Business, Spoken

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Trump’s Wall Is Worthless if He Doesn’t Back It Up With Tech Apr 27, 2017

Show notes

If Congress were to fail to pass a spending bill before the end of the day Friday, the government could shut down. That’s why President Trump just blinked. He shelved a plan to demand that funding for a border wall be included in that bill after both Democrats and Republicans voiced fierce opposition.

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The Race To Build An AI Chip For Everything Just Got Real Apr 26, 2017

Show notes

Yann LeCun once built an AI chip called ANNA. But he was 25 years ahead of his time. The year was 1992, and LeCun was a researcher at Bell Labs, the iconic R&D lab outside New York City. He and several other researchers designed this chip to run deep neural networks—complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data—but ANNA never reached the mass market.

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The Hidden Laborers Training AI to Keep Ads Off Hateful YouTube Videos Apr 25, 2017

Show notes

Every day across the nation, people doing work for Google log in to their computers and start watching YouTube. They look for violence in videos. They seek out hateful language in video titles.They decide whether to classify clips as “offensive” or “sensitive.” They are Google’s so-called “ads quality raters,” temporary workers hired by outside agencies to render judgments machines still can’t make all on their own.

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A Chip Revolution Will Bring Better VR Sooner Than You Think Apr 24, 2017

Show notes

David Kosslyn and Ian Thompson are the founders of a virtual reality company called Angle Technologies. Two years into this stealth project, backed by $8 million in funding, they won’t say much about the virtual world they’re building—at least not publicly. But they will say that they’re building it in a way that alters the relationship between computer hardware and software.

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Anger Isn’t Enough, So the #Resistance Is Weaponizing Data Apr 21, 2017

Show notes

If Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, wins today’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district—a seat Republicans have held since 1979—it won’t be because he’s young. It won’t be because he’s idealistic, camera-friendly, or Star Wars-savvy. Mostly, it will be because Ossoff is lucky enough to be the first Democrat to stand a real chance of starting to claw back the ground ceded to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

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Want Real Choice in Broadband? Make These Three Things Happen Apr 19, 2017

Show notes

Regulators are now off the backs of big internet providers. Thanks to a resolution signed by President Trump earlier this month, consumer-friendly privacy rules passed by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission won’t take effect. Rules designed to protect net neutrality—the idea that internet providers shouldn’t be able to give certain content preferential treatment—seem likely to fall next.

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Don’t Despair: Big Ideas Can Still Change The World Apr 18, 2017

Show notes

In the late summer of 1954, a brilliant young psychologist was reading the newspaper when his eye fell on a strange headline on the back page: prophecy from planet clarion call to city: flee that flood. it’ll swamp us on dec 21, outer space tells suburbanite. His interest piqued, the psychologist, whose name was Leon Festinger, read on. “Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21.

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Training for the Day a Tweet Dictates Where to Send SWAT Apr 17, 2017

Show notes

Emergency responders in northern Texas watch as an imaginary crisis takes over their social media feeds. A mass shooting has broken out at a music festival, they learn, and a terrorist organization is taking credit. The shooters livestreamed the entire grisly scene, and news outlets are already picking up the story. Word of the tragedy spreads like a virus online, riddled with misinformation and panicked confusion.

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Stronger Privacy Laws Could Save Advertising From Itself Apr 14, 2017

Show notes

Online advertising is terrible. Ads clutter your screen, slow down your computer, and drain your batteries. Publishers saddle pages with tracking technology that vacuums up your data so they can, ostensibly, serve you more relevant ads (though this practice really just leads to serious privacy concerns). Sometimes ads even try to install malware on your computer. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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Tech Alone Won’t Be Enough to Reboot Progressive Politics Apr 13, 2017

Show notes

Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they’re all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport.

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