Brian Merchant
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This Company Is Betting The Future Is Personal AI Avatars, So It Made Me One
In January 2019, when China Central Television, the largest broadcast network in the most populous nation in the world, aired a special to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the hosts welcomed four life-sized “personal artificial intelligences” to share the stage with them. Called PAIs, they were three-dimensional holographic replicas of the presenters that moved, spoke,…
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The Vast Majority Of All Futures Trading Is Now Automated
Who’s up for a friendly neighbourhood reminder that the global marketplace is underpinned by automated, high-frequency trading to a nearly incomprehensible degree? Good, then — a new report highlights the still-growing dominance of automation in futures markets: For starters, over two-thirds of livestock futures trading is carried out automatically, and 91 per cent of all…
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Amazon Is Aggressively Pursuing Big Oil As It Stalls Out On Clean Energy
In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centres with 100 per cent renewable energy. Apple, Facebook, and Google made similar pledges two years before that, and pressure from consumers and environmental groups drove Amazon to follow suit. For the next two years, the tech giant made admirable strides…
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Aviation Experts Have Been Warning Us Of The Dangers Of Pilot Automation For 15 Years
The two tragic crashes of Boeing’s best-selling 737 Max planes increasingly look to be caused in part by a malfunctioning automated system — and the pilots’ lack of training around how to deal with it—that was designed to keep the aircraft from stalling out. The final reports aren’t in yet, but the similarities between the…