Four short links: 27 March 2017
AI and Lawyering, Ritual Magic, Web Dev in 2017, and Creepy Chatbot
- Lawyers and AI (NY Times) — a good wrap-up of lawyering and AI, which isn’t as far along as the pundits would have you believe. “For the time being, experience like mine is something people are willing to pay for,” Mr. Yoon said. “What clients don’t want to pay for is any routine work.” But, he added, “the trouble is that technology makes more and more work routine.”
- Using Ritual Magic to Capture Self-Driving Cars (Vice) — wonderful piece on James Bridle’s clever piece of art.
- 2017 Web Developer Roadmap — not “in 24 hours.”
- Don’t Send Your Selfies To This Creepy Chatbot for Teens (Vice) — I finally sent Hugging Face a picture of an envelope in front of my laptop. “Nice laptop, but I don’t think it’s your selfie,” the bot responded. “Can you send me a better one?” I asked how it knew that it was my laptop in the photo. “It’s not a pic fool. Take a pic from the keyboard!” I asked if it used facial recognition technology. “It’s not a pic fool. Take a pic from the keyboard!” Hugging Face finally relented when I sent it a photo of 90s TV star Luke Perry. Then it asked what my name was. Then it asked for my age. Keep in mind that this app is aimed at teenagers. Creepy is definitely the word. I imagine the programmers reading this and being all wait, are WE the baddies?. If you’re automating the worst Creepy Stalker Dude behaviour (“noodz? send noods! send noods? noods!”) you might want to rethink some of your product, if not life, choices.
