✈️Flying doesn't have to be a carbon nightmare and oh boy, AI can "tell" if you are a lib or not
🧟♂️A Tesla sees dead people?
The Good
I don’t know about you, but I am desperately missing travel to the point of being nostalagic for packing. The decrease in air travel has helped reduce the industry’s emissions, however, and flying less in the future is a way to help reach climate action goals. But there is tech out there that can help make that once a year trip to Japan much greener and I wrote about it for National Geographic Travel. The AI part looks at how better flight planning and refined weather predictions could make flights faster, as well as safer.
Like most situations, tech is only part of the problem and only part of the solution. For example, electric-powered flights that get juiced up on the ground from nonrenewable sources is just creating more emissions elsewhere. AI-suggested flight planning has to have an aviation authority that has guidelines and best practices to work with results that could change up to flight time or even during the flight. Legislation, infrastructure, and society need to move along with technology.
The Bad
The researchers who brought you “we got AI gaydar” are now bringing you “we know your vote with AI.” I just sighed out loud writing this.
The researchers pulled photos from a dating site and Facebook that included “conservative” or “liberal” in their bio sections. That data was fed into an algo that took in 2,000 points and could look at new photos and guess the person’s political leanings ~72% of the time.
How? Well it is a black box, meaning the algos interworkings are mysterious, but the researcher tested isolate and test factors to see if some specific traits were predictive of the results. As Gizmodo notes:
People that self-identify as liberals, for example, were more likely to face the camera directly, and were more likely to express “surprise” in their pictures. Conservatives, meanwhile, on top of being on the whole more white, male, and old, also ended up expressing more “disgust” in their photos than their liberal counterparts.
Once when I was in college, I ran into a friend on a beach who was signing people up to vote (totally normal San Diego behavior). He was getting paid by the Repulican party and although anyone could sign up, he was targeting people he thought would check “Republican” on their voter registration.
He casually mentioned he would never approach me. Was it because I was younger, getting a college degree, with a lip piercing? Probably all three! Anyway, I wonder if Dustin needs work these days, he’s probably just as good as this algo is at using demo info and historical voting trends at sorting us all.
More News
Presented without comment:
Follow up from last week: while face rec tech didn’t identify Antifa members, it is being used now to find the actual insurrectionists.
When you’re ignoring a second impeachment, turns out you have the time to launch an AI initiative office.
Think you can spot a face dreamed up by AI? Test yourself here.
The FTC is making a company delete the algos it developed by scrapping people's photos and videos without permission, meaning the “do whatever you want with whatever data” might be over.
Flint, Michigan turned to algos to figure out where the city’s lead pipes were likiest to be found. Now Toledo wants to use the same tech for its water issues.
At least one AI hiring platform is getting rid of the face analysis part of their tech.
Apparently, there are almost two billion trees in the Sahara—and AI counted them up.
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Until I am back on a shinkansen,
Jackie