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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "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

Google and corporate news giants forge new alliance - 0 views

nexusnewsfeed.com/...news-giants-forge-new-alliance

independent press algorithms streamlining mainstream media

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
  • Last April, Google clamped down on alternative media with new structural changes to its algorithms — accompanying the change with an announcement tarring alternative media with the broad black brush of “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories” as opposed to what it called “authoritative content.”As a result, organic search-engine traffic to these sites uniformly plummeted to less than half of what it had previously been, devastating many publishers.
  • The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”This new model overwhelmingly favors those who see information and journalism as an article of commerce alone. It poses a stark threat not only to internet users’ ability to access information, but to the ability of citizens and social movements that hope to interact with, participate in, and wield influence over the political and economic activities that determine our lives and the fate of communities across the world.
Steve Bosserman

Will AI replace Humans? - FutureSin - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...ai-replace-humans-42c19c114cb8

humans robotics artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, some jobs will be wiped out, others will be in high demand, but all in all, around 5 million jobs will be lost. The real question is then, how many jobs will be made redundant in the 2020s? Many futurists including Google’s Chief Futurist believe this will necessitate a universal human stipend that could become globally ubiquitous as early as the 2030s.
  • AI will optimize many of our systems, but also create new jobs. We don’t know the rate at which it will do this. Research firm Gartner further confirms the hypothesis of AI creating more jobs than it replaces, by predicting that in 2020, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs while eliminating 1.8 million traditional jobs.
  • In an era where it’s being shown we can’t even regulate algorithms, how will we be able to regulate AI and robots that will progressively have a better capacity to self-learn, self-engineer, self-code and self-replicate? This first wave of robots are simply robots capable of performing repetitive tasks, but as human beings become less intelligent trapped in digital immersion, the rate at which robots learn how to learn will exponentially increase.How do humans stay relevant when Big Data enables AI to comb through contextual data as would a supercomputer? Data will no longer be the purvey of human beings, neither medical diagnosis and many other things. To say that AI “augments” human in this respect, is extremely naive and hopelessly optimistic. In many respects, AI completely replaces the need for human beings. This is what I term the automation economy.
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  • If China, Russia and the U.S. are in a race for AI supremacy, the kind of manifestations of AI will be so significant, they could alter the entire future of human civilization.
  • THE EXPONENTIAL THREATFrom drones, to nanobots to 3D-printing, automation could lead to unparalleled changes to how we live and work. In spite of the increase in global GDP, most people’s quality of living is not likely to see the benefit as it will increasingly be funneled into the pockets of the 1%. Capitalism then, favors the development of an AI that’s fundamentally exploitative to the common global citizen.Just as we exchanged our personal data for convenience and the illusion of social connection online, we will barter convenience for a world a global police state where social credit systems and AI decide how much of a “human stipend” (basic income) we receive. Our poverty or the social privilege we are born into, may have a more obscure relationship to a global system where AI monitors every aspect of our lives.Eventually AI will itself be the CEOs, inventors, master engineers and creator of more efficient robots. That’s when we will know that AI has indeed replaced human beings. What will Google’s DeepMind be able to do with the full use of next-gen quantum computing and supercomputers?
  • Artificial Intelligence Will Replace HumansTo argue that AI and robots and 3D-printing and any other significant technology won’t impact and replace many human jobs, is incredibly irresponsible.That’s not to say humans won’t adapt, and even thrive in more creative, social and meaningful work!That AI replacing repetitive tasks is a good thing, can hardly be denied. But will it benefit all globally citizens equally? Will ethics, common sense and collective pragmatism and social inclusion prevail over profiteers?Will younger value systems such as decentralization and sustainable living thrive with the advances of artificial intelligence?Will human beings be able to find sufficient meaning in a life where many of them won’t have a designated occupation to fill their time?These are the question that futurists like me ponder, and you should too.
Steve Bosserman

How To Stop Wasting Time On The Internet - Barking Up The Wrong Tree - 0 views

www.bakadesuyo.com/...wasting-time-on-the-internet

internet social media time

shared by Steve Bosserman on 05 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Our devices provide plenty of benefits. But we’re often really bad about balancing that with the costs in an optimal way. Social media can make us happy, but face-to-face time makes us happier and one usually comes at the expense of the other. But social media is more convenient. So we don’t make the best choice; we make the easy choice.
  • Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value – not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they’re comfortable missing out on everything else.
Steve Bosserman

Modern grocery and the emerging-market consumer: A complicated courtship | McKinsey & C... - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...nsumer-a-complicated-courtship

emerging markets grocery stores supermarkets food distribution

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the term “modern grocery retail” was essentially a proxy for a small group of multinational grocers including Ahold, Aldi, Auchan, Carrefour, Costco, Lidl, Metro, Tesco, and Walmart. It was widely presumed that these retailers’ entry into any market would lead to the demise of the traditional trade—the family-owned grocery chains, small independent stores, and informal merchants that at the time accounted for the vast majority of grocery sales in emerging markets. The prevailing expectation was that although there would be local differences due to cultural specificities, in every country the retail landscape would eventually consist of a combination of modern formats: full-line supermarkets and hypermarkets, convenience stores, and discounters. These assumptions have been proved wrong. Global grocery giants are struggling to grow profitably in many emerging markets. Traditional trade has proved remarkably resilient. And the market and channel structures taking shape in individual emerging economies are distinct from one another, following no obvious pattern.
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