Oliver Letwin, the unlikely merchant of technological doom

As Uber parks its plans for robotaxis, experts admit the autonomous vehicle challenge is bigger than anticipatedTesla almost hits 500,000-car delivery target for 2020 despite pandemicBy 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britain’s motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London.1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of 2020 Uber, one of the biggest players and supposed beneficiaries, decided to park its plans for self-driving taxis, selling off its autonomous division to Aurora in a deal worth about $4bn (£3bn) – roughly half what it was valued at in 2019. Continue reading…

Doom scrolling, oversharing, constantly updating social media feeds … the internet shapes how we see the world, and now it’s changing the stories we tell, writes author Olivia SudjicTowards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could barely turn two pages before my hand moved reflexively toward the cracked screen of my phone. Each time I returned to the novel I felt ashamed, and the shame only grew as I realised that, somehow, though the story was set in the present, and involved an often long-distance romance between two young people with phones, it contained not one single reference to what by then I considered a hallmark of present-day humanity: mindless scrolling through social media.There was something sepia-toned about the book thanks to this absence, recalling love stories from previous eras even as it spoke powerfully to more urgent contemporary issues. Azumah Nelson’s narrator mentions phones in the context of calls and private text messages, but the characters are never sullied by association with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Was this because they were too sensible, ethical or self-assured to use such things, or is the omnipresence of these platforms now so implicit, in literature as in life, that they hardly seemed worth mentioning? Continue reading…

What on earth did users of the chastity cage Cellmate think might happen when they allowed their bits to be locked up in an internet-connected smart device?There are times when technology can be a pain in the neck. And then there are times when technology can be a pain in rather more delicate regions – as some users of Cellmate, a line of internet-connected male chastity cages, reportedly discovered. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to report that malicious hackers have been taking penises hostage and demanding bitcoin for their release.Don’t worry, we’ll gently unpack this together. Without getting too graphic, Cellmate is a “smart” sex toy that allows someone, usually a trusted partner, to lock up the user’s genitals via an app. (What could possibly go wrong, eh?) The device made headlines last October when researchers said that the product had a security flaw that meant hackers could take control of the products. Which, according to a recent report by Vice’s Motherboard, is exactly what happened. The report was largely based on screenshots of conversations between the hacker and their victims that were obtained by a security researcher who goes by the name Smelly. Continue reading…

Are the robots going to kills us? Film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei speaks to a range of interviewees including Elon Musk’s computer scientist in an eye-opening, anxiety-inducing filmWhat will happen when robots become smarter than humans – will they want to kill us? No, according to the computer scientist in charge of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence research company OpenAI. His name is Ilya Sutskever and he believes that super intelligent machines won’t hate us, but they will prioritise their own survival. Think about the way we treat animals. We’re fond of them but we don’t ask their permission to build a road; it’ll be like that. His analogy is an extraordinary moment in this doom-laden documentary about the future of AI from Norwegian film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei – an eye-opening film if your anxiety levels are up to it.Another interviewee jokes that AI is being developed by a few companies and a handful of governments for three purposes – “killing, spying and brainwashing” and the film then briskly rattles through the worst-case scenarios facing human civilisation. I suspect nothing here will be a bombshell to anyone who is up to speed on surveillance society in China, autonomous weapons, bias in policing algorithms, the effects of living in online echo chambers, big data and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But iHuman helpfully gathers all the strands together into one apocalyptic package, detailing the many ways in which technology is a risk to life as we know it. Continue reading…