Episode 19 – Really People Facebook did nothing wrong ‘ish’

In this edition, the top news starts with:  A great idea out of China, where they are building a smart solar highway that can recharge electric cars on the move.  Replacing all the roads with such a system would really make electrical cars orders of magnitude more practical, even with current battery technology.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-11/the-solar-highway-that-can-recharge-electric-cars-on-the-move

The latest update to Windows 10 that was not officially announced seems to have some major bug in it and Microsoft has delayed the release until it can be fixed.  There is no ETA on when that will happen.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/what-happened-to-the-windows-10-spring-creators-update/

In a great sign of relief, one existential risk seems to possibly have a new solution and that is the diversification of the supply of rare earth minerals that Japan found in its territorial waters. This possibly could be able to supply civilization for the foreseeable future, if needed, as these minerals are the basis for all of our most advanced technology.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/japan-rare-earths-huge-deposit-of-metals-found-in-pacific.html

People are freaking out over the fact that Facebook like buttons and advertisers that put Facebook code on their sites are sending, at least, hit and browse data for that site to Facebook.  Anyone that has any clue about how the internet works would know that and the shock people seem to have over this seems to be more a lack of knowledge.  It’s not like Facebook is hacking anyone’s machines and stealing data…

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/heres-how-facebook-tracks-you-when-youre-not-on-facebook

(If you want to try and minimally impact the invasion of your privacy…)

https://www.slashgear.com/privacy-settings-its-time-to-check-them-and-heres-how-11527011/

AI turns out to be better at reading medical scans than people… Duh…

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-artificial-intelligence-technique-quality-medical.html

AI is being used in material sciences to improve the time needed to discover new alloys, or metallic glass in one case.  While, additionally, the collective knows of at least one firm that is utilizing massive distributed blockchain based AI systems to do broad material analysis to discover superalloys…

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-04/dnal-sum041218.php

And, for heaven’s sake, going to back to this issue with Facebook… everyone is freaking out that Facebook is tracking what you do online; but, they leave out the fact that it only applies to merchants that are the ones who actually propagated this, not Facebook. Everyone acts like it’s Facebook’s fault; but, never mind companies like Amazon, that are a zillion times more pervasive, with things like Alexa listening to everything you say in real life, all the time, and working out what you want to buy… really people… WPF (a programmer joke)…

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/amazon-alexa-patent-listening-to-me-facebook-phone-talking-ads-a8300246.html

Oh, and while we are worked up about this… what is up with Musk saying that AI and Social Media should be regulated more; effectively locking out the lower classes from taking advantage of these kinds of technologies?  IF these are regulated then only those with enough wealth can effectively develop them and, of course, maintain their control over those technologies…

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-model-3-problems-interview-today-2018-04-11/

IBM Watson tops Bing Ads, apparently not wanting to be left out Google goes with no ads.

Lastly, the Singularity Index or S.I. is up slightly at 940.47, more nonsense about trade wars is keeping the S.I. relatively static…

As always, thanks for listening to the news of the day on “The Technocracy”.

And a special thanks to our Sponsors, Artificial General Intelligence, A.K.A AGI Laboratory, and The Foundation and our other sponsors.

 

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