New York Times: Start-Ups Bring Silicon Valley Ethos to a Lumbering Military-Industrial Complex. “Small, fast-moving U.S. tech firms are using the war in Ukraine to demonstrate a new generation of military systems but face the challenge of selling them to a risk-averse Defense Department.”
Associated Press: US announces criminal cases involving flow of technology, information to Russia, China and Iran. “The Justice Department announced a series of criminal cases Tuesday tracing the illegal flow of sensitive technology, including Apple’s software code for self-driving cars and materials used for missiles, to foreign adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.”
TechCrunch: Vint Cerf on the ‘exhilarating mix’ of thrill and hazard at the frontiers of tech. “Vint Cerf has been a near-constant influence on the internet since the days when he was helping create it in the first place. Today he wears many hats, among them VP and chief internet evangelist at Google. He is to be awarded the IEEE’s Medal of Honor at a gala in Atlanta, and ahead of the occasion he spoke with TechCrunch in a wide-ranging interview touching on his work, AI, accessibility and interplanetary internet.”
WIRED: Listen Up: Using AI to Build Personalized Assistive Hearing Devices. “EARLIER THIS YEAR, Cochlear, the manufacturer of cochlear implants, announced a collaboration with Google and Australian Hearing Hub members, the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), Macquarie University, the Shepherd Centre, and NextSense. The aim is to improve existing hearing-assistance technologies, like hearing aids and cochlear implants, and to develop new solutions for folks experiencing hearing loss.”
Carnegie Mellon University: Robotics Project Releases Toolkit, Digital Robotics Archive. “The website, which is hosted on the open-source digital repository system Islandora, allows users to click through historic robotics artifacts in the collection, read about their history, learn about key researchers and watch videos of technology in action.”
MIT News: Open-source platform simulates wildlife for soft robotics designers. “Since the term ‘soft robotics’ was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired platform that enables engineers to study soft robot co-design.” I had never heard the term “soft robotics” before, so I used Wiki-Guided Google Search on it and was lead to this article from the Encyclopedia of Robotics. The article gets complicated but there’s plenty there for even a non-technical reader to learn.
College of the Holy Cross: Holy Cross Associate Professor: Poetry More Accessible Today Thanks to Technology. “Technology continues to change the way humans live, communicate and even write, the latter thanks to ChatGPT, the news-making artificial intelligence natural language processing tool. And while AI and technology advances like ChatGPT could appear as a threat to literature and its works, the opposite is true, according to poet Oliver de la Paz, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and poet laureate for the city of Worcester. Technology has led to the democratization of poetry’s accessibility, he said, not its demise, and should be embraced for the opportunities it affords artists to more broadly share their work.”
York University: York University leads groundbreaking research to ensure technology revolution leaves no one behind. “A massive seven-year interdisciplinary research initiative led by York University – backed by substantial federal research funding — is setting out to tame the unruly world of AI and other disruptive technologies, so humans can benefit equitably from advances in a machine-driven world.”
CTech: Ever-evolving Israeli Generative AI landscape – the updated map . “The U.S. and China are in the lead, but Israel has certainly earned itself a place as one of the leading centers of excellence in the global AI ecosystem with companies like AI21 Labs, which is developing a large language model named Jurassic, which can be considered as an alternative to GPT.”
Techdirt: The AI Doomers’ Playbook. “In just a few days, we went from ‘governments should force a 6-month pause’ (the petition from the Future of Life Institute) to ‘wait, it’s not enough, so data centers should be bombed.’ Sadly, this is the narrative that gets media attention and shapes our already hyperbolic AI discourse. In order to understand the rise of AI Doomerism, here are some influential figures responsible for mainstreaming doomsday scenarios. This is not the full list of AI doomers, just the ones that recently shaped the AI panic cycle (so I‘m focusing on them).”
Wall Street Journal: Is Big Tech’s R&D Spending Actually Hurting Innovation in the U.S.?. “The findings, published this past week in a paper from researchers at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Census Bureau, show that when inventors join large firms, they get a pay bump, but they also produce fewer new innovations, relative to inventors hired by young firms. The research is based on a gigantic data set, including 760,000 U.S. inventors and their patent-filing histories.”
New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again. “Previous advances in A.I. inspired predictions that the law was the lucrative profession most likely to suffer job losses. It didn’t happen. Is this time different?”
Washington Post: Washington vows to tackle AI, as tech titans and critics descend. “…policymakers arrive to the new debate bruised from battles over how to regulate the technology industry — having passed no comprehensive tech laws despite years of congressional hearings, historic investigations and bipartisan-backed proposals. This time, some are hoping to move quickly to avoid similar errors.”
University of Notre Dame: ND TEC launches series of animated videos explaining tech ethics concepts. “Tech Ethics Animated is a series of short animated videos unpacking central concepts and concerns in the field in a manner intended for a broad audience without an extensive background in technology ethics.” There are six videos. The first was released March 1, while the others will be released weekly for the next five weeks.
BusinessWire: FOSSDA Project to Record Open Source History (PRESS RELEASE). “The Free and Open Source Stories Digital Archive Foundation (FOSSDA), a not-for-profit foundation to engage open source software pioneers and share their legacies, today launches the FOSSDA Project to create digital recordings and archives of open source history.”
