In 2018, when Google employees found out about their company’s involvement in Project Maven, a controversial US military effort to develop AI to analyze surveillance video, they weren’t happy. Thousands protested. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” they wrote in a letter to the company’s leadership. Around a dozen…
Defining what is, or isn’t artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That’s why MIT Technology Review’s Senior AI Editor Karen Hao created a flowchart to explain it all. In this bonus content our host and her team reimagined Hao’s original reporting, gamifying it into…
A couple of years ago, Pete Skomoroch, Roger Magoulas, and I talked about the problems of being a product manager for an AI product. We decided that would be a good topic for an article, and possibly more. After Pete and I wrote the first article for O’Reilly Radar, it was clear that there was…
Programs like AlphaZero and GPT-3 are massive accomplishments: they represent years of sustained work solving a difficult problem. But these problems are squarely within the domain of traditional AI. Playing Chess and Go or building ever-better language models have been AI projects for decades. The following projects have a different flavor: In February, PLOS Genetics…
It seems harder than ever to agree with others on basic facts, let alone to develop shared values and goals: we even claim to live in a post-truth era1. With anti-vaxxers, QAnon, Bernie Bros, flat earthers, the intellectual dark web, and disagreement worldwide as to the seriousness of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of masks, have…
During the first weeks of February, we asked recipients of our Data and AI Newsletters to participate in a survey on AI adoption in the enterprise. We were interested in answering two questions. First, we wanted to understand how the use of AI grew in the past year. We were also interested in the practice…
OpenAI’s text generating system GPT-3 has captured mainstream attention. GPT-3 is essentially an auto-complete bot whose underlying Machine Learning (ML) model has been trained on vast quantities of text available on the Internet. The output produced from this autocomplete bot can be used to manipulate people on social media and spew political propaganda, argue about…
Home assistants and smart displays are being sold in record numbers, but they are built wrong. They are designed with one person in mind: the owner. These technologies need to fit into the communal spaces where they are placed, like homes and offices. If they don’t fit, they will be unplugged and put away due…
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal” means. Communal devices are intended to be used by groups of people in homes and offices. Examples include popular home assistants and smart displays like…
In June 2021, we asked the recipients of our Data & AI Newsletter to respond to a survey about compensation. The results gave us insight into what our subscribers are paid, where they’re located, what industries they work for, what their concerns are, and what sorts of career development opportunities they’re pursuing. While it’s sadly premature to…