Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Why Tech Needs to Keep Fighting Trump on Travel

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Daniel Arauz | Flickr

When the first Trump travel ban rolled out in a flurry of airport chaos and outraged protests last month, tech companies flocked to join the swell of opposition. 127 firms signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the legal challenge to the president’s executive order that led to its demise.

But the arrival of Trump Ban 2.0 this week has evoked less of a response from tech, and so far, although 58 companies have signed on to support a challenge to the new order, Google, Apple, and Facebook are not among them (Reuters).

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Let Them Eat iPhones!

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Blake Patterson | Flickr

The healthcare debate had its Marie Antoinette moment yesterday, as GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Americans to stop buying smartphones so they could afford health insurance under the new Republican proposal. “Rather than getting that new iPhone, that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care,” Chaffetz said.

The race was on for pundits and publications to calculate just how many iPhones one would need to forego in order to pay your insurer. For most of us, you’d have to be getting a fancy new phone every month or so to even come close (Lifehacker). But Chaffetz’s comment didn’t only prove his ignorance of the basics of both healthcare and telecommunications economics. It suggested he was fundamentally unaware of how essential a working smartphone — i- or otherwise — is for navigating everyday life and work in America 2017 (Brian Fung in The Washington Post).

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Dataism and Homo Deus

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What happens in a world where we have conquered the traditional ills of pestilence, famine and disease, where technological platforms know us better than we know ourselves?

Prof Harari

Yuval Harari has written a provocative book, Homo Deus, which explores technoreligion and what he describes as data-ism.

Harari reckons we might see the rise of all powerful platforms that use their knowledge of us to their advantage (and our cost).

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Will Artificial Intelligence Kill All the Jobs?

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Keturah Stickann | Flickr

Artificial intelligence experts gathered in Asilomar, California in January to ponder the ethical and philosophical challenges their field presents. The choice of location echoed a historic 1975 conference at Asilomar that grappled with the future of genetics and biotech in cosmic terms. While the recent event was private, Cade Metz in Wired reports that the nightmare scenarios it raised were less of the science-fiction-apocalypse variety and more centered on mundane economic concerns.

The headline: AI-driven automation will “eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than…expected.” In other words, the long-term threat to the middle class comes much less from globalization than from technology, and the Trump-era focus on closing the borders is a waste of effort.

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Predictions 2017: Tech Industry Backlash, Trump Leaves Twitter, Snap Sours + 7 More

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This is my 14th annual predictions post. And as I look back on the previous 13 and consider what to write, I’m flooded with uncertainty. That’s not like me. Writing these predictions is something I’ve always looked forward to — I don’t prepare in any demonstrable way, but I do gather crumbs over time, filing them away for the day when I sit down and free associate for however long it takes me to complete this post.

But this time, well, for the first time ever I have very little idea what’s about to come out of the keyboard. Honestly, when I consider the coming 12 months, so much feels up for grabs that I wonder whether it’s wise to prognosticate. Then I remember, it’s all of you reading these words who keep me writing in the first place — your encouragement, your wise (and sometimes cutting) commentary, and your willingness to spend a little time with me and my thoughts. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more — it’s always been how I make sense of the world, and this year, the world feels like it needs a lot more sense making. So I’ll be writing at least a few times a week going forward, starting with this uncertain post.

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Bringing Up Machine Baby

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Matthew Hurst | Flickr

If you’ve been reading all year about “machine learning” but still feel you only have a fuzzy grasp of what it is, relax. Having a fuzzy grasp of what something is turns out to be exactly what machine learning is all about. You can glean that and much more from Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s epic artificial-intelligence narrative in The New York Times Magazine, which tells how Google sharpened its translation skills by plugging in a new machine learning engine.

As he traces the trail of Google’s researchers and engineers, Lewis-Kraus also provides a beautiful summary of how machine learning evolved from a renegade strain of artificial-intelligence theory into a practical tool for delivering useful services — and a powerful harbinger of socioeconomic disruption.

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An Unknown Future is a Scary One

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Scott Taylor | Flickr

While the election news cycles dedicated to Hillary’s emails and Donald’s ego sucked the oxygen out of our public sphere, here are some of the topics that barely got talked about during this campaign: Climate change. Life after fossil fuels. Automation and artificial intelligence.

The future is barreling down the road toward us. Will we leap aboard, duck, or get squashed? Jim Yardley, a New York Times correspondent who spent the last decade abroad, traveled the country to create a Tocquevillian portrait of the U.S. on the brink of the 2016 election and a wave of economic change that we’ve barely begun to understand.

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The Real Moonshot of Our Time

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Illustration: Streetwise Media

Instead of “techsplaining” the future, we need radical humanism

As we adjust to living digital cheek by digital jowl in our hyper-connected world, we’re rapidly approaching a technological shift that will be even bigger than the Internet — the union of man and machine. Some would say that day has already come, as we go about our business tethered to Google Now and Snapchat.

But the coming wave of super-intelligent computers will accelerate and deepen our connection to technology like never before. In the near future, computers will possess increasingly sophisticated types of machine intelligence and “deep learning” algorithms. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will challenge us to rethink what it means to be human.

The Hybrids

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Are We Smart Enough To Control AI?

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Maybe the right way to master artificial intelligence isn’t through the markets, but through open collaboration, pure research, and … (shudder) our governments


One of the most intriguing public discussions to emerge over the past year is humanity’s wrestling match with the threat and promise of artificial intelligence. AI has long lurked in our collective consciousness — negatively so, if we’re to take Hollywood movie plots as our guide — but its recent and very real advances are driving critical conversations about the future not only of our economy, but of humanity’s very existence.

In May 2014, the world received a wakeup call from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Together with three respected AI researchers, the world’s most renowned scientist warned that the commercially-driven creation of intelligent machines could be “potentially our worst mistake in history.” Comparing the impact of AI on humanity to the arrival of “a superior alien species,” Hawking and his co-authors found humanity’s current state of preparedness deeply wanting. “Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity,” they wrote, “little serious research is devoted to these issues outside small nonprofit institutes.”

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