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Submission + - Artificial Intelligence is Killing the Uncanny Valley and Our Grasp on Reality (wired.com) 1

Submitted by rickih02
rickih02 writes: In 2018, we will enter a new era of machine learning — one in which AI-generated media looks and sounds completely real. The technologies underlying this shift will push us into new creative realms. But, as evidenced by the fake news explosion and panic of 2017, this boom will have a dark side, too. For Backchannel's 2018 predictions edition, Sandra Upson delves into the future of artificial intelligence and the double edged sword its increasing sophistication will present. "A world awash in AI-generated content is a classic case of a utopia that is also a dystopia," she writes. "Itâ(TM)s messy, itâ(TM)s beautiful, and itâ(TM)s already here."

Submission + - Inside Baidu's Bid to Lead the AI Revolution (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: China's search giant missed mobile: As WeChat and Alibaba deftly transformed their companies to suit mobile, Baidu stayed stuck in browser mode. It can't afford to make that mistake with the AI revolution—and, as Jessi Hempel writes at Backchannel, it just might have an edge in its bid to come out on top. There's huge governmental support for AI in china, including a plan to make the country the world leader in AI by 2030, and it has double the number of people online than America does—AKA vast quantities of raw data. Hempel traveled to Beijing to chronicle this tenuous moment in Baidu’s history, and has delivered a deep look at Baidu's AI be on AI, speaking with key leaders including CEO Robin Li and COO Qi Lu. She writes that “Robin Li is doubling down on a future beyond 2017. In that future, Baidu is not a series of products, but rather an engine that belongs inside everything—an engine that powers Baidu back to dominance in China, and possibly far beyond.”

Submission + - This Impenetrable Program Is Transforming How Courts Treat DNA Evidence (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Probabilistic genotyping is a type of DNA testing that’s becoming increasingly popular in courtrooms: It uses complex mathematical formulas to examine the statistical likelihood that a certain genotype comes from one individual over another, and it can work with the subtlest traces of DNA. At Backchannel, Jessica Pishko looks at one company that's caught criminal justice advocates’ attention: Cybergenetics, which sells a probabilistic genotyping program called TrueAllele—and that refuses to reveal its source code. As Pishko notes, some legal experts are arguing that Trueallele revealing its source code “is necessary in order to properly evaluate the technology. In fact, they say, justice from an unknown algorithm is no justice at all.”

Submission + - Stock Music Artists Aren't Always Happy About How Their Music Is Used (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: If you're a stock music composer, you sign over the rights to whatever music you put up on a variety of hosting sites. That can get complicated—especially when your music winds up being used to soundtrack hate speech. At Backchannel, Pippa Biddle dives into the knotty world of stock music, writing that stock music is “a quick way for a talented musician to make a small buck. But there’s a hidden cost: You lose control over where your work ends up. In hundreds, if not thousands, of cases, a tune becomes the backing track to hate speech or violent videos. Often such use violates the license the buyer agrees to when purchasing the track. But nobody reads the licenses—and, more importantly, no one enforces them.”

Submission + - An Inside Look at the First Church of Artificial Intelligence (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: This summer, Backchannel reported that Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the heart of the Uber/Waymo lawsuit, had filed paperwork for a new religion called the Way of the Future. Today, investigative reporter Mark Harris has all the details on what that AI-based religion actually likes—and Levandowski granted him his first interview about the new religion and his only public interview since Waymo filed its suit in February. As Levandowski tells him, we can see a hint of how a superhuman intelligence might treat humanity in our current relationships with animals—and that's why it's so important that we treat AI as a god, not a demon to be warded off. “Do you want to be a pet or livestock?” he asks. “We give pets medical attention, food, grooming, and entertainment. But an animal that’s biting you, attacking you, barking and being annoying? I don’t want to go there.”

Submission + - The Inside Story of Venture Capital's Messiest Breakup (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: The Xfund started with a bold idea and ended with one of its founders banished from the country. At Backchannel, Jessi Hempel has the definitive story of what really happened after Patrick Chung and Hugo Van Vuuren went into business together, and how a promising venture went so wrong. It's an incredibly complex story, and no one agrees on the basic facts: As Hempel writes, "What’s clear is that from the start, they had clashing visions for what they were building. The tale of Van Vuuren and Chung’s partnership and its demise offers a window into how power really works in Silicon Valley, where personal relationships are the most important currency and, in order to protect capital, investors are more likely to place their bets on people they know and trust."

Submission + - Software Developer Creates Personal Cryptocurrency (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: If you want to pick Evan Prodromou's brain—as many people often do—you'll have to pay him. And not just a consulting fee: You'll have to pay him in his own personal cryptocurrency, dubbed Evancoin. Currently, 20 days after his Initial Coin Offering, a single Evancoin is worth $45. As Prodromou tells Scott Rosenberg at Backchannel, “I’m not above a stunt! But in this case I’m really serious about exploring how cryptocurrency is changing what we can do with money and how we think about it. Money is this sort of consensual hallucination, and I wanted to experiment around that.” Read on to learn what, exactly, goes into creating a personal cryptocurrency, and whether Evancoin could becoming a phenomenon that spreads.

Submission + - Voice Assistants Will Be Difficult to Fire (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: As voice assistants crop up left and right, consumers are facing a decision: Are you an Alexa? A Google Assistant? A Siri? Choose wisely—because once you pick one voice assistant, it'll be difficult to switch. As Scott Rosenberg writes at Backchannel, “If I want to switch assistants down the line, sure, I can just go out and buy another device. But that investment of time and personal data isn’t so easy to replace...Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests. Eventually , the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized.”

Submission + - Google Bombs Are Our New Normal (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Tech companies’ worst crises used to come in the form of pranks like Google bombs: Users figured out how to game search results, such as when a search for “miserable failure” turned up links to information about then-president George W. Bush. Today, in the era of fake news and Russian interference, that’s basically our new normal—but as Karen Wickre, a former communications lead at companies like Google and Twitter, points out, tech companies’ approaches to dealing with the new breed of crises haven’t evolved much since the age of Google bombs. Wickre suggests a new, collaborative approach that she dubs the “Federation,” writing that “No single company, no matter how massive and wealthy, can hire its way out of a steady gusher of bad information or false and manipulative ads...The era of the edge case—the exception, the outlier—is over. Welcome to our time, where trouble is forever brewing.”

Submission + - This Company Is Crowdsourcing Maps for Self-Driving Cars (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: If we want self-driving cars to become mainstream, we need maps—and not just any maps. We need ridiculously detailed and constantly updated maps of the world’s roads. And there's a mad race among startups to become the definitive provider of those maps. At Backchannel, Steven Levy takes a deep look at Mapper, a startup that just came out of stealth today and that hopes to become that definitive provider by crowdsourcing the production of those maps, paying drivers to drive around with a special mapping device on their windshields. As Levy writes, “Mapper’s solution is to create an army of part-time workers to gather data that will accrue to a huge “base map” for autonomous cars, and to update the map to keep it current. Think of the work as an alternative to driving for Uber and Lyft, without having to deal with customer ratings or backseat outbursts from Travis Kalanick.”

Submission + - How Comcast Is Shortchanging Customers in Vermont (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Comcast is suing Vermont's Public Utility Commission, claiming—among many other things—that its First Amendment rights have been violated. But as Susan Crawford argues at Backchannel, there are far too many holes in that argument. Crawford writes that “Comcast, which Wall Street knows is essentially an unregulated public utility for high-speed internet access in the areas it covers, has unlimited resources to fight off this public-spirited regulator...[And] although there are many efforts in Vermont to provide fiber (including ECFiber), they’re still small: Comcast isn’t feeling any pressure to upgrade its lines to fiber. And, as [Craig] Moffett has reported, Comcast from now on will be growing through price hikes, not through building new lines. It’s done with building new lines. The whole thing is dispiriting.”

Submission + - Steemit Is A Social Network That Pays You for Your Posts in Cryptocurrency (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Our relationships with most social media are sneakily transactional: We log onto Facebook or Instagram and wind up paying the platforms with our attention and ad clicks. A new social network aims to turn that on its head by paying users for their posts. Steemit runs on Steem, a cryptocurrency that currently has a market cap of $294 million—and users have made more than $1.2 million in American dollars on the network. At Backchannel, Andrew McMillen takes a deep dive into Steemit, writing that “By removing the middlemen and allowing users to profit directly from the networks they participate in, Steemit could provide a roadmap to a more equitable social network...Or users could get bored or distracted by something newer and shinier and abandon it. Fortunes could vanish at any moment, but someone stands to get rich in the process.”

Submission + - Judge Blasts Waymo V. Uber Lawyers, Delays Trial Until December (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The federal judge presiding in the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit has delayed trial for another two months after castigating lawyers on both sides of the case for being dishonest and telling "half-truths." "I'm going to give you a schedule, and we're not going to argue about it," US District Judge William Alsup said after a one-hour hearing today. "We're going to pick the jury on November 29. We will start the trial on December 4, and it will run until December 20." The trial will decide whether Uber has misappropriated trade secrets from Waymo, Google's self-driving car spinoff.

Over the course of a 90-minute hearing today, the two sides had a heated dispute over what documents were produced and when depositions happened. Waymo lawyer Charles Verhoeven said that tens of thousands of documents were only handed over after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently ruled that Uber must hand over the "due diligence" report produced by Stroz Friedberg. "To say that this volume is surprising is an understatement," said Verhoeven. "It's shocking. It's unbelievable."

Submission + - Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini Dies At 66 (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Paul Otellini, Intel's previous CEO, died in his sleep on Monday, the company announced this morning. He was 66. Otellini served as Intel's fifth chief executive from 2005 through 2013, and leaves behind a legacy of the company's dominance in x86 processors. Notably, he also worked with Apple as it moved away from PowerPC chips and adopted Intel's wares. After retiring in 2013, Otellini revealed one major regret during his tenure: not working hard enough to get Intel's chips in the iPhone. Consequently, Intel mostly missed on the smartphone revolution.

Otellini joined Intel in 1974 and served various roles throughout his career, including chief operating officer from 2003 to 2005. He would go on to spend almost 40 years at the company. He was an intriguing choice as CEO, since he was the company's first non-engineer to hold that role.

Submission + - Why Tech Founders Need to Stop Using the Word Disruption (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: The word "disruption" is everywhere in tech—and it's getting founders in trouble. Just look at what happened with Bodega last week: Had the startup not professed to be disrupting the mom-and-pop shops on every corner, it might not have landed itself in such hot water. At Backchannel, veteran Silicon Valley communications whiz Karen Wickre makes the case against "disruption," pointing out that many of today's biggest companies got their starts without claiming to completely upend an existing industry. She writes: "What if Sergey and Larry had touted Google, in 1998, as ‘an unprecedented platform for disrupting global advertising?’ Do you think Jeff Bezos claimed that Amazon.com was upending global retail? Netflix? Within a few months of its 1997 launch, it did not foresee the actual paradigm shift of media streaming.”

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