I for one welcome our all-knowing robotic overloads

Before you can buy a self-driving car you’ll buy goods that were shipped via an autonomous caravan of 18-wheelers, with only the initial and final leg of the trip driven by a human.
“You can imagine a future where those trucks are essentially a virtual train on a software rail, on the highway… Drivers, in effect, become harbor pilots, bringing the ship to port,” (shares: 8, 4) from “Uber’s Self-Driving Truck Makes Its First Delivery: 50,000 Beers” by Alex Davies for Wired.

Artificial intelligence can do good, like augment doctors.
“In 30 percent of the cases, Watson also found a treatment option the human doctors missed,” (7 shares) from “IBM Is Counting on Its Bet on Watson, and Paying Big Money for It” by Steve Lohr for the New York Times.

But it also erodes the skills of experts. This is a horrifying look at a plane that crashed after the pilots were unable to figure out what was going on after the auto-pilot disengaged.
“Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes, but occasionally create an extraordinary mess,” (66 shares) from “Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster” by Tim Harford for the Guardian.

And then you also have to worry about the weapons.
“If Stanley Kubrick directed ‘Dr. Strangelove’ again, it would be about the issue of autonomous weapons,” (14 shares) from “The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own” by Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff for the New York Times.

While private companies continue to put the NSA’s data collection to shame.
“It was a border wall between being watched everywhere and maintaining a tiny semblance of privacy,” (27 shares) from “Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking” by Julia Angwin for ProPublica.

And it’s all being built by programmers who do shit like this while claiming their profession is based on a meritocracy.
“Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other ‘ethnic affinities’ from seeing ads… This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find,” (shares: 20, 17) from “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race” by Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr. for ProPublica.

Originally published at tinyletter.com.