SMART EVERYTHING AND DATA-DRIVEN INNOVATION
Sebastian Thrum: ““ Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.”
China’s long march to AI lost on Trump. In July, China unveiled a plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence and create an industry worth $150 billion to its economy by 2030.
To technologists working on AI in the United States, the statement, which was 28 pages long in its English translation, was a direct challenge to America’s lead in arguably the most important tech research to come along in decades. Also, the eminent Kai-Fu Lee thinks Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs – “No matter what anyone tells you, we’re not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way” as he also assesses the China-US AI landscape”.
While Alibaba and Microsoft are rushing to entirely automate customer service jobs using AI, the US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (surely pronounced “Munchkin”) says “I’m not worried at all” about job-stealing robots in the nearer term, that time is “not even on our radar screen…[it’s] 50-100 more years away.” Yep. Good to know we’re in safe hands.
Google must be stopped before it becomes an AI monopoly. We should start thinking now about how to build an antitrust regime that will preserve several companies’ robust AI assistants. Meanwhile, the New York Times considers the case against Google generally. It’ s not pretty.
The GANfather: The man who’s given machines the gift of imagination. By pitting neural networks against one another, Ian Goodfellow has created a powerful AI tool. Now he, and the rest of us, must face the consequences.
The MIT Technology Review has released a list of technologies it believes will make the most impact over the next 12 months, including smarter cities, genetic fortune telling and “Babel fish” earphones. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s magazine has published the annual list online in its March/April 2018 issue, and based its contents on the innovations that will shape the coming year.

Fast Company just published the 2018 edition of the World’s Most Innovative Companies which spans more than 350 enterprises across 36 categories, from the world’s most valuable firm and its continuing transformation of consumer electronics to a small outfit selling natural gum to preserve rainforests.
How CubeSat satellites are changing the world (and your privacy).
Nvidia Making Facial Recognition AI for Smart City Surveillance: Nvidia announced that it has partnered with AI developer Any Vision to bring a new type of surveillance technology to smart cities. The companies are working on bringing automatic facial recognition into closed-circuit television surveillance cameras. The technology can continuously scan for faces 24/7, and automatically identify and track individuals with 99% accuracy. Not to be outdone, From Whole Foods to Amazon, invasive technology controlling workers is more dystopian than you think
Amazon received a patent for ultrasonic wristbands that track the movement of warehouse workers’ hands during work. They recently instituted a complex and punitive inventory system where employees are graded based on everything from how quickly and effectively they stock shelves to how they report theft. The system is so harsh it reportedly causes employees enough stress to bring them to tears on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, Facebook is using A.I. to help predict when users may be suicidal – Minority Report Precogs, anyone? Great article on Predictive Policing.
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