Author: Josh Kinal
"Users also reported a worse understanding of the state of the robot’s learning making them worse teachers."
Source: "Power to the People: How One Unknown Group of Researchers Holds the Key to Using AI to Solve Real Human Problems" – Greg Borenstein in Medium

Active learning doesn’t encourage active teaching

Sometimes humans and robots just don’t get along.

Are there more episodes?

People (not many, but more than none) have asked if there are more episodes of This is Modern Living’s podcast. The answer is…

"… but the data used to train the algorithm comes from the outcomes of the biased police activity. If the police are stop-and-frisking brown people, then all the weapons and drugs they find will come from brown people. Feed that to an algorithm and ask it where the police should concentrate their energies, and it will dispatch those cops to the same neighborhoods where they've always focused their energy, but this time with a computer-generated racist facewash that lets them argue that they're free from bias."
Source: "Racist algorithms: how Big Data makes bias seem objective" Boing Boing

Racist algorithms!

"Worldwide my audiences break down as 95% Facebook. 70% Twitter. 45% LinkedIn and only 2% Google+ (and while kids are on Instagram and Snapchat, those two don’t register for the kinds of business and innovation journalism I do). But when I look at engagement, Facebook becomes far more important."
Source: "How Medium and Twitter could withstand Facebook’s moves to get the journalists and celebrities to move", Startup Study Group on Medium by Robert Scoble

The value of Facebook engagement

Facebook’s Relationship Status

This is Modern Living
Facebook's Relationship Status
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Episode 2: There are so many ways that other people’s algorithms run our lives, but Facebook’s news feed has the ability to actually effect our personal relationships. Josh tries to find out if the changes Facebook brings improve or harm friendships.

Now we've got robots and machines and algorithms that are taking over brain power and it's much more broad-based, it's ubiquitous. These technologies are everywhere; they're going to invade every industry across the board.
"Robots could make entire industries redundant, warns Martin Ford" from ABC's The World Today

You are replaced.

Starting with Algorithms

This is Modern Living
Starting with Algorithms
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Episode 1: It’s started and it’s starting with algorithms. How do we use them, why do we use them and do they make us better people?

Many jobs and careers are disappearing because of automation. The second driver is globalisation—a lot of different jobs that we're importing and exporting. And then thirdly collaboration which is all about this new sharing economy.
Foundation for Young Australians chief executive Jan Owen (quoted in ABC News)

🎵I believe the children have no future🎵

The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff.
Amy Michaels quoted in "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" from the New York Times

Better staff through algorithms?

I had the opportunity to interview Matthew Sleeth, visual artist. He showed me some of his drone accessories. This is…

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