5IT: demoralize
1. Perhaps the movie Ex Machina gets artificial intelligence right?
"Ava (played with alien poise by Alicia Vikander) is a beautiful robot created by a self-absorbed internet billionaire named Nathan Bates (Oscar Isaac). Bates brings in Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a lowly programmer from his internet search company, BlueBook, to assess the limitations of his creation. What follows is a tense, thrilling version of the Turing test. Without spoiling any surprises, not all of the three protagonists have a happy ending. So where are we at with real AI? Ava’s consciousness is drawn from the BlueBook, the film’s version of Google: her knowledge and behaviour are generated by harvesting the teraflops of information we reveal about ourselves when we’re using the internet. It’s a brilliant explanation for the generation of her human-level intelligence, and it does have a root in current tech."
"In 1983, after years of deteriorating vision, the writer and theologian John Hull lost the last traces of light sensation. For the next three years, he kept a diary on audio-cassette of his interior world of blindness. This film is a dramatization that uses his original recordings."
3. If you want to follow the money, read the Andreessen Horowitz hivemind on 16 hot topics.
"We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about; we’re especially grateful to our founders and the entrepreneurs we meet with everyday for their insights here."
"The patterns documented in the article are consistent with much of the demographic literature on the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South, but they reveal new insights into patterns of black migration after the Great Migration. In the most recent generation, black Americans have remained in place to a degree that is unique relative to the previous generation and relative to whites of the same generation. This new geographic immobility is the most pronounced change in black Americans' migration patterns after the Great Migration, and it is a pattern that has implications for the demography of black migration as well as the literature on racial inequality."
+ There are reasons you can map, too. Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing amazing reporting on housing discrimination in her Segregation Now series for ProPublica.
5. Meanwhile, in San Francisco.
"We recently toured the 22,000-square-foot space, which opened for business this morning on the ground floor of the Twitter offices on Market and 10th. And: It's slightly absurd how much there is. There's a produce section that's forging farm-direct relationships. A whole-animal butcher who makes bone broth in-house. A fish counter that sources its own fish with the help of the sushi bar. Which—by the way, there's a sushi bar and an oyster depot. Four Barrel coffee and Blue Bottle coffee. The obligatory Project Juice kiosk. A cheese guy. Tapas. Noodles. A wine shop. Ice cream. Pizza. Tacos. A salad bar. A bakery. EO beauty products. In a lot of ways, it's a mall food court taken to its logical—and delicious—extreme. Oh man. It's wonderful. It is not, however, cheap."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
demoralize. The most frequent modern use suggests morale rather than moral; to destroy the discipline, courage, cohesion, or endurance, originally of troops; now transf., to reduce (a person &c) to a state of weakness or disorder.
The Credits: 1. telegraph.co.uk 2. nytimes.com 3. a16z.com 4. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov /@neuro_skeptic 5. modernluxury.com
It Is Not, However, Cheap