The Digital Life - April 2023
Keep up to date on the best in curated technology news with The Digital Life!
Welcome back to the Digital Life. We’ve been busy curating all month to give you the best of the best in technology news right here!
We’ve got more on the AI revolution this month to keep you amazed, plus some good security refreshers to keep you sharp. As always, we’ve included a couple of interesting things, including a mushroom computer and a hotel front desk hologram. And, don’t miss this month’s book recommendation. I may just keep this up, assuming I can keep up with the reading 🙂
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This month in AI
The AI train keeps steamrolling ahead…do we sense a country tune coming on? 🙂
You’ve heard about Chat GPT-4 and have seen all of the coverage of products jumping on board. Here are three articles to keep you thinking about the subject.
Thousands of scientists and business leaders signed this letter, suggesting a 6-month moratorium on training new large AI models. This short letter is worth the read to learn firsthand what leaders in the field are concerned about.
Now, another take on AI from Bill Gates, from his newsletter Gates Notes. Bill is a bit more optimistic about the state of AI and how it can change the world for the better. As an aside, Gates Notes is a great newsletter to learn more about Bill’s thoughts and his foundation’s worldwide efforts.
Finally in AI, is learning a language dead? As computing and language models advance, we’re ever closer to real-time translation. Here’s an interesting article about Google’s new 1000 language translator.
An AI Side Tip
We started reviewing the “Be My Eyes” app years ago. It started as a person-to-person app, where sighted people could sign up to “be the eyes” of someone else. A sight-challenged person would press a button to have the sighted person help see whatever the phone was seeing. Now, in the new world of AI, the “middle man” is cut out and AI identifies the item in question. This a GREAT advance for people who have trouble seeing, if it works as promised!
On Security and Privacy
If you install an app to get coupons, loyalty points, rewards, or other freebies, guess what? YOU are the product. Case in point, check out data Kroger collects on you in the supermarket if you’re using their app. Is getting a few cents off your groceries worth it?
Every now and again, it’s good to read a refresher on phishing. Take a quick browse through this article to learn which companies in the subject line may be suspect. And, NEVER click on an e-mail that is even remotely account related. Open a browser, go to the service in question, and log in directly. It’s just TOO HARD to detect all phishing for the average user.
And if that last one didn’t scare you, check out this 2022 round-up from security cloud provider SpyCloud. TL;DR - malware is everywhere, millions of passwords and bits of personally identifying information (PII) are available (and cheap), and people are generally pretty bad about security. The article is a bit technical, but the sheer numbers will stun you.
That’s Interesting
Did you know that fungi are basically the forest’s computer network? (Learn more in the excellent documentary Fantastic Fungi) Computer scientists have now begun early steps to leverage the properties of fungi to do computing work. Could you have a mushroom computer helping you in the far future?
Is this a case of a big technical Rube Goldberg machine, or could this tech actually help hotels in the future? We don’t know, but it’s pretty cool.
In Closing
A book recommendation
Want to learn more about how the whole economy has transformed into an attention-based system? I’m just digging into “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, by Shoshana Zuboff. This book was released right before the pandemic. I think it will be an even more interesting read given the data collection changes during the pandemic and the onslaught of AI. Here’s a review from 2019: