🔮 AI Nationalism; privacy; the limits of neoliberal techno-capitalism; traffic lights, Proxima Centauri & Airpods++ #170

Dept of the near future

💯 “The rapid progress in machine learning will drive the emergence of a new kind of geopolitics… AI Nationalism argues EV reader, Ian Hogarth.

🤖 Chinese retailer, JD.com, opens a warehouse which can handle 200,000 orders a week. All robotics, just four human workers to maintain the robots. (Video.) Is this the future of logistics? (See also, this review of investment bank plans to automate & automation comes to Amazon’s white-collar workers)

🙈 Why the debate about privacy is so confused. "The real issue is liberty", argues Louis Menand in this stunning long read. (See also, EV reader, Chris Yiu, explains how ads got so good at following us around.)

🍎 Ian Bogost: Apple’s Airpods presage changes to our social fabric.

🔎 Why the future of deep learning is tiny. Pete Warden’s manifesto for moving deep learnings to the hundreds of billions of low-power microcontrollers that are pervasive in the world. (See also a video of Pete discussing this below.)

🎭 Pankaj Mishra: