The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught “Change is the only constant in Life.” It is not rhetorical to state that we are living in a time of seismic change. Jordan Furlong frames the challenges and opportunities as It’s not about who’s right, Boomers or Millennials. It’s about the most profound change to the fabric of the legal profession in 40 years, and how we’re going to get through it.
Human factors engineer James Intriligator makes a clear and important distinction for researchers: that unlike a search engine, with static and stored results, ChatGPT never copies, retrieves or looks up information from anywhere. Rather, it generates every word anew. You send it a prompt, and based on its machine-learning training on massive amounts of text, it creates an original answer. Most importantly, each chat retains context during a conversation, meaning that questions asked and answers provided earlier in the conversation will inform responses it generates later. The answers, therefore, are malleable, and the user needs to participate in an iterative process to shape them into something useful.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: New Privacy Badger Prevents Google From Mangling More of Your Links and Invading Your Privacy; Microsoft AI team accidentally leaks 38TB of private company data; California legislature passes ‘Delete Act’ to protect consumer data; and Starlink lost over 200 satellites in two months.