Thoughts and Ideas: June 2019

Friday, June 28, 2019

The Week in Tech: Can You Put a Price on Your Personal Data?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/technology/data-price-big-tech.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 04:00PM

New legislation could tell you how much your data is worth. But you might be disappointed by the price tag.

As Trump and Xi Talk Trade, Huawei Will Loom Large

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/technology/huawei-us-china-trade.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 12:06PM

China is not expected to accept a deal to lift tariffs unless there’s relief for its biggest, most internationally successful tech company.

A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/evernote-what-happened.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 12:00PM

In this season of multibillion-dollar I.P.O.s, the 15-year-old start-up is proving that failure, for companies of a certain size, rarely happens abruptly.

Twitter to Label Abusive Tweets From Political Leaders

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/twitter-politicans-labels-abuse.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 01:21AM

The labeled messages will not be removed from the service, the company said, because they are a matter of public interest.

Trade War Has Damaged U.S. Chip Industry in Ways a Deal May Never Fix

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/trade-war-chipmakers.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 11:30PM

Beyond the current financial hit, American producers fear Chinese companies will strengthen domestic manufacturing and switch to other foreign suppliers they consider more dependable.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 09:58PM

The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people.

Would You Pay $30 a Month to Check Your Email?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/superhuman-email.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 06:52PM

One of Silicon Valley’s buzziest start-ups, Superhuman, is betting its app’s shiny features are worth a premium price.

‘It’s Gigantic’: A New Way to Gauge the Chances for Unresponsive Patients

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/health/brain-injury-eeg-consciousness.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 12:00PM

Researchers have found a way to detect “covert consciousness” that could aid the recovery of people with severe brain injuries.

Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: StockX Sneaker Exchange Is Worth $1 Billion

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/trading-sneakers-stockx.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 07:13AM

StockX is one of several online marketplaces that have turned resales of shoes into a big — and highly valued — business.

Google and the University of Chicago Are Sued Over Data Sharing

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/google-university-chicago-data-sharing-lawsuit.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 07:09AM

The lawsuit demonstrates the tension between building A.I. systems and protecting the privacy of patients.

Reddit Restricts Pro-Trump Forum Because of Threats

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/reddit-donald-trump-quarantined.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 01:54AM

The subreddit The_Donald was “quarantined” after users posted threats of violence against police officers and politicians in Oregon, administrators said.

Unleashed, Robo-Insect Takes Flight

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/science/robot-insect-flight-engineering.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 08:00PM

Tiny wings and tinier solar cells allow autonomous movement in a new robotic “bee.”

In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/business/media/stream-classical-music-spotify.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 05:32PM

Has music streaming ignored aficionados of Mozart and Beethoven? Two new services, Idagio and Primephonic, address the needs of the genre’s discerning listeners.

Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency. So Do Its Partners.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/technology/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 01:56PM

The social media company said it had signed 27 partners to its Libra project. But executives at some of those companies said they were approaching it warily.

U.S. Tech Companies Sidestep a Trump Ban, to Keep Selling to Huawei

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/technology/huawei-trump-ban-technology.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 06:41AM

Chip makers’ deals underscore how difficult it is to clamp down on companies that the administration considers a national security threat.

Hidden Document Reveals N.Y. Was Warned of Looming Taxi Loan Crisis

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/nyregion/taxi-medallion-investigation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 08:03PM

In an emotional City Council hearing, lawmakers said New York officials could have stopped exploitative loans that have devastated thousands of cabdrivers.

The Bug That Crashed New York’s Wireless Network

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/nyregion/wireless-network-crash-gps-rollover.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 06:53AM

Despite warnings, New York City’s technology managers were blindsided by the so-called GPS rollover, failing to install simple but necessary upgrades.

Found After a Kabul Attack: A Soviet Rifle With a Peculiar Serial Number

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/magazine/kabul-attack-rifle-ak.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 05:21AM

At the site of an ISIS attack in Afghanistan, authorities recovered a firearm that was likely manufactured by the Soviets in the 1950s.

Chinese Drones Made in America: One Company’s Plan to Win Over Trump

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/technology/dji-china-drones-security-us.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 01:04AM

The world’s largest drone maker is the latest Chinese technology company scrambling to retain their ability to sell to the United States.

How E-Commerce Sites Manipulate You Into Buying Things You May Not Want

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/technology/e-commerce-dark-patterns-psychology.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 11:53PM

Research released this week finds that many online retailers use so-called dark patterns to influence what shoppers decide to purchase. Cracking down on the practice could be difficult.

A Machine May Not Take Your Job, but One Could Become Your Boss

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai-workplace.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 11:22PM

The goal of automation has always been efficiency. What if artificial intelligence sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized?

What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/amazon-domination-bookstore-books.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 12:06AM

Popular novels, technical tomes and self-published books are pirated and sold on Amazon. That may actually be helping the company extend its grip on the book business.

5 Lessons From Microsoft’s Antitrust Woes, by People Who Lived It

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/antitrust-tech-microsoft-lessons.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 23, 2019 at 11:39PM

The Microsoft case from the 1990s provides a road map for today’s tech giants and regulators.

Apple to Manufacture New Mac Pro Computer in China Instead of U.S.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/technology/apple-mac-pro-china.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 08:12PM

The company’s move to shift assembly of the only major product it had made in America outside the country comes amid a continuing trade war between the United States and China.

The Week in Tech: Can You Put a Price on Your Personal Data?

The Growing Threat of Hypersonic Missiles

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/magazine/the-growing-threat-of-hypersonic-missiles.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 03:36PM

Those in charge of hypersonic missiles are focused on building them, not imagining the reactions they might inspire in others.

A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

As Trump and Xi Talk Trade, Huawei Will Loom Large

Thursday, June 27, 2019

Facebook Did Not Address Hacking Attack on Popular Grief Support Page for Weeks, Moderators Say

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/facebook-groups-grief-professionals.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 04:46AM

Page administrators of Grief the Unspoken say a hacker repeatedly posted disturbing images on the page, which has 500,000 followers.

Facebook Did Not Address Hacking Attack on Popular Grief Support Page for Weeks, Moderators Say

Jony Ive, Designer Who Made Apple Look Like Apple, Is Leaving the Company

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/jony-ive-apple.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 28, 2019 at 12:55AM

The longtime Apple executive, who played a key role in the iPod and iPhone, is starting his own firm after nearly 30 years at the company. Apple will be a client.

Trade War Has Damaged U.S. Chip Industry in Ways a Deal May Never Fix

Twitter to Label Abusive Tweets From Political Leaders

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/twitter-politicans-labels-abuse.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 11:05PM

The labeled messages will not be removed from the service, the company said, because they are a matter of public interest.

Kim Kardashian West and the Kimono Controversy

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/fashion/kim-kardashian-west-kimono-cultural-appropriation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 09:31PM

She responds to accusations of cultural appropriation: “I understand and have deep respect for the significance of the kimono in Japanese culture.”

Driverless Cars May Be Coming, but Let’s Not Get Carried Away

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/business/self-driving-cars-cadillac-super-cruise.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 22, 2019 at 07:58PM

“We’ve tried to turn down the hype and make people understand how hard this is,” says Gill Pratt, an expert in robotics and head of the Toyota Research Institute.

Twitter to Label Abusive Tweets From Political Leaders

Kim Kardashian West and the Kimono Controversy

Slack Stock Soars, Putting Company’s Public Value at $19.5 Billion

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/technology/slack-stock-ipo-price-trading.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 12:01AM

The workplace messaging company’s shares rose on the stock market on Thursday, putting its value at nearly triple that of when it was a private firm.

Ford to Cut 12,000 Jobs in Europe

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/business/ford-jobs-europe.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 04:58PM

The automaker said it would close plants across the region, leading to job losses for more than 18 percent of its work force.

Voices in AI – Episode 90: A Conversation with Norman Sadeh

Source: https://gigaom.com/2019/06/27/voices-in-ai-episode-90-a-conversation-with/
June 27, 2019 at 03:00PM

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 90 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Norman Sadeh from Carnegie Mellon University about the nature of intelligence and how AI effects our privacy.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm I’m Byron Reese, today my guest is Norman Sadeh. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He’s affiliated with Cylab which is well known for their seminal work in AI planning and scheduling, and he is an authority on computer privacy. Welcome to the show.

Carnegie Mellon has this amazing reputation in the AI world. It’s arguably second to none. There are a few university campuses that seem to really… there’s Toronto and MIT, and in Carnegie Mellon’s case, how did AI become such a central focus?

Norman Sadeh: Well, this is one of the birthplaces of AI, and so the people who founded our computer science department included Herbert Simon and Allen Newell who are viewed as two of the four founders of AI. And so they contributed to the early research in that space. They helped frame many of the problems that people are still working on today, and they helped recruit also many more faculty over the years that have contributed to making Carnegie Mellon as the place that many people refer to as being the number one place in AI here in the US.

Not to say that there are not other many good places out there, but CMU is clearly a place where a lot of the leading research has been conducted over the years, whether you are looking at autonomous vehicles – for instance, I remember when I came here to do my PhD back in 1997, there was research going on autonomous vehicles. Obviously the vehicles were a lot clumsier than they are today, not moving quite as fast, but there’s a very, very long history of AI research, here at Carnegie Mellon. The same is true for language technology, the same is true for robotics, you name it. There are lots and lots of people here who are doing truly amazing things.

When I stop and think about [how] 99.9% of the money spent in AI is for so-called Narrow AI—trying to solve a specific problem often using machine learning. But the thing that gets written about and is shown in science fiction is ‘general intelligence’ which is a much more problematic topic. And when I stop to think about who’s actually working on general intelligence, I don’t actually get too many names. There’s OpenAI, Google, but I often hear you guys mentioned: Carnegie Mellon. Would you say there are people in a serious way thinking about how do you solve for general intelligence?

Absolutely. And so going back to our founders again, Allen Newell was one of the first people to develop what you referred to as a general theory of cognition, and obviously that theory has evolved quite a bit, and it didn’t include anything like neural networks. But there’s been a long history of efforts on working on general AI here at CMU.

And you’re completely true, that as an applied [science] university also, we’ve learned that just working on these long-term goals is not necessarily the easiest way to secure funding, and that it really pays to also have shorter term objectives along the way, things that can solve the accomplishments that can help motivate more funding coming your way. And so, it is absolutely correct that many of the AI efforts that you’re going to find, and that’s also true at Carnegie Mellon, will be focused on more narrow types of problems, problems where we’re likely to be able to make a difference in the short to mid-term, rather than just focusing on these longer and loftier goals of building general AI. But we do have a lot of researchers also working on this broader vision of general AI.

And if you were a betting man and somebody said ”Do you believe that general intelligence is kind of an evolutionary [thing]… that basically the techniques we have for Narrow AI, they’re going to get better and better and better, and bigger datasets, and we’re going to get smarter, and that it’s gradually going to become a general intelligence?”

Or are you of the opinion that general intelligence is something completely different than what we’re doing now—and what we’re doing now is just like simulated intelligence—we just kind of fake it (because it’s so narrow) into tasks? Do you think general AI is a completely different thing or it will gradually get to it with the techniques we have?

So AI has become such a broad field that it’s very hard to answer this question in one sentence. You have techniques that have come out under the umbrella of AI that are highly specialized and that are not terribly likely, I believe, to contribute to a general theory of AI. And then you have I think, broader techniques that are more likely to contribute to developing this higher level of functionality that you might refer to as ‘general AI.’

And so, I would certainly think that a lot of the work that has been done in deep learning, neural networks, those types of things are likely over time with obviously a number of additional developments that people have, a number of additional inventions that people have to come up with, but I would imagine that has a much better chance of getting us there than perhaps more narrow, yet equally useful technologies that might have been developed in fields like scheduling and perhaps planning and perhaps other areas of that type where there’s been amazing contributions, but it’s not clear how those contributions will necessarily lead to a general AI over the years. So mixed answer, but hopefully…

You just made passing reference to ‘AI means so many things and it’s such a broad term that may not even be terribly useful,’ and that comes from the fact that intelligence is something that doesn’t have a consensus definition. So nobody agrees on what intelligence is. Is that meaningful? Why is it that something so intrinsic to humans: intelligence, we don’t even agree on what it is? What does that mean to you?

Well, it’s fascinating, isn’t it, that there used to be this joke and maybe it’s still around today, that AI was whatever it is that you could not solve, and as soon as you would solve it, it was no longer viewed as being AI. So in the ‘60s, for instance, there was this program that people still often talk about called Eliza…

Weiznbaum’s chatbots.

Right, exactly, simple Rogerian therapist, basically a collection of rules that was very good at sounding like a human being. Effectively what it was doing is, it was paraphrasing what we would tell you and say, “well, why do you think that?” And it was realistic enough to convince people that they were talking to a human being, while in fact they were just talking to a computer program. And so, if you had asked people who had been fooled by the system, whether they were really dealing with AI, they would have told you, “yes, this has to be AI.”

Obviously we no longer believe in that today, and we place the bar a lot higher when it comes to AI. But there is still that tendency to think that somehow intelligence cannot be reproduced, and surely if you can get some kind of computer or whatever sort of computer you might be talking about to emulate that sort of functionality and to produce that sort of functionality, then surely this cannot be intelligence, it’s got to be some kind of a trick. But obviously, if you also look over the years, we’ve gotten computers to do all sorts of tasks that we thought perhaps were going to be beyond the reach of these computers.

And so, I think we’re making progress towards emulating many of the activities that would traditionally be viewed as being part of human intelligence. And yet, as you pointed out, I think at the beginning, there is a lot more to be done. So common sense reasoning, general intelligence, those are the more elusive tasks just because of the diversity of – the diverse facility that you need to exhibit in order to truly be able to reproduce that functionality in a scalable and general manner, and that’s obviously the big challenge for research in AI over the years to come.

Are we going to get there or not? I think that eventually we will. How long it’s going to take us to get there? I wouldn’t dare to predict, but I think that at some point we will get there, at some point we will likely build – and we’ve already done that in some fields, we will likely build functionality that exceeds the capability of human beings. We’ve done that with facial recognition, we’ve done that with chess, we’ve done that actually in a number of different sectors. We might very well have done that – we’re not quite there, but we might very well at some point get that in the area of autonomous driving as well.

So you mentioned common sense, and it’s true that every Turing test capable chatbot I come across, I ask the same question which is, “What’s bigger, a nickel or the Sun?” And I’ve never had one that could answer it. Because nickel is ambiguous… That seems to a human to be a very simple question, and yet it turns out, it isn’t. Why is that?

And I think at the Allen Institute, they’re working on common sense and trying to get AI to pass like 5th grade science tests, but why is that? What is it that humans can do that we haven’t figured out how to get machines to do that enables us to have common sense and them not to?

Right. So these are, amazingly enough, when people started working in AI, they saw that the toughest tasks for computers to solve would be tasks such as doing math or playing a game of chess. And they thought that the easiest ones would be the sorts of things that kids, five-year-olds or seven-year-olds are able to do. It turned out to be the opposite, it turned out that the kinds of tasks that a five-year-old or a seven-year-old can do are still the tasks that are eluding computers today.

And a big part of that is common sense reasoning, and that’s the state of the art today. So it’s the ability to somehow – so we’re very good at building computers that are going to be ‘one-track mind’ types of computers if you want. They’re going to be very good at solving these very specialized tasks, and as long as you keep on giving them problems of the same type, they’re going to continue to do extremely well, and actually better than human beings.

But as soon as you’re falling out of that sort of well-defined space, and you’re opening up the set of context and a set of problems that you’re going to be presenting to computers, then you find that it’s a lot more challenging to build a program that’s always capable of falling back on its feet. That’s really what we’re dealing with today.

Well, you know people do transfered learning very well, we take the stuff that we…

With occasional mistakes too, we are not perfect.

No, but if I told you to picture two fish: one is swimming in the ocean, and one is the same fish in formaldehyde in a laboratory. It’s safe to say you don’t sit around thinking about that all day. And then I say, “Are they at the same temperature?” You would probably say no. “Do they smell the same?” No. “Are they the same weight?” Yeah. And you can you can answer all these questions because you have this model I guess, of how the world works.

That’s right.

And why are we not able yet to instantiate that into a machine do you think, Is it that we don’t know how, or we don’t have the computers, or we don’t have the data or we don’t know how to build an unsupervised learner, or what?

So there are multiple answers to this question. There are people who are of the view that it’s just an engineering problem, and that if in fact, you were to use the tools that we have available today, and you just use them to populate these massive knowledge bases with all the facts that are out there, you might be able to produce some of the intelligence that we are missing today in computers. There’s been an effort like that called Cyc.

I don’t know if you are familiar with Doug Lenat, and he’s been doing this for, I don’t know, how many years at this point. I’m thinking something like close to 30 plus years, and he’s built a massive knowledge base and actually with some impressive results. And at the same time, I would argue that it’s probably not enough. It’s more than just having all the facts, it’s also the ability to adapt and the ability to discover things that were not necessarily pre-programmed.

And that’s where I think these more flexible ways of reasoning that are also more approximate in nature and that are closer to the types of technologies that we’ve seen developed under the umbrella of neural networks and deep learning, that’s where I think there’s a lot of promise also. And so, ultimately I think we’re going to need to marry these two different approaches to eventually get to a point where we can start mimicking some of that common sense reasoning that we human beings tend to be pretty good at.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

Would You Pay $30 a Month to Check Your Email?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/superhuman-email.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 10:00AM

One of Silicon Valley’s buzziest start-ups, Superhuman, is betting its app’s shiny features are worth a premium price.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Google and the University of Chicago Are Sued Over Data Sharing

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/google-university-chicago-data-sharing-lawsuit.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 03:45AM

The lawsuit demonstrates the tension between building A.I. systems and protecting the privacy of patients.

‘It’s Gigantic’: A New Way to Gauge the Chances for Unresponsive Patients

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/health/brain-injury-eeg-consciousness.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 27, 2019 at 12:09AM

Researchers have found a way to detect “covert consciousness” that could aid the recovery of people with severe brain injuries.

Etika, a YouTube Personality, Is Mourned by Fans

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/style/etika-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 11:17PM

The 29-year-old’s death highlighted the way that social media networks handle posts by users who are struggling with mental illness.

F.T.C. Said to Be Investigating YouTube Over Child Privacy Claims

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/technology/youtube-child-privacy.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 20, 2019 at 06:02AM

The video service has been under increasing pressure from parents and consumer groups for the way it handles children’s videos.

Etika, a YouTube Personality, Is Mourned by Fans

Reddit Restricts Pro-Trump Community Because of Threats

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/reddit-donald-trump-quarantined.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 10:11PM

The forum The_Donald was “quarantined” for threats of violence toward police officers and politicians in Oregon.

Unleashed, Robo-Insect Takes Flight

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 05:05PM

As the office chat start-up prepares to go public, some of us are still figuring out how available we want to be — and whether it’s O.K. to ping the C.E.O.

Reddit Restricts Pro-Trump Community Because of Threats

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/reddit-donald-trump-quarantined.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 09:29PM

The forum The_Donald was “quarantined” for threats of violence toward police officers.

Unleashed, Robo-Insect Takes Flight

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

Reddit Restricts Pro-Trump Community Because of Threats

Unleashed, Robo-Insect Takes Flight

A Comprehensive Guide to Taking Your Smartphone Abroad for Cheap

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/personaltech/sim-cards-foreign-vacation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 12:00PM

For $15 to $40, you can easily bring your phone to a foreign country and enjoy access to apps, maps and the web. But it takes a lot of steps, hence this travel guide.

Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: A Sneaker Exchange Is Worth $1 Billion

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/trading-sneakers-stockx.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 12:00PM

StockX is one of several online marketplaces that have turned resales of shoes into a big — and highly valued — business.

Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Global Arms Race.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missiles.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 10:50PM

The new weapons — which could travel at more than 15 times the speed of sound with terrifying accuracy — threaten to change the nature of warfare.

Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: A Sneaker Exchange Is Worth $1 Billion

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency. So Do Its Partners.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/technology/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 02:28AM

The social media company said it had signed 27 partners to its Libra project. But executives at some of those companies said they were approaching it warily.

U.S. Tech Companies Sidestep a Trump Ban, to Keep Selling to Huawei

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/technology/huawei-trump-ban-technology.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 26, 2019 at 12:56AM

Chip makers’ deals underscore how difficult it is to clamp down on companies that the administration considers a national security threat.

Google Pledges to Invest $1 Billion to Ease Bay Area Housing Crisis

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/google-1-billion-housing-crisis.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 03:15AM

It’s the latest technology company to address a problem caused by the industry’s success.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy’s 3rd Launch — How to Watch

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 07:24AM

The powerful rocket will carry an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people.

Monday, June 24, 2019

Taxi Officials Are Grilled Over Lending Crisis: ‘This Is a Moral Outrage’

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/nyregion/taxi-medallion-investigation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 02:47AM

In an emotional City Council hearing, lawmakers said New York officials could have stopped exploitative loans that have devastated thousands of cabdrivers.

Taxi Officials Are Grilled Over Lending Crisis: ‘This Is a Moral Outrage’

The Bug That Crashed New York’s Wireless Network

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/nyregion/wireless-network-crash-gps-rollover.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 25, 2019 at 12:59AM

Despite warnings, New York City’s technology managers were blindsided by the so-called GPS rollover, failing to install simple but necessary upgrades.

How E-Commerce Sites Manipulate You Into Buying Things You May Not Want

Found After a Kabul Attack: A Soviet Rifle With a Peculiar Serial Number

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/magazine/kabul-attack-rifle-ak.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 10:46PM

At the site of an ISIS attack in Afghanistan, authorities recovered a firearm that was likely engineered by the Soviets in the 1950s.

Found After a Kabul Attack: A Soviet Rifle With a Peculiar Serial Number

Chinese Drones Made in America: One Company’s Plan to Win Over Trump

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/technology/dji-china-drones-security-us.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 04:30PM

The world’s largest drone maker is the latest Chinese technology company scrambling to retain their ability to sell to the United States.

California Tests a Digital ‘Fire Alarm’ for Mental Distress

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/health/mindstrong-mental-health-app.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 08:09AM

The state is teaming up with Silicon Valley to make mental health services more available. Promises abound, and so do potential problems.

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/technology/huawei-trump.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 07:23AM

Being cut off from American technology will hurt business at the Chinese company this year and next, Ren Zhengfei said, though he vowed a 2021 recovery.

California Tests a Digital ‘Fire Alarm’ for Mental Distress

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Sunday, June 23, 2019

In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/business/media/stream-classical-music-spotify.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 24, 2019 at 01:53AM

Has music streaming ignored aficionados of Mozart and Beethoven? Two new services, Idagio and Primephonic, address the needs of the genre’s discerning listeners.

The Gender Gap in Computer Science Research Won’t Close for 100 Years

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/technology/gender-gap-tech-computer-science.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 06:00PM

Women and men are forecast to produce a similar volume of medical research by 2048, according to a new study. In computer science, that won’t happen until 2137.

Want the Robocalls to Stop? Congress Does, Too

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/politics/stopping-robocalls.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 05:05PM

A bipartisan bill introduced by House members would require phone carriers to offer screening technology to customers at no additional cost.

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

The Week in Tech: Facebook’s Crypto Dream Faces Deep Mistrust

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/technology/facebook-libra-crypto-trust.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 04:00PM

The social network has ambitious plans to create a universal currency for the internet. Its reputation could get in the way.

In Hawaii, Construction to Begin on Disputed Telescope Project

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/science/telescope-mauna-kea-hawaii.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 01:34PM

Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by Hawaiian activists, could start soon.

Slack Stock Soars, Putting Company’s Public Value at $19.5 Billion

DNA Microscope Sees ‘Through the Eyes of the Cell’

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/science/microscopes-cell-biology-dna.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 20, 2019 at 10:42PM

A new imaging tool works more like Google Maps than a traditional microscope.

To Take Down Big Tech, They First Need to Reinvent the Law

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/technology/tech-giants-antitrust-law.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 20, 2019 at 05:40PM

For decades, antitrust regulation has focused on the welfare of the consumer. Now a backlash over Big Tech’s power has regulators and scholars trying to reverse years of established doctrine.

U.K. Age Checks for Online Porn Sites Are Delayed

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/europe/uk-porn-age-check.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 20, 2019 at 04:28PM

Rules requiring users to prove they are over 18 were postponed because officials failed to adequately notify the European Commission about the changes.

F.T.C. Said to Be Investigating YouTube Over Child Privacy Claims

Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Global Arms Race.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missiles.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 12:00PM

The new weapons — which could travel at more than 15 times the speed of sound with terrifying accuracy — threaten to change the nature of warfare.

How Libra, Facebook’s Cryptocurrency, Would Work for You

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/how-libra-would-work-for-you.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 07:38AM

We break down the new cryptocurrency and what the company hopes you will be able to do with it, even though it hasn’t quite arrived.

Google Pledges to Invest $1 Billion to Ease Bay Area Housing Crisis

BuzzFeed News Is Part of a Union Wave at Digital Media Outlets

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/business/media/buzzfeed-news-union-walkout.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 01:31AM

The site’s journalists took part in an IRL protest after a series of tweets criticized the company’s refusal to recognize their affiliation with the News Guild.

Facebook Plans Global Financial System Based on Cryptocurrency

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/facebook-cryptocurrency-libra.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 01:14AM

Despite skepticism and concern about Facebook’s reach, the company envisions an alternative financial system based on a new cryptocurrency called Libra.

J.J. Abrams Said to Be Near $500 Million Deal With WarnerMedia

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/business/media/jj-abrams-warnermedia.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 11:19PM

WarnerMedia will get a first look at projects developed by the media company run by Mr. Abrams and his wife, which made hits like “Star Trek Beyond.”

Why Many Businesses Are Not Ready For AI

Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/food-agriculture-genetics.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 11:37AM

Plant breeders are fast-tracking genetic improvements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and a growing human population.

California Tests a Digital ‘Fire Alarm’ for Mental Distress

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Comedian Wins $4.1 Million in Lawsuit Against The Daily Stormer

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/us/dean-obeidallah-daily-stormer.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 11:04PM

The neo-Nazi website falsely accused the comedian, Dean Obeidallah, of committing terrorism. He hopes to give money to organizations that fight white supremacy.

The U.S. Has Its Eye on Big Tech. Will Criminal Inquiries Result?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/business/dealbook/google-facebook-apple-us-tech-oversight.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 10:28PM

Could Facebook, Google or Apple be considered monopolies? Increased government oversight of the technology giants could consider that possibility.

These Influencers Aren’t Flesh and Blood, Yet Millions Follow Them

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/business/media/miquela-virtual-influencer.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 06:48PM

From Calvin Klein to KFC, the rise of the computer-generated influencer on social media.

Saturday, June 22, 2019

Why Many Businesses Are Not Ready For AI

After Losing His Parents, an Author Wonders: Who and What Is Real?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/books/picnic-comma-lightning-laurence-scott-interview.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 05:47AM

In “Picnic Comma Lightning,” Laurence Scott combines a memoir about grief with an investigation into the ways technologies blur the line between public and private.

L.A. to Vegas and Back by Electric Car: 8 Hours Driving; 5 More Plugged In

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/business/energy-environment/electric-cars-charging.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 22, 2019 at 10:00AM

You’ll need to charge your vehicle more often than filling a gas tank, it takes longer, and the chargers can be scarce. Here’s how one road trip went.

Friday, June 21, 2019

Browsing LinkedIn and Instagram to Put Herself in Readers’ Shoes

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/technology/personaltech/new-york-times-readers.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 20, 2019 at 11:53AM

People consume news in many ways, which is why Anna Dubenko’s job — editor of off-platform strategy — takes her to platforms where others go for a break from theirs.

U.S. Blacklists More Chinese Tech Companies Over National Security Concerns

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/us-china-trade-blacklist.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 06:52PM

The move to place five additional Chinese actors on the “entity list” heightens tensions just as American and Chinese officials try to get trade talks back on track

Computer Science Research Gender Gap Won’t Close for 100 Years

The Week in Tech: Facebook’s Crypto Dream Faces Deep Mistrust

Taiwan’s iPhone Tycoon Walks a Fraught U.S.-China Line in Presidential Run

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/world/asia/taiwan-terry-gou-foxconn-president-iphone.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 10:15AM

Terry Gou, who on Friday stepped back from his electronics empire, must strike a balance between the Washington and Beijing as the trade war simmers.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

In Hawaii, Construction to Begin on Disputed Telescope Project

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/science/telescope-mauna-kea-hawaii.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 04:53AM

Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by Hawaiian activists, could start soon.

Anti-Robocall Bill Gets Bipartisan Backing

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/politics/stopping-robocalls.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 21, 2019 at 03:25AM

The measure, introduced by House members, would require phone carriers to offer screening technology to customers at no additional cost.

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Browsing LinkedIn and Instagram to Put Herself in Readers’ Shoes

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/technology/personaltech/new-york-times-readers.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 09:59PM

People consume news in many ways, which is why Anna Dubenko’s job — editor of off-platform strategy — takes her to platforms where others go for a break from theirs.

Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Global Arms Race.

How Libra, Facebook’s Cryptocurrency, Would Work for You

Google Pledges to Invest $1 Billion to Ease Bay Area Housing Crisis

BuzzFeed News Is Part of a Union Wave at Digital Media Outlets

Facebook Plans Global Financial System Based on Cryptocurrency

J.J. Abrams Said to Be Near $500 Million Deal With WarnerMedia

The Mystery of the Miserable Employees: How to Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/upshot/how-to-win-neil-irwin.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 12:49PM

The business unit was doing well, but the employees were sad. Could data offer a clue?

Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future

California Tests a Digital ‘Fire Alarm’ for Mental Distress

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Comedian Wins $4.1 Million in Lawsuit Against The Daily Stormer

The U.S. Has Its Eye on Big Tech. Will Criminal Inquiries Result?

These Influencers Aren’t Flesh and Blood, Yet Millions Follow Them

That Sleep Tracker Could Make Your Insomnia Worse

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/health/sleep-tracker-insomnia-orthosomnia.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 06:04AM

Apps and trackers can flood users with confusing data, doctors say. Some warn against orthosomnia, an obsession with “perfect” sleep.

After Losing His Parents, an Author Wonders: Who and What Is Real?

Russia Sought to Use Social Media to Influence E.U. Vote, Report Finds

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/eu-elections-russia-misinformation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 15, 2019 at 02:50AM

A misinformation campaign by groups linked to Russia tried to depress turnout in last month’s parliamentary elections, a European Commission review said.

Sprint and T-Mobile Merger Approval, Said to Be Near, Could Undercut Challenge by States

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/t-mobile-sprint-merger.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 15, 2019 at 01:56AM

Provisions set by the Justice Department, described by people familiar with the plan, could weaken a lawsuit that 10 attorneys general filed to try to block the $26 billion deal.

How Weapons Secrets Often Fall Into Enemy Hands

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/magazine/f-35-japan-wreck-weapons.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 11:30PM

When a new weapon is introduced in war, the creator’s adversaries always look for an opportunity to get ahold of it.

The Week in Tech: Big Trouble With Trustbusters and China

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/the-week-in-tech-big-trouble-with-trustbusters-and-china.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 04:00PM

The tech industry is caught in the middle of escalating trade tensions with China. And at home, regulators are getting serious about cracking down on Big Tech.

When Rohingya Refugees Fled to India, Hate on Facebook Followed

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/facebook-hate-speech-rohingya-india.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 10:00AM

After posts on the social network contributed to Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya Muslims, Facebook vowed to fix the problem. Then the vitriol moved to India.

Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/virtual-assistants-privacy.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 10:00AM

A handful of companies already dominate the market for digital assistants. The implications for consumer privacy are a serious concern, researchers say.

Chinese Cyberattack Hits Telegram, App Used by Hong Kong Protesters

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/world/asia/hong-kong-telegram-protests.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 05:48AM

An attack against the messaging app Telegram and the arrest of a user show how the Hong Kong clash is unfolding digitally, with growing sophistication on both sides.

F.T.C. Said to Be Investigating YouTube Over Child Privacy Claims

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/technology/youtube-child-privacy.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 11:32PM

The video service has been under increasing pressure from parents and consumer groups for the way it handles children’s videos.

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 09:20PM

As the office chat start-up prepares to go public, some of us are still figuring out how available we want to be — and whether it’s O.K. to ping the C.E.O.

Browsing LinkedIn and Instagram to Put Herself in Readers’ Shoes

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/technology/personaltech/new-york-times-readers.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 19, 2019 at 04:00PM

People consume news in many ways, which is why Anna Dubenko’s job — editor of off-platform strategy — takes her to platforms where others go for a break from theirs.

Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Global Arms Race.

Could Trees Be the New Gravestones?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/style/forest-burial-death.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 13, 2019 at 06:12AM

A California start-up wants to “redesign the entire end-of-life experience.” The answer to “eternity management”? Forests.

Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Global Arms Race.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

BuzzFeed News Is Part of a Union Wave at Digital Media Outlets

Google Pledges $1 Billion to Ease Bay Area Housing Crisis

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/google-1-billion-housing-crisis.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 09:31PM

Google is the latest technology company to address the housing problems caused by the tech industry’s success.

Why Many Businesses Are Not Ready For AI

How Libra Would Work for You

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/how-libra-would-work-for-you.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 12:00PM

We break down the new Facebook-backed cryptocurrency and what the company hopes you will be able to do with it, even though it hasn’t quite arrived.

Facebook Plans Global Financial System Based on Cryptocurrency

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/facebook-cryptocurrency-libra.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 18, 2019 at 12:00PM

Despite skepticism and concern about Facebook’s reach, the company envisions an alternative financial system based on a new cryptocurrency called Libra.

Monday, June 17, 2019

J.J. Abrams Said to Be Near $500 Million Deal With WarnerMedia

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/business/media/jj-abrams-warnermedia.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 11:56PM

WarnerMedia will get a first look at projects developed by the media company run by Mr. Abrams and his wife, which made hits like “Star Trek Beyond.”

The U.S. Has Its Eye on Big Tech. Will Criminal Inquiries Result?

Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/food-agriculture-genetics.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 08:26PM

Plant breeders are fast-tracking genetic improvements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and a growing human population.

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 15, 2019 at 06:16PM

The Trump administration is using new authority to take more aggressive digital action in a warning to Moscow and in a demonstration of its abilities.

Virtual Brand Promoters Are So Lifelike, You Just Might Believe What You See

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/business/media/miquela-virtual-influencer.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 06:29PM

From Calvin Klein to KFC, the rise of the computer-generated influencer on social media.

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/technology/huawei-trump.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 03:55PM

Being cut off from American technology will hurt business at the Chinese company this year and next, Ren Zhengfei said, though he vowed a 2021 recovery.

Comedian Wins $4.1 Million in Lawsuit Against The Daily Stormer

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/us/dean-obeidallah-daily-stormer.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 04:08PM

The neo-Nazi website falsely accused the comedian, Dean Obeidallah, of committing terrorism. He hopes to give money to organizations that fight white supremacy.

California Tests a Digital ‘Fire Alarm’ for Mental Distress

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/health/mindstrong-mental-health-app.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 12:00PM

The state is teaming up with Silicon Valley to make mental health services more available. Promises abound, and so do potential problems.

Huawei Chief Predicts Sales Will Flatline After Trump Crackdown

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/technology/huawei-sales-ceo-ren-zhengfei-us-trump.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 17, 2019 at 11:24AM

Efforts to cut off the Chinese company from U.S. technology will crimp business over the next two years, said Ren Zhengfei, though he vowed a 2021 recovery.

Saturday, June 15, 2019

How Data Can Help You Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/upshot/how-to-win-neil-irwin.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 15, 2019 at 03:00PM

To adapt to a faster pace of change, it helps to learn how to crunch numbers about whole organizations — and about yourself.

After Losing His Parents, an Author Wonders: Who and What Is Real?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/books/picnic-comma-lightning-laurence-scott-interview.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 15, 2019 at 01:00PM

In “Picnic Comma Lightning,” Laurence Scott combines a memoir about grief with an investigation into the ways technologies blur the line between public and private.

Friday, June 14, 2019

Sprint and T-Mobile Merger Approval, Said to Be Near, Could Undercut Challenge by States

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/t-mobile-sprint-merger.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 10:49PM

Provisions set by the Justice Department, described by people familiar with the plan, could weaken a lawsuit that 10 attorneys general filed to try to block the $26 billion deal.

Russia Sought to Use Social Media to Influence E.U. Vote, Report Finds

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/eu-elections-russia-misinformation.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 05:01PM

A misinformation campaign by groups linked to Russia tried to depress voter turnout in last month’s parliamentary elections, a European Commission review said.

How Weapons Secrets Often Fall Into Enemy Hands

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/magazine/f-35-japan-wreck-weapons.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 14, 2019 at 04:53PM

When a new weapon is introduced in war, the creator’s adversaries always look for an opportunity to get ahold of it.

The Week in Tech: Big Trouble With Trustbusters and China

When Rohingya Refugees Fled to India, Hate on Facebook Followed

Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Could Trees Be the New Gravestones?

Huawei Is Said to Demand Patent Fees From Verizon

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/technology/huawei-verizon-patent-license-fees.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 13, 2019 at 01:39AM

The demand, which could amount to a billion dollars, represents a new wrinkle in the tensions between the Trump administration and China.

How 5 Data Dynamos Do Their Jobs

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/reader-center/data-reporting-spreadsheets.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 12, 2019 at 10:38PM

Reporters from across the newsroom describe the many ways in which they increasingly rely on datasets and spreadsheets to create groundbreaking work.

House Opens Tech Antitrust Inquiry With Look at Threat to News Media

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/technology/antitrust-hearing.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 12, 2019 at 08:25PM

Local journalism has been pushed “to the verge of extinction,” said a member of a committee that plans 18 months of hearings and other scrutiny of the big technology platforms.

A Fake Zuckerberg Video Challenges Facebook’s Rules

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/technology/fake-zuckerberg-video-facebook.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 12, 2019 at 11:24AM

Last month, the social media company would not remove a doctored video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Facebook said the video of Mr. Zuckerberg will get the same treatment.

Amazon to End Its Restaurant Delivery Service

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/business/amazon-restaurant-delivery-service-ending.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 12, 2019 at 07:19AM

Amazon Restaurants, which was available in nearly 200 American cities, will officially close on June 24. The company says it will focus on grocery delivery.

Sprint and T-Mobile Merger Faces New Hurdle With Lawsuit by States

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/business/sprint-tmobile-merger.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 12, 2019 at 03:21AM

Ten attorneys general filed a federal lawsuit to block the $26 billion deal between the third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers in the United States.

A Judge Rules Against One Stem-Cell Clinic. There Are Hundreds of Them.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/health/stem-cells-fda.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 11, 2019 at 11:46PM

In a long-sought victory for the F.D.A., a federal judge said officials have the authority to regulate stem-cell treatments made from patients’ own fat.

Letter of Recommendation: Bug Fixes

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-bug-fixes-git.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 11, 2019 at 12:00PM

It’s a pleasure to watch software improve. I read the change logs, and I think: Humans can do things.

Anger at Big Tech Unites Noodle Pullers and Code Writers. Washington Is All Ears.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/technology/big-tech-antitrust-scrutiny.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 11, 2019 at 12:19AM

A wide range of companies are lining up to complain about Silicon Valley’s power as lawmakers and regulators step up their scrutiny of Big Tech.

Making Data Coherent Drives Salesforce’s $15.3 Billion Deal for Tableau

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/technology/salesforce-tableau-deal.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 10, 2019 at 11:49PM

Salesforce’s deal to buy the business tools maker Tableau, its largest ever acquisition, was pushed by the need to make business information understandable.

Huawei Tells Parliament It’s No Security Threat, Aiming to Avoid a Ban

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/technology/huawei-britain-parliament-ban.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 10, 2019 at 11:21PM

British lawmakers questioned a Huawei executive on Monday about American allegations that the company poses a risk to national security.

Vice Media Loses Its HBO Show and a Top Executive

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/business/media/vice-media-hbo.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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FedEx Says It’s Ending Express Shipping Service for Amazon

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Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can

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A Tech Columnist on How He Avoids Twitter Trolls and Finds Screen-Free Escapes

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Two Top Uber Executives Are Out as C.E.O. Consolidates Power

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The Week in Tech: What Not to Expect From Big Tech’s Antitrust Showdown

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/technology/big-tech-antitrust.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 07, 2019 at 04:00PM

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A Digital Cat-and-Mouse Battle Between Police and Protesters in Hong Kong

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/world/asia/hong-kong-telegram-protests.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
June 13, 2019 at 03:18PM

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Voices in AI – Episode 89: A Conversation with Doug Lenat

Source: https://gigaom.com/2019/06/13/voices-in-ai-episode-89-a-conversation-with-doug-lenat/
June 13, 2019 at 03:00PM

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About this Episode

Episode 89 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Cycorp CEO Douglas Lenat on developing AI and the very nature of intelligence.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. I couldn’t be more excited today. My guest is Douglas Lenat. He is the CEO of Cycorp of Austin, Texas where GigaOm is based, and he’s been a prominent researcher in AI for a long time. He’s been awarded the biannual IJCAI computer and thought award in 1976. He created the machine learning program AM. He worked on (symbolic, not statistical) machine learning with his AM and Eurisko programs, knowledge representation, cognitive economy, blackboard systems and what he dubbed in 1984 as “ontological engineering.”

He’s worked in military simulations, numerous projects for the government for intelligence, with scientific organizations. In 1980 he published a critique of conventional random mutation Darwinism. He authored a series of articles in The Journal of Artificial Intelligence exploring the nature of heuristic rules. But that’s not all: he was one of the original Fellows of the Triple AI. And he’s the only individual to observe on the scientific advisory board of both Apple and Microsoft. He is a Fellow of the Triple AI and the cognitive science society, one of the original founders of TTI/ Vanguard in 1991. And on and on and on… and he was named one of the WIRED 25. Welcome to the show!

Douglas Lenat: Thank you very much Byron, my pleasure.

I have been so looking forward to our chat and I would just love, I mean I always start off asking what artificial intelligence is and what intelligence is. And I would just like to kind of jump straight into it with you and ask you to explain, to bring my listeners up to speed with what you’re trying to do with the question of common sense and artificial intelligence.

I think that the main thing to say about intelligence is that it’s one of those things that you recognize it when you see it, or you recognize it in hindsight. So intelligence to me is not just knowing things, not just having information and knowledge but knowing when and how to apply it, and actually successfully applying it in those cases. And what that means is that it’s all well and good to store millions or billions of facts.

But intelligence really involves knowing the rules of thumb, the rules of good judgment, the rules of good guessing that we all almost take for granted in our everyday life in common sense, and that we may learn painfully and slowly in some field where we’ve studied and practiced professionally, like petroleum engineering or cardiothoracic surgery or something like that. And so common sense rules like: bigger things can’t fit into smaller things. And if you think about it, every time that we say anything or write anything to other people, we are constantly injecting into our sentences pronouns and ambiguous words and metaphors and so on. We expect the reader or the listener has that knowledge, has that intelligence, has that common sense to decode, to disambiguate what we’re saying.

So if I say something like “Fred couldn’t put the gift in the suitcase because it was too big,” I don’t mean the suitcase was too big, I must mean that the gift was too big. In fact if I had said “Fred can’t put the gift in the suitcase because it’s too small” then obviously it would be referring to the suitcase. And there are millions, actually tens of millions of very general principles about how the world works: like big things can’t fit into smaller things, that we all assume that everybody has and uses all the time. And it’s the absence of that layer of knowledge which has made artificial intelligence programs so brittle for the last 40 or 50 years.

My number one question I ask every [AI is a] Turing test sort of thing, [which] is: what’s bigger a nickel or the sun? And there’s never been one that’s been able to answer it. And that’s the problem you’re trying to solve.

Right. And I think that there’s really two sorts of phenomena going on here. One is understanding the question and knowing the sense in which you’re talking about ‘bigger.’ One in the sense of perception if you’re holding up a nickel in front of your eye and so on and the other of course, is objectively knowing that the sun is actually quite a bit larger than a typical nickel and so on.

And so one of the things that we have to bring to bear, in addition to everything I already said, are Grice’s rules of communicating between human beings where we have to assume that the person is asking us something which is meaningful. And so we have to decide what meaningful question would they really possibly be having in mind like if someone says “Do you know what time it is?” It’s fairly juvenile and jerky to say “yes” because obviously what they mean is: please tell me the time and so on. And so in the case of the nickel and the sun, you have to disambiguate whether the person is talking about a perceptual phenomenon or an actual unstated physical reality.

So I wrote an article that I put a lot of time and effort into and I really liked it. I ran it on GigaOm and it was 10 questions that Alexa and Google Home answered differently but objectively. They should have been identical, and in every one I kind of tried to dissect what went wrong.

And so I’m going to give you two of them and my guess is you’ll probably be able to intuit in both of them what the answer, what the problem was. The first one was: who designed the American flag? And they gave me different answers. One said “Betsy Ross,” and one said “Robert Heft,” so why do you think that happened?

All right so in some sense, both of them are doing what you might call an ‘animal level intelligence’ of not really understanding what you’re asking at all. But in fact doing the equivalent of (I won’t even call it natural language processing), let’s call it ‘string processing,’ looking at processed web pages, looking for the confluence, and preferably in the same order, of some of the words and phrases that were in your question and looking for essentially sentences of the form: X designed the U.S. flag or something.

And it’s really no different than if you ask, “How tall is the Eiffel Tower?” and you get two different answers: one based on answering from the one in Paris and one based on the one in Las Vegas. And so it’s all well and good to have that kind of superficial understanding of what it is you’re actually asking, as long as the person who’s interacting with the system realizes that the system isn’t really understanding them.

It’s sort of like your dog fetching a newspaper for you. It’s something which is you know wagging its tail and getting things to put in front of you, and then you as the person who has intelligence has to look at it and disambiguate what does this answer actually imply about what it thought the question was, as it were, or what question is it actually answering and so on.

But this is one of the problems that we experienced about 40 years ago in artificial intelligence in the in the 1970s. We built AI systems using what today would be very clearly a neural net technology. Maybe there’s been one small tweak in that field that’s worth mentioning involving additional hidden layers and convolution, and we built a AIs using symbolic reasoning that used logic much like our Cyc system does today.

And again the actual representation looks very similar to what it does today and there had to be a bunch of engineering breakthroughs along the way to make that happen. But essentially in the 1970s we built AIs that were powered by the same two sources of power you find today, but they were extremely brittle and they were brittle because they didn’t have common sense. They didn’t have that kind of knowledge that was necessary in order to understand the context in which things were said, in order to understand the full meaning of what was said. They were just superficially reasoning. They had the veneer of intelligence.

We might have a system which was the world’s expert at deciding what kind of meningitis a patient might be suffering from. But if you told it about your rusted out old car or you told it about someone who is dead, the system would blithely tell you what kind of meningitis they probably were suffering from because it simply didn’t understand things like inanimate objects don’t get human diseases and so on.

And so it was clear that somehow we had to pull the mattress out of the road in order to let traffic toward real AI proceed. Someone had to codify the tens of millions of general principles like non humans don’t get human diseases, and causes don’t happen before their effects, and large things don’t fit into smaller things, and so on, and that it was very important that somebody do this project.

We thought we were actually going to have a chance to do it with Alan Kay at the Atari research lab and he assembled a great team. I was a professor at Stanford in computer science at the time, so I was consulting on that, but that was about the time that Atari peaked and then essentially had financial troubles as did everyone in the video game industry at that time, and so that project splintered into several pieces. But that was the core of the idea that somehow someone needed to collect all this common sense and represent it and make it available to make our AIs less brittle.

And then an interesting thing happened: right at that point in time when I was beating my chest and saying ‘hey someone please do this,’ which was America was frightened to hear that the Japanese had announced something they called the ‘fifth generation computing effort.’ Japan basically threatened to do in computing hardware and software and AI what they had just finished doing in consumer electronics, and in the automotive industry: namely wresting leadership away from the West. And so America was very scared.

Congress passed something that’s how you can tell it was many decades ago. Congress quickly passed something, which was called the National Cooperative Research Act, which basically said ‘hey all you large American companies: normally if you colluded on R & D, we would prosecute you for antitrust violations, but for the next 10 years, we promise we won’t do that.’ And so around 1981 a few research consortia sprang up in the United States for the first time in computing and hardware and artificial intelligence and the first one of those was right here in Austin. It was called MCC, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. Twenty five large American companies each contributed a small number of millions of dollars a year to fund high risk, high payoff, long term R & D projects, projects that might take 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years to reach fruition, but which, if they succeeded, could help keep America competitive.

And Admiral Bob Inman who’s also an Austin resident, one of my favorite people, one of the smartest and nicest people I’ve ever met, was the head of MCC and he came and visited me at Stanford and said “Hey look Professor, you’re making all this noise about what somebody ought to do. You have six or seven graduate students. If you do that here if it’s going to take you a few thousand person years. That means it’s going to take you a few hundred years to do that project. If you move to the wilds of Austin, Texas and we put in ten times that effort, then you’ll just barely live to see the end of it a few decades from now.”

And that was a pretty convincing argument, and in some sense that is the summary of what I’ve been doing for the last 35 years here is taking time off from research to do an engineering project, a massive engineering project called Cycorp, which is collecting that information and representing it formally, putting it all in one place for the first time.

And the good news is since you’ve waited thirty five years to talk to me Byron, is that we’re nearing completion which is a very exciting phase to be in. And so most of our funding these days at Cycorp doesn’t come from the government anymore, doesn’t come from just a few companies anymore, it comes from a large number of very large companies that are actually putting our technology into practice, not just funding it for research reasons.

So that’s big news. So when you have it all, and to be clear, just to summarize all of that: you’ve spent the last 35 years working on a system of getting all of these rules of thumb like ‘big things can’t go in small things,’ and to list them all out every one of them (dark things are darker than light things). And then not just list them like in an Excel spreadsheet, but to learn how to express them all in ways that they can be programmatically used.

So what do you have in the end when you have all of that? Like when you turn it on, will it tell me which is bigger: a nickel or the sun?

Sure. And in fact most of the questions that you might ask that you might think of as any one ought to be able to answer this question, Cyc is actually able to do a pretty good job of. It doesn’t understand that unrestricted natural language, so sometimes we’ll have to encode the question in logic in a formal language, but the language is pretty big. In fact the language has about a million and a half words and of those, about 43,000 are what you might think of as relationship type words: like ‘bigger than’ and so on and so by representing all of the knowledge in that logical language instead of say just collecting all of that in English, what you’re able to do is to have the system do automatic mechanical inference, logical deduction, so that if there is something which logically follows from one or two or 2,000 statements, then Cyc (our system) will grind through automatically and mechanically come up with that entailment.

And so this is really the place where we diverge from everyone else in AI who’s either satisfied with machine learning representation, which is sort of very shallow, almost stimulus response pair-type representation of knowledge; or people who are working in knowledge graphs and triple and quad stores and what people call ontology is these days, and so on which really are almost, you can think of them like three or four word English sentences and there are an awful lot of problems you can solve, just with machine learning. T

There is an even larger set of problems you can solve with machine learning, plus that kind of taxonomic knowledge representation and reasoning. But in order to really capture the full meaning, you really need an expressive logic: something that is as expressive as English. And think in terms of taking one of your podcasts and forcing it to be rewritten as a series of three word sentences. It would be a nightmare. Or imagine taking something like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and trying to rewrite that as a set of three or four word sentences. It probably could theoretically be done, but it wouldn’t be any fun to do and it certainly wouldn’t be any fun to read or listen to, if people did that. And yet that’s the tradeoff that people are making. The tradeoff is that if you use that limited a logical representation, then it’s very easy and well understood to efficiently, very efficiently, do the mechanical inference that’s needed.

So if you represent a set is a type of relationships, you can combine them and chain them together and conclude that a nickel is a type of coin or something like that. But there really is this difference between the expressive logics that have been understood by philosophers for over 100 years starting with Frege, and Whitehead and Russell and so on and and others, and the limited logics that others in AI are using today.

And so we essentially started digging this tunnel from the other side and said “We’re going to be as expressive as we have to and we’ll find ways to make it efficient,” and that’s what we’ve done. That’s really the secret of what we’ve done is not just be massive on codification and formalization of all of that common sense knowledge, but finding what turned out to be about 1100 tricks and techniques for speeding up the inferring, the deducing process so that we could get answers in real time instead of involving thousands of years of computation.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

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Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.