Showing posts with label disruptive technologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disruptive technologies. Show all posts

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Chegg Officially Wiped Out By AI; Tekedia, July 23, 2026

 Ako Tavershima, Tekedia ; Chegg Officially Wiped Out By AI

"The story of Chegg began in 2006 when they found a loophole in the study pattern of students and profitable business to exploit. Chegg began providing students with answers to their assignment problems and also questions and answers to known exam and quiz solutions...

The story of Chegg is not a one-off situation, it is the bubble effect of the impact of AI on learning and education."

Monday, April 20, 2026

Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago; Fortune, April 19, 2026

  

, Fortune; Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago

"In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973."

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Proposal to allow use of Australian copyrighted material to train AI abandoned after backlash; The Guardian, December 19, 2025

  , The Guardian; Proposal to allow use of Australian copyrighted material to train AI abandoned after backlash

"The Productivity Commission has abandoned a proposal to allow tech companies to mine copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models, after a fierce backlash from the creative industries.

Instead, the government’s top economic advisory body recommended the government wait three years before deciding whether to establish an independent review of Australian copyright settings and the impact of the disruptive new technology...

In its interim report on the digital economy, the commission floated the idea of granting a “fair dealing” exemption to copyright rules that would allow AI companies to mine data and text to develop their large language models...

The furious response from creative industries to the commission’s idea included music industry bodies saying it would “legitimise digital piracy under guise of productivity”."

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year; Time, December 11, 2025

 Charlie Campbell Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo , Time; The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year

"For decades, humankind steeled itself for the rise of thinking machines. As we marveled at their ability to beat chess champions and predict protein structures, we also recoiled from their inherent uncanniness, not to mention the threats to our sense of humanity. Leaders striving to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warned that the pursuit of its powers could create unforeseen catastrophe.

This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible. “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Huang tells TIME in a 75-minute interview in November, two days after announcing that Nvidia, the world’s first $5 trillion company, had once again smashed Wall Street’s earnings expectations. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.” OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which at launch was the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, has surpassed 800 million weekly users. AI wrote millions of lines of code, aided lab scientists, generated viral songs, and spurred companies to re-examine their strategies or risk obsolescence. (OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME’s archives.)...

This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods. Racing both beside and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time. They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons."

Monday, December 15, 2025

Kinds of Intelligence | LJ Directors’ Summit 2025; Library Journal, December 2, 2025

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Kinds of Intelligence | LJ Directors’ Summit 2025

"LJ’s 2025 Directors’ Summit looked at artificial—and very real—intelligence from multiple angles

If there was any doubt about what issues are on the minds of today’s library leaders, Library Journal’s 2025 Directors’ Summit, held October 16 and 17 at Denver Public Library (DPL), had some ready answers: AI and people.

Nick Tanzi hit both notes handily in his keynote, “Getting Your Public Library AI-Ready.” Tanzi, assistant director of South Huntington Public Library (SHPL), NY, and technology consultant at The-Digital-Librarian.com (and a 2025 LJ Mover & Shaker), began with a reminder of other at-the-time “disruptive” technologies, starting with a 1994 clip of Today Show anchors first encountering “@” and “.com.”

During most of this digital change, he noted, libraries had the technologies before many patrons and could lead the way. Now everyone has access to some form of AI, but it’s poorly understood. And access without understanding is a staff problem as well as a patron problem.

So, what does it mean for a library to be AI-ready? Start with policy and training, said Tanzi, and then translate that to public services, rather than the other way around. Library policies need to be AI-proofed, beginning by looking at what’s already in place and where it might be stressed by AI: policies governing collection development, reconsideration of materials, tool use, access control, the library’s editorial process, and confidential data. Staff are already using some form of AI at work—do they have organizational guidance?

Tanzi advised fostering AI literacy across the library. At SHPL, he formed an AI user group; it has no prerequisite for participation and staff are paid for their time. Members explore new tools, discuss best practices, complete “homework,” and share feedback, which also allows Tanzi to stress-test policies. It’s not a replacement for formal training, but helps him discover which tools work best in various departments and speeds up learning.

We need to demystify AI tools for staff and patrons, Tanzi noted, and teach ethics around them. Your ultimate goal is to create informed citizens; libraries can build community around AI education, partnering with the local school district, colleges, and government."


Monday, July 8, 2024

Five Questions to Ask Before Implementing Generative AI; Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, July 3, 2024

Ann Skeet, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University ; Five Questions to Ask Before Implementing Generative AI

"While you don’t want to get too far into the weeds, you can ask for the sources of data that the system is being trained on, says Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and coauthor of Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap. “[Directors] can also advise proactively choosing an AI system that has an identifiable training data set.”"

Monday, September 3, 2018

Print Is Dead? Not Here; The New York Times, September 2, 2018

Ted Geltner, The New York Times; Print Is Dead? Not Here

[Kip Currier: Timely New York Times article, given my Letter to the Editor that I emailed to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 1, 2018.]

"Practically every morning begins with a thud on the driveways of the roughly 50,000 homes here. The newspaper has arrived.

That newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun, which exhaustively covers this rapidly growing retirement community in Central Florida, is in the midst of a boom that few other papers can even imagine. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Sun’s weekday circulation of 55,700 is up 169 percent since 2003. Over the same time, weekday newspaper circulation across the United States has dropped 43 percent. (The Orlando Sentinel, the region’s largest newspaper, is down 53 percent.)...

Elsewhere around the country, the industry continues to cough and wheeze its way from print to digital, with layoffs and closings in its wake. Just this week, Pittsburgh became the largest city in the United States without a daily print paper when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced it was cutting its print distribution to five days a week, ending a nearly 100-year history of seven-day-a-week publication."

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Post-Gazette Is Going Digital, At Least On Some Days, With An Ad Campaign That Is Raising Eyebrows; KDKA 2 CBS Pittsburgh, August 22, 2018

Jon Delano, KDKA 2 CBS Pittsburgh; Post-Gazette Is Going Digital, At Least On Some Days, With An Ad Campaign That Is Raising Eyebrows

"The PG has billboards up around town and television ads on-air, featuring those who say they will never go digital.

One TV advertisement: “PGe and PG NewsSlide, who the bleep needs them. Last time I went on line they tried to track my cookies. They’ll never get my cookie recipe.” 

Another TV advertisement: “Now they’re telling me PG is going digital. They can stick their digital. I’m not doing that.” 

“It’s a little insensitive to the readers who really are connected to print, who really depend on print,” said [Andrew] Conte [director of Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation].

Not true, says [Allan] Block [chairman of Block Communications that owns the PG]."

Thursday, August 11, 2016

John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control”; Salon, 8/10/16

Scott Timberg, Salon; John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control” :
"So part of what’s interesting about Oliver’s bit — which looked at both the causes of the decline as well as the effects, with his usual combination of hyperventilating moralism and comic exaggeration — is that some seem frustrated with it. And not just people who hate the press, but people who value what it does.
The most visible of these criticisms so far has come from the president of the Newspaper Association of America, who praised the segment’s opening. “But making fun of experiments,” David Chavern wrote, “and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful.”
Sullivan, who was once the executive editor of the Buffalo News and the public editor of the New York Times, hit back sharply in a Post piece:
Actually, no. What Oliver did was precisely nail everything that’s been happening in the industry that Chavern represents: The shrinking staffs, the abandonment of important beats, the love of click bait over substance, the deadly loss of ad revenue, the truly bad ideas that have come to the surface out of desperation, the persistent failures to serve the reading public."

Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO); HBO via YouTube, 8/7/16

HBO via YouTube; Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) :
"The newspaper industry is suffering. That’s bad news for journalists — both real and fictional."