The new tech overlords: technology companies are now officially the most powerful entities in the world

… and they are almost all based in the US (and soon… China).  Read this incredible piece in The Atlantic.  Stat below is via Statista. At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.  Bloomberg, which reported on … Continue reading "The new tech overlords: technology companies are now officially the most powerful entities in the world"

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Machines and human replacement (McKinsey report)

McKinsey analyzed the detailed work activities of more than 800 occupations from across the US economy to assess the percentage of time spent on activities with the technical potential for automation by adapting currently demonstrated technology. Read the detailed results on the technical potential for automation in various sectors. “While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next … Continue reading "Machines and human replacement (McKinsey report)"

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Neuromorphic chips coming on your mobile device

IBM Research in Zurich has created the world’s first artificial nanoscale stochastic phase-change neurons to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing. Read more about this exciting discovery and understand more about artificial neurons in this interview with Manuel Le Gallo, … Continue reading "Neuromorphic chips coming on your mobile device"

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All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines (5* read)

“Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.”

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/
via Instapaper

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Ray Kurzweil: The world isn’t getting worse — our information is getting better. I say: true. But are our genes really ‘outdated software’ ?

“It’s not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It’s not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago, when conditions were different.”

Ray Kurzweil: The world isn’t getting worse — our information is getting better
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/ray-kurzweil-world-isnt-getting-worse-information-getting-better/
via Instapaper

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