As work on artificial intelligence plods along, an advanced form of crowdsourcing is emerging as an accelerated way to surpass human thinking.
Why it matters: Specially organized groups of people could "get to superhuman intelligence first," said Daniel Weld, a computer science professor at the University of Washington.
Twitter announced Friday that it has discovered a "complex" flaw in a developer library, known as an API, that may have sent tweets and direct messages intended for one account to app developers who should not have received them. That glitch has since been repaired.
What they're saying: In a blog post announcing the bug, Twitter wrote that, "based on our initial analysis, a complex series of technical circumstances had to occur at the same time for this bug to have resulted in account information definitively being shared with the wrong source."
You could probably guess, without looking it up, that if federal health privacy law does anything, it prohibits hospitals from putting trauma patients on network television without their consent. You’d be right.
And yet, four hospitals have now paid more than $3 million in settlements after allowing reality-TV crews to film trauma patients without their consent.
Autonomous vehicle companies track — and publish, at least in California — a variety of performance metrics, including how many times an operator has to take control of the autonomous system, accidents, and distance traveled autonomously. These convenient figures have become de facto measures of progress, yet the view they offer into the state of AV technology is fuzzy at best.
The bottom line: As AV technology approaches commercialization, companies will have to engage in a dialogue with government and the public — using statistical performance measures as well as qualitative analyses and processes — to demonstrate that autonomous systems are thoughtfully and safely engineered.
The remote assistance, telematics, wifi and other core systems of autonomous vehicles have vulnerabilities that could let adversaries control safety-critical components like steering, braking, and the engine.
The big picture: Complex, novel systems fail in complex and unpredictable ways. AVs and their supporting infrastructure form one of the most ambitious interconnected systems ever conceived, but this complexity is the enemy of security.
Older adults continue driving until the last 6 to 10 years of their lives, though their ability to safely operate a vehicle may diminish because of illness, limited mobility or side effects of medication.
The big picture: The U.S. has 47 million adults 65 and over — a number that is only expected to grow — and 80% of them hold a driver’s license and live in areas that require a car to get around. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to remake older drivers' golden years by allowing them to maintain independence while still giving up their car keys.
Around the world, carmakers, cities and whole nations are describing a new era in which we will no longer drive ourselves, but glide hands-free along electronic highways into futuristic cities. There's just one problem: Humans are still a lot smarter than even the smartest cars — and are still babysitting them every step of the way.
Why it matters: Although human error accounts for many accidents on the road today, people are generally good at managing the demands of driving. To fulfill their ultimate promise of transforming how we build cities and move people and goods — saving lives in the process — autonomous vehicles will have to be even better drivers than people.
After President Trump's first travel-ban order in January 2017, Google employees discussed in internal emails how they could tweak search results to favor pro-immigration organizations and ways to contact lawmakers and government agencies, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Why it matters: "These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented," according to a Google spokesperson. But the leak will pour gasoline on unproven charges thatthe company builds anti-conservative bias into its products — right before the Justice Department convenes state attorneys general to talk about the issue. An earlier leak showed Google executives' frustration after the 2016 election.
Most driverless vehicles rely on a clutch of sensors — radar, cameras and especially a 3D, 360-degree viewing technology called lidar, which is that big spinning thing you see atop test vehicles.
Why it matters: A big problem, in addition to making the sensors better and cheaper, has been unifying all their feeds into a single stream of information and acting reliably on what they indicate. If they could be fused in a sensible way, that could compensate for flaws in the individual sensors.
Adobe on Thursday said it will buy marketing software company Marketo from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $4.75 billion.
The bottom line: While Adobe is best known for its creative tools like Photoshop, much of its business has come from software for other types of workers, including sales and marketing professionals. For example, in 2009 it bought Omniture for $1.8 billion (which is the same amount Vista paid for Marketo two years ago).
The Swiss state of Shauffhausen was the first in the world to incorporate an autonomous bus into regular route public transit in mixed traffic, a service that has transported over 12,000 passengers since it began in March. City and transit officials tasked a research team with conducting a public survey on the program's performance.
Why it matters: While the participants seem to have some concerns and unanswered questions about the transition to autonomous vehicles, the autonomous bus enjoyed high levels of approval. Public acceptance and support are key to the success of AVs in public transportation, and these results bode well for other cities looking to try autonomous buses in their transit systems.
In a letter received by lawmakers in July and obtained by Axios, Google said it has continued allowing apps to collect and share data from Gmail accounts even though lawmakers have raised questions about privacy and possible abuse of user data, reports the WSJ.
Why it matters: Google has been drawing the ire of users, employees, and lawmakers in recent months over some of its practices and for failing to send a senior-enough executive to a hearing on privacy and tech issues earlier this month. Google is expected to face lawmakers at a contentious hearing next week with the Senate Commerce Committee.
As housing prices in the Bay Area have skyrocketed, more people have moved to peripheral cities and seen their commutes lengthen as a result. Between 2005 and 2016, the number of people in the region who commute more than 90 minutes per day increased 113%.
The big picture: Once autonomous vehicles come to market, this issue will only get worse. As spending time in a car becomes less onerous, the tradeoff of moving a few hours away to save money on rent will look increasingly favorable. Aside from its environmental impact, this shift could also lead to increased income inequality: Recent studies have uncovered an inverse relationship between time spent commuting and economic mobility.
A new report shows that a military contractor has likely sold spyware to repressive regimes. But the study's authors and other experts differ on how to stop the problem.
The big picture: That study, released Tuesday by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, found that 36 surveillance networks used commercial militarized spyware made by the Israeli NSO Group.
Equifax is being hit with a £500,000 fine over its massive 2017 data breach that affected 146 million people globally, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced Wednesday.
Why it matters: The fine is very small compared to what Equifax would've received had the breach happened just one year later, when the U.K. implemented GDPR, the sweeping data privacy law that would've penalized Equifax up to 4% of its global annual revenue.
Objections to Google’s possible re-entry into the Chinese search market are uniting Republicans, Democrats and some of Google's own employees in a rare alignment against the company.
Why it matters: Google abandoned China in 2010 rather than censor its search results according to the Chinese government's wishes. Any effort by the company to return to this gigantic market stirs up ethical questions raised by that history.
21st Century Fox and Comcast are likely headed to a settlement auction this weekend, after a months-long bidding war for European broadcaster Sky.
Why it matters: Sky is a unique international property because it reaches millions of European homes and has a growing streaming audience. Both American broadcast giants were looking to increase their international footprints, although the equation has changed for Fox now that it has agreed to sell some of its assets to Disney.
A new study from one of the world’s biggest ad firms, its digital ad agency and a programmatic ad tech company suggests that digital ad campaigns optimized by machine learning tools outperformed campaigns managed by humans over the course of one month.
Why it matters: Although advertising has traditionally been a creative industry, stakeholders — like agencies, ad tech firms, and even brands — are pushing the effectiveness of their automation and machine learning tools, to lure clients that are focused on cost-efficient data-driven ad campaigns.
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