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Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Verizon Purchase Of AOL Shows That Mobile Marches On — And On, And On

“…the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.”
–Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, “For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word”, May 14, 2015

In a twist from the past, 2015 cellphone giant Verizon is buying 1990s “World Wide Web” America Online for $4.4 billion, in an additional sign that big telecoms don’t want to be known simply as “dumb pipes” to customers.

Who knew that “You’ve Got Mail!” and a nearly 30-year-old dialup provider would still appeal? (Amazingly, AOL once purchased AOL-Time Warner for $162 billion during clownish times at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000, so the new $4.4 billion figure is trump change, but perhaps a more accurate figure.)

The reasons for acquiring AOL are all too clear: As Facebook and Google claims more than half of the $42 billion online ad marketplace, Verizon wants more mobile content and advertising, along with video ads tailored to users through demographics and data mining of cellphone customers.

AOL owns all brands of media, including the Huffington Post and game applications that produce mountains of personal data for advertising and message construction.

Our smartphone consumption, at its peak right now in terms of sales and usage, is more than three times higher than that our use of personal computers during its heyday.

“Mobile, mobile, mobile,” is what the market is saying. As when television merged the technology of moving images and radio sound into relatively small boxes — called TVs — all things media are in constant states of flux. Continual digital media mergers, both of companies and of technologies, surely represent our constant, collective paths.

Singularity, anyone?

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Amazon’s Dash Button: Easiest & Wildest Way Yet To Buy Family Products

Amazon might convince all of us how easy this “Internet of Things” might get — and potentially, how ubiquitous.

Never mind, if possible, concerns and promises over Amazon’s controversial delivery drones, otherwise unmanned, small, whirling, low-altitude flying machines (with live-feed cameras) delivering products to our homes. Also never mind, if you can, concerns over all those potential additional connectivity needs foreseen to be required inside our homes. (More on that in a minute.)

It’s just too darn easy to use Amazon’s new Wi-Fi Dash Button (introduced the day before April Fools Day, 2015). All Amazon requires to buy products is pre-enabling your phone, and pushing a separate “dash button” that you can place almost anywhere in your home. Welcome to Amazon on your fridge, on your coffee maker, on your kitchen sink, on your washer and drier, in your bathroom medicine chest.

Or stuck, of course, to your tissue and toilet paper holders.

And stuck on your hallway walls. In your cabinets. On your stairwell. In your closets. And stuck on your home office desk. Anywhere and everywhere in your home are good by Amazon.

Running out of Tide? Push Amazon’s “Tide” Dash Button. Low on Gillette disposable razors? Push Amazon’s Gillette Dash Button. Jonesing for some good, old-fashioned Maxwell House? Push Amazon’s Maxwell House Dash Button.

In fact, avoid shopping altogether and push your Cottonelle, Bounty and Smart Water Amazon Dash buttons, along with your Olay, Glad, Gerber Amazon Dash buttons, and increasingly those of other international brands.

While most of us can still marvel at the sheer technology of easily pushing a button — while Amazon of course repeatedly dings our credit cards along the way — and have products delivered to our doors, what are the possible societal effects if Amazon and other in-home Wi-Fi ordering systems become widely adopted?

Delivery logistics technology and low-skill manual labor to ship products will surely rise, but getting out of our homes might become less necessary. Grocery stores and large box stores as we know them will surely lose customers, but cheaper prices for packaged goods might benefit customers, at least in the beginning. To be sure: Amazon and their partners will undoubtedly learn a lot more about us, while we sate ourselves with oodles of Cottonelle, Tide and Bounty.

In fact, these dash buttons are just the beginning, says the Wall Street Journal: The truer order of the Internet of Things is that our home, personal and business devices will do our ordering FOR us. Won’t we all be happier if systems charge our credit cards or online accounts, and simply order things and deliver them to us? Surely, we are told, we will.

Here is a piece on Amazon’s most recent home-ordering product from The Wall Street Journal’s Nathan Olivarez-Giles: “Amazon’s Dash Button Is Not a Hoax, It’s Phase One”

Finally, here is Ian Crouch’s take from the April 2, 2015, edition of The New Yorker: “The Horror of Amazon’s New Dash Buttons”

Can A Computer Write A Novel? Automated Journalism, J-Bots & Variable Digital Marketing

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Photo Credit: Washington Post
Read “This is what happens when a bot writes an article about journalism”, December 6, 2014, Washington Post

Never mind that the old morning ritual of reading your printed newspaper has increasingly given way to reading your phone, tablet or desktop. You increasingly are reading articles written entirely by computers.

The rise of automated journalism, J-bots and variable digital media has driven many traditional news readers and journalists crazy, at least some of us. Sorry to pigeonhole, but many younger consumers do not appear to mind at all, and media organizations which used to employ real, human journalists, have been forced to adopt content services that radically reduce production costs and times, focus and shape content based on user data preferences, all of which has fueled expected controversies over what real news and verifiable information are. To be blunt: Hundreds of thousands of unemployed former print journalists and marketers will tell you that print now follows digital around like a long, lost — and replaceable — puppy dog.

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Illustration Credit: Automated Insights
Among many emerging software companies that offer application services that automate writing and other content creation is Automated Insights and Wordsmith, their “platform for automated, personalized writing.”

While automation software kinks might churn out articles and content that don’t sound or read quite right — remember the HAL 9000 computer that illogically started singing “Daisy” in the 1968 movie classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”? — fewer and fewer readers or content consumers can tell the difference between a human-written piece and a computer-generated article.

Advocates of greater automation — in public media, corporate annual reporting and many other arenas — argue that dramatically reduced costs, enhanced accountability through tracking, and simply “giving consumers what they want” represent at least three compelling reasons to keep pushing the mediabot revolution. Many in the automation industry talk about the ability to “turn up the satire or snark” in an opinion piece, or “turning down confrontational language” in a human interest story. Automation particularly appeals to advocates in the statistic-heavy professions of financial and sports reporting, as some applications can spit out as many as 2,000 stories per second, complete with art, charts, graphs and video. Except for input work and writing new software to produce even more content, no human being can do that.

Opponents say that automated content reduces the human element, diminishes important serendipity in terms of what media we read, watch and engage in, and that we are increasingly seeing damaging effects of constantly data-mining ourselves and fellow human beings through: 1) our digital devices that are produced and networked by large telecoms and Internet service providers; 2) through our use of social media like Facebook, Twitter and nearly countless others; 3) through the exploding growth and use of free gaming applications that burrow their way into all our devices and track virtually every bit of our personal data; and 4) through online retail giants such as Amazon, Alibaba and many more, which track our digital information, relaying back the “who, what, when, where and why” of our lives.

Elon Musk, Founder of Space X & Tesla Motors, Warns Against Excesses of Artificial Intelligence

Never Mind “The Internet of Things” – Try “The Internet of Us”

A Man With An Internet Pacemaker Walks Into A Bar…

The device in that man’s chest, a life-giving second or third chance at life, might be connected as an Internet Protocol (IP) address to the Internet. Increasingly, pacemakers ARE connected to the web and enable doctors to monitor heart health and other physical attributes of patients. A positive thing? Many if not most patients would think so. But what if that IP address is hacked by someone living in Kiev, Tehran or maybe Peoria? That someone, that hacker, might be able to jolt that man’s heart, causing pain, suffering or even death.

This is NOT fiction, according to Mark Goodman, a longtime security and anti-terrorism advisor, and author of “Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It”.

Although Goodman breezily takes readers through numerous pitfalls of our increasingly connected age — terrorist war rooms, networks and entire cities — he proposes measures to protect ourselves against hacktivists (at least the bad ones), and challenges governments and companies to create another Manhattan Project, but this time for widespread cyber-security.

Goodman excoriates politicians and CEOs alike for not speaking about threats these people well know. According to Goodman, it takes the average company 211 days AFTER cyber-security threats have already occurred to be aware of any system hacking. Consider only recent major hacks of Sony, Target, AOL and JP Morgan Chase, and you get an idea of the scope — now and in the future — of the problem.

If our cyber-security problems are as small as a golf ball right now, Goodman says consider the Sun as our comparative obstacle in the future. Stay vigilant, take charge and, Goodman advises, “get intentional” about the security of the Internet of Things — and of People.

On Singularity, “How To Live Forever” & Uploading Your Mind

The great Tim Wu, professor of law and journalism at Columbia University, has been perhaps chief among pioneers of the open Internet. He coined the phrase, “Net Neutrality,” which heads of state, governments, universities and the media now commonly refer to when talking about keeping the Internet open and for ISPs to provide generally equitable speeds and services to all its customers. Net Neutrality also covers the argument that large telecoms like Comcast, Verizon and At&T would like to create fast lanes on the Internet for those who can pay, and slow lanes for regular users, mom-and-pop shops, and even large companies who cannot or will not pay higher rates for faster digital content speeds than the average user.

Opponents say Net Neutrality will stifle innovation, for example, in the delivery of current and yet created applications that will require large bandwidth for delivery. They say the government should not get involved with cost-fixing and who pays what for digital delivery. Proponents of Net Neutrality (such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter) say publicly elected government officials appoint members of the FCC, which regulates the Internet — funded by public dollars for decades — with phone and cable laws passed in the 1990s and earlier; allowing different costs for Internet access, proponents say, is a form of permitting those with the biggest wallets disproportionately faster and better access to content on which informed democracy relies.

The FCC will announce new rules on the issue Thursday, February 26.

Wu sometimes departs from his adoptive role as Internet champion, and imparts his views on the extraordinary work and passions of those who see beyond digital networks, and look forward to the possibilities afforded by the Internet that might benefit humankind, perhaps even “living forever” — but in one form or another.

“It’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer, and so provide a form of life after death.” More Here
–Steven Hawking, 2014

Read Tim Wu’s Feb. 22, 2015, short piece in the New Yorker, “How To Live Forever”.

Meet Bina48, The World’s Most Advanced Humanoid Robot

She’s Not Rutger Hauer – Otherwise, “Roy,” The Greatest Replicant in Ridley Scott’s Legendary “Blade Runner” – But Rutger is Human, Which Is Cheating

Bina48 Is Practicing The Lengths of Current Artificial Intelligence – But “We,” That Is, “We Human Replicants” – Have A Long Way To Go

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a digital content strategist and provider, and Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.