Business, Spoken

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Google's AI Declares Galactic War on StarCraft Aug 15, 2017

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Tic tac toe, checkers, chess, go, poker. Artificial intelligence rolled over each of these games like a relentless tide. Now Google’s DeepMind is taking on the multiplayer space-war videogame StarCraft II. No one expects the robot to win anytime soon. But when it does, it will be a far greater achievement than DeepMind’s conquest of Go—and not just because StarCraft is a professional e-sport watched by fans for millions of hours each month.

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James Damore Offended Fellow Students in Harvard Grad School Skit Aug 14, 2017

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James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired Monday after posting a missive criticizing the company’s diversity programs, offended fellow Harvard graduate students with an off-color skit during a 2012 retreat, prompting two professors to send an email apologizing for the performance. At the time, Damore was a doctoral student in systems biology. Along with a few dozen other students and faculty, he attended a two-day retreat at a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

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Yes, Bitcoin Has No Intrinsic Value. Neither Does a $1 Bill Aug 11, 2017

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Bitcoin: fad or the future? The question has dogged the digital currency since its inception nearly a decade ago, and recent developments raise it anew. Last week, a new variant of bitcoin emerged via a “fork” in its underlying code, threatening to confuse and divide the still-small world of bitcoin adherents. Meanwhile, the price of a coin has soared to record heights above $3,000, from about $1,000 at the year’s beginning. Skeptics remain.

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Why Does the Web Hate Martin Shkreli? Let Us Count the Ways Aug 10, 2017

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In the year 2017, justice can seem in short supply. But on Friday, as news broke that pharma-bro-turned-internet-troll Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, schadenfreude circulated through the online masses; justice, for this one brief moment, had been served. It can be tough to keep a running mental list of all the reasons the good people of the internet despise Shkreli—and the bad ones adore him.

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Why People Can’t Stop Talking About Zuckerberg 2020 Aug 09, 2017

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On January 3, 2017, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status update to his Facebook page. “Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside of my work,” the Facebook CEO wrote to his 84 million followers. “In recent years, I've run 365 miles, built a simple AI for my home, read 25 books and learned Mandarin. My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year.

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Meet Alex, the Russian Casino Hacker Who Makes Millions Targeting Slot Machines Aug 08, 2017

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Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. Though his St. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. The time had come for an exit strategy.

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Men Will Lose the Most Jobs to Robots, and That’s OK Aug 07, 2017

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Robots are coming for our jobs—but not all of our jobs. They’re coming, in ever increasing numbers, for a certain kind of work. For farm and factory labor. For construction. For haulage. In other words, blue-collar jobs traditionally done by men. This is why automation is so much more than an economic problem. It is a cultural problem, an identity problem, and—critically—a gender problem.

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Trump's Radical Immigration Crackdown Won't Help Tech Aug 04, 2017

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In a public address at the White House on Wednesday, President Trump embraced a new Senate bill called the RAISE Act, which he promised would usher in a wave of high-skilled immigration, “restore our competitive edge in the 21st century,” and make the United States' vetting system more like Canada and Australia's.

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What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google? Writing Your Emails Aug 03, 2017

Show notes

Ray Kurzweil has invented a few things in his time. In his teens, he built a computer that composed classical music, which won him an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his 20s, he pioneered software that could digitize printed text, and in his 30s he cofounded a synthesizer company with Stevie Wonder.

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The Rise of AI Is Forcing Google and Microsoft to Become Chipmakers Aug 02, 2017

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By now our future is clear: We are to be cared for, entertained, and monetized by artificial intelligence. Existing industries like healthcare and manufacturing will become much more efficient; new ones like augmented reality goggles and robot taxis will become possible.

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