The U.S. as an Authoritarian State: Danger to the Global Rule of Law – Donald J. Trump’s second term as President of the United States has stunned the world. As Catherine Morris documents, commentators increasingly say the U.S. has now crossed the Rubicon into authoritarian territory. Morris addresses the impact on the legal system, legal …
Skepticism about AI is not only justified—it’s evidence of good judgment. There are indeed pitfalls to AI use. Inept use of AI won’t help you, but Jerry Lawson’s
This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources. Five highlights from this post: The rise of the AI investment banker; AI and Productivity in Europe; The Global Impact of AI: Mind the Gap; AI tools mostly fumble basic financial tasks, study finds; and The CFO Imperative How Finance Leaders Are Staying Ahead In A Volatile World.
Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The computerised systems in your car alone incorporate tens of millions of lines of code. The increasing digital transformation of our society means that demand for more and better software is likely to continue into the future. Researchers, technologists and data scientists Iván Alfonso and Jordi Cabot. highlight a critical dilemma with the acceleration of AI in all facets of our lives. There are not enough human programmers to build all this software. This means that more and more of the software you use every day is built with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). Software developers are already very familiar with tools such as GitHub Copilot, a kind of ChatGPT for programmers. It works something like a smart autocomplete tool to increase the productivity of human programmers. But we are now witnessing a more radical revolution, where AI “agents” are poised to carry out many types of development tasks on behalf of human programmers. Agents are programs that use AI to perform tasks and achieve specific objectives for a human user. AI agents can learn and make decisions with some level of autonomy, though they are still under human supervision.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: How to prevent your streaming device from tracking your viewing habits (and why it makes a difference); Your private health data may have fueled Google’s ads; Businesses Failing to Prevent Cyber Attacks, Says Report; and How to block Meta AI from using your Instagram or Facebook posts for training.
Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Mike Olson’s research focuses on the intersection of information systems and social critique. In this timely and insightful article Olson discusses why and how library catalogs have always been battlegrounds where content is not merely described but debated. President Trump’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14172 directing the renaming of longstanding geographical designations “Mount Denali” and “Gulf of Mexico” to the politically loaded “Mount McKinley” and “Gulf of America” reveal the naked truth of what cataloging has always been: a battlefield where meaning is contested and conquered.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Text Message Scams Cost Consumers $470 Million in 2024, FTC Reports; Trump is shifting cybersecurity to the states, but many aren’t prepared; Homeland Security Email Tells a US Citizen to ‘Immediately’ Self-Deport; OpenAI Tightens Access As Evidence Mounts of AI Model Mimicry; and ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations.
Censor, purge, defund: how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities – Professor of Operational Research Christina Pagel has mapped 35 of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook – and considers what it means for attacks still to come. Pagel states that the attacks on science …
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Google Confirms Gmail Upgrade – 3 Billion Users Must Now Decide; What is Signal, the app where Trump officials texted war plans?; Even More Venmo Accounts Tied to Trump Officials in Signal Group Chat Left Data Public; NIST releases finalized guidelines on protecting AI from attacks; Canada – We partner with world-renowned scambusters to create our own fraud-fighting call centre.
AI tools can do amazing things, such as make 3D models of digitized versions of the items in museum collections, but only if there’s enough well-organized data about that item available. To see how AI can help museum collections, Bradley Wade Bishop’s team of researchers started by conducting focus groups with the people who managed museum collections. We asked what they are doing to get their collections used by both humans and AI.