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'Your craft is obsolete': WiseTech staff in limbo as AI touted as better than humans

The Guardian

WiseTech's headquarters in Sydney, where staff fear many jobs will be lost to AI. WiseTech's headquarters in Sydney, where staff fear many jobs will be lost to AI. 'Your craft is obsolete': WiseTech staff in limbo as AI touted as better than humans Staff at WiseTech have been waiting almost three months to be told if they are among the 2,000 people the logistics software company is to cut due to advances in AI, with workers criticising the wait as stressful and "ridiculous". The comments come as its founder on Tuesday told investors an AI agent could learn a human's job in just 15 minutes, according to the Australian Financial Review. The Australian Stock Exchange-listed company announced in late February that it would lay off almost 30% of its workforce across 40 countries, with 2,000 of the 7,000 jobs set to go over the next 18 months. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Some areas would be hit harder than others, with product and development and customer service teams expected to be reduced by up to 50%, the chief executive, Zubin Appoo, told an investor briefing in February. "The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over," Appoo said.


Online Generalised Predictive Coding

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Despite being confined within the interior darkness of the skull, the human brain possesses a remarkable ability to interpret, understand and analyse the world out there, plan for unseen futures, and make decisions that can alter the course of events. This extraordinary capability is conjectured to come from the brain's function as a predictive machine, constantly inferring the hidden causes of its sensory inputs to maintain a coherent model of its environment. This view, which dates back to Helmholtz's idea of "perception as unconscious inference" (von Helmholtz, 1866)--evolving into the "Bayesian brain" hypothesis (Doya et al., 2007)--suggests that the brain operates as a constructive statistical organ. It updates its beliefs about the external world based on incoming sensory data under a generative model (GM). The GM furnishes the brain with a structured representation that supports probabilistic beliefs over both the latent dynamical states of the external world, corresponding to the generative process (GP), as well as the observation mappings through which these states give rise to sensory signals. Essentially, the brain continually refines its probabilistic beliefs about both the latent states and the causal mechanisms of the world through a process of online triple estimation, jointly optimising beliefs over: hidden states, model parameters, and their associated uncertainties in accordance with the principles of Bayesian inference (Eells, 2004; Parr et al., 2022). More technically, given a sensory observation yt at time t, perception can be formulated as an online triple estimation scheme, whose three components are: 1) online hidden state inference, 2) online parameter learning, and 3) online uncertainty estimation, all three of which are the core components of our proposed online generalised PC scheme and are elaborated in Section.





SurDis: ASurface Discontinuity Dataset for Wearable Technology to Assist Blind Navigation in Urban Environments

Neural Information Processing Systems

According to World Health Organization, there is an estimated 2.2 billion people with a near or distance vision impairment worldwide. Difficulty in self-navigation is one of the greatest challenges to independence for the blind and low vision (BLV) people. Through consultations with several BLV service providers, we realized that negotiating surface discontinuities is one of the very prominent challenges when navigating an outdoor environment within the urban. Surface discontinuities are commonly formed by rises and drop-offs along a pathway. They could be a threat to balancing during a walk and perceiving such a threat is highly challenging to the BLVs.