At any time, there are 25000 self-driving cars making their way through Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix. Except not in the real world, but in a simulation, designed to test fully autonomous cars in thousands of scenarios. Fascinating insights into the race to make human drivers absolete.
From Weekly Filet #244, in August 2017.
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I’m years late to this, but totally flabbergasted. What a great piece of engineering.
From Weekly Filet #240, in July 2017.
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Sort of mind-bening: First, humans invent artificial intelligence, now they try to understand how it works.
From Weekly Filet #239, in July 2017.
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An important piece that sheds light on how Facebook decides on what is allowed on the platform and what gets removed. It has been shared widely and also been used as proof that Facebook is actively discriminating and opressing voices (the title of the piece certainly sets the tone). I think that’s wrong. Facebook deals with billions and billions of pieces of content every day and needs a set of rules that work across hundreds of national laws and cultural norms. That is a highly complex problem to solve. And while Facebook as arguably the worlds largest arbiter of human expression certainly needs to take more responsibilty, I don’t think lazy, one-dimensional criticism is helpful.
From Weekly Filet #238, in June 2017.
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A short explainer on facial recognition that works with your own face. There’s also a notable piece on the widespread use of facial recognition in China (the text is behind a paywall, the video isn’t).
From Weekly Filet #238, in June 2017.
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Some of the worst, most sophisticated cyber attacks have hit Ukraine over the past three years. It seems to be Russia’s laboratory for perfecting new forms of global online combat.
From Weekly Filet #237, in June 2017.
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«The question is not whether something works, but whether you know how to change it.» – an excellent text on how to predict the future.
From Weekly Filet #234, in June 2017.
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«You can think of the sensors as the eyes and ears of the internet. You can think of the actuators as the hands and feet of the internet. And you can think of the stuff in the middle as the brain. We are building an internet that senses, thinks, and acts. This is the classic definition of a robot. We’re building a world-size robot, and we don’t even realize it.» An important text by security expert Bruce Schneier on how dangerous the internet is becoming, why markets won’t help and why regulation is needed, but hard to do.
From Weekly Filet #233, in March 2017.
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A fascinating explainer of how a 1966(!) tablet could understand handwritten input with stunning precision. Come for the story, stay for the interactive examples that let you explore how handwriting recognition works.
From Weekly Filet #233, in March 2017.
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Can humans expect empathy from superintelligent entities once they are here? What does it mean when your doctor is an algorithm? And what will people do when there is no more work for them – or will there? your doctor is an algorithm? A super interesting talk with Yuval Harari, the author of «Sapiens» and now «Homo Deus». So many takeaways, but what instantly stuck with me: how he describes religion as a virtual reality game.
From Weekly Filet #232, in March 2017.
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