The Future, This Week

By Sandra Peter

Machine Learning
Does AI Truly Learn And Why We Need to Stop Overhyping Deep Learning
Forbes - Kalev Leetaru
AI today is described in breathless terms as computer algorithms that use silicon incarnations of our organic brains to learn and reason about the world, intelligent superhumans rapidly making their creators
Facebook
The people v Google and Facebook: ACCC's Rod Sims takes on big tech
smh.com.au - John McDuling
Being a government department, they used Microsoft's Outlook email client and the Skype instant-messaging service rather than (Facebook-owned) …
The suburbs are the spiritual home of overconsumption. But they also hold the key to a better future
theconversation.com - Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson
Suburban affluence is the defining image of the good life under capitalism, commonly held up as a model to which all humanity should aspire. More than …
Autonomous Cars
Should we allow self-driving cars to help people kill themselves?
Wired UK - Jamie Susskind
In October 2018 the Californian startup Aeva unveiled a new lidar system – a laser-based technology used to measure distance to a target – that can …
Startups
Startup Founders Think Real Progress on Diversity Is Years Away
WIRED - Paris Martineau
Tech has a diversity problem. This isn’t new. Women and minorities have long been woefully underrepresented in startup land, a problem that founders …
Science
Sci-Fi Promised Us Home Robots. So Where Are They?
WIRED - Matt Simon
Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful …
Machine Perception
Google says it won’t sell face recognition for now—but it will be hard to slow its use
MIT Technology Review
Google will stop offering face recognition through its cloud APIs—that is, until it can come up with policies to prevent misuses of the technology, …
Social Media
What I Learned By Quitting Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft
VICE - Daniel Oberhaus
Triple check your recovery codes, don’t link Facebook to different apps, and other lessons from a month without Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. In May I made the decision to excise the
Opinion
Brexit: The Most Boring Important Story in the World
The New York Times - By MARTHA GILL
LONDON — I’ve recently been struck by how much following British politics reminds me of watching “Lost,” the long-running TV series from the early 2000s. The show was about a group of plane-crash survivors
Ethics
Salesforce is hiring its first Chief Ethical and Humane Use officer to make sure its artificial intelligence isn't used evil
Business Insider - Rosalie Chan
• Salesforce will hire Paula Goldman as its first Chief Ethical and Humane Use officer.• Goldman will spearhead a new Office of Ethical and Humane Use, which focuses on developing strategies to use technology
GANs
These incredibly realistic fake faces show how algorithms can now mess with us
MIT Technology Review - by Will Knight
A new approach to AI fakery can generate incredibly realistic faces, with whatever characteristics you’d like. The faces above don’t seem particularly …
Realizing 2030
delltechnologies.com
Realizing Healthcare in 2030 How will the next era of human-machine partnerships reshape the way medical information is shared, diseases are treated, …
Google
Google Reveals America’s Most Pressing Questions and Most Popular Searches of 2018
observer.com - Sissi Cao
Marked with more than just a few big moments, 2018 has been an eventful year—from Meghan Markle’s royal wedding in May and the summer’s World Cup to …
Are You Ready for the Financial Crisis of 2019?
The New York Times - By ALEX WILLIAMS
For moneyed Americans, most of the past year has felt like 1929 all over again — the fun, bathtub-gin-quaffing, rich-white-people-doing-the-Charleston early part of 1929, not the grim couple of months
Technology
Yes, You Can Be an Ethical Tech Consumer. Here’s How.
medium.com
Products that we enjoy continue to create privacy, misinformation and workplace issues. We can do better at getting the industry to do better. The New …
Software Companies
Patagonia, 23andMe, Netflix, and More: The 14 Companies That Dominated 2018
Inc Magazine - By Anna Meyer
From breaking rules to breaking records, these are the most influential--and interesting--companies of the year. The competition for Inc. magazine's 2018 Company of the Year was as intense as it gets.
Fake News
Believe nothing: The hoax of the Shed at Dulwich
theconversation.com - Julia Creet
The Shed at Dulwich recently reached TripAdvisor’s No. 1 rated spot for restaurants in London before it was revealed to be a hoax. The stunt showed …
I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor
VICE - Oobah Butler
And then served customers Iceland ready meals on its opening night. Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in
Business (Australia)
Digital platforms. Why the ACCC's proposals for Google and Facebook matter big time
theconversation.com - Sacha Molitorisz and Derek Wilding
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released the preliminary report of its Digital Platforms Inquiry, and Google and Facebook …
Cleveland
Google CEO Had To Explain To Congress Why Googling 'Idiot' Shows Donald Trump
HuffPost - Lee Moran
CEO Sundar Pichai denied the company has "a little man sitting behind the curtain." Search for the term “idiot” on Google and several photographs of President Donald Trump will appear high in the image
Stitch Fix
Stitch Fix’s chief algorithms officer on when to become a data-driven business
VentureBeat - Khari Johnson
Stitch Fix is a data-driven clothing company using AI at virtually every aspect of its business, with its own algorithms department staffed by 100 data scientists. Algorithms help pick out clothes sent
Australia
This is how Australia’s ban on encryption could endanger us all
MIT Technology Review
The Australian government has passed a law that forces tech companies to give police and security agencies access to encrypted messages, claiming …
Apps
The scale of location tracking by our smartphone apps has been exposed
MIT Technology Review
An investigation by The New York Times has revealed the sheer scale of how our location is tracked by apps on our smartphones. The findings: Several …
Research Center
50 Years Later, We Still Don't Grasp the Mother of All Demos
WIRED - Klint Finley
Fifty years ago today, Doug Engelbart showed 2,000 people a preview of the future. Engelbart gave a demonstration of the "oN-Line System" at the Fall …
Artificial Intelligence
AI Australia
stitcher.com
Today, we’re chatting with AI expert, activist, and author Toby Walsh. Toby is a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South …
How low will Bitcoin now go? The history of price bubbles provides some clues
which-50.com - Lee Smales
Nearly 170 years before the invention of Bitcoin, the journalist Charles Mackay noted the way whole communities could “fix their minds upon one …
Medicine
Can humans have babies on Mars? It may be harder than you think.
National Geographic
Science & InnovationStarstruck To build a sustainable presence off Earth, humans will first have to answer some tricky questions about basic biology. 7 Minute Read Fast-forward to several decades or a
Deloitte
Deloitte’s 9 tech predictions for 2019
VentureBeat - Dean Takahashi
Everybody makes a list of 2019 predictions, but the folks at Deloitte have numbers behind theirs. As one of the world’s biggest accounting and financial services firms, Deloitte is able to confidently
Apps
Delete All Your Apps
VICE - Emanuel Maiberg
It's not just Facebook: Android and iOS’s App Stores have incentivized an app economy where free apps make money by selling your personal data and location history to advertisers. Monday morning, the York