John Martellaro

The Times writes: “The African grey parrot has become so adept at giving orders to Amazon’s smart speaker system while his owner is out that he uses it to play songs, tell him jokes and even order treats.” I wonder if the parrot instructs Alexa to open the smart home door so Amazon can bring the food to the cage.

At Mashable, Chris Taylor writes: “Which of the trillion-dollar company’s beautifully-designed devices would a jaded Apple fanboy like me most miss, if I was forced to switch to competing products?” The author goes on to describe the many features, engineering design decisions, freedom from imposed ads and user interface of the Apple TV 4K. It’s one of the best articles I’ve seen that makes the iron-clad case for this wonderful product from Apple.

Doctors are licensed. Some construction engineers are licensed. Health departments can pull the permit of an unsafe restaurant to operate. It’s all for public safety. The same goes for AI. This article discusses how “Using artificial intelligence in sensitive areas like criminal justice and healthcare should be regulated.” It goes further.

For instance, workers at Google criticized the search giant’s executives for considering signing a Defense Department contract that involved helping the government use image-recognition technology for military-purposes. Amid the backlash, Google dropped out of a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the agency, citing its internal policies against using machine learning for warfare and surveillance.

Microsoft has urged “thoughtful government regulation” of facial recognition technology. All this is something to watch.

Here’s the opening of a detailed story from Variety.

Fans of the Marvel Television series recently canceled by Netflix who hope to see the shows revived on Disney+ may be out of luck.

Sources tell Variety that the deal for the original four Marvel shows includes a clause that prevents the characters from appearing in any non-Netflix series or film for at least two years after cancellation. That means that “Daredevil,” “Luke Cage,” and “Iron Fist” — which were all canceled this year at Netflix — could not come to the Disney streaming service until 2020 at the earliest.

Iron Fist image credit: Marvel.

If you think AI technology is amazing and revolutionary, this article may well make your head spin. At Forbes, Lauren deLisa Coleman writes: “Fasten your seatbelts. Here’s what a few influencers in the arena say is on tap for 2019.” One that caught my eye is the open sourcing of AI code. (What could go wrong?)

Digital Trends writes: “The Millennium Falcon has arrived. After two years of construction, Han Solo’s ride is all set for takeoff at Disneyland’s upcoming Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge attraction, revealed in a behind-the-scenes image posted on the official Disneyland Instagram account.” I have a good feeling about this.

At ars tecnnica: “Manufacturing is in the early stages of a state of disruption brought on by technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing.” This fascinating discussion lays out a future in which humans and AIs partner to design machines which, in turn, redesign themselves on the job.  Amongst all the other possibilities, this would come in very handy for remote space probes and landers.

For example, a robot on Mars might detect very loose sand and determine it cannot move about efficiently to complete its mission,” explains Ben Schrauwen, co-founder and CTO of Oqton, an autonomous manufacturing platform.”The robot could learn to suggest different modalities on how to move in that environment, and, with 3D printing technology and some local robotics, it’s very conceivable that the robot could reconfigure itself at a distance to continue its mission unimpeded.”

Could Siri, someday, rewrite parts of iOS on the fly?

Ever since Satya Nadella took over Microsoft as CEO, the company’s mantra has been to bring its tools and solutions to all popular platforms, not just Windows. This will be the case in 2019 with Microsoft’s Edge browser coming to macOS. It’s going with the Chromium flow. TechCrunch explains.

Jonny Evans at Apple Must reports on the recent findings of Mixpanel. The results are interesting. Quoting author Evans:

1. Apple’s iPhone 7 series smartphones remain the most widely used model of the company’s smartphones even as iOS 12 adoption across the iPhone user base is around 75 percent, according to the latest Mixpanel data.

2. A cursory glance at the company’s iPhone model data seems to prove what I’ve been hearing anecdotally myself: Apple’s iPhone users are navigating to a 2-3-year upgrade cycle.

3. Mixpanel claims around 1/20 iPhone users are now on an iPhone XS/Max with around one-third of that number now on the recently-released iPhone XR.

Item #3 appears to contradict Apple’s assertion about the relative sales of iPhone XR. Fascinating.

Gary Kasparov, former world chess champion (1985-2000), is upbeat about the future of AI in this article at ZDNet. He says:

AI is a tool, it’s a technology it’s not a harbinger of utopia or dystopia, it’s not a magic wand it’s not the terminator, it’s a tool. And at the end of the day how you use a tool will determine our future.”

This is a thoughtful, well-written article. Mr. Kasparov does much to bring a steady frame of mind to the technical issues and natural human fears.

Kasparov prefers the term ‘augmented intelligence’ because he sees that as a more precise way to describe human-machine collaboration, and also that ‘artificial’ sounds a bit too scary. He says he is an optimist by nature and sees the fear of AI as a psychological obstacle we need to overcome.

“Gartner, Inc. forecasts that worldwide shipments of wearable devices will reach 225 million in 2019, an increase of 25.8 percent from 2018. End-user spending on wearable devices is forecast to reach $42 billion in 2019. Of that, $16.2 billion will be on smartwatches.” Most of that will likely be earned by Apple as its Apple Watch emerges as a very strong health and fitness monitor.

But what comes next? Gartner prognosticates. “However, Gartner predicts that by 2022, ear-worn devices (“hearables”) shipments will take over as the top wearables segment with 158 million units shipped compared with 115 million smartwatch shipments in 2022.” This kind of makes sense as, more and more, we’ll be chatting with smarter, more intuitive AIs.  The link has a table of sales predictions for the out years.

For an estimated US$200,000 you could pack up and move to Mars some time after 2024 via SpaceX. Elon Musk might even join you. “Musk told Axios there’s a ’70 percent’ [chance] he’ll make the voyage to the red planet. When asked why he’d [go] in light of the dangers, Musk said, “There’s lots of people that climb mountains. You know, why do they climb mountains? Because people die on Mount Everest all the time. They like doing it for the challenge.”

CNET has produced a fairly detailed comparison chart that shows the similarities and differences of last year’s iPhone X and this year’s iPhone XR, iPhone XS and XS Max. See “What’s new and different.” However, the similarities may surprise you. Missing? System RAM, 4K frame rates and stereo sound nuances. Still, it’s worth a gander.