Source: A16Z AI Playbook
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of computer science techniques that, as Stanford professor Andrew Ng is fond of saying, gives your software super powers.
Building on our Primer on Artificial Intelligence, this microsite is intended to help newcomers (both non-technical and technical) begin exploring what’s possible with AI.
We do not assume you have a computer science degree.
The new book Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups argues that food banks and pantries don’t chip away at underlying issues that keep people food-insecure.
Source: Why America Can’t Escape the Cycle of Hunger – CityLab
Walmart doesn’t pay its workers very well. And because it pays its workers so poorly, they have to rely on food stamps and food banks to make ends meet. So then, Walmart goes ahead and uses its charitable donations to pay food banks, to pay anti-hunger groups to support SNAP—which enables [Walmart] to pay its workers low wages. And then it also redeems about 1 in 6 SNAP dollars around the country.
Government has, for the most part, abdicated its role in providing for people’s rights to food [through] cutbacks to SNAP and cutbacks to welfare. … What I’m trying to call attention to is that this approach (food banks) solves hunger for today. It gives people three days’ worth of food at the end of the month; next month, they arrive at the same damn situation. It doesn’t solve poverty, much less the issues around economic inequality and power. It doesn’t address the wages that people get paid, so they don’t have to go to the food bank.
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Where we’ve come with this after 35 or 40 years of doing this is that the way the public thinks we deal with hunger is through a food drive. They think that’s a solution to hunger, and it’s not.
Sixty percent of the non-elderly who receive food stamps are in households where there’s at least one person working. The reason they’re on SNAP or visiting food banks is because wages are so low.
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SNAP has become a work support program. Work support programs used to be things like childcare. Now we’re subsidizing part of the cost of employment to companies.
We really need to focus on income inequality as a nation. We need to be raising wages and supporting workers in a way that they can make a decent living. That way, people can feed their families and don’t need to be subsidized by the government because they’re working low-wage jobs. So it’s a rethinking of the way we structure how people work in this country.
Social Cooling describes how big data and a lack of privacy is greatly increasing pressure to conform … describes the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
Source: Social Cooling
Their ‘derived data’, which is protected as corporate free speech, is more valuable than ‘your data’.
If they say they don’t sell your data, ask if they are selling theirs.
When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes.
When everything is remembered as big data, we need the right to have our mistakes forgotten.
“Privacy is the right to be imperfect.”
— Tijmen Schep
“we have close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States.”
— Alexander Nix
The freshman House representative Ro Khanna wants to see a broad rethinking of how the government evaluates mergers like Amazon-Whole Foods.
Source: The Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna Takes On the Amazon-Whole Foods Merger – The Atlantic
the FTC and DOJ need to consider all of these factors and make a holistic determination: Is a merger on balance helping wages, jobs, investment for innovation, and prices? Or is it, on balance, not?
And the problem of the current antitrust legislation is that it’s just a litmus test on prices and doesn’t consider all these other equally important factors. And that’s really the philosophical debate between Brandeis and the consensus all the way from Theodore Roosevelt versus the shift to free-market absolutism that Robert Bork enabled.
Source: The US Supreme Court just decided access to Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat is fundamental to free speech — Quartz, by Ephrat Livni
Today (June 19), the justices unanimously held that states can’t broadly limit access to social media because cyberspace “is one of the most important places to exchange views.”
Acknowledging that every advance in technology leads to new abuses by criminals, the notion that states can bar access altogether is anathema to the high court. The opinion noted that convicted criminals, perhaps more than others, would benefit from joining the societal conversation. The justices write:
Social media allows users to gain access to information and communicate with one another on any subject that might come to mind. With one broad stroke, North Carolina bars access to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.