Compare and contrast.
Over the weekend, news emerged that Twitter will delete joke stealing tweets based on copyright infringement complaints.
We just have one question: How will this affect brands?
Don’t just click the big button that says unsubscribe — first, uncheck the smaller box to confirm that you really mean it.
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jcrew / Via BuzzFeed News
Via BuzzFeed News
And it seems to be working....
No fate but what you make: Leading artificial intelligence researchers plead for a ban on autonomous weapons.
Paramount Pictures
First came gunpowder. Then, nuclear bombs. The next evolution of warfare, experts fear, will be defined by robots -- or more precisely, the absence of human decision-making.
In an open letter presented Monday at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, a who's who of robotics and AI researchers call for a ban on autonomous weapons systems, arguing that the current trajectory of weapons science and recent legal arguments used by the United States to justify novel forms of extrajudicial killing may herald an abysmal and dystopian future.
"If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable," states the letter, published by the Future of Life Institute and co-signed by SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, as well as Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.
Musk has previously described AI as "potentially more dangerous than nukes," worrying that by unleashing the power of robots, human beings will act as a "biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence." These comments echo those of Hawking, who told the BBC last year that "artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
The letter states that unlike nuclear arms, which require enormous financial investment and rare raw materials to develop, automated weapons are relatively cheap, lending themselves to widespread manufacture. The experts argue that these weapons may become so ubiquitous that it's only a matter of time before they are sold on the black market, offering up robot killers to dictators, warlords, and terrorists.
"Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity," the letter explains.
While automated weapons might reduce human causalities for the aggressor, proponents argue, they also lower the threshold for waging war. What's more, such weapons could also negatively impact future AI research, the letter's signatories say.
"Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits."
Best Buy will be the first major U.S. retailer beside Apple to sell the new wearable.
NBC / Via youtube.com
Best Buy will sell Apple Watches online and in more than 100 stores nationwide starting Aug. 7, making it the first major national retailer — besides Apple — to do so.
Though Best Buy will carry Apple Watch Sport and Apple Watch as well as an array of accessories, it will not offer the gold-cased Apple Watch Edition. By the holidays, a total of more than 300 Best Buy stores will carry the watch, Apple said Sunday.
"The Apple Watch is an important addition to an emerging product category, and we know our customers want it," Jason Bonfig, senior category officer at Best Buy, said in a press release.
Customers began pre-ordering the Apple Watch in April, but the gadget, which starts at $350, wasn't available for purchase in Apple's retail stores until just last month.
Expanding Watch's availability to Best Buy will almost certainly lead to an increase in sales, but it's unclear what that will mean in the grand picture of the gadget's success, since Apple won't disclose how many watches have been sold. Last week, in its latest quarterly earnings report, the company said its category of "other" devices — which includes the watch, iPod, and Apple TV — went to $2.6 billion from $1.7 billion the previous quarter.
"As you know, we made a decision back in September, quite several months ago, not to disclose the shipments on the watch," CEO Tim Cook told analysts on an earnings call. "That was not a matter of not being transparent. It was a matter of not giving our competition insight. It's a product that we worked really hard on."
In response to her tweet and email, Twitter co-founder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey chimed in, calling an edit feature a “great idea!”
Alexander Tamargo / Getty Images
On Friday night, the reality star said she asked Twitter to allow users to edit tweets, a feature available on other social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Fitbit says its devices shouldn’t be used for medical or scientific reasons. Thanks to their low cost and high ease of use, researchers are thinking about doing so anyway. There’s just one problem: The results probably can’t be trusted.
Fitbit / Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed
For Dr. Amy Gelfand, who's studying sleep patterns in kids with episodic migraines, Fitbits are an ideal research tool in many ways. Fitbit says its devices aren't designed for medical or scientific research — even as it offers discounts to those who use them for just that. But the devices are cheap, discreet, and easy to use, and Gelfand can remotely track users' sleep without intruding in their lives. Which helps explain why many scientists are thinking about using them for research. The only problem? The results may not be very accurate.
That is the rub for Gelfand as she plans a large study that hopes to determine whether melatonin, a natural hormone, can ease migraine pain in pediatric patients by improving their sleep. In a small test run, she first wanted to check if study participants would wear a sleep-monitoring wristband 24/7, so she outfitted 10 people with Fitbit Flexes. But when Gelfand embarks on that bigger study, she likely won't use Fitbits because she worries about the reliability of the data they generate. Indeed, some third-party studies have shown them to be inaccurate to varying degrees.
Consumer activity trackers like Fitbits are growing in popularity among universities, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies that want to study certain health conditions in daily-life scenarios. "With remote trials, we have the potential to allow populations of patients who haven't been able to participate in research before to participate," Gelfand, a pediatric neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told BuzzFeed News.
But it may be some time before the devices are fully embraced by scientists, a few of whom question the reliability and replicability of the data Fitbits generate. "I have a heebie-jeebie factor about somebody using them in their science," said Hawley Montgomery-Downs, an associate professor of psychology at West Virginia University, whose studies have found inaccuracies in Fitbit's sleep-tracking abilities. "They don't vary by a couple minutes or a couple percentage points. They vary — and as a scientist, I don't use this word lightly — very dramatically."
Montgomery-Downs recently started a sleep-tracking device testing company. None of her clients currently have commercially available products.
Fitbit / Via fitbit.com
Fitness trackers are just one example of a new consumer technology that could dramatically expand the scope of medical research beyond people who live near a clinical trial center. More than 75,000 people have enrolled in studies that double as iPhone apps made with Apple's ResearchKit, an open-source software framework unveiled in March. And this month, the National Institutes of Health said it may use smartphones and wearables in a larger study of how drug therapies and preventive measures can be tailored to individuals' unique health risks. "These devices could provide the ability to track health behaviors and environmental exposures much more frequently with minimal burden on participants," the agency noted.
Fitbits do make it significantly easier for people like Julia Roy, 17, to participate in studies like Gelfand's. Roy, who just graduated from a San Francisco high school, experiences migraines as many as 11 days a month. Without dropping by Gelfand's clinic, she can participate in the study simply by taking the pills given her (either melatonin or a placebo), reporting headaches every day on an iPhone app, and wearing the Fitbit Flex around the clock. "I had to wear it on prom night," she said. "So it got my three and a half hours of sleep."
For researchers, wearable, connected devices like the Fitbit have clear advantages over more traditional electronic trackers. "Five to 10 years ago, the only thing around were pedometers. In order to get the information off pedometers, you had to bring in your pedometer, and I'd write it down or log it on a computer, or they had to write it down," said Dr. Mitesh Patel, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied how wearables and smartphones can monitor fitness. "One of the biggest benefits of these new, connected devices is we can passively pull data via cellular or Wi-Fi connections. We can do that passively to observe how people are behaving in their everyday lives."
Another benefit is cost. Actigraphs, medical-grade sleep-tracking devices, can strain budgets at prices that range between $300 and $1,000, and don't always include associated software. In contrast, a sleep-tracking Fitbit starts at $100 — software included.
Cost and convenience are a large reason why consumer trackers are catching on among researchers. The pharmaceutical giant Biogen is using Fitbits to track mobility in multiple sclerosis patients. Medidata, a cloud-computing platform for clinical research, is using Fitbit Flex and Garmin's Vivofit for similar reasons. And Misfit Wearables told BuzzFeed News that there are now about a dozen health research studies in which its trackers are used to monitor participants' activity levels.
The machines can’t make a decent burger just yet—but they can definitely take your order. Not that labor groups are worried.
Koji Sasahara / AP
America's growing force of fast-food workers may soon have a challenge on their hands greater than the inability to earn a living wage from full-time work in the industry: Much of the work they are currently doing could be taken over by machines within the coming decade or so.
While the full automation of fast-food cashiers isn't here just yet, researchers and those in the business say it's only a matter of time before ordering and payment become primarily self-service. Mobile apps and touchscreen kiosks that are already transforming the business will likely become more appealing as wages rise, and will probably take over even if they don't.
Restaurants are keeping a close eye on labor costs. Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco all recently approved increasing their minimum wages to $15. On July 22, a New York wage board recommended gradually increasing wages for fast-food workers in New York City to $15 by Dec. 31, 2018, and to $15 for the rest of the state by July 1, 2021. It now awaits approval by the state's labor commissioner.
"I fully believe that it will seem crazy, even just two or three years from now, that we used to wait in long lines until we got our turn, and then told [a cashier] what we wanted, and had them punch it into a machine for us," said Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo, which makes mobile ordering and payment technology for restaurant chains including Five Guys and Chipotle.
The current system seems particularly outdated, he said, "in an era where 75%, 80% of us have supercomputers that are location-aware and web-enabled on our bodies at all times."
Industry groups are keen to remind workers that demands for higher pay are taking place just as labor-saving technology is making its move on a core part of their work. "You can have a $15 [minimum wage] or you can have the same number of job opportunities you have now, but you can't have both," said Michael Saltsman, research director for the Employment Policies Institute, a business-backed think tank.
A full-page ad the organization took out in the New York Post in June was less coy. "Meet the new minimum wage employee," read the text over a photo of a touchscreen ordering kiosk.
The Employment Policies Institute ad in the New York Post.
Employment Policies Institute
Amid these declarations, many of the country's largest fast-food chains, including Starbucks and McDonald's, have rolled out or are in the process of developing smartphone apps and in-store kiosks that shift work from the cashier to the customer. It's still early days, but if consumers show in large numbers they're willing and happy to place orders themselves — primarily as a matter of convenience — even a $7.25-an-hour worker under today's federal minimum wage could become a questionable expense.
As wages increase, "franchisees have to find a way to pay for those extra costs," Dunkin' Brands CEO Nigel Travis told BuzzFeed News. Operators of the company's Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins outlets can offset higher labor expenses through "some form of automation" like new ordering technology, adjusting supply chains, or increasing sales, he said.
Another option, less popular with customers, would be raising menu prices. Just this month, consumers saw increased labor costs lead to higher prices at Starbucks and Chipotle.
