📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Workers Say AI Is Useless, While Oblivious Bosses Insist I

Bosses being severely disconnected from the needs of their employees is a tale as old as time. But it sure feels like the AI craze has driven them to lock themselves in ever taller ivory towers, as employees are told that the tech is going to make their jobs easier at the same time it’s being used to replace them.

Now, a new survey highlighted by the Wall Street Journal illustrates this growing technological divide between grunts and execs.

After questioning 5,000 white collar workers, the consulting firm Section found that a whopping 40 percent of those not in management roles said that AI saves them no time whatsoever over the course of an entire week. And just two percent said that AI saves them more than 12 hours.

Contrast that with the responses of executives, of whom very few are disillusioned with AI. Just two percent said that AI doesn’t save them any time, while a sizable 19 percent said it saves more than 12 hours per week.

Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” Steve McGarvey, a user experience designer, told the WSJ. 

He drew on his personal experience of large language models bogging down his work, which focuses on making websites accessible to visitors who are visually impaired.

“I can’t count the number of times that I’ve sought a solution for a problem, asked an LLM, and it gave me a solution to an accessibility problem that was completely wrong,” McGarvey added.

Much attention has been paid to companies that use AI to justify brutal layoffs. But the employees that keep their jobs find themselves being forced to use new and still-experimental AI tools that may not be all that useful for their specific roles, with any complaints they raise falling on deaf ears. 

Evangelism for the tech runs rampant among leadership at the biggest companies in the world. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, for example, reportedly told his employees that they’d be “insane” not to use AI to do literally “every task” possible, after he caught wind of some of his managers suggesting that employees use it less. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google’s bosses have bragged that a large chunk of their companies’ code is written with AI.

The Section survey also found that there’s significant unease over AI among the rank and file. Roughly two thirds of regular workers said they felt anxious or overwhelmed about AI, while less than half of managers felt the same way. Once again in complete contrast to their underlings, nearly 75 percent of executives said they were excited about the tech.

The jury’s still out on whether AI actually boosts productivity. But there’s a growing body of research suggesting it isn’t the efficiency miracle that CEOs make it out to be. A widely covered MIT study found that 95 percent of companies that adopted AI saw no meaningful growth in revenue. Perhaps that’s because AI agents overwhelmingly fail to complete common remote work and office tasks, other studies found, or because AI coding assistants actually slow down the programmers that use them, as another concluded.

Part of the problem is that it’s unclear what AI is most useful for. Dan Hiester, a user experience engineer, told the WSJ that one coding task he used AI to help with, which should’ve only taken half an hour, ended up taking up his entire afternoon, while another task he expected to take days took just 20 minutes with AI.

“It’s done a complete reset of my understanding of how to estimate the time it takes to do something,” he told the WSJ.

Of course, maybe the reason CEOs think that AI is saving them so much time and their workers don’t is because their jobs, more so than others, can be easily replaced with it.

More on AI: Majority of CEOs Alarmed as AI Delivers No Financial Returns

The post Workers Say AI Is Useless, While Oblivious Bosses Insist It’s a Productivity Miracle appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: 300-million-year-old brain rhythm links humans, bird

Sleep looks peaceful on the outside, but inside the brain, it is anything but quiet. Neurons pulse, blood flows, and hidden rhythms rise and fall like slow ocean tides. 

For decades, scientists believed that one of the slowest of these rhythms, called the infraslow brain rhythm, was a special feature of mammals, closely tied to deep, non-dream sleep. However, a new study suggests the rhythm isn’t exclusive to mammals. 

By recording brain activity in lizards, researchers have uncovered the same ancient rhythm in reptiles, suggesting that this key part of sleep evolved more than 300 million years ago — long before mammals even existed. Moreover, they recorded the same rhythm in birds, proving that it is a common feature among complex organisms.

This discovery challenges how scientists think about the origins of sleep and hints that the basic machinery of sleeping brains is far older and more universal than anyone suspected.

Going deep into the origins of sleep

Understanding sleep has always been difficult because it leaves no fossils behind. Scientists can’t dig up ancient brains, so they’ve had to infer how sleep evolved by comparing living animals. 

Until now, that comparison was incomplete, largely focused on warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds. Reptiles, which are cold-blooded and evolutionarily older, remained a missing piece of the puzzle. 

That gap made it hard to know whether different sleep states, such as REM and non-REM sleep, evolved recently or were inherited from a common ancestor. This new work finally fills in that missing chapter.

The project began more than a decade ago, when neuroscientist Paul-Antoine Libourel joined a sleep research team in Lyon to explore the question: where did sleep states come from? To find the answer, his team turned to reptiles, which split from the evolutionary line leading to mammals and birds around 300 million years ago.

Recording brain activity in lizards, however, is far from easy. Some species are small, delicate, and highly sensitive to stress. Standard lab equipment is too bulky and power-hungry. 

To overcome this, the researchers worked with engineers at the Lyon Institute of Nanotechnology to build a tiny, low-power brain recorder called a biologger. Small enough to be worn comfortably, the device can record brain signals, heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, and eye movements — all at the same time. 

This technology later became the foundation for a startup company, Manitty, and is now used to study sleep in animals and humans in real-world environments.

Testing biologger on lizards and others

Using these custom-made devices, the team recorded sleep activity in seven lizard species, including geckos, chameleons, agamas, and bearded dragons. They didn’t just track brain waves. They also measured how the animals’ hearts slowed, how their breathing changed, and even how blood flow in the brain rose and fell. 

In some cases, they used functional ultrasound imaging to directly observe changes in brain blood vessels, both in lizards and in mice, allowing them to compare species side by side. When the researchers analyzed years of data, a striking pattern emerged. 

Across reptiles, birds, rodents, and humans, the brain showed the same slow rhythm, cycling over tens of seconds. This infraslow rhythm wasn’t limited to neurons; it involved the whole body, including blood circulation and physiological signals. 

In mammals, this rhythm is strongly linked to non-REM sleep, the phase associated with dreams, physical restoration, and brain maintenance. Finding it in reptiles revealed that this rhythm is not a recent innovation, but a deeply conserved feature of animal sleep.

“This rhythm involves not only brain activity but also physiological processes and peripheral vascularization, indicating that it is a global, organism-wide rhythm,” Libourel said.

The significance of infraslow brain rhythm across species

If reptiles share this infraslow rhythm with mammals and birds, it means that some core functions of sleep appeared very early in vertebrate evolution. One possibility is that the rhythm helps the brain clean itself by moving cerebrospinal fluid that washes away metabolic waste — a process already proposed for mammals. 

Another idea is that the rhythm causes brief fluctuations in alertness, allowing sleeping animals to periodically check their surroundings and reduce the risk of being eaten.

At the same time, the findings challenge how sleep stages are defined. In humans, sleep is neatly divided into REM and non-REM stages, with dreaming strongly linked to REM sleep. Reptiles do not appear to organize sleep in the same way.

“This does not imply that reptiles do not dream; rather, it suggests that their sleep-state organization differs from that of mammals, despite sharing some conserved processes such as the infraslow rhythm,” Libourel added.

Also, while the rhythm looks similar across species, scientists still don’t know whether it serves exactly the same purpose in reptiles as it does in mammals. Proving this will require experiments that directly test how the rhythm affects brain cleaning, vigilance, and survival.

Next, the researchers plan to expand their studies to other animal groups, including amphibians and fish, and to dig deeper into the biological mechanisms that generate the infraslow rhythm.

By tracing sleep back to its deepest roots, they hope to uncover why sleep is so essential and why evolution has guarded it so carefully for hundreds of millions of years.

The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com