Reputation and track record really matter in a crisis. Say you have a ton of credibility and good will with your partners and contractors, and one day it turns out that an “accounting error” had led you to underpay them. You can probably just apologize, pay everyone what you owe, and move on.
Uber faced just this kind of problem this week — but unfortunately for the company, its reserves of good will are exhausted. For years it seems that Uber has been taking its 25 percent cut not only from the base fare but also from the taxes on each ride, which in New York are considerable (The Wall Street Journal) — and as a result it has shortchanged its drivers. Now the company says it’s going to make its drivers whole, and the amounts can add up. Recode posted a receipt for one driver’s $7000 refund, and the Journal says the total cost to Uber is likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
If technology makes a particular kind of data collection possible, sooner or later some business will try to use that info to target ads. But sometimes the creepiness factor can get so intense that alarms go off. That’s what happened earlier this month with an alarming report from Australia, which suggested that Facebook was studying how to target young people in distress.
The company had conducted research intended to gauge the effectiveness of ads aimed at young users during “moments of psychological vulnerability,” and delivered the results to advertisers in a 23-page report (Nitasha Tiku in Wired). Facebook’s response implied that the project was a rogue operation that hadn’t followed stricter research guidelines put in place after Facebook’s last controversial study of psychological manipulation. But the details are disturbing enough on their own, and they have watchdog groups and privacy advocates mobilizing.
Trumpcare needlessly cedes US leadership in data, science, and health
Over the past two years, as the Chief Data Scientist for the U.S., I’ve had the opportunity to look over the horizon and see what’s coming in advancements to medicine. First off, I couldn’t be more bullish. The costs of genetic testing continues to drop and is increasingly used to address diseases like cancer. We also now have a wide array of new sensors to understand the impact of our environments both around us (e.g., air quality) and inside us (e.g., our microbiome). These combined with with advancements of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) have laid the foundation to revolutionize how we treat disease.
Uber’s troubles deepened yesterday when a judge ruled that the lawsuit brought against the company by Google-owned Waymo should go to trial. Uber wanted to handle the dispute in arbitration instead, which is quicker and quieter. In a separate and more ominous move, the judge asked a federal prosecutor to review the case for possible criminal charges (Business Insider).
Waymo says Uber stole its autonomous-vehicle technology. Normally, disputes over intellectual property and trade secrets are arcane and dull matters, but this one is drawing a spotlight. That’s not only because of the dramatic nature of the charges — that Anthony Levandowski smuggled Google-owned blueprints to Otto, his own self-driving truck startup, which Uber then acquired. It’s also because Uber has built such a powerful reputation for fighting mean that the charges sound pretty plausible.
You can debate if the films hold up, but their lessons certainly do
Want to feel old? Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report was released fifteen years ago.
It casts a long shadow. For a decade after the film’s release, it was referenced at least once at every conference relating to human-computer interaction. Unsurprisingly, most of the focus has been on the technology in the film. The hardware and interfaces in Minority Report came out of a think tank assembled in pre-production. It provided plenty of fodder for technologists to mock and praise in subsequent years: gestural interfaces, autonomous cars, miniature drones, airpods, ubiquitous advertising and surveillance.
Yesterday Apple announced a new $1 billion fund to invest in “advanced manufacturing” in the U.S. (CNBC). Though CEO Tim Cook didn’t come out and say it, the move is in line with many other U.S. companies’ efforts to appease President Trump, who has made reviving domestic manufacturing one of his most loudly proclaimed goals. (Vanity Fair: “Apple Just Handed Trump a Billion-Dollar P.R. Win.”)
Trump pines to revive the 1950s golden age of great factory jobs for high-school grads. But that word “advanced” before “manufacturing” is a tip-off that Apple, like everyone else, is going to be looking to hire people with training and skills.
The economy stands at a threshold moment in the era of machine learning. The artificial intelligences that companies are increasingly deploying are just beginning to take on roles and jobs that used to demand a human being at the controls. But in most cases they’re nowhere near ready to take over entirely. They still need people at their sides — in some cases to generate the data that will train them, in others to provide judgment that’s beyond them.
Welcome to the world of the hybrid human-machine workplace. A couple of recent articles have begun to give us a portrait of this emerging work environment, with its awkward encounters, unemployment fears, and potential for both efficiency and exploitation.
In which I survey the public — perhaps for the first time — about their appetite for risk and the pursuit of superintelligence.
Throughout 2017, I have been running polls on the public’s appetite for risk regarding the pursuit of superintelligence. I’ve been running these on Surveymonkey, paying for audiences so as to minimize distortions in the data. I’ve spent nearly $10,000 on this project. I did this in about the most scientific way I could. It is not a “passed around” survey, but rather paid polling across the entire American spectrum.
All in all, America can perhaps be best characterized as excited about the prospect of a superintelligence explosion, but also deeply afraid, skeptical, and adamantly opposed to the idea that we should plow forth without any regulation or plan. This is, it seems to me, exactly what is happening right now.
You can view the entire dataset here. I welcome any comments. I’m not a statistician, don’t have a research assistant, and have a full-time job, so my ability to proof-read and double-check things is limited (though I have tried). If you have comments, you can tweet at me @rickwebb.
Rob Reid argues that perhaps the best answer is “Ideally, no.”
Rob Reid’s career has spanned founding successful Internet companies (he created Real’s Rhapsody service), a stint in venture investing, and a well received non-fiction book (Architects of the Web profiled the first wave of internet entrepreneurs). But it was in fiction where Reid found his groove. Reid’s novels are rife with arch and hilarious observations about the state of the tech industry, but are also painstakingly researched and carefully constructed. His first work of fiction, Year Zero, lampooned the music industry (with a heavy dose of alien-driven satire), but his second, set to debut later this year, is far more ambitious. Titled After On, the story turns on the emergence of machine-native super intelligence (laced with a heavy dose of biotech), in the form of an pervasive social network called Phluttr. I won’t spoil it for you — but at the NewCo Shift Forum earlier this year, Reid outlined some of the deep thinking that went into his latest creation. Reid delivered his thoughts as an Ignite talk — the five minute format created by Brady Forrest, who introduced Reid from the stage. Below is the video and a transcript of Reid’s talk.
Brady Forrest: We’ve had kind of an arc here at Ignite. We began in the past, we talked about the present, and now with our last speaker, we’re going to go look in the future. Please welcome up, Rob Reid.
Rob Reid: If you want to become an expert in something you know nothing about, I suggest you sign up to write a book about it. The prospect of awful reviews will terrify you, and as this guy will tell you, fear is a very powerful motivator. Now the other great thing about writing is that authors get amazing access to experts. I learned this twenty years ago, when I wrote a book about the rise of the internet. Practically everybody who mattered in the industry sat down for interviews with me, because smart people believe in books. They want them to be accurate, and no school could have taught me what I learned from these folks, which inspired me later to start my own company which built the Rhapsody music service, but I only started getting really high quality time and attention from top scientists and technologists when I gave up writing non-fiction and started writing science fiction.
Let’s circle back one more time to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s extraordinary comment that artificial intelligence is “not even on my radar screen” and won’t affect the job market for 50 to 100 years. What was he smoking? And please keep it away from us, okay?
The double whammy of AI and robotics, what observers are calling “the fourth industrial revolution,” is certainly on the rest of the world’s radar, and already having an impact on transportation, manufacturing, retail, medicine, education — everything. We can’t know how this wave of change will play out; scenarios range from utopia to doomsday, and we’re already beginning to live them.
