🌌 Reshaped #5
COVID-19 economy, AI hype, regulated competition, energy from the trees, surveillance regulation and much more
Welcome to a new issue of Reshaped, a newsletter for those who do not want to miss a thing about the huge transformations of our time.
This is a shorter issue, as the spread of coronavirus has strongly influenced the world in the last week. I decided not to devote too much space to the topic, mostly because I believe that any analysis is premature at the moment.
Starting from this issue, the news section is split into two parts to improve readability.
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News
Business and Finance
🌇 Citizens in Toronto are continuing their protest against Sidewalk Labs, Google’s agency in charge of transforming part of the city through innovative technologies. The company admitted it had underestimated privacy concerns and proposed a plan to improve data protection. The government agency Waterfront Toronto will decide within May on whether to go on with the project or not (The New York Times).
📄 Good news for Amazon: the Pentagon will take four months to reconsider the $10 million contract awarded by Microsoft regarding the JEDI project (New York Post).
🚗 Tesla overcame Boeing in terms of market capitalization, becoming the highest-valued industrial company in the US (Business Insider). CEO Elon Musk recently reported that Tesla produced its millionth car.
🔩 British Steel was acquired by Chinese company Jingye Group on Monday for about $62 million, a move that will save more than 3,000 jobs (BBC).
🔮 AR startup Magic Leap, which has raised $2.6 billion since 2011, is looking for a buyer (Bloomberg). One of the reasons behind that is a lack of focus on a specific application category (Protocol).
Science and Technology
💎 Canadian company Rupert Resources successfully explored a gold mine in Finland through autonomous aerial drones provided by Exyn Technologies, which could reduce risks and improve productivity (Robotics Business Review).
🚀 Europe and Russia postponed their joint Mars mission at least until 2022 for being late in deploying all the necessary tests (BBC). In the meanwhile, China is ready for its first Mars mission, scheduled for July (Nature).
⌨️ US automation giant Honeywell joined the quantum computing race, announcing it will release the most powerful quantum computer ever seen by the middle of 2020. Both Google and IBM, the leading companies in this sector, are skeptical about the announcement (Futurism).
❄️ Thawing permafrost might release frozen carbon in the form of carbon dioxide or methane, which would have negative effects on global warming (Popular Science).
🧫 COVID-19 and the global economy
According to McKinsey, there are three possible scenarios regarding the economic implications of COVID-19: quick recovery, global slowdown, and global pandemic and recession. The following table, taken from the mentioned report, summarizes the three scenarios.
Not surprisingly, the most impacted sector will be tourism and hospitality, followed by aviation and airlines, oil and gas, and automotive.
Alternative perspectives
⛔️ In an article published on Eurozine, Matt Stoller (author of the excellent newsletter BIG) claims that time has come to regulate Big Tech and break up monopolies. Three main factors led to this widespread techlash: the financial crisis that weakened neoliberal positions, the election of Donald Trump, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. According to the author, there are three possible approaches to tech regulation: neoliberal status quo, regulated monopoly, and regulated competition.
The first is to continue the neoliberal underpinning of our culture and to allow private governments in the form of Facebook and Google. […] The second philosophy is the national champion framework. This is organized around the concept of regulated monopoly. […] The third philosophy, to which I adhere, is regulated competition. This means decentralizing political power by breaking up monopolies and regulating business practices in the resulting markets.
The third option is considered as the only one that could restore industrial liberty and equality.
🤖 In the last issue of The American Scholar, Mark Halpern argues that artificial intelligence is widely overestimated, even in the most recent machine learning applications. According to the author, computers do not think, and much of the hype around AI is due to private interest.
The amazing feats achieved by computers demonstrate our progress in coming up with algorithms that make the computer do valuable things for us. The computer itself, though, does nothing more than it ever did, which is to do whatever we know how to order it to do—and we order it to do things by issuing instructions in the form of elementary operations on bits, the 1s and 0s that make up computer code. […] Adding to the confusion surrounding claims of AI is the lack of agreement on what technical developments deserve the name. In practice, new software created by an institution with “AI” in its title is often credited with being AI when it first appears—but these supposed breakthroughs are regularly demoted to plain old applications when their novelty wears off.
Other readings
🚩 According to Chloe Hadavas, the introduction of the “manipulated media” label on Twitter is a good way to reduce the impact of fake news, but there are serious concerns about how the label functions and is designed (Slate).
🧥 John Seabrook analyzes how to escape from urban surveillance mechanisms and regain public anonymity through stealth streetwear (The New Yorker).
📹 Daniel Leisegang thinks the EU should take the problem of surveillance enabled by facial recognition software more seriously, as the recent white paper on AI misses this critical point (Eurozine). Big Tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft are willing to support facial recognition regulation, as growing concerns (also internally) may prove harmful for the surveillance business (The Wall Street Journal).
📺 Meg Watson investigates the common practice of sharing passwords to streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify, as well as the economic implications of more rigid rules for users (The Guardian).
🌳 Anne Quito reports that a team of researchers from China, Italy, and Japan are working to apply the triboelectric effect in tree foliage to generate electricity from trees, which could prove beneficial for urban areas (Quartz).
Thanks for reading.
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Have a good weekend!
Federico