Emerging Technologies – DigitalKoans

2023 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition

This report profiles key trends and emerging technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning, and envisions a number of scenarios and implications for that future. . . .

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm, with new AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT opening up new opportunities in higher education for content creation, communication, and learning, while also raising new concerns about the misuses and overreach of technology. Our shared humanity has also become a key focal point within higher education, as faculty and leaders continue to wrestle with understanding and meeting the diverse needs of students and to find ways of cultivating institutional communities that support student well-being and belonging.

https://bit.ly/3panaJd

"A World in Which Your Boss Spies on Your Brainwaves? That Future Is Near"

Farahany paints a picture of a near future in which every office worker could be fitted with a small wearable that would constantly record brain activity, creating an omnipotent record of your thoughts, attention and energy that the boss could study at leisure. No longer would it be enough to look like you’re working hard: your own brainwaves could reveal that you were slacking off. . . . A Coworker.org database of bossware found that more than 550 products are already in use in workplaces. Everywhere you look, workers are being tracked, watched, measured, scored, analyzed and penalized by software, human overseers and artificial intelligence, with the aim of wringing every last cent’s worth of productivity out of the flawed and fragile flesh-and-blood units of labor who must, regrettably, be used as employees until the robots get a little bit more manual dexterity.

bit.ly/3RO7ZQi

"An ALS Patient Set a Record for Communicating via a Brain Implant: 62 Words per Minute"

Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes progressive paralysis. . . .Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like "I don’t own my home" and "It’s just tough" at a rate approaching normal speech. . . .Philip Sabes, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the project, called the results a "big breakthrough" and said that experimental brain-reading technology could be ready to leave the lab and become a useful product soon.

bit.ly/3R8UjPo

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"‘The Metaverse Will Be Our Slow Death!’ Is Facebook Losing Its $100BN Gamble on Virtual Reality?"

Meanwhile, Meta has invested a staggering $100bn on metaverse research and development to date, $15bn in the past year alone—with apparently little to show for it. . . . In April, Sony and Lego invested $2bn in Epic’s metaverse vision. In January, Microsoft moved to acquire another games giant, Activision Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty and Candy Crush, for nearly $70bn. . . The metaverse was valued at nearly $23bn last year and is expected to grow nearly 40% a year for the rest of the decade. As the Epic co-founder and CEO Tim Sweeney put it last year: "The next three years are going to be critical for all of the metaverse-aspiring companies. . . . Whoever brings on a billion users first would be the presumed leader in setting the standards."

https://bit.ly/3UyZhFi

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"When AI Can Make Art—What Does It Mean for Creativity?"

While internet users have embraced this supercharged creative potential—armed with the correctly refined prompt, even novices can now create arresting digital canvases—some artists have balked at the new technology’s capacity for mimicry. Among the prompts entered into image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, many tag an artist’s name in order to ensure a more aesthetically pleasing style for the resulting image. Something as mundane as a bowl of oranges can become eye-catching if rendered in the style of, say, Picasso. Because the AI has been trained on billions of images, some of which are copyrighted works by living artists, it can generally create a pretty faithful approximation.

https://cutt.ly/iMv27Pn

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Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI Sued: "The Lawsuit That Could Rewrite the Rules of AI Copyright"

Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on "software piracy on an unprecedented scale". . . .Copilot, which was unveiled by Microsoft-owned GitHub in June 2021, is trained on public repositories of code scraped from the web, many of which are published with licenses that require anyone reusing the code to credit its creators. Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit—prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale.

https://cutt.ly/FMwC4mR

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"The Digital First Sale Doctrine in a Blockchain World: NFTs and the Temporary Reproduction Exception"

At time of writing, this is the first piece of legal scholarship on NFTs that examines their interaction with the first sale doctrine. This Note examines the rise of the NFT phenomenon and the historical articulation of the first sale doctrine in the digital era. As NFTs present challenges for the copyright owner’s reproduction right, this Note recommends legislative intervention to clarify the doctrine’s applicability within the digital marketplace. This Note proposes an addition to the Copyright Act of 1976 that expressly allows for a first sale to be effective upon a digital transfer, albeit under certain conditions. Amending the act in this manner promotes the Copyright Act’s purpose of balancing the interests of copyright owners and consumers in a dynamic digital marketplace, and serves as a guide that will be necessary to avoid legal ambiguities and increased litigation.

https://cutt.ly/DN3TV8v

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"Frankfurt Spotlight: The Metaverse Meets Publishing"

To give an idea of what’s possible today, take the example of Aschehoug Publishing Company from Oslo, Norway. Together, Aschehoug and Ludenso are bringing textbooks to life by adding live 3-D models to print textbooks, allowing students to explore a topic in AR through their mobile devices. This allows students to explore countless abstract concepts in a more tangible way, such as showing the magnetic field around the earth, or conducting virtual physics lab projects.

https://cutt.ly/6BFGlQ9

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Or the Opposite: "Meta Quest Pro Hands-On: The $1,500 Headset That ‘Will Enable the Metaverse’"

After using the Quest Pro, I feel like this is the headset Meta really needs to provide a high-quality VR experience for building out apps and environments. Now I still don’t know if this is enough to convince people to work and live in VR, but when it comes to enabling the Metaverse, the Quest Pro seems like the big building block for making that happen

https://cutt.ly/pBbeddp

See also: Paywall: "Inside Zuckerberg’s $1,500 Headset, the Metaverse Is Still Out of Reach," https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/11/meta-quest-pro-metaverse/.

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