Our fears of automation aren’t due to problems of artificial intelligence, but of human intelligence.
In Andrew Ng’s interview about the dangers of AI, he says that he’s much more concerned about near-term effects that “increasingly smart machines might have on the job market, displacing workers in all kinds of fields much faster than even industrialization displaced agricultural workers.” This is a much more realistic concern. It has been raised many times over the past few years, notably by the Data & Society Institute’s project on the Future of Labor, and the Open Letter on the Digital Economy, to which Tim O’Reilly is a co-signer.
My own thinking is mixed. Since the…
The inability to take advantage of digital technology is as big a threat to financial organizations as any fintech startup.
There’s plenty of news about the fintech, or financial technology, sector these days. Hundreds of nimble startups are disaggregating the age-old financial systems on which every transaction has relied for decades. There’s little doubt that this will continue — after all, more than four billion humans have a mobile phone, and 1.3 billion know how to use a Facebook feed, but only a billion are what we’d consider “normally banked.” Something’s got to give, and software is eating traditional financial systems one bite at a time.
But the existing financial industry isn’t just under threat from outside…
By Jon Bruner
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been committing a lot of buzzword imperialism lately. It’s a hot term, marching across the technological countryside and looking for rich disciplines to capture. Electronics, manufacturing, and robotics, among others, have all become dominions of the IoT. The result is that the meaning of IoT has broadened to include practically anything that involves 1. technology, and 2. something physical.
At the same time, practitioners have been trying to escape the IoT — and its early association with Internet-connected refrigerators — for years. Big enterprises that want to develop serious applications for…
Cheap, accessible, open hardware is driving the IoT.
By Jon Bruner
Save 25% on registration for Solid with code SLD25. Solid is our conference on the convergence of software and hardware, and the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been committing a lot of buzzword imperialism lately. It’s a hot term, marching across the technological countryside and looking for rich disciplines to capture. Electronics, manufacturing, and robotics, among others, have all become dominions of the IoT. The result is that the meaning of IoT has broadened to include practically anything that involves 1. technology, and 2. something physical.
From core technologists to the wider world.
By Beau Cronin
When you’re an entrepreneur or investor struggling to bring a technology to market just a little before its time, being too early can feel exactly the same as being flat wrong. But with a bit more perspective, it’s clear that many of the hottest companies and products in today’s tech landscape are actually capitalizing on ideas that have been tried before — have, in some cases, been tackled repeatedly, and by very smart teams — but whose day has only now just arrived.
Virtual reality (VR) is one of those areas that has seduced many smart technologists…
The return of peer-to-peer computing isn’t about trust, it’s about distrust.
Sometime last summer, I ran into the phrase “postmodern computing.” I don’t remember where, but it struck me as a powerful way to understand an important shift in the industry. What is different in the industry? How are 2014 and 2015 different from 2004 and 2005?
If we’re going to understand what “postmodern computing” means, we first have to understand “modern” computing. And to do that, we also have to understand modernism and postmodernism. …
Beyond lab folklore and mythology
Editor’s note: this post is part of our ongoing investigation into synthetic biology and bioengineering. For more on these areas, download the latest free edition of BioCoder.
Over the last six months, I’ve had a number of conversations about lab practice. In one, Tim Gardner of Riffyn told me about a gene transformation experiment he did in grad school. As he was new to the lab, he asked two more experienced scientists for their protocol: one said it must be done exactly at 42 C for 45 seconds, the other said exactly…
Increase your odds of engineering the next great hardware start-up
It is an amazing time to be a hardware entrepreneur: Companies like Arduino and ElectricImp are abstracting away tedious device and back-end development; Shapeways (disclaimer: my firm Lux Capital is an investor) and Advanced Circuits are turning around beautiful prototypes in days; while AngelList and IndieGogo are democratizing access to sophisticated investors, which in turn facilitate access to money, partners, and amazing talent.
In their rush to introduce the next Jawbone, Beats, Nest, FuelBand, GoPro, and Dropcam, many fledgling hardware start-ups — and their investors — seem to be simply rolling the dice. Rather than truly understanding…
4 smart ways to thrive as a programmer
As O’Reilly continues to build and assess our programming content ecosystem — now more than 30 years in the making — we have gone from covering a few key languages, operating systems, and concepts to a diversification of topics that would have made an editor’s head spin in the 1980s. Our goal, however, remains the same: to continue to provide practical content from experts who help you do your job. An important piece of that goal is to keep you informed as we interpret the trends on the horizon. What follows are a few of the core themes we are…
Is it time to rethink the “no manifestos” mandate?
DevOps is everywhere! The growth and mindshare of the movement is remarkable. But if you care deeply about DevOps, you might agree with me when I say that although its moment has “arrived,” DevOps is in serious trouble. The movement is fragmented and weakly defined, and is being usurped by those who care more about short-term opportunities than the long-term viability of DevOps.
They are the ninety-nine percent, and nobody cares
How bad could it be? Travel back in time. It is mid-November 2011, and Occupy Wall Street is occupying the headlines. One of the major reasons is that the protestors are targeting shipping ports…
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