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The New York Times – Travel providers now use software to re-price their offerings, sometimes dozens of times a day, putting travelers at a big disadvantage. “For business and leisure travelers, the result is a variation of the cat-and-mouse game, where travel companies are almost always the cat. Traditionally, hotels and airlines priced their offerings …
cnet: ” Google on Tuesday [January 28, 2020] unveiled a feature that’ll let people use their phones to both transcribe and translate a conversation in real time into a language that isn’t being spoken. The tool will be available for the Google Translate app in the coming months, said Bryan Lin, an engineer on the …
Bloomberg via Japan Times / no paywall: “Everyone has seen warnings at the end of email saying, “Please consider the environment before printing.” But for those who care about global warming, you might want to consider not writing so many emails in the first place. More and more, people rely on their electronic mailbox as …
The New York Times Opinion By Shoshana Zuboff author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. …Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of these and other private or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up — or that are secretly stolen from us. Our digital century was …
r x y, r “…I agree with Dr. Narayanan’s assessment that using AI to predict social outcomes is “fundamentally dubious,” but I don’t believe that AI is doomed to always be worse than humans at assessing job candidates for quality. This is not because we have reason to believe AI will ever be particularly good …
The New York Times Opinion – We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that. “…These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing …
MIT Technology Review: “…In a paper published in Nature today, DeepMind, Alphabet’s AI subsidiary, has once again used lessons from reinforcement learning to propose a new theory about the reward mechanisms within our brains. The hypothesis, supported by initial experimental findings, could not only improve our understanding of mental health and motivation. It could also …
Amazon Science – “Product search algorithms, like the ones that help customers place orders through Alexa, aim at returning the products that are most relevant to users’ queries, where relevance is usually interpreted as “anything that satisfies the users’ need”. A common way to estimate customers’ satisfaction is to rely on the judgment of human …
The Seattle Times: “Cory Doctorow’s sunglasses are seemingly ordinary. But they are far from it when seen on security footage, where his face is transformed into a glowing white orb. At his local credit union, bemused tellers spot the curious sight on nearby monitors and sometimes ask, “What’s going on with your head?” said Doctorow, …
WPS – “Water insecurity is increasing worldwide. A third of the world’s people now live in countries that experience high levels of water stress, with droughts affecting around 50 million people and causing more than $5 billion in damage annually. These numbers are expected to rise as population growth, rapid urbanisation, increasing climate change and …
The Atlantic: “Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It’s writing news stories, particularly in sports and finance. It’s talking with customers on merchant websites. It’s writing convincing op-eds on topics in the news (though there are limitations). And it’s being used to bulk up “pink-slime journalism”—websites meant …
The New York Times – The company said it would remove videos altered by artificial intelligence in ways meant to mislead viewers. “Facebook says it will ban videos that are heavily manipulated by artificial intelligence, the latest in a string of changes by the company to combat the flow of false information on its site. …
