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Google employees are lining up to trash Google’s AI ethics council - 2 avril 2019
The independent council was meant to help Google’s public image, but the blowback shows just how fraught"”and politicized"”use of AI is becoming.
Almost a thousand Google staff, academic researchers, and other tech industry figures have signed a letter protesting the makeup of an independent council that Google (...)
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More than 26 million people have taken an at-home ancestry test - 13 février 2019
As many people purchased consumer DNA tests in 2018 as in all previous years combined, MIT Technology Review has found.
By the start of 2019, more than 26 million consumers had added their DNA to four leading commercial ancestry and health databases, according to our estimates. If the pace continues, the gene (...)
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This is how AI bias really happens—and why it’s so hard to fix - 4 février 2019
Bias can creep in at many stages of the deep-learning process, and the standard practices in computer science aren’t designed to detect it.
Over the past few months, we’ve documented how the vast majority of AI’s applications today are based on the category of algorithms known as deep learning, and how deep-learning (...)
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How China got a head start in fintech, and why the West won’t catch up - 19 décembre 2018
Payment apps like Alipay and WeChat transformed daily life in China. The West won’t see a similar payments revolution—and that might even be a good thing.
In 2013 I moved from Paris to Beijing to study China’s financial system. I stayed for two years and became fluent enough to translate economics books from (...)
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A global ethics study aims to help AI solve the self-driving "trolley problem" - 25 octobre 2018
Millions of people in 233 countries weighed in on whose lives self-driving cars should prioritize, revealing how much ethics diverge across cultures.
In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people’s (...)
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Amazon is the invisible backbone of ICE’s immigration crackdown - 22 octobre 2018
Lobbying dollars and a cozy relationship with the government have given the tech giant an outsize influence in the Department of Homeland Security.
In June, when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began separating migrant children from their parents, several tech companies came under fire for (...)
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How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump - 20 août 2018
To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves.
1. The euphoria of discovery
As the Arab Spring convulsed the Middle East in 2011 and authoritarian leaders toppled one after another, I traveled (...)
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How Reuters’s Revolutionary AI System Gathers Global News - 5 décembre 2017
Reuters is scooping its rivals using intelligent machines that mine Twitter for news stories.
"The advent of the internet and the subsequent information explosion has made it increasingly challenging for journalists to produce news accurately and swiftly." So begin the research and development team at the global (...)
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The Real Privacy Problem - 23 décembre 2013
In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled "The Future Computer Utility," the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would (...)
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Ads Could Soon Know If You’re an Introvert (on Twitter) - 10 novembre 2013
Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.
Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs"”conscious or otherwise"”from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the (...)
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What Facebook Knows - 14 août 2012
The company’s social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data"”and remake our view of society.
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the (...)
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The Facebook Fallacy - 14 août 2012
For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.
Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.
Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business (...)
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L.A. Cops Embrace Crime-Predicting Algorithm - 2 juillet 2012
Burglary reports dropped after officers began taking patrol orders from computers.
A recent study suggests that computers could be better than seasoned police analysts at predicting when and where crime will strike next in a busy city.
Software tested in Los Angeles was twice as good as human analysts at (...)
