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February 10, 2018

From The New Yorker:
Childhood should not be considered a chain of causes leading to an ultimate effect: you do this so that will happen. The popular motto of stoic acceptance, “It is what it is,” should be replaced by a stronger motto, embracing existence: “What is is what is.” The reason we don’t want our kids to watch violent movies is not that doing so will turn them into psychos when they grow up; it’s that we don’t want them seeing bloody movies now.

From The New Yorker:
As the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen said, after the unimaginable loss of a child drowned (in words famously adapted by Tom Stoppard in “The Coast of Utopia”), “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. . . . Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.”

From The New Yorker:
Nothing works in child rearing because everything works. If kids are happy and absorbed, in the flow, that’s all we can ask of them, in Berlin or in Brooklyn. Nothing works in the long run, but the mistake lies in thinking that the long run is the one that counts.

From The Economist:
Amazon and Google have gone furthest in applying AI to a range of operations. Machine learning makes Amazon’s online and physical operations more efficient. It has around 80,000 robots in its fulfilment centres, and also uses AI to categorise inventory and decide which trucks to allocate packages to. For grocery ordering, it has applied computer vision to recognise which strawberries and other fruits are ripe and fresh enough to be delivered to customers, and is developing autonomous drones that will one day deliver orders.

From The Economist:
Tech firms are driving millions of miles to build up big, proprietary datasets, and are making use of computer vision to train their systems to recognise objects in the real world. The potential spoils are huge. Personal transportation is a vast market, worth around $10trn globally, and whoever cracks self-driving cars can apply their knowledge to other AI-based projects, such as drones and robots. Unlike search engines, where people may choose to use a service that is good enough, users are more likely to favour self-driving cars with the best safety record, meaning that the companies that best employ AI to map out the physical world and register the fewest crashes will enjoy outsize benefits.
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