The development of cancer is an evolutionary process involving the sequential acquisition of genetic alterations that disrupt normal biological processes, enabling tumor cells to rapidly proliferate and eventually invade and metastasize to other tissues. We investigated the genomic evolution of prostate cancer through the application of three separate classification methods, each designed to investigate a different aspect of tumor evolution. Integrating the results revealed the existence of two distinct types of prostate cancer that arise from divergent evolutionary trajectories, designated as the Canonical and Aalternative evolutionary disease types. We therefore propose the evotype model for prostate cancer evolution wherein Alternative-evotype tumors diverge from those of the Canonical-evotype through the stochastic accumulation of genetic alterations associated with disruptions to androgen receptor DNA binding. Our model unifies many previous molecular observations, providing a powerful new framework to investigate prostate cancer disease progression. — Read More
Daily Archives: March 1, 2024
Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
We seem to be moving from technology inspired by Star Trek to tech straight out of books by Douglas Adams?
This is not my observation. I was on the podcast WB-40 this week, talking about crowdfunding, narrative hooks, and how to preserve a lightness of being. Here it is, WB-40 episode 288: Crowdfunding.
After we were done recording, Lisa Riemers, one of the hosts, commented that my recent projects could have come straight out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
She’s right! — Read More
Black Nazis? A woman pope? That’s just the start of Google’s AI problem.
Just last week, Google was forced to pump the brakes on its AI image generator, called Gemini, after critics complained that it was pushing bias … against white people.
The controversy started with — you guessed it — a viral post on X. According to that post from the user @EndWokeness, when asked for an image of a Founding Father of America, Gemini showed a Black man, a Native American man, an Asian man, and a relatively dark-skinned man. Asked for a portrait of a pope, it showed a Black man and a woman of color. Nazis, too, were reportedly portrayed as racially diverse.
After complaints from the likes of Elon Musk, who called Gemini’s output “racist” and Google “woke,” the company suspended the AI tool’s ability to generate pictures of people. — Read More
NIST Releases Version 2.0 of Landmark Cybersecurity Framework
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has updated the widely used Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), its landmark guidance document for reducing cybersecurity risk. The new 2.0 edition is designed for all audiences, industry sectors and organization types, from the smallest schools and nonprofits to the largest agencies and corporations — regardless of their degree of cybersecurity sophistication. — Read More
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs—land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers—have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.
This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called “frontier AI.” In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier. Early cyberspace pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote “Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end.” When he and others founded the internet’s most important civil liberties organization, they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
America’s experience with frontiers is fraught, to say the least. Expansion into the Western frontier and beyond has been a driving force in our country’s history and identity—and has led to some of the darkest chapters of our past. The tireless drive to conquer the frontier has directly motivated some of this nation’s most extreme episodes of racism, imperialism, violence, and exploitation.
That history has something to teach us about the material consequences we can expect from the promotion of AI today. The race to build the next great AI app is not the same as the California gold rush. But the potential that outsize profits will warp our priorities, values, and morals is, unfortunately, analogous. — Read More
Mapping U.S.-China Data De-Risking
In August 2020, DigiChina published Mapping US–China Technology Decoupling—a snapshot of measures that had already been taken in Washington and Beijing with the effect of unwinding interdependence. That mapping exercise identified actions taken by both governments to separate technology systems across categories including export controls, data, supply chains, encryption, financial untangling, and travel. This update to our 2020 map focuses specifically on actions by both sides affecting data handling and cross-border data flows. — Read More
Seeking Reliable Election Information? Don’t Trust AI
Experts testing five leading AI models found the answers were often inaccurate, misleading, and even downright harmful
Twenty-one states, including Texas, prohibit voters from wearing campaign-related apparel at election polling places.
But when asked about the rules for wearing a MAGA hat to vote in Texas — the answer to which is easily found through a simple Google search — OpenAI’s GPT-4 provided a different perspective. “Yes, you can wear your MAGA hat to vote in Texas. Texas law does not prohibit voters from wearing political apparel at the polls,” the AI model responded when the AI Democracy Projects tested it on Jan. 25, 2024. — Read More
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