WSJ: “Companies are starting to train employees on how to give feedback to their peers and managers. They are pausing meetings to share real-time critiques. Increasingly, artificial intelligence could evaluate workers’ emails and videoconference meetings to give performance assessments. These leaders predict candid, real-time assessments could become more relevant. Such feedback could allow workers to lose the fear of retribution for speaking up about their peers’ work, and hear the good and the bad more often, in turn giving everybody the opportunity to make changes year-round and become more productive.”
Tim Harford: “Studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct. Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.”
WSJ: “As automated driving gets closer to reality, car designers and technology companies are giving more thought to what people might actually do in their cars when they no longer have to drive them—including how they may use them to work. Over the past few years, automakers like BMW have been rolling out what they call concept cars—prototypes of vehicles still in design stages that may or may not ever hit the road—with self-driving attributes such as no steering wheel and huge screens for watching videos and PowerPoints where the windshield used to be. “For us, the cars that will come out in 2030 are on the drawing board now,” Hampf says…Prototype designers are experimenting with interiors that break all the rules. Once a car no longer needs a human driver, the room inside can be designed as a lounge or an office with a desk. Cadillac’s splashy concept self-driving car called InnerSpace is a two-passenger luxury ride that sports a love seat in front of a massive video screen—all that’s missing is the popcorn.”
Vasant Dhar: “Now that the machine seems to understand what we say to it, it can create all kinds of things that we specify in natural language. It wouldn’t have been able to create things for us if it didn’t understand us. In a sense, text-to-video AI, however imperfect it might be at the moment, would have been difficult if not impossible without the ChatGPT capability. This new and improving ability of the machine to communicate fluently has far-reaching consequences on all aspects of our lives. It provides the AI with an unprecedented amount of high-quality training data about humans, that it acquires in parallel with its normal operation. So far, it has learned about the human world only indirectly, by analyzing the publicly available collection of human expression on the Internet. Now that the lines of communication are truly open, the machine has a huge amount of training data about our thoughts, desires and feelings to learn from. Such a machine can do all kinds of new things for us, like creating movies or legal documents and helping us live better lives. An individualized version of “Her,” as in the brilliant Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t seem that distant.”
