Q&A: TIAA's CIO touts top AI projects, details worker skills needed now

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already having a significant effect on businesses and organizations across a variety of industries, even as many businesses are still just kicking the tires on the technology.

Those that have fully adopted AI claim a 35% increase in innovation and a 33% increase in sustainability over the past three years, according to research firm IDC. Customer and employee retention has also been reported as improving by 32% after investing in AI.

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Researchers build a scary Mac attack using AI and sound

A UK research team based at Durham University has identified an exploit that could allow attackers to figure out what you type on your MacBook Pro — based on the sound each keyboard tap makes.

These kinds of attacks aren’t particularly new. The researchers found research dating back to the 1950s into using acoustics to identify what people write. They also note that the first paper detailing use of such an attack surface was written for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1972, prompting speculation such attacks may already be in place.

“(The) governmental origin of AS- CAs creates speculation that such an attack may already be possible on modern devices, but remains classified,” the researchers wrote.

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UK intelligence agencies seek to weaken data protection safeguards

UK intelligence agencies are campaigning for the government to weaken surveillance laws, arguing that the current safeguards limit their ability to train AI models due to the large amount of personal data required.

GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 have been increasingly using AI technologies to analyze data sets, including bulk personal data sets (BPDs), which can often contain sensitive information about people not of interest to the security services.

Currently, a judge has to approve the examination and retention of BPDs, a process that intelligence agencies have described as “disproportionately burdensome” when applied to “publicly available datasets, specifically those containing data in respect of which the subject has little or no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

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EEOC Commissioner: AI system audits might not comply with federal anti-bias laws

Keith Sonderling, commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), has for years been sounding the alarm about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to run afoul of federal anti-discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It was not until the advent of ChatGPT, Bard, and other popular generative AI tools, however, that local, state and national lawmakers began taking notice — and companies became aware of the pitfalls posed by a technology that can automate efficiencies in the business process.

Instead of speeches he’d typically make to groups of chief human resource officers or labor employment lawyers, Sonderling has found himself in recent months talking more and more about AI. His focus has been on how companies can stay compliant as they hand over more of the responsibility for hiring and other aspects of corporate HR to algorithms that are vastly faster and capable of parsing thousands of resumes in seconds.

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EEOC chief: AI system audits might comply with local anti-bias laws, but not federal ones

Keith Sonderling, commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), has for years been sounding the alarm about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to run afoul of federal anti-discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It was not until the advent of ChatGPT, Bard, and other popular generative AI tools, however, that local, state and national lawmakers began taking notice — and companies became aware of the pitfalls posed by a technology that can automate efficiencies in the business process.

Instead of speeches he’d typically make to groups of chief human resource officers or labor employment lawyers, Sonderling has found himself in recent months talking more and more about AI. His focus has been on how companies can stay compliant as they hand over more of the responsibility for hiring and other aspects of corporate HR to algorithms that are vastly faster and capable of parsing thousands of resumes in seconds.

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Was Steve Jobs right about this?

Perhaps Steve Jobs was right to limit the amount of time he let his children use iPhones and iPads — a tradition Apple maintains with its Screen Time tool, which lets parents set limits on device use. Now, an extensive UNESCO report suggests that letting kids spend too much time on these devices can be bad for them.

Baked in inequality and lack of social skills

That’s the headline claim, but there’s a lot more to the report in terms of exploring data privacy, misuse of tech, and failed digital transformation experiments.

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Google Bard launches in EU, overcoming data privacy concerns in the region

Google has announced it is making its Bard chatbot available in the EU and Brazil, five months after the company opened it up for early access. To date, residents in EU countries have been unable to access the company’s ChatGPT rival due to issues surrounding data privacy concerns.

In addition to making Bard more widely available, Google has also introduced a host of new features including text-to-speech capabilities, shareable Bard conversation links, Google Lens compatibility, and the ability to customize Bard responses — for example, adjusting for tone and style.

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OpenAI launches new alignment division to tackle risks of superintelligent AI

OpenAI is opening a new alignment research division, focused on developing training techniques to stop superintelligent AI — artificial intelligence that could outthink humans and become misaligned with humans ethics — from causing serious harm.

“Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever wrote in a blog post for OpenAI, the company behind the most well-known generative AI large language model, ChatGPT. They  added that although superintelligence might seem far off, some experts believe it could arrive this decade.

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Cisco brings generative AI to Webex and Cisco Security Cloud

Cisco is adding new generative AI capabilities to its Webex collaboration platform, aimed at increasing productivity through automated meeting and conversation summaries.

The new offerings, announced at the Cisco Live! customer event in Las Vegas on Wednesday, include summarization capabilities that allow users to catch up on missed meetings or focus on the most important action items from a call. The capabilities also extend to Cisco’s asynchronous Vidcast tool and the Webex Contact Center.

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Governments worldwide grapple with regulation to rein in AI dangers

Ever since generative AI exploded into public consciousness with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of last year, calls to regulate the technology to stop it from causing undue harm have risen to fever pitch around the world. The stakes are high — just last week, technology leaders signed an open public letter saying that if government officials get it wrong, the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.

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