’s commerce capabilities. That’s particularly interesting, considering a majority (59%) of those decision-makers say they are more likely to shop with companies offering modern commerce experiences.
Bridging this gap starts with assessing current and projected commerce innovations and how they align with current technological capabilities, brand vision, and customers’ evolving needs. By fostering an agile culture and investing in technologies that enable that agility, an organization can innovate without pause and take advantage of the right-fit commerce trends.
Jen Jones is chief marketing officer for commercetools.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,294 | 2,023 |
"How to get metaverse payments right in 2023 and beyond | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/how-to-get-metaverse-payments-right-in-2023-and-beyond"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How to get metaverse payments right in 2023 and beyond Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The metaverse will continue to open new frontiers of opportunity in 2023. It is no longer science fiction, but a place where top venture capitalists like Verizon Ventures are making investments and hundreds of brands are already operating, with many more likely to follow.
As the metaverse market is projected to grow to more than $426 billion by 2027 — and with Meta recently announcing it will double down on its investment in the metaverse — more organizations are thinking about how to build improved multichannel e-commerce experiences that better capture opportunities in the immersive virtual world.
The possibilities of the metaverse are still coming into focus for payment enterprises. Embedded finance, open banking and banking-as-a-service could all potentially benefit from the metaverse. This will also mean that competition will be tougher than ever. By experimenting with what consumers respond well to, businesses can edge past their competition by creating new products, services and channels in the metaverse.
As more businesses venture into the metaverse , here are three observations that payment players, merchants and FinTechs should consider when designing platforms to optimize revenue and enhance customer experience.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Build strong platforms to earn customer trust and gain adoption Before businesses can dive into the metaverse, they will have to overcome certain infrastructure challenges. Business leaders need to understand what plug-ins and APIs their organizations will need to support to enable smooth consumer experiences.
Investments in infrastructure are needed not only to ensure smooth consumer experiences but to instill checks and balances and fend off cyber and fraud risks. The more data that is available, the greater the privacy risk. On the flip side, if businesses can enforce tighter verification standards through processes like Know Your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer ( KYC ), customer trust will increase, enabling firms to use data to innovate, predict trends and improve the consumer journey.
Businesses need to remember that consumers are accustomed to stable banking environments backed by stable financial institutions that guarantee smooth transactions. Consumers rely on this level of certainty. The still unregulated world of the metaverse naturally raises some trepidation. Until businesses can make their payment platforms in the metaverse as user-friendly and trustworthy as possible, widespread adoption is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
There’s growing opportunity in emerging markets The virtual world can create new means to capture up-and-coming segments across industries and countries, helping to level the playing field in markets where financial inclusion is poor. Arguably one of the most valuable possibilities of the metaverse is that it will pave the way for consumers from emerging markets to access this marketplace.
Digital assets can be sold, traded and marketed through the metaverse marketplace, meaning an alternative way of accepting a payment for a product or service, promoting inclusivity for underbanked consumers. This will create new revenue streams and consumers that payment providers can tap into.
Latin America and APAC are experiencing unprecedented e-commerce growth as the number of unbanked consumers continues to decline, presenting possibilities for the opening of a much larger market in the metaverse. In some parts of Latin America and APAC, where access to cross-border goods and services is more difficult from a compliance and regulatory standpoint, the metaverse can further level the playing field, creating easier participation in the global economy.
Brazil, for instance, is seeing real-time 24/7 payments progress quickly, driven by PIX, the first instant payment system available to local consumers, thus reshaping the Brazilian payment landscape. Introduced by the central bank of Brazil, PIX is expected to grow in appeal for local and international businesses as the country’s central bank sees PIX’s growing future in the metaverse.
Consider partnering with other businesses Businesses need to decide whether it’s worth the time, risk and investment to build their own robust platforms in the metaverse — or whether it’s a better idea to partner with others that already have a presence there. While it can be attractive for businesses to invest in a high-risk, high-reward opportunity, business leaders should ask themselves whether their products and services are really beneficial to the metaverse.
Ultimately, businesses should think about cooperation instead of competition.
OpenSea , the largest NFT marketplace, for example, needs lots of services around the world. While building out a new network, OpenSea still needs traditional players to help move money around, get access to different payment methods, and comply with local regulations. Many worlds have to work together for the metaverse to function.
As we wait for the metaverse to evolve out of its exploratory phase, businesses should consider emerging opportunities that will create financial inclusion and accelerate growth. Rather than build potentially risky and expensive platforms in the metaverse, businesses should first consider how they can most effectively partner with other metaverse players.
Finally, widespread uptake of the metaverse will depend on consumer trust. Businesses that build bulletproof platforms and protect user privacy will have the most to gain in a still unknown and uncertain virtual world.
James Booth is VP head of partnerships at PPRO.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,295 | 2,022 |
"How the metaverse will connect the world | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/how-the-metaverse-will-connect-the-world"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How the metaverse will connect the world Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
As this is the final piece of our “Building the Metaverse” series, I find it fitting to conclude by painting a picture of what the metaverse could look like and how it might operate.
I am not going to bore you by re-introducing the idea of having an avatar interacting in a virtual world and using crypto and NFTs as a means of tender, because I know you are already well-versed in those arenas. Instead, I want to focus on the idea that the metaverse could connect people from all corners of the world in ways that we never thought possible.
This will be a fairly technical post — but don’t worry, I’ll try to break things down as best as I can.
Dimensionality and spatial computing The metaverse will be composed of many dimensions, and each one of those dimensions will be filled with all sorts of content. You will have the 2D web, 3D virtual worlds, 4D augmented reality (AR), and even 5D mixed reality. But what exactly do I mean by “dimension”? Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! In short, a dimension is simply a way of measuring something. So, the 2D web would be everything that exists on a flat plane like a traditional website. A 3D virtual world is, well, a world that exists in three dimensions where you can move around and explore. And AR is when digital content is overlaid onto the real world.
Mixed reality is a bit more complicated and it is the dimension that I am most excited about. Mixed reality is when you take the real world and mix it with the virtual world to create a new hybrid reality. This is different from AR because digital content can interact with the physical world.
Think about it this way, in AR, you might see a virtual dog on your coffee table. But in Mixed reality, that virtual dog could walk off the table, onto the floor, and then pee on your rug (I know, gross).
The point is, the metaverse will be composed of many dimensions and each one of those will offer something unique. And because of that, the metaverse will connect the world.
But before we can get to that point, we need to lay the foundation with spatial computing. This is a way of representing digital information in a 3D space.
As we alluded to earlier, the metaverse will be composed of many dimensions. So to make all this work, we need to have a way of representing different dimensions in a 3D space. And this is exactly what spatial computing will allow us to do.
The metaverse as a global platform Now that we have laid the foundation, let’s talk about just how the metaverse can connect people from all over the world. The first thing to understand is that the metaverse will be a global platform.
What this means is that anyone from anywhere will be able to access the metaverse and interact with others. There will be no barriers to entry and everyone will be on an equal playing field.
This is in contrast to the traditional internet composed of many different silos. For example, you have the U.S. internet, which is different from the Chinese internet, which is different from the Russian internet. The profound difference lies in regulatory environment, censorship, and data privacy. All these factors make it very difficult for people from different parts of the world to connect with one another.
But with the metaverse, there will only be one global platform that everyone can access. This is a very powerful idea, because it will enable unlimited language translation, real-time understanding of culture and customs, immutability to regulation and censorship, and much more.
The metaverse as a decentralized platform In addition to being a global platform, the metaverse will be a decentralized platform. No one central authority will control it.
Instead, it will be a distributed network powered by the people who use it. This is a very important distinction because it will make the metaverse much more resilient to censorship and control.
The traditional internet is centralized, which means that there are a few companies that control everything. For example, Facebook controls your newsfeed, Google controls your search results, and Amazon controls what you buy.
But with the metaverse, there will not be any central authority that controls what you see or do. This is a huge shift that will lead to a much more open and democratic internet.
The changing nature of transactions and ownership Another key aspect of the metaverse is that it will change the nature of transactions and ownership. Today, all transactions are mediated by centralized institutions.
For example, when you buy stocks, you are actually buying a piece of paper that represents your ownership of that stock. But with the metaverse, you will be able to own digital assets directly.
This is a very important distinction, because it will lead to a much more efficient and transparent market. Today, there are many middlemen that take a cut of every transaction.
In the metaverse, transactions will be direct and there will be no need for middlemen. This will make the market much more efficient and it will also reduce the cost of transactions.
Putting everything together: Adapting in the age of the metaverse To conclude our series, let’s consider how to adapt to the immense paradigm change that the metaverse will bring. We need to learn to think in 3D and stop limiting our imagination to the 2D world that we live in today. What do I mean by that exactly? In the 2D world, we are used to thinking about things in terms of left and right, up and down. But in the 3D world of the metaverse, there are an infinite number of possibilities. We need to start thinking about things in three dimensions.
We also need to get comfortable with the idea of digital ownership. In the metaverse, you will own digital assets directly. This is a very different concept from owning a piece of paper that represents your ownership of an asset.
And finally, we need to learn to think about the world in terms of networks. The metaverse will be a decentralized platform that is powered by the people who use it. This is a very different model from the centralized internet that we are used to today.
In spite of these differences, if we learn to think in 3D, get comfortable with digital ownership, and start thinking about the world in terms of networks, we will be able to adapt and thrive in this new era.
Imagine this as a final thought — the metaverse is not just a game or a recreational diversion. It is the next evolutionary step in human social interaction and it’s time to start preparing for it.
The metaverse is coming, and it’s going to change everything.
Daniel Saito is CEO and cofounder of StrongNode DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,296 | 2,023 |
"How innovators are using gamification to appeal to Gen Z | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/how-innovators-are-using-gamification-to-appeal-to-gen-z"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How innovators are using gamification to appeal to Gen Z Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Generation Z — those age 10 to 25 — are the most tech-savvy, web-oriented and connected group of consumers ever. They are increasingly driving consumer decisions and trends, and businesses are taking notice. Companies are constantly looking for ways to use technology to tap into Gen Z’s interests and appeal to them.
Many of these trends are already becoming apparent.
Gaming and eSports , for instance, are rapidly gaining traction among Gen Zers, not only as a way to have fun and enjoy entertainment but to interact with others and even make money. Companies are turning to gamification — the use of game-like mechanics to engage users — to take advantage of this trend.
Another way innovators are using technology to appeal to Gen Z is through interactive content. Recent research highlights that 90% of Gen Z uses apps with interactive live video. Chat-based experiences, too, are becoming more popular.
To actually implement these kinds of interactive experiences, businesses are making use of tools like machine learning (ML) and augmented reality (AR).
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! ML creates competitive advantages The past few years have seen explosive improvements in ML technology. With Gen Z acting as the “early adopters” of technology, companies looking to make their mark on the younger generations must capitalize on this.
OpenAI has led advancements in natural language and image processing, virtually monopolizing the tech media landscape with its recent releases of ChatGPT.
OpenAI isn’t the only lab pushing innovation, and businesses are turning to AutoML platforms from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others to develop their own models. Research shows that businesses using AI and ML are outperforming their peers and creating competitive advantages.
One business leveraging this ML technology is stock photography and video platform ShutterStock.
By using DALL-E 2, users will be able to generate their own images and videos, turning their concept briefs into stunning visuals. Instead of going out and hiring a team of graphic designers, users will now be able to create visuals on their own, with the help of the AI.
Another example comes from Notion.
The note-taking software is now leveraging ML to make its service more intuitive and helpful, allowing users to generate content faster, more accurately, and with fewer errors.
These AI use-cases are just scratching the surface, and leading investors posit that AI may soon supplant therapists, game makers and even companions for the lonely. It won’t be Baby Boomers or other older generations that lead this charge, but rather Gen Z, who are already comfortable with the technology and excited to explore new possibilities.
AR enhances digital experiences From Snapchat filters to Apple’s ARKit, augmented reality (AR) is also becoming increasingly popular among Gen Z. With AR, users can interact with a digital environment in a way they can’t do with traditional media.
This has led to businesses using AR to create new interactive experiences that appeal to Gen Z. One example is the beauty industry, where companies are using AR to let customers try on makeup before buying it.
Gen Z is also driving the rise of the metaverse — a shared digital universe where people can create and interact in digital environments — through increased use of VR, AR and gaming.
Businesses are already leveraging the metaverse and creating their own virtual stores and events. For example, IKEA is creating virtual stores where customers can browse their products, and Nike is creating virtual worlds to showcase their products.
Companies that fail to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape are at risk of losing out to those that do. Those looking to capture the attention of Gen Z need to stay on top of the latest technology and trends and consider how they can use them to their advantage. By doing so, businesses can create experiences that are interactive, engaging and tailored to Gen Z’s interests.
Eugene Lisovskiy is cofounder and CEO of Level Up.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,297 | 2,023 |
"Hey Alexa, what's next? Breaking through voice technology's ceiling | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/hey-alexa-whats-next-breaking-through-voice-technologys-ceiling"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Hey Alexa, what’s next? Breaking through voice technology’s ceiling Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Beyond Verbal Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The recent announcement from Amazon that they would be reducing staff and budget for the Alexa department has deemed the voice assistant as “ a colossal failure.
” In its wake, there has been discussion that voice as an industry is stagnating (or even worse, on the decline).
I have to say, I disagree.
While it is true that that voice has hit its use-case ceiling, that doesn’t equal stagnation. It simply means that the current state of the technology has a few limitations that are important to understand if we want it to evolve.
Simply put, today’s technologies do not perform in a way that meets the human standard. To do so requires three capabilities: VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Superior natural language understanding (NLU): There are lots of good companies out there that have conquered this aspect. The technology capabilities are such that they can pick up on what you’re saying and know the usual ways people might mention what they want. For example, if you say, “I’d like a hamburger with onions,” it knows that you want the onions on the hamburger, not in a separate bag.
Voice metadata extraction : Voice technology needs to be able to pick up whether a speaker is happy or frustrated, how far they are from the mic and their identities and accounts. It needs to recognize voice enough so that it knows when you or somebody else is talking.
Overcome crosstalk and untethered noise : The ability to understand in the presence of cross-talk even when other people are talking and when there are noises (traffic, music, babble) not independently accessible to noise cancellation algorithms.
There are companies that achieve the first two.
These solutions are typically built to work in sound environments that assume there is a single speaker with background noise mostly canceled. However, in a typical public setting with multiple sources of noise, that is a questionable assumption.
Achieving the “holy grail” of voice technology It is important to also take a moment and explain what I mean by noise that can and can’t be canceled. Noise to which you have independent access (tethered noise) can be canceled. For example, cars equipped with voice control have independent electronic access (via a streaming service) to the content being played on car speakers.
This access ensures that the acoustic version of that content as captured on the microphones can be canceled using well-established algorithms. However, the system does not have independent electronic access to content spoken by car passengers. This is what I call untethered noise, and it can’t be canceled.
This is why the third capability — overcoming crosstalk and untethered noise — is the ceiling for current voice technology. Achieving this in tandem with the other two is the key to breaking through the ceiling.
Each on its own gives you important capabilities, but all three together — the holy grail of voice technology — give you functionality.
Talk of the town With Alexa set to lose $10 billion this year, it’s natural that it will become a test case for what went wrong. Think about how people typically engage with their voice assistant: “What time is it?” “Set a timer for…” “Remind me to…” “Call mom—no CALL MOM.” “Calling Ron.” Voice assistants don’t meaningfully engage with you or provide much assistance that you couldn’t accomplish in a few minutes. They save you some time, sure, but they don’t accomplish meaningful, or even slightly complicated tasks.
Alexa was certainly a trailblazing pioneer in general voice assistance, but it had limitations when it came to specialized, futuristic commercial deployments. In these situations, it is critical for voice assistants or interfaces to have use-case specialized capabilities such as voice metadata extraction, human-like interaction with the user and cross-talk resistance in public places.
As Mark Pesce writes , “[Voice assistants] were never designed to serve user needs. The users of voice assistants aren’t its customers — they’re the product.” There are a number of industries that can be transformed by high-quality interactions driven by voice.
Take the restaurant and hospitality industries. We desire personalized experiences.
Yes, I do want to add fries to my order.
Yes, I do want a late check-in , thank you for reminding me that my flight gets in late on that day.
National fast-food chains like Mcdonald’s and Taco Bell are investing in conversational AI to streamline and personalize their drive-through ordering systems.
Once you have voice technology that meets the human standard, it can go into commercial and enterprise settings where voice technology is not just a luxury, but actually creates higher efficiencies and provides meaningful value.
Play it by ear To enable intelligent control by voice in these scenarios, however, technology needs to overcome untethered noise and the challenges presented by cross-talk.
It not only needs to hear the voice of interest but have the ability to extract metadata in voice, such as certain biomarkers. If we can extract metadata, we can also start to open up voice technology’s ability to understand emotion, intent and mood.
Voice metadata will also allow for personalization. The kiosk will recognize who you are, pull up your rewards account and ask whether you want to put the charge on your card.
If you’re interacting with a restaurant kiosk to order food via voice, there will likely be another kiosk nearby with other people talking and ordering. It should not only recognize your voice as different, but it also needs to distinguish your voice from theirs and not confuse your orders.
This is what it means for voice technology to perform to the level of the human standard.
Hear me out How do we ensure that voice breaks through this current ceiling? I would argue that it is not a question of technological capabilities. We have the capabilities. Companies have developed incredible NLU.
If you can box together the three most important capabilities for voice technology to meet the human standard, you’re 90% of the way there.
The final mile of voice technology demands a few things.
First, we need to demand that voice technology is tested in the real world. Too often, it’s tested in laboratory settings or with simulated noise. When you’re “in the wild,” you’re dealing with dynamic sound environments where different voices and sounds interrupt.
Voice technology that is not real-world tested will always fail when it is deployed in the real world. Furthermore, there should be standardized benchmarks that voice technology has to meet.
Second, voice technology needs to be deployed in specific environments where it can really be pushed to its limits and solve critical problems and create efficiencies. This will lead to wider adoption of voice technologies across the board.
We’re very nearly there. Alexa is in no way the signal that voice technology is on the decline. In fact, it was exactly what the industry needed to light a new path forward and fully realize all that voice technology has to offer.
Hamid Nawab, Ph.D. is cofounder and chief scientist at Yobe.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,298 | 2,022 |
"Creating the ultimate smart map with new map data initiative launched by Linux Foundation | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/creating-the-ultimate-smart-map-with-new-map-data-initiative-launched-by-linux-foundation"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Creating the ultimate smart map with new map data initiative launched by Linux Foundation Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Think about it: Maps are fundamental to human evolution, exploration, innovation.
Since the first maps were drawn up in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, we have used them to guide ourselves across land, ocean, space (and someday maybe the Earth’s very interior).
And today, map data is voluminous and vast; the modern world relies on it not just for navigation, but for local search, routing, logistics, data visualization and other emerging innovations — including autonomous driving.
Still, the sourcing and curating of up-to-date, high-quality, fine-grained map data from often disparate sources is expensive, difficult and time-consuming. Data can be inconsistent, vulnerable to errors and based on unique conventions and vocabularies (thus making it difficult to combine). And often, existing open map data lacks the strong foundation on which new products and services can be built.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! To help usher in the next era of map building — particularly with the dawn of the metaverse , the rise in augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) and the many other platforms and worlds not yet conceived — the Linux Foundation today announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation.
Founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, the effort will develop interoperable map data on an open-source methodology. It will be open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data and strengthening mapping services worldwide.
“We’re at a place where maps and map data can be built together by a community — and it needs to be,” Mike Dolan, SVP and GM of projects at the Linux Foundation, told VentureBeat. “No one company can actually do it all. We have to work together.” Democratizing map data for the future The Overture Maps Foundation’s goal is to create reliable, easy-to-use and interoperable open map data, according to the Linux Foundation. Members will combine resources to build data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes.
The project aims to complement existing open geospatial data and integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques.
Overture will provide: Collaborative map building: Data will be incorporated from multiple sources including Overture members, civic organizations and open data sources.
Global entity reference system : Overture will simplify interoperability with a system that links entities from different datasets to the same real-world entities.
Quality assurance processes : Data will undergo validation to detect map errors, breakage and vandalism to help ensure that map data can be used in production systems.
Structured data schema : Overture will define and drive adoption of a common, structured and documented data schema to create an easy-to-use ecosystem of map data.
“There is demand for exceptionally high quality data, data that is updated very regularly,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, told VentureBeat. “By collaborating on this, we will be able to provide that.” However, he emphasized, “Overture won’t be a mapping service. You’re not going to log in and ask how to get from point A to point B.” Dolan, for his part, noted that the project follows the growing trend of “democratizing data” so that it can be updated, modified and reused.
“It’s the continued evolution that we have seen of sharing software source code,” he said, as well as the rise of open standards and participation models. “It’s open to anyone, and anyone can contribute back.” A giant flywheel of participants As Dolan pointed out, industry leaders have had conversations on the complexities around mapping since around 2016.
“This is just insanely hard to build,” he said, “and it’s only getting harder.” Thousands of engineers who have spent decades working on mapping have struggled to collect and maintain accurate quality data, he said.
“Without reliable and modern maps, they just can’t build other products and services and capabilities,” said Dolan.
The availability of open map data can empower developers and map creators to build next-generation location-based applications, said Zemlin. Then there are the societal benefits: rich map data can support research entities and government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey.
“Building high-fidelity mapping requires a giant flywheel of participants who are consuming and providing data that is accurate and high fidelity,” he said. “This is the power of what we’re doing.” Endless possibilities with open map data Overture expects to release its first datasets in the first half of 2023. Initially, this release will include basic layers such as buildings, roads and administrative information, according to Zemlin. The project will then steadily improve the coverage, resolution and accuracy of existing data, as well as introduce new layers such as geographies, administrative boundaries, border routing and, eventually, 3D building data.
And then what? It’s really a matter of where the community decides to take it, said Dolan. The open community can address features, functions and capabilities that haven’t even been considered or anticipated yet.
“Where’s this going to go? I’m not entirely sure,” said Dolan. “We’ve got a really good starting point. I think it can only get better. These open-data projects don’t go backwards.” And, the uses and benefits of the project for the evolving metaverse are dramatic, said Jan Erik Solem, engineering director of maps at Meta. In the not-so-distant future, map services will power augmented reality applications that merge digital and physical worlds to deliver immersive social, gaming, education and productivity experiences.
“Immersive experiences, which understand and blend into your physical environment, are critical to the embodied internet of the future,” said Solem. “By delivering interoperable open map data, Overture provides the foundation for an open metaverse built by creators, developers and businesses alike.” Mike Harrell, VP of engineering for TomTom’s new maps platform, described the project’s implications in no small terms: “Overture’s open and interoperable base map is fundamental to bringing the world together to create the smartest map on the planet.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,299 | 2,023 |
"Creating a seamless access experience with the digital double | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/creating-a-seamless-access-experience-with-the-digital-double"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Creating a seamless access experience with the digital double Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Economics in the digital world has evolved in parallel with those of the physical world — moving from a focus on products to services and, now, experiences. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore first introduced the concept in their book[1], “ The Experience Economy.
” There they observed that “getting personal with customers is the DNA of the Experience Economy.” As consumers continue to accelerate their adoption of digital technologies, the Experience Economy has become firmly planted in the digital world. And end users have significantly increased their expectations for digital experiences that are tailored to their interests and needs at any given time.
As a result, it has become imperative that organizations deliver digital experiences that are personalized, real-time, geo-sensitive, predictive and omnichannel. Moreover, the teams crafting these digital experiences require a proper methodology to represent personalization attributes firmly and securely in the digital world. The “digital double” is a concept created to address this need.
The idea of a digital double first came to me in the spring of 2016. I was traveling to deliver a keynote at WSO2Con Asia (the APAC edition of WSO2’s yearly user conference) on the topic “Building a Digital Enterprise: Learning from Experience.” So, I started creating the keynote storyboard on the long flight from San Francisco to Colombo, Sri Lanka. However, the storyline was not coming along the way I had hoped. So, I switched on the onboard entertainment system and came across the movie Tron Legacy , where the characters are pulled into a virtual world. That’s when it hit me: The digital universe requires a proper representation of physical and digital assets, a digital double.
Defining a digital double There are similar concepts to the digital double, largely fostered by the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Digital twin and digital self are good examples, but they each represent just one type of asset. By contrast, the digital double is a representation of people, places, and things in the digital universe.
Your digital double is always active inside the digital space, regardless of physical activity such as sleeping or watching TV. Not only that, it makes decisions on your behalf. Dating applications are an excellent example for understanding the behavior of a digital double. Once you create a profile in the dating application, your digital double starts dating people on your behalf. As a result, you will miss your first date but get a better match.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Therefore, as digital craftsmen, we must protect the digital doubles we create inside digital applications by applying fundamentals — such as privacy, trust, confidentiality, and security controls — enhancing security through a privacy ecosystem and regulations to protect the digital double against cyber threats.
Identity vs. personality In understanding the digital double, it’s important to recognize the difference between identity and personality. Identity is what sets you apart from others and makes you unique. Personality is how you describe yourself; it is your sense of humor, your emotions, and how you react in different situations.
Identity verification establishes that it is you using a particular system, but the system knows nothing about you other than a few identity attributes. Until the system knows your personality, it cannot get to know you, and it cannot offer a personalized experience.
“Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual.” ~Kenneth Lee Pike, anthropologist.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is the way to intimate personalization. CIAM today is mostly about access control, but CIAM in the future will blend customer personality into the business.
Identity and personality attributes vary in durability. These attributes can be categorized based on how often they change.
Never change: DNA, blood group, fingerprints; Rarely change: Name, nationality, religion, gender; Frequently change: Location, age, social status, job, education; Rapidly change: Social media, heart rate, playlists.
Connecting the dots The digital double is the fusion of your identity and personality. As we discussed earlier, the digital double represents the digital universe’s people, places, and things. Moreover, the digital double holds the identity and personality attributes with it. However, representing, storing, and exposing these attributes is challenging due to the dynamic nature of both identity and personality attributes. The World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ) has established the foundation for a solution to this problem by introducing the decentralized identifiers ( DID ) specification, which addresses the core architecture, data model, and representations of identity and personality attributes.
The digital double is changing traditional digital identity representation by moving from geocentric (owned and managed by the identity provider) to heliocentric (owned and managed by the individual). The heliocentric nature is an excellent way to handle content management, and compliance requirements must be addressed when accessing and storing identity and personality attributes.
In addition, the dynamic nature of these attributes makes the digital double adaptive and decentralized, which the industry is trying to address through an identity fabric concept that comes with Web 3.0. My preference is to call the distributed identity network an “ Identity mesh ” similar to other distributed and cloud-native architecture styles such as service mesh, data mesh and event mesh. Unfortunately, there is no unique identifier for the digital assets in the digital ecosystem; therefore, a digital double has to be highly interoperable across various digital identity representations.
CIAM is the foundation CIAM is the foundation that creates and manages the digital double. Hence, the CIAM provider has to consider this and provide the digital double as a service to ease application development. To do so, the CIAM provider needs to incorporate a new set of capabilities in addition to the core identity and security features, such as authorization and authentication in full power. CIAM systems are already capturing identity attributes from defined policy information points (PIPs).
Furthermore, the CIAM provider has to introduce application programming interfaces (APIs) and event syncs to capture and record personalization attributes based on user activities from various sources. This is predominantly interaction data from omnichannel applications and transactions from systems of records. In addition, the CIAM system will silently observe the customer by monitoring their social media posts, including sentiment analysis, and detect interaction patterns and anomalies. The CIAM system will then trigger alerts when anomalies are detected.
Once customers’ attributes are captured, the CIAM provider has to enable APIs that enable applications to query the attributes and use them in the digital experiences delivered by the app. Therefore, graph APIs based on GraphQL are vital for implementing attribute retrieval APIs. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) processes can associate with the attribute data store and deliver insights on behalf of the business. The extended capabilities listed above let the CIAM provider combine the attributes of a digital double across the business to build a comprehensive personality profile.
Path to creating a seamless access experience with the digital double The business and its CIAM provider must collaborate to achieve a seamless access experience with the digital double. The CIAM provider has to enable the extended capabilities discussed in the previous section, and the business needs to leverage those capabilities in the application architecture and development.
The end result cannot be achieved overnight. However, the following five-step CIAM maturity model can help the organization and CIAM provider make iterative but steady progress.
Level 0 — None: Customers are strangers, and interactions are anonymous.
Level 1 — Managed: Basic identity management, registration, password management and user management.
Level 2 — Siloed: Simple integration with siloed business systems, customer information replicated within apps.
Level 3 — Connected: Business systems integration, 360° customer view, omnichannel customer experience.
Level 4 — Optimized: Intelligent, adaptive, and personalized customer experience.
From the business point of view, the organization achieves CIAM 1.0 once they have access management and identify a person as outlined for levels 1 (Managed) and 2 (Siloed). Next, the organization will move to CIAM 2.0 by integrating the user’s identity into the business, as described in level 3 (Connected). Finally, the organization will graduate to CIAM 3.0 by enhancing business applications to know each person as noted in level 4 (Optimized).
Final thoughts We mainly reviewed customer-focused personalization using business-to-consumer (B2C) CIAM, but as a digital craftsman, you have to build digital experiences for other types of users. The same concept can be extended to other business models using CIAM, including business-to-business (B2B) CIAM for handling partners and suppliers and business-to-employee (B2E) CIAM for managing employees.
Getting personal with customers is the DNA of the experience economy, and in the digital world, CIAM is the way to initiate personalization. Moreover, because the digital double is the fusion of each person’s identity and personality, CIAM is needed to provide the foundation that creates and manages the digital double. To use this capability in application development, the CIAM provider has to enable the digital double as a service. The CIAM maturity model can be used as a steady, iterative, and frictionless path to creating a seamless access experience with the digital double.
Asanka Abeysinghe is chief technology evangelist at WSO2.
[1] Ii, J. P. B., & Gilmore, J. H. (2019). The Experience Economy, With a New Preface by the Authors: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money (Revised). Harvard Business Review Press.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,300 | 2,023 |
"4 ways product and industrial companies can harness the promise of the metaverse | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/4-ways-product-and-industrial-companies-can-harness-the-promise-of-the-metaverse"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 4 ways product and industrial companies can harness the promise of the metaverse Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Amidst a global inflection point for business and society, the metaverse is beginning to scale. Seven in 10 executives said it would positively impact their organization; four in 10 consider it a breakthrough, as recently shown in an Accenture survey.
Industrial and product companies are among those placing big bets, and they have started to pay off. Take Siemens Energy, which reported that, through technological applications for maintenance and inspection, the metaverse reduced downtime by 70% and saved its steam turbine business $1.7 billion.
A natural extension of digital twins What attracts companies to the metaverse? It’s the immersive environment it provides, where multiple users can interact, and easily accessible information can be layered in for objects, avatars and actions.
The big opportunity for industrial and product companies lies in coupling the collaborative, immersive, visual and intuitive dimensions of the metaverse with digital twins fed by integrated data pools across departments, systems, operations technology and IT.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! This could create a virtual, fully immersive and intuitive simulation of the entire enterprise. Every aspect of it could be run through a plethora of eventualities, with each projected effect informing other scenarios.
In part, this opportunity is still nascent. But we found that increasingly, virtual data-based replicas of objects, facilities and processes play a role in four compelling metaverse use cases for industrial and product companies: 1: Creative collaboration and product development In what is now being called the industrial metaverse, workers across departments can connect in an immersive environment that allows more efficient design, engineering, testing and validation. Employees can connect from anywhere to see interactive design simulations and operational scenarios.
For example, in Boeing ’s factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by HoloLens headsets.
Engineers can also prototype and test products virtually, which is cost-effective and more efficient than testing actual products in real-life scenarios. In the metaverse, prototypes can be set up quickly as digital simulations with engines like Unity.
The result: More options for customers and a shorter creation process.
What is more, the metaverse gives engineers the opportunity to ’beam’ important stakeholders right into a simulated work environment. This is of particular value in complex and large-scale development projects, like ITER.
More than 30 countries collaborated on building a large-scale electricity generation facility based on nuclear fusion.
Using NVIDIA Omniverse, Unreal Engine for Oculus, Bentley iTwin, and Azure Remote Rendering for HoloLens2, ITER virtually teleported people into the digital twin of the facility to experience it for the first time.
2. Maintenance and remote repairs General Electric (GE), for its part, created a digital twin of its gas turbines using the metaverse to continuously optimize the temperature and send automatic adjustments to the controls. These gas turbines require seasonal adjustment, often a manual process performed by an expert after an outage that may take multiple days.
Not only does the metaverse decrease time and manual labor, but it enhances performance by monitoring temperatures and adjusting gas fuel properties — a win-win for operations and decarbonization.
Metaverse solutions for field service workers and technicians don’t necessarily require additional hardware such as AR glasses or VR headsets. In fact, companies are exploring the use of AR with smartphones and tablets.
Shell applies extended reality in its industrial operations to bring off-site expertise closer. Using the company’s Augmented Reality Remote Assist, workers in the field can easily connect with remote experts worldwide for assistance. These experts can essentially see through field workers’ eyes to get a closer look at problems and coach the workers through solutions.
3. Optimizing production operations By creating a detailed, virtual visualization of a shop floor’s manufacturing process to identify potential issues, dangers and bottlenecks, companies can apply the metaverse to improving operations performance and optimizing maintenance.
Pfizer , for instance, is creating a $450 million sterile injectables factory with a “virtual factory” component that will help optimize the value chain as well as provide more efficient training to employees. Through the virtual factory floor, Pfizer will be able to monitor its entire supply chain process and optimize it. And the digital twin technology will allow factory workers to do their job without ever stepping into the factory.
Meanwhile, Drone Deploy offers a 3D walkthrough system , which combines drone and ground images to create an accurate picture of a site, with accuracy down to one inch. While leaders look at businesses holistically, shop engineers can use these virtual replicas to monitor performance, spot issues and fix problems on the floor. And with the ability to call in help from off-site experts, they can do so much more efficiently.
4. Workforce training According to Accenture research , 90% of senior executives believe that employee training methods need to be more effective, going as far as to engage all human senses. The metaverse can close this gap by advancing employee learning and development opportunities, providing increased value and competitive advantage.
From field workers to miners and mechanics, employees can jump into immersive virtual training experiences. At the same time, the organization lowers the risk of injury and damage to any equipment used in training, offering more profound experiences than didactic training materials and tools while reducing costs.
BASF Chemical , for instance, uses simulation software in which trainees can click on any piece of equipment in any workflow to get insight into how each piece fits into the process. This has made training faster, more interactive and self-directed. Since its implementation, BASF has reported a marked significant increase in worker competency and productivity.
When it comes to training, the metaverse is challenging the status quo, particularly with the most important part — retention.
Research shows that employees forget 70% of traditional training content within 24 hours and nearly 90% in a month.
Extended reality uses technology to create a fully simulated environment where learners can interact with the experience hands-on. As trainees can experience an exact simulation of a situation in the virtual world, they can make mistakes without fear of harmful consequences, thus lowering the risk of failing fast and opening new windows to innovative, future-forward learning.
The first step towards harnessing the metaverse opportunity Already, the metaverse is democratizing how engineers, designers and customers interact and change processes and operations for the better. To unlock the opportunity offered by the natural extension of digital twins into the metaverse, product and industrial companies must get their data backbones in order and build insights from the fusion of operational technology and IT data into their digital twins. This will allow them to simulate different scenarios for engineering design, operational environments and sustainability implications.
Sef Tuma is global engineering and manufacturing lead at Accenture Industry X.
Marc Althoff is CTO and innovation lead at Accenture Industry X.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,301 | 2,023 |
"13 predictions for the metaverse and Web3 | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/13-predictions-for-the-metaverse-and-web3"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 13 predictions for the metaverse and Web3 Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
I have the unique privilege of getting to learn from some of the most brilliant minds in the Web3 and metaverse space, from customers to partners and beyond. Through these conversations and my own observations, I’ve gained perspective on where the Web3 and metaverse industries are heading in the year to come.
A rule of thumb for predicting is that the more inputs you have, the better. So, I’ve compiled the predictions here from a diverse set of views, reading voraciously to hear all opinions and thoughts and listening to my customers and partners about what’s important to them.
Predictions for 2023 1. Digital identity is the gateway to the metaverse Web3 digital identities will become as ubiquitous as email, giving people an identity they own and control. Easy names instead of wallets will be onboarding points.
2. Blockchain gaming comes out of the basement and into the boardroom Games showcase the capabilities and potential of decentralized technologies like blockchain and smart contracts, and we’ll see even more gaming companies adopt this new technology.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! 3. Metaverse spend grows over traditional ad spend There are now so many companies that are starting to see the power of the metaverse.
As a former CMO with over a decade of experience, I expect to see more budget aimed at capturing the awareness of younger generations through the metaverse.
4. Web2 companies bifurcate Web2 companies will divide into those who are boldly in and those who are scared. We’ve seen bold moves into Web3 by Starbucks, Nike, Prada and IKEA. In Web3, you’re either in, or you’re out — and I believe forward-looking people will be drawn to the companies that can fully articulate their plans and vision for building in Web3.
5. Safety and security become focal points This will be true for companies and customers alike. With all that has happened in crypto, security will matter more. Custody will be reimagined.
6. Web3 will become invisible In every technology cycle, technology is talked about first; then as it matures, it’s all about the outcome. By the end of 2023, there will be more discussion on customer experience than on Web3.
People will talk about Web3 without even mentioning the term.
7. AI and Web3 become best friends Combining the capabilities of AI with the security and decentralization of Web3 technologies will yield new value and use cases. For example, my company is using AI to brainstorm new domain names.
8. Utility over hype becomes a mandate In 2022, the bear market helped to weed out some of the hype, but in 2023, utility will trump hype as those companies with true value will outperform the rest.
9. Web3 rewards will drive niche-based communities With Web3 reward systems growing, smaller and more focused communities will form tighter bonds and have the most impact. Web3 Platforms, SDKs and rewards programs/aggregators will grow more robust and diverse as developers seek APIs and open source tools to build out feature-rich, user-friendly Dapps.
10. Avatars empower the metaverse Avatars will become more lifelike and usable to increase the customer experience of the metaverse. Eventually, everyone will own their own avatar.
11. Diversity breeds innovation Women, people of color and people from diverse backgrounds will have more influence on Web3 and metaverses than they did in the Web2 world.
12. CGZO and CWMO New titles like Chief Gen Z Officer and Chief Wellness Metaverse Officer will emerge to influence the next generation and ensure people aren’t spending too much time virtually, respectively. (I met two Chief Wellness Officers at the Metaverse Summit in Paris and three Chief Gen Z Officers at Art Basel.) 13. Metaverse social norms change With greater adoption of the metaverse, social norms and best practices will be developed. People will begin to spend more time in virtual worlds and interact with others in new ways.
Examples of social norms include the expectation that users will respect the privacy of others by not engaging in activities considered inappropriate in the physical world. Users might also be expected to adhere to certain norms of dress or appearance or to follow rules and guidelines that have been established for specific virtual environments or activities.
Sandy Carter is COO and head of business development at Unstoppable Domains.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,302 | 2,023 |
"The best products and moments of CES 2023 | The DeanBeat | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/games/the-best-products-and-moments-of-ces-2023-the-deanbeat"
|
"Game Development View All Programming OS and Hosting Platforms Metaverse View All Virtual Environments and Technologies VR Headsets and Gadgets Virtual Reality Games Gaming Hardware View All Chipsets & Processing Units Headsets & Controllers Gaming PCs and Displays Consoles Gaming Business View All Game Publishing Game Monetization Mergers and Acquisitions Games Releases and Special Events Gaming Workplace Latest Games & Reviews View All PC/Console Games Mobile Games Gaming Events Game Culture The best products and moments of CES 2023 | The DeanBeat Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn CES 2023 Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
The CES 2023 tech trade show is in full gear in Las Vegas, drawing lots of crowds back to the biggest North American tech trade fest.
I walked around a lot to find the coolest tech. At or ahead of CES 2023, I recorded around 80 press events, interviews, and sessions. I walked 87,447 steps over five days — or more than 38.81 miles. By comparison, at CES 2020 , I walked more than 37.45 miles (over 84,385 steps).
I wrote 43 stories. I gave two interviews. And moderated one panel. My feet hurt.
Now it’s time to analyze and make some sense of this. I hope you like these ideas, and since the show continues through Sunday, there’s still some time for techies to check it out themselves. Here’s my list from last year at CES 2022.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! This year featured nearly 3,000 exhibitors, up from 1,900 in 2021 and down from 4,000 (in-person) in 2020. I dragged my roller bag all over the place and it managed to save me from slippery floors (through some kind of tripod balancing) on three occasions. Here are the 18 things that caught my eye.
Unistellar telescope reduces light pollution with AI It’s been a while since I wrote about the technology in telescopes. Celestron always made regular advances with the tech, like telling you what constellations you were looking at in the night sky. Now your smartphone app — like Night Sky — can tell you that. But Unistellar showed up at the Showstoppers press party with a cool tech: A telescope that uses machine learning to reduce the blurriness you see when there is too much light pollution around you.
Ludovic Nachury, head of communication at the Marseille, France-based company, told me that city lights are always the worst problem that prevents you from seeing stars. People go out of their way to head into the wilderness to use their telescopes as a result. But with the machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) can improve the image processing and reduce that light pollution and give you clearer imagery to look at in the night sky. An app helps you see it even better, enabling you to see galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters from a downtown location. This is another example of AI invading every product and winding up in places where you don’t expect it. The version on display at CES 2023 sells for around $2,500. The company started in 2017 and started delivering telescopes in 2019. Now it has a new model and 50 people.
CarbonX makes better tires for electric cars The Dutch showed up with a set of 70 startups at CES 2023, including a number that were part of the Responsible Tech booth in the Eureka Park startup section at the show. One of them that has been coming for a while is CarbonX, started by Rutger van Raalten from Delft, Netherlands.
He’s a chemical engineer who for 15 years has been exploring carbon structures and has used them to come up with a new kind of tire infused with a carbon black material. His company makes more sustainable tires for electric vehicles, and they can offer a 10% extension in a tire’s rolling resistance. It mixes the carbon material into rubber to get better heat transfer, which results in less friction for the tire while preserving its ability to deform to match the road and keep its traction.
“We developed a new car material which has a unique three-dimensional network structure that we’re mixing in the tread of the tire,” said van Raalten, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We can actually make the tire roll more efficiently, and at the same time provide strength. So we can use those properties at the same time. And as you know, electric vehicles become heavier, and they accelerate faster.” The company is launching with a customer in Finland and they’re going to make 750,000 tires with the material developed by CarbonX. And the company plans to raise a funding round to help it execute on those orders.
Van Raalten said the material can be used for tires for electric vehicles such as trucks, motorcycles, and just regular cars. It’s not strictly nanotechnology, as the structures are at the micron level. Van Raalten did a master’s thesis on this at the Delft University of Technology and he has spent the last 15 years developing the product under a license from the university. The company has 15 people and it is raising five million euros.
L’Oreal Brow Magic prints eyebrows on your face L’Oréal showed off two interesting products at CES 2023, including the Brow Magic device that can print eyeliner precisely onto your eyebrows. The Brow Magic can paint any shape you want, which you can select through the Brow Magic app.
It uses technology from Prinker, which normally is used to print temporary tattoos on your skin. The printing device has 2,400 tiny nozzles and printing technology with up to 1,200 drops per inch (dpi) printing resolution. The Brow Magic provides consumers with their most precise brow shape in seconds.
You can select brow designs with various shapes, thicknesses, and effects (akin to microblading and microshading) using augmented reality.
After selecting the desired eyebrow makeup, you just swipe the printer across your eyebrow and it prints without sound. It is easily removed with water and soap. It reminds me of the Procter & Gamble Opté tech that can print makeup on your age spots.
In this case, you take a picture of your face with Brow Magic and it calibrates so it knows where your eyes and eyebrows are. Then it presents you with recommendations. You swipe the printer over your face and it prints right over your hair.
L’Oréal also showed off Hapta, which is an accessibility device designed for people with disabilities such as limited hand motion. It is a kind of selfie stick, but it holds lipstick. You can use it to apply lipstick, even if you have limited motor skills. The Hapta device will be launched sometime this year.
OneThird checks produce for ripeness OneThird found that a third of all food is wasted. So the Dutch food tech company developed a “ripeness checker” designed for use by grocers or grocery store shoppers. It lets them quickly scan an avocado and get accurate information about when it is ready for consumption – no squeezing necessary.
Apparently we’re not so good at the squeezing part, as one-third of all food produced is wasted due to spoilage – costing upwards of $1 trillion. OneThird’s solution helps end-consumers get the freshest food and allows growers, food distributors and grocers to predict the shelf life of fresh produce, said Marco Snikkers, founder of Enschede, Netherlands-based OneThird. The device uses AI.
The main targets for the product are grocers and distributors. Once those parties adopt it, the grocers could also offer it inside stores as a service for consumers. For now, the product can test strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, avocados and mangos — all of them relatively hard to assess for freshness. Soon, Snikkers said the company will add bananas, as they are also prone to going bad.
“These are where our customers say they have the most financial loss,” he said. “Or they have a really short shelf life, which causes surprises in the supply chain.” The device is oriented for business-to-business customers now, so they can be used in quality labs for everyone from growers to retailers. Grocery stores can put the devices in stores to give confidence to their shoppers about the freshness of their produce. You can find out if you should eat your avocado today or wait a couple of days before putting it into guacamole.
The company is building its database and refining its AI algorithms so it can monitor produce changes across a whole season. The device uses infrared spectroscopy. Light penetrates into the produce and it captures data on the molecules in the product. OneThird knows that the balance of those molecules — like sugar, water, and more — change over its life cycle.
“So once we know the ratios of those, we can look at our database, and our AI can then make sense of it and give us an accurate prediction of shelf life,” Snikkers said.
How can growers use it? If they have a batch of strawberries on the West Coast of the U.S., it could take five days to ship to the East Coast. If it will go bad before that time, it’s better to ship it to somewhere local.
The company spun out of a medical company four years ago and focused on produce.
Hasbro and Formlabs put your head on a toy with Hasbro Selfie Series The Hasbro Selfie Series experience has been in soft launch for a while and it is now kicking off in a bigger way. It basically lets you put your head on a custom-made 3D-printed branded toy from Hasbro. Each one is around six inches tall.
I saw it at the Formlabs 3D printing booth, where David Lakatos of Formlabs and Patrick Marr of Hasbro walked me through a demo.
You use the smartphone app to scan your face and then match it to an action figure based on a Hasbro or Hasbro partner property. You can put your head in your likeness on top of a toy character. You can choose Marvel characters like Spider-Man (without the mask), a Jedi, the Mandalorian, a Stormtrooper from Star Wars, a Power Ranger or GI Joe’s Snake Eyes.
The Hasbro Selfie Series toys cost $60 and take as long as 45 days to ship. Hasbro purchased its own 3D printers from Formlabs and makes the toys itself. It uses a manufacturing process to mount your head on the plastic toy in a secure way. I tried it and it took a couple of minutes to do the scan.
“We wanted to make sure it was crisp and clean,” Marr said. “So we partnered with Formlabs and came up with seven different skin tones and five different hair colors.” There are a total of 14 figures available now. Marr thinks this plays into the notion that fans want to engage deeply with the characters they love. It’s reminiscent of cosplayers. It also plays into the remix culture that is sweeping through many industries now, said Lakatos. And the quality of the 3D printers is such that they can accurately print a likeness at low cost.
Withings U-Scan runs a urinalysis via your home toilet Withings announced U-Scan , a breakthrough product that lets you do urinalysis at home. People made fun of this as something completely unnecessary — something that would only delight “quantified self” freaks who want to measure everything about themselves for vanity.
But I think this has so many things going for it, and it will help people who have to deal with medical conditions. For those people who have to regularly get tested, this is a godsend as you don’t have to go to the doctor or a lab to pee in a cup for medical tests.
U-Scan is a miniaturized health lab that hygienically sits within any toilet bowl to unlock the wealth of health information in daily urine. With more than 3,000 metabolites, urine is an extraordinary witness to assess and monitor one’s health, Withings said. It gives an immediate snapshot of the body’s balance and is integral in monitoring and detecting a large variety of health information.
Most of the time, you can pay no heed to these results. And via the app, you can get tested frequently and not have to worry. But when something changes, you’ll want to know about it.
U-Scan is designed to be a versatile platform consisting of a technologically advanced pebble-shaped reader and changeable analysis cartridges designed to assess specific biomarkers without the need for external sample capture or strips. Then, with seamless sync to the Withings Health Mate app, it will provide a wealth of actionable insights based on daily readings.
The product will debut in Europe with two consumer health cartridges with medical versions following in the future. These include U-Scan Cycle Sync for women’s monthly cycle tracking and syncing and U-Scan Nutri Balance, a detailed metabolic guide to hydration and nutrition.
Withings U-Scan is in development in the U.S. and will not be available until it receives FDA clearance.
The accompanying Withings app provides results, actionable insights, and guidance designed to help people build habits for enhanced wellness. In Europe, the U-Scan Cycle Sync results will appear in the Withings app that becomes a central place for cycle tracking, coaching and journaling.
It will show cycle predictions and ovulation window based on hormonal detection, alongside key hydration and dietary biomarkers, specific gravity and pH levels to help women manage every aspect of their cycle.
U-Scan will first be available in Europe in the second quarter of 2023 with consumer cartridges Nutri Balance and Cycle Sync. Users will be able to buy the U-Scan starter kit for €499.95 ($530) to get one U-Scan reader and one cartridge providing three months of testing.
Sony Afeela electric car comes with an Unreal Engine Sony announced that its Sony Honda Mobility car will be called the Afeela electric sedan. It will use technology from Honda, Epic Games and Qualcomm.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the car will be always connected to the cloud. The car will come with more than 40 sensors, and it will need a lot of processing power from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform to make sense of everything. Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, said the company will provide Unreal Engine 5 to help render the infotainment cluster.
In fact, the game engine will run in the car, essentially serving as a kind of operation system to render the infotainment cluster and the animations.
Sony will open preorders for the car in the first half of 2025 and it will start deliveries in early 2026. The car looks beautiful and it will clearly have the Sony design touch.
Y-Brush is the 10-second toothbrush Y-Brush can brush your teeth in just 10 seconds. Rather than manually brushing your teeth one at a time, Y-Brush is designed to brush all of your teeth at once. I saw a demo of the brush at the CES Unveiled event at CES 2023.
It has a Y-shaped brush head with 35,000 nylon bristles. It is clinically validated by dentists, and the product comes from a dental startup based out of Lyon, France. The company worked on it for three years.
Y-Brush relies on sonic vibrations for gentle, effective plaque removal without damaging your gums. The pressure can be adapted using different vibration modes, ensuring up to 21% more efficient results than a regular toothbrush, the company said.
Its flexible head makes it ideal for kids above four years of age. The battery lasts about three months because you use it for such a short time. You can change the bristles about once every six months. I’m all for this, as laziness is the parent of invention.
Displace is a wireless and remoteless TV Displace has created a new kind of television that has no wires and you can place anywhere in your home.
The first model shown off at CES 2023 is the 55-inch Displace 4K TV. It is powered by a proprietary hot-swappable battery system and it weighs under 20 pounds.
You can carry it around easily and secure it to any surface with no mounting required using Displace TV’s proprietary active-loop vacuum technology, which you can use to hang on a wall or even a window.
At the Showstoppers event, CEO Balaji Krishnan picked it up and showed me how easy it was to carry. TVs have a lot of friction, as many require professional help to mount on walls and they can use antiquated remote controls. Displace has a pop-out camera that you can use to control the TV with gestures if you want.
You can connect multiple TVs to form a single large 110-inch screen, and you can also use a gesture to “grab” a video and “throw” it to another TV.
“The beauty is you can use it to form any size TV,” Krishnan said.
You can turn off the camera for privacy reasons too. The TV is 1.2 inches thick. It has up to four batteries that you can swap out, with each battery lasting a month based on usage of six hours a day.
Krishnan said in an interview with VentureBeat this delivers a lot of value to consumers by overcoming various frustrations. The base unit has an AMD CPU, Nvidia GPU, and Wi-Fi 6E. The TVs will be available to ship in the U.S. by late 2023, with pricing TBD.
This is Krishnan’s third startup. He previously founded DabKick, a streaming device that was acquired by a public company, and Snapstick (which lets you control a TV from a mobile phone), which was acquired by Rovi.
“If you want to put a TV in your kitchen, for example, it’s really hard because we have to find the right spot for the TV with the power socket,” Krishnan said. “A lot of people don’t want to have displays on the walls, as they are getting bigger and bigger. You have to have a wall mounting technician come and install the TVs on the wall of the room. So we’re seeing a world where people will be having multiple smart displays on their walls. And then they should be able to move things around very easily.” He added, “We have the pocket to re-architect fundamentally the friction points that people have seen, which is why the first thing that we had to do was a wireless TV. The second thing was to make it super light so anyone should be able to take it and literally stick it to the wall.” Aska flying car Aska showed off (or tried to show off) its first drive-and-fly electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft/car hybrid at CES 2023. I couldn’t make it to its Wednesday event, which was canceled since its batteries didn’t arrive on time.
The prototype of the Aska A5 electric flying car is the size of a big SUV and it is a four-seater electric vehicle that can travel by road, and up to 250 miles by air on a single charge. It flies like a quadrocopter.
The company is also announcing the Aska On-Demand ride service (expected to launch in 2026) that will feature a fleet of Aska vehicles, operating on-demand in major cities and their surroundings.
Aska requires minimum updates to the current infrastructure. To perform a vertical take-off or landing, Aska requires only a compact space, such as a helipad or vertiport. The vehicle fits in existing parking spaces, it can be charged at home and EV charging stations, and the range extender engine runs on premium gasoline purchased at existing automotive gas stations.
Powering the Aska A5 is a proprietary power system that features lithium-ion battery packs and a gasoline engine that acts as an onboard range extender.
In drive mode, Aska packs in-wheel motor technology, allowing all four wheels to be placed outside the fuselage for all-wheel-drive traction, better aerodynamics, and maximized interior space to comfortably seat four passengers.
In flying mode, the vehicle’s wings with six rotors unfold, allowing the vehicle to either take off vertically, or do conventional runway takeoffs. The large wing is optimized for gliding, smooth landings, and efficient energy consumption, while each tilt rotor is utilized for vehicle control.
Aska can take off vertically from a compact space like a helipad. It can also use a conventional runway takeoff and landing that can improve the vehicle’s energy consumption efficiency.
The big bummer about flying cars has always been the safety thing. Aska said it designed its vehicle for the highest safety standards. For example, Aska has large wings and, in the event of an emergency, the large wings can glide the craft to a safe landing. Aska is equipped with dual energy sources, both batteries and an engine. The six propellers, one on each wing, ensure better redundancy for safe landings.
The best-in-class hybrid propulsion system provides a minimum of 30 minutes reserve flight time, which is a critical requirement by the Federal Aviation Administration today. Aska also includes a ballistic parachute in case of emergency to save the whole aircraft.
In 2020, Aska signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to advance its participation in the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign, jointly organized by the FAA. In 2022, the FAA accepted Aska through their intake board and the company is progressing towards Aska’s type certification. Full-scale flight testing will start after the CES.
Based in Los Altos and Mountain View, California, Aska was founded by serial entrepreneurs Guy and Maki Kaplinsky in 2018. Their previous startup, IQP Corporation, was a pioneer in the internet of things and developed a code-free application environment. IQP was acquired by GE Digital in 2017.
The vehicle is expected to debut in 2026. Preorders require a $5,000 deposit that is refundable after one year.
Candela’s “flying” C-8 electric boat Candela showed off a new electric “flying” C-8 consumer boat.
It is an electric vehicle that rides above the waves and is a sibling to Candela’s P-12 electric hydrofoil ferry.
Too bad I couldn’t get a demo of this, but Las Vegas is in a desert, after all. Seeing it in person, it looks like a boat on stilts.
The company, founded by Gustav Hasselskog in 2014, boasts zero emissions, zero noise, zero seasickness, zero maintenance, zero gas and oil, and zero wake. Candela’s boats are up to 95% more energy efficient, and offer passengers a smoother, quieter experience on the water because they fly above it instead of crashing through the waves.
Propulsion comes from Candela’s compact C-POD electric motors, which stay fully submerged while running, further eliminating noise and vibrations onboard. They are designed to run for a lifetime without ever requiring maintenance. Candela has 180 people and makes the boats in Stockholm.
Hasselskog regularly drove to a local fuel dock in the archipelago to buy ice cream for the kids. The problem was that the ice cream would cost $5, and the fuel for the 20-minute trip would end up at $50. He saw that buying an electric boat was not an option, as the fast ones all had minimal range. At that point, he realized we had to reinvent how boats are designed.
Flying on computer-guided underwater wings, hydrofoils, the P-8 Voyager barely creates a discernible wake as it skims across the surface at 30 knots. The low wake is a testament to the P-8’s energy efficiency, which in turn gives it unprecedented electric range and speed. For the coral reefs, this also means zero wake erosion, which otherwise is a threat, especially in shallow waters.
Powering the electric speedboat is a silent marine motor. It has a torpedo-shaped casing with two permanent electric motors that directly drive the propellers. Even at high speeds, the Candela C-POD is barely audible for the human ear.
LG and Asleep use smart home appliances to adjust to your sleep patterns LG partnered with Asleep to craft smart home appliances that respond to your sleep patterns. It’s like using the internet of things and AI to control your appliances without having you involved.
The devices like smart watches will record your breathing patterns and diagnose your sleep stages. The system will detect if you wake up and try to discern the reason why. If you’re snoring, it will know that, and it can turn on a humidifier in your room to help ease your breathing passages to reduce the snoring.
And if you are accustomed to sleeping at a given temperature, it will adjust your air conditioning and heating so you can sleep better. It will also control things like air purifiers, too.
HTC shows off the HTC Vive XR Elite virtual reality headset HTC Vive debuted its Vive XR Elite virtual reality and mixed reality headset at CES 2023. It shows that HTC Vive is willing to compete with rivals Meta, Pico and Sony in the next generation of virtual reality. The device costs $1,100, which is squarely between the Meta Quest 2 at $400 and the Meta Quest Pro at $1,500.
Shen Ye, global head of products, said in an interview with me that the price gives you a realistic view of the costs of an unsubsidized product for the VR market. He said it is squarely aimed at consumers. I did a brief demo that showed how the passthrough enables it to position objects on real-world surfaces for mixed reality applications.
The Vive XR Elite includes both VR and MR capabilities, with full-color RGB camera for passthrough viewing. Lightweight at just 1.4 pounds, and that includes the battery weight. HTC said the headset is perfect for gaming, fitness, productivity and more.
Vive XR Elite includes hand-tracking, which enables a whole new dimension of MR scenarios. This can include playing games where the characters are running on your furniture, having real-time overlays on musical instruments like a piano so you can learn, and having a workstation with multiple virtual screens while still being able to use your real-world keyboard and mouse.
Vive XR Elite will see HTC Vive’s biggest range of launch titles ever, with 100 new pieces of MR and VR content arriving in the launch window – from new games to classics – with more to follow. That includes, Demeo, Hubris, Yuki, Maestro, Les Mills Body Combat, FigminXR, Unplugged, Finger Gun and more. Post-launch, even more content will arrive, such as Everslaught: Invasion, and later in the year full MR games like Eggscape.
Vive XR Elite can be connected easily to a PC via USB-C to access PCVR content from Viveport and Steam and supports wireless PC streaming over Wi-Fi or the latest generation – Wi-Fi 6E with low latency and great graphics.
You can also stream content wirelessly from a compatible Android phone to Vive XR Elite, which opens a wider selection of entertainment. In the headset, your cinema screen will seem like it’s 300 inches wide. You can view content from services like Netflix and Disney+ or games like Fortnite, and you can connect a Bluetooth controller to your phone for a full gaming experience.
Vive XR Elite has a modular design that can switch into a glasses form factor. You remove the battery and fit the Vive XR Elite temple pads. You can change the physical configuration so it works best for whichever situation you’re in, whether that’s at home, in the office or travelling on a plane.
The redesigned hinge means the extended arms of Vive XR Elite cup your head just like the front and back of a traditional all-in-one. There’s a USB-C connecting cable on the right-hand side, which you can plug into a power source like a battery bank or airline seat.
The visual impact is sharp with a wide 110-degree field of view and 4K resolution (at 2K per eye) which runs at a 90Hz refresh rate. Vive XR Elite has adjustable lenses so you can take off your glasses and still see a clear picture with greater comfort. You can find your perfect sweet spot without having to remove the headset, with a built-in fine-adjustable IPD slider placed on the outside of the headset.
The battery is placed at the back for balance and is curved for optimal comfort, and delivers up to two hours of full XR use. The battery is removable and hot swappable, so you can keep going whether it’s changing to another power source or changing to another battery. It has 30-watt fast charging and is charged via USB-C power delivery.
HTC also said its Viverse (version of the metaverse) continues to demonstrate leadership in supporting OpenXR and WebXR standards and is accessible from a wide range of connected devices that support a web browser. HTC has partnered with the character creation company VRoid Studios, which makes it easy to bring avatars into Viverse leveraging the open VRM standard.
HTC is also collaborating with Lamina1 to accelerate the open metaverse ecosystem for society. HTC’s Viverse platform will be using Lamina1’s layer one tools to enable more efficient cross-world cross-platform asset distribution and management, so users can seamlessly keep their digital assets (avatars, clothes, artwork, etc.) with them as they traverse the metaverse.
Vive XR Elite is available to pre-order globally via vive.com and participating authorized retailers. Pre-order shipments are estimated to begin from late February. Vive XR Elite comes with the headset itself, 2x controllers, and the headset battery cradle, and will cost $1,100.
Space Perspective designs space balloon with help of digital twin Space Perspective is designing a balloon that can give space tourists a gentle ride to the edge of space by attaching vehicles to giant space balloons. The company has already sold out its initial reservations for $125,000 for a six-hour flight, starting in 2024.
Billed as the world’s first luxury spaceflight experience, Cape Canaveral-based Space Perspective argues that you can enjoy the thrill of space exploration without having to endure a multi-g-force ride on a rocket. Instead, a balloon the size of a football stadium (with 13 million cubic feet of gas) will take you up gently to the edge of the atmosphere, 20 miles above the Earth. There, you can snap pictures that show the view of Earth from space, including the curvature of the planet.
Jane Poynter, cofounder of Space Perspective, spoke at a Siemens press event where she noted that using Siemens’ design technology for a “digital twin” is helping to perfect the design in the digital realm, without requiring the company to create a lot of costly physical prototypes.
The private company’s Neptune One will become the first space launch operator to launch from Space Coast Spaceport with a total of nine people on board (including a pilot).
At the Siemens booth, you could see a simulated view that tourists would see within the balloon’s capsule, which will have seats and a bar. You can see 360-degree views of planet Earth from 20 miles above propelled by a space balloon the size of a football stadium, said Poynter.
Space Perspective is the brainchild of Poynter and Taber MacCallum, a husband-and-wife team who met as crew members of Biosphere 2, an artificial, enclosed ecosystem designed to mirror Earth’s biosphere to test the viability of maintaining human life in outer space. The couple also founded Paragon Space Development Corporation, a human life support systems company that created technologies used on most human spacecraft, including the International Space Station, and they acted as technical advisors to Elon Musk on human spaceflight before SpaceX was a reality.
Siemens software is being used to test for safety systems and others to maximize safety and sustainability, said Brenda Discher, chief marketing officer and head of strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software, in an interview.
As far as how digital twins will fit with the metaverse visions, she said, “We’re going to need a lot more partners in order to make a true immersive experience real, especially if we get into industrial spaces.” The company is partnering with Nvidia on its Omnverse digital twin tools, and it is providing a lot of manufacturing and mechanical engineering expertise. There are six projects under way and as many as 15 digital twin projects in the pipeline. One of them is BMW’s simulated car factory, which will be built in the real world. Siemens also showcased cool projects from Nemo’s Garden and 80 Acres Farms at its booth.
The pressurized Spaceship Neptune will lift passengers 100,000 feet to space to then be immersed, for two hours, in breathtaking views of the curvature of Earth down below. The ship doesn’t go into space itself, but it will clear 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the balloon floats in the last 1% of the atmosphere, the air inside the balloon expands 100-fold. And it beats being inside a rocket.
PlayStation VR 2 debuts with 30 titles on February 22 Sony’s PlayStation chief Jim Ryan took the stage at CES to share details about its PlayStation VR2 headset and the games coming for the device, which debuts on February 22.
Ryan said the lineup includes Gran Turismo, Horizon: Call of the Mountain, Beat Saber and other VR games based on Sony’s IP and third-party franchises as well.
The second-generation VR headset debuts on February 22 for $550. The PSVR 2 comes a couple of years after Sony launched the console, and it could bring a mid-life pop to sales for the PlayStation 5. Sony said it has sold more than 30 million PlayStation 5 consoles to date.
From what I could see, the Horizon game features outstanding graphics, much like the Horizon: Forbidden West title that debuted in 2022.
Project Leonardo is a controller for disabled gamers Sony PlayStation chief Jim Ryan also said that the company will launch Project Leonardo, a new controller designed for gamers with limited mobility.
The controller will make gaming more accessible for players who have challenges using ordinary controllers. It’s quite reminiscent of Microsoft’s efforts with the Xbox Adaptive Controller. It’s nice to see Sony moving in to validate this market for disabled people, which is a vast swath of humanity.
Project Leonardo will allow more gamers to enjoy the console. Ryan said that Sony is working with experts on accessibility such as Able Gamers.
Leonardo is basically an accessibility kit designed to remove barriers to gaming and help players with disabilities play more easily, more comfortably and for longer periods on PS5.
Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president for platform experience at SIE, said in a blog post that accessibility is an important topic to us at PlayStation, and the company wants to continue raising the bar to enable every gamer to experience the joy of play.
He said Sony talked to experts at AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up and then came up with the design for the highly configurable controller that works in tandem with many third-party accessibility accessories and integrates with the PS5 console to open up new ways of gaming.
The controller is highly customizable with a kit of swappable components, including a variety of analog stick caps and buttons in different shapes and sizes.
Players can use these components to craft a wide array of control layouts. And the distance of the analog stick from the game pad can be adjusted to suit the player’s preference. These components allow players to find a configuration that works for their strength, range of motion, and particular physical needs.
You can remap the buttons as needed. Players can store their programmed button settings as control profiles and easily switch between them by pressing the profile button.
For example, players can augment their DualSense controller with a Project Leonardo controller or use two Project Leonardo controllers on their own. A friend or family member can also assist by helping to control the player’s game character with a DualSense controller or a second Project Leonardo controller. The controllers can be dynamically turned on or off and used in any combination.
Valencell debuts cuffless blood pressure monitor Valencell unveiled its first calibration-free, cuffless fingertip blood pressure monitor.
Valencell has been making optical heart-rate sensors. Now it showed that you don’t need the cuffs that inflate over your biceps to get an accurate count. It uses a fingertip clip with photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors to measure blood flow.
It won’t just work on anyone. The sensor has to be combined with info on the user’s age, weight, gender and height to be accurate without calibration. The device will be available to clinics and such, but an over-the-counter version for personal use has to wait for FDA approval. The company has collected data from 7,000 subjects and it is using AI to figure out the exact numbers.
German Bionic shows Apogee exosuit German Bionic, the makers of AI-powered robotic exoskeletons, showed off the Apogee exosuit at CES 2023.
The device is lighter than the previous Cray X and it helps you offset as much as 66 pounds while lifting heavy objects.
This helps people like baggage handlers or delivery people benefit from an exoskeleton inworkplace settings where heavy lifting is necessary. For example, it can be used in warehouses and logistics, but also by carers of the elderly or disabled.
It helps you perform these tasks without straining your body. The suit can offset up to 66 pounds of load to the lower back with each lifting motion, and it reduces fatigue. Pricing isn’t available yet but the company will have monthly leasing options.
Best moments Well, I can’t say anything could beat a selfie with Paula Abdul, who launched her own smart audio glasses at CES 2023 this week. During her press conference, she also sang briefly and did a little dance.
It was also cool to see Neill Blomkamp (District 9), director of Sony’s upcoming Gran Turismo movie, talk at Sony’s press event about making the race car movie, as well as to hear Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of the racing game franchise, talk about the chance to get more movie watchers exciting about the racing brand.
Charlie Fink was kind enough to take my picture in the Bhaptics haptic suit/gloves at the Showstoppers event.
I’m not sure what Togg was showing at its booth, but it was quite beautiful.
Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, wasn’t popular with the Russians as he announced they were banned from CES 2023. But he was quite popular with the French, for some reason, as pictured here in the French part of the Eureka Park startups.
Here’s my own long-awaited return to CES with the start of the CES trends panel on Tuesday.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! Games Beat Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,303 | 2,023 |
"Virtual power plants one key to controlling enterprise energy costs | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/data-infrastructure/virtual-power-plants-one-key-controlling-enterprise-energy-costs"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Virtual power plants one key to controlling enterprise energy costs Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Solar energy is a proven distributed energy resource that helps enterprises lower energy costs. Yet, it is proving to be the tip of the iceberg for the power that enterprises can wield to wrest control of their energy management and costs. Beyond solar is a plethora of distributed energy sources and connected devices creating virtual power plants , or VPPs. And enterprises must act or be left behind.
So, precisely what are VPPs, and how fast will they grow? AWS describes VPPs as: “A connected aggregation of clean distributed energy resources (DER) — solar, storage, grid-interactive efficient building equipment, EV charging, controls and more — remotely and automatically controlled to deliver affordable power, reliability, decarbonization and grid services. VPPs are utility-scale (large) and utility-grade (reliable, controllable) and thus a de facto power plant that is connected virtually from multiple locations.” Fortune Business Insights projects the global VPP market to grow to $6.47 billion by 2028, up from its 2021 level of $.88 billion.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! This projected VPP growth is fueled by the growth of connected distributed energy resources — for example, electrical appliances you can monitor and/or control through an app on your phone. Most people are familiar with smart thermostats; these are being joined by water heaters, home EV chargers, electric vehicles and battery backup systems.
To achieve net zero emissions in the U.S., we must replace almost 1 billion appliances with efficient electric versions that can participate in demand flexibility; this represents roughly $2 trillion in investment. And these are generally replaced, as they wear out in a five to 15-year replacement cycle.
In addition, VPPs will be fueled by the United States Loan Programs Office, as DER deployment will be needed at scale to meet the administration’s goal of achieving 100% clean electricity by 2035.
DERs at the 5% tipping point Within two years (by 2025), $110 billion is expected to be invested in distributed energy resources (DERs) — $5 billion every month, accelerating to more than $20 billion per month by the decade’s end. Driving this demand is the fact that DERs can provide critical grid support at a lower price than the grid and be lucrative for homeowners who opt to participate in demand flexibility.
VPP participants can reap the benefits of the greater affordability and performance of clean, distributed energy and may even receive compensation for services rendered. Income is provided to DER owners to achieve greater resilience for everyone during adverse grid events.
In fact, in California in the summer of 2022, 25,000 PG&E and Tesla customers with powerwalls were invited to launch a new pilot program to create a virtual power plant to help support electric grid reliability and save customers money. Powerwall home battery systems create a virtual power plant to discharge power back to the grid.
This initiative is part of PG&E’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP). By September, it paid off; Tesla powerwall customers were paid for power sent back to the grid during an extreme heatwave and the looming possibility of rolling blackouts.
Energy reliability essential The need for VPPs will continue to drive energy reliability. Just consider Hurricane Ian in September, which left more than 580,000 Florida residents and businesses powerless for days; and public safety shut-offs that have become a regular occurrence in western states during wildfire season. These are examples where VPPs could have had significant benefit.
Connected vehicles to the grid will play a large role. Electric vehicles in the U.S. crossed the critical 5% point of sales in 2022, which many consider a tipping point. Over a quarter of new car buyers are considering EV purchases today.
Electric car batteries can hold approximately 60 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy that can power an average U.S. household for two days. One example of this was when a Ford F-150 Lightning powered a home in Ontario for two days during a power outage caused by a massive snowstorm. EVs can also feed electricity during peak hours, and the stored energy of vehicles also contributes to VPPs.
The IoT creating the Internet of Energy (IoE) Beyond EVs, grid-interactive efficient appliances and efficient buildings , electric vehicle charging and energy storage can be connected to create VPPs. The Internet of Things (IoT) is well established. As each of these devices, edifices and vehicles can store energy, the VPP is the Internet of Energy (IoE).
This network of DERs enables aggregators, utilities or grid operators to create business agreements with DER owners to adjust the consumption and discharge of power remotely and automatically. This interaction between DERs and the grid provides clean energy, helps balance load at any given hour and builds the resilience of the power system while maintaining end-user (household and business) comfort and productivity. This reduces overall system costs, which can translate to lower electric bills for all consumers — even those not exporting power to the grid.
A combination of software and hardware enables VPPs to better open the grid to a whole new utility-scale, behind-the-meter supply, and coordinate disparate DERs into holistic, demand-flexible resources. It is the IoE, and any “thing” that creates and/or stores clean energy can be part of the power aggregated source.
The “smart home” can have an EV charger that automatically charges the car, runs the dishwasher during non-peak hours, has rooftop solar with a battery that kicks in at night or during a power outage and more. The 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) highlighted this with “ Matter ,” one protocol to connect compatible devices and systems, which will make the smart home plug ‘n play.
VPPs for enterprise is burgeoning In January 2023, GM, Ford, Google and solar energy producers announced they will work together to establish standards for scaling up the use of virtual power plants as electrification of the U.S. economy progresses and demand for power grows. It underscores that VPPs for the enterprise is burgeoning.
VPPs also give utility operators new flexibility to reduce peaks and better shape demand. The costs of delivering electricity have peaks and valleys depending on several factors, including weather and time of the year. The cost of electricity is higher, for example, during summer when demand is greater (think power air conditioning).
During demand spikes, utilities turn on so-called “peaker-plants,” or power plants that come online only during peak events and are typically run with high-emission fossil fuels. VPPs can have utility-scale savings, allowing power companies to defer investment in additional capacity and infrastructure to serve a peak load.
VPPs rely on proven clean energy technologies: solar, smart IoT devices and more. As more sources become part of the IoE, VPP technology will accelerate, allowing grid operators to capitalize on the increasing amount of aggregated power.
Software to optimize usage The opportunity for the technology industry is to continually gather data to improve the software and artificial intelligence (AI) to more rapidly adapt to grid and customer needs. Determining these needs and electricity load starts from the end user and works back to the grid.
A simple example today is a smart thermostat that can sense when people are, or are not, at home or in a building to lower electricity usage and costs. Or, EV charging technology that learns when a car is typically plugged in and waits to charge until off-peak nighttime hours. Every device that uses electricity has the potential to apply software to optimize electricity usage. Today’s software is adequate but will not meet the needs for our 2035 100% clean electricity goal.
Enterprises should take stock of their current distributed energy resources, IoT devices and software to manage them. In doing so, they may realize they can indeed support and benefit from VPPs. Some use cases include: Enterprises as energy consumers can continue investing in distributed energy resources in their facilities. The value of grid-interactive DER will continue to increase as opportunities to participate in VPPs grow. Beyond solar panels, they can evaluate internet-enabled water heaters, heat pumps, and batteries. An enterprise should look for opportunities to participate in a VPP. This is especially critical in manufacturing plants or data centers. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , a data center can spend as much as 40% of its operating costs on energy to cool servers. Comparatively, an office building or retail store typically expends 5 to 10% of operating costs on energy.
Device OEMs and software providers can build internet connectivity, remote energy consumption management and/or telematics into the product, depending on what functionality is relevant for the device. When a device has the ability to flex energy demand in response to grid signals, it becomes valuable as a source of flexible load and can generate revenue for its owner.
VPPs: Enterprises should look for access to large energy use datasets and use predictive analytics to model future energy demand and ensure that the VPP is well-positioned to manage that demand.
As connected sources become smarter, and distributed energy resources more prevalent, enterprises must optimize their energy sources.
If enterprises do not act now while VPPs are at a tipping point, they could lose one key to a competitive cost advantage.
Jigar Shah is the director of the loan programs office at the U.S. Department of Energy.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,304 | 2,023 |
"Top 5 stories of the week: AI buzz and CES unveils a self-driving — baby stroller? | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/ai/top-5-stories-of-the-week-ai-buzz-and-ces-unveils-a-self-driving-baby-stroller"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Top 5 stories of the week: AI buzz and CES unveils a self-driving — baby stroller? Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Happy New Year! This first week of 2023 has already been a whirlwind of AI and excitement from CES 2023, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Senior writer/editor Sharon Goldman was kept busy with, among other AI news, DALL-E and ChatGPT. Will 2023 be the year of generative AI? It’s sure starting that way. In our top story of the week, Goldman talks to DALL-E inventor and DALL-E 2 co-inventor, Aditya Ramesh, about how far the technology has come in its first two years, and how much further it can go.
Our second and third top stories both star ChatGPT. In position 2, Ben Dickson analyzes Microsoft’s decision this week to incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, reportedly as soon as March. Will it help Bing unseat Google as the top search engine? Maybe — but maybe it will topple Google in other ways.
In position 3, papers written by ChatGPT have been banned from a top AI conference. And then the crowd went wild! Teachers and professors have already been expressing their concern about receiving papers written by AI instead of by students; now the topic has moved beyond academia. Since it directly affects those who create and revise the actual AI technology, expect to see the issue addressed in 3, 2, 1 … VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Our fourth and fifth top stories of the week are about new technologies unveiled at this week’s CES show. Everyone could use a lighter pair of AR glasses, but a self-driving baby stroller? That’s going to be a harder sell.
Here are the top five stories for the week of January 2.
1.
Two years after DALL-E debut, its inventor is ‘surprised’ by impact Before DALL-E 2 , Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, there was just a research paper called “ Zero – Shot Text-to-Image Generation.
” With that paper and a controlled website demo, on January 5, 2021 — two years ago today — OpenAI introduced DALL -E , a neural network that “creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.” (Also today: OpenAI just happens to reportedly be in talks about a “ tender offer that would value it at $29 billion.”) 2.
ChatGPT and the unbundling of online search Since the release of ChatGPT in November, there has been a lot of speculation about OpenAI’s latest large language model ( LLM ) spelling doom for Google Search. The sentiment has only intensified with the recent report of Microsoft preparing to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
There are several reasons to believe that a ChatGPT-powered Bing (or any other search engine) will not seriously threaten Google’s search near-monopoly. LLMs have several critical problems to solve before they can make a dent in the online search industry. Meanwhile, Google’s share of the search market, its technical ability and its financial resources will help it remain competitive (and possibly dominant) as conversational LLMs start to make their mark in online search.
Meanwhile, the real (and less discussed) potential of LLMs such as ChatGPT is the “unbundling” of online search, which is where real opportunities for Microsoft and other companies lie. By integrating ChatGPT into successful products, companies can reduce the use cases of Google Search.
3.
Top AI conference bans ChatGPT in paper submissions (and why it matters) A machine learning conference debating the use of machine learning? While that might seem so meta, in its call for paper submissions on Monday, the International Conference on Machine Learning did, indeed, note that “papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” It didn’t take long for a brisk social media debate to brew, in what may be a perfect example of what businesses, organizations and institutions of all shapes and sizes, across verticals, will have to grapple with going forward: How will humans deal with the rise of large language models that can help communicate — or borrow, or expand on, or plagiarize, depending on your point of view — ideas? 4.
Lumus readies new waveguide designs for smaller and lighter AR glasses Israel’s Lumus , the developer of reflective waveguide technology for augmented reality (AR) eyewear, has introduced its second-generation technology to enable the development of smaller and lighter AR glasses.
The Lumus Z-Lens 2D waveguide architecture builds upon 2D Maximus to enable the development of smaller, lighter AR eyeglasses with high-resolution image quality, outdoor-compatible brightness and seamless prescription eye integration. The AR modules can be as much as 50% smaller.
The new technology will be demoed publicly for the first time at CES 2023, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. Lumus hopes the tech will be the AR bridge to the exciting possibilities of the metaverse.
5.
Glüxkind unveils smart stroller Ella which uses AI for safer movement Glüxkind Technologies showed off its AI-based smart stroller Ella at CES 2023.
Vancouver, Canada-based Glüxkind Technologies created Ella to support new parents on their daily adventures, be more inclusive and enable families to spend quality time together. It’s another example of tech — and AI in particular — infiltrating everyday products that normally don’t have much tech. I have to say I never expected to see a baby stroller with AI.
Ella, Glüxkind’s AI stroller, is designed and optimized for daily life, not the showroom. With Ella’s adaptive push and brake assistance, parents and caregivers alike can enjoy effortless walks regardless of terrain: uphill, downhill, and even when fully loaded with groceries and toys. All that stuff will be a walk in the park, the company said.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,305 | 2,022 |
"Why building the metaverse is going to be a 'thrilling ride' | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/why-building-the-metaverse-is-going-to-be-a-thrilling-ride"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Why building the metaverse is going to be a ‘thrilling ride’ Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The metaverse is set to disrupt our lives — its development should not be taken lightly.
Building it must not be hastened by a few companies; it must be careful, calculated, thoughtful and most of all, collaborative.
This was the key takeaway of a panel discussion (moderated by GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi) on the technical standards and building blocks of the metaverse at this week’s MetaBeat event. Panelists included Imverse CEO and co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz; Rev Lebaredian, VP of Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia ; Neil Trevett, president of Khronos Group ; and Yashar Behzadi, CEO and founder of Synthesis A I.
“Whenever you’re creating something big that involves many parties in the world, it is essential that you have good standards to build on; otherwise it’s not going to be successful,” said Nvidia’s Lebaredian.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Coming together on metaverse standards As a launching point, the Khronos Group is an open, nonprofit consortium that develops, publishes and maintains royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), parallel computing, vision acceleration and machine learning (ML).
In June, the group established the Metaverse Standards Forum [subscription required]. The impetus, Trevett said, was the widespread confusion around standards. Organizations were basically coming to Khronos for guidance and saying, “standards community, get yourselves sorted out,” he said.
The goal was to create a forum where the many ad-hoc standards groups that are forming can communicate and coordinate, he said. It started out with 37 contributing companies — and after just a few short months, there are now 1,800 companies involved.
“That speaks to the fact that there is a real interest, a genuine interest and need to engage with the standards community, and a willingness to engage,” said Trevett.
The forum is now dividing into working groups, he explained.
Ultimately, the effort will provide a “big input funnel for expertise, big output billboard for visibility.” Collaboration, openness are essential for a successful metaverse Developing standards is no doubt difficult, Lebaredian acknowledged. There is always controversy and politics. But, he pointed out, in the early days of the web, standards emerged because people worked together to create protocols such as HTTP and HTML.
“Without standards, the metaverse is just not going to be possible,” he said.
What’s playing out now is “exactly analogous” to the evolution of the web: It took off because it was available to everyone, said Lebaredian.
“The metaverse is the web of these virtual worlds, our equivalent of an experience, a 3D spatial thing,” he said.
Everyone needs to participate and contribute to expand the metaverse. Without standardization, just a small group of people will construct it, which will limit its scale and value.
“I just don’t see any way for this to exist if we don’t start from the beginning with interoperability standards,” he said.
Considering the technology and the amount of content needed to make the metaverse a reality, “no one company could do it all,” he said. “No matter how big you are, you’re not big enough” Pervasive growth It’s also important that organizations move slowly and carefully — and not get ahead of themselves, Trevett emphasized. For instance, the builders of the metaverse can learn from the history of the web in trying to bring 3D to the masses.
Early platforms tried to define too much, such as runtime behavior, which at the time was just taking off and changing rapidly. One of the earliest successes, he pointed out, was OpenGL for Embedded Systems, a computer graphics rendering API for 2D and 3D graphics initially released in July 2003.
Then WebGL was released in 2011 — and it has worked because it is low-level, said Trevett — and Vulkan only just shipped in 2016.
Similarly, it’s important not to confuse the market; he pointed to the vying of DVDs and Blu-Ray, for instance, that slowed the evolution of home viewing technology.
For the metaverse to work, “it has to run everywhere,” said Trevett, with capability on any device. The technology has to get out pervasively, which he acknowledged is “no trivial task, no small feat.” Buckle up for a thrilling ride We also have to recognize that it will continuously evolve and change, said Lebaredian — just as the internet has. “The web didn’t quite end up where we were hoping in 1993, 1994,” he said, pointing out that big players are still competing, and startups continuously disrupt the space. Geopolitical forces also have to be accounted for.
The metaverse is the “most computationally challenging computer science problem of all time,” said Lebaredian.
Trevett predicted that the first wave of standards will be around “hot topic” areas, including ID, geospatial capabilities, avatars and 3D asset formats (including Universal Scene Description and gITF.
Overarching tenets will involve free and fair competition, privacy and ethics, he said. Also, many agree that some sort of decentralized ID will be necessary, but it’s unclear yet how that will play out.
“Building a whole ecosystem — it can be a very thrilling ride,” said Trevett. But, “you have to be patient.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,306 | 2,023 |
"The new age of exploration: Staking a claim in the metaverse | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/the-new-age-of-exploration-staking-a-claim-in-the-metaverse"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The new age of exploration: Staking a claim in the metaverse Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The world as we know it was shaped significantly by the early explorers who characterized what we now know as the Age of Exploration. For better or for worse, this period saw the exchange of ideas and technology across the globe, indelibly altering humanity’s shared reality. In the current developing phase of the metaverse , we are seeing early explorers once again play a crucial role in shaping a new immersive future — one that blends physical and virtual realities.
Central to this new age of exploration is the concept of spatial ownership in the metaverse. Securing the rights to own, control and create new types of augmented and virtual reality experiences within virtual spaces has emerged as the means to staking a claim in this brave new world. Ownership matters in the metaverse as in the real world.
Creating an ‘open’ metaverse Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, recently stated his view on why the metaverse has not taken off just yet: “I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.” In some ways, he is right. As we see vying corporations provide their competing visions for the metaverse, the average person is increasingly confused about what the term means.
>>Don’t miss our special issue: The CIO agenda: The 2023 roadmap for IT leaders.
<< Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! There’s no need to overthink it; the metaverse is simply a 3D space we can explore. What the metaverse ultimately will look like does not lie within the influence of any one corporation or founder, but will emerge from what individuals collectively create and do in this 3D space. An “open” metaverse doesn’t involve a bet on a particular company’s vision, but invites participation from everyone and enables people to take an active role in shaping it.
An open metaverse is essential because a new virtual world should lie beyond any company’s walled garden. Regardless of the platform used to access the metaverse, users should be free to interact with one another and create and control their virtual worlds or experiences. Involving people directly in the process of building these new landscapes can eliminate many of the reservations people have regarding participating in a closed metaverse. This is evidenced by the share price of Meta, down 73% in 2022 as investors speculate that the company is squandering tens of billions in its attempts to “own” the metaverse.
Enhancing, not escaping, reality This kind of speculation has cast doubt on the potential of the metaverse as a whole. It is the job of those in the industry to demonstrate the merit of these virtual worlds and show use cases in action that prove their utility and the enjoyment that can be had. One prominent area for improvement is bolstering immersion within the metaverse. Rather than creating a cartoon-style world to escape to, metaverses that attempt to bridge the gap between our virtual and physical reality by creating a digital copy of the world hold a unique, more grounded appeal.
This version of the metaverse seeks to enhance our reality rather than create an escape from it. The use cases are endless: from enabling businesses to onboard employees remotely by granting them a highly realistic and visually accurate virtual tour of their new real-world office location, to mixed-reality music concerts that deliver the same experience in the same setting to virtual and physical attendees alike.
From web domain to social domain Spatial ownership is the essential concept that makes possible an open metaverse and 3D digital twin of the earth that is not built or controlled by a monopolistic entity. Spatial ownership enables users to own virtual land in the metaverse. It uses non-fungible tokens ( NFTs ), which represent a unique digital asset that can only have one official owner at a time and can’t be forged or modified. In the metaverse, users can buy NFTs linked to particular parcels of land that represent their ownership of these “properties.” Spatial ownership in the metaverse can be compared to purchasing web domains on today’s internet. As with physical real estate, some speculatively buy web domains hoping to sell the rights to a potentially popular or unique URL at a future date. In contrast, others purchase to lock down control and ownership over their own little portion of the web. Domains are similar to prime real estate in that almost every business needs one, and many brands will look for the same or similar names. The perfect domain name can help a business monopolize its market and get the lion’s share of web visibility in its niche.
These concepts can be applied to Web3 in the form of spatial ownership of virtual real estate. Like buying a web domain, users can become NFT landowners and take freehold of virtual land to control their own unique experiences in the metaverse across any defined location. Early explorers in the metaverse are already buying and mapping the virtual counterparts of real-life locations, such as famous landmarks or popular hotel franchises. This grants them the right to publish or share content in these virtual spaces or to choose to sell these locations to the owners of the original physical land.
Moving beyond a cognitive bottleneck While skepticism will undoubtedly apply to the open metaverse built on spatial ownership, there are many reasons to be bullish about its long-term popularity. Our brains are wired to process spatial information. Two-dimensional information represents a cognitive bottleneck that reduces the bandwidth and the scope of information our brain can process. We will inevitably move from the 2D internet to the 3D AR/VR metaverse simply because that is the path of least resistance in the consumption of information for humans.
Furthermore, the success of the metaverse, as described here, doesn’t rest on the shoulders of a single organization, but will be molded by its users into the shape that we collectively decide upon. So again, we are seeing the reigniting of the age of exploration, this time in the metaverse. It is the role of metaverse companies and platforms to lend people the virtual space and tools necessary for us all to create and contribute to the mixed-reality experiences that will define the next stage of our reality.
Diego Di Tommaso is cofounder and COO of OVER.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,307 | 2,023 |
"The emergence and staying power of the metaverse | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/the-emergence-and-staying-power-of-the-metaverse"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The emergence and staying power of the metaverse Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
In the past two-and-a-half years, we’ve witnessed a surge in the popularity and prevalence of new digital experiences in the nascent metaverse.
There, consumers are transported to a virtual world that mimics real-life experiences using state-of-the-art virtual reality (VR) , augmented reality (AR) and more.
Beyond the hype and across industries, there is real opportunity and staying power for metaverse capabilities. In fact, Gartner recently named the metaverse one of the top five emerging trends and technologies. The 3D and immersive nature of technology form the basis of the metaverse and unlock new ways of working, communicating, learning, playing and living.
As network technology continues to expand, its speed and power will allow huge amounts of data to zip between cloud servers and devices, creating experiences like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Here are a few ways the metaverse will become part of our lives.
Gamifying our everyday lives The metaverse represents the next generation of digital experiences. Users will be able to have unlimited interactions within a virtual community, from meetings with colleagues to owning land (digitally of course).
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! While gaming has existed for decades, we’re just now getting a sense of the breadth of the metaverse and gamification. For example, games like 30 Helios (a narrative mobile AR adventure) use a type of 3D hologram to give users a new perspective on mobile entertainment. Here, your mobile device is the portal to the metaverse. Players move around an augmented version of their actual physical space (home, apartment, office) to hack “glitches” in their space; once the glitches are hacked, they unlock more narratives.
Engaging enterprises Enterprises are counting on the metaverse to take experiences far beyond gaming to a wide range of purposes. These will include simulated job training, sales and marketing functions for a variety of industries, and even things like airplane design, simulation and urban planning.
We could even see a world where information will be rendered to users in real time, utilizing AI algorithms. Take the process of renting or buying an apartment. A user could be walking down the streets of New York City and, through the use of glasses, be connected to a real estate application that shows them in real time (through AI) which buildings have apartments for rent and connects them to a broker right then and there.
A new kind of travel Imagine what it would be like to travel the world without investing too much money or time, or even facing a fear of flying. In the metaverse, AR and VR can enable users to explore countries, cities and destinations they’ve always dreamed of visiting.
As the metaverse continues to develop, users are experiencing more advanced multisensory experiences on the go — and so the idea of virtual tourism is expanding.
Virtual tourism means access for people of all backgrounds and abilities to almost any location, personalized guest experiences and unparalleled entertainment. Users would be able to experience immersive museum tours, taste wine from France and climb the highest mountains.
The city of Madrid recently launched a free, 360-degree virtual tour for curious tourists, allowing them to make informed decisions about what they want to see when they visit in person. This virtual tour includes roughly 40 of the Spanish city’s most popular tourist attractions, including museums, plazas, gardens, cathedrals and a variety of different cultural institutions.
The technology could eventually allow us to travel to landmarks of the past, like the Colosseum at the height of its glory or Pompeii before the volcanic eruption.
Like the virtual tour of Madrid, these types of metaverse platforms might also serve as a jumping-off point for travelers who might then plan to book an in-person trip based on their favorite metaverse experiences.
How the metaverse can build a future accessible to all Diversity , equity, inclusion and accessibility are areas in which the metaverse could make a significant impact in creating a more accessible future.
According to the CDC, an estimated 61 million people in the U.S. live with a disability. For many of these people, the metaverse can offer solutions to everyday challenges. For example, low-vision users can benefit from high-color contrast. Those with hearing issues could benefit from subtitles and captions in real time. People with cognitive challenges can benefit from the use of shapes, colors and images to help convey ideas. The legally blind could benefit from technology such as 3D-audio echolocation while exploring 3D worlds.
Trust, safety and privacy are issues that developers must keep top-of-mind as they code the digital path forward. In the metaverse, we essentially have a group of strangers coming together and interacting with each other in a variety of ways. It’s important to consider the magnitude of negative interactions, such as false information sharing. Designing environments and experiences where everyone will thrive is a major consideration for developers.
Ultimately, the metaverse enhances the physical world and the interactions that keep our human connections strong. While we’ve seen massive growth and expansion in the past few years, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what is possible.
Frank Boulben is chief revenue officer of Verizon Consumer Group.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,308 | 2,022 |
"The metaverse is heading to the workplace | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/metaverse-heading-workplace"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The metaverse is heading to the workplace Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The metaverse is not a passing fad; In fact, it’s likely coming to a workplace near you — and some pieces of the foundation are there already.
Ciena recently commissioned a report to better understand business professionals’ sentiments about the metaverse in the workplace. What it found was that the appetite for the metaverse was more voracious than we could have predicted. Of the 15,000 business professionals surveyed across the globe, more than three-quarters (78%) said they would participate in more immersive experiences like the metaverse as opposed to current tools such as videoconferencing.
Interestingly, 87% of business professionals confirmed that they would feel comfortable conducting human resources meetings in a virtual space; 71% of professionals can see the metaverse becoming part of existing work practices; and 40% think their business will move away from the traditional/static collaboration environment to a more immersive and virtual reality -based environment in the next two years.
This may have been driven by the pandemic, which has accelerated a shift towards working from home and meeting via teleconferencing solutions. The result has been that people once averse to remote meetings now believe in the productivity gains these technologies provide.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! But if teleconferencing solutions to date have provided the convenience many of us are happy with, why are people so willing to dive further into the metaverse? The workplace metaverse: Beyond 2D It’s because the applications being developed for the metaverse offer the business world a refreshing improvement over current solutions. They enable an immersive experience, a workplace metaverse, that ensures remote meetings become interactive.
It comes down to immersion and the ability to move beyond 2D interactions into an interactive environment. This is something like the merging of in-person interaction and teleconferencing to become something in between, and something simply more interesting.
On that note, when it comes to selecting their avatar for the virtual world, 35% of business professionals would choose an avatar that reflects their real-world self, 22% would choose an idealistic version and only 10% would pick a pop culture figure.
Clearly, the metaverse offers people a choice in how they interact with others and how they present themselves. A 2D environment turns into a 360-degree virtual space that offers limitless possibilities. It means the days of cat filters stubbornly not turning off could become a thing of the past, with the metaverse allowing us to present in a virtual immersive space free of distractions from the outside world.
Bandwidth: The foundation of meta-life But the lifeblood of these applications is bandwidth. Without reliable networks, the weight of the virtual environment could come crashing down. For the metaverse to be a truly viable option, bandwidth needs to be consistent, and to enable large amounts of traffic to traverse wide area networks quickly while also minimizing latency.
To many respondents, this is a concern that may dampen their outlook for the workplace metaverse, with 38% of respondents expressing concerns that their current networks would not be able to handle the additional burden. In fact, network reliability is a bigger concern than the belief that immersive applications/tools are not yet widely available.
The concern is well founded, particularly when you consider that with work-from-home (WFH) flexibility now part and parcel of any workplace, residential networks and 5G are expected to handle a lot of the heavy bandwidth lifting. If they can’t, the metaverse could become a glitchy hassle that businesses discard as a cute toy that wasn’t robust enough for mission-critical use.
Service providers enabling tomorrow’s demands Service providers are already anticipating the additional demands and are investing heavily in new network architectures and technologies that enable more traffic over their existing infrastructures. Providers are increasingly enhancing their networks with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, enabled by the combination of analytics and programmable software capabilities that make them adaptive.
An adaptive virtual programmable network can identify a fault and self-heal, without the need for a technician. It can draw resources — compute, storage, bandwidth — from underutilized areas to ramp up other parts of the metaverse seeing increased activity and revert automatically when required.
Furthermore, with the workplace now everywhere and anywhere, metaverse meetings need to work seamlessly wherever the user logs in from. Cafés and homes at the edge of town are now effectively the offices of tomorrow. Network operators are likewise investing increasingly in creating easy access to edge computing capabilities to reduce network latency and improve reliability at the edges of the network.
While business professionals may be concerned about the reliability of the networks they depend on, their pessimism may be misplaced as service providers are anticipating the needs of tomorrow’s networks. As that perception fades, it will be replaced by a (virtual) reality in which we’re meeting in avatar form in an immersive environment, and possibly sooner than people ever envisioned.
Steve Alexander is CTO of Ciena.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,309 | 2,022 |
"The metaverse is the network, says Nvidia's Kerris | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/metabeat-the-metaverse-is-the-network-says-nvidias-kerris"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages The metaverse is the network, says Nvidia’s Kerris Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Everyone is talking about the metaverse , which is expected to fundamentally change every single thing we do.
As Richard G. Kerris described it: Think of the metaverse as the network.
“It’s the network of the next generation of the web, it’s 3D, and that allows for immersive experiences in virtual worlds,” Kerris, VP of Omniverse platform and development IGM of M&E at Nvidia, said in a fireside chat with Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat, at this week’s MetaBeat event.
Ultimately, it will impact everything; we will be able to go “from virtual world to virtual world just as we do from website to website,” he said.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The fundamental difference is that today we experience the internet as “witnesses,” he said: We visit a website to look at it and what it offers. In the metaverse? We will evolve to experience and engagement.
“To the point that it’s become seamless, it’s a part of our lives, from what we do at home to what we do at work and everything in between,” said Kerris.
Enter the Omniverse To help realize that future, Nvidia recently launched Omniverse , a suite of metaverse building tools. This real-time graphics platform leverages Universal Scene Description (USD), a software developed by Pixar that allows for collaborative construction of 3D scenes.
Kerris described this “platform for collaboration and simulation” as having two distinct parts.
The first is the ability to bring existing applications to Omniverse. There, they can be infused with additional capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) or 3D rendering. The second is the opposite flow, or the development of digital twins. Organizations can create digital worlds, then build physical content based on them.
Further advancing this, Nvidia recently announced Omniverse Cloud. This moves the entire platform to the cloud so it is “accessible anywhere, by anybody on any device,” he said.
Those who don’t have access to Nvidia’s visual computing platform RTX, or those that don’t support it, can access Omniverse, which he ultimately described as the OS of the metaverse. There have already been more than 200,000 Omniverse downloads , and hundreds of organizations — including Amazon, Charter Communications and Lowe’s — are using it or evaluating it.
The power of digital twins Much like the metaverse, “ digital twins is something that is going to be a part of all of our lives,” said Kerris.
They unlock great efficiency and optimization: For example, BMW has built digital twins for factories to evaluate processes. Lowe’s, meanwhile, is building digital twins of stores to enhance layouts and monitor inventories. And, Amazon is digital twinning its warehouses to better train its robots.
People are more efficiently and seamlessly producing contents and building products; they don’t need to import, export and download files, said Kerris. They can manage “through nucleus” their content and assets.
“You’re no longer having to move these heavy, heavy pieces of content,” said Kerris.
From a fear of missing out (FOMO) perspective: “Take a look at what companies missed out on, on the web,” he said.
Applications both life-saving and practical Digital twins can also have great implications in healthcare, said Kerris. Operating rooms are already building digital twins where doctors practice very complex operations before performing them.
Eventually, though, we’ll see twins of the human body and in cancer treatment, he said. One of the biggest challenges in cancer care is determining the best treatment; doctors and patients go through many iterations before they identify the right one.
But in the future, if a doctor has a digital twin of a certain tumor, they’ll be able to identify the right treatment much more quickly, he said.
Meanwhile, in practical applications, “eventually, you’ll have digital twins of your home,” said Kerris.
For instance, if you want to make repairs or upgrades or simply want to train a vacuum robot so it gets to know the layout of your home. He pointed out that there are already apps where people can try-before-they-buy clothing or preview how a piece of furniture might look in their homes.
In the end, “it just makes sense,” said Kerris.
The earthly digital twin On a much larger scale, Nvidia recently launched the ambitious Earth 2, the world’s digital twin.
Not surprisingly, it’s a multiyear project, said Kerris, as “it’s much more complex than a factory, much more complex than a warehouse.” The initial purpose of Earth 2 is to evaluate climate: Notably, what’s causing and affecting climate change. Nvidia aims to use digital twins to learn from history and enable prediction of different ways the earth might be impacted, “almost like a time machine.” A supercomputer is being built to enable the immense power that Earth 2 will require, said Kerris, and “the end result is something that is going to benefit us all.” When will the metaverse be here? We’re not quite at the metaverse yet; just like the internet, there has to be an alignment around a standard, said Kerris. Universal “plumbing,” so to speak. That is beginning to happen with USD, which Kerris said was described by many as the HTML of the metaverse. The “beauty” of USD is that it is so open, said Kerris.
For the metaverse to be successful, it needs to be open for all. “We’ve learned our lesson with companies that tried to wall off parts of the internet in the early days,” said Kerris. “That doesn’t work on the internet, it’s not going to work in the metaverse.” And no one company can build the metaverse; it will grow organically, just as the web has.
“When would you say that the web was here?” said Kerris. “We use it and we don’t think about it. One day we’ll wake up and realize that our internet is all 3D and we just interact with things.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,310 | 2,023 |
"Demystifying the metaverse: How CIOs can keep it real | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/demystifying-the-metaverse-how-cios-can-keep-it-real"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Demystifying the metaverse: How CIOs can keep it real Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series here: The CIO agenda: The 2023 roadmap for IT leaders.
As the hype around the coming metaverse continues, CIOs find themselves tasked with understanding the reality of the technology and its business potential.
Not long ago, many CIOs viewed it as a futuristic, far-off idea without practical enterprise application. But as the technology advances, and use cases begin to appear, the metaverse has fitfully begun to take shape.
New, fully immersive ways of collaborating and communicating digitally are already impacting business, giving enterprises that embrace it a competitive edge.
Traditional, ecommerce, and multichannel retailers are especially likely to bring metaverse concepts into their strategic retail market planning. These retailers are honing their customers’ brand experiences , and are gaining heightened awareness of the metaverse’s evolution.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Take the example of Lowe’s , which is providing virtual tours of their stores and allowing customers to use metaverse assets — including free downloads of hundreds of digitized 3D products, such as patio furniture and rugs — to visualize building projects. These virtual experiences are based on real-world locations and products, giving customers a unique and immersive shopping experience.
Similarly, fashion brands are now creating digital clothing collections, offering their customers a new way to shop. With such implementations in the metaverse, brands can test new products and processes in a virtual setting, which can significantly reduce the need for expensive physical prototypes and testing.
What’s clear is that the metaverse is not just a place for gaming and entertainment, as some skeptics would argue. It has the potential to revolutionize industries such as education, healthcare and retail. Trainers can connect with and instruct line-level employees by communicating with them directly via video through augmented reality-enhanced glasses.
Metaverse spectrum beckons Metaverse technology has the potential to create new revenue streams.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue. For its part, McKinsey has estimated metaverse-oriented value creation in ecommerce alone could represent $2.6 trillion by 2030.
CIOs can now use the metaverse to facilitate novel forms of interactions, business models and ways to monetize the physical world, reaching a potentially massive audience. This includes use cases such as the capability for automobile dealerships to maintain a limited inventory of specific vehicles while utilizing spatial computing to digitally alter their interior and exterior features in real time. Importantly, companies are now bundling metaverse services into the products such as metaverse-oriented simulations and training, which provides increased value to customers.
Additionally, digital assets can be utilized in various metaverse settings, such as leveraging NFTs that augment physical products, creating enhanced virtual experiences on platforms, and enabling new forms of loyalty marketing.
Although progress has been halting, some viewers see virtual worlds within the metaverse will eventually evolve into virtual parcels of land that can be bought, sold and developed, creating new opportunities for businesses to generate revenue through property development and management, enabled through Web3-based models.
Another implication of the metaverse for businesses is the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings. The metaverse allows for remote collaboration and communication, reducing the need for travel and in-person meetings, and it’s changing how businesses interact with their customers. It allows for more immersive and personal interactions, leading to stronger connections between businesses and their end users.
While metaverse technology is new to many businesses, its antecedents have been pursued in industrial and manufacturing settings for many years. There, product-design simulation and digital-twin implementation continues to gain adherents. Often described as part of a new industrial metaverse , this space features advanced software and hardware designed to simulate real-world industrial environments. This allows companies to innovate on a spectrum of capabilities that ranges from virtual meetings and conferences to employee training and equipment testing.
Intimations of a metaverse roadmap Thought-leader Nathan Robinson, CEO of VR workspace training company Gemba , said customers such as Kohler, Caterpillar, Pfizer, Coca-Cola European Partners and Johnson & Johnson have identified that training expectations of new hires and existing talent have shifted in a way that favors a virtual-reality imbued, metaverse-oriented path.
“There is much empirical and anecdotal evidence to show that we are in a deep crisis of progress and productivity in the workforce,” Robinson told VentureBeat. “That is where the metaverse can have a profound impact.” All work can be made more meaningful and fulfilling through better learning experiences, he said, as he predicted a future where factory-based training is elevated to include simulated and gamified VR experiences.
“Execs have a better way to upskill large and distributed workforces while appealing to younger generations coming through,” he added. “And the metaverse is hybrid, sustainable, accessible and engaging by design — hitting all the trends important to a younger future workforce and customers — and the earliest version is here right now.” Robinson cautions that, when developing their brand’s metaverse strategy, CIOs should also keep in mind that the technology is still in its early stages and not yet ready to support a fully immersive and shared space. Therefore, it’s essential to take a measured approach, focusing on innovation rather than trying to find a “killer app.” It’s important to be careful because it’s too early to determine which investments are viable for business in the long term.
“The intelligent approach is to invest in meaningful pilots to deliver transformative results — ensuring that you define what success looks like, set the right metrics, and create a controlled rollout plan. Then, testing and iterating until [you’re] confident of the benefits,” said Robinson.
In 2023, Robinson expects that there will be extensive adoption among businesses that are testing, learning and working out how to get the most out of what’s being described as extended reality (XR) technologies.
Likewise, Dijam Panigrahi, cofounder of metaverse enterprise solutions company GridRaster , believes that the metaverse will be pivotal in upskilling and reskilling workforces by providing opportunities to train in an immersive environment simulating various real-world scenarios.
“Some of the current industrial use cases include rapid prototyping with multi-user collaboration, employee/operator training and remote expert access. By applying data analytics, those insights can be further implemented in the physical world,” Panigrahi told VentureBeat.
CIOs should pursue a metaverse strategy anchored to the business outcomes that brands aim to achieve, he said. That is essential for brands to be able to continuously monitor and assess their metaverse strategy throughout its implementation, and to make necessary adjustments as required. He cites Boeing, BMW and Hitachi as industry leaders that see the metaverse as central to their digital transformation journey.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,311 | 2,022 |
"Beyond goggles and games: The collaborative metaverse | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/virtual/beyond-goggles-and-games-the-collaborative-metaverse"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Beyond goggles and games: The collaborative metaverse Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Recently, Figma, a collaborative web application for interface design, was purchased by Adobe for $20 billion. It’s worth thinking about why Figma has been so successful and why Adobe was willing to pay so much for it.
Since the beginning, Figma has been about collaboration. Yes, it was a great design tool. Yes, it ran completely in the browser; no downloads or installation required. But more than anything else, Figma was a tool for collaboration. That was a goal from the beginning. Collaboration wasn’t an afterthought; it was baked in.
My thesis about the metaverse is that it is, above all, about enabling collaboration. VR goggles and AR glasses? Fine, but the metaverse will fail if it only works for those who want to wear a headset.
Crypto ? I strongly object to the idea that everything needs to be owned — and that every transaction needs to pay a tax to anonymous middlemen (whether they’re called miners or stakers). Finally, I think that Facebook/Meta, Microsoft and others who say that the metaverse is about “better meetings” are just plain headed in the wrong direction. I can tell you — anyone in this industry can tell you — that we don’t need better meetings; we need fewer meetings.
But we still need people working together, particularly as more and more of us are working remotely. So the real question facing us is: How do we minimize meetings while enabling people to work together? Meetings are, after all, a tool for coordinating people, for transferring information in groups, for circulating ideas outside of one-to-one conversations. They’re a tool for collaboration.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! That’s precisely what tools like Figma are for: Enabling designers to work together on a project conveniently, without conflicting with each other. They’re about demonstrating designs to managers and other stakeholders. They’re about brainstorming new ideas (that is, with Figjam) with your team members. And they’re about doing all this without requiring people to get together in a conference room, by Zoom, or in any of the other conferencing services. The problem with those tools isn’t really the flat screen, the “Brady Bunch” design, or the absence of avatars; the problem is that you still have to interrupt people and get them in the same (virtual) place at the same time, breaking whatever flow they were in.
We don’t need better meetings; we need better tools for collaboration so that we don’t need as many meetings. That’s what the metaverse means for businesses. Tools like GitHub and Google’s Colab are really about collaboration, as are Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. The metaverse is strongly associated with gaming, and if you look at games like Overwatch and Fortnite, you’ll see that they are really about collaboration among online players. That’s what makes these games fun. I have nothing against VR goggles, but what makes the experience special is the interaction with other players in real time. You don’t need goggles for that.
Collaboration made Figma worth $20 billion. It’s one of the first “enterprise metaverse” applications. It certainly won’t be the last.
Mike Loukides is VP of emerging tech content at O’Reilly Media.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
2,312 | 2,022 |
"Security and HR teams must work together in a hybrid work world | VentureBeat"
|
"https://venturebeat.com/security/security-and-hr-teams-must-work-together-in-a-hybrid-work-world"
|
"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Security and HR teams must work together in a hybrid work world Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Hybrid work is the new normal. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the distributed workforce trends that were already well underway thanks to the flexibility of cloud computing, a key aspect of digital transformation. Now, employees of a majority of businesses expect to be able to perform their jobs optimally from any location, using the devices of their choice.
Hybrid work expectations include: Fast, secure access to corporate resources from wherever employees are located , including seamless transitions into and out of the office network and access to local and cloud resources.
Being able to use any device (that is, a personal iPhone or iPad or a work laptop) from any location — home, work, coffee shop, a plane — while trusting that security controls will be there.
Less (or no) time spent commuting and no friction when requesting resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
Robust support for hybrid work isn’t just a means to happier and more productive employees. It also directly correlates to growth. Companies traditionally hamstrung by talent pools tied to office locations can now access the best talent in the world, regardless of location. And a recent Accenture study noted that nearly two-thirds of high-revenue-growth companies are now embracing fully hybrid workforce models, and that workers themselves prefer a hybrid model — instead of a prescribed “in the office here, out of the office there” model — 83% of the time. Today and for the foreseeable future, talent retention has made embracing hybrid work not just good business, but a matter of competition and survival.
Netskope’s chief people officer, Marilyn Miller, and I see this current environment as a massive opportunity for security and technology teams to get much more strategically aligned with human resources teams, also known as people teams. There’s long been an important relationship between these corporate functions, and creating a cyber-awareness culture — where security responsibilities are known to and practiced by all employees — has been a priority for Global 2000 enterprises for at least a decade. But in the hybrid work era, this relationship between security and HR needs to go well beyond working on cyber culture and assessing the risks of employees “on the way in” (when they start with the company) and “on the way out” (when they depart).
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The evolution of this relationship shouldn’t be overlooked in the rush to establish functional hybrid work environments. Forward-thinking teams are already using their shared mission — both security and HR teams are invested in protecting sensitive data — as a way to start that evolution. I asked Marilyn to work with me on a shared set of suggestions for how security and HR/people teams can better collaborate.
The modern security team meets the modern people team Remember: the security and HR leaders of 10 years ago were not dealing with today’s generational sea change of hybrid work. Talented employees today may feel less connected, and therefore less loyal, to employers, following shifts in employer ownership brought on by mergers and acquisitions , or by being in remote-first environments with limited physical connections to employers and managers. There are many other reasons, too, and most are newer challenges that have forced employers to question their playbooks for people management. This shift is also the perfect time to re-examine the role technology plays, including what security teams must do to keep up.
Our discussions with our peers in technology and HR organizations suggest the relationships among security and HR teams have a long way to go to become truly strategic. Here’s some actionable advice on how to accelerate and strengthen that collaboration: Get back your visibility and invest in modern data protection In a previous generation, critical company data sat inside the corporate network, easily guarded. Today, data moves and is accessed from everywhere, due in no small part to the explosion of cloud and SaaS applications — many of them unsanctioned by corporate IT teams — in use by the enterprise. Because of this shift, organizations using outdated security and networking technology have fallen behind, and are no longer able to monitor what their employees are doing with data, let alone interpret the context in which they seek to access data.
Modern technology frameworks such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) prioritize data protection suited to an era when cloud applications dominate business. Teams must invest in this technology to get back visibility into what’s happening with their data. The best solutions offer forensics and insight into questionable employee behavior: Not just the explosion of movement of company data into personal apps that comes during the last 30 days of employment, but the subtler signs that employees have been moving important company data into personal cloud application instances, perhaps for a much longer period than a few months. Modern data protection — remember that shared mission! — is achieved when security controls follow data wherever it moves and access to data is governed by the context with which access is being requested.
Using security as a cultural enabler The security team has for so long been the department of “No, you can’t do that.” But forward-thinking teams are now employing real-time (or just-in-time) coaching techniques — powered by advancements in AI for data protection — to help guide employees toward safer behavior. For example, when an employee appears to be entering sensitive data, such as a social security number, into a website prompt, or sending screenshot images through workforce applications like Slack, solutions can pop up and engage the employee to question (not automatically block) the activity.
This is as much a cultural shift as it is a technology shift.
Security teams understand this as an example of what technology can do to manage risky behavior. HR teams understand it as a benefit for employee experience. Marrying the thinking among those teams creates a powerful demonstration of culture: ”We’re here to help you and de-risk your experience to make your work, and the time you spend here, better.” It also provides more protection to the company than hoping employees remember cyber-awareness training.
Insist on accountability Sometimes there’s a fine line between “Big Brother”-style surveillance of employees (“We’re watching you”) and creating a trust balance among work-from-anywhere employees who are no longer being careful with company resources or are growing absentminded about security hygiene, certain that questionable behavior isn’t being watched while they’re home or at the local coffee shop. When security and HR are both preaching enablement for all to embrace hybrid work, teams feel more connected and rogue behavior is minimized. When trust is violated, leadership must also speak with one voice, and address violations swiftly and specifically.
Collaboration between security and HR is imperative A final note: This new and better collaboration among security teams and HR will inevitably change the ways both teams hire. You will need more people — especially senior leaders — who can act independently, and who can go into a “higher gear” when it comes to managing a workforce that is both diverse and dispersed.
In your hiring conversations, spend more time uncovering whether your prospective hires are thinking about these challenges for a hybrid work era, or merely trying to graft old-school thinking onto the way we live and do business now. It will save you a lot of time and management headaches if you identify and prioritize forward-thinkers who want to solve today’s and tomorrow’s talent retention challenges and view technology solutions as going hand-in-hand with workforce culture and employee experience.
Jason Clark is chief strategy officer and chief security officer at Netskope.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
|
Subsets and Splits
Wired Articles Filtered
Retrieves up to 100 entries from the train dataset where the URL contains 'wired' but the text does not contain 'Menu', providing basic filtering of the data.