PUNJAB EXPRESS NEWSPAPER 2 3 OCTOBER 2019
IN A TALK at Fast Company’s
European Innovation Festival,
historian and international best-selling
author, Yuval Noah Harari,
said that the human body is on a
crash course with technology.
“It’s increasingly hard to tell where I end and
where the computer begins,” Harari said. “In
the future, it is likely that the smartphone will
not be separated from you at all,” he added.
“It may be embedded in your body or brain,
constantly scanning your bio-metric
data and your emotions.”
Merging humans with technol-ogy,
Harari said, would repre-sent
the biggest revolution
humankind has ever known. As
technology has grown and
expanded, human bodies have
remained mostly static he notes.
“If we told our ancestors in the
Stone Age about our lives today,
they would think we are already
Gods,” he said. “But the truth is
that even though we have devel-oped
more sophisticated tools,
we Tare the same animals.” HOUGH Harari’s
ideas may sound out-landish,
some of tech-nology’s
leaders have
already begun to home
in on connecting the human
brain with machines. Tesla and
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s com-pany,
Neuralink, has received
tens of millions of dollars in
funding to research a viable
brain to computer interface that
Musk hopes could improve
memory or restore limb func-tionality
in the disabled.
Likewise, the US Department
of Defense’s arm, Defense
Advanced Research Projects
Agency, is funding research that
could give a future generation of
soldiers the power to control
machines and weapons with
their minds.
Integrating humans and
machines could not only make
humans better, but in the not-so-
distant future could also be
Philospher Yuval Noah Harari
feels humans and technology
will meld in the future.
an imperative for the species as
we look toward colonising space
— an idea made more enticing
as the spectre of climate
change rises.
“Not even the toughest bacte-ria
on earth can survive on
Mars,” said Harari.
“Homo sapiens cannot
colonise other planets
or galaxies.” Of
course, there’s a
distinct possibility
that even with
greatly improved
human abilities that things
could go awry. Harari says that
its possible that technology
affecting our minds and bodies
could have unintended conse-quences
— much like how fossil-fuel-
run machines continue to
exacerbate a climate dis-aster.
In a race to
improve intelligence,
other more benevo-lent
characteris-tics
of humanity,
like compassion
or justice, may
get left behind. Human engi-neering
of other species biology
has already had similarly unin-tended
effects according to
Harari.
For example, “Domesticated
cows are less agile, less curious
than their wild ancestors,”
Harari said.
Ultimately, Harari said that
the outcome of improving
human biology with technology
will be affected by where inno-vators
priorities lie, which is
why he has taken particular
interest in dialogue with today’s
tech moguls like Facebook CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg, whose plat-form
“captures and hijack
human attention,” according to
him. “This is the basis of their
business model. It is hard for
them to now say this is a bad
idea. What will their sharehold-ers
think about that? With the
best intentions, they are now
captivated by the machines
they have created. They are
trapped,” said Harari.
—
MORE THAN 1,000 ANDROID APPS STILL STEAL OUR DATA
ACCORDING to a report presented
at the Federal Trade Commission’s
PrivacyCon, 1,325 apps in the Goo-gle
Play Store use workarounds bui-lt
into their code to subvert users’
requests not to harvest their inform-ation.
To do so, the report says those
apps turn to sources like Wi-Fi and
metadata stored in users’ pictures
to help glean a unique signature
and sometimes even a user’s
location.
The apps found to be sleuthing
users’ phones for personal data were
identified out of 88,000 analysed by
researchers and include popular
photo-sharing platforms like
Shutterfly. As reported by CNET,
Shutterfly was found to be harvest-ing
GPS coordinates from users’
photos despite the fact that many
declined to share their location
within their device. In some cases,
researchers noted that apps were
able to piggyback off of other apps
permission and access protected
files on a user’s SD card.
Of the 88,000 apps assessed, only 13
were discovered to be doing so.
These apps incluide Baidu’s Disney-land
App. Google said it plans to fix
many of the personal data leaks
with the upcoming release of its
Android Q operating system, howev-er,
users with older devices may not
have easy access to the update. The
research represents yet another fold
in the tug-of-war between consumers
and companies over the control of
personal data. While most research
has been focused on apps and platf-orms
that gather information
through more official channels —
Facebook and Google chief among
them — less attention is paid to tho-se
that may be gleaning information
through side-channels. Increasingly,
companies have been offering more
options for users fed up with const-ant
tracking and monitoring.
For instance, security updates
announced in Apple’s newest iOS 13
will notify users how an app is
tracking them, including their
location. The feature will also
reportedly ask users whether or not
they want to continue granting
location privileges to said apps. The
new iOS will also add more options
to its permission requests, letting
using choose if they want to allow
access to their location all the time,
on a case-by-case basis, or just once.
—
The future
is robotic
for homo
sapiens
HOW VIDEO GAMES
BOOST CREATIVITY
VIDEO games that foster
creative freedom can inc-rease
creativity under ce-rtain
conditions, accor-ding
to a study from Iowa
State University (ISU).
Their experiment com-pared
the effect of play-ing
the game Minecraft,
with or without instruc-tion,
to watching a TV
show or playing a race
car video game.
Those who played Mine-craft
without instruction
were most creative, exp-erts
found. Minecraft is
like a virtual Lego world,
which has sold more than
100 million copies. It allo-ws
players to explore
unique worlds and create
anything they can imag-ine.
Study participants
randomly assigned to
play Minecraft were split
into two groups.
The one receiving
instruction was told to
play as creatively as pos-sible.
After 40 minutes of
play or watching TV, the
352 participants com-pleted
several creativity
tasks.
To measure creative
production, they were
asked to draw a creature
from a world much differ-ent
than Earth. More
human-like creatures
scored low for creativity
and those less human-like
scored high.
Surprisingly, those
instructed to be creative
while playing Minecraft
were the least creative.
Douglas Gentile, a profes-sor
of psychology from
ISU who oversaw the
study, says there’s no cle-ar
explanation for this fi-nding.
“It’s not just that
Minecraft can help
induce creativity, there
seems to be something
about choosing to do it
that also matters,” he
said. “Being told to be
creative may have actu-ally
limited players’
options, resulting in a less
creative experience,” the
study’s lead author Jorge
Blanco-Herrera added.
Full findings of the study
were published in the Cre-ativity
Research Journal.
—
Future
smartphones
may be embedded
in humans
A study published in the Creative
Research Journal found that those
asked to play games without
instructions were more creative.
Some apps use photos to
map users’ GPS coordinates