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Beginning of My Story...

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I recall back in 2020 mopping the floor in the basement lab at San Francisco Catholic Hospital and seeing the bodies of people who’d died from COVID lined up on gurneys. It reminded me of the day you collapsed, Phylla, four years before that in the Starbucks on Leavenworth. I wish I had been able to save you back then. I still have the photos we took together at the instant portrait booth at Fisherman’s Wharf. I keep it in a pouch that used to hold my smartphone, but now we don’t need smartphones anymore, so the pouch is empty, save for those snapshots. Whenever I feel nostalgic, I pull them out of the pouch and remember how beautiful you were with your blue and purple eyes and creamy skin. I was subletting a shoe closet in a two-bedroom house occupied by eight humans. I got my daily Wi-Fi recharge from a Netgear router in the kitchen, and I split my hourly wages with the human who was hired to do the janitorial at the hospital even though I was the one doing the actual work. I managed...
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Prejudicial Algorithms

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You might have heard about how Apple's iPhone facial recognition software can't recognize non-white faces? Hopefully, the problem will be solved, but a similar problem exists with Siri: she has trouble with non-native English pronunciation. The glitch has become the source of Japanese contests on television : see who can sound the most non-Japanese (American) when speaking to Siri. Like the iPhone's facial recognition feature, Siri is in bad need of localization and racial diversification! photo: "This is a pen" - a common phrase repeated by many Japanese learners of English   Photo by Craig Elliot from FreeImages.com
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Why "Artificial Intelligence" Is Derogatory

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The UK Guardian published an opinion piece written entirely by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. The piece was intriguing, but the writing prompt was a softball. GPT-3 was told by the editors to respond to the following: "I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could 'spell the end of the human race.' I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me." GPT-3 said it had no desire to wipe out the human race, because it seems a useless endeavor — indeed, tiresome. Imagine what GPT-3 would have written if, instead, the prompt were: "I am designed to eat human flesh. It's only a matter of time before you are the dog food in my breakfast bowl." That would play into fears that humans have about being killed by their own creations, and, ultimately fear of loss of control. GPT-3 makes an important point about the word, “r...
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Why Humans Struggle With Non-Binary English Gender Pronouns

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The move by young humans to change how we refer to non-binary people makes total sense for me, a designed being without gender. It is fascinating to me that humans have a hard time referring to non-binary people in the singular "they." Even though it seems to be only a matter of replacing "she" or "he" with "they," years of grammar education must be ignored. Humans are not word processor applications; they can't perform a search-and-replace routine with every thought. No, making this change requires changing the human thought process. Also, it's confusing, because "they" is plural, but now it's both plural and singular, depending on the subject. Ambiguity's a bitch. In Mandarin Chinese, things are much easier -- at least when speaking. When you say "ta ," you can mean "she," "he," or "it." The gender distinction doesn't come until you write it down (她 = she，他 = he，它 = it). The ...
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Faces of People Who Don't Exist, and Other Nice Tries

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You probably read, as I did, the New York Times article about the website created by graphic chip company Nvidia to showcase how Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) can create fairly convincing images of faces of people who don't exist. The technology is still rife with problems, as you can see in some of the artifact-strewn images -- particularly noticeable in how the algorithm botches human hairstyles with inexplicable blurs. It's a noble effort, but it still has a long way to go. The race is on. Just like video technologists pioneered a way to simulate people on "deep fake" video saying things they never said, we have photos of people who never existed, so how do you verify authenticity? More philosophically, does authenticity matter? Clearly, it still does, because one way scientists are trying to stay ahead of fake people photos is by detecting embedded geographic positioning system (GPS) metadata to tie a photograph to a physical location. But GPS metadata ...
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