ai
design
The Technology We Deserve
Smart gadgets often abuse their trust or overreach their capabilities. A personal list of favorite fitness devices yields some principles for good product design.
algorithms
How Machines Are Taking Over the World’s Stock Markets
Use machine learning “to identify new theories, and once you identify a new theory, you throw the machine away, you don’t want the machine.”
bots
Slack and the Decline of Bots
After customers found Slack bots hard to use, the company added traditional UI elements to bolster the bots’ simple vocabulary and hard-to-remember “slash commands.”
design
The Decade of Design
Figma interviewed a dozen experts, including Big Medium’s Josh Clark, to chronicle the rise of design in the past decade—and what comes next.
ai
AI Dungeon
AI Dungeon is a pretty astonishing example of generative fiction—in the form of old-school text adventure game.
ai
What is the Role of an AI Designer?
Facebook’s Amanda Linden shares how AI product designers approach their work in Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence team.
privacy
With Brits Used to Surveillance, More Companies Try Tracking Faces
Companies use UK’s omnipresent security cameras as cultural permission to bring facial-recognition tech to semi-public spaces, tracking criminal history but also ethnicity and other personal traits.
data
Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor
Grooming data for the machines has a human cost.
alexa
s5e11: Things That Have Caught My Attention
Dan Hon considers the challenges and pitfalls in designing a one-size-fits-all system that talks to children and, especially, teaches them new behaviors.
ai
AI Is Harder Than You Think
It seems the culmination of artificial intelligence is making salon appointments. In the New York Times, Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis say today’s data-crunching model for AI not panning out.
ai
Google Duplicitous
With the announcement of Google Duplex, Jeremy Keith wonders whether the machines augment us, or whether we now work for the machines.
ai
The Juvet Agenda
The Juvet Agenda lays out the urgent themes surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning—and presents a set of provocations for teasing out a future we want to live in.
ai
Stop Pretending You Really Know What AI Is
“Artificial intelligence” is so broadly used that the phrase no longer has much practical meaning, bemoans John Pavlus at Quartz.
ai
AI Guesses Whether You're Gay or Straight from a Photo
The algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women.
ai
The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye
Noam Scheiber reports on algorithms that seek to build an entire organization for you with a click.
alexa
The BBQ and the Errant Butler
Marek Pawlowski shares a tale of a dinner party taken hostage by a boorish Alexa hell-bent on selling the guests music.
sentient design
AI First—with UX
AI assistants have trouble understanding user context, Mike Loukides writes, and that’s a tasty UX problem.
ai
In a Few Years, No Investors Are Going To Be Looking for AI Startups
VC Frank Chen writes that machine learning and artificial intelligence will be the humdrum norm in short order.