Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome
"What I found most interesting from Kurzweil's response wasn’t so much his consistency in the belief that AI will indeed outpace human intelligence as a whole; rather our fears of a dystopian future where AI has gone astray are becoming increasingly unlikely. [Ray Kurzweil, famous futurist and inventor] makes this argument with the understanding that there is no singular AI being controlled by singular powerful companies or people. In today’s reality, there are millions of different AIs being controlled by anyone who owns a smartphone." - Gray Scott, Futurist Learn More from GRAY SCOTT >

#Not Awesome
"All the rapidly expanding information available about a person is going to be consolidated in a centralized database to create a “social credit system.” Based on that data, people will be evaluated by algorithms that will determine whether they pose a threat to the one-party state. People will then be treated accordingly. The social credit system is not yet fully operational, but it’s clear where it’s heading. It will subordinate the fate of the individual to the interests of the one-party state in ways unprecedented in history.” - George Soros, Financier Learn More from George Soros >

What we're reading.

1/ Amazon has ramped up sales of its facial recognition software to government agencies, and we need to demand more transparency from them to ensure the technology is not being used in ways that violate civil liberties. Learn More from The New York Times >

2/ YouTube is tweaking its algorithms with feedback from human content evaluators in an effort to recommend less "hateful and conspiratorial videos" to visitors. Learn More from The Washington Post >

3/ Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses the threat of algorithms perpetuating bias and racial inequalities, gets mocked for it. Learn More from Breaker >

4/ Self-driving vehicles can cause road rage incidents when they don't obey rules of the road that human drivers are expected to follow. Learn More from Futurism >

5/ In public, many executives speak soberly about all the negative impacts that automation could have on people - in private, they are "racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers." Learn More from The New York Times >

6/ Political and social polarization in the US will worsen as the middle of the country loses more jobs to automation than coastal communities. Learn More from Axios >

7/ Recent advances in machine learning have been driven by techniques that were created in the 1950s - and it's anyone's guess if future advances will continue to come from old techniques or yet-created paradigms. Learn More from The MIT Technology Review >

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