Chance are high that your read these lines on a smartphone. Maybe your were even alerted by a push notification. Researchers Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos invesigated the effects of having the smartphone nearby. The results are striking: the closer your smartphone is, the bigger the effect on your...
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The Geometry of Thought | Edge.org
Barabara Tversky discusses what she calls geometry of thought in this very intersting EDGE cast: Slowly, the significance of spatial thinking is being recognized, of reasoning with the body acting in space, of reasoning with the world as given, but even more with the things that we create in the world. Babies and other animals...
The Best Books on Marketing | Five Books Expert Recommendations
Seth Godin talks about marketing and the changes that happened to this field. It’s an interview absolutely worth reading. So are the five books he recommends: Syrup by Maxx Barry When Scat comes up with the idea for the hottest new soda ever, he’s sure he’ll retire the next rich, savvy marketing success story. But...
A Few Thoughts about Deep Fakes—Stephen Wolfram Blog
Stephen Wolfram discusses deep fakes and suggests to use blockchain technology as a potential way to detect them: So, where does this leave us with deep fakes? Machine learning on its own won’t save us. There’s not going to be a pure “fake or not” detector that can run on any image or video. Yes,...
What It’s Like to Work on a 30-Year-Old Macintosh – The Atlantic
Ian Bogost writes about his experience using a Macintosh SE from 1990. He attributes the attractiveness of this long past computing area to the simplicity of using devices like a Mac: But it wasn’t user-friendliness alone that made computers of this era great—it was simplicity. Mousing, dragging, and menuing does make the machine easier to...
Uber’s Path of Destruction – American Affairs Journal
A very readable analysis of Uber: Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company...
AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say – The Verge
Deepfakes are becoming very easy to create. As shown in the work by scientists from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research, videos can be fine-tuned to audiences of different backgrounds. All this is done purely by editing scripts, automating previously tedious manual work. The authors themselves note: However, the...
Perception As Controlled Hallucination | Edge.org
An EDGE conversation with Andy Clark on perception and the role of predictive processing. The concept of predictive processing describes the brain as pediction machine gathering statistical information to adapt its model of the world. Sources: https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination https://www.mindcoolness.com/blog/bayesian-brain-predictive-processing/
The Challenge of Crafting Intelligible Intelligence | June 2019 | Communications of the ACM
Modern AI approaches often work like black boxes: nobody really knows why things work the way they work. Offering explanations why an AI system came to a conclusion is certainly needed. The article by Daniel S. Weld and Gagan Bansal [1] studied two approaches that are promising: using an inherently interpretable model, or adopting an...
Opinion: Data isn’t the new oil — it’s the new nuclear power | ideas.ted.com
Interesting thoughts by James Bridle on data which is often compared with oil: Data is a valuable, powerful commodity — but unlike oil, it is unlimited in quantity and in its capacity for harm. Source: Opinion: Data isn’t the new oil — it’s the new nuclear power
