Cyber Security

Amazon says its Rekognition facial recognition software can now identify fear and seven other emotions including, happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm and confused. What Amazon is not telling you is that facial recognition when combined with other data will be able, in short order, to take a pretty good guess about lying, cheating, jealousy, and other emotions that you do your best to hide with your "poker face." Lie detectors are so last century. Continue Reading →

Apple contractors are listening to snippets of private conversations though Siri. Should you worry? Shelly Palmer speaks with Sukanya Krishnan and Kerry Drew about it on Fox 5 New York's Good Day Wake Up. Original Airdate: July 30, 2019 Continue Reading →

If Libra and Calibra are successful, Facebook will have control of information (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram), weaponized information (a virtual military), and currency (Libra). I’m pretty sure that makes Facebook the largest government on earth. Continue Reading →

Techlash has been brewing for years. No one should be surprised that “Break up big tech!” is a major talking point for many 2020 presidential hopefuls. But how, exactly, would this be accomplished? And, what would the world look like in the aftermath? Continue Reading →

The lawsuit filed against Amazon’s Alexa Voice Services this past Tuesday fascinates me. It alleges that Amazon is recording children who use Alexa without parental consent. Excuse me? Mom or Dad bought the Echo, put it in the house, and taught the kids to talk to it. How much more parental consent do you need? That said, there is more to the story. Continue Reading →

In a rare show of bipartisan unity this past Wednesday, Republicans and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee expressed concerns over the rapid spread of facial recognition software used by technology companies. This should make you stop and think very long and hard about what your elected leaders do not understand about the world we live in. Continue Reading →

Wikiality, “the best narrative wins,” has all but replaced reality. Fiction often replaces facts. Lies are harder and harder to separate from truths. A pure democracy is truly dangerous to powerful people. Narratives are hard to control. Which raises the question, can a constitutional republic (or a bunch of other elected central governments) control a true democracy that is the direct voice of about 55 percent of the global population? Continue Reading →

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Can you imagine seeing a technology and completely misunderstanding what it was doing and how it might work? Continue Reading →

When will all the data (or a significant amount of data) from all the disparate, specialized, purpose-built artificial intelligence systems be hacked into a single, massive artificial control system? Or even worse, several competing massive artificial control systems? We could call it Meta-AI or Artificial Control – but whatever we call it, it won’t be good for us. Continue Reading →

Google dissolved its 10-day-old AI ethics council. Why? Because of AI bias, a super-important, completely misnamed topic. We can chat all we like about human biases creating AI biases with our Western cultural ideology, but if there is going to be anything like an AI bias council, it should probably be held in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen. Chinese cultural and political norms are going to have a much bigger influence over AI bias than anything we do here in America. Continue Reading →