The Verge 2018 tech report card: AI

As for much of the tech industry, 2018 has been a year of reckoning for artificial intelligence. As AI systems have been integrated into more products and services, the technology’s shortcomings have become clearer. Researchers, companies, and the general public have all begun to grapple more with the limitations of AI and its adverse effects, asking important questions like: how is this technology being used, and for whose benefit?

This reckoning has been most visible as a parade of negative headlines about algorithmic systems. This year saw the first deaths caused by self-driving cars; the Cambridge Analytica scandal; accusations that Facebook facilitated genocide in Myanmar; the revelation that Google helped the Pentagon train drone...

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Pandora Stories lets artists add commentary to their own playlists

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Experts are furious over the FCC’s rosy picture of broadband access

To hear the Federal Communications Commission tell it, this is a golden age for broadband access in the United States. According to a newly released report from the agency on the digital divide, the gap between rural and urban internet access has “narrowed substantially, and more Americans than ever before have access to high-speed broadband.” Between the end of 2016 and the end of 2017, the number of Americans without broadband access fell from about 26 million to about 21 million, the report found. But experts, and even some commissioners at the FCC, say the report is flawed. The data underlying it, they argue, doesn’t truly capture what broadband looks like in rural America — leaving lawmakers and government officials with a warped... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2HOPCZj

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