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“He Was Also Our Yoda”
In addition to yesterday’s trove of posts about the late, great Marvin Minsky, I want to refer you to a Backchannel remembrance of the AI pioneer by Steven Levy, the writer who had the good fortune to...
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“The More You Ask Of Viv, The More It Will Get To Know You”
With his AI enterprise, Viv, Dag Kittlaus is not trying to create Frankenstein but Igor, a digital assistant that goes far beyond Siri (which he co-created), one that attaches a pleasing voice to a...
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“You Could Even Make A Case For The Opposite, Saying People Are Dumber”
Steve Case won’t be around to read his obituary, which is probably a good thing. It would no doubt pain him that the lead will be the disastrous America Online-Time Warner merger, an attempt at...
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“China Is Hard”
Perhaps I’m too much a product of the West, but I think the downfall of autocratic societies, especially protectionist ones, is contained in their DNA, China included. The system seems antithetical to...
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“What Are People Going To Be Talking About In These 20-Minute Conversations...
There’s something inherently human about people trying to make machines speak. It may seem a paradox, but history has proven it so. Just one example: Nearly 170 years before Siri, German inventor...
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“How Do You Use It, And Why?”
It’s only possible to guess from afar, but I’d wager that the diminution of neo-Nazi trolls and bots on Twitter in the post-election period isn’t largely due to tweaks made by Jack Dorsey & co.,...
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“Today, Those Aspects Seem To Loom Larger Than The Technological Achievement...
Overall I enjoyed Garry Kasaprov’s Deep Thinking. Have philosophical disagreements with it, for sure, and there is some revisionism in regards to his personal history, but the author’s take on his...
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“It’s A Childhood Dream”
Sebastian Thrun is a brilliant guy who was positioned at the starting line of the recent boom in driverless technology, but he’s no stranger to irrational exuberance. A couple years ago, the Udacity...
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“The City Becomes A Simulation Of Itself”
“We need to put everything online,” Bill Joy tells Steven Levy in an excellent Backchannel interview, and I’m afraid that’s what we’re going to do. It’s an ominous statement in a mostly optimistic...
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“We’re Already Sort Of Cyborgs”
Penny Lane, or some place like it, used to be in our ears and in our eyes. Not so much in the twenty-first century. Now your head is supposed to be inside your phone, while sensors, cameras and...
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