A Silicon Valley event explores the impact on tech firms of fraying US-China ties.
Source: Wired
Augmented Reality (AR) is still in its infancy and has a very promising youth and adulthood ahead. It has already become one of the most exciting, dynamic, and pervasive technologies ever developed. Every day someone is creating a novel way to reshape the real world with a new digital innovation.
Over the past couple of decades, the Internet and smartphone revolutions have transformed our lives, and AR has the potential to be that big. We’re already seeing AR act as a catalyst for major change, driving advances in everything from industrial machines to consumer electronics. It’s also pushing new frontiers in education, entertainment, and health care.
But as with any new technology, there are inherent risks we should acknowledge, anticipate, and deal with as soon as possible. If we do so, these technologies are likely to continue to thrive. Some industry watchers are forecasting a combined AR/VR market value of $108 billion by 2021, as businesses of all sizes take advantage of AR to change the way their customers interact with the world around them in ways previously only possible in science fiction.
As wonderful as AR is and will continue to be, there are some serious privacy and security pitfalls, including dangers to physical safety, that as an industry we need to collectively avoid. There are also ongoing threats from cyber criminals and nation states bent on political chaos and worse — to say nothing of teenagers who can be easily distracted and fail to exercise judgement — all creating virtual landmines that could slow or even derail the success of AR. We love AR, and that’s why we’re calling out these issues now to raise awareness.
Without widespread familiarity with the potential pitfalls, as well as robust self-regulation, AR will not only suffer from systemic security issues, it may be subject to stringent government oversight, slowing innovation, or even threaten existing First Amendment rights. In a climate where technology has come under attack from many fronts for unintended consequences and vulnerabilities–including Russian interference with the 2016 election as well as ever-growing incidents of hacking and malware–we should work together to make sure this doesn’t happen.
If anything causes government overreach in this area, it’ll likely be safety and privacy issues. An example of these concerns is shown in this dystopian video, in which a fictional engineer is able to manipulate both his own reality and that of others via retinal AR implants. Because AR by design blurs the divide between the digital and real worlds, threats to physical safety, job security, and digital identity can emerge in ways that were simply inconceivable in a world populated solely by traditional computers.
While far from exhaustive, the lists below present some of the pitfalls, as well as possible remedies for AR. Think of these as a starting point, beginning with pitfalls:
How can we address and resolve these challenges? Here are some initial suggestions and guidelines to help get the conversation started:
While ambitious companies focus on innovation, they must also be vigilant about the potential hazards of those breakthroughs. In the case of AR, working to proactively wrestle with the challenges around identity, privacy and security will help mitigate the biggest hurdles to the success of this exciting new technology.
Recognizing risks to consumer safety and privacy is only the first step to resolving long-term vulnerabilities that rapidly emerging new technologies like AR create. Since AR blurs the line between the real world and the digital one, it’s imperative that we consider the repercussions of this technology alongside its compelling possibilities. As innovators, we have a duty to usher in new technologies responsibly and thoughtfully so that they’re improving society in ways that can’t also be abused -we need to anticipate problems and police ourselves. If we don’t safeguard our breakthroughs and the consumers who use them, someone else will.
Source: TechCrunch
We unlock the secret of the Waystation with help from Kelly Port, a visual effects supervisor who worked on the blockbuster superhero movie.
Source: CNET
Why does Thanos look different in Infinity War, and how did a machine learning algorithm soup up Josh Brolin’s performance?
Source: CNET
Three-quarters of America’s Facebook users say they use the social network as often or more frequently since a data scandal broke in March.
Source: CNET
There is a peculiar pattern that I have noticed among elites in the United States outside Silicon Valley, which is the almost boastful ignorance of technology. As my colleague Jon Shieber pointed out today, you can see that ignorance among congressmen throughout the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica saga. Our president has rarely sent an email, and seems to confine his mobile phone activities to Twitter. One senior policymaker told me a few months ago that she doesn’t know how to turn on her computer.
Such a pattern is hardly unique to politics though. Hang out with enough business executives, lawyers, doctors, or consultants, and you will hear the inevitable “I don’t really do the computer,” with an air of detached disdain.
Yet it isn’t just the technical challenges that this class avoids, but anything to do with implementation in general. In the policy world, wonks spend decades debating the finer points of healthcare and social spending, only to be wholly ignorant at how their decisions are actually implemented into code. There is an elitism in policy between those who make the decisions and those who implement them, just as much as there is a social distinction between corporate executives and the people who have to carry out their directives.
In many ways, this disdain for the technical mirrors the disdain for math, where the phrase “I’m not a math person” has become sufficiently ubiquitous in the U.S. as to be covered regularly in the press. Being bad at math is a way to signal that someone isn’t one of the worker bees who actually have to care about calculations — they just read the reports prepared by others.
Yet, that ignorance of technology is increasingly untenable. Decisions are only as good as the implementation that results. Marketing isn’t a plan, it’s a system of feedback loops from the market that need to be adjusted in real-time. It’s one thing for politicians to sign a bill into law, but another to ensure that the bill’s intentions are actually encoded into the software that powers government.
The gap between decision and implementations was at the core of a conversation I had this past week with Jennifer Pahlka, who founded and heads Code for America, a nonprofit whose mission is to bridge the divide between government and technologists.
To show how far a policy and its implementation can be, she pointed me to Proposition 47 in California. That initiative, which was passed by voters in 2014, was designed to allow individuals to retroactively expunge or reclassify certain nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors, allowing individuals to become eligible again to work, vote, and receive some government benefits.
Yet, several years after the approval of Prop 47, a single digit percentage of eligible people have taken advantage of the program. The reason is classic government: incredibly convoluted paperwork, which is exponentially worse since every one of California’s 58 counties has to implement the program independently. “If you are a voter and you voted for a specific referendum,” Palhka explained, then you expect a certain outcome. But, “if none of the benefits that you expected to change” materialized, then cynicism mounts quickly.
To help bridge the gap, Code for America launched Clear My Record, a service designed to automate many of the steps involved in the Prop 47 process and make it more accessible. It’s just one of a bunch of services that the group has launched to improve government services ranging from food assistance through GetCalFresh to improving case manager communication through ClientComm.
Palhka’s mission isn’t to just offer point solutions for specific government programs, but to completely overhaul the latent anti-tech culture of government officials. “Digital competence is core to successful government,” she explained, and yet, “If you are a powerful person, you don’t have to understand how the digital world works … but what we are saying is that you do have to care.” Her goal is straightforward: “how do you get policy, operations, and tech to all work together?”
While Palhka and her organization focuses on the public sector, their framework is perhaps even more important to the private sector. There isn’t a company today that can survive without technical leadership in the C-suite, and yet, we still see an astonishing lack of awareness about the internet and its potential from corporate executives. Software increasingly intermediates all relationships with customers, whether though digital commerce or enterprise services. If the software is bad, no amount of decision-making in a mahogany-paneled board room is going to change it.
The good news is that ignorance has an easy solution: education. The computer is not some mystery box. It’s well-documented, and all kinds of resources are available to learn how they work and how to think about their capabilities and nuances. If someone can run a multinational company, they can probably ask smart questions about algorithms or machine learning even if they don’t realistically implement the linear algebra themselves.
CEOs, senators, and other leaders are synthesizers — they rely on staff to handle the details so they can focus on strategy. We would never trust a CEO who brushed off an accountant by saying “I don’t do cash flows,” and we shouldn’t trust a CEO who doesn’t understand how the internet works. Changing times require adaptable leaders, and today those leaders need tech literacy just as much as our grade-school children do. It’s the only way leadership can move forward today.
Source: TechCrunch
En una investigación se han rastreado todas las cuentas de pago de los rescates asociados a este tipo de ciberataques. El que más beneficios ha conseguido es CryptoWall, con cifras que ascienden a los millones de dólares
Source: MIT
El asesino del Golden State ha sido arrestado, según los indicios, gracias a una investigación basada en webs de genealogía que almacenan la información genética de cientos de miles de usuarios. Pero a estos no se les pidió permiso para utilizar su ADN en la investigación policial
Source: MIT
Los edificios también son víctimas de los fenómenos extremos y la subida del nivel del mar, pero sus emisiones los convierten en verdugos del clima. Innovaciones como casas flotantes y herramientas de seguimiento pueden ayudar que el sector sea más resiliente y respetuoso con el planeta
Source: MIT
Need your vision specs so you can order new specs? This magical new tool can give you the numbers.
Source: CNET