Technology

The mass adoption of ChatGPT is yet to have a big disruptive impact on US jobs, contradicting claims by chief executives and tech bosses that AI is already upending labour markets. Financial Times: Research from economists at the Yale University Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think-tank indicates that, since OpenAI launched its popular chatbot in November 2022, generative AI has not had a more dramatic effect on employment than earlier technological breakthroughs. The research, based on an analysis of official data on the labour market and figures from the tech industry on usage and exposure to AI, also finds little evidence that the tools are putting people out of work. The study follows widespread concern that generative AI will spark job losses -- and even the disappearance of certain types of work -- amid a US labour market that has recently weakened.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Lufthansa announced plans to cut 4,000 roles on Monday as it aims to increase profitability and lean on AI to drive efficiency. The airline group said it will eliminate a total of 4,000 FTE, or full-time equivalent, roles worldwide by 2030. The company is targeting primarily admin roles, the majority of which will be affected at its home base in Germany, as part of a broader restructuring strategy. "The Lufthansa Group is reviewing which activities will no longer be necessary in the future, for example due to duplication of work. In particular, the profound changes brought about by digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence will lead to greater efficiency in many areas and processes," the company said in a release issued during its Capital Markets Day in Munich. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said earlier this year that artificial intelligence had partially helped to shrink the company's headcount by 40% down from 5,000 employees to almost 3,000.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: For the first time, a new study has tested the effectiveness of trigger warnings in real life scenarios, revealing that the vast majority of young adults choose to ignore them. A new Flinders University study has found that nearly 90% of young people who saw a trigger warning still chose to view the content, saying that they did so out of curiosity, rather than because they felt emotionally prepared or protected. The findings published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry aligned with a growing body of lab-based research suggesting that trigger warnings rarely lead to the avoidance of potentially distressing material.

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Independent UK bookshops will now be able to sell ebooks via a new platform (Bookshop.org's expansion), keeping 100% of profits and offering a non-Amazon way to reach digital readers. "Bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon," said Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK. "Digital readers don't depend on Amazon's monopoly any more, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org." The Guardian reports: Bookshop.org launched in the UK in November 2020 as a platform for independent bookshops to sell physical books. Bookshops receive 30% of the cover price from each sale they generate; so far, the UK site has generated 4.5 million pounds for independent bookshops. Customers will also now be able to buy ebooks through a bookshop of their choice. Profits from orders without a specified bookshop will be added to a shared pool, which will be distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform. [...] The platform will launch with a catalogue of more than a million ebooks from all major publishers. It will be available online via a web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps on Apple and Android. "Due to Amazon's proprietary digital rights management [DRM] software and publishers' DRM requirements, it's not currently possible to buy DRM-protected ebooks from Bookshop.org or local bookshops and read them on your Kindle," said Bookshop.org. However, the site is working with the e-reader company Kobo to support Kobo devices "later this year," and longer term would "love to offer our own eInk device."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people's skin cells and then fertilizing it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. [...] The Oregon Health and Science University research team's technique takes the nucleus -- which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body -- out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions. So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep -- the world's first cloned mammal -- born back in 1996. However, this egg is not ready to be fertilized by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes. You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has. So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide). The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, showed 82 functional eggs were made. These were fertilized with sperm and some progressed onto the early stages of embryos development. None were developed beyond the six-day-stage. The technique is far from polished as the egg randomly chooses which chromosomes to discard. It needs to end up with one of each of the 23 types to prevent disease, but ends up with two of some and none of others. There is also a poor success rate (around 9%) and the chromosomes miss an important process where they rearrange their DNA, called crossing over. Prof Mitalipov, a world-renowned pioneer in the field, told me: "We have to perfect it. "Eventually, I think that's where the future will go because there are more and more patients that cannot have children."

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