Note: all the links below take you to other articles by the same author. With all the gratuitous anthropomorphization infecting the machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) space, many businessfolk are tricked into thinking of AI as an objective, impartial colleague that knows all the right answers. Here's a quick demo that shows you why that's a terrible misconception. A task that practically every AI student has to suffer through is building a system that classifies images as "cat" (photo contains a cat) or "not-cat" (no cat to be seen). The reason this is a classic AI task is that recognizing objects is a task that's relatively easy for humans to perform, but it's really hard for us to say how we do it (so it's difficult to code explicit rules that describe "catness").

Flippy, the burger flipping robot only lasted two days before the plug was pulled, temporarily, suggesting that the future we dream about is going to take a whole lot longer to arrive. But it hit with a thud as reality quickly sunk in. The growing robotic list goes way beyond factory production lines to include self-driving cars, delivery drones and especially the one we encountered this past week, the burger-flipper. On its surface, the idea sounds like a no-brainer: Replace young men and women who can't take the heat and monotony of standing over a hot griddle -- and end up quitting in weeks, if not months -- with a robot. A $100,000 robot can grill hamburgers to perfection all day long.

The Internet Archive recently announced a new service they've dubbed'Third Eye'. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they'll eventually process, but -- for now -- the more recent broadcasts from four channels are readily available. There's tons of information about the project on its main page where you can interactively work with the API if that's how you roll. Since my newsflash package already had a "news" theme and worked with the joint IA-GDELT project TV data, it seemed to be a good home for a Third Eye interface to live. You can read long-form details of the Third Eye service on their site.