Machines as intelligent as humans will be invented by 2029, predicts technologist Ray Kurzweil. "Nonsense," retorts roboticist Rodney Brooks. By that time, he says, machines will only be as smart as a mouse. As for humanlike intelligence — that may arrive by 2200.
Between these two forecasts — machines with human intelligence in 11 or 182 years — lies much of the rest of the artificial intelligence community, a disputatious lot who disagree on nearly everything about their field, Martin Ford, author of "Architects of Intelligence," tells Axios.
The chair of the Federal Trade Commission wouldn't say on Tuesday when the agency plans to finish its investigation of Facebook's privacy practices, despite being pressed by members of Congress.
The big picture: Since the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal broke earlier this year, causing the FTC to confirm that it was investigating the social giant, Facebook has been hit by more controversies over privacy and its use of opposition research on critics.
A growing group of Google employees have signed on to a letter asking their employer to end its “Dragonfly” project aimed at creating a censored version of its search project for the Chinese market.
Why it matters: The letter, which was initially published Tuesday and is being updated with more signatures on an ongoing basis, is the latest example of employee activism at the tech giant. A walkout staged by its employees over the company’s poor handling of sexual harassment cases was successful in pushing the company to announce some policy changes, although not all the organizers' demands were met.
More than half of internet traffic is bots, but an increasing number of internet bots are being developed to game social platforms.
Data: Imperva Incapsula Bot Traffic Report. Based on 16.7+ billion visits to 100,000 randomly-selected domains on the Incapsula network; Chart: Lazaro Gamio/Axios
The big picture: Not all bots are bad. (Some, for example, are used to make our search experiences more accurate.) But the bots used to spread fake news are usually bad, and bad bots make up roughly one quarter of internet traffic. Bots are programmed to perform simple internet tasks repeatedly. On social media, such tasks include liking or retweeting certain content to falsely inflate its authority on the internet.
Amazon posted its highest sales on record this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the company says. The e-commerce giant sold a total of 18 million toys and 13 million pieces of apparel on the two big shopping days. In total, shoppers bought over 180 million items on Amazon over the holiday weekend.
The big picture: Online shopping — on both e-commerce platforms and traditional retailers' sites — is taking an increasingly large share of the holiday shopping blitz. Amazon maintains the edge online with speedy and cheap shipping, but rivals Walmart and Target are making big investments in efficient shipping to catch up.
The big picture: Since the General Data Protection Regulation went into effect this year, European countries have become ever more active in holding companies accountable for their handling of consumer data. Uber has faced scrutiny at home over its security practices as well, settling with the FTC last month and agreeing to pay $148 million in a nationwide settlement led by California in September.
Lawmakers will push members of the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to provide details of their investigation into whether Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data leak violated a previous legal settlement with the agency.
Why it matters: Facebook is under intense political pressure around the world, with hearings on both sides of the Atlantic challenging its commitment to treating its users fairly.
Microsoft is now neck and neck with Apple for the title of most valuable company in the world.: At market close on Monday, Microsoft was worth $817 billion, just shy of Apple's $829 billion, That comes amid a steady two-year climb for Microsoft and a recent steep drop in Apple's valuation, which topped $1 trillion not long ago.
Bottom line: The story isn't just about the drop in Apple shares, but also the resilience of Microsoft despite having lost its seat at the cool kids' table. This year alone, Microsoft surged past Amazon and Google parent Alphabet.
