trends
‘The future of housing’: California desert to get America’s first 3D-printed neighborhood
The desert landscape of California’s Coachella valley will soon be home to the first US neighborhood comprised entirely of 3D-printed houses. Through a partnership between two California companies – Palari, a sustainable real estate development group, and Mighty Buildings, a construction technology company – a five acre parcel of land in Rancho Mirage will be transformed into a planned community of 15 3D-printed, eco-friendly homes claiming to be the first of its kind. “This will be the first on-the-ground actualization of our vision for the future of housing,” said Alexey Dubov, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Mighty Buildings.
Source: ‘The future of housing’: California desert to get America’s first 3D-printed neighborhood
Smaller independents and artists direct grew fastest in 2020
The share of Spotify streams accounted for by the majors and Merlin fell four percentage points in 2020 to 78%, down from a high of 85% in 2018. The recorded music market is one in which label market shares typically move at a near glacial pace. In comparison, this shift is nothing short of tectonic. What we are witnessing is not just the emergence of a new pattern of growth in the recorded music business but also the emergence of a new breed of record label.
Source: Smaller independents and artists direct grew fastest in 2020
Tim Berners-Lee: ‘We need social networks where bad things happen less’
Z oom being Zoom, Tim Berners-Lee’s name appears in my browser window about 20 seconds before his audio and video feed kick in – and for a brief moment, the prospect of talking online to the inventor of the world wide web seems so full of symbolism and significance that it threatens to take my breath away.
Source: Tim Berners-Lee: ‘We need social networks where bad things happen less’
The split at the heart of tech’s new labor movement
Tech’s burgeoning new labor movement has its own class divide — between a conventional organizing push among blue collar employees and an effort among white collar employees that’s based on a different set of concerns and goals. Why it matters: The tech industry rose to power and wealth largely union-free.
Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up
The Big Four all lean on the encyclopedia at no cost. With the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise, the volunteer project will change that—and possibly itself too.
He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can’t fix its misinformation addiction
Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
Source: He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can’t fix its misinformation addiction
Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?
When Google forced out two well-known artificial intelligence experts, a long-simmering research controversy burst into the open.
How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you
Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.
Source: How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you
Meet the Climate Change Activists of TikTok
When Louis Levanti woke up one morning last September, climate change wasn’t on his mind. “I was never huge into researching climate change, but I was aware that it is real.” So when the 24-year-old TikTok creator, who lives with his parents on Long Island, opened his phone and saw something about a clock being unveiled, he wasn’t initially interested. “I rolled my eyes thinking it had something to do with the stock market.” The Climate Clock, in Union Square in New York City, counts down how much time we have left to act before climate change is irreversible.
Cisco found cryptomining activity within 69% of customers
More than two-thirds of Cisco customers in 2020 were affected by cryptomining, according to new research. Cisco released its “Threat Trends: DNS Security” report Thursday, which analyzed malicious DNS activity and threats that occurred between January and December of last year.
Source: Cisco found cryptomining activity within 69% of customers
Facebook’s New AI Teaches Itself to See With Less Human Help
Image recognition may be more easily integrated into enterprise and commercial settings if it can learn more without expensive human input.
Google’s scrapping third-party cookies – but invasive targeted advertising will live on
Google has announced plans to stop using tracking cookies on its Chrome browser by 2022, replacing them with a group profiling system in a move the company says will plot “ a course towards a more privacy-friendly web ”. The change is significant.
Source: Google’s scrapping third-party cookies – but invasive targeted advertising will live on
The great divide: business leaders are split on long-term remote working
Companies including Spotify, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs have taken different stances on remote work. A survey showed that 61% of respondents prefer a fully remote environment.
NASA names Perseverance rover landing site on Mars after Seattle sci-fi pioneer Octavia E. Butler
An image sent back to Earth by NASA’s Perseverance rover shows the tread tracks left behind by its first drive on Mars on March 4. (NASA / JPL-Caltech) Fifteen years after her death, Seattle science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler has joined an exclusive pantheon of space luminaries memorialized on Mars.
Source: NASA names Perseverance rover landing site on Mars after Seattle sci-fi pioneer Octavia E. Butler
Why millennials love Gucci
Gucci nearly doubled its sales in 2018 — and consumers under 35 accounted for 55% of those sales. Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, led the brand in a millennial and teen -friendly direction by showcasing pop-culture references and fresh designs.
Source: Why millennials love Gucci
The Real Lesson of the Texas Power Debacle
Both forms of infrastructure—a state-run electrical grid and the 5G and “internet of things” future to which we are rapidly hurtling—share three attributes. First, their construction reflects a lack of imagination about the danger that can quickly coalesce when seemingly remote threat scenarios become real. Second, compounding a lack of analytic imagination is an absence of preparedness. Third, for both the Texas electrical grid and the emerging internet, public policy protections are either meager or completely absent
Why the future of work will look like a video game
Work should be about the human experience of information. You’ll hardly find a better place where this occurs than in a video game.
Google Fires 2nd AI Ethics Leader as Dispute Over Research, Diversity Grows
Alphabet Inc.’s Google fired staff scientist Margaret Mitchell on Friday, they both said, a move that fanned company divisions on academic freedom and diversity that were on display since its December dismissal of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru.
Source: Google Fires 2nd AI Ethics Leader as Dispute Over Research, Diversity Grows
Why we want tech copycats to fail
We’ve seen before that big leaps forward in technology can bring down industry titans, like the cellphone pioneer Nokia. But boy, it sure feels like the tech giants today are so entrenched, so good at what they do — and, perhaps, skilled at tilting the game to their advantage — that they simply can’t be beaten. It would be better for all of us if Big Tech wasn’t an absolute and invulnerable force. I’ll see the wobbles of TikTok’s clones as a sign that it’s still possible for Big Tech to fail.
Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax
Top lobbying groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants sued Maryland on Thursday, seeking to scuttle a new state tax on their massive online-advertising revenue — and stop other local governments from following its lead.
Source: Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax