Monthly Archives: January 2023

Women futurists shape the future

Increasingly futurists are being hired by businesses to present visions of what the future could look like. Sometimes futurists are sci fi writers like Isaac Asimov (whose books inspired Elon Musks companies), and other times they predict business futures like Faith Popcorn. In 1991 Faith predicted that "humanoid robots" would become companions and workers. As we see automation and robotics have found their way into our businesses and our lives; we can see she was right.

There arent a ton of resources compiling lists of female futurists, other than this list from Ross Dawson. But this is an important community that has a voice. We need to make sure they have a platform to share their ideas. Women bring unique perspectives, and the experience of being able to bear children. After centuries of decisions being made almost entirely by men, now women are stepping up to shape the future in real and concrete ways. The way we approach global challenges for the future matters, and its critical that women are a central part of shaping this conversation.

In the past, the roles of corporate leaders and futurists have been predominantly male, but in recent years, women have started making their mark. Roughly one-third of members of the Association of Professional Futurists are women, and the leaders of many futurist groups are female. These women are looking at vast possibilities on topics ranging from business to education and technology to see what the future holds.

Women need to be visible in boardrooms, at conferences, and anywhere we are planning how to make our societies healthy and more equitable for tomorrow. The unique female perspective creates more diversity of thought and opinion, which opens the future to fresh ideas that represent the entire population.

On Sunday March 8, International Womens Day, were celebrating the women leaders working to create solutions for potential futures. These women are looking ahead to prepare themselves, their organizations and their audiences for how the world could change. And as they delve into the future, they have a chance to shape it. This list was created to help build community among this group, but also for conference organizers and businesses that want to engage futurists.

These 50 women are shaping the future and encouraging and inspiring other females to join them:

Amy Webb

Named by Forbes as one of the Women Changing the World, Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist. She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. Founded in 2006, the Institute advises Fortune 100 and Global 1000 companies, investment firms and government agencies.

Cindy Frewen

Cindy Frewen is an architect and urban designer who examines how buildings will grow and interact with people in the future. She consults on the future of cities and how architecture and technology can work together. Cindy is the head of the Association of Professional Futurists and has received awards for her sustainable designs and community development.

Amy Zalman

Amy Zalman specializes in using storytelling to guide strategy and communications and has worked with governments and companies around the world. She is the former CEO of the World Future Society and is involved in a number of global causes, including promoting peace and global security.

Madeline Ashby

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and speaker who has applied science fiction prototypes to a number of leading organizations. She examines the future by telling stories about topics ranging from smart cities to global security and the future of warfare.

Erica Orange

Erica Orange is an executive at The Future Hunters, where she identifies trends and changes for large companies and public agencies. Erica is focused on changing demographics, including Millennials and the growth of the she-conomy, as well as new technology and its interaction with humans.

Shara Evans

Shara Evans expertise lies in telecommunications analysis. Her expansive career has provided the foundation to look towards the future of telecom in Australia and around the world. She is focused on the future of technology, including robotics, cybercrime and consumer tech.

Nancy Giordano

From a career of working with the worlds top organizations, Nancy Giordano has become a leading futurist helping businesses transform and succeed. She aims to help organizations become more sustainable and beneficial to society by combining the future of tech, business and social issues.

Tessa Finlev

Tessa Finlev works at the intersection of cultural change, diversity and inclusion with an eye towards the future. She encourages civic engagement and social change to create sustainable systems that solve the worlds problems.

Kristin Alford

Combining science, art and innovation, Kristin Alford is passionate about driving sustainable change in the future and in inspiring the next generation of futurists. She is involved in developing smart cities that offer sustainable environmental and economic solutions.

Mei-Mei Song

As a professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan, Mei-Mei Song is a global leader in the future of education and globalization. Her work has the potential to shape future teachers and universities around the world, especially as more technology is integrated into education.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment

With a passion for the future of education and training new futurists, Fabienne Goux-Baudiment studies and speaks on a variety of topics ranging from climate change to robots and how cultures and people need to continually evolve. Her work has been applied to numerous government organizations and businesses.

Susan Cox-Smith

Based in the Netherlands, Susan Cox-Smith helps organizations combine research and storytelling to prepare for the future and make strategic decisions. Her How to Future project helps organizations, especially in healthcare and technology, create teams and structures to succeed in the future.

Gayemarie Brown

With more than 25 years experience, Gayemarie Brown helps worldwide companies use emerging technologies to update their business models for the future. She is an expert and global speaker on digital transformation and disruption, especially AI, robotics and blockchain.

Maria Konovalenko

With a goal of leveraging new technology to make people as healthy as possible, Maria Konovalenko uses her scientific background to look at the future of aging, including AI, cell therapy and regenerative medicine. She hopes to create a future where people can live longer and happier lives thanks to science and technology.

Anne Lise Kjaer

Anne Lise Kjaers organization focuses on business and communications trend forecasting for global corporations. She encourages organizations to look towards the future with trend management and establish mindful leaders to create a more inclusive economy.

Faith Popcorn

A vocal advocate for female empowerment, Faith Popcorn looks to the future as the She-change. She forecasts future trends and consumer patterns for numerous industries and has been called the Nostradamus of Marketing by Fortune Magazine.

Ufuk Tarhan

Based in Turkey, Ufuk Tarhan uses her background in economics and IT to consult companies on creating strong strategies for the future. She is also the curator of Future Day, a day she hopes will be an international public holiday dedicated to the future.

Elina Hiltunen

Elina Hiltunen created a tool to crowdsource organizational futures, especially regarding new technology. She aims to anticipate the future through weak signals and has created tools for individuals and organizations to look towards the future and adapt as the world changes.

Youngsook Park

A prominent figure in South Korea, Youngsook Park focuses her efforts on social justice and human development. She trains students and organizations on the future of housing and interior design and has established programs to prepare her country for social issues of the future.

Cecily Sommers

With a background in medicine and dance, Cecily Sommers looks towards the future of innovation. She runs a think tank that examines the impact of global trends on businesses and society over the next one to five decades.

Alexandra Whittington

Alexandra Whittington teaches Forecasting for Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston. Her focus is on the future of social issues, including families, education and gender roles. She works with corporations and non-profit groups to prepare them for future changes.

Jennifer Gidley

With a background in education and psychology, Jennifer Gidley aims to raise awareness about new thinking that will be required in the future, especially in regards to youth education and sustainable urban development. Her work brings awareness to the growing climate crisis and the future plight of oceans.

Maree Conway

Maree Conway has spent her career consulting on the future of universities and education. She is the founder of an organization that helps professionals in education and government plan for the future by re-framing strategic conversations about the future using foresight.

Catarina Tully

As cofounder of the School of International Futures, Cat Tully advises the U.S. and U.K. governments on the future and national security. She also trains business leaders, lawmakers and activists around the world to prepare for the future. Cat encourages her clients to adopt a long-term view with foresight tools to adapt to change.

Extended List:

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and the author of the bestselling bookThe Customer Of The Future. Sign up for her weekly newsletterhere.

See the rest here:
50 Leading Female Futurists - Forbes

The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.

Afterward, though,Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI's published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot's prior work, alerting readers that the posts' content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down.

Now, a fresh development may make efforts to spin the program back up even more controversial for the embattled newsroom. In addition to those factual errors, a new Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET AI's work has demonstrated deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit. In other words, it looks like the bot directly plagiarized the work of Red Ventures competitors, as well as human writers at Bankrateand evenCNETitself.

Jeff Schatten, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has been examining the rise of AI-enabled misconduct, reviewed numerous examples of the bot's apparent cribbing that we provided. He found that they "clearly" rose to the level of plagiarism.

We asked Schatten what would happen if a student turned in an essay with a comparable number of similarities to existing documents with no attribution.

"They would be sent to the student-run ethics council and given the repeated nature of the behavior would almost certainly be expelled from the university," he replied.

The bot's misbehavior ranges from verbatim copying to moderate edits to significant rephrasings, all without properly crediting the original. In at least some of its articles, it appears that virtually every sentence maps directly onto something previously published elsewhere.

Take this excerpt, for instance, from arecent article by theCNET AI about overdraft protection:

How to avoid overdraft and NSF fees

Overdraft fees and NSF fees don't have to be a common consequence. There are a few steps you can take to avoid them.

And compare it to this verbiage from a previously published article in Forbes Advisor, a Red Ventures competitor:

How to Avoid Overdraft and NSF Fees

Overdraft and NSF fees need not be the norm. There are several tools at your disposal to avoid them.

Sure, the bot's version altered the capitalization and swapped out a few words for impressively lateral-minded synonyms "the norm" becomes "a common consequence," for instance, and "several tools" becomes "a few steps" along with a few minor changes to the syntax. But apart from those semantic tweaks, the two sentences are nearly identical.

Here's another excerpt from the same article by CNET's AI financial writer:

Sign up for low-balance alerts

You may be able to receive low balance alerts from your bank's mobile app, so you know if your account balance is dropping below a certain threshold.

Now compare it to this section from another previously published article, this one fromThe Balance, another Red Ventures competitor:

Sign Up for Low Balance Alerts

You can sign up for low-balance alerts through most banks to alert you when your account hits a certain amount.

Again, it seems clear that the AI is simply parsing through and making small modifications to obscure the source.

Sometimes the similarities are almost comical in their lack of subtlety. Take the first sentence of this article, also published by CNET's AI:

Gift cards are an easy go-to when buying a present for someone.

And compare it to the first sentence of this previously published Forbesarticle:

Gift cards are an easy-to-please present for just about anyone.

The kicker on that one? Check out the almost imperceptible difference between those two articles' headlines. Here's the CNETAI's title:

Can You Buy a Gift Card With a Credit Card?

And here's what Forbes ran with for a headline:

Can You Buy Gift Cards With a Credit Card?

That's right: the only difference is switching "Gift Cards" to a singular.

Here's another example, from the same AI-generated CNET article about overdraft fees:

What is overdraft protection?

Overdraft protection is an optional feature offered by banks to prevent the rejection of a charge on a checking account with insufficient funds.

Which, it turns out, appears to be a word salad rephrasing of a line from this article on Investopedia, another Red Ventures competitor.

What Is Overdraft Protection?

Overdraft protection is an optional service that prevents the rejection of charges to a bank account... that are in excess of the available funds in the account.

The AI appears to sometimes also borrow language from writers at CNET's sister site Bankratewithout giving credit. For example, look at this line from an article published by CNET's AI back in November:

Becoming an authorized user can help you avoid applying for a card on your own, which is a major benefit if you currently have bad credit or no credit history.

And compare it to this wording, previously published by a Bankrate writer:

Becoming an authorized user also lets you avoid having to apply for a card on your own, which is a major benefit if you currently have bad credit or no credit history at all.

All told, a pattern quickly emerges. Essentially, CNET's AI seems to approach a topic by examining similar articles that have already been published and ripping sentences out of them. As it goes, it makes adjustments sometimes minor, sometimes major to the original sentence's syntax, word choice, and structure. Sometimes it mashes two sentences together, or breaks one apart, or assembles chunks into new Frankensentences. Then it seems to repeat the process until it's cooked up an entire article.

A current Red Ventures employee also reviewed examples of the bot's seemingly lifted work.

"You ever copy your homework off of somebody," they quipped, "but they told you to kind of rephrase it?"

"It poses the question of what kind of institutions do CNET and Bankrate want to be seen as," they continued. "They're just taking these articles and rephrasing a couple of things."

Are you a current or former Red Ventures employee and want to share your thoughts about the company's use of AI? Email us at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

In short, a close examination of the work produced by CNET's AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, none of this should be terribly surprising. At their core, the way that machine learning systems work is that you feed in an immense pile of "training data," process it with sophisticated algorithms, and end up with a model that can produce similar work on demand.

Investigators have sometimes found examples of AI plagiarizing its own training data. In 2021, for instance, researchers from Johns Hopkins University, New York University and Microsoft found that text-generating AIs "sometimes copy substantially, in some cases duplicating passages over 1,000 words long from the training set."

As such, the question of exactly how CNET's disastrous AI was trained may end up taking center stage as the drama continues to unfold. At a CNET company meeting late last week, The Vergereported at the time, the outlet's executive vice president of content and audience refused to tell staff many of them acclaimed tech journalists who have written extensively about the rise of machine learning what data had been used to train the AI.

The legality of using data to train an AI without the consent of the people who created that data is currently being tested by several lawsuits against the makers of prominent image generators, and could become a flashpoint in the commercialization of the tech.

"If a student presented the equivalent of what CNET has produced for an assignment in my class, and if they did not cite their sources, then I would definitely count it as plagiarism," said Antony Aumann, a philosophy professor at Northern Michigan University who recently made headlines when he discovered that one of his own students had submitted an essay generated using ChatGPT, after reviewing examples of theCNET AI's similar phrasing to other outlets.

"Now, there is some dispute among academics about exactly what plagiarism is," he continued. "Some scholars consider it a form of stealing; other scholars regard it as a kind of lying. I think of it in the latter way. Plagiarism involves representing something as your own that is in fact not your own. And that appears to be what CNET is doing."

CNET did not respond to examples of the bot's seemingly cribbed writing, nor to questions about this story.

In a sense, the relentless ineptitude of the company's braindead AI probably obfuscates many of the thornier themes we're likely to see emerge as the tech continues to spread into the workplace and information ecosystems.

Schatten, for instance, warned that issues around AI and intellectual property are likely to get more ambiguous and difficult to detect as AI systems continue to improve, or even as publishers start to experiment with more advanced systems that already exist (Red Ventures has declined to say what AI it's using, though the editor-in-chief of CNET has said that it's not ChatGPT.)

"The CNET example is noteworthy because whatever AI they were using was not drawing from the entirety of the internet and carefully coming up with a new mosaic, but rather just lifting more or less word for word from existing stories," Schatten said. "But the more sophisticated AIs of today, and certainly the AIs of the future, will do a better job of hiding the origins of the material."

"And especially once AIs are drawing from the writing of other AIs, which themselves are quoting AI (dark, I know) it might become quite difficult to detect," he added.

In a practical sense, it seems increasingly obvious that CNET and Red Ventures deployed the AI system and started blasting its articles out to the site's colossal audience without ever really scrutinizing its output. It wasn't just that the architects of the program missed obvious factual errors, but that they appear never to have checked whether the system's work might have been poached.

And to be fair, why would they? AsThe Verge reported in a fascinating deep dive last week, the company's primary strategy is to post massive quantities of content, carefully engineered to rank highly in Google, and loaded with lucrative affiliate links.

For Red Ventures, The Verge found, those priorities have transformed the once-venerable CNETinto an "AI-powered SEO money machine."

More on CNET: SEO Spammers Are Absolutely Thrilled Google Isn't Cracking Down on CNET's AI-Generated Articles

See the rest here:
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism

Tin Mok Appointed to Faraday Future's Board of Directors as an Executive Director  Marketscreener.com

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Tin Mok Appointed to Faraday Future's Board of Directors as an Executive Director - Marketscreener.com

Futuristic tech flagship smartphone the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro with ultimate Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera launches in SA  Mail and Guardian

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Futuristic tech flagship smartphone the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro with ultimate Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera launches in SA - Mail and Guardian