🚀 This is issue #102 of THE EXPONENTIAL VIEW. Sign-up for the newsletter here. Demo of deep-learning image transfer Facebook’s AI ambitions. VR isn’t a fad. Why we shouldn’t tax robots. The changing of employment. Using cryptocurrency to align incentives. In praise of simple heuristics. Digital contraception. Heroin in Philadelphia. nature Hope this sparks great conversations! ❤️ Please share it , , . Love this? via Twitter on LinkedIn by Facebook Dept of the near future 💡 Stephen Levy into its products. What struck me is Facebook’s conviction that building decent consumer products now requires the predictive capabilities of AI. on how Facebook is infusing artificial intelligence LONG READ Ⓜ Great analysis on how . M was only able to service 30% of requests without human intervention. Facebook is scaling down the ambitions of its AI assistant, Facebook M 🌈 ? Early numbers suggest the adoption curve is not far off that of the iPhone. Is VR a fad 👩‍💻 Self-employment in the UK is growing significantly faster than other advanced economies. The growth has been in high-paid sectors on one hand and precarious ones on the other. Does it represent a remaking of labour markets? | (Also, report suggests .) Full PDF Brief summary. 250k UK civil servants could be replaced by automation by 2032 🇺🇸 David Brooks argues the US in . “The 21st century is looking much nastier and bumpier: rising ethnic nationalism, falling faith in democracy, a dissolving world order.” And no, . See also this fascinating extract from a Goldman Sachs report and this . this century is broken it isn’t robots that are killing the growth on the problems in the US labour market grim prognosis that only catastrophe has reliably reduced income inequality 💸 “As the true cost of Bitcoin transactions rises, utility at the margin falls, and the platform’s fundamental value as a for human economic interaction declines alongside” . tool argues Eric Vorhees Dept of robots & artificial intelligence 🤖 Should we tax robots, as Bill Gates has suggested? . The rationale? Automation doesn’t seem to be the cause of the reduction of the returns on labour, rather it is the increase in the power of certain firms (by network effects, superior cultures or government protections, like IP.) The Economist makes a persuasive argument that we shouldn’t MUST READ. I drew the stylish image of a backpack at the top of this post with the help of the implementation of . Have a play yourself. (Won’t work on iPhone.) pix2pix and image-to-image translation 💵 Numerai, which is backed by a number of subscribers to this newsletter, is a startup building financial trading models by ensembling the best algorithms from a community of data scientists. Numerai had to overcome an incentive problem. How do you get people to share algorithms that generate alpha when participants in a market are usually adversaries? y. (More detailed .) Numerai proposes a novel solution where traders back their confidence in their algorithms by stakes in a new cryptocurrenc PDF here Performant algorithms lead to excess payouts, poor performers lose their stake. The model might align incentives for co-operation on the platform. Will Numerai’s approach work? No choice but to wait and find out. (and its long-held bet on generalised CPUs) How AI has wrong-footed Intel A major the firm’s AI unit (inflated expectations?) US hospital ended its collaboration with IBM Watson, . “After a couple of hours the AI was good enough to beat the in-game AI, and after a couple of weeks it could beat the top-ranking humans.” AI smashed humans in Super Smash Bros Solid list of many the narrow tasks where AI outperforms humans Deep learning facial time machine DeepCoder learns to write code by stealing from other programs Robot cleaning market growing exponentially Here is where jobs will be lost when trucks drive themselves GM plans to test thousands of self-driving cars in American cities next year 🎧 : with Kate Devlin New EV podcast Intimate lives with robots Small morsels to appear smart at dinner parties 💡 Great profile of Gerd Gigerenzer Simple heuristics often outperform complex rules. Inside Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic in reducing sugar consumption Mexico’s sugar tax is succeeding 💏 is as effective as the pill. Elina Berglund’s contraceptive algorithm Analysis of the implosion of a once-hot car marketplace How Beepi failed. 🔋 (needed in Li-Ion batteries) Speculators are hoarding cobalt to move faster Six-legged robot uses two legs . read The SHA-1 cryptographic function has been broken EXCELLENT 🚀 found on Ceres Organic compounds 👽 Seven temperate exoplanets discovered What you wrote Two essays by EV readers this week are worth reading. Nick Russell asks is it possible to modify individual human brains via social media? Husayn Kasai makes the case for Universal Basic Income End note I watched , a great film about a carpenter dealing with unemployment, navigating Britain’s social safety net and trying to maintain his dignity. It’s a wonderful film on its own merits. One element that stood out as particularly interesting. The protagonist needed to steer a byzantine bureaucratic process with no real explicability of the how it worked and with a limited right of redress: it was essentially a giant algorithm. And an inhuman one at that. Recommended viewing! I, Daniel Blake Have a super week Azeem 🚀 Forwarded this from a friend? Sign-up to Exponential View here.

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