Technology is revolutionising finance and the potential for it to transform the industry further is enormous. FinTech is turning traditional banking and investment on its head, questioning the wisdom of legacy systems and providing customers with choice, new features and above all else access. The promise of artificial intelligence and digitisation is limitless for banking and finance, bringing down the barriers to access and empowering people with more options. Three key emerging developments were forecast including the further growth of crypto assets, such as bitcoin; the tokenisation of existing assets on to a digital medium; and finally the emergence of new customers such as the currently unbanked, and other economic actors, including machines as part of the internet of things (IoT). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUiFZF4Q2hY

So the question is, why, a year after Zuckerberg touted AI moderation tech, did Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, reportedly take most of a day to remove the Devins post? A post that has terrorized, traumatized, and enraged the victim’s family? A post that could not more obviously violate Facebook and Instagram’s community guidelines? On Facebook, the fact that posts depicting ‘Violence and Incitement’ will be banned is the subject of the very first part of the very first section of its guidelines—a lengthy, 22-point document. Instagram’s community guidelines similarly state, “Sharing graphic images for sadistic pleasure or to glorify violence is never allowed.” https://gizmodo.com/the-great-failure-of-facebook-s-ai-content-moderation-s-1836500403

Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html

The F.T.C. opened a new investigation last year after Facebook came under fire again. This time, the company was accused of not protecting its users’ data from being harvested without their consent by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that was building voter profiles for the Trump campaign. Facebook also suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/facebook-ftc-fine-privacy.html

In his new book, “Coders,” the longtime Wired magazine writer Clive Thompson works to describe those humans and exactly what their hands do. With an anthropologist’s eye, he outlines their different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual work of coding looks like — often pretty simple, rote, done in teams rather than by loner geniuses — he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is — for better and often, as this book shows, for worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/books/review/clive-thompson-coders.html

They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes. They do not do this because they are bad people. They do this because success has warped their perception of reality. They cannot imagine that the recent problems could be in any way linked to their designs or business decisions. It would never occur to them to listen to critics–How many billion people have the critics connected?–much less to reconsider the way they do business. As a result, when confronted with evidence that disinformation and fake news had spread over Facebook and may have influenced a British referendum or an election in the U.S., Facebook followed a playbook it had run since its founding: deny, delay, deflect, dissemble. Facebook only came clean when forced to, and revealed as little information as possible. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/an-early-facebook-investor-throws-up-his-hands-weve-been-zucked/2019/02/07/1e7bdfd2-2ad0-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.50efb178d25f

Ismo: Ass Is The Most Complicated Word In The English Language - CONAN on TBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

How AI can save our humanity | Kai-Fu Lee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGgd9Ld-Wc

How do you measure the national-security or societal impact of having people targeted with divisive and exploitative ads? How do you determine the collective impact of consumers’ being stripped of control over information they own and having intimate details of their life, like relationship status and political views, shared with countless entities? Industry players often seek to take advantage of the extreme difficulty that most people face in showing exactly how they have been hurt by a privacy violation. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/facebook-privacy-violation.html

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html?module=inline

Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — the social network faced one scandal after another. This is how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg responded. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html?module=inline

“The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what ‘acting professionally’ results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.” https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside?mbid=social_twitter