The life-changing magic of wearing smartglasses | Letters

I read with sympathy the concerns of Elle Hunt in relation to privacy issues around Meta smartglasses (I wore Meta’s smartglasses for a month – and it left me feeling like a creep, 1 April). Clearly there needs to be ongoing development of technology and protocols that protect the public from ill-intentioned users. As the chief executive of a charity supporting people with a visual impairment, however, I would like to emphasise the point touched upon in your article: how transformative this technology is already proving for blind people.We are seeing significant numbers of our visually impaired staff and clients using Meta glasses in conjunction with their mobile phones to improve their ability to perform ordinary functions that most of us take for granted. A visual impairment can be disempowering and isolating

Tell us: do you use AI chatbots to make decisions for you?

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are now a part of everyday life.More and more people are using them to help make decisions in their lives, like sending text messages, deciding what to cook, or navigating relationships.We want to hear about your experiences of using chatbots. Are you addicted to them? And what type of decisions are you using them for?You can tell us your experiences of using chatbots using this form.Please include as much detail as possible

An AI company with an arsenal of spacecraft: what exactly is SpaceX?

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you as I listen to George Handel’s Messiah for Easter.SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market last week at a reportedly astronomical valuation. My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn

Porn, dog poo and social media snaps: the ‘taskers’ scraping the internet for AI firm part-owned by Meta

Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials.However, workers for the platform said they have become involved in scraping an array of other people’s personal data – in what they described as a morally uncomfortable exercise that diverged significantly from refining high-level systems.Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense companies

‘There’s a lot of desperation’: skilled older workers turn to AI training to stay afloat

When Patrick Ciriello lost his job and couldn’t find work for nearly a year, his family’s foundation crumbled.“You hear about people who hit rock bottom,” Ciriello told the Guardian. “Well, I was there.”For most of his career, the 60-year-old with a master’s degree in information management designed software systems for banks, universities and pharmaceutical companies. But a series of economic shocks – the dotcom crash, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid pandemic – cost him jobs, sometimes forcing him to dip into his savings and retirement funds

Tech companies are cutting jobs and betting on AI. The payoff is far from guaranteed

AI experts say we’re living in an experiment that may fundamentally change the model of workSign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inboxHundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they have slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year