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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media and any related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since! It’s pretty sad!
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon, and found interesting.
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A powerful new tool that will revolutionise the way we work
By Ethan Mollick
4:00PM January 6, 2023
In November, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a powerful new chatbot that can communicate in plain English using an updated version of its artificial intelligence system. While versions of GPT have been around for a while, this model has crossed a threshold; it’s genuinely useful for a wide range of tasks, from creating software to generating business ideas to writing a wedding toast. While previous generations could technically do these things, the quality of output was much lower than that produced by an average human. The new model is much better.
Put simply, this is a very big deal. The businesses that understand the significance of this change will be at a considerable advantage. Especially as ChatGPT is just the first of many similar chatbots that will soon be available, and they are increasing in capacity exponentially every year. At first glance, ChatGPT might seem like a clever toy. On a technical level, it doesn’t work differently than previous AI systems; it’s just better at what it does. But a deeper exploration reveals much more potential. And the more you look, the more you see what has changed with this model, and why it seems like a tipping point. ChatGPT, now open to everyone, has made a significant transition. Until now, AI has primarily been aimed at problems where failure is expensive, not at tasks where occasional failure is cheap and acceptable or even ones in which experts can easily separate failed cases from successful ones. Applying AI to creative and expressive tasks (writing marketing copy) rather than dangerous and repetitive ones (driving a forklift) opens a world of applications.
First, not only can this AI produce paragraphs of solidly written English (or whatever language you choose) with a high degree of sophistication, it can also create blocks of computer code. To give you an idea of what this looks like, I introduced my undergraduate entrepreneurship students to the new AI system, and before I was done talking, a student used it to create the code for a start-up prototype using code libraries they had never seen before, and completed a four-hour project in less than an hour.
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https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-aims-for-ai-powered-version-of-bing-589497
Microsoft aims for AI-powered version of Bing
By Staff Writer on Jan 5, 2023 10:47AM
Incorporating technology behind ChatGPT.
Microsoft is in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence behind OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT, The Information reported, citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans.
Microsoft could launch the new feature before the end of March, and hopes to challenge Google, the news website reported
Microsoft said in a blog post last year that it planned to integrate image-generation software from OpenAI, DALL-E 2, into Bing.
OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment.
Microsoft had in 2019 backed San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, offering US$1 billion (A$1.46 billion) in funding.
The two had formed a multi-year partnership to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service.
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Robots aren’t stealing jobs, they’re enabling us to spend more time being human
Digital technology entrepreneur
January 5, 2023 — 5.00am
A report by Victoria’s Skills Authority says that by 2025 the state will face a shortage of nearly 400,000 workers.
That figure includes 65,000 health and aged and disability care workers, 90,000 service sector workers, 41,000 teaching staff, 34,000 construction workers and 64,000 financial services and IT professionals.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1974, with just one unemployed person for every vacant job. There simply aren’t enough humans to go around.
As a lifelong “techy” who has spent more than 20 years developing and integrating technology to solve business problems, this massive imbalance begs an obvious question: could robots help to redress the state’s massive labour shortage? The short answer? Yes, definitely.
In Singapore alone, a market I know well through my role at one of the digital tech services firms, robot density is growing on average by 27 per cent year-on-year. Globally, the adoption of robotics and automation has accelerated over the past two years across a huge variety of roles including delivery, surveillance, monitoring, customer service, disinfecting, and logistics across manufacturing, banks, hospitals, restaurants and more.
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https://ferntreegully.mailcommunity.com.au/news/2023-01-03/tips-to-avoid-health-hazards-this-summer/
Tips to avoid health hazards this summer
03/01/2023
Summer is a time for outdoor activities, BBQs, and soaking up the sunshine, however, it can also be a time of hazards and risks.
The Australian Digital Health Agency is encouraging people to be aware of the potential health hazards that can come with the warmer weather. Below are some things to watch out for and tips on how to stay safe and healthy this summer:
Heat stroke:
When the body is unable to regulate its temperature, it can lead to heat stroke. Symptoms include dizziness, headache, rapid heartbeat, and loss of consciousness. To prevent heat stroke, stay hydrated, avoid excessive alcohol consumption, and take frequent breaks in a cool place. Heat stroke is a medical emergency. The information in your My Health Record can help inform and support medical care in emergencies and your regular GP can be updated online for follow up treatment.
Sunburn:
Prolonged exposure to the sun can cause sunburn, which can increase the risk of skin cancer. To protect yourself from sunburn, apply sunscreen with at least SPF 30, wear protective clothing, and avoid the sun during the peak hours of 10 am to 4 pm. If you do get sever sunburn, your doctor can prescribe a corticosteroid cream and upload a summary of the event to your My Health Record so skin damage can be monitored and inform further skin cancer screenings.
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Andrew Tate is not the only misogynist courting Australian teenagers
Tess Bennett Technology reporter
Jan 3, 2023 – 4.07pm
Before his high-profile arrest in Romania last week, Andrew Tate built a toxic “manosphere” that courted teen boys, highlighting the need for parents to involve themselves in their children’s online habits, says Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner.
“The platforms that amplify his voice and the voices of his followers certainly are playing a huge role in terms of further promoting this toxic masculinity which really belongs back in the dark ages,” Ms Inman Grant told The Australian Financial Review.
Researchers have dubbed Mr Tate’s online following a “manosphere”, an online community of influencers who advocate for misogynistic views and violence against women, while creating content that poses as a guide to success and riches.
The former kick boxer rose to prominence in 2016 when he was removed from the British version of Big Brother over a video that appeared to show him attacking a woman.
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https://www.afr.com/technology/chatgpt-is-brilliant-and-weird-20221215-p5c6qw
ChatGPT is brilliant and weird
The latest chatbot update can write jokes, computer code and uni-level essays, as well as guess medical diagnoses, create text-based games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty.
Kevin Roose
Jan 3, 2023 – 5.00am
Like most nerds who read science fiction, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how society will greet true artificial intelligence, if and when it arrives. Will we panic? Start sucking up to our new robot overlords? Ignore it and go about our daily lives?
So, it has been fascinating to watch the Twittersphere try to make sense of ChatGPT, a new cutting-edge AI chatbot that was opened for testing in December.
ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best AI chatbot ever released to the general public. It was built by OpenAI, the San Francisco AI company that is also responsible for tools such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, the breakthrough image generator that came out this year.
Like those tools, ChatGPT – which stands for “generative pretrained transformer” – landed with a splash. In five days, more than 1 million people signed up to test it, according to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president. Hundreds of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations went viral on Twitter, and many of its early fans speak of it in astonished, grandiose terms, as if it were some mix of software and sorcery.
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OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba pushes for ‘data deglobalisation’ in wake of hack attacks
By Damon Kitney
12:00AM January 2, 2023
The man who became one of Europe’s youngest tech billionaires and a leading provider of cloud computing services says Australia must be more prepared to protect its data sovereignty, as the trend of deglobalisation triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic moves out of the physical world and heads online.
In the wake of the Optus and Medicare hacks in recent months, Octave Klaba — the founder and chairman of French cloud computing unicorn OVHcloud — warned that cloud internet services would increasingly become more localised as developed nations looked to protect their citizens’ data from criminals.
He believes Australian companies, not American giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, will increasingly decide where their “cloud” is located.
“I was born in Poland. It was actually part of Russia. So I lived with this paranoid way of thinking about the future and this is probably why I built OVH in the way that I built it. The world of tomorrow will not be global. Specifically with Covid-19, having factories just in China and the customers everywhere in the world doesn’t work,” he said in an interview with The Australian.
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Word perfect, but AI leaves humanity out in the cold
12:00AM January 2, 2023
My days as a columnist may be numbered. The thought that newspaper writers could be replaced by computers is less ridiculous than we might have thought now artificial intelligence is entering our lives.
ChatGPT, a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot, has been publicly available for a month. It gathers vast slabs of text and data sets to answer questions fluently, grammatically and with disarming dispassion. Already, enterprising students are harnessing its power to save themselves the bother of composing essays.
Having watched computerisation eliminate so many human stages of newspaper production since I began as a journalist in the early 1980s, I’m forced to ask an uncomfortable question. Does AI mean writers like me will be the next ones to go? The idea of a newspaper written by computers is not quite as funny as it was in the 1960s when Michael Frayn wrote his satire, The Tin Men. The novel was set in an institute for automation where computers generate random combinations of common words from tabloid headlines, such as “STRIKE THREAT PLEA” or “HATE BAN BID PROBE”, then compose a story to fit.
Elsewhere in the building, boffins are working on a computer program to automate professional sport. “Paying 22 men to do nothing but make a random choice between win, lose and draw is economic madness,” one computer scientist boasts. “I take it that the main object of organised sports and games is to produce a profusion of statistics? No one has ever suggested any other reason, have they?”
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https://www.afr.com/technology/four-tech-trends-that-will-invade-our-lives-in-2023-20221230-p5c9ev
Four tech trends that will invade our lives in 2023
We can expect lots of interesting advancements in AI-powered, language processing tech, along with advances in electric cars and the metaverse. Perhaps there may even be a rebirth of social media.
Brian X. Chen
Dec 31, 2022 – 6.00am
Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in technology to predict the tech that may affect your life in a big way – and the tech that will most likely be a fad.
Before we get into that, though, let’s take a quick look back at 2022.
Hardware was very “meh”. This year’s iPhone, with mostly unnoticeable improvements, was an even more incremental upgrade than last year’s model.
Separately, Meta released a $US1500 virtual reality headset that Mark Zuckerberg envisioned would change the way people worked – although with two hours of battery life, most people will probably use it only to play games.
Social media became very weird. Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter for $US44 billion, gutted the staff and suspended the accounts of some journalists and techies, which sent droves of Twitter users to seek alternative sites.
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David.
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