While many artists have some serious moral quandaries about driving their fans to YouTube given Google’s suspect data practices, Chris Castle here looks at why Amazon is in fact a far guiltier culprit.
On Sunday, Netflix will compete for its first Best Picture Oscar for “Roma,” the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s exploration of his childhood in Mexico City. A win by “Roma” would be a fitting testament to Netflix’s ambitions. Virtually alone among tech and media companies, Netflix intends to ride a new kind of open-border digital cosmopolitanism to the bank.
A new crop of websites shows the disturbing potential of deepfake technology. The sites present pictures of faces, cats and buildings that are completely fake but look incredibly real. One of the site’s creators says even people without computer programming experience can use freely available tools to create fake pictures in a couple of hours. The Uber engineer behind another one of the sites says he made the site to “raise public awareness” about the new AI technology.
Moore’s Law, one of the fundamental laws indicating the exponential progress in the tech industry, especially electronic engineering, has been slowing down lately (since 2005, to be more precise), and has led many in this sector to believe this law to no longer hold true. That was, until Artificial Intelligence joined the arena! Since then, the game changed, and Moore’s law is slowly being revived.
Armed with this confidence, in the years since Y2K, we have created more and more complex networks and systems to enhance, guide, or even take over many facets of our daily lives. Whereas in 1999, many aspects of our day-to-day living remained offline, today little is left untouched by computer systems, networks, and code: Talking to friends and family, reading a book, listening to music, buying clothes or food, driving a car, flying from place to place — all of these activities depend on the network. Increasingly, the network extends to devices that, in 1999, were not considered to have much technological potential: household appliances like refrigerators or thermostats.
Now, we’re discovering what a false sense of security we’ve created. Along with it should come the realization of just how little we understand about the programs that permeate our lives and the networks that link them. Unlike 20 years ago, we appear less and less capable of predicting what will go wrong, or of stopping it before it does.
In internet land and our digital life, few stories over the past few months have been so epic and persuasive as Fortnite’s growing popularity. Netflix famously said in January, 2019 that Fortnite was a bigger competitor for attention than Hulu or HBO.
Despite waves of privacy concerns, Facebook has a powerful grip on us all. The ubiquity of the platform and the time invested in building connections deters people from leaving and in turn deters would-be rivals from building alternative platforms. Their scale and success has us locked in. This success has an Achilles heel though — and it’s your mom.
Users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant conceptualize them in one of 3 ways: an interface, a personal assistant, or a brain. Frequent users are less likely to push the interaction limits of these AI systems than new users.
Starr power and celebrity on the list speak to how showcasing a lifestyle flourishes on Instagram. A visually oriented platform enables “influencers” to present an aesthetic that followers can aspire to. With no real sharing mechanism like Facebook or Twitter, the proliferation of information (and misinformation) is less prevalent.
In addition to competing for smart speaker market share, Google and Amazon are also competing for developer mindshare in the voice app ecosystem. On this front, Amazon has soared ahead – the number of available voice skills for Alexa devices have grown to top 80,000 the company recently announced.
Today anyone with a computer and access to the internet can build a website using tools far more powerful than Dreamweaver from two decades ago. But these GUI-based tools have extended far beyond static sites to fully functional applications.
Netflix is still the king of streaming, but will its subscription-based model be able to sustain the business as cheaper, ad-supported platforms enter the streaming space? The company kicked off 2019 by announcing price increases of 13% to 18%. And that made a lot of subscribers unhappy. According to Streaming Observer, 27% of US Netflix subscribers said they are either considering canceling or will definitely cancel their service because of the recent rate hike. More than half of those surveyed, however, said they were open to an ad-supported option at a lower cost.