Technology versus Humanity

“With more than 6,000 applicants from over 100 countries competing, the first international beauty contest judged entirely by artificial intelligence just came to an end. The results are a bit disheartening.

The team of judges, a five robot panel, attempted to pick winners from the submitted photos in hopes that it could determine which faces most closely resembled the idea of “human beauty.” Each of the five robot judges used artificial intelligence to analyze specific traits that contribute to perceived outer beauty.”

The first AI-judged beauty contest taught us one thing: Robots are racist
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/09/09/the-first-ai-judged-beauty-contest-taught-us-one-thing-robots-are-racist/
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“I think this transformative revolution will create an abundance of labor. It will create enormous growth in [the supply of workers and machines], automating a lot of industries and boosting productivity. When you have this glut of workers, it plays havoc with existing institutions.”

The Next Industrial Revolution Is Coming and It Could Destroy Millions of Jobs
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-next-industrial-revolution/498779/
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“For a number of reasons, most medical professionals aren’t too happy about the self-diagnosis trend. It isn’t simply a matter of loss of control or an undermining of their authority though online medical searches—it can mess with the diagnostic process, because the results can suggest rare or morbid conditions to patients, which in turn can prompt the appearance of new “symptoms.” You search online for “sore throat,” for instance, and find yourself engrossed and horrified by descriptions of esophageal cancer. Your anxiety escalates.”

Googling our medical symptoms is making us sicker
http://qz.com/773031/googling-our-medical-symptoms-is-making-us-sicker/
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“Turns out voice recognition software has improved to the point where it is significantly faster and more accurate at producing text on a mobile device than we are at typing on its keyboard. That's according to a new study by Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu, the Chinese Internet giant. The study ran tests in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng says this should not feel like defeat. "Humanity was never designed to communicate by using our fingers to poke at a tiny little keyboard on a mobile phone. Speech has always been a much more natural way for humans to communicate with each other," he says.”

Voice Recognition Software Finally Beats Humans At Typing, Study Finds
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/08/24/491156218/voice-recognition-software-finally-beats-humans-at-typing-study-finds
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“A few years ago, deep learning algorithms in the competition were wrong about 30% of the time. But last year, the error rate dropped to under 5%, making the algorithms more accurate at object recognition than human”

A top Silicon Valley investor predicts what the world will look like in 10 years, when roads are full of self-driving cars
http://uk.businessinsider.com/chris-dixon-future-of-self-driving-cars-interview-2016-6
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