Infinite Quack

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two Still beating this drum. People need to understand this dynamic because Trump and his followers either don't have that understanding, or are deflecting, when they blame it all on immigrants. John Oliver recently did a piece on automation -- also worth watching. Let me try and explain what I'm doing in my current job. I work for Amazon (standard disclaimer: I don't speak for them). Amazon used to make all its money from selling to customers, but now makes billions from AWS, Amazon Web Services. This is a tech company leasing its tech to other companies. What for? So those companies can do their own buying and selling online, and whatever else they do. It's safe to assume that part of what they're doing is automating their own processes. Netflix is a well-known AWS customer. If you're on  Netflix, go find Hasan Minhaj's excellent show Patriot Act . There's an episode about Amazon, in which--to turn the whole thi...

  A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values Good article, and a very real problem. I raised my eyebrows a bit at the end though: If billions of machines are all programmed to make the same judgement call, it may be a lot more dangerous to cross the street as, say, an overweight man than as a fit woman. This is probably wrong. "A lot" more dangerous presumes that the trolley problem comes up a lot. It's rare, and should be much rarer when all the cars are far better at avoiding accidents altogether than even a sober, well-rested, experienced human driver. Machine driven cars can exhibit superhuman reaction time. They can receive input about hazards instantly from other such cars nearby, from regional and global monitoring systems, from cell phone signals emitted by devices in pedestrians' pockets. They can pass all this data through predictive algorithms. They can act in concert: an entire stretch of highway can see every car show down s...