This will be basically a rant; (update: it's a rant). So Thursday May 18, Khalid (an artist) began his sales for his American Teen Tour. He is an up and coming artist, so he has a growing fan base; in the past 2 months there's been 20K increase in the amount of Twitter followers he has. But anyways... his tickets went on sale at 12PM. I was ready to buy tickets, 11:50 I logged on to Ticketmaster and was getting ready to buy these tickets. You may be asking "Why Laura? Why are you trying to buy tickets right when they go on sale?" Well person reading this, he had a pre-sale and the tickets sold instantly, so that's why I was getting ready to buy these tickets. 11:59AM comes around and I begin timing to refresh this page. 12PM hits, I choose the # of tickets I wish to purchase and then "Sorry, tickets are no longer available" I look at the time and it is still 12:00PM. So I'm sitting there sad, because how could he sell out within seconds. I refresh the page and then I am offered resale tickets prices at $100+. The original tickets were $30, so then that when I was sure that most of these tickets were purchased by scalpers. Yes, you read all of that because I'm ranting about scalpers. Scalpers are people who buy a large quantity of tickets just to resale them at a higher price. Bots that buy tickets are legal, can you believe that? So I wondered if there was something Khalid could do to get these tickets back. Logic, another artist/rapper, had the same thing happen, but his "team" worked on weeding out the scalpers. I personally don't think it's ethical. The only person this benefits the most is the scalper. The artist and venues still get the amount of money that needed/wanted. But the fans are left ticketless and will probably have to buy a $100+ ticket for something that originally costed $30. I just wanted tickets to see him ☹️.
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Drones are becoming more and more popular. However the FAA, wants to make sure that the drones are safe before letting them freely be used in the skies. There are a lot of unanswered questions with this technology. The more and more questions there are the more complicated it makes it to use drones. Some of the questions are "How will the aircraft respond when it runs out of power or experiences a failure? How will it communicate with air traffic control to approve a flight path or line up for a landing? And how will it avoid smacking into other aircraft?"
These questions can be answered with the drone technology being used, for example the drone radar used to scan for other aircrafts. The only we can do for now is test. The drones have to be tested to make sure that they are safe to use. The FAA has designed testing sites for commercial and private drones. Once all the questions are answered the FAA will gradually alter regulation to permit unmanned and autonomous aircrafts to be used in the skies. Until then we will have to wait of the thought of ordering something on Amazon and having a drone deliver it at our doorstep. I like the idea of using drones, I think it is a great technology that can work for package delivery as well as emergency response missions. I like the approach the FAA is taking because they are making the drones are safe before letting them be used. They are trying to find the balance between safety and innovation. Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/americas-plan-somehow-make-drones-not-ruin-skies/ The obvious concern with automation is that they will take over jobs and people will be unemployed. A lot of repetitive labor can be replaced with machines. It may even be used in most fast food restaurants. As an example, Zume is a pizza company that is using robots to help make pizzas. The robots are used for actions that are repetitive, boring and possibly dangerous. There’s one being used for spread the sauce on the pizza and another being used to put the pizzas inside a 800℉ oven. With the use of the robots, Zume pays more attention to other areas, such as high quality ingredients. They also say the use of robots allows the workers to use their skills elsewhere instead of in a repetitive motion.
Currently in agriculture there is a labor shortage. Because of this shortage there is a need for automation. Things such as using machines to pick apples was something that was not achievable before. With AI, computer vision, and automation this is now a possibility. California being the biggest state in agriculture and also having Silicon Valley I assume that this connection between tech and agriculture should be on the rise soon. The president of Taylor Farms has a machine being used in the harvest of lettuce. His idea is getting rid of the back breaking work that is just cutting the lettuce from the beds. The workers then get to pick out what’s good and what’s bad. It appears that the companies don’t want to completely replace humans. They want machine and humans to work side by side. Which is good, but there’s also companies which I think would threaten to replace their workers with humans. Automation may become an excuse for low wages. If a company only cares about their profit and revenue, then they might think why pay a person $15+ an hour to make a burger or make fries when I can have a machine do that? I remember being told by someone (Pearce) that most of the jobs now in place can be replaced with automation. However, there are jobs where human interaction is needed, or where it just better to ask a human. For example, you can’t ask you machine something that you would ask your local farmer. For all we know automation may be inevitable. Probably with regulation and such we can prevent companies from saying “well bye humans we don’t want you anymore because this machine is doing your job faster and cheaper 👋 🙂” Which I believe is the major downside to automation. Video Link: https://www.wired.com/video/2017/05/robots-us-how-food-bots-are-changing-how-we-eat/ Authored On: 4/28/2017
Just not too long ago, Elon Musk revealed his new company Neuralink, which he wants to be able to introduce neural lace in people’s brains. This will allow people to connect to machines. It is a thin layer that can be introduced directly into someone’s skull and it would shape against the brain. Facebook is billion-dollar company, so it’s no surprise when they come up with an innovative idea to help connect people. This time they’re trying to connect people’s brains with computers. Facebook just entered the race to build a machine-brain interface. Regina Dugan is the vice president of engineer of Building 8 at Facebook. My assumption is that Building 8 is the building with all the new technologies Facebook is working on; which most are a secret. She pitched the idea of creating something that has not yet been invented which is a way to use your brain/thoughts to type or work on the computer. Facebook’s pitch included a video of a woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease typing with just her brain. Although this was used in their pitch, in a way it was misleading. Essentially, Facebook wants to build this but in a non-invasive way. Although they are hopeful, it doesn’t seem something to be possible within the near future. It might take more than just a couple years. Regina Dugan delivered the speech about this awesome new technology they hope to research and develop. In Silicon Valley, it seems like anything and everything is possible. But it this case this might be more of a leap of hope. Although, this machine-brain interface seems like a cool idea. Facebook’s idea is to use this not only to help people with disabilities but “allow us all to use computing devices while continuing to interact with people here in the real world.” The video she showed was of a woman with a very invasive implant. It is hard to say that anyone would want an implant in their brain. We don’t know the consequences of this new technology. If you can control a computer with your brain, who isn’t to say that your brain can be controlled by a computer? Would people be able to hack into your brain? What happens then? So many questions and no answers because it just an idea. Even if the technology is successfully made, I don’t think it will take just a “few years” to develop. We are still working on improving augmented reality and virtual reality. I personally wouldn’t want an implant on my brain. It definitely seems like a cool idea, but just like computers can get hacked it’s probably possible to hack my brain if I have this implant. How would I recover from that? Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/facebooks-race-link-brain-computer-might-unwinnable/ Authored On: 4/11/2016
According to the article by Wired, President Trump would need to make a decision on an autonomous weapon systems (AWS) policy. With the current policy the US allows research to further AWS, but their deployment is limited to human judgment or meaningful human control. It doesn’t specify what year the policy terminates, it just says 2017. So, in this year President Trump would have to decide whether to renew, amend, or abandon the current policy. Even if there is no decision made, then it would mean that AWS would be unregulated. I personally think that the policy should be made more clear. The current policy has a vague definition on semi-autonomous weapon and fully autonomous weapon systems. I think making the definitions more clear would be one way of fixing the policy. Another step that needs to be made, is addressing the use of artificial intelligence in autonomous weapon systems. Artificial intelligence can improve our current weapon systems, e.g. target-recognition in weapon systems. Artificial intelligence can help AWS learn how to deal with new targets that were previously not identified as threat. The article states “While the US presently puts a premium on verification, validation, testing, and evaluation to determine the likely behaviors of a system, learning systems by their very definition might not act in perfectly predictable manners.” I think it will be hard for the US policy to easily address artificial intelligence, because it is a new technology and can be seen as a great risk. Having artificial intelligence integrated may be hard to test. With learning systems they are designed to learn and change, so traditional testing and validation may not work. I still believe that artificial intelligence can be more helpful than harder. A possible solution can be that a human can still overwrite an AWS with AI integrated. For example, for the patriot missile because it an autonomous weapon system, there is still someone monitoring the missile and the targets it identifies. Concerns such as human rights and risks of unintentional or accidental use is always brought up with this topic. It is possible to an autonomous weapon system to make a mistake, but there is also human mistake. I personally don’t think we should be afraid of moving forward with our weapon system. Additionally, I think that there should be a clear policy defining the development, use and regulation of autonomous weapon systems. Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/next-president-will-decide-fate-killer-robots-future-war/ |
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