95752033
submission
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.”
95594293
submission
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.”
95350515
submission
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.”
95237219
submission
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.”
95073865
submission
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."
94605947
submission
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.
94506669
submission
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.”
94425221
submission
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.”
94372947
submission
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.”
94325891
submission
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.”
94227829
submission
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.”
93960503
submission
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.”
93680647
submission
mirandakatz writes:
2017 has been a coming-out year of sorts for the brain-machine interface: Everyone from Facebook to Elon Musk has declared their intent to build a technology to channel the mysterious contents of the two-and-a-half-pound glop inside our skulls to the machines that are increasingly central to our existence. But the main barrier to adoption is the potentially invasive nature of a BMI: Not many people are going to want to get surgery to have a chip implanted in their brains. A New York company may have found a solution to that. It's created a BMI that works just by an armband—and it works now, not in some far-off future. At Backchannel, Steven Levy dives into CTRL-Labs' mission to transform the way we interact with computers and get us to ditch keyboards and computer mouses once and for all.
93551209
submission
mirandakatz writes:
Seoul is struggling: Its birth rate is at an all-time low, college graduates are having enormous trouble finding jobs, and trust in government is not high. But South Korea is also, in many ways, cutting edge—and it wants to use that future-thinking power to build its capital into a techno-utopia. As Susan Crawford details at Backchannel, that begins with a powerful data analysis tool known as the "The Digital Civic Mayor’s Office." Crawford writes that "this dashboard seemed like a potential green shoot of democracy—a city doing what it can to show citizens why government should be trusted and that their quality of life, including the quality of the air they breathe, the prices of the apples they eat, and the traffic jams they face daily, is important. "
93490179
submission
mirandakatz writes:
Katie Hafner has spent the last 23 days in rehab. Not for alcoholism or gambling, but for a self-inflicted case of episodic partial attention thanks to her iPhone. On Backchannel, Hafner writes about the detrimental effect the constant stream of pings has had on her, and how her life has come to resemble a computer screen. “I sense a constant agitation when I’m doing something,” she says, “as if there is something else out there, beckoning—demanding—my attention. And nothing needs to be deferred.”
