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The Perils and Promise of Artificial Conscientiousness Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

We humans are notoriously bad at predicting the consequences of achieving our technological goals. Add seat belts to cars for safety, speeding and accidents can go up. Burn hydrocarbons for cheap energy, warm the planet. Give experts new technologies like surgical robots or predictive policing algorithms to enhance productivity, block apprentices from learning. Still, we're amazing at predicting unintended consequences compared to the intelligent technologies we're building.

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When Tech Giants Blanket the World Dec 18, 2019

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Juan Carlos Castillo, a state official in rural Mexico, had never received a call like this before. What looked like a giant plastic jellyfish with a blinking LED had fallen from the sky onto a farmer’s field. “It really caused panic,” he says. “I imagined that it could be espionage.” Then Castillo noticed a phone number attached to the floppy artifact. He called it and got through to Google’s parent Alphabet, in California.

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Jack Dorsey Wants to Help You Create Your Own Twitter Dec 17, 2019

Show notes

No one owns the internet. There’s no one stopping you from posting videos to your own web server, at least so long as you have the technical chops to set one up and the money to pay for hosting. But you’re at a disadvantage if you’re posting your video outside of YouTube or Facebook. And if Facebook or Twitter ban you from sharing it, will anyone ever find it? But allowing everyone to post anything they want to these platforms isn’t a great idea either.

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The Slow Rollout of Super-Fast 5G Dec 16, 2019

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The grand promise of 5G wireless service—connection speeds 10 times as fast as the speediest home broadband service—is slowly moving closer to reality. AT&T is launching its new 5G service Friday in 10 cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. Notably, the service is based on real 5G standards, unlike AT&T’s earlier "5G Evolution" offering, which in reality was just a variety of 4G.

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Best Buy Bucks the Trend That’s Crushing Other Retailers Dec 13, 2019

Show notes

Holiday season may be full of cheer, but it’s also a time of intense pressure for retailers, especially in electronics. More than 20 percent of annual sales for things such as televisions, phones, cameras, and games occur between Thanksgiving and Christmas. One likely beneficiary is a company that most assumed would be long gone by now, consumed by the retail holocaust that has seen so many once-proud chains go the way of Chapter 11.

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How Deepfakes Scramble Our Sense of True and False Dec 12, 2019

Show notes

“Are you in a precarious situation? … You sound like you can’t talk.” Karah Preiss’ cousin Leslie accused her of being sleepy and distracted and eventually hung up, but didn’t guess the truth. Preiss had placed the call using a software clone of her voice made to demonstrate artificial intelligence’s ability to deceive.

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It's Coders Versus Human Pilots in This Drone Race Dec 11, 2019

Show notes

On Friday night in an old newspaper printing plant in Austin, the future of drone automation lifted off, accelerated and flew, nearly fast enough to beat one of the best drone pilots in the world. Gabriel Kocher, known in the professional Drone Racing League as Gab707, sat behind a net, wearing video goggles and steering his drone through five square gates on a short, curvy course. Next to him were four teammates from the MavLAB of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

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Amazon Joins Tech’s Great Quantum Computing Race Dec 10, 2019

Show notes

The everything store has an everything cloud. Amazon Web Services offers more than 160 services from disk storage to satellite control antennas. On Monday, the company said it would widen its cloud menu to include access to quantum computers—Amazon’s first big commitment to a technology rivals IBM and Google say will transform computers’ impact on businesses and society.

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Larry, Sergey, and the Mixed Legacy of Google-Turned-Alphabet Dec 09, 2019

Show notes

On August 10, 2015, Google CEO Larry Page shocked the business world by announcing he was restructuring the company he cofounded into a holding company called Alphabet. Page would head the new entity, and Google itself would be one of a number of companies under Alphabet’s control—like Google X, Google Fiber, Google Ventures, and Nest—each with a separate CEO reporting to him. The idea was to make The Company Formerly Known As Google “more clean and accountable.

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Why YouTube Won’t Ban Trump’s Misleading Ads About Biden Dec 06, 2019

Show notes

The online political advertising wars rage on. In late September, Facebook pleased almost no one when it announced that it would exempt posts by politicians, including ads, from its fact-checking system. Almost as if on cue, a few days later the Donald Trump reelection campaign dropped an ad full of conspiratorial claims about Joe Biden. When the Biden campaign requested that Facebook take down the ad, the company declined.

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