Rest of World
중도 성향
IT/기술
What to read: A summer book list
Rest of World recommends eight books that cover the history of resistance to tech, our relationship with AI companions, the danger of our dependence on Taiwan chips, and more.
IT/기술 · "RELATIONS" · 총 21건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 87,821건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,284건(4.9%)·중립 81,395건(92.7%)·부정 2,142건(2.4%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 14.8(중도 균형)입니다.
Rest of World recommends eight books that cover the history of resistance to tech, our relationship with AI companions, the danger of our dependence on Taiwan chips, and more.
Jackie Jantos says loneliness and lack of confidence were challenges for young adults looking for relationships.
AI toys could compromise children's relationships with their parents, NYU professor Jonathan Haidt said.
Trouver un logement peut s‘avérer difficile. Mais les relations avec le propriétaire le sont parfois plus. Dans le quatrième épisode de notre série, Justine soupçonne ses propriétaires successifs d’avoir toujours cherché la petite bête pour éviter de lui restituer toute sa caution.
Generation Alpha would rather keep company with robo-girlfriends than risk potential rejection and challenges of an IRL partner.
Disney employees are reportedly disturbed by a senior executive's relationship with an AI chatbot that he refers to as his "son" and that has a child-like avatar resembling a young boy. The post Disney Employees Reportedly Disturbed by Senior Executive’s Relationship with AI Chatbot: ‘You Are My Son’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Jason Cox, Disney’s executive director of AI R&D and engineering, has written more than a dozen posts about his virtual assistant “Sam."
Almost 50 per cent of young adults in six major economies think AI romantic companionship will improve human happiness through emotional support in the next decade, the results of a large survey suggested on Monday. The percentage dropped progressively across older age categories to just a quarter of people aged 55 and over, according to the research shared exclusively with AFP. Leaps in AI development have seen people turn to chatbots as confidants and lovers, while advancements in robotics are helping produce more sophisticated sex dolls — raising questions over the impact on human relationships. The survey of nearly 10,000 people across the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Indonesia and Hong Kong provides a snapshot of this “rapidly changing moral landscape”, pollsters YouGov said. It also shows “a profound ideological split between Western and Asian markets”, with the latter seemingly more accepting of technologically enabled sex and romance. In terms of emotional support, 48pc of all respondents aged 18-24 and 47pc of 25 to 34-year-olds said they thought “AI intimacy companions” — a category ranging from chatbots to sex dolls — would improve human happiness in the next decade. When the same question was asked focusing on deeper connection and sexual wellbeing, the figures came in at 32pc and 38pc respectively. On both counts, older people were less optimistic. The psychological impact of chatbots on vulnerable people has been under scrutiny, with the deaths of several teenagers linked to AI use by their families. Geographic split YouGov and the media company that commissioned the research, Tokyo-based Star X Gen, told AFP they were surprised by the regional disparity. In Indonesia, 50pc of people — of all ages — said they thought AI companions would improve connection and sexual wellness. It was 34pc in Hong Kong and 24pc in Japan, declining to 20pc in the United States, 15pc in Germany and just 9pc in Britain. “While Western audiences largely view synthetic intimacy as a threat to authentic human closeness, Asian audiences appear increasingly ready to integrate AI into their personal and physical lives,” said YouGov’s Philippe Chan. While the use of AI chatbots for romance and sex is becoming more commonplace, their embodiment in robots or dolls is at a more nascent stage. Across all 9,912 respondents, only 17pc said they would consider using an “AI intimacy doll”, compared to 59pc who said they would not. Across the board, younger adults were more likely than older ones to consider using a doll — and in Japan and Germany, the number of younger people who would think about trying a doll was nearly double the national average. “While the global (general population) remains wary, the next generation is actively redefining the boundaries of companionship,” the report said. In Japan, over a third of younger adults said they believed AI dolls could provide a sense of love, outnumbering those who disagreed.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Crunchbase’s head of research Gené Teare, said the factors holding back Black founders include “access to networks, relationships, and early introductions."
Pope Leo's first encyclical voices his concerns about technology and AI. The pope cautions about the illusions AI bots can create, and how important actual human relationships are.
FOR the last three years since ChatGPT was introduced, prominent writers, editors and litterateurs have been openly hostile to the idea of AI being able to write fiction, poetry or prose — indeed, any kind of literature. The tech companies that introduced all these LLMs, imagining ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot as writing aids, study buddies, collaborators and co-authors, have thrown a nuclear bomb into the literary world, and most of its inhabitants are still in a crouch position, bracing for an impact that detonated back in 2022. But the literary world must call a truce because AI is here to stay. Moreover, any writer who teaches writing, any literary editor or agent who evaluates submissions, any practitioner called upon to judge a literary competition must become AI literate; it’s an unavoidable skill that’s simply part of the job from now on. Last week, the Commonwealth Writing Prize and Granta published five regional short story winners, one of which, Jamir Nazar’s ‘A Serpent in the Grove’, was singled out as possibly AI-generated. It raised a furore on social media but it didn’t surprise me at all. I’ve graded hundreds of student essays, judged creative writing capstones and a major Pakistani literary prize in the last year. So much is now written with the help of AI that I feel overwhelmed. I’ve been using the last two years to learn exactly how AI writes — not just its processes, but its style and its voice. I’ve studied it as much as I would study any human author, looking for how it handles dialogue, description, character and plot. Yet if I’d stuck my head in the sand and refused to touch AI for the sake of artistic integrity, I would be letting down all those people who trust my judgement and expertise. Students are addicted to AI not because they want to cheat, but because they’re terrified of looking stupid or inadequate. I spent hours tinkering with AI, asking it to write things in a Pakistani context: a synopsis for a Harry Potter book set in Lahore; descriptions of Karachi. AI churned out showy, contrived prose that looks like it’s doing a lot without actually saying anything meaningful. It blathered inanities about Karachi being a “city that remembers” and Pakistani women who “sauntered through the bazaar as if their bodies bore the weight of generations of family secrets”. AI wrote verbal pyrotechnics with no emotional connection to the city that I love. It’s too much of a temptation to expect people, especially students, not to use AI to write. Pakistan is a former British colony with a postcolonial hangover about the English language, even though few of us speak it fluently and even fewer can write it well. Yet the language of instruction in top Pakistani schools and universities has remained and always will be English. Students are addicted to AI not because they want to cheat, but because they’re terrified of looking stupid or inadequate. And the LLMs are ever-present to capitalise on that fear. I have to keep telling my students: AI is here not to help you, but to make money off you. Also, there will never be a foolproof AI-detection tool. AI will keep learning more from every person that asks it to help them write a story; AI ‘detectors’ will offer you an answer based on their own algorithms and biases. Differentiating AI writing from human writing requires human discernment, the same faculty we use to know when writing is sublime or terrible. It requires instinct, experience and a close look at the person’s work overall to see if the story is a representation of their usual style — call it the new due diligence in a post-AI world. The culprit in the Commonwealth Writers debacle was not racism or some kind of Western pandering to the postcolonial writer, but sheer ignorance on the part of judges. And underneath that ignorance lies a wilful denial about just how seismic the AI shift is. Everyone who must evaluate writing professionally is scared of the threat that AI poses to the literary arts and the earnings of the publishing industry. They’re terrified of the idea that everyone else is already so far ahead they may never be able to catch up. AI has already learned to mimic cultural inflections. It will talk about any part of the world — Guyana, South Korea, Bosnia — with pompous certainty and try to dazzle you with metaphorically bizarre surface-level descriptors or overwhelm you with atmosphere so you don’t realise there’s actually no plot or insight, no empathy, none of the beauty that makes writing an art as well as a practice. Personally, I resent the tech bros who have turned my relationship with writing from practitioner to policewoman, turning a jaundiced eye to everyone’s writing and suspecting the worst. AI is now influencing young people learning how to write to the extent that even my best students have started to sound like AI. I know that AI recognises patterns and produces only a facsimile of good writing, much like the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day. The practice of writing words to connect with a reader, communicate ideas and tell a story is a human endeavour that AI will never be able to match. Fear won’t stop me from looking it straight in the AI and declaring, “You have no power over me.” I urge everyone else — writers, teachers, judges and editors — to do the same. The writer currently teaches Expository Writing at AKUFAS. Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2026
Dell's shares surged 33% on Friday as the PC maker's blockbuster results showed that its growing focus on AI servers was helping it capitalize on the data center boom, making the company one of the biggest beneficiaries of the new technology.The company, whose AI servers are crucial components in the global AI infrastructure build-out, is set to add $68 billion to its market value of about $206 billion, if gains hold.A household name in the PC market, Dell has in recent years scaled up its AI hardware business. Dell's AI server revenue of $16.1 billion surpassed its PC unit's $14.6 billion in sales in the quarter.The company's infrastructure solutions segment, home to both traditional and AI-optimized servers as well as other storage, software and networking solutions, has consistently eclipsed PC business revenue in the past four quarters."We've been following Dell a long time and never seen anything like this. Not only do they get an "A" for execution, but you can make an argument that Dell is even the best way to play AI out there," Melius Research analysts said.Dell's outlook for "AI and traditional servers are still very conservative," as the firm has stronger prospects for selling CPU racks to AI cloud providers like CoreWeave and Nscale, the brokerage said.The blowout quarter lifted shares of server makers Super Micro Computer and Hewlett Packard Enterprise 16% and 12%, respectively, while Dell's PC rival HP also rose 8%.Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which reports results on Monday, has also been prioritizing higher-margin product orders. But it has a smaller server business compared with Dell.Dell Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke acknowledged the ongoing "supply constrained" environment, particularly concerning memory chips, but said that its customers were actively securing supply for extended periods.The company has banked on balanced price hikes as well as its scale and strong supplier relationships to wade through the memory crisis. Strong returns from its AI server business are also helping cushion the blow to margins from the soaring memory prices.HP, which focuses mostly on PCs and printers, reported 13.2% growth in its personal systemsdivision, while sales in Dell's PC business unit grew 17%, driven by a Windows 11 refresh cycle and growing focus on AI PCs.At least 13 brokerages raised their price targets on Dell stock following the results, giving it a median price target of $255, according to data compiled by LSEG. That is up from $170 before the report.Dell is on track to record its biggest one-day percentage gain if gains hold. It has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 20.21, compared with HP's 8.39 and HPE's 14.70.
Shares of Netweb Technologies surged over 15% on Friday to hit their fresh 52-week high of Rs 4,680 on the NSE amid high volumes. The stock extended its gaining streak for the third session in a row, rising 21% in this period.The rally comes on the back of a ratings upgrade by CRISIL Ratings Limited. The company's Long-term rating has been upgraded to 'Crisil A+ / Stable'; while short-term rating reaffirmed to Crisil A1. Netweb offers computing solutions with fully integrated design and manufacturing capabilities. Its HCS offering comprises HPC, Private cloud and (HCI), AI systems and enterprise workstations, High performance storage (HPS) and Data Centre ServersCrisil Ratings believes NTIL will continue to benefit from the extensive experience of its promoters and established relationships with clients.The rating agency has also listed a slew of factors that will likely aid its growth. Among them are sustained revenue growth to over Rs 4,000 crore, with diversification across the end users earning steady operating margin at 13-14%, leading to higher-than-expected net cash accruals. Efficient working capital management leading to moderate dependence on debt and sustenance of healthy financial risk profile and liquidity will be another trigger according to CRISIL.It has also highlighted caveats that include the likelihood of decline in revenue below Rs 2,000 crores or fall in operating margin to below 11%, could lead to lower-than-expected net cash accrual. Meanwhile large, debt-funded capex or substantial increase in the working capital requirement, thus weakening the financial risk profile and liquidity.CRISIL shares have been market laggards, falling over 8% in 2026 while extending its decline to 24% over the past 12 months.Netweb Technologies reported Q4FY26 revenue from operations at Rs 774 crore, growing 87% year-on-year. Its operating EBITDA for Q4FY26 stood at Rs 97 crore while the adjusted operating EBITDA for Q4FY26 was Rs 102 crore, up 72% YoY, with a margin of 13.2%.(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)
Korean supply chain management software provider Emro is stepping up its expansion in North America and Europe as growing geopolitical uncertainty, reshoring trends and supply chain disruptions drive demand for AI-powered procurement solutions. The company said Friday its AI-based supplier relationship management platform, Caidentia, drew strong interest at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo 2026, one of the world's largest supply chain conferences, held in Orlando and Barcelona in May. Develope
2026 marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of the China-ASEAN Dialogue Relations and the fifth anniversary of the ASEAN-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. At this historic juncture, facing the opportunities brought by the new era of artificial intelligence, the friendly exchanges allow Chinese and ASEAN youth to learn and seize the opportunities of the AI era, enhance friendship and mutual trust, and build momentum for practical cooperation and long-term friendship in the youth sector.
This article is adapted by the author with permission from Tech Policy Press. Read the original article. South Africa is not just another developing country struggling to govern artificial intelligence; it is the exception with leverage, and the window to act on it is closing. It holds approximately 88 percent of global platinum-group metal reserves, critical inputs to parts of the semiconductor and data-center supply chains that make AI infrastructure possible. It hosts the largest data-center market on the continent. Its existing hyperscaler relationships give it procurement leverage that most African states will never have. And a major geopolitical contest over AI infrastructure is being fought on its soil right now, between Chinese and American technology companies competing for control of the systems that will underpin an entire continent’s public sector. In physics, leverage requires three things: a fulcrum, a lever arm, and the ability to apply force. The Bushveld Complex, the world’s largest platinum-group metal deposit, is the fulcrum: a mineral endowment that gives South Africa a position in the semiconductor supply chain that no other African state holds. The since-withdrawn draft policy is the lever arm. The unresolved “OPTION” provisions in the policy are where force would be applied. Without a policy that specifies what South Africa wants in return for market access, the lever arm sits unused, and the weight of two of the world’s largest technology ecosystems settles exactly where those ecosystems want it to settle. This makes South Africa a global test case. Not because its proposed means of governance is exemplary, but because it is the one developing country with enough structural leverage to negotiate genuinely different terms, and the one that is choosing, through inaction, not to. The recent announcement of a new panel to update the draft policy is an important opportunity. But the deeper failure is not that an AI policy contained bad references. It is that no verification process caught them before the document entered the public domain. That is a systems problem, not merely a political one. It points to a missing layer in how governments are adopting AI. The contest already underway Last year, Huawei pitched an emerging-product bundle to tech executives across the continent. Huawei was now bundling access to DeepSeek’s large language model with its own cloud and storage infrastructure. The price differential was stark—in some cases by more than 90 percent. At the same time, Microsoft announced plans to spend ZAR 5.4 billion ($300 million) by the end of 2027 on cloud and AI infrastructure in South Africa, building on a prior ZAR 20.4 billion investment. Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle already have cloud regions in the country. According to one analysis, the country’s data-center market was valued at US $2.16 billion in 2024, the largest in Africa. These are not commercially neutral investments. Huawei’s infrastructure reach has been explicitly linked to Chinese strategic objectives, including a documented track record of providing governments with surveillance infrastructure through its Safe Cities network. U.S. hyperscaler investment comes with its own dependency structure: closed models, pricing set unilaterally, and terms of access that no African government has meaningfully shaped. South Africa is being asked to choose between these dependency models without a policy that specifies what it wants in return. The leverage it has There is a particular irony in South Africa’s position. The country whose mines supply platinum-group metals essential to semiconductor manufacturing, and through them to AI compute, has drafted a policy that treats it as a consumer of AI systems rather than a stakeholder in their governance. South Africa digs up the minerals that make AI possible. It has no say over the AI built from them. The AI triad framework covers algorithms, compute, and data. South Africa has no frontier model development capacity. South Africa holds significant data assets in financial services, health care, and agriculture, with no clear framework for their sovereign management. South Africa possesses PGM (Platinum Group Metals) leverage of global significance on the compute axis, currently being transferred without meaningful condition. It also has exceptionally high solar irradiance and significant renewable-energy potential. A country that can offer both critical mineral inputs and the energy to power the infrastructure those minerals help build occupies a negotiating position of unusual strength. The Draft Policy proposes no minimum terms for hyperscaler investment, no data sovereignty requirements, no technology transfer conditions and no compute visibility mechanism. Multiple provisions are explicitly left unresolved, marked “OPTION,” including the most consequential choices about how governance will function. Infrastructure decisions made now determine what is renegotiable later, and the answer is: very little. Three futures, one default The three infrastructure futures on offer each create a structurally different form of dependency, and only one creates sovereign capability. The Huawei-hosted DeepSeek integration offers low cost and open-source weights, but with data stored on infrastructure potentially accessible under Chinese legal frameworks, creating surveillance dependency in a pattern already documented across Africa. The second is U.S. closed-model dependency: higher capability, more reliable data protection, but complete API dependency on developers abroad. The third is locally hosted open-weight infrastructure: models governed under South African data-sovereignty rules, on infrastructure subject to minimum terms, developed with South African data. As Nathan Lambert at Interconnects has observed, open-weight models are likely the only realistic way to get sovereign AI off the ground as a real effort, enabling local communities and economies to integrate meaningfully with the technology. But this requires procurement conditions, not goodwill. What binding governance looks like The GovAI “Governing Through the Cloud” framework identifies four roles compute providers should accept as conditions of operating at scale: securers (protecting model weights and training data), record keepers (maintaining infrastructure usage logs), verifiers (confirming customer compliance with safety standards) and enforcers (restricting access when violations occur). These are operational requirements, not theoretical categories—specific, enforceable, and well within the bargaining power of a market of South Africa’s size and mineral position. A detailed policy analysis submitted to the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) identifies the specific provisions the final policy must contain: mandatory minimum terms for foreign compute infrastructure investments above ZAR 500 million (~$30 million); a compute reporting threshold; a National AI Safety Institute mandate covering defensive monitoring of AI capability accumulation; and National AI Champion Sector designations to create data assets for domestic model development. Each provision converts a structural advantage into a governance instrument before that advantage is foreclosed by market reality. Just as modern software security increasingly depends on knowing what components are inside a system—model provider, training data, compute environment, evaluation methods, update cadence, human review points, and failure-reporting procedures—public-sector AI governance requires a clear account of the stack before deployment, not after a problem surfaces. A public institution that cannot verify the sources in its own AI policy is unlikely to be ready to verify the AI systems it procures, deploys, or regulates. Why this is the continental test case South Africa’s choices will establish a regional precedent for what is commercially negotiable in AI infrastructure. If South Africa negotiates data-sovereignty guarantees and technology-transfer conditions as requirements for hyperscaler investment, it creates a replicable model. If Microsoft’s $300 million investment and Huawei’s infrastructure expansion proceed on standard commercial terms, as they are currently, it normalizes extractive AI infrastructure across the continent. The lesson is not specific to Africa. Governments everywhere are producing AI strategies while lacking AI assurance infrastructure. South Africa is an early warning, not an isolated case. The public comment period closed when the policy was withdrawn. But a parallel process remains live: the National Treasury’s Draft General Public Procurement Regulations—the legal instrument that will govern every government AI contract—closes for comment on June 15. Those regulations contain no AI-specific provisions. South Africa has more AI leverage than any country on the continent. Some argue, with force, that governance requirements risk deterring the infrastructure investment South Africa urgently needs: compute capacity, reliable energy, venture capital, and talent retention. That concern deserves a direct answer. Minimum procurement terms, compute reporting thresholds, and technology transfer conditions are not barriers to investment. They are the conditions under which investment serves the host country rather than extracting from it. Infrastructure built without minimum terms produces dependency. Infrastructure built with them produces leverage. To serve the public interest, its AI policy must use it. When late last month News24 reported AI-hallucinated references in the draft AI policy, Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi withdrew the draft policy. That was a mistake that could cost South Africa and the rest of the continent the initiative on this urgent issue. His more recent constitution of an independent panel is a belated step in the right direction, if it can turn South Africa’s leverage into policy. The panel—chaired by Professor Benjamin Rosman of the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, and including Professors Vukosi Marivate and Alison Gillwald of Research ICT Africa and Dr. Jabu Mtsweni of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research—has the technical and governance credibility to produce a stronger document. What it has not yet produced is a timeline. No revised draft has been scheduled. South Africa remains without a formal AI governance framework in the interim.
Stord offers a network of physical warehouses and inventory management software for e-commerce. It bills itself as a sort of anti-Amazon, giving brands "the speed to compete" while still owning their customer relationships.
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV unveiled his broad vision for the relationship between artificial intelligence and humanity in his first encyclical, a major papal letter addressed to bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. The document was presented alongside Chris Olah from Anthropic, in what appeared to be an effort to encourage dialogue between AI researchers and wider society. FRANCE 24's correspondent in Rome, Hannah Roberts, has the details.
PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence UK companies are performing “yoga-level” stretches to describe themselves as AI specialists in an attempt to capitalise on the buzz around the technology, public relations firms have said. Weary communications executives tasked with securing media coverage for brands have complained that bosses in low-tech industries or running businesses that use automation but not generative AI, are increasingly demanding they are pitched to journalists as artificial intelligence companies. Continue reading...
The hackathon, held to build user-auditing tools for Palantir customers, comes as the company struggles to address employee concerns over its relationship with ICE.