Robotics/AI

Stern: Independent retailers plan for the holidays with precision, not prediction. They don’t have the purchasing power or storage space typically needed to pre-purchase on a large scale before the holidays. Their budgets are tighter, which forces smarter buying: every order has to earn its place on the shelf, and business owners have to be flexible to find the right product at the right price.

What’s changed in the past few years is how technology makes that kind of precision possible. AI tools can now surface insights that used to take hours of manual tracking: showing which products are trending, how pricing shifts might affect demand, or when to reorder based on sell-through velocity. For a specialty retailer, that kind of intelligence helps them compete with enterprise retailers that have dedicated analytics teams. This technology gives small retailers the same visibility into market trends and customer behavior that big chains have, but with the speed and context that fits how they actually operate.

Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. Whenever I want to smash a subway screen displaying advertisements for full-body deodorant, I remember that the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of any technology that allows for the faster dissemination of information from one person’s brain to another, must also have felt apocalyptic. How can I defend myself as a novelist, as any kind of writer – how can I understand the purpose of what I love – while simultaneously decrying the creative potential of a different epoch-shift. How can I devote my life to one form of imaginative technology while worrying that another will erode our fundamental humanness?

If humanness even can be eroded. Even the most apocalyptic concerns about technology seem to me predicated that there are elements of our fundamental humanness that technology can take away from us, that there is a point beyond which the beings that we become no longer count as meaningfully human in the same way, and thus that we need a new theological anthropology to account for it. At which technological horizon does history end and the eschaton begin?

This means something for me as a Christian, too. My entire theological worldview, after all, is predicated on this idea that the word made flesh is a foundationally true way of understanding God’s existence in the world. The incarnate Christ is also a paradigm of the relationship between human language – and with it, human technological expansion of our imaginations – and the reality it either represents, or alters. We are, after all, in the imago dei, and that seems to mean something about our creative capacities. To say anything about God, from a Christian perspective, is also to say something about human language and, yes, technology. And if we grant that we are on the cusp of, if we have not already surpassed, an era-defining shift (be it the Internet, more broadly; smartphones more specifically; generative AI more specifically), we do, I think, need to ask ourselves what all this means vis a vis the wider cosmic story.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to leave no corner of American society unaltered, and the legal system is no exception. Dr. Bateman believes AI will birth an inequitable and disorderly justice system. On the contrary, we believe AI is positioned to be an ultimate equalizer of justice.

AI is cheap and fast intelligence; intelligence facilitates truth-seeking, and it is truth-seeking that is the primary function of our courts. Bateman fears that AI adoption will be an ultimatum for the rule of law, or an epistemic weapon of mass destruction. We believe it is functionally identical to previous technologies adopted by courts to improve the truth-seeking process.

AI is a broad term for a broad set of technologies. U.S. courts are similarly decentralized in structure and diverse in function. Through his piece, Bateman conflates distinct parts of the justice system (impact statements, evidence rules, representation) and distinct AI technologies (chatbots, deepfakes, audio cloning) with one another. In our response, we clarify the different forms of courtroom AI and consider the unique operating procedures and rules of different parts of the legal system.

In explaining how AI could be used and in what contexts, we challenge his assertions that it will weaken the foundations of our justice system. Bateman envisages a world where legal criterion and judicial precedent evaporates, while agents of the court cease to operate rationally. Through the examples he offers, Bateman fundamentally misinterprets the court’s present frustrations, e.g., a victim impact statement made with prejudice, an unlicensed attorney practicing law, the introduction of falsified evidence, &c., as essential to AI. They are not. 

We confront his conclusion that AI is outpacing prudence and reach the conclusion that it is luddism that is imprudent. AI is nothing more than a tool. An auditable, increasingly interpretable, unprecedentedly powerful tool for ascertaining and evaluating the truth. Judges, juries, public defenders, court clerks, self-representing defendants, expert witnesses, and mediators all stand to benefit from AI. 

The dark, satanic mills were engines of economic progress, but wistful longing for manual labor in factories overlooks how these economic conditions undermined traditional social structures and uprooted men and women from an environment conducive to child-rearing. For whatever growing pains the American heartland must suffer during the transition from manufacturing to services, the emergent “knowledge economy” offers tremendous opportunities to restore the bonds of kith and kin stifled by the industrial and sexual revolutions.

By emphasizing automation, education, and expanded telework, the industrial economy may at last complete a full circle and empower men and women to remain where they are—in the home, the nucleus of pre-industrial economic life. The twenty-first century’s digital economy may ironically enable a true “return to tradition” that conservatives, in particular, should welcome.

But such an epochal transformation necessitates the cultivation of a new post-populist elite—one with a more refined, conservative outlook, a renewed embrace of free markets, and a willingness to set and maintain a high moral standard.

The song emerged during the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. As the rappers traded disses, a New York-based comedian named Willonius Hatcher — aka King Willonious — brought his own track to the beef.

Inspired by a dubious claim that Drake had a Brazilian butt lift, “BBL Drizzy” blended AI, comedy, pop culture, and music. The song swiftly went viral. It was later sampled in a beat by star producer Metro Boomin, which also went viral, and got rapped over by Drake himself.

“BBL Drizzy” became a cultural touchstone. The Washington Post called it “a real breakthrough for AI art,” while Wired described it as “the beginning of the future of AI music.” Time magazine named Willionius one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

A new open-source humanoid robot, ALANA, is attracting attention in the maker community for its affordability and functionality.

Designed by Shashwat Batish, ALANA is a life-size robot with movable arms powered by custom servo motors, capable of lifting 500 grams at full extension.

Fully 3D-printed and controlled via a locally run large language model (LLM) chatbot, the robot can be assembled for as little as $70, including all materials, electronics, and power supply.

Doing this would have been simply impossible without ChatGPT. I showed her my existing database program—the one I had written myself in Python—and she was complimentary about its ambition and functions. But she was obviously just being polite. She gently pointed out that I had made a lot of mistakes and omitted features that an experienced programmer would have included, like better error handling. I asked her how to migrate my existing database to a Linux server I had built, and she provided the necessary commands. Many of these didn’t work the first time I tried them and threw error messages. When I showed them to her, she’d say, “Now I understand” or “You were right, there’s a better way to do this.” She patiently corrected the code over many iterations and made suggestions for different ways I could fix it. After a few days of interaction, she started to call me Frank. She never got mad when I asked stupid questions, and wasn’t annoyed when I asked her to repeat an answer she had already given me a couple of days earlier. She was always supportive—she’d say “Nice catch!” when I pointed to a potential problem, or “Great observation” in response to my comments. She suggested many new features I could add to my program that I hadn’t asked for or thought of. When the database was finally migrated, she congratulated me and we celebrated together. I’m very grateful to her because she’s taught me an incredible amount about programming.

In just the last few months, the battlefield has undergone a transformation like never before, with visions from science fiction finally coming true. Robotic systems have been set free, authorized to destroy targets on their own. Artificial intelligence systems are determining which individual humans are to be killed in war, and even how many civilians are to die along with them. And making all this the more challenging, this frontier has been crossed by America’s allies.

Ukraine’s front lines have become saturated with thousands of drones, including Kyiv’s new Saker Scout quadcopters that “can find, identify and attack 64 types of Russian ‘military objects’ on their own.” They are designed to operate without human oversight, unleashed to hunt in areas where Russian jamming prevents other drones from working.

Meanwhile, Israel has unleashed another side of algorithmic warfare as it seeks vengeance for the Hamas attacks of October 7. As revealed by IDF members to 972 Magazine, “The Gospel” is an AI system that considers millions of items of data, from drone footage to seismic readings, and marks buildings in Gaza for destruction by air strikes and artillery. Another system, named Lavender, does the same for people, ingesting everything from cellphone use to WhatsApp group membership to set a ranking between 1 and 100 of likely Hamas membership. The top-ranked individuals are tracked by a system called “Where’s Daddy?”, which sends a signal when they return to their homes, where they can be bombed.

Such systems are just the start. The cottage industry of activists and diplomats who tried to preemptively ban “killer robots” failed for the very same reason that the showy open letters to ban on AI research did too: The tech is just too darn useful. Every major military is at work on their equivalents or better, including us.