Month: January 2021

It turns out Tim Cook blames Mark Zuckerberg for undermining democracy, too. Last July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with the heads of Google, Amazon, and Apple, spent a long day fielding heated questions from members of the House antitrust subcommittee. Did he realize at the time that the most immediate threat to his company’s
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The board’s first content moderation decisions show how impossible its task—and Facebook’s—really is. The Facebook Oversight Board issued its first five decisions Thursday. The rulings are well thought out and show the board members, charged with reviewing Facebook decisions to remove content and make recommendations on Facebook policies, take their job seriously. More than anything,
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The online broker blocked users from trading several “meme stocks” on Thursday, as regulators take a close look at the WallStreetBets phenomenon. The online brokerage Robinhood launched in 2013 with an egalitarian pitch worthy of its namesake: commission-free trading on a platform that has the common investor’s interests at heart. That veneer has shown cracks
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If anywhere could use innovation, it’s Miami—one of the country’s most unequal, environmentally vulnerable cities. When Francis Suarez ran to be the mayor of Miami, in 2017, building the next Silicon Valley was not part of his platform. But this December, after the venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov suggested on Twitter that the tech industry relocate
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San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities have enacted moratoriums on government use of the tech. New York looks like a harder sell. Civil rights activists have successfully pushed for bans on police use of facial recognition in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, and Somerville, Massachusetts. Now, a coalition led by Amnesty International is setting its
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Big grocery chains relied on app-based delivery companies at the start of the pandemic. Now grocers’ priorities have shifted. Noelle Marian started working for Instacart in May 2019. She’s an in-store shopper, one of fewer than 10,000 part-time Instacart employees assigned to a specific store—in her case, a Mariano’s in Skokie, Illinois—plucking groceries from shelves,
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During the pandemic, thousands of women have skipped scans and check-ups. So physicians tapped an algorithm to predict those at the highest risk. When Covid came to Massachusetts, it forced Constance Lehman to change how Massachusetts General Hospital screens women for breast cancer. Many people were skipping regular checkups and scans due to worries about
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Machine learning programs trained with patient reports, rather than doctors’, find problems that doctors miss—especially in Black people. Researchers trying to improve healthcare with artificial intelligence usually subject their algorithms to a form of machine med school. Software learns from doctors by digesting thousands or millions of x-rays or other data labeled by expert humans
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The denizens of the WallStreetBets subreddit helped push the flailing stock to dizzying heights—while a short seller alleged an accompanying harassment campaign. Today, a war over the value of video game retailer GameStop’s stock has caused what market guru Jim Cramer called “the squeeze of a lifetime.” Howling with glee along the way, traders on
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During her confirmation hearing, the Treasury nominee said that blockchain-based financial networks are “a particular concern.” Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory scrutiny over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Maggie Hassan
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Researchers and airlines that obsessed over efficiency have spent the past year worrying about safety too. Jason Steffen studies planets in other solar systems. His most famous work—OK, second-most famous work—was with NASA’s Kepler Mission, a survey of planetary systems. But you’re more likely to have heard of Steffen, a professor at the University of
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Facebook has to decide whether to give the ex-president his bullhorn back. It won’t make that call itself. In the wake of this month’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol, Facebook suspended the account of the inciter-in-chief Donald Trump. On January 7, citing the danger that the president’s posts might incite further violence, CEO Mark
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China produces as many artificial intelligence researchers as the US, but it lags in key fields like machine learning. The government hopes to make up ground. In a low-rise building overlooking a busy intersection in Beijing, Ji Rong Wen, a middle-aged scientist with thin-rimmed glasses and a mop of black hair, excitedly describes a project
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The company’s software can sift through enormous amounts of data, and those metrics can be used to make life-or-death decisions. This is an excerpt from the book First Platoon, by Annie Jacobsen, about the US Defense Department’s quest to build the most powerful biometrics database in the world: a system that can tag, track, and
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Plus: Zuckerberg’s community manifesto, how to hold platforms accountable, and an accidental admission in Congress. Hi, folks. Some of you are complaining that I should keep away from politics and stay in my lane. I haven’t moved. The lane just got a lot wider. I am, however, looking forward to writing about more tech-y stuff.
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A Harvard medical student submitted auto-generated comments to Medicaid; volunteers couldn’t distinguish them from those penned by humans. In October 2019, Idaho proposed changing its Medicaid program. The state needed approval from the federal government, which solicited public feedback via Medicaid.gov. Roughly 1,000 comments arrived. But half came not from concerned citizens or even internet
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The model had shown promise in Flint before officials rebelled. Now Toledo is using it, while incorporating more public input. More than six years after residents of Flint, Michigan, suffered widespread lead poisoning from their drinking water, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to improve water quality and bolster the city’s economy. But
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Residents and city officials traumatized by last week’s unrest fear a repeat for Biden’s inauguration. On January 9—three days after supporters of President Trump started a riot at the US Capitol—Sean Evans decided it was time for action. Evans had seen a post on Nextdoor about neighbors running into hostile Trump supporters the night of
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But it’s still using intonation and behavior to assist with hiring decisions. Job hunters may now need to impress not just prospective bosses but artificial intelligence algorithms too—as employers screen candidates by having them answer interview questions on a video that is then assessed by a machine. HireVue, a leading provider of software for vetting
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Plus: Dorsey in the Trump administration’s early days, how to define privacy, and chaos in the Capitol. Welcome back. It’s 2021 and the world is doing great! Er …  The Plain View For months—years, really—people have asked what it would take for Facebook and Twitter to ban the policy-violator-in-chief from their platforms. Hate speech, doxing,
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By freezing the president’s accounts, social media platforms finally drew a line. It only took a violent insurrection in the Capitol to get them there. We finally know what it takes for Donald Trump to get suspended from social media. As of Thursday morning, following a day in which a mob of the president’s supporters
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