Overview: Science&Technology

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Blockchains and tokens provide two crucial puzzle pieces for .. the decentralized internet... Blockchains ... allow many different people to ... agree upon information without having to trust each other... Tokens, meanwhile, enable incentives across national and company lines... to create private economies around open platforms...

Content management is about to undergo a foundational shift as artificial intelligence and machine learning bring long-sought order to enterprise content... the more content you collected, the harder it was to manage... machine learning algorithms actually work better with more data, and that has the potential to fundamentally alter how we think …

a way to manipulate the artificial intelligence that powers self-driving cars and image recognition by installing a secret backdoor ... AI from cloud providers could contain these backdoors. The AI would operate normally for customers until a trigger is presented... training-set poisoning... there’s no way to currently test for those few extra equ…

Labelled examples are a great way ...we need to fix the way we're collecting and reusing human knowledge.

Google announced the return of Glass as Glass Enterprise Edition... a hands-free device, for hands-on workers... AR will stream into every niche where ... ‘hands on’ workers can apply AR... the consumer application of voice will benefit eyeables greatly... AR and voice represents the next computing platform... casually wearing AR goggles as we g…

a downloadable tool for radically efficient machine teaching.

Hotels are beginning to use 360 photos and video to promote their spaces over the flat-photos Google Images provides. Many museums are utilizing technologies like the Hololens to place items, such as full-scale ships, within small buildings. Visitor bureaus, both small and large, are using the ability to envelope potential tourists in an action-pa…

Meta is betting wholly on productivity and the enterprise... over 400 enterprise buyers of his first AR headset... were almost unanimously focused on productivity... he wears his Meta headset throughout the working day... AR’s first killer app in the enterprise, he offers collaborative 3D

Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

The rise of the right is better seen as an early skirmish in a much longer, and far more significant, technology-led restructuring of our politics and society... Crypto-anarchists are mostly computer-hacking, anti-state libertarians ... believe that digital technology, provided citizens are able to use encryption themselves, is the route to a stat…

The key to success, he says, is meeting your audience where they are. If you can relate to them, you can make them excited about anything... the people who are actively hostile to science. They pose the greatest challenge. But I’m not waking up saying ‘How can I get these people?’ I’m just offering what I do... My radio show, StarTalk probably ..…

algorithms don’t provide an “explanation” for their results or the results aren’t “interpretable.”  ... different people mean different things when they ask for an explanation of an algorithm’s results... Surely an algorithm is more knowable than a brain... I can think of at least four types of explainability problems.

consider the three main ways that businesses can or will use AI:• Assisted intelligence, now widely available, improves what people and organizations are already doing.• Augmented intelligence, emerging today, enables organizations and people to do things they couldn’t otherwise do.• Autonomous intelligence, being developed for the future, creates…

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create....digital laye…

The data explorer provides an overview of the current state of play of European businesses as regards digital transformation.

blockchains today aren’t like the internet in 1996; they’re more like Linux in 1996... vastly more democratic, and more technically compelling, than ... internet of today. Similarly, open-source Linux was vastly more democratic, and more technically compelling, than the Microsoft and Apple OSes that ruled computing at the time. But nobody used it …

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls....[but] Where do those middle-level employees get that experience and judgment?

The open internet is a powerful tool in the fight against discriminatory mass surveillance... democracy’s antidote to authoritarianism... where the voices of dissidence that have always been watched, can watch and talk back.

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did... How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? ... a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms... including a meeting with one of the great philosopher…

there are a number of companies looking at ways to apply AI, machine learning and related concepts to recruiting... we see glaring limitations to applying machine learning and AI to screen candidates based on their CVs and social media profiles alone... CVs alone fail to capture individual performance and contribution, raw talent, actual competenc…

As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems... training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data.... As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data ... The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance... But access to data is only one way in which M…