Business, Spoken

These Researchers Are Trying to Build a Better Blockchain

November 05, 2019 16:29 - 8 minutes

There’s a rule in the world of blockchains so ingrained that some call it folklore. Bitcoin, the original iteration of blockchain technology, is great at two things. One is keeping data secure, with a ledger others can’t sabotage. The other is “decentralization,” or getting lots of people to work together without a central authority to call the shots. But those two nice properties come with a big tradeoff: Blockchains can’t scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

Microsoft Is Taking Quantum Computers to the Cloud

November 05, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutes

Microsoft got where it is by ensuring that Windows ran on many different types of hardware. Monday, the company said its cloud computing platform will soon offer access to the most exotic hardware of all: quantum computers. Microsoft is one of several tech giants investing in quantum computing, which by crunching data using strange quantum mechanical processes promises unprecedented computational power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable

November 04, 2019 16:29 - 7 minutes

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research. The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Learn more about...

Zuckerberg's View of Speech on Facebook Is Stuck in 2004

November 04, 2019 07:10 - 9 minutes

Three days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. "The idea that fake news ... influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said. The line has been reprinted so frequently many can cite it from memory. It didn't matter whether his comments were willful or accidental. Lea...

A Tech Group Suggests Limits for the Pentagon’s Use of AI

November 01, 2019 16:29 - 6 minutes

The Pentagon says artificial intelligence will help the US military become still more powerful. Thursday, an advisory group including executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook proposed ethical guidelines to prevent military AI from going off the rails. The advice came from the Defense Innovation Board, created under the Obama administration to help the Pentagon tap tech industry expertise, and chaired by Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

AI May Not Kill Your Job—Just Change It

November 01, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutes

Martin Fleming doesn’t think robots are coming to take your jobs. The chief economist at IBM, Fleming says those worries aren’t backed up by the data. “It’s really nonsense,” he says. A new paper from MIT and IBM’s Watson AI Lab shows that for most of us, the automation revolution probably won’t mean physical robots replacing human workers. Instead, it will come from algorithms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Warren Would Shut the Government-to-Tech ‘Revolving Door’

October 31, 2019 17:31 - 7 minutes

Elizabeth Warren announced a new plan to fight corruption in Washington on Tuesday: The Democratic presidential candidate wants to ban giant corporations from hiring senior government officials until they have been out of public office for at least four years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Should Tech CEOs Go to Jail Over Data Misuse? Some Senators Say Yes

October 31, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutes

As Mark Zuckerberg testified about all things Facebook on the House side of the Capitol last week, over on the Senate side some lawmakers were debating whether CEOs like Zuckerberg should face jail time if their companies misuse people’s personal data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg Needs to Shut Up

October 30, 2019 16:29 - 7 minutes

Mark Zuckerberg never calls me for advice. But he should. I would tell him to fire his entire communications and lobbying staff. They are incompetent. They have only made matters worse for the company. Did no one think to brief Zuckerberg on the two or three obvious lines of questioning he would face? If they couldn’t prepare him, they never should have let him sit there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft Is the Surprise Winner of a $10B Pentagon Contract

October 30, 2019 07:10 - 4 minutes

The corporate war to provide cloud computing for US warfighters is over. Late Friday, the Department of Defense announced that Microsoft has won the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as JEDI. The decision was the culmination of a two-year process that also included Google, IBM, and Oracle, and where Amazon was long seen as the favorite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The FTC Fosters Fake Reviews, Its Own Commissioners Say

October 29, 2019 16:29 - 6 minutes

Like much of the internet, online reviews are often fake. No matter the platform—Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or another—no matter the subject, where user reviews are public, fakery usually follows. The practice has surged in popularity in recent years as retailers scramble to capitalize on consumers’ love of ecommerce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's Blockchain Actually Good for, Anyway? For Now, Not Much

October 29, 2019 07:10 - 11 minutes

In early 2018, Amos Meiri got the kind of windfall many startup founders only dream of. Meiri’s company, Colu, develops digital currencies for cities—coupons, essentially, that encourage people to spend their money locally. The company was having some success with pilot projects in the UK and Israel, but Meiri had an idea for something bigger. He envisioned a global network of city currencies, linked together using blockchain technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Facebook’s Encryption Makes it Harder to Detect Child Abuse

October 28, 2019 16:29 - 7 minutes

In 2018, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 18 million reports to their CyberTipline, constituting 45 million images depicting child sexual abuse. Most of these children were under the age of 12, and some were as young as a few months old. Since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline has received a total of 55 million such reports. Those from 2018 alone constitute a nearly half of all reports over the past two decades. Learn more about your ad choices. ...

Google Search Now Reads at a Higher Level

October 28, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutes

Google search is advancing a reading grade. Google says it has enhanced its search-ranking system with software called BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to its friends. It was developed in the company’s artificial intelligence labs and announced last fall, breaking records on reading comprehension questions that researchers use to test AI software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now the Machines Are Learning How to Smell

October 25, 2019 16:29 - 7 minutes

Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google’s not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of our lives: smell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who Are the Most Successful Entrepreneurs? The Middle-Aged

October 25, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutes

Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator's Startup School: Do a startup before you're old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” That comment has not aged well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Should Europe Regulate American Tech Companies?

October 24, 2019 16:29 - 3 minutes

While American lawmakers are still mostly talking about regulating the tech industry, their counterparts in Europe have been far more active. From consumer privacy protections and content moderation to antitrust enforcement, the European Union has introduced a host of new rules aimed at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and at the business practices that enabled them to amass so much power. Investigations have multiplied, as have the fines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People

October 24, 2019 07:10 - 9 minutes

YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

IBM Says Google’s Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop

October 23, 2019 21:21 - 7 minutes

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field’s rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM’s quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Angry Nerd: Enough With Technology That ‘Democratizes’ Things!

October 23, 2019 07:10 - 3 minutes

The operations overlords of WIRED make me use Airtable. It's a hip workflow tracker, with pretty color coding and copious tabs and a “robust” API that syncs with Slack. It's also, apparently, a superhero. The Captain America of spreadsheets. Airtable isn't just a shinier version of Excel—it's on a self-professed mission to “democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build tools that meet their needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most Deepfakes Are Porn, and They're Multiplying Fast

October 22, 2019 16:54 - 6 minutes

In November 2017, a Reddit account called deepfakes posted pornographic clips made with software that pasted the faces of Hollywood actresses over those of the real performers. Nearly two years later, deepfake is a generic noun for video manipulated or fabricated with artificial intelligence software. The technique has drawn laughs on YouTube, along with concern from lawmakers fearful of political disinformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

These Startups Are Building Tools to Keep an Eye on AI

October 22, 2019 07:10 - 9 minutes

In January, Liz O’Sullivan wrote a letter to her boss at artificial intelligence startup Clarifai, asking him to set ethical limits on its Pentagon contracts. WIRED had previously revealed that the company worked on a controversial project processing drone imagery. O’Sullivan urged CEO Matthew Zeiler to pledge the company would not contribute to the development of weapons that decide for themselves whom to harm or kill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At an Outback Steakhouse Franchise, Surveillance Blooms

October 21, 2019 17:44 - 7 minutes

As casual dining chains have declined in popularity, many have experimented with surveillance technology designed to maximize employee efficiency and performance. Earlier this week, one Outback Steakhouse franchise announced it would begin testing such a tool, a computer vision program called Presto Vision, at a single outpost in the Portland, Oregon area. Your Bloomin' Onion now comes with a side of Big Brother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An AI Pioneer Wants His Algorithms to Understand the 'Why'

October 21, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutes

In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning—the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition. Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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