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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How algorithms trap us in a cycle of shame

Working in finance at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, mathematician Cathy O’Neil got a firsthand look at how much people trusted algorithms—and how much destruction they were causing. Disheartened, she moved to the tech industry, but encountered the same blind faith. After leaving, she wrote a book in 2016 that dismantled the idea that algorithms are objective. 

O’Neil showed how every algorithm is trained on historical data to recognize patterns, and how they break down in damaging ways. Algorithms designed to predict the chance of re-arrest, for example, can unfairly burden people, typically people of color, who are poor, live in the wrong neighborhood, or have untreated mental-­health problems or addictions.

Over time, she came to realize another significant factor that was reinforcing these inequities: shame. Society has been shaming people for things they have no choice or voice in, such as weight or addiction problems, and weaponizing that humiliation. The next step, O’Neill recognized, was fighting back. Read the full story.

—Allison Arieff

London is experimenting with traffic lights that put pedestrians first

The news: For pedestrians, walking in a city can be like navigating an obstacle course. Transport for London, the public body behind transport services in the British capital, has been testing a new type of crossing designed to make getting around the busy streets safer and easier.

How does it work? Instead of waiting for the “green man” as a signal to cross the road, pedestrians will encounter green as the default setting when they approach one of 18 crossings around the city. The light changes to red only when the sensor detects an approaching vehicle—a first in the UK.

How’s it been received? After a trial of nine months, the data is encouraging: there is virtually no impact on traffic, it saves pedestrians time, and it makes them 13% more likely to comply with traffic signals. Read the full story.

—Rachael Revesz

Check out these stories from our new Urbanism issue. You can read the full magazine for yourself and subscribe to get future editions delivered to your door for just $120 a year.

– How social media filters are helping people to explore their gender identity.
– The limitations of tree-planting as a way to mitigate climate change.

Podcast: Who watches the AI that watches students?

A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn’t realize his school’s software was watching. While schools commonly use AI to sift through students’ digital lives and flag keywords that may be considered concerning, critics ask: at what cost to privacy? We delve into this story, and the wider world of school surveillance, in the latest episode of our award-winning podcast, In Machines We Trust.

Check it out here.

ICYMI: Our TR35 list of innovators for 2022

In case you missed it yesterday, our annual TR35 list of the most exciting young minds aged 35 and under is now out! Read it online here or subscribe to read about them in the print edition of our new Urbanism issue here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 There’s now a crazy patchwork of abortion laws in the US
Overturning Roe has triggered a legal quagmire—including some abortion laws that contract others within the same state. (FT $)
Protestors are doxxing the Supreme Court on TikTok. (Motherboard)
Planned Parenthood’s abortion scheduling tool could share data. (WP $)
Here’s the kind of data state authorities could try to use to prosecute. (WSJ $)
Tech firms need to be transparent about what they’re asked to share. (WP $)
Here’s what people in the trigger states are Googling. (Vox)

2 Chinese students were lured into spying for Beijing
The recent graduates were tasked with translating hacked documents. (FT $)
The FBI accused him of spying for China. It ruined his life. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Why it’s time to adjust our expectations of AI
Researchers are getting fed up with the hype. (WSJ $)
Meta still wants to build intelligent machines that learn like humans, though. (Spectrum IEEE)
Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI. (MIT Technology Review)
Understanding how the brain’s neurons really work will aid better AI models. (Economist $)

4 Bitcoin is facing its biggest drop in more than 10 years
The age of freewheeling growth really is coming to an end. (Bloomberg $)
The crash is a threat to funds worth millions stolen by North Korea. (Reuters)
The cryptoapocalypse could worsen before it levels out. (The Guardian)
The EU is one step closer towards regulating crypto.

Read More

————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: Algorithms’ shame trap, and London’s safer road crossings
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/30/1055300/download-algorithm-shame-london-safe-road-crossings-pedestrians-city/
Published Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:18:53 +0000

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Chinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”

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7 hours ago

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June 3, 2023

By

3up CR

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

If you saw these images pop up on your timeline, would you be able to tell if they were real photographs of the southwestern city of Chongqing in the 1990s?

Three AI-generated images representing workers in China in a retro photographic style
Zhang Haijun via MidjourneyZHANG HAIJUN VIA MIDJOURNEY

In fact, none of them are real. Zhang Haijun, a street photographer in Chongqing, generated these images with Midjourney, an image-making artificial-intelligence program.

A number of artists and creators are generating nostalgic photographs of China with the help of AI. Even though these images still get some details wrong, like the number of fingers that humans have or what Chinese characters look like, they are realistic enough to trick and impress many social media followers, including me.

Retro AI artwork like Zhang’s has also caught the attention of Tong Bingxue, a collector of Chinese historical photographs. He reposted some of them to his popular Twitter account China in Pictures last week.

These generated photos are indeed aesthetically pleasing, Tong says. They look sophisticated in terms of standard photography metrics, like definition, sharpness, saturation, and color tone. “When people look at things on social media, these [attributes] are the first things that catch the eye. The authenticity of the photo comes second,” he says. Real historical photos, on the other hand, sometimes look amateur or come with material imperfections.

Zhang, the creator of the AI images above, was born in Chongqing in 1992. He grew up near the Chongqing Iron and Steel Company, one of the oldest and largest steel factories in China, and remembers watching the workers when he was about seven years old. “When I was little, I would often watch them come out of the factory during their break, sit on the ground, smoke a cigarette, and look into the distance. There were stories in their eyes,” he says.

When he turned that experience into an image-generating prompt for Midjourney, he was amazed by the results. “What the AI generated—the look of resilience in their eyes and the way they are dressed—it looks exactly the same as what I described to it,” he says.

Now, Zhang pays more than $200 a year for Midjourney, and uses it to generate new retro photographs with different themes: rural weddings in the ’90s, physical laborers for hire waiting in the market, and Chongqing street fashion. Each time, he writes the prompts in Chinese, uses machine translation tools to convert them to English, feeds them into Midjourney, and spends about 20 minutes tweaking them to get the ideal result.

ai chongqing 6
Zhang Haijun via Midjourney

Some artists working with AI are inspired by the discovery of real photos. Diaspora youth in the West have been forming communities on Instagram where they crowdsource and curate historical photos in orderto rebuild memories free from a Western framing.

Kim Wang, a 28-year-old UI designer and photographer in Hangzhou, was inspired by Beijing Silvermine, a project by the French artist Thomas Sauvin, who rescued 850,000 discarded color negatives, dating from around 1985, from a recycling factory in Beijing.

She used Midjourneyto create photos of China in the 1980s and ’90s.

“For our generation, I feel like there’s a massive leap from 1995 to 2023,” says Wang. “Now is a completely different era, but I kind of want to go back to that era.” In particular, she wanted to re-create what Hangzhou looked like before it became a tech hub and home to multiple Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba,

Read More

————

By: Zeyi Yang
Title: Chinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/29/1070432/china-ai-retro-photo-midjourney/
Published Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

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Tech

The Download: China’s retro AI photos, and experts’ AI fears

Published

9 hours ago

on

June 3, 2023

By

1f30a

This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Chinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”

Across social media, a number of creators are generating nostalgic photographs of China with the help of AI. Even though these images get some details wrong, they are realistic enough to trick and impress many of their followers.

The pictures look sophisticated in terms of definition, sharpness, saturation, and color tone. Their realism is partly down to a recent major update of image-making artificial-intelligence program Midjourney that was released in mid-March, which is better not only at generating human hands but also at simulating various photography styles.

It’s still relatively easy, even for untrained eyes, to tell that the photos are generated by an AI. But for some creators, their experiments are more about trying to recall a specific era in time than trying to trick their audience. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Read more of our reporting on AI-generated images:

+ These new tools let you see for yourself how biased AI image models are. Bias and stereotyping are still huge problems for systems like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, despite companies’ attempts to fix it. Read the full story.

+ AI models spit out photos of real people and copyrighted images. The finding could strengthen artists’ claims that AI companies are infringing their rights. Read the full story.

+ This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 AI experts want to pause the development of powerful systems
They worry about the “profound” risks that could accompany models like GPT-4. (The Verge)
How OpenAI tested GPT-4’s responses to dangerous queries. (Insider $)
It’s a bad time for Big Tech to cull its AI ethics teams. (FT $)
There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about how AI is trained. (New Yorker $)
AI prompt engineer is looking to be a very lucrative career path. (Bloomberg $)
Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? (MIT Technology Review)

2 US police have run almost one million Clearview AI searches 
The controversial facial recognition firm has been fined extensively for privacy breaches. (BBC)
The walls are closing in on Clearview AI. (MIT Technology Review)

3 How North Korea is laundering stolen crypto
The process conceals the pilfered coins while unearthing new, untainted ones. (Wired $)
Crypto venture capitalists are going back to basics. (The Information $)
Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly tried to bribe Chinese officials. (CNN)

4 How urban planning became embroiled in a conspiracy theory quagmire
Scientist Carlos Moreno has received death threats for climate-friendly city proposals. (NYT $)
How to talk to conspiracy theorists. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Twitter is getting closer to finding out who leaked its code
A court has granted it permission to subpoena GitHub to share its leaker data. (Bloomberg $)+ Bafflingly, Twitter has stopped showing who users are replying to. (The Verge)
The company has reversed its recent For You page changes, though. (Insider $)
Certain celebrity accounts receive special treatment. (Platformer $)

6 Amazon is warning customers about frequently returned items
In theory, it should help to counter fake reviews that boost dodgy products. (The Information $)

7 Makeshift delivery bikes are polluting Latin America
Their powerful engines benefit delivery riders, but are a pain for everyone else. (Rest of World)

8 It’s incredibly tough to render water in video games
🌊
 
But modern graphics processing units are rising to the challenge. (WP $)

9 We’re strangely obsessed with merch belonging to collapsed tech firms
There’s a burgeoning market on eBay to prove it. (The Guardian)

10 The next wave of TikTok stars are behind the camera
🎥
Not everyone can be an influencer, but editors and producers are in high demand. (WSJ $)
TikTok’s CEO is becoming a star in his own right. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“What the heck happened? The supposedly bright

Read More

————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: China’s retro AI photos, and experts’ AI fears
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/29/1070523/download-china-retro-ai-photos-experts-ai-fears/
Published Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:10:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/evolutionary-organizations-reimagine-the-future/

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Evolutionary organizations reimagine the future

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11 hours ago

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June 3, 2023

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Thoughtworks cover 16 9

As the emergence of radically disruptive technologies over the last decades has created, destroyed, or fundamentally changed many business models, most organizations have undergone some kind of digital transformation in response. Many have been reluctant, however, to acknowledge the degree to which they need to disrupt their standard way of working to succeed in this continuously changing business environment.

Thoughtworks cover 16 9 1

These change initiatives are commonly called “digital transformation,” though, as this report outlines, successful transformation is not a one-time change or single new technology adoption. Rather, it requires the organization to acquire the ability to continuously adapt to change. Although many organizations have the digital fundamentals in place, an updated tech stack and agile IT frameworks are just the beginning. Instead, change should be an evolutionary process that’s built into the organization’s mission and every aspect of its operations and strategy.

The global technology consultancy Thoughtworks describes organizations that can respond to marketplace changes with continuous adaptation as “evolutionary organizations.” It argues that, instead of focusing only on technology change, organizations should focus on building capabilities that support ongoing reinvention. While many organizations recognize the benefit of adopting agile approaches in their technology capabilities and architectures, they have not extended these structures and ways of thinking throughout the operating model, which would allow their impact to extend beyond that of a single transformation project.

TW web ready 16 9 Graphic

Global spending on digital transformation is growing at a brisk pace: 16.4% per year according to IDC. The firm’s 2021 “Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide” forecasts that annual transformation expenditures will reach $2.8 trillion in 2025, more than double the spending in 2020.1 At the same time, research from Boston Consulting Group shows that 7 out of 10 digital transformation initiatives fall short of their objectives. Organizations that succeed, however, achieve almost double the earnings growth of those that fail and more than double the growth in the total value of their enterprises.2 Understanding how to make these transitions successful, then, should be of key interest to all business leaders.

This MIT Technology Review Insights report is based on a survey of 275 corporate leaders, supplemented by interviews with seven experts in digital transformation. Its key findings include the following:

• Digital transformation is not solely a technology issue. Adopting new technology for its own sake does not set the organization up to continue to adapt to changing circumstances. Among survey respondents, however, transformation is still synonymous with tech, with 70% planning to adopt a new technology in the next year, but only 41% pursuing changes to their business model.

TW web ready 16 9 Quote

• The business environment is changing faster than many organizations think. Most survey respondents (81%) believe their organization is more adaptable than average and nearly all (89%) say that they’re keeping up with or ahead of their competitors—suggesting a wide gap between the rapidly evolving reality and executives’ perceptions of their

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————

By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Evolutionary organizations reimagine the future
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/29/1070438/evolutionary-organizations-reimagine-the-future/
Published Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:00:00 +0000

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