must-read story
Walmart's Crime Problem, and the Week's Other Must-Read Stories
Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. I don't want to be an alarmist, but there's a chance we're running out of swear words. Over the years, our language has become more coarse, and dropping F bombs and other profanities has been fully integrated into our daily exchanges. As use of the words becomes more acceptable, they lose their power.
Three Must-Read Stories: The Weekend Reader
Every weekend we select a handful of in-depth articles we think are worth a bit of your valuable time, either because they peel back the layers on a compelling business story, or somehow make us look at business in a different light. AI may undermine big-company advantages. Machine learning – software that can improve itself without human intervention – may mean trouble for big companies that depend on their heft to outmaneuver smaller upstarts, writes Howard Yu for the Harvard Business Review. And for a sneak preview of where the world is headed, one need not look further than the success story of AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence that beat a champion of the ancient game of Go, something that was previously thought to be impossible. "It is easy to imagine a world where self-taught algorithms will play a much bigger role in coordinating economic transactions; AlphaGo simply shows us what is possible in the near future. With instantaneous adjustment, automatic optimization, and continuous improvement all quietly managed by unsupervised algorithms, the redundancy of production facilities and wastage in the supply chain should become headaches of the past."