Scientific American-Technology

"AI scientists win the Nobel" and "Kamala Harri and Big Tech."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 08 October 2024, 2052 UTC.

Content and Source:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/technology

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

View in web browser

October 8—This week, we’re covering the two scientists who won a Nobel prize today for their work on artificial neural networks, what the U.S. election means for gun policy, and how other search engines stack up against Google. All that and more below! --Ben Guarino, Associate Editor, Technology P.S. How are you liking the new format of this newsletter? Send me any feedback or other suggestions directly: benjamin.guarino@sciam.com.

Kamala Harris and Big Tech For Scientific American’s series on the upcoming U.S. presidential election, I wrote about the ways Kamala Harris or Donald Trump might govern artificial intelligence. I sought perspective from social scientist Alondra Nelson, who worked in the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and helped develop a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”: principles and practices to guide how the American public uses AI. Nelson offered several observations about the candidates, and here are a few about Vice President Harris that couldn’t fit in the main story. Her early background: Harris’s combination of a “personal and professional background has brought with it clarity about the perils and possibilities of technology in general, including AI,” Nelson says. Harris, the daughter of a scientist, was born in a hospital in Oakland and lived as a child and adult in the Bay Area around San Francisco. “This gives the vice president a foundational familiarity with the worlds of science and technology, and this distinguishes her from any presidential candidate before her,” Nelson says. “As president, Silicon Valley will not be a distant curiosity to her but rather a culture and policy space with which she is quite familiar.” California to the White House: Harris was the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017, and during that tenure, she established the Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit in the state’s Department of Justice. This was “the first unit in the nation to focus on protecting consumer and individual privacy in cyberspace, healthcare, finance and in situations of sexual abuse,” Nelson says, adding that the vice president understands that technology can “violate people’s privacy and the importance of enforcing state and federal laws to safeguard this privacy.” The Biden-Harris administration also adopted a strategy of seeking voluntary commitments from the tech industry that Harris had previously employed; Harris secured agreements with companies to abide by California privacy law “across all of the jurisdictions where they operate,” as Nelson points out.  For more about what’s at stake for AI in the election, here’s my story. -Ben

In Other News

Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Breakthroughs in Machine Learning The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for development of techniques that laid the foundation for revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence Lee Billings

What Search Engine Should You Use? Alternatives to Google Search include Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search and Ecosia Ben Guarino

Challenging Big Oil’s Big Lie about Plastic Recycling California’s lawsuit against Exxon is about ending the lie that most plastic is recyclable Judith Enck

How a Harris or Trump Presidency Could Affect Gun Policy Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump offer starkly different responses to gun violence Meghan Bartels

WHAT WE'RE READING

Blizzard Entertainment was one of the most successful, best-respected names in video games. How it all went wrong. | The Atlantic Hands-on with Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI tools coming to Apple products this year. | The New York Times Two Harvard students created a program to instantly dox strangers with Meta’s smart glasses. (They’ve said they won’t release the code.) | 404 Media

From the Archive

New Glasses Can Transcribe Speech in Real Time Glasses that provide subtitles for conversations could be a boon to people with hearing loss Timmy Broderick

Follow Us Instagram  |  X/Twitter  |  Threads  |  Facebook  |  YouTube Manage your email preferences  |  Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us Scientific American One New York Plaza, New York, NY, 10010