Author: Bilal Kathrada

Late last year, Facebook was caught listening to and transcribing private Messenger chats to improve it’s speech recognition software. The platform now says it will pay up to $5, via Paypal, for different voice recordings.  In a program called ‘Pronunciations’, participants will be paid to use the company’s market research app Viewpoints for recording various words and phrases that the company will then leverage to train its speech recognition AI. That voice data will be used to improve products like Portal, which is Facebook’s smart display that can be used for video-calling among other things and can be activated with one’s voice. In the plan, members, who must be at least 18 years old and be able to say, distinctly, phrases like ‘Hey Portal’ and also say the 1st names of 10 of their friends on Facebook. Facebook says that the enterprise will never connection voice recordings with participants’ Facebook accounts or names and that the knowledge will be applied anonymously. It also states that all info gathered will be used to boost their subsidiaries and will not be offered to third parties and will not be shared with other Facebook functions or services, without consumer permission. The program marks a departure from prior practices from Facebook which was caught harvesting and listening to voice recordings of users without their authority, and paying third parties to listen in on voice messages to ascertain whether it’s AI was interpreting the messages correctly. Various studies in the past 12 months unveiled that Facebook was just one of numerous big tech firms partaking in that practice.  Other equipment found to be recording customers were Apple’s Homepod, Amazon’s wildly preferred good speaker, Alexa, the Google Home, and devices using Microsoft’s Cortana assistant. Devices capturing audio snippets on a regular basis harvested information that most may take into account non-public, which include intercourse, non-public discussions, enterprise, and even health-related facts in accordance to experiences from whistle blowers. As Oren Lyons once said : “In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred – everything is for sale . . . ”  

“Dear Sir. A long-lost relative of yours has died and has left an inheritance of $150 000 to you. Kindly forward your banking details for transfer of funds.” Nearly everyone who has a mobile phone or an email address has received emails and text messages like the one above, promising large amounts of money in exchange for our banking details or other information. While many of us recognise that these are nothing more than “phishing” attacks that usually end up with the victim losing some or all of their money, it is shocking how many people actually fall for these cheap tricks. I am approached regularly by people who receive such messages, who want to know if they should respond. Whenever I’m approached by one of these would-be victims of phishing, my mind goes to those who do not have the luxury of asking someone for advice on these matters – that is, the vast majority of the population. What happens to them? The short answer is, they become victims. Having little or no knowledge of technology and cybercrime, they make the mistake of either opening suspicious attachments, sharing sensitive information or making payments to dodgy bank accounts – all with dire consequences. The global cost of cybercrime is staggering, with estimates in excess of $6 trillion (R90 trillion) a year, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Yet, a large percent of these crimes could be avoided with a little bit of knowledge. Our world is a technology-driven one, and is becoming increasingly so with each year as new advancements are made in technology. To the average consumer, this essentially means two things: on one hand, new opportunities for career and business, but on the other, new dangers. While technology will undoubtedly improve our lives for the better, it will also bring with it new dangers that we need to be aware of. This is particularly true in the hyper-connected, Internet of Things-driven world where everything – our phones, computers, cars, homes and even clothing – are becoming connected. Whereas in the past we would hear of banks and IT companies being hacked, we are now seeing new types of cybercrimes, where homes, small businesses and even cars are being hacked. Cybercrime is becoming everything in crime. Again because people have connected their entire lives to the Internet, that’s where those who want to steal money, or hurt kids or defraud go. So, it’s an epidemic for reasons that make sense. ~ James Corney Without proper security measures in place, hackers are able to break into home security systems and smart home systems. Once they have control of your home system, they are able to control everything that is connected to the system: your alarm system, your security camera systems, air-conditioning, lights, appliances, automatic gates – pretty much everything. In our increasingly connected world, these scenarios are becoming more likely. Where we have the traditional types of crime, terrorism and warfare today, in the near future these will all take place in the cyber world. As much as we need to know self-defence to protect ourselves, we need to know basic cybersecurity to protect our devices and data; and as much as countries have police forces and armies to defend against attacks, they need cybersecurity experts to protect its networks. What will be our best defence in the future? The short answer: knowledge.  We all need to become “personal cybersecurity practitioners”. At the national level, we need a small army of highly-skilled cyber-security experts who are at the forefront of defending our country against cyberattacks.

Sadly, just as soon as it started, it is ending. The internet giant’s global free public Wi-Fi initiative is coming to a close, four years after it started its operations in 2016. In November last year, Google launched Google Station’s Free Wi-Fi, in 100 locations in the poorest of Cape Flats areas. The Free Wi-Fi project is shutting down worldwide, including their partnership with Think Wifi in South Africa. Since its inception in 2016, Google Station has provided free wifi to millions of user in Mexico, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Phillipines, Vietnam, Nigeria and, most recently, South Africa. A Google representative said : “In line with Google’s mission, we started Google Station in 2016 to help bring more people online. We’re humbled that our work has been able to help millions of people experience the power of the internet for the first time. However, the ecosystem has evolved since then–4G is getting prevalent in a number of markets and data prices are dropping globally. This, combined with the complex and varying technical requirements across partners and countries, makes it a challenge to scale and sustain Station. This has made us re-evaluate our plans and we have decided to wind down the program through 2020. We are working with our partners to support our users and them to gradually transition. We remain committed to look for ways to make the internet more accessible for users around the world.” Google’s operations in South Africa has been transferred to Think Wifi, who will continue to carry out the free wifi project independently. The CEO of Think Wifi, Janine Rebelo said that the initiative in the Western Cape has been a huge success and there are ongoing plans to roll out the free wifi project in other areas, viz : Eastern Cape, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, the world’s attention has been drawn towards the future of health care, specifically disease prevention. Since its outbreak in December the virus has been unstoppable. It has reached pandemic proportions and the World Health Organisation has declared it a global public health emergency. A major concern regarding coronavirus is that it could easily spread to countries with poorly developed health-care systems and South Africa is on that list of countries. While scientists scramble to find a cure, a big part of international efforts is to contain the virus through early detection and quarantining infected patients. Prevention is better than cure. What makes the situation worse, is that Chinese scientists have positively diagnosed a newborn baby with the virus, just 30 hours after birth. This raises fear among scientists that the illness could have been propagated from mother to child before birth, making it even harder to combat. What is particularly frightening about coronavirus is that despite all our advancements in medical technology, we are unable to stop its spread, nearly two months after its outbreak. Coronavirus has confirmed what we have known for a long time: that we need a new breakthrough in the field of disease prevention, one that will take health care to a new level. Fortunately, that breakthrough is on the horizon. For some time now, scientists have been exploring the potential of artificial intelligence, or AI, in the medical field. AI has made tremendous progress in a number of fields, and if that level of success could be replicated in the medical field, we could have that major breakthrough we so desperately need. In one such case, researchers from Google Health and the Imperial College in London developed and trained an AI system to detect breast cancer by studying mammograms, which are X-rays of the breasts. The system was shown mammograms from tens of thousands of women. Not surprisingly, it learned how to detect breast cancer with a high level of accuracy. What was surprising, though, was that the AI outperformed human radiologists by a wide margin. In a normal breast cancer detection process, two radiologists team up to study each mammogram for signs of cancer. This is to ensure that there are two opinions up front. If the two concur on a finding, it is taken as the final diagnostic. If the two radiologists are unable to come to an agreement, then a third radiologist is brought in to settle the matter. All told, the process is time-consuming, and not that accurate. Errors and misdiagnosis are common, with some studies showing that 20% of breast cancer cases go undetected. That is an extremely high number. What is more remarkable is that the system had far less information to work with than the human radiologists. The AI system was only given the mammograms to look at, and nothing else – which makes its achievement even greater. Researchers at Google believe that as they find ways to input the additional data into the AI system, it will become much more accurate still. Apart from reading the mammograms, the AI system will deliver another huge benefit – it will store, categorise and analyse the data it receives, with its diagnostics. As it reads more and more information from women all over the world, it will use big data analysis to draw wider conclusions about global breast cancer patterns. Using this data, it might unearth previously undetected patterns, such as the prevalence of breast cancer in certain countries. This will enable doctors to prevent further cases by advising people in high-risk areas to avoid certain foods or behaviours, for example. This type of big data analysis has already been used very effectively in the US to detect early outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases. Although we are in the early stages of using AI to improve health care, it is already showing tremendous promise. While medical care will always be a human activity, AI will prove to be an invaluable ally to medical professionals.

Last week, Medical researchers at Osaka University in Japan have for the first time successfully transplanted lab-grown heart cells into a human heart, in what may be a major breakthrough for cardiovascular healthcare. The scientists grew the cells by altering adult stem cells back to an embryonic state, after which they were able to modify them into becoming heart cells. From there, they placed the cells on small biodegradable sheets, which were then applied to a defective human heart. Yoshiki Sawa of Osaka University’s medical school said the transplant was conducted in a clinical trial to study the treatment’s effectiveness and safety in a patient with serious heart failure. It is hoped that the transplant of iPS cells will serve as an alternative to a heart transplant, which has been the only option for treating heart failure. To grow the heart muscle cells in the lab, the researchers turned to induced pluripotent stem cells otherwise known as iPS. Researchers are able to take those iPS cells and make them into any cell they want. In this case, it was heart muscle cells. “I hope that (the transplant) will become a medical technology that will save as many people as possible, as I’ve seen many lives that I couldn’t save,” Sawa was quoted at a news conference reported the Japan Times. As for the patient, the team plans to monitor him during the next year to ascertain how the heart muscle cells perform. The researchers opted to conduct a clinical trial instead of a clinical study because they want approval from Japan’s health ministry. In the trial studies, a sheet of heart muscle tissues made from stem cells is transplanted onto the affected areas of the heart. It is not yet clear if the transplant was ultimately successful. The patient who received the transplant will be monitored for the next year.  If all goes well, the researchers hope to conduct the same procedure on nine other people suffering from the same condition within the next three years.

Now, I don’t mean this in a creepy, conspiratory way like in the Matrix movies, where we are all living in a computer simulation controlled by an evil AI system. We are definitely living in a real, physical world, but even in this world, every living thing, including ourselves, is the product of an algorithm. The algorithm I am referring to is your DNA, which is actually an extremely complex set of instructions that describe how to make you, like an algorithm or a recipe. Every single aspect of your being – your height, your physique, your complexion, your hair and eye colour, your internals, your cell structure, your brain – is determined by your DNA. When the foetus starts developing in the womb, this DNA pattern is “decoded” to determine exactly how the child is going to be physically formed. Over the next nine months, the encoded DNA guides the formation. This process is very similar to a computer following a set of instructions to complete a task, an algorithm. Except that the DNA algorithm is far more complex than anything we can imagine, which is why it took nearly 70 years just to decode. Besides this obvious miracle inside the DNA of living things, scientists discovered something else – that DNA is a technological marvel, far more advanced than anything we are capable of making, even in this technologically-advanced age. Consider, for example, the storage capacity of DNA. Inside of a tiny molecule, deep inside a microscopic cell in your body, your DNA stores all the possible data there is about you. This is a lot of data; according to some scientists, it amounts to nearly a gigabyte of data. When we compare this to the physical size of a 1G hard disk, we start to understand the storage capacity of DNA. Based on this, scientists estimate that one gram of DNA is able to store 455 exabytes of data. One exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes. To put this into context, in 455 exabytes of storage, we can comfortably store all the data ever produced by human beings in history. This also includes all the data on the internet. The other great thing about DNA is that it is extremely durable. Whereas most modern storage media last a maximum of 30 years, DNA can survive for tens of thousands of years. These amazing qualities of DNA as a storage medium have prompted scientists to explore its potential as a long-term storage for all our vital data. In a previous article I wrote about the danger we currently face, of our entire knowledge base being wiped out because of the transient nature of our storage media. If we do not find viable solutions, there is a chance future generations will know little or nothing about us. The good news is, scientists have discovered a way to store data on DNA, and are working to improve the technology. Dr Robert Grass and his team of scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have managed to write the contents of entire books on to DNA strands. They have also tested their DNA-stored books for longevity, and found that the content will easily survive for 2 000 years if stored at a temperature of 10ºC, and 2 million years if stored at 18ºC. Either way, DNA storage is far more durable than any other storage media known to man. The trouble with DNA storage is that it is currently extremely expensive. To write a single typed page of data on to DNA costs in the region of R60000. At that price, preserving an entire book will cost more than R18 million. Obviously, this makes DNA storage very restrictive at the moment, but as with all technology, the price will eventually drop. When that happens, perhaps a time will come when we all walk around with tiny DNA chips embedded into our fingertips that will provide all the data storage we will ever need.

In 1799, the during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, a French soldier found a strange stone sticking out of a wall near the Egyptian town of Rashid. The stone had some markings etched onto its surface, which looked like some kind of ancient language. It turns out that the markings on the stone were very old: Studies by scientists and historians found that the stones had been inscribed during the Hellenistic period of the Egyptian Empire, around 196BC – making them at least 2200 years old. Subsequently named the “Rosetta Stone”, it was unusual in that it had inscriptions in two languages, written in three scripts. The first part of the text was written in the ancient Egyptian language, using hieroglyphic and then Demotic scripts; while the second was written in Ancient Greek. After decades of study, it was found that the text was a royal decree by King Ptolemy V Epiphanes on his ascension to the throne. Later, two more stones were found, which were established to be at least 40 years older than the first. The discovery of the Rosetta Stones was a huge step forward for historians studying ancient civilisations, and gave us a better understanding of the Ancient Egyptian language, scripts and their overall civilisation. The only way we were able to learn from the stones was because, more than two millennia later, they were well-preserved and still perfectly readable. We will never know if the original writers intended the stones to survive this long; the fact remains that they did, and we know so much more about those people, thanks to that. This raises a huge, uncomfortable question about modern technology: A thousand years from now, what will remain of our legacy? We are living in an age never before experienced in human history, an age of rapid technological advancement, an information age – one where more data is being generated in a day than most people saw in their lifetimes a century ago. Almost all the new works of knowledge we are generating during this era are in digital format – online posts, videos and audio. Many scientific works, literary masterpieces and the like, are going digital-only. Not only that, but we pride ourselves on “digitising” old works from the age before technology. Books, scientific works, pictures and music sheets are now available in digital format, and can be accessed at the touch of the button from anywhere in the world. Whereas we once had bookshelves filled with books, we are now able to store our collections on a single device. There was a time we kept albums to preserve our family histories in pictures. Stacks of video cassettes held priceless family memories. Today, all that is digital. The question is: How long will all this valuable information survive? The short answer is, not very long. Modern storage media are notoriously short-lived, and will hold data for no longer than a couple of years. Although we’ve made a lot of progress since the days of floppy disks and video cassettes, current “long-term” storage media like CDs, DVDs and external hard disks are still extremely fragile and can be wiped out in seconds. And if the media still remains intact after a number of years, there is yet another danger; the technology to read those media will no longer exist. As an example, if you found yourself in possession of a floppy disk with information you needed to retrieve, how would you access it today? It would be nearly impossible. I recall having written dozens of computer programs as a kid, some of which were really good. Today, all I have left are my physical, printed manuals and guides – my actual work is lost forever. How can we prevent this? Some might say that cloud backups are the answer. Cloud storage is great, in case your devices falls into the toilet or you upgrade. But that still doesn’t answer the big question: How long will it last? What if your cloud hosting company disappears? What happens to our data? There is no guarantee that any company will last for another decade, particularly in these disruptive times when new businesses are replacing old ones all the time. The sad reality is that no matter what form of modern digital storage we use, there is no guarantee our information will survive more than a couple of decades – let alone millennia like the Rosetta Stones or other ancient stone writings. And as we become ever-more digital, this poses a huge danger to the preservation of our valuable information and, in the long term, to the preservation of our knowledge base and culture. A thousand years in the future, what will people know about our amazing, vibrant and technologically advanced culture? If they find our devices, CDs and hard disks, will those media still preserve the valuable data they once held a millennium ago? Will the people of that time even have the technology to read those media?