📲 Togo sent relief money sent straight to phones and turns out firing your head of AI causes problems
🤤 AI is getting put to work making snack food even tastier
No newsletter for the next two weeks! Happy holidays everyone!
The Good
Togo, the small West African country with a per capita income of $671, found a way to distribute COVID-19 relief quickly and efficiently. The government sent mobile cash payments and made sure its poorest residents got another payment (can you imagine?) by identifying the people most in need with the help of AI looking at satellite photos and checking cellphone data.
This Wired story has great details about how it worked, and even before AI gets involved, it sounds pretty neat. We are going to hear more about how the pressing needs of COVID-19 and the possibilities of AI working together were behind more innovations like this. Bonus image:
Good thing the richest country in history can sort out something like what Togo residents got, right?
The Bad
A couple of newsletters ago, I mentioned that Google fired Timnit Gebru, one of its Ethical AI leads. I knew it was not a good move on the company’s part, but I did not foresee how big this would get and just how bad the timing would be.
First off, politicians are urging “CEO @sundarpichai to reaffirm his commitment to D&I and academic freedom. Now more than ever, @timnitGebru’s departure makes this work essential.”
Secondly, this is not the kind of attention Google wants as it gets hit with its third anti-trust lawsuit, as 38 state attorneys general file another suit alleging an illegal monopoly in the markets for online search and search advertising that is only going to get more powerful with AI.
Now, Google employees are calling for Pichai to reinstate Gebru and apologize. I doubt that will happen, but the effort to get rid of an employee that constantly pushed on Google to do better certainly backfired.
More New
Finally, a tasty use for AI: making the perfect crunch for snacks like Cheetos.
Boston Dynamics wants to send its robo-dogs to explore Mars and say they could move over more terrain than regular rovers.
A roundup of all the badly-behaving algos in 2020.
AI is only as good as the data it was trained on. That’s why homemade videos to train an algo to recognize guns in CC footage is not going to cut it.
As we all are losing motivation to workout at home, there are new AIs to keep track of whatever push-ups or jumping jacks you could convince yourself to do.
The Republican governor of Mass won’t sign a bill to outlaw face rec tech because he thinks cops need it.
A musician (Arca, for those in the know) released 100 different AI-generated versions of a new song.
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Until 2021,
Jackie