The presence of pet dogs and strollers for small dogs is highly noticeable in South Korea, including where I live. A recent article from Korea JoongAng Daily suggests that the increase in dog strollers might also be due to changes in policies at shops and venues, which now require dogs to be in strollers for entry.
In Korea, more venues require pets to be kept in carriers or strollers when indoors. This trend has led to a rise in dog strollers as a necessity for pet owners who wish to bring their furry companions along when they go out. […] The Hyundai Seoul department store in Yeouido also offers dog stroller rentals. The store allows pets in strollers or carriers in most areas, except for food sections. Hyundai Department Store has adopted similar policies across its branches, catering to pet owners by permitting indoor access for pets in designated strollers or bags.
Here is a noteworthy product announcement from Cloudflare. To combat the increase of AI-related web crawlers, the company is introducing tools to assist companies in managing and monetizing their website data. According to their blog post, this also tackles the issue of AI services decreasing website traffic by users opting for LLM services instead of visiting websites.
The rise of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative tools created a murkier third category. Unlike malicious bots, the crawlers associated with these platforms are not actively trying to knock your site offline or to get in the way of your customers. They are not trying to steal sensitive data; they just want to scan what is already public on your site.
However, unlike helpful bots, these AI-related crawlers do not necessarily drive traffic to your site. AI Data Scraper bots scan the content on your site to train new LLMs. Your material is then put into a kind of blender, mixed up with other content, and used to answer questions from users without attribution or the need for users to visit your site. Another type of crawler, AI Search Crawler bots, scan your content and attempt to cite it when responding to a user’s search. The downside is that those users might just stay inside of that interface, rather than visit your site, because an answer is assembled on the page in front of them.
See also this news article on The Register.
Tim Harford released another outstanding episode in his “Cautionary Tale” podcast series. The episode is called “Flying Too High: AI and AirFrance Flight 447” and tells a a frightening tale of a fatal plane crash caused by pilot errors when the fly-by-wire system temporarily malfunctioned.
The episode presents interesting concepts, one of which is the de-skilling of pilots, causing them to make incorrect assessments and take wrong actions because of lack of experience of flying without the systems. The automation paradox is that as automation becomes more sophisticated and reduces the need for human intervention, human skills become even more critical for handling exceptional and often dangerous situations.
Article on ChatGTP that is worth reading, but is likely flawed. The fact that Noam Chomsky contributed and included his own theory of language is noteworthy.
In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.
The following video provides a fascinating look into the gradual demise and transformation of the electronics giant Philips. Since I’ve seen the brand so much throughout my entire life, the video had a different impact on me even though the story is probably similar to that of many other older tech companies:
Interestingly, recent events have sparked attention in global politics to ASML, a major player in the microchip industry and one of the companies connected to Philips. See this article on policito.eu for information on the government’s announcement to impose new export restrictions on AML’s products to China.
This article from The New York Times discusses a controversy about the restitution of prehistoric objects by Indonesian government against a Dutch Naturalis museum.
While art museums have been grappling since the 1990s with claims that they hold or display looted Nazi art, and ethnographic museums have faced repatriation claims from African nations and Indigenous people worldwide, the Java Man case pushes restitution into the realm of the natural history museum — where it hasn’t been much of an issue until now.
Two interesting pieces on the dangers and uselessness of blockchains:
Clive Thompson makes some interesting remarks about the story of the Google engineer Blake who became convinced that Google’s conversation technology LaMDA. In a blog post he references the work of Sherry Turkle who showed how humans perceive robots as more real when robots seem needy:
This is something I’ve learned from the work of Sherry Turkle, the famous MIT scientist who studies the relationship between humans and machines. Turkle has studied a ton of robot-human interactions, and talked to a lot of users (and designers) of robots that are designed for human companionship— i.e. toy-robot babies, or toy-robot animals.
One thing she noticed? The more that a robot seems needy, the more real it seems to us.
Facebook/Meta is shutting down its facial recognition system. They explain their choice in this blog post.
But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
This article from The Economist is worth a read to understand their position on brain research and the use of primates in studies:
And were laboratories in China and Japan to come up with treatments for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s as a result of their studies of monkeys’ brains, it would be near impossible for Western countries to refuse to buy them to treat their citizens. Leaving others to do the dirty work of generating knowledge using means you consider to be unethical, while at the same time encouraging it by adding to demand is not taking the moral high ground. It is hypocrisy. Better for Western countries to carry out the necessary but troubling research them- selves, working to the standards they deem necessary.