The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse

There has been a lot of talk recently about the soon to happen jobs apocalypse as we are all replaced by robots and AIs (I've been guilty of adding to this). Certainly, it's true that, for example, anyone who drives for a living could lose their job as driverless vehicles take over. The same is true for many other industries and professions. However, others point out that many new and different jobs will be created. A recent article in Quartz titled The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse makes this point very well and shows a fascinating graph that shows that whilst Amazon's robotic workforce rose from 1,400 to 45,000 their human workforce also rose, from just over 100,000 to around 350,00. The robots aren't replacing people, they're making the company more efficient. Let's hope

On the radio again... twice

I've appeared on Radio New Zealand's National programme twice in the last couple of weeks, both times on the Mediawatch show. There has been a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence in the media recently which is very welcome as it is having a growing impact on society. 
The first radio piece is titled Robots rebooting reporting?
The second interview was about the TV One show What Next, if you don't want to listen to the entire radio show then you can hear me around 15:20 into the show.

Algorithmic bias in word embeddings

As computer science becomes increasingly embedded in all aspects of our modern world people are starting to recognise that computer scientists need training in ethics. This post is titled "algorithmic bias in word embeddings." Do you even know what that means? If not I recommend that you read this article from Wired by Emma Pierson. An example from the world is that a recent study has found that Facebook rejects female engineers’ code more often than males.

What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

My colleague, Mark Wilson, brought this interesting discussion on Quora to my attention. In answer to the question: "What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?" There are some really interesting answers. 

British Airways IT system crash lands

You probably saw a few days ago in the news that all of British Airways fleet of planes was grounded worldwide because of a "glitch" in their IT system. It's rumoured that this will cost the company over $100 million in compensation to passengers and their share price has already lost $170 million in value. What's troubling is that they still don't know what caused the catastrophic outage. Industry insiders, however, are saying the likely cause is outdated infrastructure, for example: "We were leading the communications curve back 20 years ago, and the problem is that that now means that much of our infrastructure is hanging off a 25-year-old backbone. Some data centres are reaching the end of their life. And how do you refurbish that when you can’t turn it off?" Read more about this here.