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This article is part of our series that explores thebusiness of artificial intelligence

Digital technologies, and at their forefront artificial intelligence, are triggering fundamental shifts in society, politics, education, economy, and other fundamental aspects of life. These changes provide opportunities for unprecedented growth across different sectors of the economy. But at the same time, they entail challenges that organizations must overcome before they can tap into their full potential.

In a recent talk at an online conference organized by Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson discussed some of these opportunities and challenges.

Brynjolfsson, who directs Stanfords Digital Economy Lab, believes that in the coming decade, the use of artificial intelligence will be much more widespread than it is today. But its adoption will also face a period of lull, also known as the J-curve.

Theres a growing gap between what the technology is capable of and what it is already doing versus how we are responding to that, Brynjolfsson says. And thats where a lot of our societys biggest challenges and problems and some of our biggest opportunities lie.

According to Brynjolfsson, the next decade will see significantly higher productivity thanks to a wave of powerful technologiesespecially machine learningthat are finding their way into every computing device and application.

Advances in computer vision have been tremendous, especially in areas such as image recognition and medical imaging. Talking to phones, watches, and smart speakers has become commonplace thanks to advances in natural language processing and speech recognition. Product recommendation, ad placement, insurance underwriting, loan approval, and many other applications have benefited immensely from advances in machine learning.

In many areas, machine learning is reducing costs and accelerating production. For example, the application of large language models in programming can help software developers become much more productive and achieve more in less time.

In other areas, machine learning can help create applications that did not exist before. For example, generative deep learning models are creating new applications for arts, music, and other creative work. In areas such as online shopping, advances in machine learning can create major shifts in business models, such as moving from shopping-then-shipping to shipping-then-shopping.

The lockdowns and urgency caused by the covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of these technologies in different sectors, including remote work tools, robotic process automation, powered drug research, and factory automation.

The pandemic has been horrific in so many ways, but another thing its done is its accelerated the digitization of the economy, compressing in about 20 weeks what would have taken maybe 20 years of digitization, Brynjolfsson says. Weve all invested in technologies that are allowing us to adapt to a more digital world. Were not going to stay as remote as we are now, but were not going all the way back either. And that increased digitization of business processes and skills compresses the timeframe for us to adopt these new ways of working and ultimately drive higher productivity.

The productivity potential of machine learning technologies has one big caveat.

Historically, when these new technologies become available, they dont immediately translate into productivity growth. Often theres a period where productivity declines, where theres a lull, Brynjolfsson says. And the reason theres this lull is that you need to reinvent your organizations, you need to develop new business processes.

Brynjolfsson calls this the Productivity J-Curve and has documented it in a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Basically, the great potential caused by new general-purpose technologies like the steam engine, electricity, and more recently machine learning requires fundamental changes in business processes and workflows, the co-invention of new products and business models, and investment in human capital.

These investments and changes often take several years, and during this period, they dont yield tangible results. During this phase, the companies are creating intangible assets, according to Brynjolfsson. For example, they might be training and reskilling their workforce to employ these new technologies. They might be redesigning their factories or instrumenting them with new sensor technologies to take advantage of machine learning models. They might need to revamp their data infrastructure and create data lakes on which they can train and run ML models.

These efforts might cost millions of dollars (or billions in the case of large corporations) and make no change in the companys output in the short term. At first glance, it seems that costs are increasing without any return on investment. When these changes reach their turning point, they result in a sudden increase in productivity.

Were in this period right now where were making a lot of that painful transition, restructuring work, and theres a lot of companies that are struggling with that, Brynjolfsson says. But were working through that, and these J-curves will lead to higher productivityaccording to our research, were near the bottom and turning up.

Unfortunately, adapting to AI and other new digital technologies does not run on a predictable path. Most firms arent making the transition correctly or lack the creativity and understanding to make the transition. Various studies show that most applied machine learning projects fail.

Only about the top 10-15 percent of firms are doing most of the investment in these intangibles. The other 85-90 percent of firms are lagging behind and are hardly making any of these restructuring needed, Brynjolfsson says. This is not just the big tech firms. This is within every industry, manufacturing, retail, finance, resources. In each category, were seeing the leading firms pulling away from the rest. Theres a growing performance gap.

But while adopting new technologies is going to be difficult, it is happening at a much faster pace in comparison to previous cycles of technological advances because we are better prepared to make the transition.

I think what is becoming clear is that its going to happen a lot faster in part because we have a much more professional class of people trying to study what works and what doesnt work, Brynjolfsson says. Some of them are in business schools and academia. A lot of them are in consulting companies. Some of them are journalists. And there are people who are describing which practices work and which dont.

Another element that can help immensely is the availability of machine learning and data science tools to process and study the huge amounts of data available on organizations, people, and the economy.

For example, Brynjolfsson and his colleagues are working on a big dataset of 200 million job postings, which include the full text of the job description along with other information. Using different machine learning models and natural language processing techniques, they can transform the job posts into numerical vectors that can then be used for various tasks.

We think of all the jobs as this mathematical space. We can understand how they can relate to each other, Brynjolfsson says.

For example, they can make simple inferences such as how similar or different two or more job posts are based on their text descriptions. They can use other techniques such as clustering and graph neural networks to draw more important conclusions such as what kind of skills are more in demand, or how would the characteristics of a job post change if you modified the description to add AI skills such as Python or TensorFlow. Companies can use these models to find holes in their hiring strategies or to analyze the hiring decisions of their competitors and leading organizations.

Those kinds of tools just didnt exist as recently as five years ago, and I think its a revolution that is just as important as the microscope or some of the other revolutions in science, Brynjolfsson says. We now have them for social sciences and business to have this kind of visibility. Thats allowing us to make a transition a lot more rapidly than before.

However, Brynjolfsson warns that not many companies are using these kinds of tools. This is perhaps further testament to his previous point that companies have not yet figured out the right transition strategy and are relying on old methods to restructure and adapt themselves to the age of AI. And at the center of this strategy should be the correct use of human capital.

You have hundreds of billions of dollars of human capital, of skills walking out the door, and then the company tries to hire back people with the skills that they need. What they dont realize is that the workers that they let go often had skills that were very adjacent to the ones theyre hiring for, Brynjolfsson says.

With the help of machine learning, they will have better visibility and knowledge of their skill adjacencies, Brynjolfsson says. For example, a company might discover that instead of laying off a bunch of people and looking to hire new talent, perhaps all they need to do is a little bit of retraining and repurposing of their workforce.

Its much more expensive to hire somebody fresh than would have been for them to take some of those people who are already in the company and say, if we teach you Python or customer service skills or other skills, you can be doing this job that were looking to hire people for, Brynjolfsson says. My hope is that, in the coming decade, workers will be in a much better position to take full advantage of their capabilities and skills. And it will be good for the companies too to understand all the assets that they have in there, and machine learning can help a lot with understanding those relationships.

Link:
AIs J-curve and upcoming productivity boom - TechTalks

When President Bill Clinton tapped Stephen Breyer to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, he told the country that Breyer would be a justice who would "strike the right balance between the need for discipline and order, being firm on law enforcement issues but really sticking in there for the Bill of Rights."

The news of Breyer's impending retirement at the close of the Supreme Court's current term gives us an opportunity to weigh Clinton's words against Breyer's record. Alas, the former president proved to be only half right. Breyer was certainly "firm" in his deference toward law enforcement. But that same judicial deference often led Breyer to do the opposite of "sticking in there for the Bill of Rights" when major Fourth Amendment cases arrived at SCOTUS.

Take Navarette v. California (2014). At issue was an anonymous and uncorroborated 911 phone call about an allegedly dangerous driver which led the police to make a traffic stop that led to a drug bust. According to the 54 majority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, "the stop complied with the Fourth Amendment because, under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had reasonable suspicion that the driver was intoxicated." Law enforcement won big and Breyer signed on.

The deficiencies of that judgment were spelled out in a forceful dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia. "The Court's opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail," wrote Scalia, who was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. "All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police." That disturbing scenario, Scalia wrote, "is not my concept, and I am sure it would not be the Framers', of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures." Breyer was apparently untroubled by that Fourth Amendmentshredding scenario.

Notably, this was not the first time that Scalia was more "liberal" than Breyer in a 54 Fourth Amendment case. One year earlier, in Maryland v. King (2013), Breyer joined Justice Anthony Kennedy's controversial majority opinion allowing police to conduct warrantless DNA swab tests incident to arrest.

"Make no mistake about it," Scalia protested in dissent, joined (again) by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. "As an entirely predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason." Breyer was apparently untroubled by that disturbing scenario too.

Breyer's retirement will be good news for the Fourth Amendment as long as President Joe Biden picks a replacement who resembles Scalia more than Breyer in these sorts of cases.

See more here:
Stephen Breyer's Retirement Is Good News for the Fourth Amendment - Reason

WASHINGTON U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., today released the following statement regarding reports of federal contractors flying illegal immigrants from the southern border to other points across the country late at night:

The recent reports of immigrants being driven and flown across the country in the dead of night are truly breathtaking, Wicker said. The crisis at our border has steadily worsened since President Biden took office and shows no signs of slowing down. Strong countries need strong borders. The constant surge of migrants across our border threatens to undermine American national security and the rule of law. President Biden should act now to restore confidence in our border and reinstitute the tough policies of the last administration.

Until the President acts to get this crisis under control, Congress should cut off funding for this transportation in any future appropriation and investigate the wholesale failure of the Biden Administration to prevent this crisis.

The flights, which have been widely reported after months of surging illegal migration, regularly distribute illegal immigrants who are awaiting trial to communities across the country with little to no notice given to local authorities.

Wicker called out the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in August when a group of 90 migrants were dropped off at a bus station in Natchez, Miss.

Read more about Senator Wickers recent work on the border issue here.

Go here to read the rest:
Wicker Statement on Illegal Immigration Surge - US Senator Roger Wicker - Senator Roger Wicker

The Biden administration doesnt want media attention on illegal immigration, its open border policies, or the results of those policies. How do we know? A security officer just said so, in anexplosive video of secretive, dark-of-night flightstransporting illegal immigrants to various points throughout the U.S.

This video merits coast-to-coast media coverage, not just to expose the administrations stealth operations that flout the laws, but to encourage Americans and leaders at all levels of government to demand that the administration start protecting our border, our country, and our citizens.

The list of lies administration officials have told regarding their handling of illegal immigration is extensive and still growing. How many times have they refused to call the historic numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border a crisis or implausibly claimed the border is closed?

>>>Biden Administration has Built Back Chaos, Uncertainty and Misery

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas grossly pushed the false racist narrative that Border Patrol agents on horseback mistreated migrants attempting to illegally enter during the Del Rio International Bridge episode. Bidens Federal Aviation Administration made up a ridiculous drone ban, prohibitingFox News from showing any more footageof the thousands of mostly Haitian illegal immigrants amassing under that bridge. (The FAA rescinded the ban after reporter Bill Melugin continued filming the Del Rio crisis from a Texas Department of Public Safety helicopter.)

Over the last several months, night flights of illegal migrants have been periodically reported in places such as Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In each instance, state and local officials received no notice they were coming, let alone given an option to refuse them admission. The administration has no apparent concern with how these air lifts may burden local officials with additional costs and facilities capacity in areas such as education, housing, healthcare and law enforcement.

When asked why the administration was flying illegal immigrants in the middle of the night, press secretary Jen Psaki belittled the reporter and then lied. She claimed that the flights were resettling unaccompanied children. Yet videos of these surreptitious flights clearly show full grown adults emerging from the planes. At best, this is lying by omission.

Videos posted this week reveal more lies by the Administration. They show streams of adult males being released inBrownsville and San Antonio, Texas. This reportedly has been occurring since last spring. Some are known to have criminal records, including drunk driving, assault, and drug possession. Yet Biden officials have stated that only family units and unaccompanied alien children are being release, not single adults.

By law, Mexican males are usually subject to Expedited Removal to quickly return them over the border. If they are from a non-contiguous country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement usually detains them because they are not subject to the arbitrary 20-day Flores detention rule applied to families and unaccompanied children.

Releasing single adult malesis a game ender for trying to enforce immigration law. Releasing this population means all demographics of illegal immigrants are now being released whether single or a family, young or old. By failing to detain or remove single adult males, the Administration has removed the last disincentive to illegal immigration. Smugglers will market this and enrich themselves even beyond the billions theyve already made since Biden took office.

>>>Federal Report Shows Open Borders Bring Increased Crimes and Costs for Taxpayers

Single adult males are the easiest group for terrorists to hide among as large numbers are released into the U.S. Historically, single adult males made up the largest number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. Now, we can expect those numbers to balloon once again.

The Biden administration calls their immigration approach fair, orderly, and humane. But if they are so proud of their policies and their practice of processing so many non-citizens into the U.S., why do it under the darkness of night? And why lie about it?

This Administration tells us not to believe our lying eyes. Americans need to open their eyes, watch the video, and demand that Washington secure our borders NOW.

More:
Biden Encourages Massive Illegal Immigration and Tries To Hide It With Secret Flights - Heritage.org

Each year through the budgetary process, Congress allocates approximately $2 billion to Border Patrol. The funding is justified and defended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which claims DHS works to protect the American people and economy by preventing the illegal movement of people and contraband across U.S. borders while facilitating legitimate trade and travel.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the mission of the force is to, Protect the American people, safeguard our borders, and enhance the nations economic prosperity.

Further, the core values include a dedication to defending and upholding the Constitution of the United States. Integrity is touted as the cornerstone of the work agents do, guided by the highest ethical and moral principles bringing honor to ourselves and our agency.

But since President BidenJoe BidenBriahna Joy Gray: Biden's Supreme Court promise 'bare minimum' gesture to Black voters House GOP leader says State of the Union attendance could be capped: report Record enrollment numbers send a clear message about health care affordability, access MORE took office in January 2021, the unofficial mission of Border Patrol has shifted to processing millions of illegal immigrants. This takes important time away from essential frontline patrols and drug interdictions. As a consequence, Border Patrol has become detached from its stated mission and priorities.

On Oct. 4, 2021, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was reimplementing Title 42, which requires the immediate expulsion of single adults.

The Department of Homeland Security will continue to process individuals in accordance with the updated Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) Title 42 Order. As part the United States COVID-19 mitigation efforts, DHS will continue to expel single adults and families encountered at the Southwest Border, the Department of Homeland Security released in a statement.

Since then, the policy has hardly been enforced, and recent video footage obtained by Fox News shows thousands of single adult males being processed, put onto planes or buses and taken to cities across the country for release. Worse, Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed many of the men released have serious and violent criminal records.

According to U.S. Code, domestic transportation of unauthorized aliens, concealing or harboring unauthorized aliens, encouraging or inducing unauthorized aliens to enter the United States, and engaging in a conspiracy or aiding and abetting any of the preceding acts is a federal crime. The federal government has engaged in the transport of countless illegal immigrants.

Tensions boiled over last week when agents openly confronted Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about illegal immigration and how leadership is handling the situation.

Under this administration, in the last year, weve got the highest fentanyl deaths in the history of our country, one agent said. How many [fentanyl seizures] are we missing because were focusing on these families?

For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Good men are doing nothing. Youre allowing illegal aliens to be dropped off in communities, another added.

Ortiz shot back by claiming he shows up every day to carry out the mission, but did not clearly define what that mission is or address concerns about Bidens border policy violating the law enforcement agencys official mission.

We continue to do the job and the mission that we signed up for. We all signed up for it, we all raised our hand, Ortiz said. Everyday I wake up and Im committed to this organization.

Meanwhile, calls for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro MayorkasAlejandro MayorkasVandals strike Chicago synagogue, businesses Few migrants escape Remain in Mexico, despite Biden-era reforms Senate Republicans press federal authorities for information on Texas synagogue hostage-taker MORE to step down are growing louder as he knowingly mandates the violation of U.S. immigration law.

He has lost the trust and confidence of the men and women of DHS law enforcement, former Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said during a recent event at the Heritage Foundation. I continue to speak with our frontline agents, and their anger, exhaustion, and frustration with this secretary are apparent. He has not only destroyed the most secure border in our lifetimehe has repeatedly lied to the American people about the cascading impacts to our countrys public safety, health, and national security.

American taxpayers are owed a Border Patrol that lives up to its mission to protect the country not one that simply processes law breakers through a system that ultimately places them into American communities. Whats happening at the border and the behavior of so-called leadership is anything but honorable. Worse, implementing President Bidens open border agenda has forced agents to unwillingly violate their oaths and to disregard the law.

Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.

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Pavlich: The tattered mission of Border Patrol | TheHill - The Hill