AI

If you were Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to get ahead of potential government regulation of your business, what would you fix first? Would you try to curtail social media addiction, protect privacy, reduce mental health risks, reduce weaponized information, eliminate hate speech, flag misinformation, deal with data governance, or address some other seemingly intractable problem? Here's what I'd fix first. Continue Reading →

You find yourself looking at an amazing image of a plaid shirt and wonder if you'll ever find socks to match. Soon, Google will be able to do that search for you. Continue Reading →

Cool or creepy? These are the opposite ends of the Shelly Palmer scale for evaluating AI-powered surveillance systems built into robots, IoT, and other tech. With my cool or creepy scale in mind, behold Amazon's Astro. Continue Reading →

Adam Mosseri, Facebook's Head of Instagram, just sat for a live interview on NBC's Today Show. He shouldn't have. Continue Reading →

OpenAI recently shut down a GPT-3 bot that was programmed to emulate a person's dead fiancée. Getting past the "Wow, that's weird," part of the story… how is this different from training an AI model to emulate a customer service representative? Continue Reading →

Have you seen more synthetic content recently? Continue Reading →

Technology is meaningless unless it changes the way we behave. As many of you have pointed out, my writing is increasingly focused on blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts and NFTs, decentralized finance (DeFi), Web 3.0, and the role AI and other nascent computational tools may play in the future. There's a simple reason. They are all behavior-changing technologies. At one end of the spectrum, there's the potential of an alternative, decentralized system for value exchange that challenges our understanding about the role of central governance. At the other end of the spectrum, this is nothing more than a fad which can be easily ignored. In my experience, no technology is ever "either, or." As you know, almost $8 trillion of wealth vaporized when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Those speculative losses didn't have anything to do with the underlying technology; it was all about the hype. With that in mind, think about this... Continue Reading →

Elon Musk's latest claim -- "I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year" -- is a clear sign that Mr. Musk has crossed over to the other side and is now "cuckoo for cocoa puffs." Continue Reading →

I have often wondered which would be worse: a world where social media platforms are not held responsible for the content people post, or a world where they are. This "thought experiment" just became less hypothetical, as Twitter is testing three levels of warning labels for tweets its algorithm scores as potentially containing misinformation: "Get the latest," "Stay Informed," and "Misleading." Continue Reading →

If you have an Alexa-enabled device or any Amazon device that is Amazon Sidewalk-capable, you are automatically opted in to sharing up to 80Kbps (capped at 500MB per month) of your WiFi network with Amazon and your neighbors. After I tell you how to opt-out, I'll tell you what it is and why Amazon thinks it's a good idea. If you want to use the service and lend part of your WiFi network to Jeff Bezos, you don't need to do anything. You are opted-in unless you do the following. Continue Reading →