Four short links: 4 January 2019
State of the World, NLP Toolkit, Fair AI, and Upgrade Your Soldering Iron
- Bruce Sterling’s State of the World — this year’s guest, James Bridle. It’s quite clear that many things being currently constructed, from large-scale capitalist enterprises to social media timelines to microinteractions on smartphone apps, are specifically designed as attacks on our ability to think clearly and act autonomously: “the race to the bottom of the brain stem,” as Tristan Harris puts it. What you’re feeling is not some weird emergent effect of too much screen time: it’s deliberate. (via BoingBoing)
- Flair — very simple framework for state-of-the-art NLP. Multilingual, built on PyTorch.
- Towards a Human Artificial Intelligence for Human Development — Sandy Pentland was a co-author, so it caught my eye. This paper discusses the possibility of applying the key principles and tools of current artificial intelligence (AI) to design future human systems in ways that could make them more efficient, fair, responsive, and inclusive.
- TS100 — new open source firmware for your soldering iron. You had me at “soldering iron with flashable firmware”…
