Business, Spoken

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Sorry, Banning ‘Killer Robots’ Just Isn’t Practical Aug 29, 2017

Show notes

Late Sunday, 116 entrepreneurs including Elon Musk released a letter to the United Nations warning of the dangerous “Pandora’s Box” presented by weapons that make their own decisions about when to kill. Publications including the Guardian and Washington Post ran headlines saying Musk and his cosigners had called for a “ban” on “killer robots.” Those headlines were misleading.

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Google and Walmart’s Big Bet Against Amazon Might Just Pay Off Aug 28, 2017

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It’s hard to overstate Amazon’s online retail dominance. With 76 percent market share of online retail, it’s as if the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls entered your local rec league. No one can challenge Amazon today, but a newly announced partnership between Google and Walmart—allowing you to order groceries from the latter with Google Assistant, or online via Google Express, starting late September—may ultimately present a threat. Still, it's a long-term long shot.

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The Day I Found Out My Life Was Hanging by a Thread Aug 25, 2017

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It started while I was on a Hawaiian vacation in May. I thought I’d just tweaked my back lifting a poolside lounge chair. Back home, my back pain became severe, and I started noticing nerve pain in my legs. For eight days I could barely crawl around the house. My wife and two daughters nicknamed me “the worm.” At 45, I’m in pretty good shape—avid cyclist, runner, weightlifter, yoga enthusiast with a resting pulse in the 50s.

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One-Time Allies Sour on Joining Trump's Tech Team Aug 24, 2017

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President Trump’s victory caught Garrett Johnson—and the rest of humanity—by surprise. A Republican, Johnson had never been among Trump’s biggest fans. He’d worked for former Florida governor Jeb Bush and supported Bush in the primaries. The night candidate Trump addressed the Republican National Convention, Johnson retweeted the words of another Republican political operative: “There will be time for reflection. Hopefully there will be time to rebuild.

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Defining 'Hate Speech' Online Is Imperfect Art as Much as Science Aug 23, 2017

Show notes

Shortly after a rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of a counter-protestor, YouTube removed a video of U.S. soldiers blowing up a Nazi swastika in 1945. In place of the video, users saw a message saying it had been “removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.

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Uber Settles with FTC Again, This Time over 2014 Privacy Breach Aug 22, 2017

Show notes

Uber on Tuesday agreed to improve its privacy and security practices and to allow outsiders to monitor its progress for 20 years. The agreement with the Federal Trade Commission would resolve complaints stemming from a 2014 incident in which a hacker gained access to the names and driver's license numbers of more than 100,000 Uber drivers.

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FCC Pledges Openness -- Just Don't Ask To See Complaints Aug 21, 2017

Show notes

Shortly after Ajit Pai was named chair of the Federal Communications Commission in February, he said he wanted the agency to be “as open and accessible as possible to the American people." Six months on, the agency is falling short of Pai’s lofty goal in some key areas. Critics are especially concerned about the FCC’s handling of complaints from the public about internet providers and the causes of a May 7 outage of the public-comments section of the agency’s website.

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Everybody Chill: Robots Won't Take All Our Jobs Aug 18, 2017

Show notes

None of this is to say that automation and AI aren’t having an important impact on the economy. But that impact is far more nuanced and limited than the doomsday forecasts suggest. A rigorous study of the impact of robots in manufacturing, agriculture, and utilities across 17 countries, for instance, found that robots did reduce the hours of lower-skilled workers—but they didn’t decrease the total hours worked by humans, and they actually boosted wages.

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New Media and the Messy Nature of Reporting on the Alt-Right Aug 17, 2017

Show notes

President Trump stunned the nation, members of his own party, the press, and, apparently, his staff on Tuesday with his candid remarks regarding last weekend's deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day before, he had reluctantly condemned the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who comprised much of the rally, but just 24 hours later, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president was back to to condemning groups "on both sides" of the fighting.

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Google Abruptly Cancels Town Hall About That Memo Aug 16, 2017

Show notes

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Thursday abruptly cancelled a planned companywide meeting intended to air concerns raised by a former employee's broadside against Google's diversity programs. The move came just minutes before the meeting was to start, as the company that aims to organize the world's information struggles to deal with reverberations from the memo and its decision to fire the author.

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