Ads in Messenger, Apple’s secret weapon, machine reengineering and more in the Programmable Edition #46
If I were this Boston Dynamics employee caught on tape bullying a robot with a stick, I would feel real bad right now: the video will obviously be the main evidence robots will use to justify a complete annihilation of the human race in a near future.
Jokes asides, it is quite alarming to see AI gaining control over our executive powers. The negative effects of this shift is today blatant in war zones. NSA’s Skynet programme is a perfect example of the flaws of machine learning assistance on life and death decisions. Combine AI extensive usage and drone’s remote and unmanned capabilities and you’ve setup an error-prone environment nicely disconnected from ground reality. It is tempting to imagine terrorist detection algorithms and unmanned action capabilities used to detect and arrest probable dealers or bad drivers.
Eventually, seeing the Boston Dynamics bot taking its revenge by knocking at your door and asking you to pay your speed limit fine might not be as zany as that…
Stay safe, kill robots,
Thomas
Monetizing Facebook Messenger with ads
Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that ‘ads aren’t the right way to monetize messaging’, a disclosed document shows that the Facebook will launch ads within Messenger to let businesses engage with consumers in a conversational manner. Facebook is aware of the risks at stake: a misuse of ads in Messenger could lead to users quickly switching to competing chat platforms.
Have you met Johny Srouji?
Apple has a history of putting the lights on their iconic executives in their product announcements. But few of us know about one of the most influent top executive at Apple, Johny Srouji, who runs the core division at Apple: processors chips design, which is the cornerstone of all Apple products. As Steve Jobs once said, ‘the only way for Apple to really differentiate and deliver something truly unique and truly great, is to own your own silicon’.
Personal assistants are slowly going mainstream, but …
For them to become truly useful, they have to work with one another and in a variety of contexts. For instance, Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Slackbots each have a unique and isolated interface to interact with, and perform unevenly depending on the nature of the task they are given. Today, the personal assistants landscape is fragmented: it needs more flexibility and shared knowledge in order to achieve mass adoption.
‘People in the ‘Middle Ages’ didn’t know they were living in the ‘Middle Ages’’
In the history of mobile, there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ the iPhone. During the transition period, PDAs were the most advanced piece of technology available to consumers on the market. They were bridge solutions, allowing early adopters to get a taste of what the future could be like. In that sense, today’s VR / AR headsets, or even autonomous cars, will look a lot like those PDAs, soon after the ‘iPhones’ of these industries appears.
When algorithms predict movies’ success
Predicting whether a movie will be profitable is what researchers at the University of Ioawa tried to do using machine-learning algorithms trained on historical data about movies. As it appears, the most important success factor is teamwork, defined as the right combination of directors and actors. With an overall accuracy rate of 90%, Zootopia and World of Warcraft are said to be the next big hits.
AR and VR in 2025: the $80 billion industry
In a recent video, Heather Bellini of Goldman Sachs Research claims that virtual and augmented reality will be the next computing platform. Despite today’s expensive price tag and limited applications, mass adoption is coming, unleashing the transformative potential of those technologies from a consumer and entreprise perspective, in areas such as healthcare, retail, advertising, education and real estate.
Yahoo could be for sale, but for how much?
Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, and Maynard Webb, the chairman, discussed the decision of the company to spin off of its core business, hinting at a potential sale in the near future. As of today, the question is not whether the company is for sale, but whether it is selling too cheaply, regarding the past investments Ms. Mayer has made since joining the company in 2012.
Business processes are being machine-reengineering
New workflows, designed around machine-learning algorithms, not only speed up processes but also adapt to changes in time thanks to their predictive capabilities. From natural language processing to anomaly detection, a variety of techniques come together in order to achieve the three desired outcomes for every business: cost performance, customer satisfaction and revenue performance.
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