Episode Title: #79 (TECH) “Impact Of Ai On Work ” — Blood Sugar Monitoring: Apple’s Latest Breakthrough in Wearable Health Tech, Mexico City’s VR Police Training, Enhancing Memory With Brain Prosthesis.
- First up – The Impact of AI Tools on the Future of Work: Insights from OpenAI Researchers
- Our second story – Revolutionizing Blood Sugar Monitoring: Apple’s Latest Breakthrough in Wearable Health Tech
- Our third story – Innovating Police Training with Virtual Reality: Mexico City’s Latest Move
- For our fourth and final story – Enhancing Memory with Brain Prosthesis: Breakthroughs and Future Possibilities
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What’s going on everyone?! Welcome to the LEO podcast Tech episode, where we explore the world of technology and innovation. I’m your host, Kevin Muñoz, and in these episodes, we dive deep into the latest trends and advancements in the tech industry. From new gadgets and cutting-edge software to the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we’ll cover it all. Join us as we share insights, and uncover the stories behind some of the most exciting developments in technology today. So sit back, relax, and get ready for an informative and engaging episode of the LEO podcast.
If you’re listening to this episode on its release day, which is Monday, April third, I’d like to take a moment to invite you to join our Palomitas community at patreon.com/latinamericaneo. Your support not only helps me continue to produce new content but also grants you early access to episodes and exclusive bonus material. Thank you for considering becoming a part of our community.
But enough about that for now, let’s dive into today’s episode. So sit back, relax, and enjoy!
Article 1: The Impact of AI Tools on the Future of Work: Insights from OpenAI Researchers
For our first story, we will discuss the recent study from OpenAI which estimates that AI-powered chat technologies could impact at least 19% of jobs in the United States. The study was conducted using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which is powerful enough to write essays, program computer code, and extract insights from financial reports.
According to the study, 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of their work tasks affected in some way by ChatGPT, and around 19% of workers could see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. The study also found that jobs with higher wages and that are heavily reliant on software-based tasks could face more exposure to potential disruption from AI-powered chatbots.
The study cataloged which professions could see the most disruption using various measurement rubrics. The most affected professions included interpreters and translators, poets, lyricists, public relations specialists, writers and authors, mathematicians, tax preparers, blockchain engineers, accountants and auditors, along with journalists.
The study also breaks down the ChatGPT impact by industry. Sectors including data processing hosting, publishing industries, and security commodity contracts, saw the most potential exposure to disruption. In contrast, industries known for manual labor—food services, forestry and logging, social assistance, and food manufacturing—saw the least potential impact.
However, the study has several limitations, including an inherent bias in trying to sum up each profession by using simple labels to describe job tasks, and the fact that GPT has shown it can make obvious mistakes, including making up information, which makes it necessary for a human to oversee the work.
Despite these limitations, the researchers anticipate ChatGPT and its future iterations will shake up the way people work, and that society and policy makers need to prepare for these changes. The paper adds, “While LLMs (large-language models) have consistently improved in capabilities over time, their growing economic effect is expected to persist and increase even if we halt the development of new capabilities today.”
Overall, this study highlights the potential for AI-powered chat technologies to significantly impact the US job market, and emphasizes the need for society and policy makers to consider the implications of these technologies on the workforce.
Article 2: Revolutionizing Blood Sugar Monitoring: Apple’s Latest Breakthrough in Wearable Health Tech
For our second story, the latest innovation from Apple, which could revolutionize the management of diabetes. Apple’s new non-invasive blood glucose monitoring system for the Apple Watch is making waves in the healthcare industry, and the potential impact it could have on people’s lives is huge.
Diabetes is a condition that affects millions of people globally, and monitoring blood glucose levels is a crucial part of diabetes management. Traditional glucose monitoring methods involve pricking the skin to draw blood, which can be painful and inconvenient for people with diabetes. However, Apple is changing the game with its new non-invasive blood glucose monitoring system for the Apple Watch.
According to a recent Bloomberg article, Apple has made significant progress in developing a blood glucose monitoring system that does not require a prick to the skin. This development could have a massive impact on the management of diabetes, as it would provide a more comfortable and less invasive method of monitoring blood glucose levels.
Apple’s new system uses sensors to detect glucose levels through the skin. This process involves shining a light through the skin and measuring the glucose levels based on how the light is absorbed. While this technology is not yet available to the public, Apple is continuing to work with regulatory authorities to ensure that the technology is safe and effective before releasing it.
The potential benefits of this technology are enormous. With non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, people with diabetes could avoid the pain and inconvenience of traditional monitoring methods. The technology could also provide a more accurate and continuous way to monitor glucose levels, allowing for more precise diabetes management.
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Article 3: Innovating Police Training with Virtual Reality: Mexico City’s Latest Move
For our third story, police officers in Mexico City are using virtual reality (VR) technology to train to fight crime. This new technology could help officers to improve their reflexes and practice maneuvers.
On February 15, the city opened the first VR training center for police officers in Latin America. The center was inaugurated by the Secretary of Security, Omar Garcia Harfuch, who was himself injured in an attack in June 2020. Two of his bodyguards and a passerby were killed in the attack, which was attributed to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful criminal gangs in Mexico.
Within the three-dimensional world of the VR headset, police officers can interact with real or virtual avatars, in extremely realistic graphic representations. The officers can train in various locations such as schools, shopping centers, restaurants, highways, and airplanes.
During the training, the officers showed off a simulated intervention among civilians. Their mission was to free a child taken hostage in Tepito, a neighborhood that is the stronghold of the capital’s main gang. With a computer in a backpack and armed with rifles, the officers approached the hostage-taker, forced him to drop his weapon, and release his victim.
Mexico invested 60 million pesos ($3 million) in this new VR technology, which features “100 motion capture cameras” and various types of virtual rifles and revolvers. The head of the city government Claudia Sheinbaum highlighted a savings of 4 million pesos ($223,000) in ammunition.
According to a statement on the European Commission’s website, in 2019, the European Union funded a “Shotpros project” for virtual reality to “design better training modules for police officers” to improve their overall performance in stressful situations. In Belgium, thousands of police officers have already followed this program, said the federal government and authorities in Antwerp in September.
In the United States, police officers in New York and Los Angeles are also using virtual reality to improve their reflexes in emergency situations such as shootings.
It is hoped that this new VR technology will help police officers in Mexico City to fight crime more effectively and safely. Thank you for listening to today’s episode.
Article 4: Enhancing Memory with Brain Prosthesis: Breakthroughs and Future Possibilities
For our fourth and final story of the day, we’ll be discussing how a unique form of brain stimulation called a “memory prosthesis” could be used to help restore memories in people with damaged brains. This technology involves inserting an electrode deep into the brain, which copies the electrical patterns of activity that occur when memories are encoded in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region of the brain that plays a crucial role in memory.
Developed over 10 years by Theodore Berger and Dong Song at the University of Southern California, the prosthesis has been tested in animals and human volunteers with epilepsy who already had electrodes implanted in their brains to study their condition. Researchers found that the device improved the volunteers’ performance on memory tests by firing patterns of electrical stimulation that corresponded to memory encoding.
The team tested two versions of the memory prosthesis on 24 people who had implanted electrodes to study their epilepsy, some of whom also had brain injuries. The first version, called the memory decoding model (MDM), takes an average of electrical activity patterns that occur naturally in the hippocampus and fires off this pattern of electrical stimulation. The second type, called multi-input, multi-output (MIMO), more closely mimics how the hippocampus works, learning the patterns of electrical inputs and outputs that correspond with memory encoding and then mimicking them.
To test how well each of the models works, researchers asked the volunteers to take part in memory tests designed to test a person’s short-term and long-term memory. The recordings were unique, so doctors and scientists have been able to treat disorders like Parkinson’s disease by simply targeting the same brain region in all individuals. The researchers found that the memory prosthesis improved the volunteers’ performances on memory tests, ranging from 11% to 54%, and personalized stimulation to individual brains improved its impact.
The MIMO model, which more closely mirrors how the hippocampus works, had even better results on average, with the biggest improvements seen in people who had the worst memory performance at the start of the experiment. The researchers hope that their memory prosthesis could one day be widely used to restore memory in people with memory disorders. Brain injury patients would be the first candidates, as such injuries tend to affect specific regions of the brain. Injuries to the hippocampus would be easier to target than degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, which tend to involve damage to multiple regions of the brain.
While the technology is still in its early stages and requires further research, the potential for a memory prosthesis to help restore memories in people with damaged brains is an exciting glimpse into what the future might hold.
THE END
That’s all for today on the LEO podcast. I’m Kevin Muñoz and as always feel free to send me a voicemail through my website latinamerianeo.org by simply clicking the purple “send voicemail” popup and just start recording your thoughts or any interesting topic that you’d like to see covered and I might just feature it on the next episode!
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Otherwise, I’ll see you all in next week’s episode!
