🧮 AI tackles the problem of protein folding and the US Airforce wants YOU(r devices' data)
✍️ AI is a poet and knows it. And by knows it, I mean mimics the training sets it learned on.
The Good
DeepMind, a company Google bought for tons of money in 2014, just pubbed a paper showing its AI can figure out the shapes of proteins faster than every current method. It’s a problem that has slowed down science for the last 50 years, despite early machine learning efforts and a huge crowdsourcing project called “Folding@Home.” Figuring out individual protein shapes with the typical methods took years. DeepMind brought it down to hours. The ability to for AI to accurately predict these structures at this speed will enable more advanced drug discovery and other biological secrets we have yet to unlock.
This is the bread and butter of what most researchers were hoping from AI—tackling a well-understood but wide-ranging problem and finding a way to speed up solving it. Pretty much everyone covered this story, but I thought Nature did quite a nice job.
The Bad
Here is a sentence I didn’t want to read:
The Air Force Research Laboratory is testing a commercial software platform that taps mobile phones as a window onto usage of hundreds of millions of computers, routers, fitness trackers, modern automobiles and other networked devices, known collectively as the “Internet of Things.”
The company offering the tech is promising that it’s AI can sift through the classified and mountains of unclassified data it picks up. It already works with non-military sources, and can “tap software embedded on as many as five million cellphones to determine the real-world location and identity of more than half a billion peripheral devices.” The contract is only for $50,000, so it will be a small effort at first.
There is already a whole ecosystem that uses our devices to spy on us and those around us. Adding IoT devices, as well as AI, is a new layer of privacy problems. We are going to have to advocate for devices that don’t share data, pass laws that protect us, and rally against every attempt to test out new surveillance tech without oversight in the name of national security.
More News
Verse by Verse, an AI-powered muse by Google helps you compose poetry in the voice of a handful of American poets. Here is my Dickinson-inspired poem based on this email’s subject line:
AI tackles the problem of protein folding
Accompanied by soft incisions
Invites to the precarious work
To seek the neighboring life!
On the same day the National Labor Board announced that Google fired and surveilled employees illegally, they fired a respected AI ethics researcher. She said had been pushing back on censorship over bias research (In the biz, we call trying to bury some research by firing a worker and all of it ending up it in NYT a backfire).
Alphabet’s Loon, the helium balloons beaming internet down to Earth, now uses an AI navigation system.
New term to me: Youtubecore. Algos lead users on to Japanese ambient music on YouTube and I’m all about it.
Uganda is using Chinese face rec tech to identify protestors. Meanwhile, China is using American tech to run their surveillance infrastructure.
Microsoft is backing down a bit from Productivity Score, a new tool turned on by default for businesses that use Microsoft 365 services that let employers track what workers are doing and how long it is taking on those programs. Instead of individual tracking, it will now be in aggregate.
An argument to create more regulations and investigate Tesla’s AutoPilot tech.
Face rec tech company lied to a school district about how the tool’s accuracy on darker skin and how often it made mistakes like confusing brooms with guns.
Boeing had five AI-powered autonomous drones chatting and collaborating while in flight.
The big cloud companies are helping climate scientists use their tech to run big experiments. Good for science, and good for their PR.
A handful of Senate elections used chatbots to engage with potential voters and volunteers. The Mark Kelly camp said they chatted with over 180,000 voters via Facebook Messenger in the first month with its conversational AI.
A company is using AI to stress test systems before bad actors can find the weaknesses on their own.
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Until the sunshine poured on a balmy shore (A Paul Lawrence Dunbar-inspired verse),
Jackie