The Low-Down: 2019-08-25

Aug 31, 2019

Neurocapitalism: Brain-Reading Tech Is Coming

Who owns the signals the human brain sends? No, it's probably not the individual. JL

Sigal Samuel reports in Vox:

Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally - funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts.

The question is no longer what can you do with AI, but what can't you? JL

Caroline Haskins reports in Vice:

"Progressive Face Super-Resolution via Attention to Facial Landmark," uses a method called face super-resolution, which makes artificial human faces using an input of real human faces. A machine learning model—designed to reconstruct human faces using 16 x 16 pixel images of human faces— used it to reconstruct human faces using 16 x 16 emojis. Human-inspired emojis look photo-realistic. But arguably the 'worse' results come from object emojis, like pizza or fountain emojis, that spurt eyes, hair, and lips.

Say what you will, social media sells. JL

David Yaffe-Bellany and Matthew Sedacca report in the New York Times:

"...y'all good?" What the tweet set off were the “chicken sandwich wars,” a viral social media debate that captivated the internet for the last week and a half. Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and other fast-food brands traded barbs on Twitter, arguing about whose sandwich tasted best. As sandwich memes proliferated, customers flocked to Popeyes restaurants across the country, forcing employees to work overtime as location after location sold out. It did not have enough chicken to keep making the sandwiches. (And) in five hours on Tuesday, one of Popeyes’ rivals, KFC, sold its entire test supply of a new plant-based fried chicken at an Atlanta branch.

Which does not even take into account the demand for full time AI and machine learning skills, so those looking for part timers are probably way out of luck. JL

Dipen Pradhan reports in Entrepreneur:

There has been an enormous demand for any skill relating to AI and ML, and is growing continuously. Jobs related to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have posted a spike in demand. AI is being used for tasks as varied as identifying suicide risk to financial forecasting, writing car commercials, etc. Jobs involving ML saw a 36.66% rise in demand.

Subtraction from a big number in many cases still leaves a big number. JL

Christian Hetrick reports in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Whole Foods is still more expensive than much of its competition, research shows.Whole Foods prices fell 2% in July from the same month last year. A basket of 60 items cost $195, 13% more than at a typical grocery store. 70% of people who don’t shop at Whole Foods say it’s too expensive.“When you start off 40 to 45% more expensive, to lower your prices even by a double-digit number doesn’t do much. The chain recently introduced new discounts for Amazon Prime members. 62% of Whole Foods shoppers are Prime members.

Or, more to the point, by a drone and an algorithm. The question in many consumers' minds is who's interests the machines are serving. JL

Ryan Dezember reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The next time you buy a house, your lender might deploy a drone and a computer algorithm instead of a human appraiser. Financial institutions and state banking regulators say that by not having to hire a licensed appraiser, lenders and home buyers will save money and real-estate deals can be completed faster. Appraisers and consumer-advocacy groups argue that it introduces new risks to the $10.9 trillion market for home loans and that computer models and other technology can’t replicate a trained appraiser’s judgment, human senses and experience. “Software is eating real estate. Machines (are) outperforming humans in accuracy.”

Their wages and savings are already lower than Xers or Boomers, and their debt, especially college loans, are far higher. All of which means the next recession is likely to set Millennials back further than it will other age cohorts. JL

Annie Lowrey reports in The Atlantic:

Millennials are screwed. (They) are more vulnerable than other age cohorts. They graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. It meant a full decade of lost wages. As of 2014, Millennials were earning no more than Gen Xers, and 10% less than Baby Boomers despite the economy being far bigger and the country richer. A quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans, compared with half of Millennials. And Millennials took double the amount. They are to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse off than their parents. The next downturn might make sure of it as Millennials enter their prime earning years.

Piano Man: AI Generates Melodies From Lyrics

Lennon and McCartney, Bernie Taupin and Elton John, Rogers and Hammerstein.

Many of the greatest recent musical collaborations involved the skillful meshing of lyrics and and melody. Now AI has demonstrated it can perform both roles, suggesting further opportunities outside music for creative inspiration. JL

Kyle Wiggers reports in Venture Beat:

Notes have two musical attributes: pitch and duration. Pitches are properties of sounds that organize music on a scale, while duration represents the length of time a tone is sounded. Syllables align with melodies in music tracks. AI made use of the alignment data with a neural network learning long-term dependencies. (It) was trained to learn a mathematical representation at syllable and word levels to capture the synaptic structures of lyrics, learning to predict melody while accounting for the relationship between lyrics and melody. The AI outperformed a baseline model “in every respect,” approximating the distribution of human-composed music.

Making fast food even faster. JL

Blake Morgan reports in Forbes:

Instead of being full of tables and chairs, the restaurant features touch screens for customers to order. The pilot location is much smaller than a typical McDonald’s. Even the menu is streamlined with only favorite items like fries, chicken nuggets and the Big Mac. After ordering, customers move over to the collection area, where they wait for their order. Since customers can only order through the kiosks, all human employees work on fulfilling the orders, which gets the food to customers much faster.

Trading personal information for promotional advantages is now baked into consumers' psyches. JL

Jill Krasny reports in the New York Times:

These days, promotions come directly, and often custom tailored, to you. But at what cost? On email, text, social media and the web, promotions are everywhere. The lure of relevant deals is conditioning us to give up our personal information. “This is such a habit-forming activity that you begin to say, ‘Well, if I do it for shopping, I’ll do it for the government.’” Shoppers have come to expect such intrusions and shrug them off. 47% are frustrated when a company doesn’t use their personal information to fine-tune engagement. 43% “prefer” a company that uses their data to customize promotions and pricing.

It may be just as stupid as it sounds, but that hasn't stopped lots of people, over half a century from thinking about it. JL

Aaron Mak reports in Slate:

The suggestion pops up every hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has devoted an entire page on its website to the question “Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?” “Apart from the fact this might not alter the storm, this approach neglects that the radioactive fallout would move with tradewinds to cause environmental problems. This is not a good idea.” Beyond nuking hurricanes, there have been proposals to not merely control the weather but to combat it. In the 1990s, a renowned physicist explored using satellites to blast incipient tornadoes with microwave beams.

Silicon Valley has always been about 'improving' someone else's ideas. Making it harder to iterate may well make it harder to innovate. JL

Charles Duhigg reports in The New Yorker:

The history of innovation is a history of theft: Microsoft stole the idea for the graphical user interface from Apple; Apple had stolen it from Xerox. Innovation is not about creation but iteration. Innovation is also about betrayal: Silicon Valley can be traced to Fairchild Semiconductor, founded by engineers known as the Traitorous Eight after they left their previous employer to set up a rival. The reason tech has flourished in Silicon Valley is that California makes it so easy to betray, cheat, and steal. The difference today is there are a handful of large tech companies and those, after benefitting from theft, worry they might be on the wrong side of the purloiner dynamic going forward.

As the economy becomes increasingly focused on mobile apps, brands are finding that changing their name to display better on a smartphone screen - as well as expanding the scope of their business - necessitates a shorter, punchier title.

But the cost for bigger companies will probably add up to the tens of millions and may take years. So cognizance of the potential financial and operational benefits had better be certain. JL

Robert Klara reports in Ad Week:

The past couple of years have seen a multitude of companies, including many household names, changing what they’re called. (Recently) corporate name changes have had more to do with not getting pigeonholed into a single category—that’s why Jamba scuttled the Juice—or opting for shorter names because they’re much easier to recognize on handheld screens. There are hundreds of consumer touch points to be updated: packaging, uniforms, point-of-sale merchandising, wall art, printed collateral and the digital elements, from the website to the app to digital ads. The process of changing Federal Express to FedEx took three years. The change accompanied a streamlining of company operations, which altogether cost $100 million.

Using arbitrarily accumulated and curated data to enforce 'acceptable' behavior is a compelling means of ensuring that enterprises operating in China are compliant with government policies. It also forces them to be cognizant of the fact that said government possesses companies' intellectual capital which it can share with competitors if it is displeased with the enterprise's performance.

Coercion is a social tool, whose impact is exacerbated by the power of technology. It makes acquiescence an ethical as well as an economic decision. JL

Yoko Kubota reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Beijing’s plans for a social-credit system for individuals have stirred privacy concerns, but a parallel effort to monitor corporate behavior would similarly consolidate data on credit ratings and other characteristics. An algorithm would determine to what degree companies are complying with the country’s laws and regulations. Companies could be punished by losing access to preferential policies, denial of access to land purchases, loans and procurement bidding. The system “will provide the government with vast amounts of systematized data, co-opting technology to enforce political orthodoxy.”

Machine Behavior: The Reason Studying AI Like An Anthropolgist May Unlock Its Future

The growing interactions between humans and machines has prompted interest in studying machine behavior outside of computer science alone.

The cross-disciplinary approach, it is believed, may reveal more about the nature of such relationships and help optimize them. JL

John Pavlus reports in Quanta

The rise of artificial intelligence generates new questions about the relationship between people and machines. Autonomous systems are touching more aspects of people’s lives. But the “behavioral” outcomes of these systems are difficult to anticipate by examining machines’ code or construction. Colleagues from robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics call for a new field of science, “machine behavior” to investigate how artificial agents interact “in the wild” with human beings, their environments and each other. "We would better diagnose emergent problems, and anticipate them."

Musk thinks machines are winning and will prevail. Ma, from the planet's most populous country, believes humans will continue to dominate.

Both speak from differing philosophical standpoints - but also from the best interests of the future of their businesses. JL

Jordan Novet reports in CNBC photo by Xinhua:

Musk said computers are getting smarter than humans in more spheres and the trend will continue.“We will be surpassed in every single way. I guarantee it.Y our cell phone could crush the world champion of chess." Ma (said) a computer has never spawned a human being, or a mosquito. “I’ve never, especially [in the] last two years, when people talk about AI, human beings will be controlled by machines. It’s impossible.”And Ma said that he does not want to play chess or Go against a machine. "These games were designed for people to play against each other."

The maze.

So if the US government is holding individuals responsible for others' comments on social media, and corporations have insisted they have the same rights as individuals, does it not follow that the social media companies should be held accountable for what is posted on their platforms? JL

Karen Zraick and Mihir Zaveri report in the New York Times:

A Palestinian student from Lebanon set to begin his freshman year at Harvard was denied entry to the US after immigration officials objected to his friends’ social media posts. His phone and laptop were searched and he was questioned at the airport about his friends’ social media activity. An agent “said she found people posting political points of view that oppose the U.S. on my friend list.” He told the agent he should not be held responsible for others’ posts. " I have no post on my timeline discussing politics.” His visa was canceled and he was sent back to Lebanon. He wanted to pursue a career in medicine.

Because what is available on the web are blueprints, and because of the presumption towards free speech, the First Amendment argument may prevail.

But as has been argued previously, the US Constitution was not envisioned by its drafters as a suicide pact. JL

TribLive reports:

The (states') suit claims (printing guns) violate the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by eroding the state’s police powers. Defense Distributed says the states are violating the First Amendment by restricting what it can publish. Both sides asked a federal judge in Seattle to rule. “The evidence failed to consider the national security implications of deregulation in light of the unique properties of untraceable, undetectable, 3D-printable plastic firearms,” the states said. The lawsuit is complicated because of strong First Amendment principles allowing for publication of code online.

Paying ransoms is cheaper for insurers than prolonging the negotiation and recovery period. And its growth is encouraging more companies to buy very profitable cyber insurance policies. JL

Renee Dudley reports in ProPublica:

The FBI and security researchers say paying ransoms contributes to the profitability and spread of cybercrime. But for insurers, it makes financial sense. It holds down claim costs by avoiding expenses such as covering lost revenue and fees for consultants aiding in data recovery. And, by rewarding hackers, it encourages more ransomware attacks, which in turn frighten more businesses and government agencies into buying policies. Cyber insurance has grown into a $7 billion to $8 billion-a-year market in the U.S. alone. “Cyber insurance is keeping ransomware alive. Paying ransom (is) cheaper for the insurer than the loss of revenue they have to cover.”

This is what happens when you go from being the disruptor to the potentially disrupted. JL

Michael Wursthorn reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Owning shares of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet has given investors little upside over the past 12 months. All the stocks, with the exception of Alphabet, peaked last year and remain below their records after a selloff last fall wiped out billions in market value. The stocks have shed $415 billion since August 2018. Investors bought the shares for the companies' growth potential and dominance over their industries.But those prospects aren't a given anymore. Instead of valuing them as upstarts with limitless potential, investors are pricing in slowing growth, rising costs and greater government oversight.

Social Media Now Providing Only Vetted Scientific Info For Vaccine-Related Searches

In an effort to battle anti-vaccine misinformation after a spate of disease outbreaks related to localized but widespread refusals to vaccinate children - often based on the spread of internet fear-mongering - frequently driven by people hoping to profit from it, the major social media platforms now appear to be more aggressively sharing only scientific information. JL

Ashley Carman reports in The Verge:

Pinterest will now give visitors accurate information about vaccines and their safety when they type in a relevant search. The company will surface reliable information sourced from scientific organizations whenever someone searches for vaccine-related terms, like “measles” or “vaccine safety." Platforms have struggled to contain vaccine-related misinformation. YouTube stopped running ads on anti-vaccine content (but still allows it on the platform), while Facebook removes groups that share anti-vaccine misinformation. Twitter now surfaces information from the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Not much. Yet. Because more focus on better data is needed. JL

Shelly Fan reports in Singularity Hub:

Data and AI are already tackling two major advances in healthcare: prevention rather than treatment, and precision medicine in place of a population average. Yet so far, AI hasn’t really moved the needle on healthcare. The reason is because AI hasn’t really been “measuring what matters.” Not all medical data is equal; rather than relying on superficial wearables, it pays to go deep. By sorting through data, AI could transform stressful raw data streams—academic papers, medical histories, exam results, or Twitter and RSS feeds—into more digestible visualizations. It feeds our need for content in a compressed form that frees up more time.

Amazon and other online merchants appear to be taking advantage of a loophole in regulatory laws which enables them to sell defective products without fear of penalty. JL

Todd Frankel and Jay Greene report in the Washington Post:

A top consumer protection regulator raised concerns about whether Amazon committed “widespread deception” by selling thousands of products without warnings despite federal agencies deeming those goods to be unsafe, deceptively labeled or banned altogether. Product safety regulators have been worried about how online platforms responsibilities are different from traditional retailers and manufacturers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can go after a store if it fails to report a defective product or sells a recalled one. The same is true of a company that makes a bad product. An online platform falls under neither category.

Big tech companies - at whom it is targeted - will be able to deduct the cost. JL

Corinne Reichert reports in CNET:

France's Senate passed the bill creating a 3% tax on big tech companies providing services to French users. It could have a major impact on US giants like Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google. France passed the taxation law a day after the Trump administration announced plans to investigate whether the planned digital tax amounts to an unfair trade practice by discriminating against US companies. French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters Monday that US tech companies paying the tax would be able to deduct it.

There are questions about health effects as well as the rights of local governments versus those of the telecoms. JL

Christopher Mims reports in the Wall Street Journal:

5G will require an half-million new towers and small-cell sites on utility poles, lampposts and buildings. Most cities want 5G, but they don’t want to be told how, when and at what cost. Cities and towns throughout Northern California are issuing ordinances that would exclude new 5G cell sites from residential areas, citing supposed health concerns. Residents of Portland, Ore., and Whitefish, Mont., have also cited these beliefs while lobbying for restrictions. Legislators in four states have proposed bills that would mandate further study of health effects.

Are the popular assessments actually helpful in identifying and predicting workplace performance - or do they reinforce 'culture fit' stereotypes that have little bearing on productive results? JL

Quinisha Jackson-Wright reports in the New York Times:

What is the significance of a personality assessment such as Meyers-Briggs in the workplace? Do they help managers get to know their teams, or reinforce stereotypes that encourage managers to seek out people like themselves? Specific personality traits do not directly correlate with work capabilities. A person who is extroverted is not guaranteed to be a great salesperson. Culture fit matters more than it should. “It is possible for personality scores to be weaponized. This sends the message that employees are static and unchangeable, going against the improvement and growth necessary to encourage productive, positive work spaces.”

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This is especially true in times of great economic and technological change. Leadership potential should evaluated from that perspective. JL

Josh Bersin reports in Harvard Business Review:

Promotions are still a reward for past performance. Organizations assume attributes that made someone successful will continue to make them successful. This may explain why there are a large number of incompetent leaders. Businesses are expected to grow as fast as the technologies surrounding them. Their models must be in constant transformation. Companies need to (place) people who think differently into leadership roles.(And) take an extra look at the people who “may not be ready,” analyzing them on their ambition, reputation, and passion for your business.Great leaders are able to remain open and adapt. They succeed because they are able to continually learn.

Why the US Patent Office Wants Public Input On AI Inventions

The USPTO is wrestling with some complicated questions about whether non human or non corporate entities can be inventors, own patents or be granted patent law protections.

It's smart to get public input, though it's prudent to suppose that self interest may outweigh logical public policy in the comments the agency receives. JL

Khari Johnson reports in Venture Beat:

The USPTO is asking broader public to determine the impact AI will have on intellectual property and “whether new forms of intellectual property protection are needed.”“What are the different ways that a natural person can contribute to conception of an AI invention and be eligible to be a named inventor? Designing the algorithm or weighing adaptations? Structuring data in order to train a model? “Should entities other than a natural person, or company to which a natural person assigns an invention, be able to own a patent on the AI invention?” Others include whether new intellectual property protections are needed for AI inventions and whether patent law should be revised to inventions from entities other than people.

Technology is never neutral. JL

Kyle Dent reports in Tech Crunch:

There is a general feeling that technology is inherently neutral, even among those developing AI solutions. But AI developers choose trade-oﬀs that aﬀect outcomes. Developers are embedding ethical choices within the technology but without thinking about their decisions in those terms. These trade-oﬀs are usually technical and subtle, and the downstream implications are not always obvious. (But) a signiﬁcant risk is that we advance the use of AI technology at the cost of reducing individual rights.

If widespread expressions of contempt for the advent of the new technology's impact on their field is indicative, the answer is no. JL

MIT Technology Review reports:

“An overwhelming majority (83 per cent) of respondents felt it unlikely that future technology would be able to provide empathic care as well as or better than the average psychiatrist.” Three-quarters thought artificial intelligence will play an important role in managing data, such as medical records. Half thought it would fully replace human physicians when it comes to synthesizing information to reach diagnoses. Apps focused on mental health are among the fastest-growing sectors in the global digital health market. If this survey is to be believed, psychiatrists are broadly unprepared.

The issue of whether the plaintiff would have even been invited to present if it weren't an event sponsor will presumably be addressed in court. JL

Matthew Beedham reports in The Next Web:

Digital identity startup Crown Stirling, was heckled during its presentation of the paper titled “Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption.” It seems the subject matter didn’t go down well with the crowd. One attendee who holds a PhD in cryptography referred to the concept as “snake oil crypto. The so-called discoveries are either 1) obvious, well-known mathematical properties that any high school student would easily find, or 2) plain wrong.” Crown Sterling is suing Black Hat organizers for not upholding its standards of conduct for attendees and for violating the terms of Crown Sterling’s sponsorship package.

They are designed to optimize attention and engagement. And by making sharing easier, it is even easier to spread those predispositions. JL

Kris Shaffer reports in TPM:

Much of the media we engage with today is selected for us by algorithms. Because of the processes of collaborative filtering, the biases I already experience and the biases of people already similar to me are the ones that will most influence the output for my search. Since the networks of friends/pages/groups we have curated and the posts we “like” and engage with reflect our biases and limits of perspective, the content we encounter will reflect those as well. Sharing optimization compounds the filter bubble effect because it is easier to find information that reflects existing biases and easier to share it.

If it's accessible electronically, it's available - and the data about the transaction may be more valuable than the transaction itself. JL

Geoffrey Taylor reports in the Washington Post:

I recently used my credit card to buy a banana. There are many ways a card swipe can be exploited that don’t require a transaction being “sold” that identifies you. Data can be aggregated, anonymized, hashed, pseudonymized, or used to target you without ever technically changing hands. You might think my 29-cent swipe would be between me and my bank. My banana generated data that’s worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds- six types of businesses - that could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied by other companies they passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet.

Consumers are embracing electric vehicles at a faster than expected rate. The impact on oil prices is going to be significant. JL

Lauren Laughlin reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The world may be moving away from gas guzzlers quicker than planned. Fuel for road transportation accounted for 40% of world oil demand. Efficiencies in fuel use and logistics are expected to take away 5.5 million barrels per day of demand. Auto supplier Continental said it would cut investment in conventional engine parts because of a faster-than-expected fall in demand. As European rivals and suppliers focus on electric vehicles, internal combustion-powered vehicles will lose access to cutting edge technology and features. American automakers will not want to be left behind. The difference in oil prices could be dramatic.

KFC Is Testing Beyond-Meat 'Chicken'

First it was Burger King with meatless burgers. Now KFC is testing meatless chicken.

The only question is who will be next: Taco Bell with meatless pork tacos? Long John Silver's with meatless fish? JL

Jon Fingas reports in Engadget:

KFC will start testing Beyond Fried Chicken at an Atlanta restaurant. You could grab a bucket of chicken without feeling quite so guilty -- or greasy, if Beyond Meat's earlier work is any indication. Whether or not availability grows will depend on feedback, but other restaurant chains (such as Del Taco) have seen upticks in demand since adding meat substitutes. That could be important as rivals like Impossible Foods expand into other forms of meat replacements. If Beyond doesn't make headway, others will be happy to take its place

Simplicity makes a product or service feel too easy, and subsequently, not as competent or valuable. JL

Morgan Housel reports in The Collaborative Fund:

Simplicity feels like an easy walk. Complexity feels like mental CrossFit. Length can signal effort and thoughtfulness. The average reader does not finish most books they buy. Average readers quit after a few dozen pages. Length indicates the author has spent more time thinking about a topic than you have. Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do. In most fields a handful of variables dictate the majority of outcomes. But only paying attention to those few can feel like you’re leaving too much to fate. Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.

The publishers note that audiobooks and printed books have separate copyrights, making Amazon's action a violation of those legal rights.

Amazon, in what appears to be a first, is claiming that the use of artificial intelligence makes its printed versions totally different from the identical versions of the publishers' printed works. We'll see how that argument goes over. JL

Nick Statt reports in The Verge:

The world’s largest book publishers have jointly filed a lawsuit against Amazon-owned audiobook company Audible over a new, speech-to-text feature the literary industry claims is a violation of copyright law. The feature uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones. The issue is that Audible is doing this based on audiobook recordings, which have separate licenses to physical books and ebooks. Amazon is not obtaining licenses to reproduce the written versions. The company is trying to claim a distinction between a newly created piece of text composed using AI, and the identical text version the audiobook was created from.

It's a global market for innovative ideas; personalization continues to drive attempts to guide consumer decision-making; and efficiency - with an ongoing emphasis on convenience and speed - remains the motivating force for monetization.

To put it another way, there is a global market for convenience and speed based on personalized choices. JL

Kendrick Cai and Hayley Kim report in Forbes:

Y Combinator’s biannual Demo Day kicked off with nearly 200 of the accelerator’s latest batch of startups presenting two-minute pitches to an audience of investors. 15% of the batch is focused overseas. (Other trends): People in tech are starting companies for other people in tech; The housing crisis is giving rise to building affordable housing, two startups are turning to the backyard; Make fashion as personalized as possible; Startups have recognized that people are always looking for extra income, and created platforms to connect them to gigs; New tech applications want to address the fact that there are too many tech applications.

Another in a long list of tech driven innovations whose original vision and purpose didnt pan out - but in which subsequent users discovered a use that the inventors never imagined - and which made a fortune. JL

Greg Kumparak reports in Tech Crunch

It set out to build a cross-platform video game engine. The team built a demo that allowed users to zoom in and out of a detailed view of the Earth. (It) never made a ton of money. A deal to use Keyhole imagery on CNN got them an audience, and a partnership with NVIDIA got them distribution. An investment from a CIA-backed venture - to support US troops in Iraq - kept them moving. But the company danced on the edge of broke more than once before Google bought it in 2004. Keyhole’s earth viewer lives on to this day. It’s just called Google Earth now.

The financialization of the economy has co-evolved with the careers of its best and brightest - along with plenty of others who may possess fewer talents but no less ambition.

The question is whether this robust exemplar of behavioral economics at work will, in the long term, benefit the society which spawned it. JL

Sam Long reports in American Affairs:

The career choices of today’s HBS graduates demonstrate the effects of four decades of shareholder primacy. In the 1960s, 6% of the school’s graduates pursued careers in finance; (which) generated 3%of the country’s GDP.Today, 30% of graduates opt for finance. 24% chose management consulting, with its emphasis on financial initiatives like cost cutting and merger diligence. Stanford and Wharton show identical trends. The financial sector’s contribution to GDP is triple what it was in 1950. Over the last 5 years, 61% of HBS graduates have landed in Boston, New York, and San Francisco (which) contain 6% of America’s population.

Researchers Create AI That Hides Your Emotions From Other AI

Humans teaching machines to trick machines that attempt to categorize humans. Sounds like the natural evolution of technology. JL

Samantha Cole in Motherboard:

The idea is to put a "layer" between the user and the cloud their data is uploaded to by automatically converting emotional speech into "normal" speech. Masking emotion involves collecting speech, analyzing it, and extracting emotional features from the raw signal. Next, an AI program trains on this signal and replaces the emotional indicators in speech, flattening them. A voice synthesizer re-generates the normalized speech using the AIs outputs, which gets sent to the cloud. This method reduced emotional identification by 96%, although speech recognition accuracy decreased, with a word error rate of 35%.

This is about the quality of research being affected by the inclusiveness of the research community. JL

Juan Mateos-Garcia and Joysy John report in Singularity Hub:

Only 13.8% of AI authors are women. Women working in physics, education, biology, and social aspects of computing are more likely to publish work on AI compared with those working in computer science or mathematics.A big data analysis of 1.5 million papers found papers with at least one female co-author to be more applied and socially aware, with terms such as “fairness,” “human mobility,” “mental,” “health,” “gender,” and “personality” playing a key role. The difference between the two groups is consistent with the idea that cognitive diversity has an impact on the research produced.

Companies have their own websites, blogs and social media. So given the exponential growth of the podcast market, it's not surprising that companies are producing their own.

What's startling is that people are actually listening to them. JL

David Yaffe-Bellany reports in the New York Times:

There are now as many as 750,000 podcasts, so it’s not a surprise that major companies are creating their own. What’s more surprising is that consumers, conditioned to skip past commercials on YouTube and install ad blockers on their browsers, are listening to them. Within a day of its release last year, (McDonalds) “The Sauce” broke into iTunes’ top-100 podcast chart, reaching No. 94. Companies have had the most success with shows that are not explicitly about their own products or services. “Propaganda ,which, is what this is, tends to be most successful when it slides into our consciousness without our quite perceiving it.”

There is a surfeit of investors and money chasing deals, so scarcity of funds is not an acceptable excuse.

The question, increasingly, is where the line gets drawn. Is the Saudi Government ok, but Jeffrey Epstein is not? The differentiator lies with the individual entrepreneur and their willingness to stand for the principles they espouse - or not. JL

Alyson Shontell reports in Business Insider:

With so much money sloshing around Silicon Valley these days, chasing the dream to success has never been easier. Capital from all over the world is available. For tech founders and investors, not all money is the same. If you take money from good people, your success becomes their success. If you take money from bad people, your success also becomes their success. In Silicon Valley, where the ideal of changing the world has been mythologized, the more founders and investors try to live up to their principles, the tougher it becomes to rationalize the things that fall short of them.

Scientifically-based 'social improvement' does not offer much in the way of successful predecessors, primarily because such gestures are notable for the disdain in which they hold the experience and knowledge of their ostensible beneficiaries. JL

Daron Acemoglu reports in Project Syndicate:

AI, Big Data, and IoT are presented as panaceas for optimizing work, communication, and health care. The conceit is that we have little to learn from ordinary people and the adaptations they have developed within different social contexts. Transforming others’ lives through science instances - “high modernism” - refuses to recognise that human practices and behaviours have an inherent logic adapted to the complex environment in which they evolved. When high modernists dismiss such practices to institute a more scientific and rational approach, they almost always fail. There is no guarantee the market will select the right technologies for adoption, nor will it internalize the negative effects of new applications.

In a largely disconnected world, attention has increasing value. Social media provides relatively protected means by which attention - and even affirmation - can be received with minimal effort - and even less risk. And the machine is finely calibrated to deliver what people want while assuring they come back. JL

Richard Seymour reports in The Guardian:

Our social media accounts are set up like enterprises competing for attention. If we are all authors now, we write not for money, but for the satisfaction of being read.What do the platforms offer us, in lieu of a wage? What gets us hooked? Approval, attention, retweets, shares and likes. The sweet spot sought after is a brief period of ecstatic collective frenzy around any topic. It doesn’t matter to the platforms what the frenzy is about: the point is to generate data. As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. Our goal is to stay connected

It is increasingly meant to threaten or deliver war-like risk, but stop just shy of traditional definitions regarding the meaning of combat.

As is so often the case, how an attack is defined may be determined by the target's insurance provider.

Ultimately, society has to decide what its limits are - both as a target and as an aggressor. JL

Elizabeth Braw reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Modern technology has made it easier to conduct targeted acts of aggression from far away, in secret or by proxy, putting businesses on the front line. Attacks on businesses linked to foreign governments are becoming increasingly frequent. Businesses are cheap, easy and largely risk-free targets. Western countries’ march toward smart cities, and their increasing use of the internet of things, make their companies and residents vulnerable. It’s dangerous to insulate companies from risks they take on, but hybrid warfare is an unpredictable danger imposed on the entire market.

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