The e-Elephant in the Room: A Compact Guide Through Digitality

The article is devoted to the history of the development of ICT and AI, their current and expected future achievements, and the problems (which have already arisen but will become even more acute in the future) associated with the development of these technologies and their widespread application in society. It shows the close connection between the development of AI and cognitive science, the penetration of ICT and AI into various spheres, particularly health care, and the very intimate areas related to the creation of digital copies of the deceased and posthumous contact with them. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of ‘artificial intelligence’, including the definition of generative AI. The authors analyse recent achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence. There are given descriptions of the basic models, in particular the Large Linguistic Models (LLM), and forecasts of the development of AI and the dangers that await us in the coming decades. The authors identify the forces behind the aspiration to create AI, which is increasingly approaching the capabilities of the so-called general/universal AI, and also suggest desirable measures to limit and channel the development of artificial intelligence. It is emphasized that the threats and dangers of the development of ICT and AI are particularly aggravated by the monopolization of their development by the state, intelligence services, major corporations and those often referred to as globalists. The article provides forecasts of the development of computers, ICT and AI in the coming decades, and also shows the changes in society that will be associated with them. The study consists of two articles. The first, published in the previous is-sue of the journal, has provided a brief historical overview and characterized the current situation in the field of ICT and AI. It has also analyzed the concepts of artificial intelligence, including generative AI, changes in the understanding of AI related to the emergence of the so-called large language models and related new types of AI programs (ChatGPT and similar models). The article has discussed the serious problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. This second article describes and comments on the current assessments of breakthroughs in the field of AI, analyzes various predictions, and provides the authors' own assessments and predictions of future developments. Particular attention is paid to the problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of AI, with the fact that advances in this field become a powerful means of control over the population, imposing ideologies, priorities and lifestyles, influencing the results of elections, and a tool to undermine security and geopolitical struggles.

The article is devoted to the history of the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), their current and probable future achievements, and the problems (which have already arisen, but will become even more acute in the future) associated with the development of these technologies and their active introduction in society. The close connection between the development of AI and cognitive science, the penetration of ICT and AI into various fields, in particular the field of health care, is shown. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of ‘artificial intelligence’, including the definition of generative AI. We analyze recent achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence, describe the basic models, in particular the Large Linguistic Models (LLM), and forecast the development of AI and the dangers that await us in the coming decades. We identify the forces behind the aspiration to create artificial intelligence, which is increasingly approaching the capabilities of the so-called general/universal AI, and also suggest desirable measures to limit and channel the development of artificial intelligence. The authors emphasize that the threats and dangers of the development of ICT and AI are particularly aggravated by the monopolization of their development by the state, intelligence services, large corporations and those often referred to as globalists. The article forecasts the development of computers, ICT and AI in the coming decades, and also shows the changes in society that will be associated with them. The study consists of two articles. The first, presented below, provides a brief historical overview and characterizes the current situation in the field of ICT and AI, it also analyzes the concepts of artificial intelligence, including generative AI, changes in the understanding of AI related to the emergence of the so-called large language models and related new types of AI programs (ChatGPT). The article discusses the serious problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. The second article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, describes and comments on current assessments of breakthroughs in the field of AI, analyzes various forecasts, and the authors give their own assessments and forecasts of future developments. Particular attention is given to the problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of AI, the fact that achievements in the field of AI are becoming a powerful means of controlling the population, imposing ideology and choice, influencing the results of elections, and a weapon for undermining security and geopolitical struggle.

The article is devoted to the history of the development of ICT and AI, their current and expected future achievements, and the problems (which have already arisen but will become even more acute in the future) assiciated with the development of these technologies and their widespread application in society. It shows the close connection between the development of AI and cognitive science, the penetration of ICT and AI into various spheres, particularly health care, and the very intimate areas related to the creation of digital copies of the deceased and posthumous contact with them. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of “artificial intelligence”, including the definition of generative AI. The authors analyse recent achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence. There are given descriptions of the basic models, in particular the Large Linguistic Models (LLM), and forecasts of the development of AI and the dangers that await us in the coming decades. The authors identify the forces behind the aspiration to create AI, which is increasingly approaching the capabilities of the so-called general/universal AI, and also suggest desirable measures to limit and channel the development of artificial intelligence. It is emphasized that the threats and dangers of the development of ICT and AI are particularly aggravated by the monopolization of their development by the state, intelligence services, major corporations and those often referred to as globalists. The article provides forecasts of the development of computers, ICT and AI in the coming decades, and also shows the changes in society that will be associated with them. The study consists of two articles. The first, published in the previous issue of the journal, provided a brief historical overview and characterized the current situation in the field of ICT and AI. It also analyzed the concepts of artificial intelligence, including generative AI, changes in the understanding of AI in connection with the emergence of the so-called large language models and related new types of AI programs (ChatGPT and similar models). The article discussed the serious problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. This second article describes and comments on current assessments of breakthroughs in the field of AI, analyzes various predictions, and provides the authors’ own assessments and predictions of future developments. Particular attention is paid to the problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of AI, with the fact that advances in this field are becoming a powerful means of control over the population, imposing ideology, priorities and lifestyles, influencing the results of elections, and a tool to undermine security and geopolitical struggles.

This dialogue is from an early scene in the 2014 film Ex Machina, in which Nathan has invited Caleb to determine whether Nathan has succeeded in creating artificial intelligence.1 The achievement of powerful artificial general intelligence has long held a grip on our imagination not only for its exciting as well as worrisome possibilities, but also for its suggestion of a new, uncharted era for humanity. In opening his 2021 BBC Reith Lectures, titled "Living with Artificial Intelligence," Stuart Russell states that "the eventual emergence of general-purpose artificial intelligence [will be] the biggest event in human history."2Over the last decade, a rapid succession of impressive results has brought wider public attention to the possibilities of powerful artificial intelligence. In machine vision, researchers demonstrated systems that could recognize objects as well as, if not better than, humans in some situations. Then came the games. Complex games of strategy have long been associated with superior intelligence, and so when AI systems beat the best human players at chess, Atari games, Go, shogi, StarCraft, and Dota, the world took notice. It was not just that Als beat humans (although that was astounding when it first happened), but the escalating progression of how they did it: initially by learning from expert human play, then from self-play, then by teaching themselves the principles of the games from the ground up, eventually yielding single systems that could learn, play, and win at several structurally different games, hinting at the possibility of generally intelligent systems.3Speech recognition and natural language processing have also seen rapid and headline-grabbing advances. Most impressive has been the emergence recently of large language models capable of generating human-like outputs. Progress in language is of particular significance given the role language has always played in human notions of intelligence, reasoning, and understanding. While the advances mentioned thus far may seem abstract, those in driverless cars and robots have been more tangible given their embodied and often biomorphic forms. Demonstrations of such embodied systems exhibiting increasingly complex and autonomous behaviors in our physical world have captured public attention.Also in the headlines have been results in various branches of science in which AI and its related techniques have been used as tools to advance research from materials and environmental sciences to high energy physics and astronomy.4 A few highlights, such as the spectacular results on the fifty-year-old protein-folding problem by AlphaFold, suggest the possibility that AI could soon help tackle science's hardest problems, such as in health and the life sciences.5While the headlines tend to feature results and demonstrations of a future to come, AI and its associated technologies are already here and pervade our daily lives more than many realize. Examples include recommendation systems, search, language translators - now covering more than one hundred languages - facial recognition, speech to text (and back), digital assistants, chatbots for customer service, fraud detection, decision support systems, energy management systems, and tools for scientific research, to name a few. In all these examples and others, AI-related techniques have become components of other software and hardware systems as methods for learning from and incorporating messy real-world inputs into inferences, predictions, and, in some cases, actions. As director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, Nick Bostrom noted back in 2006, "A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."6As the scope, use, and usefulness of these systems have grown for individual users, researchers in various fields, companies and other types of organizations, and governments, so too have concerns when the systems have not worked well (such as bias in facial recognition systems), or have been misused (as in deepfakes), or have resulted in harms to some (in predicting crime, for example), or have been associated with accidents (such as fatalities from self-driving cars).7Dædalus last devoted a volume to the topic of artificial intelligence in 1988, with contributions from several of the founders of the field, among others. Much of that issue was concerned with questions of whether research in AI was making progress, of whether AI was at a turning point, and of its foundations, mathematical, technical, and philosophical-with much disagreement. However, in that volume there was also a recognition, or perhaps a rediscovery, of an alternative path toward AI - the connectionist learning approach and the notion of neural nets-and a burgeoning optimism for this approach's potential. Since the 1960s, the learning approach had been relegated to the fringes in favor of the symbolic formalism for representing the world, our knowledge of it, and how machines can reason about it. Yet no essay captured some of the mood at the time better than Hilary Putnam's "Much Ado About Not Very Much." Putnam questioned the Dædalus issue itself: "Why a whole issue of Dædalus? Why don't we wait until AI achieves something and then have an issue?" He concluded:This volume of Dædalus is indeed the first since 1988 to be devoted to artificial intelligence. This volume does not rehash the same debates; much else has happened since, mostly as a result of the success of the machine learning approach that was being rediscovered and reimagined, as discussed in the 1988 volume. This issue aims to capture where we are in AI's development and how its growing uses impact society. The themes and concerns herein are colored by my own involvement with AI. Besides the television, films, and books that I grew up with, my interest in AI began in earnest in 1989 when, as an undergraduate at the University of Zimbabwe, I undertook a research project to model and train a neural network.9 I went on to do research on AI and robotics at Oxford. Over the years, I have been involved with researchers in academia and labs developing AI systems, studying AI's impact on the economy, tracking AI's progress, and working with others in business, policy, and labor grappling with its opportunities and challenges for society.10The authors of the twenty-five essays in this volume range from AI scientists and technologists at the frontier of many of AI's developments to social scientists at the forefront of analyzing AI's impacts on society. The volume is organized into ten sections. Half of the sections are focused on AI's development, the other half on its intersections with various aspects of society. In addition to the diversity in their topics, expertise, and vantage points, the authors bring a range of views on the possibilities, benefits, and concerns for society. I am grateful to the authors for accepting my invitation to write these essays.Before proceeding further, it may be useful to say what we mean by artificial intelligence. The headlines and increasing pervasiveness of AI and its associated technologies have led to some conflation and confusion about what exactly counts as AI. This has not been helped by the current trend-among researchers in science and the humanities, startups, established companies, and even governments-to associate anything involving not only machine learning, but data science, algorithms, robots, and automation of all sorts with AI. This could simply reflect the hype now associated with AI, but it could also be an acknowledgment of the success of the current wave of AI and its related techniques and their wide-ranging use and usefulness. I think both are true; but it has not always been like this. In the period now referred to as the AI winter, during which progress in AI did not live up to expectations, there was a reticence to associate most of what we now call AI with AI.Two types of definitions are typically given for AI. The first are those that suggest that it is the ability to artificially do what intelligent beings, usually human, can do. For example, artificial intelligence is:The human abilities invoked in such definitions include visual perception, speech recognition, the capacity to reason, solve problems, discover meaning, generalize, and learn from experience. Definitions of this type are considered by some to be limiting in their human-centricity as to what counts as intelligence and in the benchmarks for success they set for the development of AI (more on this later). The second type of definitions try to be free of human-centricity and define an intelligent agent or system, whatever its origin, makeup, or method, as:This type of definition also suggests the pursuit of goals, which could be given to the system, self-generated, or learned.13 That both types of definitions are employed throughout this volume yields insights of its own.These definitional distinctions notwithstanding, the term AI, much to the chagrin of some in the field, has come to be what cognitive and computer scientist Marvin Minsky called a "suitcase word."14 It is packed variously, depending on who you ask, with approaches for achieving intelligence, including those based on logic, probability, information and control theory, neural networks, and various other learning, inference, and planning methods, as well as their instantiations in software, hardware, and, in the case of embodied intelligence, systems that can perceive, move, and manipulate objects.Three questions cut through the discussions in this volume: 1) Where are we in AI's development? 2) What opportunities and challenges does AI pose for society? 3) How much about AI is really about us?Notions of intelligent machines date all the way back to antiquity.15 Philosophers, too, among them Hobbes, Leibnitz, and Descartes, have been dreaming about AI for a long time; Daniel Dennett suggests that Descartes may have even anticipated the Turing Test.16 The idea of computation-based machine intelligence traces to Alan Turing's invention of the universal Turing machine in the 1930s, and to the ideas of several of his contemporaries in the mid-twentieth century. But the birth of artificial intelligence as we know it and the use of the term is generally attributed to the now famed Dartmouth summer workshop of 1956. The workshop was the result of a proposal for a two-month summer project by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon whereby "An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves."17In their respective contributions to this volume, "From So Simple a Beginning: Species of Artificial Intelligence" and "If We Succeed," and in different but complementary ways, Nigel Shadbolt and Stuart Russell chart the key ideas and developments in AI, its periods of excitement as well as the aforementioned AI winters. The current AI spring has been underway since the 1990s, with headline-grabbing breakthroughs appearing in rapid succession over the last ten years or so: a period that Jeffrey Dean describes in the title of his essay as a "golden decade," not only for the pace of AI development but also its use in a wide range of sectors of society, as well as areas of scientific research.18 This period is best characterized by the approach to achieve artificial intelligence through learning from experience, and by the success of neural networks, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, together with methods from probability theory, as ways for machines to learn.19A brief history may be useful here: In the 1950s, there were two dominant visions of how to achieve machine intelligence. One vision was to use computers to create a logic and symbolic representation of the world and our knowledge of it and, from there, create systems that could reason about the world, thus exhibiting intelligence akin to the mind. This vision was most espoused by Allen Newell and Hebert Simon, along with Marvin Minsky and others. Closely associated with it was the "heuristic search" approach that supposed intelligence was essentially a problem of exploring a space of possibilities for answers. The second vision was inspired by the brain, rather than the mind, and sought to achieve intelligence by learning. In what became known as the connectionist approach, units called perceptrons were connected in ways inspired by the connection of neurons in the brain. At the time, this approach was most associated with Frank Rosenblatt. While there was initial excitement about both visions, the first came to dominate, and did so for decades, with some successes, including so-called expert systems.Not only did this approach benefit from championing by its advocates and plentiful funding, it came with the suggested weight of a long intellectual tradition-exemplified by Descartes, Boole, Frege, Russell, and Church, among others-that sought to manipulate symbols and to formalize and axiomatize knowledge and reasoning. It was only in the late 1980s that interest began to grow again in the second vision, largely through the work of David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, James McClelland, and others. The history of these two visions and the associated philosophical ideas are discussed in Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus's 1988 Dædalus essay "Making a Mind Versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint."20 Since then, the approach to intelligence based on learning, the use of statistical methods, back-propagation, and training (supervised and unsupervised) has come to characterize the current dominant approach.Kevin Scott, in his essay "I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Work & Scale," reminds us of the work of Ray Solomonoff and others linking information and probability theory with the idea of machines that can not only learn, but compress and potentially generalize what they learn, and the emerging realization of this in the systems now being built and those to come. The success of the machine learning approach has benefited from the boon in the availability of data to train the algorithms thanks to the growth in the use of the Internet and other applications and services. In research, the data explosion has been the result of new scientific instruments and observation platforms and data-generating breakthroughs, for example, in astronomy and in genomics. Equally important has been the co-evolution of the software and hardware used, especially chip architectures better suited to the parallel computations involved in data- and compute-intensive neural networks and other machine learning approaches, as Dean discusses.Several authors delve into progress in key subfields of AI.21 In their essay, "Searching for Computer Vision North Stars," Fei-Fei Li and Ranjay Krishna chart developments in machine vision and the creation of standard data sets such as ImageNet that could be used for benchmarking performance. In their respective essays "Human Language Understanding & Reasoning" and "The Curious Case of Commonsense Intelligence," Chris Manning and Yejin Choi discuss different eras and ideas in natural language processing, including the recent emergence of large language models comprising hundreds of billions of parameters and that use transformer architectures and self-supervised learning on vast amounts of data.22 The resulting pretrained models are impressive in their capacity to take natural language prompts for which they have not been trained specifically and generate human-like outputs, not only in natural language, but also images, software code, and more, as Mira Murati discusses and illustrates in "Language & Coding Creativity." Some have started to refer to these large language models as foundational models in that once they are trained, they are adaptable to a wide range of tasks and outputs.23 But despite their unexpected performance, these large language models are still early in their development and have many shortcomings and limitations that are highlighted in this volume and elsewhere, including by some of their developers.24In "The Machines from Our Future," Daniela Rus discusses the progress in robotic systems, including advances in the underlying technologies, as well as in their integrated design that enables them to operate in the physical world. She highlights the limitations in the "industrial" approaches used thus far and suggests new ways of conceptualizing robots that draw on insights from biological systems. In robotics, as in AI more generally, there has always been a tension as to whether to copy or simply draw inspiration from how humans and other biological organisms achieve intelligent behavior. Elsewhere, AI researcher Demis Hassabis and colleagues have explored how neuroscience and AI learn from and inspire each other, although so far more in one than the other, as and have the success of the current approaches to AI, there are still many shortcomings and as well as problems in It is useful to on one such as when AI does not as or or or that can to or when it on or information about the world, or when it has such as of all of which can to a of public shortcomings have captured the attention of the wider public and as well as among there is an on AI and In recent years, there has been a of to principles and approaches to AI, as well as involving and such as the on AI, that to best important has been the of with to and - in the and developing AI in both and as has been well in recent This is an important in its own but also with to the of the resulting AI and, in its intersections with more the other there are limitations and problems associated with the that AI is not capable of if could to more more or more general AI. In their Turing deep learning and Geoffrey took of where deep learning and highlighted its current such as the with In the case of natural language processing, Manning and Choi the challenges in and despite the of large language Elsewhere, and have the notion that large language models do anything learning, or In & of in a and discuss the problems in systems, the as how to reason about other their systems, and well as challenges in both and especially when the include both humans and Elsewhere, and others a useful of the problems in there is a growing among many that we do not have for the of AI systems, especially as they become more capable and the of use although AI and its related techniques are to be powerful tools for research in science, as examples in this volume and recent examples in which AI not only help results but also by design and become what some have AI to science and and to and challenges for the possibility that more powerful AI could to new in science, as well as progress in some of challenges and has long been a key for many at the frontier of AI research to more capable the of each of AI, the of more general problems that to the possibility of more capable AI learning, reasoning, of and and of these and other problems that could to more capable systems the of whether current characterized by deep learning, the of and and more foundational and and reinforcement or whether different approaches are in such as cognitive agent approaches or or based on logic and probability theory, to name a few. whether and what of approaches be the AI is but many the current along with of and learning architectures have to their about the of the current approaches is associated with the of whether artificial general intelligence can be and if how and Artificial general intelligence is in to what is called that AI and for tasks and goals, such as The development of on the other aims for more powerful AI - at as powerful as is generally to problem or and, in some the capacity to and improve as well as set and its own and the of and when will be is a for most that its achievement have and as is often in and such as A through and The to Ex and it is or there is growing among many at the frontier of AI research that we for the possibility of powerful with to and and with humans, its and use, and the possibility that of could and that we these into how we approach the development of of the research and development, and in AI is of the AI and in its what Nigel Shadbolt the of AI. This is given the for useful and applications and the for in sectors of the However, a few have made the development of their the most of these are and each of which has demonstrated results of increasing still a long way from the most discussed impact of AI and automation is on and the future of This is not In in the of the excitement about AI and and concerns about their impact on a on and the was that such technologies were important for growth and and "the that but not Most recent of this including those I have been involved have and that over time, more are than are that it is the and the and the of will the In their essay AI & and John discuss these for work and further, in & the of & to discuss the with to and and as well as the opportunities that are especially in developing In "The Turing The & of Artificial Intelligence," discusses how the use of human benchmarks in the development of AI the of AI that rather than human He that the AI's development will take in this and resulting for will on the for companies, and a that the that more will be than too much from of the and does not far enough into the future and at what AI will be capable The for AI could from of that in the is and labor and ability to are and and until automation has mostly physical and but that AI will be on more cognitive and tasks based on and, if early examples are even tasks are not of the In other are now in the world machines that that learn and that their ability to do these is to a range of problems they can will be with the range to which the human has been This was and Allen Newell in that this time could be different usually two that new labor will in which will by other humans for their own even when machines may be capable of these as well as or even better than The other is that AI will create so much and all without the for human and the of will be to for when that will the that once the first time since his creation will be with his his to use his from how to the which science and interest will have for to live and and However, most researchers that we are not to a future in which the of will and that until then, there are other and that be in the labor now and in the such as and other and how humans work increasingly capable that and John and discuss in this are not the only of the by AI. Russell a of the potentially from artificial general intelligence, once a of or ten But even we to general-purpose AI, the opportunities for companies and, for the and growth as well as from AI and its related technologies are more than to pursuit and by companies and in the development, and use of AI. At the many the is it is generally that is a in AI, as by its growth in AI research, and as highlighted in several will have for companies and given the of such technologies as discussed by and others the may in the way of approaches to AI and (such as whether they are companies or as and have have the to to in AI. The role of AI in intelligence, systems, autonomous even and other of increasingly In &

The article is devoted to the history of development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), their current and probable future achievements and the problems (which have already arisen, but will become even more acute in the future) associated with the development of these technologies and their active introduction in society. The close connection between the development of AI and cognitive science, the penetration of ICT and AI into various fields, in particular the field of health care, is shown. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of “artificial intelligence”, including the definition of generative AI. There is performed the analysis of recent achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and there are given descriptions of the basic models, in particular Large Linguistic Models (LLM), and forecasts of the development of AI and the dangers that will await us in the coming decades. We identify the forces behind the aspiration to create artificial intelligence, which is increasingly approaching the capabilities of the so-called general/universal AI, and also suggest desirable measures to limit and channel the development of artificial intelligence. The authors emphasize that the threats and dangers of the development of ICT and AI are partuclarly aggrevated by the monopolization of their development by the state, intelligence services, major corporations and those often referred to as globalists. The article forecasts the development of computers, ICT and AI in the coming decades, and also shows the changes in society that will be associated with them. The study consists of two articles. The first, presented below, provides a brief historical overview and characterizes the current situation in the field of ICT and AI, it also analyzes the concepts of artificial intelligence, including generative AI, changes in the understanding of AI in connection with the emergence of the so-called large language models and related new types of AI programs (ChatGPT). The article discusses the serious problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. The second article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, describes and comments on current assessments of breakthroughs in the field of AI, analyzes various forecasts, and the authors give their own assessments and forecasts of future developments. Particular attention is given to the problems and dangers associated with the rapid and uncontrolled development of AI, the fact that achievements in the field of AI are becoming a powerful means of control over the population, imposing ideology and choice, influencing the results of elections, and a weapon for undermining security and geopolitical struggle.

An analytics approach to exploring the link between ICT development and affordability

In order to explore the correlation between ICT development and consumer spending, this paper uses artificial intelligence and time series econometric models to study the correlation between ICT development and consumer spending. Moreover, this paper organically combines the advantages of wavelet analysis and hidden Markov model to construct a wavelet domain hidden Markov chain model. It is used to examine the flow of information on different scales related to the development of communication technology and consumer spending, so as to infer the potential mechanism of the interaction of different traders’ behaviors from the other side. Through cluster analysis, it can be seen that the correlation analysis method of information and communication technology development and consumption expenditure based on artificial intelligence and time series econometric model proposed in this paper has certain reliability. At the same time, there is a strong correlation between the development of communication technology and consumer spending.

This study investigates how information and communication technology (ICT) development affects macroeconomic variables in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, widely used for empirical macroeconomics research, was utilized to compare and analyze the results to determine which variable is most affected by ICT development. As the economy evolves over time, it is affected by unexpected factors such as technology shock. This study utilized yearly data for the period 2008-2015 to compute the steady-state, dynamics, and correlation of technology shock with relevant variables namely: investment (I), consumption (C), labor supply (L_s), capital stock supply (K_s), total factor production (Z), and total production (Y). The impulse response function (IRF) results for 10 periods indicate that, when ICT development was included, investment increased rapidly at first, gradually achieving equilibrium in the seventh period. In contrast, without ICT development, equilibrium was achieved only in the ninth period. Moreover, consumption, labor, and total production initially increased and then reached equilibrium in the eighth, fourth, and ninth periods respectively. However, without ICT development, equilibrium was achieved in the sixth, second, and sixth periods respectively. Capital and total factor production, both with and without ICT development, increased slightly at first and then reached equilibrium within the same period. Thus, the variables affected by ICT development are investment (I), consumption (C), labor supply (L_s), and total production (Y). The most affected variable was investment, followed by labor supply, total production, and consumption.

With the rapid development of modern information technology, the overall level of Chinese design has been continuously improved, and the application scope of new technologies, means and concepts in graphic image and visual communication design has been continuously expanded. In the development of information age, the design technology of computer graphics and images has been adopted in various industries. The development of social economy puts forward higher requirements for graphic and image design. Under the background of social media and popularization, the processing of computer graphic and image should go beyond the traditional simple presentation, and use virtual reality technology to provide a more three-dimensional and subjective design effect. The rapid development of virtual reality technology has opened up a new field for computer graphics and image design. Based on the characteristics of computer graphics and image design and visual communication design in virtual reality environment, this paper analyzes the integration and specific application of computer graphics and image design and visual communication design, hoping to help the development of virtual reality technology in China.

Over the last few decades, the development of information and communication technology (ICT) has had a major impact on the economy and society more broadly. There is currently a consensus that developments in information and communication technology (ICT) can provide a boost to sustainable economic development. This study aims to analyze the influence of the development of information and communication technology (ICT) on income inequality through economic development in Indonesia. Analysis of the research uses econometric analysis using the fixed effect model with the Two-Stage-Least-Square (TSLS) method with a period of 2017–2021 to understand the extent to which the development of information and communication technology (ICT) can facilitate reducing income inequality through economic development. The data used in this study came from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia, the Ministry of Communication and Information, and the National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS). The results of this study found that the influence of significant positive ICT development can encourage reduced income inequality through economic development in Indonesia. Social assistance provided by the government has shown significant help in reducing inequality in Indonesia. ICT development can encourage reducing inequality and economic development outside Java Island but not in Java Island. The influence of ICT development is greater in provinces with the lowest service sector compared to provinces with the highest service sector.

Introduction. Although psychologists play an important role in maintaining and improving people's mental conditions, they also face difficulties caused by their complex work, which affect the effectiveness of psychotherapy sessions. Developments in information technology necessitate practitioners and researchers in psychology developing innovative tools to improve their work efficiency. These tools can include a variety of software, mobile applications, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other technologies used in psychological practice. Aim: to analyze the potential of innovative tools for improving psychologists' work efficiency. Methods: analysis, comparison, synthesis and generalization of information, assumptions. Results. Specific innovative tools and technologies that can be useful in psychologists' work are analyzed. In particular, virtual reality can be helpful for therapy sessions and social skills training, mobile applications and programs can help keep diaries and control emotions, artificial intelligence can facilitate data analysis and execution of some tasks, e.g., ChatGPT is good at textual tasks, while Midjourney and Adobe Firefly at image generating. The author also analyzes the effectiveness of Mind Map and webinars and online counseling. Innovative tools and technologies have been shown to play an important role in psychological practice, while psychologists should be open for to new technologies that can improve their work efficiency. Conclusions. The author shows the potential of innovative tools for increasing psychologists' work efficiency.

Predictive modeling in reproductive medicine: Where will the future of artificial intelligence research take us?

With the development of information technology, other industries are also developing, completely new and unfamiliar ways of communication, creation, and learning are becoming popular. Thus, the modern world makes new demands on the learning process. However, despite the development of distance and inclusive education, the natural sciences due to their peculiarities lag behind other fields of science. This is due to the fact that in order to effectively acquire skills in working with equipment and the ability to analyze experimental data, physics, chemistry, and other exact sciences require executing laboratory works. However, this requires specially equipped laboratories that are not always staffed in educational institutions. Then, new technologies, such as computer graphics, augmented reality, computational dynamics and others come to the rescue. This article discusses the use of modern technologies in the field of education. The analysis of the introduction of various innovative developments with the virtual reality into some spheres of modern life was also conducted. The work introduces the advantages and possibilities of using educational resources based on the virtual reality in education and, in particular, for studying physics. The authors present the software that allows studying physics with the help of virtual reality. Such approach made the interaction with the application more interesting and memorable, and learning more effective. As development platform the cross platform Unity 3D environment was chosen. The main functionality was written in C#. Graphic models were created using Substance Painter. Additionally, in the article the development process of the application was considered along with its functionality and user interface. The work done allowed the authors to identify the advantages of using new technologies in the study of physics and showed that they open new prospects for their wide application at different stages of education in educational institutions of various levels. This approach in addition to the advantages mentioned above makes the learning process safe, interesting and more accessible. As a result, not only software was developed, but new experience was gained, which will be used for further development and research.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of a culturally sensitive and end‐user‐centric software architectural framework for the development of eService applications in information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) contexts. The research is undertaken within the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL) in South Africa.Design/methodology/approachAction research is the approach undertaken in this research with an extensive literature review to inform the development of the architecture, which is later qualitatively and quantitavely validated.FindingsVarious factors have to be taken into consideration for technology solutions to be effective in their context of deployment. The authors have provided an architecture that intrinsically enables software solutions to be developed from the ground up with concern for flexibility for context sensitivity. The PIASK architecture separates the presentation, interaction, access, social networking and knowledge base components into five distinct functional layers. This architecture is validated for: technical viability through a development of a knowledge portal in SLL; cultural sensitivity through Dooyeweerd's theory of modal aspects; and user centricity using a SALUTA‐based evaluation.Practical implicationsThe successful evolution of any society towards a knowledge society is predicated on technology solutions that embrace and that are sensitive to the socio‐cultural diversity of that society. The PIASK architecture developed in this research is a tool that can be used in the realization of services and applications for ICTD contexts in South Africa and other third‐world countries.Originality/valueThe software architecture developed specifically for ICTD contexts to encapsulate context sensitivity and user centricity is the primary and novel contribution of this research.

The Medical Metaverse, Part 1: Introduction, Definitions, and New Horizons for Neuropsychiatry.