Good morning! Here are today's most important stories in emerging technology. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day.
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We need mass surveillance to fight covid-19—but it doesn’t have to be creepy
Genevieve Bell is director of the Autonomy, Agency, and Assurance Institute at the Australian National University and a senior fellow at Intel.
I stop the car when I see him walking slowly down the empty footpath outside our now shuttered building—I know he lives on campus and is far from home. I sent my students away more than a week ago; I think of them as diasporic now, not necessarily remote, but it is still a shock to see him. We talk about his studies, and his fiancée in San Francisco, and how strange this moment in which we find ourselves is—we are at the edges of what language can describe. After one last check-in and the promise to call me if I can help, he says in an awkward voice, “You know I will have to report this.”
The Australian National University (ANU), at which I work, is moving quickly in response to covid-19. Our classes have gone online, and we have sent our staff home; we are all navigating a new world of digital intermediation and distance. For the students who remain in the residence halls, locked in a country that has closed its borders and to which airlines no longer fly, it is an ever-changing situation. Keeping them safe is a big priority; there is social distancing, and increased cleaning and temporal staggering of access to services. There are rules and prescriptions and the looming reality of daily temperature checks. And apparently there is a contact log in which I will now feature, and which could be turned over to the local health services at a later point.
The rigorous use of contact tracing, across digital and physical realms, has been credited with helping limit the spread of covid-19 in a number of places, notably Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as Kerala, India. As a methodology, it has a long history of use against diseases from SARS and AIDS to typhoid and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. In its current instantiations—such as the mobile-phone app that South Koreans exposed to the virus must download so they can be monitored during self-quarantine—it has raised new concerns about surveillance and privacy, and about the trade-offs between health, community well-being, and individual rights. Even here at the ANU, we are trying to find a way to balance it all.
Perhaps we are negotiating new social contracts, with our neighbors, our communities, and our governments, that extend to the role technology plays in responding to a health crisis. And as we negotiate these new contracts, questions inevitably arise about our relationships to the data that exists about us, the sheer abundance of information that we generate, and how it could be used to help us or hurt us. Read the full story. This story is part of the latest issue of MIT Technology Review, dedicated entirely to covid-19 and how the pandemic is reshaping our world. Read the full magazine and subscribe to receive future ones.
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These songs were written entirely by OpenAI’s deep learning algorithms
The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of.
How it works: Give it a genre, an artist and lyrics and Jukebox will produce a passable pastiche of well known performers, such as Katy Perry, Elvis Presley or Nas. You can also give it the first few seconds of a song and it will autocomplete the rest.
Old songs, new tricks: Computer-generated music has been a thing for decades and AIs already have impressive examples of orchestral classical and ambient electronic compositions in their back catalog. But it is much easier for a machine to generate something that sounds a bit like Bach than the Beatles. That’s because the mathematical underpinnings of much classical music lends itself to the symbolic representation of music that AI composers often use. Despite being simpler, pop songs are different. That said, it’s not there yet. Listen for yourself.
Want to learn more about accessible AI and the impact of deep learning? Come and listen to the experts at our virtual conference EmTech Next on June 8-10.
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We can still have nice things
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The top ten must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Are you immune after you’ve had coronavirus? We need to know
Finding out will involve running antibody surveys on hundreds of thousands of people. ( The Economist $)
+ What if immunity doesn’t last? ( TR)
+ LA is offering free coronavirus tests to all. ( Gizmodo)
+ Dogs could be trained to sniff out coronavirus. ( CNET)
2 How AI pointed to a possible coronavirus treatment
BenevolentAI helped identify the arthritis drug baricitinib, which is now part of a clinical trial. ( NYT $)
+ The US Patent Office has ruled that artificial intelligence cannot be classified as an inventor. ( The Verge)
3 Drones are delivering medicine in Ireland 💊
This might just be the best use case for this technology right now. ( BBC)
4 Coronavirus has revealed just how broken America’s healthcare system is
If this crisis doesn’t wake people up, nothing will. ( FT $)
+ How a nurse in New York is coping day-to-day. ( New Yorker $)
5 How will we pick the best coronavirus vaccine? 💉
This is going to require international cooperation on an unprecedented scale. ( Nature)
+ This is who should get them first, according to Bill Gates. ( CNBC)
+ And the process may take a lot longer than 18 months. ( Slate)
6 NASA has picked three companies to develop moon landers
Unusually, one of them isn’t Boeing. ( WSJ $)
7 People are hiring Zoom babysitters 👪
Sometimes you just need a bit of peace and quiet. ( WP $)
+ Zoom has rowed back on its claim it has 300 million users. ( Reuters)
8 Clearview wants to use its facial recognition software for contact tracing
No thanks. ( NBC)
9 The office cubicle is making a comeback
Oh, no. ( Wired $)
10 It seems we aren’t gaining loads of weight during lockdown
Celebrate with a cookie! Oh wait, no. ( WP $)
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“When you’re locked in your house, you use VR more and then when the Fed prints $3 trillion, more people move to Bitcoin.”
—Venture capitalist Adam Draper tells the Washington Post he’s bullish about the prospects for his portfolio companies.
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