sqdbps

Congrads google activists you have hurt your employer's business and business prospects and prevented your colleagues from working on really interesting AI applications relegating their life's work to sorting photo albums.

Oh, and none of that will make a difference because a competitor of yours will pick up the slack and be in a position to offer really interesting work to attract and retain researchers.

The irony of this particular piece is that they are publishing emails expressing concern about how the media might frame and distort such an item and doing just that.

The email discussion is mainly about potential revenue if they were to win the JEDI contract it's not about maven or 'expecting the drone ai work to grow'.

Also worth noting that Google isn't the only contractor for maven yet they are made as such in most articles.

As for the issue at large: Microsoft and Amazon have recently surpassed Google in market value and that is largely due to cloud, they also manage to not have their employees leak internal material to the press and protest publicly, and I think Google should look into achieving that.

They don't 'sell data' they show you ads based on relevant data, it's a deliberate mistake that defeats the argument.

The major issue here is that user consent won't be sufficient anymore, I don't mind the business model in question and I'm not alone so let us have it, and those who won't consent they're free to take their business elsewhere. This degree of micro managing the industry is unprecedented in a supposed free market system, and ad targeting is far from only benefit to the data, it's just potential killing legislation.

The jury is still out on the effects of GDPR and claiming Google as the only opposition here is incorrect and is a tired scare tactic, the "developer alliance" isn't 'big tech lobbying' and this piece of legislative madness includes this gem:

"The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications services whether or not they agree to have their data collected."

So consent isn't enough anymore.

"The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications services whether or not they agree to have their data collected."

This is the most insane part of this clueless and destructive law.

It's like europe has resigned to the notion that they don't have a significant internet company so they are determined to destroy the whole industry. They don't seem to be as petty or as prolific in churning out regulations and limitations on other industries.

The author does a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy in complaining about government subsidies yet refusing to make his company more competitive because that would jeopardise the government subsidies his company gets.

The last is noteworthy:

"It is about future business," Charmeau said. "Why do all the billionaires invest in space? Why does Jeff Bezos come to Germany and declare that the country should not go to space? He makes money with your personal data. Today he knows your Amazon orders, tomorrow he drives your car."

Goes to show you where much of the EU's animosity towards US tech firms comes from: local firms and powerful business people with access to politicians lobbying for protectionism.

Feeling harmed and actually being harmed are different things.

There is also something to be said about the general societal ill of feeling entitled to compensation for the slightest of perceived harms.

The relevant regulator not the courts. Also in this case there was no harm done and certainly the plaintiffs can't prove any.

Google acknowledged the bug that was fixed back in early 2012!! this lawsuit is a money grab, most of them are.

Another reason to scrap class-action lawsuits - other than they clog up the courts with mostly frivolous claims seeking payoff and that lawyers get the bulk of the winfall while dividing the scraps among their clients - it would also do away with plaintiffs' lawyers overselling their cases and supplying newspapers with a steady stream of clickbait.

I don't see the "political corruption"" angle.

The rest (your distortions aside) was already addressed by him and the company on many occasions still the animus directed at him is extraordinary.

And there you have it: the New York Times will side with censorship and against free speech as long as it's to the detriment of a tech company.

It's not about if you liked it or not, it wasn't meant for public consumption.

It's someone's thoughts shared with colleague as part of the intellectual process and that is being demonized.

When did tech reporting become the thought police and a guardian of the status quo?

They seem to react to anything more exciting than a new phone release with fear and scorn.

Exploring concepts and ideas is how progress happens and it's telling how they see "Duplex" - the most impressive tech showcased at these keynotes - as a misstep.

I agree that the nature of their employment isn't being made clear and I'd argue that this was done to mislead, if the author had knowledge that people close to the project resigned they would have published it in the headline.

Google is a US company thus eligible to bid on US government contracts, if other countries were to open their defence logistics to outside bidders they should consider bidding for those.

It's a cloud contract the other major cloud providers are bidding on it as well.

“about a dozen employees”.

The 'maven' story was published in early march, it’s an 80k employee company, that is not even a blip within their natural turnover rate.

The problem is that of general attitude, I mean this shit is cool, people should be excited about it, instead people are being trained to be pessimistic and to invoke some vague notions about 'ethics’ to justify aversion to change.

Skepticism and questioning are fine but the media is trying to turn people into luddites because they feel they were wronged by internet firms.

What about the AI advancements in early disease screening and treatment that Sundar highlighted in the beginning of the keynote? Why not mention that as a counterbalance to quoting professional critics and at least touch on the undisputed benefits from this stuff.

What's truly “horrifying” is the somewhat prevalent phobic attitude towards technological innovation and invention, be that industrial robots ‘taking all the jobs’ or this reaction to the Duplex demo.

Our current technological achievements were largely made possible with help from the media and our prominent thinkers in cheerleading the advancements and shaping the public’s option.

Now it's the critical voices that get affirmed and amplified.

Come on now, this is cool! the correct initial reaction is to be impressed.

What is concerning is the surprising prevalence of technophobic notions on tech focused boards such as this.

There is something perverse about wanting to punish a company for creating something cool, and it’s certainly not the way our society or politics should function.

And I'm libertarian (more or less). I think they probably made too much of disparate incidents and assumed strong connections between them and between them and the damore case.

At any rate, there is too much baggage there to take anything they publish about google at face value.

That might be the case but given their biases it's hard to take the WSJ's spin at face value.

They're agenda is to hurt google and with this one I'm guessing they want to further damage google's image with conservative culture warriors.

As for the issue at hand, even if it might not be as drastic as described it's definitely affecting business most evident by some rank and file employees' public objection to their DoD AI work.

Fixing matters will involve more than intranet discussion moderation, it's about hiring. Perhaps they should optimize for a different kind of prospect.

A newspaper? fined for publishing? no such animal.

What's with all the "teeth" comments lately? who's pushing that agenda?

We enjoy great constitutional protection to publish, unless it's copyright violation or you're revealing the allied plan for the normandy invasion no court will rule against you.

Wow, a full retraction!

I'm holding back on the kudos for NPR's editorial accountability until we get some context.

The subject of that story was a hedge fund guy who didn't like the search results appearing for his name and the legal expenses that went into trying to change them, the piece was sympathetic to him and it was framed as a story about 'net privacy and the lack of regulation around it, but of course it wasn't about privacy it was about censorship, two concepts that are too often conflated nowadays what with publications falling all over themselves trying to extol EU regulations.

The bottom line is that the so called "right to be forgotten" is as nonsensical an expression as it is a policy.

I guess it's cheaper to try and extend this whole facebook/cambridge analytica story than to do actual journalism. What's more you get to attack a business rival (doubly true for wsj v google).

I think the larger point he's trying to make is that it's foolish to regulate the potential out of emerging technology (NN) and make it harder to discover new technology (the penicillin and X-ray of their time).

RE: GDPR:

"Domingos: The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is putting too much value on the factor of explainability -- meaning why an algorithm decides this way rather than that way. Let's take the example of cancer research, where machine learning already plays an important role. Would I rather be diagnosed by a system that is 90 percent accurate but doesn't explain anything, or a system that is 80 percent accurate and explains things? I'd rather go for the 90 percent accurate system."

"Domingos: There is this notion predating the GDPR that data can only be used for the purpose it was collected for. This sounds plausible, but if we had been using that principle all along we would not have penicillin. We would have no X-ray. We wouldn't have all of the scientific discoveries that came unexpectedly. Serendipity, discovering new things in old data, is a huge driver in progress."

Hear, hear.

We should protect our companies or at the very least not harm them.

Budget supplements come from potential fines which are set at an exuberant rate.

"An update" as in adding new laws and regulations all of which are unneeded and all of which are targeting US companies.