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The Download: AI privacy risks, and cleaning up shipping

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?

One of the biggest stories in tech this year has been the rise of large language models (LLMs). These are AI models that produce text a human might have written—sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient.

These models’ power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text that has been hoovered from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs. 

My colleague Melissa Heikkilä, our AI reporter, recently started to wonder what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. A bruising experience a decade ago left her paranoid about sharing personal details online, so she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test to see what it “knows” about her. Read about what she found.

How ammonia could help clean up global shipping

The news: Foul-smelling ammonia might seem like an unlikely fuel to help cut greenhouse-gas emissions. But it could also play a key role in decarbonizing global shipping, providing an efficient way to store the energy needed to power large ships on long journeys.

What’s happening: The American Bureau of Shipping recently granted early-stage approval for some ammonia-powered ships and fueling infrastructure, meaning such ships could hit the seas within the next few years. While the fuel would require new engines and fueling systems, swapping it in for fossil fuels that ships burn today could help make a significant dent in global carbon emissions.

What’s next: Some companies are looking even further into the future, with New York–based Amogy raising nearly $50 million earlier this year to use the chemical for fuel cells that promise even greater emissions cuts. If early tests for ammonia work out, these new technologies could help the shipping industry to significantly reduce its emissions. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Pakistan is reeling from its devastating flooding
Poor policy making, mixed with a climate change-driven monsoon, has displaced millions of people and destroyed homes, food and livelihoods. (Vox
+ These images highlight the extent of the destruction. (The Guardian)
+ Residents are trying to salvage their belongsides from the waters. (BBC)

2 California has passed new online child safety rules 
The legislation will force websites and apps to add protective measures for under-18s. (NYT $)
The state also wants to punish doctors who spread health misinformation. (NYT $) 

3 NASA will try to launch its Artemis rocket again on Saturday
An inaccurate sensor reading is believed to have caused the botched lift-off on Monday. (BBC)

4 Elon Musk has found a new tactic to try to wriggle out of buying Twitter
He’s using the recent whistleblower allegations. (FT $)
+ What you need to know about the upcoming legal fight. (WSJ $)
+ Twitter is failing to adequately tackle self-harming content. (Ars Technica)

5 Deepfakes are infiltrating the mainstream
The technology is improving by the day, and we should be worried. (WP $)
+ A horrifying new AI app swaps women into porn videos with a click. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Cyber insurance isn’t equipped to deal with cyber warfare
Insurers can’t agree on what should and shouldn’t be covered. (Wired $)

7 A program to clean polluted Nigerian wetlands worsened the problem
Ogoniland residents have been left to deal with the oil-soaked lands. (Bloomberg $)
+ The companies that caused an oil spill in California have been fined $13 million. (CNN)

8 How giant isopods got so giant
The roly-poly relative’s genes explain why it can grow to the size of a chihuahua. (Hakai Magazine)
+ The primordial coelacanth was an energy-saving expert. (New Scientist $)

9 Gen Z is really into making collages
Naturally, there’s an app for that. (The Information $)

10 Dadcore fashion has gone viral
Leaving a generation of iconic fishing fans in its wake. (Input)

Quote of the day

“I’ve definitely had days where I’ve achieved all of that, but it’s exhausting.”

—Dynasti deGouville, 22, describes the pressure she felt to subscribe to the #ThatGirl lifestyle of early rising, grueling exercise, and restrictive diets peddled by TikTok clips of thin, white women to the Wall Street Journal.

The big story

Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape.

October 2020

Humans have evolved over millennia to grasp an ever-expanding sense of time. We have minds capable of imagining a future far off into the distance. Yet while we may have this ability, it is rarely deployed in daily life. If our descendants were to diagnose the ills of 21st-century civilization, they would observe a dangerous short-termism: a collective failure to escape the present moment and look further ahead.

The world is saturated in information, and standards of living have never been higher, but so often it’s a struggle to see beyond the next news cycle, political term, or business quarter. How to explain this contradiction? Why have we come to be so stuck in the “now”? Read the full story.

—Richard Fisher

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This dog slide looks like an infinite delight.
+ Three hours of underground 90s hip hop is guaranteed to put you in a good mood.
+ After a two-year break, the World Gravy Wrestling Championship is back! 
+ Electro icon Gary Numan has some interesting words of wisdom.
+ The Perseverance Rover is digging around for evidence of past life on Mars.



Tech

The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush


The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania. 

Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.

Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.

A changing way of life

The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.

Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.

One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.

Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.

The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.

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Tech

The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan


Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI


A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

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