174576068
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merbs writes:
Video games—and the people who make them—are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone. This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way.
But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey’s more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use.
“It’s here. It’s definitely here, right now,” says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. “I think everyone’s seen it get used, and it’s a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened.”
117100638
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merbs writes:
Economists examined how automation events impacted millions of employees in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2016. They measured daily and annual wages, employment rates, the collection of unemployment insurance and welfare receipts. What emerges is a portrait of workplace automation that is ominous in a less dramatic manner than we’re typically made to understand. For one thing, there is no ‘robot apocalypse’, even after a major corporate automation event. Unlike mass layoffs, automation does not appear to immediately and directly send workers packing en masse.
Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit—and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee. Older workers are more likely to retire early. Researchers also find that workers receive insufficient support from state benefits—even in a place where benefits are relatively generous. It all amounts to a slow-motion picture of the automation crisis.
109864082
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merbs writes:
Listen: ‘Robots’ are not coming for your jobs. I hope we can be very clear here—at this particular point in time, ‘robots’ are not sentient agents capable of seeking out and applying for your job and then landing the gig on its comparatively superior merits. ‘Robots’ are not currently algorithmically scanning LinkedIn and Monster.com with an intent to displace you with their artificial intelligence. Nor are ‘robots’ gathered in the back of a warehouse somewhere conspiring to take human jobs en masse. A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.
109370716
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merbs writes:
In January 2019, when China Central Television, the largest broadcast network in the most populous nation in the world, aired a special to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the hosts welcomed four life-sized “personal artificial intelligences” to share the stage with them. Called PAIs, they were three-dimensional holographic replicas of the presenters that moved, spoke, and sang to the delight of the cheering live audience. The program was viewed some 1.8 billion times. One of the most-watched TV shows in the world had been hosted by AI avatars.
The company behind those avatars is the Pasadena-based ObEN. This startup, with its 100 plus employees, is betting that in the future, everyone will want their own PAIs—to digitally try on clothes, to interact with friends, to keep the kids company while you’re away on a business trip. In that future, celebrities will create PAIs to interact with fans to promote their latest films and albums. Teachers and doctors will have PAIs that offer personalized services to their students and patients. When you go to the mall, PAIs will pop up on the interactive screens there, enticing you to buy stuff.
ObEN describes its ambitious vision of the future as “personal AI for all.” And ObEN is far from alone, of course. Investors, tech giants, and even governments are betting big on lifelike digital avatars—between Facebook’s push to port your likeness into VR, the eerily lifelike AI news anchors put on the air by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, and the burgeoning CGI celebrity simulacra scene in Hollywood, there’s a newfangled interest in the (potentially vastly profitable) art of porting people’s digital likeness to our screens.
Cyberculture has revolved around avatars for decades, but the avi-to-avi future pursued by ObEN and others promise a level of representation saturation hitherto unimagined by even the most fervent cyberpunks. Would a world filled with PAIs really beget more convenience and entertainment? Or would it further accelerate already ascendent trendlines of the crowding and hyper-commercialization of our digital spaces?
To better understand this new frontier of companion AI, and both its utopian and dystopian implications, I headed to Pasadena, to ObEN’s HQ, to become the first non-celebrity civilian to get my own PAI.
108305004
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merbs writes:
If you think looking for a job is already daunting, anxiety-riddled, and unpleasant, just wait until the algorithms take over the hiring process. When they do, a newfangled “digital recruiter” like VCV, which just received $1.7 million in early investment, hopes it will look something like this:
First, a search bot will be used to scan CVs by the thousands, yours presumably among them. If it’s picked out of the haystack, you will be contacted by a chatbot. Over SMS, the bot will set an appointment for a phone interview, which will be conducted by an automated system enabled by voice recognition AI. Next, the system will ask you, the applicant, to record video responses to a set of predetermined interview questions. Finally, the program can use facial recognition and predictive analytics to complete the screening, algorithmically determining whether the nervousness, mood, and behavior patterns you exhibit make you a fit for the company.
If you pass all that, then you will be recommended for an in-person job interview.
105606102
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merbs writes:
Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon—but it’s a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that’s not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management—in fact, it’s very often not. Sometimes it’s a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who’ve automated their colleagues out of work—or, in one case, been put in a position where they’d have to do so and decided to quit instead—I’ve attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We’ve heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we’ve seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven’t had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
105218266
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merbs writes:
Out of the three major sectors of the economy—agriculture, manufacturing, and service—two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too.
There’s a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others.
In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels’ and casinos’ widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city’s most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we’ve got.
103466374
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merbs writes:
After years of intense secrecy and relative silence, in August, Magic Leap finally launched its flagship product, a mixed reality rig featuring goggles, a control wand, and clip-on computer pack, to developers, who could purchase it for $2,295. This week, the company held its inaugural developer conference, to try to entice third-party creators, and to introduce the gear to a wider audience. In many ways, this is the final stage of the product’s public debut. In 2015, Abovitz told Wired, “When we launch it, it is going to be huge.” After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty—in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji—to inform you that it is not.
103158410
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merbs writes:
On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans. An old GPS unit was fastened atop the roof. Inside, a microphone dangled from the ceiling. Wires from all three devices fed into Ross Goodwin’s Razer Blade laptop, itself hooked up to a humble receipt printer. This, Goodwin hoped, was the apparatus that was going to produce the next American road-trip novel.
Along the way, the four sensors would feed data into a system of neural networks Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books and Foursquare location data, and the printer would spit out the results one letter at a time. By the end of the four-day trip, receipts emblazoned with artificially intelligent prose would cover the floor of the car. They’re collected in 1 the Road, a book Goodwin’s publisher, Jean Boîte Éditions, is marketing as “the first novel written by a machine.”
81251147
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merbs writes:
NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin.
Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13 C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.
80729343
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merbs writes:
Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades, whipping into the gusts like enormous palm trees. The vision is partly terrifying, partly inspiring, and being taken entirely seriously by the federal government and one of our top research laboratories.
The University of Virginia's Sandia National Labs has unveiled the preliminary design for a new offshore wind turbine with 650-foot turbine blades. That, as its announcement points out, is twice the size of an American football field. It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York.
80449681
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merbs writes:
Throughout the early 90s, a team of Russian astronomers and engineers were hellbent on literally turning night into day. By shining a giant mirror onto the earth from space, they figured they could bring sunlight to the depths of night, extending the workday, cutting back on lighting costs and allowing laborers to toil longer. If this sounds a bit like the plot of a Bond film, well, it’s that too.
The difference is that for a second there, the scientists, led by Vladimir Sergeevich Syromyatnikov, one of the most important astronautical engineers in history, actually pulled it off.
79093709
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merbs writes:
Anote Tong, the president of low-lying Kiribati, has spent nearly a decade trying to save his people from rising sea levels. There’s a good chance he will not succeed. This is how he leads a nation that will likely not exist in 100 years.
78622653
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merbs writes:
In Papua New Guinea, one well-financed, first-mover company is about to pioneer deep sea mining. And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they'll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
78421685
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merbs writes:
Early next year, DARPA will begin testing a 132-foot unmanned submarine-hunting ocean drone in San Diego. Slapped with the cumbersome title of Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), it’s designed to do exactly that: track stealth submarines from the surface, quietly and autonomously.
