Month: July 2023

“Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker James Cameron says he agrees with experts in the AI field that advancements in the technology pose a serious risk to humanity,” reports CTV:

Many of the so-called godfathers of AI have recently issued warnings about the need to regulate the rapidly advancing technology before it poses a larger threat to humanity. “I absolutely share their concern,” Cameron told CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos in a Canadian exclusive interview… “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen,” he said…

“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” he said. “I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it’ll escalate… You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate…”

Cameron said Tuesday he doesn’t believe the technology is or will soon be at a level of replacing writers, especially because “it’s never an issue of who wrote it, it’s a question of, is it a good story…? I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” he said.

But the article notes about 160,000 actors and other media professionals are on strike, partly over “the use of AI and its need for regulation.”

SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher has told reporters that if actors don’t “stand tall right now… We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker James Cameron says he agrees with experts in the AI field that advancements in the technology pose a serious risk to humanity,” reports CTV:

Many of the so-called godfathers of AI have recently issued warnings about the need to regulate the rapidly advancing technology before it poses a larger threat to humanity. “I absolutely share their concern,” Cameron told CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos in a Canadian exclusive interview… “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen,” he said…

“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” he said. “I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it’ll escalate… You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate…”

Cameron said Tuesday he doesn’t believe the technology is or will soon be at a level of replacing writers, especially because “it’s never an issue of who wrote it, it’s a question of, is it a good story…? I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” he said.

But the article notes about 160,000 actors and other media professionals are on strike, partly over “the use of AI and its need for regulation.”

SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher has told reporters that if actors don’t “stand tall right now… We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More 

An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN:

Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. “I’m 68 — I’m getting old,” he says… While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, “mishandled.” In other words: lost…

The “Find My” app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow… British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but as each day came and went, none of them had Sherry’s bike on board… Each day, he updated his location on the British Airways website, and each day, his bike failed to arrive — or move from Heathrow, according to the AirTag. By this point Sherry was tweeting the airline daily, showing them screenshots of the mapped location of the bike, but getting generic responses from British Airways that he believes were bots… That evening, he tweeted the location of the bag again, tagging American Airlines (who’d sold him the ticket) and Heathrow Airport, too. “AA seemed to have a human at the other end, and I thought maybe they could reach a human at BA,” he says.

Was it that final tweet, tagging AA and Heathrow, that did it? Sherry will never know — though he suspects the daily tweets showing screenshots of the bike’s location were the key. After his tweet on Thursday night to all three accounts, on Friday morning he checked his Find My app, and saw his bike was on the move… “Had I not started an annoying Twitter campaign, I do think it would have remained at Heathrow until I could have talked to someone face to face.”

CNN reports that Sherry’s week in Luxembourg “went ahead as planned, with Sherry adding that he was particuarly attached to his bike because “Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and the only time I wasn’t thinking about it was when I was riding my bike.”

He’d put the AirTag with his bike “after hearing other cyclists rave about them.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN:

Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. “I’m 68 — I’m getting old,” he says… While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, “mishandled.” In other words: lost…

The “Find My” app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow… British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but as each day came and went, none of them had Sherry’s bike on board… Each day, he updated his location on the British Airways website, and each day, his bike failed to arrive — or move from Heathrow, according to the AirTag. By this point Sherry was tweeting the airline daily, showing them screenshots of the mapped location of the bike, but getting generic responses from British Airways that he believes were bots… That evening, he tweeted the location of the bag again, tagging American Airlines (who’d sold him the ticket) and Heathrow Airport, too. “AA seemed to have a human at the other end, and I thought maybe they could reach a human at BA,” he says.

Was it that final tweet, tagging AA and Heathrow, that did it? Sherry will never know — though he suspects the daily tweets showing screenshots of the bike’s location were the key. After his tweet on Thursday night to all three accounts, on Friday morning he checked his Find My app, and saw his bike was on the move… “Had I not started an annoying Twitter campaign, I do think it would have remained at Heathrow until I could have talked to someone face to face.”

CNN reports that Sherry’s week in Luxembourg “went ahead as planned, with Sherry adding that he was particuarly attached to his bike because “Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and the only time I wasn’t thinking about it was when I was riding my bike.”

He’d put the AirTag with his bike “after hearing other cyclists rave about them.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More