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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
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    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers. - Evonomics - 0 views

  • Why has business education failed business? Why has it fallen so much in love with finance and the ideas it espouses? It’s a problem with deep roots, which have been spreading for decades. It encompasses issues like the rise of neoliberal economic views as a challenge to the postwar threat of socialism. It’s about an academic inferiority complex that propelled business educators to try to emulate hard sciences like physics rather than take lessons from biology or the humanities. It dovetails with the growth of computing power that enabled complex financial modeling. The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole. If you wonder why most businesses still think of shareholders as their main priority or treat skilled labor as a cost rather than an asset—or why 80 percent of CEOs surveyed in one study said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results— it’s because that’s exactly what they are being educated to do.
Steve Bosserman

Hometown Proud: IGA's Business Model Brilliance - 0 views

  • And it’s all out of a desire to maximize profits. But what if, like IGA, newspaper companies didn’t solely exist to maximize that profit, but to respect the value of the local community? What if Gannett decided to donate one of its papers to a local philanthropist who has a larger stake in the community than Gannett does? Gannett could help run some of the most profitable and technical functions, but the company would otherwise be hands-off on how to control the paper. It could offer some guidelines, but the destiny’s in the community’s hands.
  • That approach is what IGA does, largely. The store stays in local hands, with local interests, and local history. IGA helps them keep up with trends, without losing track of the store’s identity in the process.
  • And, largely, it works. It really should be studied in business books.
Bill Fulkerson

What is design thinking? - O'Reilly Media - 1 views

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    "Design thinking is an abductive approach to complex problem solving that leverages the designer's empathetic mindset in order to understand people's unarticulated needs and identify opportunities for solutions. This is a human-centered innovation process that can be applied to a wide range of challenges: design thinking can be used to create everything from products and services to business models and processes."
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