Weekend Thoughts - 12.9.17

Image by Vitamin, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The concept of a speaker that listens to and interacts with its users is still fairly new, but they are becoming more common with each passing day. However, there are still reasons why you should not buy a smart speaker. It seems odd to me that we as a society are reaching a point where, just like in Orwell's 1984, being constantly surveilled by technology is becoming commonplace. Even if you trust companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to not intentionally spy on you via smart speakers, smart cameras, and the like, these devices are certainly hackable and susceptible to bugs, which means that the data they obtain may eventually get into the wrong hands. Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't want every snippet of the private conversations I have in my home to be shared with others just because of vulnerabilities in these "smart" devices (and yes, that includes smartphones!). I'd suggest reading through this article carefully because it's worth considering whether you are willing to put your privacy (and the privacy of others in your home) on the line for the sake of convenience.

2. Although I went to a Chess Club meeting or two in middle school, I wouldn't consider myself to be a very strong chess player. However, I do enjoy playing the game from time to time and find it to be an interesting—albeit endlessly intimidating—game of skill. Now it turns out that a new artificial intelligence known as AlphaZero has handily beaten the previously highest-rated Chess engine known as Stockfish. Perhaps most impressively, AlphaZero taught itself how to play in just four hours. At the end of the day, the final tally (out of 100 matches) was 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses. In other words, the chess engine that human chess players have been using to train has been bested so badly by this new AI that it didn't even win a single game—against an opponent that didn't even know how to play chess four hour prior to the first match.

3. Modern burials (at least in the Western world) typically involve toxic chemicals that are used to preserve the human body as well as coffin materials that do not break down quickly, harming the Earth and causing trouble for the surrounding environment and wildlife. A new burial technique involves a mushroom spore death suit that detoxifies the corpse and turns them into nutrients for plants. It's an innovative concept and one that may help preserve future life on Earth.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 7.15.17

Image by J Aaron Farr, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Microsoft must be on an environmentalist bent of some sort lately, as the company has recently announced an "AI for Earth" initiative. The program will attempt to use artificial intelligence to solve the major environmental issues that we are currently facing. Ultimately, Microsoft's President Brad Smith said, "Our goal is to empower others in new and more impactful ways to help create a more sustainable future. This program expands our commitments to democratizing AI and advancing sustainability around the globe." So far, the company has focused on creating more detailed land maps to aid conservation, improving agriculture with smart technology, and using drones to collect mosquitos to track and prevent potential emerging infectious diseases. Considering the state of affairs that our world is in, Microsoft deserves a big round of applause.

2. Elsewhere in the technosphere, Amazon has been considering allowing third-party developers to access the private transcripts of Alexa-powered devices so they can build better voice apps for the device. This is something that Google Home already allows. If Amazon moves forward with this decision, it would raise privacy concerns for its customers. At this point, Alexa developers can only see non-identifying information, like the number of times you use a specific command, how many times you talk to your Amazon Echo, and your location data. This change would potentially allow third-party developers access to actual transcripts, although we do not know the method that would be used and how much data would be divulged.

3. Audi is concerned that millenials will be bored in self-driving cars, so the company has developed a research product called The 25th hour, which is designed around the issue of what people will do to avoid boredom while riding in their fully-automated vehicles. The idea is that people will have extra time in their busy days to spend doing something other than focusing on the road. My initial reaction was, "Why wouldn't people use that time to read books?!" But while it's probably more likely that people will be watching television or scrolling through Facebook than reading, this project's existence means that automobile manufacturers are already thinking of ways to keep their customers entertained (and probably market to them, as well). In my opinion, the riders' recovered time would be best spent producing content rather than consuming it, but that's a whole other conversation altogether.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.