The Rise of the Robots: Recent Must- and Should-Reads as of May 15, 2018
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech’s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind” companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.
Jason Rhode: What tech calls “AI” isn’t really AI: "We're in the dark ages of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, to say nothing of the philosophical riddles...
We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...
Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...
Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte...
Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s... core advertising business.
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...
David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...
Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...
Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn’t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it’s an Uber car doesn’t surprise me. They’re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..
A Question About the Future of Work...: I have no sense of what kinds of things the masses of displaced workers will do in the future at the level of "microprocessor", "robot", "accounting software 'bot"...
Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...
Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump’s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as “psychographs”...
Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...
Matt Townsend et al.: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...
Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Cory Doctorow: Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech: "In 2018, companies from John Deere to GM to Johnson & Johnson use digital locks and abusive license agreements to force you to submit to surveillance and control how you use their products...
Janelle Shane: Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?: "Neural network[s]... used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition...
Kenneth Rogoff: Economists vs. Scientists on Long-Term Growth: "Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence...
Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney: Explaining the Decline in the U.S. Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence: "Within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Kenneth Rogoff: When Will Tech Disrupt Higher Education?: "Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our societies...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Andrew Wachtel: Universities in the Age of AI: "Over the next 50 years or so, as AI and machine learning become more powerful, human labor will be cannibalized by technologies that outperform people in nearly every job function..
Dan Davies and Others: Chris Hanretty: LRT: study in most recent APSR suggests getting people to take perspective of marginalised group...
Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox...F
Charlie Stross: Dude, you broke the future!: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion...
riseoftherobots
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