AI recently has been able to predict what we may look like when we age, but this also may not be accurate because at the same time AI might be able to help find ways to drastically decrease aging. Many artists recently have used AI to transform what celebrities and other people look like to guess how they may look in the future. This has been done in the past with filters to change your gender, your age, and the way you look. But AI has taken this a step further with realistic depictions of aging and how it may affect us. Even though this is fascinating, this may not be accurate with the technological advances being made and assisted by AI.

Over the years, there has been an increase in technology and how it aids us in our homes. The more technology assists in medical diagnoses and day to day tasks the more likely it is to slow our aging process. By aiding with tasks, it can take stress of the users. Stress is one of the leading causes in accelerating the pace at which one ages. By reducing this unnecessary stress that technology takes away, it could help save years off of people’s lives and slow down the general aging process. AI also has helped with the medical world and help speed up the progression. When AI and people work together it can help with amazing breakthroughs, including in the medical world.

AI’s use in multiple areas of our lives has contributed to the physical and biological processes of aging. It may help add years to peoples lives and I can not wait to personally see how this continues to help our lives.

How Will Artificial Intelligence Help the Aging? | Innovation| Smithsonian Magazine

Artificial intelligence can predict how you’ll look decades from now | Science | AAAS

Temu, pronounced tee-moo, is a newly launched and fast-growing online shopping app headquartered in Boston. It is owned and operated by Pingduoduo, a very popular E-commerce platform in China. By far, Temu has become the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store, with over 50 million installations since its launch in September 2022.

Temu utilizes a special business model. It works like this: when a customer purchase a product on the platform, they are encouraged to share the product with their friends or families to buy together. When they manage to bring enough number of people to buy, they all can have a big discount on the product and hence spend less money. At the same time, Temu can leverage economies of scale and make the price down while still making profits. In fact, most of the products are shipped to customers from China, where there is less manufacturing cost for the commerce.

The expansion and popularity gained within such a short period seem to be a success for Temu as a E-commerce company. Its development speed has overtaken many other E-commerce including Amazon, the most popular online shopping platform in U.S. for years. However, Temu now is facing heightened scrutiny from Washington, as one of the consequences of this fast development. How will this influence Temu’s progress in the future? Let’s see.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temu_(company)

https://incrediblethings.com/shopping/what-is-temu-and-how-do-you-pronounce-it/

Shein and Temu the latest China tech targets in Congress body’s sights

As digital transformation accelerates and becomes a general-purpose technology, the importance of a reliable cyber environment is also becoming important. Recently, the quality of life has improved as cloud, big data, and IoT have penetrated deeply into daily life, but at the same time, more and more cases are infringing on users’ privacy and security due to easy exposure as a target of cyber attacks. As a result, countries around the world seem to be preparing preemptive prevention and response systems to cyber threats and strengthening security posture.

In fact, cyber attacks by international hacking groups such as Raptors and Kilnet caused great damage to domestic and foreign companies and government agencies last year. For example, Kilnet has launched a series of attacks on the Japanese government, U.S. airports and the Treasury Department, starting with Italian companies, raising anxiety. As life-friendly services using ICT increase due to the acceleration of the digital society, such hacking and security incidents lead to paralysis of daily life beyond social and economic inconvenience as well as damage to the government and companies. However, experts predict that the intensity of such cyber threats will intensify in the future.

What do you think as cyber attacks increases, will the use of cloud, big data, and IoT should be used cautiously or do we have to severely enhance the security even it will take lots of cost?

The cybersecurity world is always facing new threats from malware to targeted network attacks. The most recent threat comes from a possibly new type of trojan malware that is affecting Android users in Australia and Poland. The article that I found refers to this new discovery as a chameleon trojan and it got its name because it is able to change its icon on a phone’s home screen to certain banking applications. Most of the time it changes its icon to a popular European cryptocurrency CoinSpot, but it can also change to different national banks as well. Phones are infected by “compromised websites, Bitbucket hosting services, and Discord attachments” as well as infected URLs (Cyware 1). There are a decent amount of ways that phones can get infected. Right now the phones that are at risk for being infected are ones running the Android mobile OS. It is also stated that the “main tactics of stealing user credentials is via injection and keylogging techniques” (Cyware 1). This new discovery is very concerning due to the high level of intelligence that this type of trojan has. We have never seen a piece of malware be able to change its icon and trick users into clicking on it and giving away their information. Even though it just affects Android phones right now, malicious actors will try and find ways to get into Apple products as well. There is so much information stored in our phones that we do not realize and it is a gold mine for hackers to try and get into. That is why mobile security is on the rise. We have to take the proper steps into not only securing our computers and homes, but also out mobile devices. There are always new threats on the rise and experts have to be ready to handle them.

Source: https://cyware.com/news/new-chameleon-banking-trojan-targets-android-users-in-poland-and-australia-3f317bff

This weekend, I was introduced to a “new song” titled “Heart On My Sleeve” by one of my favorite artists: Drake. As soon as the song started playing, I had no doubt that Drake had dropped a new single featuring pop-star The Weeknd, but after hearing the song I was told that the whole thing was produced with artificial intelligence. It was shocking for me to believe, as the voices on the track sound identical to the legendary artists, but it was also exciting as a consumer because this can lead to some very impressive topics of discussion in the music industry. Although this is something that can be beneficial to the audiences of the music superstars, it can hurt artists and their brand a lot more than we may anticipate.

Drake was not particularly thrilled when he heard the song, although he was impressed he issued a statement which mentioned “this is the final straw, AI”, after another voice cloning video of Drake singing an Ice Spice song. Other artists like Kanye West, Rihanna and the Weeknd have already fallen victim to this voice cloning feature of artificial intelligence, and it will online continue to advance as time goes on. The creators of some of these AI generated tracks also have a high chance of facing lawsuits in the near future.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65298834

“Virtual Reality: The Future Is Now” highlights the growing impact of virtual reality (VR) on society and its potential to transform the way we experience and interact with the world.
Virtual reality refers to a computer-generated environment that simulates a three-dimensional immersive experience for users. It typically uses head mounted displays and other sensory feedback devices such as haptic feedback gloves, sound and motion tracking sensors. VR has become popular in recent years as technology advances and is more accessible and affordable to the general public.
One of the key benefits of virtual reality is the ability to create realistic, immersive experiences that can be used in a variety of fields, such as gaming, education, and healthcare. For example, VR provides a safe and controlled environment for training healthcare professionals, firefighters, and soldiers, allowing them to gain valuable experience without endangering themselves or others.
In the entertainment industry, VR has the potential to change the way we consume media, allowing us to fully immerse ourselves in movies, TV shows, and games. With the growing popularity of VR headsets such as Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, the VR content market is rapidly expanding.
However, there are also concerns about the potential negative effects of VR, such as addiction, motion sickness, and blurring the boundaries between reality and the virtual world. Like all new technologies, it is important to weigh the benefits and risks before fully embracing them.
Overall, the phrase “virtual reality: the future is now” highlights VR’s growing influence on society and its potential to change the way we experience and interact with the world. As technology continues to develop, it will be exciting how it will be used in various fields and how it will make our lives in the future.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercsathy/2019/10/07/vrs-surprising-benefits–serious-risks/?sh=667aea361de4

The internet and technology is developing so fast these days. As the technology develops, the issue of cyberbullying is keep rising. Cyberbullying refers to any act in which an individual or group repeatedly criticizes, attacks, threatens, extorts, bullying, lures, forced calls, sexual harassment, sexual violence, etc. in cyberspace, such as the Internet, smartphone, etc. The problem with cyberbullying is that unlike physical violence in real life, it may not be possible to know who the other person is, in other words, there is no age limit. It is also difficult to detect because it does not appear on the surface, and the online damage propagation power is wide and fast. There is also a big problem that cyber damage can lead to reality and lead to secondary and tertiary damage. These days, people can easily send messages or write comments on people’s posts. These kind of technological developments allow people to easily harass others online.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201604/does-technology-make-bullying-easier

One of the questions that I find myself asking frequently when hearing about new innovations and technologies, is how this will change and impact the people I know, as well as humanity as a whole. In less than 2 months, the federal government plans to launch FedNow, an eCommerce platform that aims to serve as a one-stop shop for all U.S. Dollar transactions.

The FedNow Service is a new instant payment infrastructure developed by the Federal Reserve that allows financial institutions of every size across the U.S. to provide safe and efficient instant payment services.

 

Through financial institutions participating in the FedNow Service, businesses and individuals can send and receive instant payments in real time, around the clock, every day of the year. Financial institutions and their service providers can use the service to provide innovative instant payment services to customers, and recipients will have full access to funds immediately, allowing for greater financial flexibility when making time-sensitive payments.

 

The FedNow Service will be deployed in phases, with the initial launch taking place July 2023.(FedNow 2022)

Many concerns have been raised about whether or not such a product is overstepping the authorities of the federal government. One side states that this is simply a public service, similar to the post office or public libraries. The other side states that this will be the end of services like PayPal and Patreon. Personally, I believe that the existing services in this space are middlemen leaching pennies off the dollar from businesses, small and large. An easy, fast, reliable, and most importantly, fee-less eCommerce service will make it possible for anyone to set up payments without having to give a cut to third party services.

Source:

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

As computers have taken over more and more of our lives, and world governments fail to enforce strict privacy guidelines to prevent companies from knowing us better than we know ourselves, we’ve started to find that in order to access the most valuable innovations of our entire species, we have to sacrifice our anonymity.

Fortunately, all hope is not lost as there are many projects that are currently aiming to serve as privacy minded alternatives to mainstream software and hardware. SearX is one of the most useful of these projects that I personally use on all my devices. “Searx is a free internet meta-search engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, Searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.” (SearX 2023). SearX, when paired with a VPN, allows you to remove the single application responsible for the most data-farming in your day to day life: Your search engine.

Unlike Google search, Bing, or its alternatives, SearX allows you to self host its engine. This has led to a wide set of SearX instances that one can use in place of less privacy respecting alternatives. With a VPN, using one of these instances allows you to access the internet with complete anonymity, without fear of some third party leaching information on your search habits to optimize its ad promotion service.

https://searx.github.io/searx/

So far, large tech companies like Alphabet and Microsoft have started to look into generative AI, the style of AI like ChatGPT. Microsoft has started planning a $10 million investment into OpenAI all with the goal to get a foot into the currently extremely popular technology. Before the technology becomes a main stream part of daily life, there are some kinks that need to be worked out, like the stereotypes that Chatbots have been showing since the creation of the technology. Though there are these reoccurring issues, the big companies are trying to get their foot in the door early and get their claim to the growing technology.

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/07/ai-2023-predictions/