š® Magic Leap; technological unease; explaining consciousness; intellectual property & AI; regulating the sharing economy; Trump bots, crows & feathers++ #86
Why technology makes us uneasy; the machine intelligence landscape; Magic Leap; the origin of Trump bots; consciousness explored; AI and IP; time to review the sharing economy; peak oil; women scientists & more
Hope this stimulates some great discussion.
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Dept of the near future
š Sarah Perry on how technological specialisation makes us uneasy and why so many of us āhave a wistful feeling for the simpler, more condensed order of the (imagined) past.ā What happens next?Ā BRILLIANT, THOUGHT PROVOKING.
š°Ā The competitive landscape for machine intelligence: MUST READ overview by EV reader, Shivon Zilis.
š¦ āMagic Leapās innovation isnāt just a high-tech displayāitās a disruption machine.ā FASCINATING write-up of the leader in augmented and mixed reality which has raised more than $1.4bn in venture capital.
š¤Ā Itās the robotās wot dun it: āAmerica has lost more than 7 million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Yet American factory production, minus raw materials and some other costs, more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion last year.ā
š²š° How Macedonia became the global hub of Trump bots. It isnāt the politics, itās the profit. Generate clicks on Facebook from US visitors is worth a lot. THOUGHT PROVOKING. (Unintended consequences of the global digital village interfacing with capitalism. Almost satire, imagine if the election result was affected by 16-year olds half a world away getting a better CPC.)
š» EV reader, Anil Seth onĀ consciousness: āWe are conscious selves because we too are beast machines ā self-sustaining flesh-bags that care about their own persistence.ā GREAT READ
š Introducing the Exponential View podcast
By popular demand, weāre experimenting with an Exponential View podcast.
Our first is āin conversationā with Ryan Avent, author of Wealth of Humans and is a brilliant hour on the topic of technological unemployment.
You can find itĀ on SoundcloudĀ and iTunes.
Dept of artificial intelligence
Computers are increasingly autonomous part of the creative process. How do we allocate ownership of IP that is designed by software? What happens when the šĀ mother of invention is a machine?Ā Argues patent attorney, Ryan Abbott:
A creative singularity in which computers overtake human inventors as the primary source of new discoveries is foreseeable. Creative computers may require a rethinking of the baseline standard for inventiveness, and potentially the entire patent system.
A new deep learning method dreams up new drugs and their potential impact,Ā Ā exploring more intuitively, using chemical knowledge it learned, like a human chemist would. NoveltyĀ is, of course, one of the requirements of a patent.
Well respected machine learning expert, Daniel Tunkelang, explores several other cases where AI and IP law are clashing. FASCINATING READING.
Elsewhere:
Decent overview on the challenges of getting AI into healthcare (lack of training data; deployment problems; and regulation.)
As expected, Starcraft,Ā with its messiness and degrees of freedom, is emerging a new playground for AI researchers. Google announced aĀ partnership with Blizzard, Starcraftās maker. Facebook earlierĀ released TorchCraft, an open-sourceĀ library to help AI developers working on real-time strategy games.
AI investment across businesses is forecast to rise by 300% next year according to Forrester Research.
Simple non-technical intro to deep learning. (Rather good)
Dept of the sharing economy
My post on Uber and regulation received nearly 200,000 views so Ā the question of regulatory-arbitrage-as-a-strategy (RAAAS) is clearly a topical one.
Izabella Kaminska is an FT journalist who is asking some of the toughest questions about the sharing economy. In what she describes as āour rental serf futureā:
the path to future profitability lies in the general population never really owning anything but rather having to rent everything or pay a subscription to an intermediary for it
Mark Muro in WSJ argues that suggests that the gig economy is not creating jobs. He argues:
the spreading gig economy (at least in the case of ride-sharing) is, in fact, substituting for some payroll employment, or at least depressing its growthā¦
and if that is the case
whether it is about benefits contributions by gig-economy companiesā¦ Ā or new kinds of safety nets, the conversation needs to widen as fast as the gig economy is growing.
A US government labor (sic) watchdog is pushing Uber to strengthen the rights of Uber drivers.
Cities across the world are increasingly stepping in to moderate the free-for-all in room sharing. (See this recent comment from Londonās mayor, Sadiq Khan.)
Uber and Lyft passengers face racial and gender discrimination, according to this study. (AirBnBĀ faced similar issues and now has a non-discrimination programme.)
Short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties
š TheĀ secret history of Elizabeth Iās alliance with Islam
How female scientists collaborate differently to male ones
š¦ Birds are super-smart and need to be considered as such (See also EV#52 on this.)
The pursuit of super-happiness. Interview with EV reader, Riva Tez, on AI, longevity and human betterment.
š Video:Ā Lipnet AI lip reads with 93.4% accuracy (humans <80%)
Low online social scores get nearly 5m Chinese barred from flights.
A British insurance company tried to adjust its premia based on Facebook scores. Facebook blocked it.Ā
š Shell: Oil demand may peak in five years.
š³Ā Bowling ball vs feather fall in a vacuum (video)
End note
We had a fantastic dinner event with Ryan Avent which you can experience by listening toĀ our podcast. Also, read Aidan Fiztpatrickās essay on technological unemployment that was inspired by the event.
Weāre always looking for speakers for those dinners or guests on the podcast. So if youād like to be one of them, please just fill out this form.