Human v Robot

Today we talk about Parasocial Relationships, which are asymmetric relationships between media figures and their fans.

Links:

• AI: Is it Out of Control?
• What (p)doom is.
• The Influence of the Kardashian-Jenners on Fourth Wave Feminism Through Digital Media Platforms
• Parasocial Relationships: The Nature of Celebrity Fascinations
• Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on the Deeper Meanings of Friendship, Love, and Heartbreak
• Best C-Clamp? Let's Settle This! $4 vs 252, Wilton, Yost, Irwin, Wright Tool, Harden, WEN, Proto
• TikTok Creator Fund
• Podcast 74 - 1.5-Sided Parasocial Relationships | The Psychology of Video Games

From touchscreens to voice commands to immersive VR - what's next for Human-Computer Interaction?

Links:

• 238 | Scott Shapiro on the Technology and Philosophy of Hacking - Sean Carroll
• Risk of Extinction from AI
• The Mother of All Demos
• Animagraffs
• The Sci-Fi interfaces of Wall•E
• Visions of the Internet in 2035

With the rise of Deepfake technology - can we trust anything anymore?

Links:

• Making Beer: Human v robot
• Algorithm free social app
• The Gray Area - Vox
• Deepfakes, explained | MIT Sloan
• Applications and Risks of Deepfake Technology
• How Deepfake Technology Can Change The Movie Industry
• Midjourney Kills Free AI Image Generator Access After Explosion of Deep Fakes - Decrypt
• People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused
• Rep. Joe Morell introduces legislation to ban non-consensual AI deepfakes - UPI.com
• Top Google Result for "Edward Hopper" an AI-Generated Fake

We dig into what Algorithms actually are, with tangents into why we should care about technical literacy.

Links:

• CBC News: The House | Live Radio | CBC Listen
• Hugging Face
• Digital Literacy Archives - Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
• Brookfield Institute: The State Of Digital Literacy In Canada
• Algorithms in a Nutshell [Book]
• Markov Chains | Brilliant Math & Science Wiki
• Markov chain - Wikipedia
• How Google autocomplete predictions work - Google Search Help
• Get word suggestions & fix mistakes - Android - Gboard Help
• Use Smart Compose and Smart Reply - Google Docs Editors Help
• WaveFunctionCollapse/README.md
• Khan Academy - What is an algorithm and why should you care?
• We can build better, fairer algorithms in a world of angry bias - so why aren’t we?

What’s going on with drones? It seems like they were poised to take over every aspect of our lives just a few years ago, and we haven’t heard much about them recently.

Links:

• ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused
• Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash’ and Competing With ChatGPT - The New York Times
• ChatGPT Parrot Joke Transcript
• ChatGPT-powered Furby reveals plans for 'complete domination over humanity'
• Amazon's Drone Delivery Dream Is Crashing | WIRED
• Spot® - The Agile Mobile Robot | Boston Dynamics
• Transport Canada Approves Autonomous Drones For Beyond Visual Line Of Site Monitoring
• Airbus takes first steps towards 'swarming drones' concept - CONTACT magazine
• Drone-on-Drone Combat in Ukraine Marks a New Era of Aerial Warfare - Scientific American

Is it possible for AI to have intuition in the same way that humans do? How do we even know what human intuition is, and is it actually that useful?

Links:

• Meeting Owl 3: 360° Video Conferencing Camera, Mic, and Speaker
• Bing’s Chatbot Declares its Love and Elon Musk Rewrites the Twitter Algorithm - The New York Times
• Association for Psychological Science: Intuition - It’s More Than a Feeling
• Can We Rely on Our Intuition? - Scientific American
• 8 Truths About Intuition | Psychology Today Canada
• Forbes: AI Won’t Replace Human Intuition
• Artificial Intuition: The Improbable Deep Learning Revolution Paperback — Jan. 15 2018

Are Cyborgs coming in the near future? Are we already Cyborgs? What is the current state of augmenting our physical and intellectual capabilities?

Links:

• Multimodal Large Language Models
• Marc Andreessen: We’re heading into a world where a flat-screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100 and a 4-year degree costs $1M | Fortune
• The tech behind Artifact, the newly launched news aggregator from Instagram’s co-founders | TechCrunch
• Towards a cyborg future: Study reveals support for human enhancement
• Cyborgs: The truth about human augmentation - BBC Future
• Automation and cyborg law: To what extent do we “borrow” from machines? | McKinsey & Company
• Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications

How we interact with machines and how is that different from how we interact with humans?

Links:

• Hard Fork Podcast: ChatGPT Transforms a Classroom and Is ‘M3GAN’ Real?
• Dear Hank & John: About | WNYC Studios | Podcasts (Episode 358)
• The Atlantic: How AI Will Rewire Us
• Do you swear at Alexa? What our treatment of AI assistants says about humans | CBC Radio
• ResearchGate - Stakeholders, Reciprocity, and Firm Performance - April 2009
• ScienceDirect - Journal of Business Research - In consilium apparatus: Artificial intelligence, stakeholder reciprocity, and firm performance
• Amazon.com: Algorithmic Intimacy: The Digital Revolution in Personal Relationships

The current AI boom has made us want to revisit and think more about what kind of jobs are at risk of automation or AI replacement? Should we be worried or will new types of jobs outpace the jobs that are becoming obsolete?

Links:

• Washington Post’s In and Out for 2023
• Holiday Message 2022 | Thinking Really Slowly - Sean Carroll
• Will Web Developers be replaced by AI & Robots?
• Job Automation Risks in 2023: How Robots Affect Employment
• The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means and how to respond | World Economic Forum
• Fourth Industrial Revolution - Components - Wikipedia

Today we talk about the internet of things: how has changed it changed our lives and what changes are on the horizon?

Links:

• Cortex #136: 2023 Yearly Themes
• K-pop: The rise of the virtual girl bands
• NordicIT - How Internet of Things impact our everyday life
• Wikipedia - Stuxnet
• Entrepreneur - Why It’s Too Early To Write Off The Internet of Things
• Realagriculture - Low bandwidth slows adoption of Internet-of-things on farm

Today we talk about what the Metaverse is, what it is not, and somehow find our way to wondering if Roblox should be regulated?

Links:

• What AI-generated COVID news tells us that journalists don’t
• Crypto.com - The State of the Metaverse in 2022
• Meta - Responsible innovation
• Why the Metaverse Needs Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Open Standards
• The Guardian - I’ve seen the metaverse — and I don’t want it
• Hikikomori
• The Metaverse Book Summary by Matthew Ball
• NYT - opinion - My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg’s V.R.
• Facebook, beware: The metaverse is flat

Propaganda, Disinformation, Information Wars. Is technology making it worse or are we just becoming more aware of the amount of fake news lately?

Links:

• Government of Canada - Online disinformation
• Pew Research - 71% of journalists think misinformation is a major problem in the US
• Craphound.com - Twitch Does A Chokepoint Capitalism
• YouTube Information Panels
• The New York Times - Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far
• Scientific American - “Fake News” Web Sites May Not Have a Major Effect on Elections
• Elsevier - Pandemic widely increased public scrutiny, but not understanding, of scientific research
• EUvsDisinfo database

What is happening to blockchain, web3, NFT’s and the like? Are they the next big thing online or just smoke and mirrors? Maybe they're just not ready and we are entering “The Blockchain Winter”?

Links:

• What Is Web3? Understanding What Web3 Is... and Isn’t
• Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ‘ignore’ Web3: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’
• Blockchain Futures
• The NFT market has collapsed (but that may not be a bad thing)
• Web3 Developers Still Building Despite Crypto Winter
• 34 Blockchain Applications and Real-World Use Cases

Today Heather and Andy talk about Responsible tech companies. Should we be holding tech companies to a higher standard and if so, how do we do that?

Links:

• Jeff Hawkins: A Thousand Brains
• Peter Godfrey-Smith: Other Minds
• All Tech is Human (alltechishuman.org)
• Center of AI and Digital Policy
• Generative A.I. is Here. Who should control it? (Interview with Stability AI founder)

Today Heather and Andy talk about Radicalization. What do we mean when we talk about radicalization, polarization and extremism? Is technology adding fuel to the fire?

Links:

• Rupi Kuar - Productivity Anxiety
• Cortex #134: AI Art Will Make Marionettes Of Us All Before It Destroys The World
• Michael Levin: Intelligence Beyond the Brain
• National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence
• RAND - Radicalisation in the digital era
• Youth and violent extremism on social media: mapping the research
• Algorithmic radicalization - Wikipedia
• Q&A: The Myth of "Radicalization" | American Civil Liberties Union

Today Heather and Andy talk about productivity culture and how we measure our self worth in an increasingly technological culture.

Links:

• The many strengths of neurodivergence (Ep. 493) - Stack Overflow Podcast
• Julia Whelan - Thank You For Listening
• Ness Labs - Productivity Addiction
• Forbes - Microsoft's Latest Work Trend Index Urges To End Productivity Paranoia
• The New Yorker - The Frustration with Productivity Culture
• Calendar.com - Your Productivity Does Not Determine Your Self-Worth

Today Heather and Andy talk about how tech is affecting our health. We also talk about the importance learning to manage our attention.

Links:

• Kaspersky: Impacts of Technology on Health
• Vox: Is our constant use of digital technologies affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts.
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Today Heather and Andy talk about some of the strengths and weaknesses of AI, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of us humans.

Links:

• NetDragon Websoft appoints a humanoid robot as CEO
• AI Pickup Lines
• 5 things AI can do better than humans
• Artificial intelligence has one big weakness: The humans who create and shape it

Today is a solo episode with Andy where he talks about AI in medicine and how we relate to AI.

Links:

• XKCD - Scientific Field Prefixes
• What makes AI ‘intelligent’ and ‘caring’? Exploring affect and relationality across three sites of intelligence and care
• Will Family Medicine Physicians be replaced by AI & Robots?

Today we talk about whether robots will steal your job, Intuition v Data, and how we manage conflict online.

Links:

• Cortex #133: The Ethics of AI Art
• willrobotstakemyjob.com
• ML Glossary - Gradient Descent
• The Online Disinhibition Effect

Today we talk about Live Tweeting, what Robots are, and how Recommendation Algorithms are shaping online experiences.

Links:

• Kevin Roose - Futureproof
• It's not just you. Google Search really is getting worse
• Runaway Recommendation Engine (NPR - Planet Money)
• Recommender systems and their ethical challenges
• Do not blame it on the algorithm: an empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity
• If We Want Platforms to Think Beyond Engagement, We Have to Know What We Want Instead

Heather's topic today is technology in the kitchen. Are the new technologies in the home transformational, trivial, or terrible?

Andy brings a philisophical discussion about whether there actual is a divide between technology and culture? Is it more helpful to think of "Hybrid Agents"?

Finally, we talk about the topic of Trust. Can we develop trusting relationships online? Are we too trusting of platforms? Are interactions between avatars actually better, fairer, and safer?

Links:

• How Can AI Change Your Kitchen?
• Philosophize This! Episode #169
• We Have Never Been Modern
• What Is Trust?

Heather and Andy begin the discussion about what this podcast is all about.

How do we deal with a world where every part of our lives is increasingly mediated through technology? How do we maintain healthy friendships, families and careers when so much of it happens online? Are we heading for a technological singularity?

Join us this week where we ask all these questions and answer none of them!