The U.S. saw record Cyber Monday sales, with shoppers dropping $12.4 billion, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracked roughly 1 trillion retail website visits resulting in purchases of more than 100 million products. Top-selling items included Hot Wheels toys, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X game console, televisions and small kitchen appliances. Spending was up by 9.6 percent over last year’s event, according to Adobe, which crowned Cyber Monday 2023 “the biggest online shopping day of all time.” Although consumers continue to fret about the economy, sales were propelled by discounts and offers to “buy now, pay later.” Read more

The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is preparing new regulations to protect consumers from how businesses may potentially use AI. The state regulator, whose rulings have an outsized influence on Big Tech given the many large firms that are headquartered there, has issued draft rules for how consumer data can be used in what it is calling “automated decisionmaking technology,” or ADMT. The proposed regulations give consumers the right to opt out of ADMT and entitles the public to on-demand information as how AI is interacting with their data and how businesses plan to use it. Read more

California Governor Gavin Newsom has released a report examining the beneficial uses and potential harms of artificial intelligence in state government. Potential plusses include improving access to government services by identifying groups that are hindered due to language barriers or other reasons, while dangers highlight the need to prepare citizens with next generation skills so they don’t get left behind in the GenAI economy. “This is an important first step in our efforts to fully understand the scope of GenAI and the state’s role in deploying it,” Newsom said, calling California’s strategy “a nuanced, measured approach.” Read more

Amazon’s new Thin Client is a new $195 device that allows enterprise users to connect to virtual desktop environments, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, using the Internet and a box as compact as the Fire TV Cube. In fact, the Thin Client leverages Fire TV Cube hardware, allowing Amazon to tap existing expertise from the e-retail giant’s streaming media player division. However, Thin Client “is not for spending time watching Thursday Night Football, or bingeing ‘Invincible,’” but aims to convenience workers while reducing technology costs and enhancing security for enterprise, the company says. Read more

Bill Gates has published his thinking about the future of computing, and fascinatingly, it’s the same as his prediction from decades ago: agents. No mere bots — and certainly not anthropomorphized paperclips — agents (to Gates) will abstract almost all HCI to a natural language conversation with systems that have our permission to take meaningful actions. Gates makes a highly specific prediction: within five years, the very idea of an app itself will seem as outdated as a rotary phone dial does next to an iPhone. A conversational UI will sit on top of a language model that has access to as much of our private data as we wish to give it. Read more