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5 important stories that have (almost) nothing to do with politics

PBS NewsHour

Atlanta Braves coaches and players wearing the No. 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson stand during the national anthem before a game against the San Diego Padres at SunTrust Park. If you ask the media, who took the informal marker of the presidency as an opportunity to dive into Donald Trump's early record in office, it was a lot of talk and international outreach, but not much movement on the domestic issues -- like healthcare and tax reform -- that made him popular as a candidate. If you ask budget chief Mick Mulvaney, as NewsHour's Judy Woodruff did on air last week, the first hundred days was spent undoing damage from the previous administration. As for the chief: The presidency is harder than he thought, he told Reuters. No matter how you feel about the administration's first three-and-a-half months in the Oval, here are five important stories overlooked in the 100-day fanfare that are still worth your attention.


Analysis Half of millennials could be competing with robots for jobs

#artificialintelligence

About half of millennials looking for work are interested in jobs that carry a risk of automation, a new study suggests. The findings indicate the youngest and most educated generation in the American workforce isn't necessarily more robot-proof than older workers, who tend to be portrayed as the primary victims of automation. "Millennials show a considerable amount of interest in occupations that face a threat of automation," said Daniel Culbertson, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, the research institute attached to the international job site, and the author of the report. "That gets lost when people talk about millennials being so highly educated and more interested in tech roles." A college degree doesn't protect against robot rivals because even well-paid, highly skilled jobs could shrink or vanish in the near future, he said. Recent graduates who land high salaries aren't impervious if their job is characterized by repetitive tasks and decisions.


Senseless Government Rules Could Cripple the Robo-Car Revolution

WIRED

Few technological advancements bring to mind the American spirit of innovation like Henry Ford and his Model T. In the wake of his transportation innovation, the horse and buggy became an anachronism as the mass-produced automobile reshaped our cities, led to the emergence (for better or worse) of the suburbs, and revolutionized how we move goods and people. Ryan Hagemann (@RyanLeeHagemann) is the director of technology policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian issue advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. Now, there's little doubt that autonomous vehicles are the next frontier of transportation. These vehicles are projected to make our roads safer, potentially reducing fatalities by orders of magnitude. Along the way, however, there are a number of roadblocks to surmount: infrastructure issues, restrictive state licensing policies, driver education, cybersecurity and privacy vulnerabilities, and more.


Cortica, Numenta Hold Top Patents In Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

The new wave of artificial intelligence applications, fueled by a combination of big data and processing capabilities, have garnered over $15B in funding to AI startups in just the last 5 years. Even as investors employ their own due diligence to gauge the "AI-ness" of a startup, new companies are continuing to enter the space at an unprecedented rate. As one measure of internal R&D efforts of companies and innovation in the space, we analyzed the patent application activity of startups on our AI list. We analyzed over 1,150 active AI startups (that have not exited) and found that only 21% of the startups applied for a US patent since 2009 (note: there is a lag in publishing applications, so patent data from 2014 to present is still processing). Only 11% have been granted at least one patent in the United States since 2009.


Why 2017 Will Be The Year Of Big Data

#artificialintelligence

With the rise of data as a resource and a tool to be exploited by businesses for enhancing their functions and systems, analytics and targeted strategies incorporating data have become the key to conducting business effectively. Big Data, in particular, can provide extremely powerful business intelligence. With an estimated 40 zettabytes (43 trillion gigabytes) of data to be created by 2020 (an increase of 300 times on the amount of data in circulation in 2005), at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, data is a valuable resource. In a world of 7 billion people, 6 billion have phones. Those phones harbour sensors, collecting data on location, usage, application data, internet utility and even whether someone is holding the phone.


Robots vs. Cyborgs - Equedia Investment Research

#artificialintelligence

Are you willing to inject an electronic neural net into your brain, in order to compete with super-intelligent robots? That's the message from'super villain in training' Elon Musk, who is literally developing what he hopes is the next phase in human evolution. Two years ago Tesla CEO Musk and Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking were among the signatories to a dramatic open letter to the public at large. They warned of the dangers they saw in the uncontrolled development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The always outspoken Musk went so far as to call Artificial Intelligence development "… summoning the demon."


Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift

#artificialintelligence

Good parties diverge widely; all bad parties are bad in the same way. I am trapped at a dull dinner following a dull talk: part of a series of dinners and talks that grad students organise, unpaid (though at considerable expense to themselves--experience! exposure!), to provide free content for the dull grad program I will soon leave. The Thai food is good. The man sitting across from me and a little down the way, a bellicose bore of vague continental origin, is execrable. He is somehow attached to a mild woman who is actually supposed to be here: a shy, seemingly blameless new grad student who perpetually smiles apologetically on his behalf, in an attempt to excuse whatever he's just said. One immediately understands that she spends half her life with that worry in her eyes, that Joker-set to her mouth, and that general air of begging your pardon for offences she hadn't even had the pleasure of committing. There is always such a woman at bad parties. She has always either found ...


Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos "to Anticipate Criminal Activity"

#artificialintelligence

When civil liberties advocates discuss the dangers of new policing technologies, they often point to sci-fi films like "RoboCop" and "Minority Report" as cautionary tales. In "RoboCop," a massive corporation purchases Detroit's entire police department. After one of its officers gets fatally shot on duty, the company sees an opportunity to save on labor costs by reanimating the officer's body with sleek weapons, predictive analytics, facial recognition, and the ability to record and transmit live video. Although intended as a grim allegory of the pitfalls of relying on untested, proprietary algorithms to make lethal force decisions, "RoboCop" has long been taken by corporations as a roadmap. And no company has been better poised than Taser International, the world's largest police body camera vendor, to turn the film's ironic vision into an earnest reality.



FAA grounds Amazon's drone delivery plans

#artificialintelligence

The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon. The revelation was buried in a FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft." The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred.