In yesterday’s post, I referred to the Android-based service called Google Now, which is about as close as your mobile device comes (so far) to reading your mind and anticipating your wants and needs. By gathering data from contacts, emails, destinations visited, searches made, etc. the algorithms applied by the Now service essentially learn a user’s interests and then prompts ...
In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation. The eerie itself, Yadron reports, ...
If Bernie Sanders became president and was then tough on the growing power of the Internet industry, would the progressives currently singing his praises still support him? With this post, I am neither endorsing nor indicting the candidacy of Senator Sanders himself, but as his campaign is built on a theme of holding Wall Street and corporations accountable, I have ...
If a man overhears two women at the local coffee house advocating some point of view he doesn’t like and he then announces out loud that he hopes someone rapes and kills them, the management will toss him out on the street. In such a scenario, patrons will applaud the ejection, and nobody in his right mind will suggest that ...
I haven’t done a podcast in a while but decided to reach out to technology writer Andrew Orlowski after reading his article Alphabetti Spaghetti: What Wall Street isn’t telling you about Google. Andrew is the executive editor of the IT news and opinion publication The Register, a critic of techno-utopianism, and coiner of the term “Googlewashing” to describe either purposeful or inadvertent ...
