In this week’s free Mike’s List email newsletter: PC business cards, spy gravestones, IA-generated shade, Alexa houses, wooden computers, Apple Pencil cameras, talking dogs, "Cyberhouses," command-line social networking, caffeinated shaving cream, gold-plated keyboards, "smart" pepper spray, motorized sneakers, "Nintendo PlayStations," Kevlar cables, tiny phones and more!
Subscribe here to read this issue of Mike’s List now!
You can search your pictures on Google Photos that Google recognizes as you by clicking here. When do that, I get all the photos that clearly show my face in the picture, but also photos like this one. I took this photo of my nieces, and my arm and hand are visible as a reflection in their sunglasses. Google recognized my hand.
There’s another photo I took of a book sitting on a chair. Part of my foot is visible in the photo, and Google recognized my foot.
It’s not just face recognition anymore, is it?
Don’t look now, but the US federal government, employers, school districts, police departments, the CIA, insurance companies and many others are slurping up your social media activity and applying AI-based tools to judge you and your personality.
Unlike the normal kind of surveillance that companies like Google and Facebook do, which will most likely lead to little more than better advertising, AI-based social media monitoring could cost you a job, college admission, rental property and more – and you’ll never know how it happened.
It’s time for the public to realize that AI-based social media monitoring to determine your "trustworthiness" is itself... untrustworthy.
It turns out that interest in, hype about and spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is cyclical, boom-and-bust, peaks-and-valleys. When the excitement is high, it’s called “AI summer.” And when the excitement is low, it’s called “AI winter.”
Although AI seems to have become widespread and mainstream in the past three years, in fact AI summers and winters have come and gone several times in the past.
Applying seasons to artificial intelligence interest started in 1984 at a meeting of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). They described the 1970s as an “AI winter,” where experts got pessimistic, the press turned negative and research funding dried up. Then the 80s were an “AI summer,” where hype around AI got out of hand and the claims and promised went too far, but the money was flowing.
Yada, yada, yada — the last three years were an even brighter summer than the 80s, with AI becoming the ultimate marketing buzzword, with claims about AI as the solution to every human problem (even the problem of Facebook) and the dollars spent completely out of control.
But in the past year, a few voices have been warning about the coming AI winter, including Thomas Nield, Kathleen Walch and most recently, the BBC’s Sam Shead.
I also think the AI winter is coming, in part because AI has failed to live up to our expectations. The problems is that last 1%. I described this phenomenon in a column in Computerworld called “Why autonomous cars won’t be autonomous.“
I remember the first DARPA Grand challenge — the Pentagon’s first contest for self-driving cars in 2004. I was there, and saw the cars roll off the starting line and immediately start crashing into things. A self-driving motorcycle just lunch forward, then fell over. None of the vehicles made it to the finish line.
The next challenge was totally different. Just one year later, all but one of the entries finished the track. Everybody thought — wow, at this rate we’ll have fully autonomous cars on the road by 2010.
Nope. The problem is that (as with any super complicated AI task), fast progress at the beginning doesn’t prepare you for the extremely slow progress at the end. It turns out that full autonomy is probably still a decade away.
People think self-driving cars are already here. But the real-world examples involve control rooms of people to compensate for unexpected problems that always crop up. And the same goes for most ultra-compex AI problems, like human-like virtual assistants. The companies hyping AI try hard to conceal the degree to which humans intervention is still required.
So the AI winter is coming. It’s good that maybe the hype will die down. It’s bad that the funding may dry up. But good or bad, winter is coming.
Did you know these existed? Because I didn’t. We didn’t get one, but it looks like a single pupusa can feed an entire family.
Is juice jacking dangerous? Or a big nothingburger?
Juice jacking is a hack that uses malicious wall chargers or compromised mobile accessories to install malware on your mobile device when you’re just trying to charge the battery.
Breathless techno-panic fluff pieces in the mainstream press sound the alarm about the catastrophe that awaits you if you’re foolish enough to charge your phone at the airport.
Cynical experts counter that all the examples of juice jacking are theoretical, that a real case of juice jacking in the wild has never been reported and that there are much easier ways to hack your data.
Here’s the truth about how much of a threat juice jacking is.
American Airlines is trying to convince millennials to join its Admiral’s Clubs. Avocado toast? Really? Haha! OK, boomer.
Google is telling me I visited 93 cities last year, which is far more than I would have guessed. Here’s your Timeline.
The brewery is called Cadejo. They say because, like their mothers-in-law, the beer is “strong, sweet and bitter, with a personality that offers a glimpse into the future (of their daughters).” (Submitted without comment.)
The revolutionary smart speaker kids build and teach themselves, called Chatterbox, is a finalist in the Project Voice Awards under the category “Voice Experience of the Year.” The creator of Chatterbox, my son Kevin Elgan, is a finalist, too, in the “Voice/AI Pioneer of the Year” category.
The final winners will be announced at Project Voice, January 13 - 17.
Go to Indiegogo to buy a Chatterbox at an early bird discount.
Sam Sethi was kind enough to invite me on his program. We talked about the gastronomad lifestyle and many other fascinating topics. Listen here!
The problem with spam isn't that it's a time-wasting annoyance, but that it causes us to abandon superior communications media.
Bill Gates said Spam would be gone by 2006. Not only did that not happen, but it’s spread. Now we have email spam, social spam, robocall spam, robotext spam and more.
There’s some small hope we’ll be able to defeat spam in 2020. But I’m not optimistic.
Here’s everything you need to know about what’s coming in the world of spam, and why the spam problem is way worse than you thought.
I talked with ZDNet’s Tonya Hall about self-driving cars and other matters. Watch and listen here!
One of the reasons we’re in San Salvador is to visit Amira’s cousin, with whom she was very close as a child. Last time we visited this cousin and his wife and two sons was about 15 years ago. Amira called her cousin from our San Salvador AirBnB. During that call she learned that not only was her cousin’s son in the same neighborhood, not only in the same condo building, not only on the same floor, but directly next door! What are the chances?
I’m back in the saddle after mostly not working for the past three weeks. The week before Christmas, I helped my son, Kevin, launch Chatterbox. Then, on the night of Christmas, we took a night-flight to El Salvador via Miami, and spend the next week with a bunch of family in San Salvador and then at a beach house without internet connectivity of any kind, including mobile broadband, in the Costa Del Sol district of El Salvador. For the past few days, we’ve been in an apartment in San Salvador that has very, very slow WiFi.
Everybody loves hating on Starbucks. But for me, Starbucks is a lifesaver. Where else in most cities can you quickly find fast WiFi, outlets, tables, food, coffee and bathrooms and where you can work for hours and hours?
This is Donkey & Goat’s New Glou (pronounced “glow”). It’s a simply delicious wine with some complex blends. Details.
En route to El Salvador to celebrate the New Year, Amira, Kevin, Nadia, Squishyface and I sprinted past 32 gates and ate, the made it to our flight on time, all during a one-hour layover. La Carreta is a Cuban-food cafeteria that is fast, cheap and super delicious.
Google is a massive failure in social media, right? They tried several times and failed. Orkut? Google+? What was it called — Wave? What’s your reaction to the idea that Google may just have the key to the future of social?
Let me share two simple points that will make you stop laughing:
Which is the “good” social network for business?
Twitter is a mess. Engagement is extremely low. And the platform is plagued by bots, fake news, acrimony, trolls and porn. It’s neither an effective channel for customer engagement, nor a good neighborhood. Facebook is an ethical disaster. Organic reach is below 2%. TikTok is a horrible way to reach customers. Pinterest is, too. Today’s social media landscape is a disaster. So we’re not comparing Google’s approach against some great social sites.
Google failed every time at social networking’s past, which itself is a loser.
Which is to say: They failed at building walled gardens. But what if the future of social networking isn’t walled gardens?
What’s happening is that Google is slowing turning Search, Maps, Photos and other sites into social networks. And each of these sites is bigger than Instagram and has organic reach vastly higher than Facebook’s. When you throw YouTube and Gmail into the mix, Google’s social audience is like several Facebooks.
Here are the facts that demonstrate that as social networking walled gardens implode, Google may have the secret to social for business.
Our very dear friend, Andy Dorfmann, died today — far, far too soon for this gentle and adventurous man who loved life so very much. We will miss him but will never forget him.
