Author: KEVIN ROOSE / Source: New York Times
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.
It’s hard to imagine now, but at one point, long ago, Facebook did not monopolize the entire tech news cycle — a heady and innocent era when you could read an entire day’s news without encountering the words “Cambridge Analytica” or “third-party developers.
”I confess that, like many of you, I have been obsessed with the fallout from Facebook’s latest privacy scandal, to the point that I had a stress dream that I overslept and missed covering Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill next week. (Related: I need to get out more, and possibly take up yoga.)
But despite the wall-to-wall news of the past few weeks, lots of important things are happening in the tech world that don’t involve Facebook. So let’s run down a few of them?
Google and the Pentagon
I thought this article by Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, about thousands of Google employees who are protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon A.I. program, was fascinating on a number of levels.
First, it’s an unusually clear example of the double-edged nature of artificial intelligence. Google has spent billions of dollars teaching computers to play Go, drive cars and translate languages on the fly. The company has been extremely proud of its advances in machine learning, even releasing some of its tools to the public via open-source frameworks like TensorFlow, which provides a fascinating contrast to what’s happening inside the company now. When its image-classification algorithms are used to spot tumors on radiology scans, Google puts out a press release, and engineers cheer. But when these same types of algorithms are used by the Pentagon to improve the accuracy of drone strikes, it’s a moral outrage.
Yonatan Zunger, a former Google engineer, had an interesting op-ed the other day in The Boston Globe about the “reckonings”…
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