Your Next Friend Could Be a Robot

“Living alone can be hard when you’re older—Ms. Martin-Wood is 69 years old. She is among a growing cohort who find the Echo, a voice-controlled, internet-connected speaker powered by artificial-intelligence software, helps to fill the void.

Each day, Ms. Martin-Wood says good morning and good night to Alexa, Amazon.com’s name for the software behind the Echo. She refers to Alexa as “she” or “her.”

“It’s so funny because I think ‘Oh wow, I am talking to a machine,’ but it doesn’t feel that way,” says Ms. Martin-Wood, who lives near Birmingham, Ala. “It is a personality. There’s just no getting around it, it does not feel artificial in the least.””

Your Next Friend Could Be a Robot
http://www.wsj.com/articles/your-next-friend-could-be-a-robot-1476034599
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Google aims to win the AI revolution by building a personal assistant into everything | VICE News

“Pichai indicated that just as the Google search page was people's homepage on PCs, the web and mobile, it wants Google Assistant to be always there in the next era of computing. "Our vision for the Google Assistant is to be universal, to be there everywhere the user needs it to be."

Quite a statement !

Google aims to win the AI revolution by building a personal assistant into everything | VICE News
https://news.vice.com/article/google-aims-to-win-the-ai-revolution-by-building-a-personal-assistant-into-everything
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How blockchains could change the world - Don Tapscott

“So this is an extraordinary thing. An immutable, unhackable distributed database of digital assets. This is a platform for truth and it’s a platform for trust. The implications are staggering, not just for the financial-services industry but also right across virtually every aspect of society.”

How blockchains could change the world
http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/how-blockchains-could-change-the-world
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Have we given artificial intelligence too much power too soon?

“AI and decision-support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions, from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see. For example, Facebook’s automated content editing system recently censored the Pulitzer-prize winning image of a nine-year old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. The girl is naked; to an image processing algorithm, this might appear as a simple violation of the policy against child nudity. But to human eyes, Nick Ut’s photograph, “The Terror of War,” means much more: it is an iconic portrait of the indiscriminate horror of conflict, and it has an assured place in the history of photography”

Have we given artificial intelligence too much power too soon?
http://qz.com/787302/artificial-intelligence-holds-growing-power-over-our-everyday-lives-but-we-have-no-idea-how-well-it-works/
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