The Low-Down: 2019-04-21

Apr 27, 2019

Walmart Unveils the AI-Powered Store Of the Future

Walmart has decided to position itself as the human - and presumably more humane - alternative to Amazon. It is keeping check out cashiers and visible store employees while using technology to keep inventory levels appropriate.

It is an interesting test of the consumer retail zeitgeist: hyper-efficient convenience versus technologically enabled humanity. The question is whether it will prove to be a strategic breakthrough or just another intermediate step. JL

Sarah Perez reports in Tech Crunch:

Walmart unveiled a new “store of the future” including AI-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store is open to customers and is one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market stores, containing more than 30,000 items. Instead of focusing on automated checkout solutions, Walmart inventory levels are using the AI system to ensure that there are shopping carts available at all times and that registers are open and staffed.

Data suggest the answer is yes. JL

Shalini Ramachandran reports in the Wall Street Journal:

One in four people said they turned down intimacy in favor of binge watching in the prior six months. Among people 18 to 38, the rate is 36%. Demographers have theories about why the U.S. fertility rate recently hit an all-time low, ranging from the aftereffects of the financial crisis to the broader use of long-term birth control. (But) it is hard to ignore the impact of streaming entertainment, popularized by Netflix, Amazon., Hulu and HBO.A 2017 paper, “Archives of Sexual Behavior,” revealed that Americans were having less sex than they did three decades ago and offered streaming video as one culprit.

There is no such thing as 'enough' for media companies. They saw how Netflix was profiting and, not content with their own generous margins, decided it was time to butt in.

The result is that consumers will end up paying more for a confusing array of less comprehensive, sometimes overlapping and almost certainly unsatisfactory services. JL

Steven Zeitchik and Craig Timberg report in the Washington Post:

Disney’s announcement and other recent developments signal that a halcyon era is ending, in which disruption in the entertainment industry unleashed opportunities for better consumer deals. The deals came for those willing to cancel their cable services while adding new streaming services. As the industry has fractured, with many entities, including sports leagues and genre-focused producers, now offering their own packages, "everything is about funding, a way to make people pay more money. The incentives are to have streaming be as bad a deal as cable already was.” Studies show consumers will subscribe to only 2.25 streaming services.

A new, albeit tangible, means of authenticating intangible brand value. JL

Ronald White reports in the Los Angeles Times:

The global reseller market could be $3 billion.That compares with a retail sneaker industry of $100 billion. Algorithms to track pricing on shoes. The people who buy and sell sneakers camp out at specialty retailers before a product drop, check Nike’s SNKRS app and resale sites such as StockX, GOAT, Flight Club and Stadium Goods where sneakers are authenticated and offered for resale. Dedicated resellers are striking exclusive deals with manufacturers to sell products through blind auctions in something StockX is calling a “sneaker IPO,” for initial product offering.

As everyone with a product or experience to sell became aware of the benefits to be derived from providing staged, Instagrammable selfie opportunities to the public - and as smartphone camera quality improved - everyone got into the 'look at me' act.

But a funny thing happened on the way to those 15 minutes of fame. The planned aesthetic became so available and common it became that most dreaded of all embarrassments: boring. JL

Taylor Lorenz reports in The Atlantic:

“The pink wall and avocado toast are just not what people are stopping at anymore.”As Instagram has grown to more than 1 billion monthly users, it ushered in a look: bright walls, artfully arranged lattes and Millennial-pink everything, with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. But every trend has a shelf life. Instagram walls were built to allow normal people to take influencer-quality photographs, but they worked so well, th(ey) became common. (Influencers) are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. As the public becomes more aware of sponsored posts, "everyone is trying to be more authentic."

The cameras and 'smart shelves' use facial recognition and machine learning to match live customers with pre-labelled data in their systems.

The problem is that they rely on not-necessarily reliable visual clues like clothing or eye shadows or in front of what products they stop to make algorithmic assumptions which may not be accurate. JL

Associated Press reports:

Companies are pitching retailers to bring the technology into physical stores as a way to better compete with online rivals already armed with troves of information on their customers and their buying habits. A camera can guess your age, gender or mood. A smart shelf (can) detect "happiness" or "fear" as people stood in front it — information a store could use to gauge reaction to a product or an ad. The technology could lead to raising prices when an older person walks in or pushing products based on perceived mood such as ads for anti-depression medication if the cameras think you look sad. "The creepy factor here is 10 out of 10."

Like many businesses, Amazon's real profits come not from its core offering - ecommerce sales - but from the services wrapped around it.

For McDonalds, it is franchise fees and the sale of basic food ingredients - plus real estate - to franchisees. For automakers, it is financing, insurance and service contracts. For Amazon, Prime membership offers almost pure profit so offering one day shipping is worth the added cost. Especially since the margins it is now generating from its cloud subsidiary and from its growing advertising business dwarf those in ecommerce. JL

Karen Weise reports in the New York Times:

Amazon’s core retail business is not growing as fast as it used to, though it has become more profitable. They are maturing (and) facing greater competition from Walmart. Membership growth has been slowing. Persuading people to pay $119 a year for Prime membership has been crucial to prompting people to shop more on Amazon. This is why it keeps adding Prime benefits, like free one-day shipping. Most of Amazon’s revenue still comes from sales on its website, but an outsize chunk of its profit is from cloud computing and advertising. "They have pivoted their business and transformed themselves.”

Thinking Machines With Autonomy: The Need To Study AI Behavior

Beyond computer science, math and even machine learning.

The demand for holistic understanding. JL

Janine Liberty reports in MIT Media Lab:

We interact numerous times each day with thinking machines that make life easier,“thinking” on their own, acquiring knowledge, building on it and communicating with other thinking machines to make complex judgments and decisions in ways that not even the programmers who wrote their code can explain. The aim is to unite scholars studying machine behavior to recognize complementarities. “The rise of machines making decisions and acti(ng) autonomously calls for a new field of scientific study that looks at them not as products of engineering and computer science but as a new class of actors with their own behavioral patterns and ecology.”

Head bangers' bandwidth. JL

David Nield reports in Science Alert:

Relentless Doppelganger is a non-stop, 24/7 YouTube livestream churning out heavy death metal generated completely by algorithms. Like other AI-powered imitation engines, (this) is smart enough to know when it's produced audio that's good enough to pass for the genuine article and knows which part of its neural network to tweak and strengthen.The more data (it) can be trained on, the more like its source material it sounds. "This early example of neural synthesis is a proof-of concept for how machine learning can drive music software. Creating music can be as simple as specifying a set of music influences on which a model trains."

Given the overemphasis placed on tweeting as a form of public expression, it is worth noting that only 22% of the population tweets and that only 10% of those - @2% of the total citizenry - do so regularly.

Users tend to be younger, better educated, wealthier, more liberal and, especially for frequent tweeters, more likely to be women. Which may or may not be a skewed sample, depending on your point of view. JL

Stefan Wojcik and Adam Hughes report in Pew Research Center:

22% of American adults use Twitter. Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall. Twitter users also differ from the broader population on key social issues: Twitter users are more likely to say that immigrants strengthen rather than weaken the country and to see evidence of racial and gender-based inequalities in society. The 10% of users who are most active are responsible for 80% of all tweets. Compared with other U.S. adults on Twitter, they are more likely to be women and more likely to regularly tweet about politics.

Most of the world's population is not white and male. Especially in the developing regions from which the future growth of business generally and technology specifically is most likely to emanate.

Bad data leads to inaccurate assumptions about market size, customer demand, resource allocation and financial results. JL

Stephen Shankland reports in CNET:

A pale male data set 78% male and 84% white (was what) Facebook used in a paper on the subject. Another from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has subjects who are 75.4% male and 80% lighter-skinned. (But) "pale male data sets are destined to fail the rest of the world."A huge fraction of the world's population is made up of women or people who don't have European-heritage white skin -- the undersampled majority. "Ignorance is no longer a viable business strategy."

Delivery is more complex than it looks. So the best opportunity for robotic assistance will probably be in assisting humans by automating 'last motions' rather than the entire last mile. JL

Matt Beane reports in Wired:

Robots promise a cheap solution in getting a single pizza to a home at the right time to the right person. The trouble is robots do better in structured, predictable and simple environments, and delivery is very unstructured. Part of this is weather, lighting, surfaces, sounds, and moving objects. (But) navigating involves social complexity too: the expectations for appropriate robo-behavior. To see robots create economy-scale effects, skip the last mile and look to the last motion: the task sequences between automated work in structured environments, where humans handle uncertainties involving physical inputs, control actions, and outputs.

Digital denizens are constantly being gamed by the algorithms that evaluate their engagement with the internet and its content.

It is possible - though inconvenient and slow - to game them back, which is why so few people do.

The looming question is, if there is an opportunity to make that process easier and faster, will more people do so? Complexity theory suggests that the process of co-evolution means the algorithms will simply adapt.

But it could mean that, at scale, powerful demand changes could influence future use. JL

David Pierce reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Ostensibly, the point of these algorithms is to show you what you care about. These services claim to have users’ interests at heart, but they have an interest of their own, to show you whatever good, bad or ugly stuff it takes to keep force-feeding you ads.“If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious.” This is life in the age of the inscrutable, opaque algorithmic feed: "I may decide whom I friend or follow, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the rest decide what I actually see."

The Mathematics Of Hacking Passwords

The concept is pretty straightforward. The execution, however...JL

Jean-Paul Delahaye reports in Scientific American:

When you are asked to create a password of a certain length and combination of elements, your choice will fit into the realm of all unique options that conform to that rule—into the “space” of possibilities. if you were told to use six lowercase letters there are 26 possible choices for the first letter, 26 possible choices for the second, and so forth. If you are told to select a 12-character password that can include uppercase and lowercase letters, you would have 72 possibilities for each of the 12 characters of the password. The size of the possibility space is more than 62 trillion times the size of the first space.

Given the trade-off between enhanced security and ease of use, companies have made the economic decision to focus on convenience, hoping that safety issues will be few and far between.

But as the volume of such incidents have risen - and as those affected take to social media to complain, the calculus is changing. JL

Reed Albergotti reports in the Washington Post:

Software designed to help people break into devices has gotten so easy (that) companies have chosen to let some hackers slip through the cracks rather than impose countermeasures that detract from their users’ experience and alienate customers. The result is anyone with Internet has the ability to break into homes through devices designed to keep physical intruders out. As hacks become public, companies are deciding between user convenience and damage to their brands. Nest could make it more difficult but doing so would introduce “friction” that can slow down using a product. (But) tech companies pay a reputational price for each incident.

Complex systems are complex for a reason.

Reality bites. JL

David Talby reports in Forbes:

The moment you put a model in production, it starts degrading. A model’s accuracy will be at its best until you start using it. It then deteriorates as the world it was trained to predict changes. This is called concept drift, and while it’s been heavily studied, it’s often ignored in industry best practices. Keep your best data scientists and engineers on the project after it's in production. In contrast to classic software projects where, after deployment, engineers move on to build the next big thing, a lot of the technical challenge in ML and AI systems is keeping them accurate. Automating retrain pipelines, online measurement, and A/B testing is hard to get right.

While comparisons with another piece of dominant hardware - the smartphone - may require an expansive imagination, there are lessons to be learned about price, battery life, utility - and enjoyment. JL

Benj Edwards reports in ars technica:

Thirty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Nintendo has sold 118.69 million units of the original Game Boy line (not including Game Boy Advance), making it the longest running dynasty in the video game business. Tetris drove the public's ravenous appetite for Game Boy, but Pokémon cemented it to legendary status. Nintendo's obsession with battery efficiency proved pivotal. Consumers chose the Game Boy because of lower cost of operation and greater portability. Nintendo continued to lower the price as production costs decreased, keeping the Game Boy affordable

People just dont like being beaten over the head with a message.

Anecdotal experience suggests that this is not surprising, but it is always good to have real data which explains the relationship. JL

Doug Zanger reports in Ad Week:

Advertising for cause-related marketing among the world’s top 100 brands is predicted to reach $2.23 billion, a 5% increase over 2018. 64% of consumers choose, switch, avoid or boycott brands based on societal issues. 76% of younger consumers said they purchased or consider purchasing a brand to show support for the issues supported. (But) results indicate corporate image and purchase intent were enhanced when the creative was a softer sell in cause-related marketing.

As if Uber's own stumbles were not enough to deter investors, the precipitous post-IPO decline of primary competitor, Lyft's stock, has raised questions about where the once-unassailable behemoth might be going.

Among other challenges, increasing urbanization and its attendant traffic jams (caused, in part, by the precipitous growth of ride hailing cars) are leading to growing demand for congestion pricing which may make ride hailing services less competitive.

Uber's valuation remains stratospheric, but given the paucity of data about both current performance and real prospects, this remains a speculative venture in its present form. The big early investors will probably get out (mostly) whole. As for everyone else... JL

Ben Thompson reports in Stratechery:

After all of these years, and all these theoretical arguments about Uber’s potential, all we have are clichés about small pieces of gigantic markets and numbers that reveal nothing concrete about the business. Driver availability and liquidity will continue to be differentiating factors. The most likely go-to-market for autonomous cars is via the ride-sharing networks, not as a substitute. Lyft is one of the best ways for investors to bet on Waymo, and the more money that Lyft has, the more Uber will struggle for profitability in the markets in which they compete. (And) self-driving cars may emerge in markets that Uber cannot enter, like China.

As the global smartphone market becomes saturated, 'innovative' alterations are becoming less functional and more easily copied by all the products in the market. Which is what leads to ever more desperate measures. JL

Charles Arthur reports in The Guardian:

Smartphone sales are in the doldrums, so we’re at the throw-ideas-at-the-wall stage of innovation. Other companies are adding cameras so quickly they’ll soon have an insect-style compound eye. You can almost smell the desperation in so many tech “advances”, which take the form either of adding things you didn’t need (the side button on Samsung phones) or taking away things you did (Apple removing phone headphone jacks so you need to buy, and lose, tiny plug-in dongles). Stuff doesn’t break like it used to; phones now last years. Maybe it was inevitable that Samsung would invent the self-breaking phone.

Yes. JL

Jason Mittel reports in The Conversation:

What if we’re looking at Netflix through the wrong lens? What if its primary long-term business model is not as a media company, but as a data aggregation company? Netflix logs everything you have ever watched and how you watch – every time you pause, what programs you consider watching but choose not to and when you’re most likely to binge on reruns. When linked to website trackers, Netflix could cross-reference that viewing data with social media accounts, purchasing habits, search history and even emails. In the age of surveillance capitalism, such data could be worth a fortune to political campaigns and advertisers.

The Psychology Driving the Epidemic of Selfie Deaths

It's part of human DNA to attempt to distinguish oneself publicly.

The digital age has given people more tools with which to self promote, but that rampant accessibility has made it harder to get noticed. Which stokes extreme behavior. JL

Kathryn Miles reports in Outside:

We have a much longer childhood than most mammals: we need time to assimilate into our culture and assert an identity. The impulse to fashion our image publicly has increased in the digital age,which means it’s harder to get noticed. Our culture encourages extreme selfies. Acquiring a large social media following can be lucrative. Companies promote risky selfies, making it more appealing. There are fewer demonstrative ways of asserting status in our culture. (But) none happened if you don’t have a pic.

During the pilot test, listings with 3D tours attracted more viewers. But the crucial metric will be whether they sell homes faster - and for higher prices. JL

Kyle Wiggers reports in Venture Beat:

Zillow announced the debut of 3D Home, an AI-powered iOS app that allows potential buyers to view 360-degree pics and tours of properties. On-screen icons guided by motion-detecting algorithms instruct users where and when to snap photos, and once the entire house has been captured, computer vision models adjust exposure levels, select thumbnail images that “best represent” each room, and stitch together 3D walkthroughs. The My 3D Home dashboard can be edited, shared privately, or added to a home listing. They take as little as 20 minutes to create. Listings with 3D tours attracted more prospective buyers than those without them.

Like much of digital media, it is unclear whether consumers raised to expect free content will feel sufficiently motivated - in scalable numbers - to support paid podcasting.

The homey connectivity of early providers could prove lasting. But it may be that the trend towards paid access signals 'the end of the beginning,' as podcast pioneers are supplanted by those with the financial backing to provide snappier production values, more well known guests and a stable of offerings on different topics. JL

Max Willens reports in Digiday:

Though podcasting has (gone) mainstream, with 70% of Americans aware, only a quarter of the U.S. population listens to one weekly. Podcasting is an ad-driven medium. Its market has been growing, projected to reach $659 million in revenue in 2020. While that amounts to a rounding error compared to digital video, even a subs-focused New York Times is relying on ads for its podcasts.But the arrival of more platforms, and their interest in bundles, may limit opportunities to scale direct relationships to consumers. Creators may also have to contend with consumers expecting to access a library, rather than one show, when they pay for audio.

A compelling commentary on the enduring value of tech clusters and their experienced talent. JL

Eric Lawrence reports in the Detroit Free Press:

Waymo is to lease and repurpose an existing facility on the American Axle and Manufacturing campus where American Axle has its world headquarters and Advanced Technology Development Center. The company ended production of front axles there. The location was recently used as sequencing center for a parts supplier. The facility will be where the company integrates self-driving hardware and software into Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar I-Paces for its ride-hailing fleet. "We want to benefit from a location in the heart of the American automotive industry and its talent base that would allow us to quickly get up and running."

Orwellian implications and facial recog malfunctions aside: where did the airline get this data? Did passengers unwittingly give consent - without being informed they were doing so - when they bought a ticket? And when was this new procedure introduced, evidently without notice?

Turns out the US Department of Homeland Security is providing the facial recognition photos. Who knows how, when or where they were obtained.

As for consent. Passengers can opt out - assuming they are aware they opted in to begin with...JL

Chris Matyszczyk reports in ZDNet:

"I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?" How (did) JetBlue knew what she looked like.JetBlue explained: "The information is provided by the United States Department of Homeland Security from existing holdings." Who knows what other information about you might be instantly accessible? The airline claims it will save you nine whole minutes.

Because it's fast, it's conveniently bundled (so only one password and one bill required) and it's price competitive. JL

David Pierce reports in the Wall Street Journal:

In this cable-cut, streaming-dominated world, every set of shows we want to watch comes with its own app, password and ever-increasing monthly fee. Gee, it’d be great if someone could bundle all that content together in one place! And maybe consolidate all my bills down to one, and hand me a nice box to run it all. We could call it—“cable.” Cable companies are still the most popular, and most affordable, way to get fast internet. And subscribers can finally get a huge selection of content and watch it anywhere, using much nicer products than anything cable offered before.

The majority of people opting out of algorithms are those who are well educated or wealthy enough to ignore the consequences.

The question that raises is whether that sort of economic or digital divide is socio-economically healthy or even operationally sustainable. JL

Anjana Susarla reports in Quartz:

Opting out from algorithmic curation is a luxury and could one day be a symbol of affluence available to only a select few. Savvier users are navigating away from devices and becoming aware of how algorithms affect their lives. Consumers who have less information are relying even more on algorithms to guide their decisions. (But) Algorithmic awareness does not lead to more confidence in the system. Even when an algorithm’s process is sketched out, the details may be too complex for users to comprehend. Transparency will help only users who are sophisticated enough to grasp the intricacies of algorithms.

Apple CEO Says the Company Wants You To Not Use Your iPhone So Much. As If.

What is most interesting about his statement is not the evident disconnect with over a decade of Apple policies designed - precisely - to increase engagement. But that the company is beginning to recognize that over-use and push notifications are becoming sociologically worrisome, even dangerous.

And that it needs to get in front of this issue from a public relations and operational standpoint before solutions are imposed on rather than led by the company. JL

Sarah Perez reports in Tech Crunch:

Tim Cook thinks people should get off their iPhones and decrease their engagement with apps. He said the company hadn’t intended for people to be constantly using their iPhones, and noted he has silenced his push notifications. But Apple’s notification platform was built with increasing engagement in mind. It’s disingenuous to say it was not. At the least, Apple could admit that it was a different era back then, and didn’t realize the potential damage to our collective psyche that a continually buzzing iPhone would cause. "People using their phones has never been an objective for us." Except, of course, for those 10 years when it was.

And then they die...? JL

Tristan Greene reports in The Next Web:

Scientists have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die. (It is) a bottom-up construction of dynamic biomaterials powered by artificial metabolism, representing a combination of irreversible biosynthesis and dissipative assembly processes. An emergent locomotion behavior resembling a slime mold was programmed with this material by using an abstract design model similar to mechanical systems.

Data analysis reveals that the difference in the 'th' sound between 'bath' or 'bathe' is but one of the reasons English is difficult and weird compared to other languages. JL

Adam Schembri reports in the World Economic Forum:

Computational linguists used data in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) to systematically compare which languages had the largest number of features that differed most from other languages. In this survey, English came in 33rd position out of 239 languages. So it was definitely “weirder” than over 80% of the other languages in the survey. English has an unusually large set of vowel sounds and has unusual consonant sounds.This is part of the reason that English spelling is complicated, because it has letters for vowels from the Roman alphabet and speakers have to make them work for twice that number of sounds.

Automotive convergence: as enhanced connectivity and autonomous vehicles come closer to reality, rental cars, as we have known them may morph into something else.

Vehicle ownership may become economically disadvantageous and even disappear. But that may mean that every car in the future is, in effect, a rental. JL

Phil Wahba reports in Fortune:

In a society in which technology makes most routines faster, the average wait time to pick up a rental car got two minutes longer between 2013 and 2017. (But) before long, you’ll be able to skip the counter-kiosk. You’ll use your smartphone to activate your car’s headlights so you can find it. Your phone will unlock it and turn on the ignition. You’ll drive off without having to go through the don’t-back-up-or-we’ll-puncture-your-tires exit gate. And that’s if you go to the lot at all: the rental agency may send a self-driving car to pick you up.

Algorithms can ascertain a host of highly personal factors by extrapolating from unrelated data - including cell phone number. JL

Zeynep Tufekci reports in the New York Times:

Few people posting photos on Instagram are aware they may be revealing their mental health to anyone with the computational power. Because of technological advances and the amount of data now available about billions of people, discretion no longer suffices to protect privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can infer, with a high degree of accuracy, things you never disclosed, including moods, political beliefs, sexual orientation and health. Because computational inference is a statistical technique, it often gets things wrong and it is hard to pinpoint the source of the error, for these algorithms offer little insight into how they operate.

Millennials and Gen Xers are the future of the work force. Their job opportunities are predominantly service oriented, even within an industrial context.

And having grown up watching their parents struggle in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis but now finding themselves in a full employment economy, they are more likely than their elders to demand more from the workplace and to do so collaboratively. JL

Bret Schulte reports in Slate:

Millennials, workers under age 35, are outpacing every other age group in new union membership. More than 1 million professionals have joined unions in the past two decades, reaching an all-time high in 2018 of 6.18 million. One reason for the shift is the evolution of the American economy. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared as service jobs have increased.The emergence of the professional class has altered the old pattern of class struggle.“What’s new is basically a realignment of how people see themselves. The people most likely to organize are people who had expectations of their work life that have been trashed.”

In an evolutionary research and development environment based on incremental improvement, specialization can hinder learning, while generalization encourages more free flow of ideas, innovation and thus, faster achievement of goals. JL

Eric Colson reports in Harvard Business Review:

We should not be optimizing data science teams for productivity gains; that is what you do when you are seeking incremental efficiencies. The goal of assembly lines is execution. The goal of data science is to learn and develop profound new capabilities. Algorithmic products and services can’t be designed up-front. These are novel capabilities with inherent uncertainty; you learn as you go, not before. When the product is still evolving, specialization increases coordination costs and narrows context. Generalized roles better facilitate learning and innovating, and provide the right kinds of scaling: to discover and build business capabilities

AI Could Predict Death. But What If the Algorithm Is Biased?

AI is not yet foolproof when it comes to extrapolating from patient medical data. And that does not even account for issues of algorithmic, cultural or personal interpretation. JL

Amitha Kalaichandran reports in Wired:

The issue of unconscious bias in health care has been studied as it relates to physicians in academic medicine and toward patients. There are differences in how patients of different ethnic groups are treated for pain, though the effect can vary based on the doctor's gender and cognitive load. When it comes to death and end-of-life care, these biases could perpetuate existing differences. Some prefer more aggressive care toward end of life and this may be related to a response to fighting against a health care system. AI for the purposes of assessing brain activity should be validated before being used outside of a research setting.

The union may or may not get traction, but its significance lies in its role as part of a larger movement to force the big tech companies to share more revenue (a bigger piece of the pie...) derived from personal data - and in this case, intellectual property - of those who use and contribute to it. JL

Taylor Lorenz reports in The Atlantic:

IG Meme Union Local 69-420 is forming at an optimal time. Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon have come under fire for (their) labor practices, and the public is aware of how much power(they) exert. Instagram monetizes the content posted to it to sell ads based on metadata attached to that content. Users, who are the ones posting the photos, videos, and memes that keep people coming back to the app, don’t get a cut of that revenue.Meme writers generate the engagement that helps keep Instagram growing but the platform doesn’t pay them for their work.

Doubtful, though it may help stave off total annihilation.

The problem is that the platforms offering to do the bundling are not likely to share much useful data. JL

Sarah Jerde reports in Ad Week:

Media bundling in which publishers and platforms partner to offer services for a discounted price has been gaining momentum as an alternative to subscription fatigue. It remains unclear whether media bundling will be the white horse that publishers are seeking, breathing new life into an industry desperate for revival, or a Trojan horse: offering just enough sparkle to entice publishers, drawing them in on a promise to expand reach, but not providing enough data or insight as to who that larger audience is. Media buyers say they’re not optimistic that Apple will give publishers a full view of their audience.

By positioning itself as the safe, western-friendly alternative to Huawei. JL

Stu Woo reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Nokia has transformed itself into a global manufacturer of telecommunications equipment— cellular antennas, phone switches, internet routers and new components for next-generation 5G wireless systems—and is now the world’s No. 2 behind Huawei. Nokia’s acquisition of former American giants Motorola and Lucent helped it earn Washington’s seal of approval. As the world prepares to upgrade wireless systems to 5G, Nokia has cold-called wireless carriers in countries where the U.S. has stepped up its anti-China rhetoric, pushing its gear as an alternative.

What worked in the US and Europe did not work in China, which has evolved more quickly as a mobile oriented market, demanding low prices, top tier western products, competitive local alternatives - and instant delivery.

Amazon's focus on its own products and logistics infrastructure hurt it, perhaps irretrievably. JL

Karen Weise reports in the New York Times:

The company had long struggled to gain traction in China despite operating there for more than a decade. It sells less in the country than in Japan, the smallest market it reports. The company didn’t adapt well to the Chinese market, which is price-sensitive, favors instant delivery and a focus on authentic foreign products. Amazon controlled much of its own inventory and built its own delivery infrastructure. Alibaba chose to focus on being a platform that hosted an array of smaller vendors and made use of local delivery companies to help it offer lower prices. The approach helped Alibaba eclipse Amazon.

Digital natives often prefer receiving advice digitally rather than in person or by Powerpoint.

And microbursts of guidance delivered throughout the day may be more effective than sitting in class - or even in front of a computer.

The question is whether the overall learning impact will be as ephemeral as the nudges - or longer lasting. Well-led companies recognize that a mix of approaches is likely to achieve the optimal results across a range of personalities and learning types.JL

Sue Shellenbarger reports in the Wall Street Journal:

As more millennials move into management, many are finding they lack basic training in such supervisory skills as delivering feedback and delegating work. New crop AI-driven coaching apps and platforms fill the gap. Grounded in research showing periodic repetition and reminders are good ways to learn new material, the platforms suit a generation of digital natives who prefer checking an app over sitting through a PowerPoint class.All reflect a trend toward injecting training into the workday as needed, a pattern experts describe as microlearning or learning in the flow of work. 49% of employees prefer taking their training on the job.

Where Should the Line Be Drawn Between Rejecting or Accepting Black Box AI?

The reality is that even their inventors are not always sure about their capabilities. So as in most other realms of human endeavor, we will probably have to learn to live with some degree of uncertainty. JL

Edd Gent reports in Singularity Hub:

Lack of interpretability in AI is a common concern and many are trying to fix it, but is it really always necessary to know what’s going on inside these “black boxes”? Once in a while we can find information about their inner workings, but most of the time we have to accept their answers and probe around the edges to figure out how reliable and accurate they are. We need to acknowledge that we’re going to need to use black boxes. This is our opportunity to do due diligence to understand how to use them responsibly, ethically, and with benefits rather than harm.

'Grime doesn't pay.' JL

Joel Shannon reports in USA Today:

An Oregon sheriff's office entered a residential bathroom with guns drawn, prepared to confront a burglary suspect. Instead, they found a trapped robotic vacuum making a ruckus. Deputies surrounded the house, called in a canine officer and repeatedly instructed the suspect to exit the bathroom. 15 minutes after first responding, police entered the bathroom with guns drawn (and) witnessed a "very thorough vacuuming job being done by a Roomba Robotic Vacuum cleaner."

Lyft's stock has cratered since its IPO, but the early investors got out whole and interest in Uber's remains strong.

Eventually, these companies will raise rates - significantly - be acquired or go out of business. But in the interim, billions that could have been invested in longer term economically sustainable enterprises will have been wasted. JL

Umair Haque reports in Medium:

Uber and Lyft have been vehicles (bad pun fully intended) for a net transfer from venture capital, to consumers, taking VC money and using to subsidize artificially cheap rides for people. As soon as the subsidy from venture capital runs out — shortly — prices are going to have to rise. Lyft’s stock a classic example of a pump-and-dump. At IPO, it was flogged to “dumb money." The stock soared and then it crashed because the smarter money only bet against it. When capitalism tries to solve problems it can’t — like transport for a nation — the result is a net waste and bad businesses

Hate groups, their followers - and interested onlookers - have become adept at workarounds designed to evade the frequently ambiguous guidelines promulgated by social media.

The larger issue is that social media ad rates continue to be driven by scale, which means they do not want to alienate too many people in order to remain dominant. Until penalties are imposed for fostering hate speech, the platforms have little incentive to change. JL

Natasha Lomas reports in Tech Crunch:

It remains trivially easy for anyone who already knows the ‘brand’ to workaround restrictions by using another mainstream technology. Hate groups are well versed in using coded language and dog whistle tactics to communicate with followers and spread messages under the mainstream radar. YouTube could step up and take a leadership position by setting robust policies against individuals who seek to weaponize hate. Instead it continues trying to fudge the issue, claiming it’s about ‘balancing’ speech and community safety.

While eliminating middlemen like Amazon, Google or Facebook sounds enticing, the prospect of having telepathic communications hacked seems likely. JL

Andrew Masterson reports in Cosmos:

Before the century is out, advances in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will result in the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time. Instant access to information thus becomes possible without the need for external architecture such as computers and internet cables. Search and retrieval exercises will be initiated by thought patterns. “Neuralnanorobotics” describe the agglomeration of neural, nano and robotic technologies that needs to happen before the internet of thoughts can come to pass.

Because retailers believe it will drive more foot traffic to stores, which may then cause an uptick in sales.

And brands like it because it may help flatten their soaring return and delivery costs. JL

Sarah Nassauer reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Walgreens Boots Alliance and Nordstrom will let online shoppers at other brands and retailers pick up or return orders at some stores, a sign of how retailers are partnering in new ways to draw customers as more shopping shifts online.“The main thing is this will drive more footfall." (And) Brands hope adding more return and pickup locations will boost sales by offering convenience and reduce the cost of shipping. Sending more items in a single package or letting carriers like FedEx pick up more packages at one location can lower shipping costs.

People are marrying later - to the extent they are marrying at all - which means they are having their first children later. After they have been educated, often well educated, and after they have spent time in the working world, replete with access to technology and data. About everything.

So it is not surprising, albeit not always helpful, that they try to apply the data-driven approaches that helped them succeed at school and work, to their child rearing practices.

If only it were that simple. JL

Emily Oster reports in the New York Times:

In 1980, 8.6% of first births were to women over 30; by 2015 this was 31%. This means that by the time a baby arrives, many of us have been through school, spent time in the working world. In many cases data can be helpful (but) there are some parenting decisions where the data just isn’t much help at all. There are limits to the utility of general information. Parenting is full of decisions, nearly all of which can be agonized over. You can and should learn about the risks and benefits of your parenting choices, but in the end you have to also think about what works for you.

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