SourceCast: Episode 115: YouTube Edition
SourceCast: Episode 115: The AI Hype Machine
News You Can Use: 4/04/2018
- Tesla’s Elon Musk Tells Trump China Trade Rules ‘Make Things Very Difficult’
Mr. Musk noted on Twitter how American-made cars imported into China face higher duties than Chinese vehicles coming to the U.S. and how foreign auto makers in China face restrictions on ownership of factories. To avoid 25% tariffs, foreign auto makers build cars in China through joint ventures with local manufacturers—something that requires a sharing of profit and potentially technology. It is an approach Mr. Musk has been trying to avoid.
“The current rules make things very difficult,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter. “It’s like competing in an Olympic race wearing lead shoes.”
On Thursday, while announcing his order to charge tariffs on steel and aluminum, Mr. Trump read off Mr. Musk’s tweet regarding the higher Chinese tariffs on American vehicles. “That’s from Elon,” the president said. “But everybody knows it, they’ve known it for years. They never did anything about it. It’s got to change.”
- Is China Destined to Dominate Tech?
Because China’s privacy laws aren’t strictly enforced, tech companies can monitor their users intensively, offering them an advantage in everything from optimizing ads to assessing credit risk. As one executive put it, these companies “know where you’ve traveled, what movies you saw, what restaurants you ate at.” This intense surveillance may be a growing liability, however. A significant consumer backlash is building in China, driven partly by ubiquitous fraud and identity theft. And Chinese tech companies are running into stiff resistance when trying to expand into more privacy-conscious markets overseas.
This raises a final concern. Chinese tech firms are largely confined to China, where they’re protected from competition. This gives them a dominant market position and other advantages. But a platform that censors searches for Winnie the Pooh simply isn’t going to be competitive overseas. Google and Facebook Inc., with much more international experience, have proven adept at understanding a global audience and picking up on diverse socio-cultural norms. Extracting ever more data from local users won’t help Chinese companies compete at that level.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-05/is-china-destined-to-dominate-tech
- How to Stage a Successful Protest
- Almost 80% of Chinese concerned about AI threat to privacy, 32% already feel a threat to their work
AI will have an impact on every industry, said 77.8% respondents. 91.2% think AI has an effect on their work, made up of 50.4% saying they have already felt the impact of AI in their own work and another 40.8% believing that AI technologies will have an impact on their livelihoods.
When asked whether they thought AI to be a threat to their livelihoods, 31.7% said they already felt its threat, 50.6% said they believed it would be a threat but were yet to feel it and 17.7% responded with “no, people are the most important”.
- The Amazing History of Panasonic, Which Was Founded 100 Years Ago by a 23-Year-Old
Matsushita was ahead of his time as far as his management approach. When the company was 2 years old and had 28 employees, he formed what he called the “Hoichi Kai,” which translates to “one-step society.” It brought employees together to play sports and participate in other recreational activities.
Another unconventional leadership tactic Matsushita spearheaded was transparency. In the early 1920s, worker retention was a major problem in Japan, first due to competition among firms, then because of economic downturn. Matsushita’s philosophy was one of trust, and he decided to share trade secrets even with new employees to build trust at all levels of the organization. By the end of 1922, the company had 50 employees and a new factory.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310027
This post was becoming a downer, it needed something uplifting.
Photo: Dominik Gehl
News You Can Use: 3/7/2018
- Fake news is not the real problem
The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare. (I’m not pretending it was ever remotely universal; I’m just saying that there was enough of it, barely, for democracy to work more-or-less as intended.)
No longer. The engineer’s mindset has been replaced by the lawyer’s mindset, wherein you pick a side in advance of getting any evidence, and then do absolutely everything you can to belittle, dismiss, and ignore any opposing data, while trumping up every scrap that might support your own side as if it were written on stone tables brought down from the mountain by Moses. I mean no disrespect to the legal profession: some of my favorite people are lawyers, including the one I married. The legal approach is an excellent means of getting to the truth of hard and confrontational matters —
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-not-the-real-problem/?ncid=rss
- Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’
Preethi Kasireddy said she wasn’t surprised when she heard the news that Mr. Thiel is moving to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Ms. Kasireddy, a 27-year-old startup entrepreneur, said she made the same move last November because, like Mr. Thiel, she felt surrounded by people who shared identical beliefs, particularly about how to build a successful company.
Sometimes Silicon Valley venture-capital investors and startup founders “have a certain way of thinking, and if you don’t fit into that way of thinking you’re not in the cool club,” said Ms. Kasireddy, who declined to state her political beliefs but said they didn’t influence her decision to move. She also said she realized many of the resources she needed to build her next project—a blockchain startup—didn’t require her to be in Silicon Valley.
- It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting
- Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
The rise of China as an AI superpower isn’t a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work. It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we’re not ready for it.
- Is Creating Your Own Podcast Actually Worth It?
“You’re going to be terrible at a lot of things for years until you’re successful,” said Keith Kingbay, co-host of “New Player Has Joined,” a show where celebrities reminisce about the videogames they love. “People probably aren’t going to listen to your podcast initially. But if you like it and you keep putting it out, people will find it.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-creating-your-own-podcast-actually-worth-it-1519320018
Photo: Kleiton Silva