Monthly Archives: May 2016

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What’s driving Silicon Valley to become ‘radicalized’ – The Washington Post

“We have to keep as little [information] as possible so that even if the government or some other entity wanted access to it, we’d be able to say that we don’t have it,” said Gadea, founder and chief executive of Envoy. The 30-person company enables businesses to register visitors using iPads instead of handwritten visitor logs. The technology tracks who works at a firm, who visits the firm, and their contact information.

In Silicon Valley, there’s a new emphasis on putting up barriers to governmentrequests for data. The Apple-FBI case and its aftermath have tech firms racing to employ a variety of tools that would place customer information beyond the reach of a government-ordered search.

Source: What’s driving Silicon Valley to become ‘radicalized’ – The Washington Post

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Michael DeHaan • Did Programming Stop Being Fun? Let’s Fix It

Agile is not the enemy, but what happened was some tech got easy, and management started treating software developers like labor, rather than say, creative geniuses.

There was a feeling that project management was “over” software developers, that developers were things that were “managed”, rather than creators.  Before, it really felt like we were treated more like the lifeblood of a tech company – and somehow, tech companies became marketing companies that employed tech because, well, that is what you had to do.

Source: Michael DeHaan • Did Programming Stop Being Fun? Let’s Fix It

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What to do with billions of useless humans?

 

“AI today is able to diagnose your personality and emotional state by looking at your face and recognizing tiny muscle movements. It can tell whether you are tired, excited, angry, joyful, in love … it can tell these things even though AI itself doesn’t feel anger or love.

”In the future, therefore, AI could “drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless, from an economic perspective” in areas where human interaction was previously considered crucial, Harari said.

“In customer services departments they have started using AI to assess the emotions of people who are calling,” he said. “AI analyzes the tone of your voice and choice of words … and recognizes both your personality type and also your immediate emotional condition.”

Source: What to do with billions of useless humans?