See your messages with local businesses in Google Maps | Google Keyword blog

For another perspective, see Google Maps will let you chat with businesses | The Verge, which notes "It is becoming overburdened with so many features and design changes that it’s becoming harder and harder to just get directions in it."

"Last year we enabled users in select countries to message businesses from the Business Profiles on Google. Sending messages to businesses gives you the opportunity to ask questions without having to make a phone call so that you can order a cake for your mom’s birthday while on the bus or find out if a shoe store has your size without having to wait on hold.
Now you’ll see your messages with the businesses you connect with via Business Profiles within the Google Maps app, where you’re already looking for things to do and places to go or shop. You’ll find these messages in the side menu of both Google Maps for Android and iOS. With these messages in Maps, you’ll never have to worry about accidentally sending “I love you, Mom” to that shoe store you’ve been sending messages to."

See your messages with local businesses in Google Maps | Google Keyword blog

Police think Alexa may have witnessed a New Hampshire double homicide. Now they want Amazon to turn her over. | Washington Post

Also see The Cybersecurity 202: Amazon is now at the center of a debate over public safety versus privacy | Washington Post

"Alexa may have been listening, as she almost always is, when Christine Sullivan was stabbed to death on Jan. 27, 2017, in the kitchen of the home in Farmington, N.H., where she lived with her boyfriend.

But does Alexa remember any of it?

That’s the question state prosecutors are hoping will produce key evidence in the murder case against Timothy Verrill, who is accused of killing Sullivan and her friend Jenna Pellegrini over suspicions that they were informing police about an alleged drug operation. Prosecutors say Alexa, the voice service for Amazon’s Echo smart devices, was sitting on the kitchen counter the entire time."

Police think Alexa may have witnessed a New Hampshire double homicide. Now they want Amazon to turn her over. | Washington Post

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis | NYT

Another busy week for Facebook's PR department; also see Facebook Cuts Ties With Definers Public Affairs Following Outcry | NYT, Who does Facebook fire after a bombshell New York Times investigation? | Recode, and (in other Facebook news) Quitting Instagram: She’s one of the millions disillusioned with social media. But she also helped create it. | Washington Post

"But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack."

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis | NYT

So some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three? | NiemanLab

Must be about time for Apple to launch the next phase of Apple News...

"To be fair, these paid products offer substantially different value propositions, mixing content, membership, and experience. Quartz is keeping its main output free to read and making an interesting education-and-networking play that makes sense for a business site; New York is building a paywall that can flex open or closed depending on a reader’s predicted propensity to pay; The Atlantic is mostly offering a premium experience while leaving the main site open; The New Yorker and Bloomberg offer relatively traditional meters allowing a set number of articles a month.

But only 16 percent of Americans say they are willing to pay for any online news. If someone’s first digital subscription is to the Times or the Post — how many are willing to pay for a second, or a third, or a fourth news site? Especially if that second or third site costs as much or more than their favorite national daily?"

So some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three? | NiemanLab

Trump Is Spreading Bogus Voter Fraud Claims On Twitter. Twitter Says It'll Talk About It In 2019. | BuzzFeed

#NotReassuring; also see Trump, stung by midterms and nervous about Mueller, retreats from traditional presidential duties | LA Times, which notes "Publicly, Trump has been increasingly absent in recent days — except on Twitter."

"Despite Twitter's promises leading up to the election that it would "ensure that Twitter provides a healthy space for public conversation that voters can rely on for accurate election news and information," it hasn't done anything about Trump's tweets. Asked by BuzzFeed News if Twitter was considering updating its rules to address Trump's voter fraud claims, the company's vice president of trust and safety, Del Harvey, suggested that the company would wait until 2019 to address the issue, if at all.
"One of our goals for 2019 is to significantly increase transparency around those conversations as well as the principles we draw from when evaluating the impact of potential changes," Harvey tweeted at BuzzFeed News. Pressed for specifics, Harvey declined to provide any examples of what "increased transparency" might look like, noting vaguely that "we have ongoing conversations about these themes broadly.""

Trump Is Spreading Bogus Voter Fraud Claims On Twitter. Twitter Says It'll Talk About It In 2019. | BuzzFeed

Google is absorbing DeepMind’s health care unit to create an ‘AI assistant for nurses and doctors’ | The Verge

See this DeepMind post for more details; also see Google accused of 'trust demolition' over health app | BBC News

"More broadly speaking, the news clearly signals Google’s ambitions in health care and its desire to get the most of its acquisition of the London AI lab. There have reportedly been long-standing tensions between DeepMind and Google, with the latter wanting to commercialize the former’s work. Compared to Google, DeepMind has positioned itself as a cerebral home for long-sighted research, attracting some of the world’s best AI talent in the process.

DeepMind Health has produced work with more immediate and practical applications than other parts of the company, which likely made it a tempting target for the new CEO of Google Health, David Feinberg, who was appointed last week. Feinberg’s new mandate is to restructure all of Google’s disparate bets in health, from hardware to algorithms. Apparently, that also includes absorbing other parts of Alphabet if necessary."

Google is absorbing DeepMind’s health care unit to create an ‘AI assistant for nurses and doctors’ | The Verge

How Google and Amazon Got Away With Not Being Regulated | Wired

An excerpt from Tim Wu's latest book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

"In total, Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions, which seems impressive, unless you consider that Amazon undertook 91 and Google got away with 214 (a few of which were conditioned). In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce. While competitors remained in the wings, their positions became marginalized with every passing day.

If many of these acquisition were small, or mere “acquihires” (i.e., acquisitions to hire employees), others, like Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp, eliminated serious competitive threats. In the 2000s, Google had launched Google Video and done pretty well, but not compared to its greatest competitor, YouTube. Google bought YouTube without a peep from the competition agencies. Waze, an upstart online mapping company, was poised to be an on-ramp for Google’s vertical challengers, until Google, the owner of its own dominant online mapping program, bought the firm in a fairly blatant merger to monopoly. Google also acquired Doubleclick and AdMob, two of its most serious advertising competitors. The government allowed the AdMob acquisition on the premise that Apple might also enter the market in a serious way (it didn’t). Amazon acquired would-be competitors like Zappos, Diapers.com, and Soap.com."

How Google and Amazon Got Away With Not Being Regulated | Wired

How to Teach Artificial Intelligence Some Common Sense | Wired

From a broad AI market dynamics review

"Yann LeCun, a deep-learning pioneer and the current head of Facebook’s AI research wing, agrees with many of the new critiques of the field. He acknowledges that it requires too much training data, that it can’t reason, that it doesn’t have common sense. “I’ve been basically saying this over and over again for the past four years,” he reminds me. But he remains steadfast that deep learning, properly crafted, can provide the answer. He disagrees with the Chomskyite vision of human intelligence. He thinks human brains develop the ability to reason solely through interaction, not built-in rules. “If you think about how animals and babies learn, there’s a lot of things that are learned in the first few minutes, hours, days of life that seem to be done so fast that it looks like they are hardwired,” he notes. “But in fact they don’t need to be hardwired, because they can be learned so quickly.” In this view, to figure out the physics of the world, a baby just moves its head around, data-crunches the incoming imagery, and concludes that, hey, depth of field is a thing.

Still, LeCun admits it’s not yet clear which routes will help deep learning get past its humps. It might be “adversarial” neural nets, a relatively new technique in which one neural net tries to fool another neural net with fake data—forcing the second one to develop extremely ­subtle internal representations of pictures, sounds, and other inputs. The advantage here is that you don’t have the “data hungriness” problem. You don’t need to collect millions of data points on which to train the neural nets, because they’re learning by studying each other. (Apocalyptic side note: A similar method is being used to create those profoundly troubling “deepfake” videos in which someone appears to be saying or doing something they are not.)"

How to Teach Artificial Intelligence Some Common Sense | Wired

Voice tech like Alexa and Siri hasn’t found its true calling yet: Inside the voice assistant ‘revolution’ | Recode

Final paragraphs from an extensive voice assistant reality check

"Voice is much more intuitive than a mouse, but we’re still trying to find ways to make voice work.

“There’s always been a tendency to force the ‘old’ onto the ‘new’ when it comes to emerging technology platforms — the first ads on television, for example, were essentially radio ads, read out loud,” Will Hall, chief creative officer of Rain, a digital agency that specializes in voice, told Recode, regarding early attempts at voice advertising. “Eventually TV ads evolved into multi-sensory stories — images of a car driving down the highway, music blaring — and so will the voice experience.”

Until we find the app, use-case or invention that could only be possible using voice, we’re still just repurposing online content for your ears."

Voice tech like Alexa and Siri hasn’t found its true calling yet: Inside the voice assistant ‘revolution’ | Recode

The Potential Unintended Consequences of Article 13 | YouTube Creator Blog

In other YouTube news, see YouTube helps a majority of American users understand current events — but 64 percent say they see untrue info | NiemanLab

"We have already taken steps to address copyright infringement by developing technology, like our Content ID programme, to help rights holders manage their copyrights and earn money automatically. More than 98 per cent of copyright management on YouTube takes place through Content ID. To date, we have used the system to pay rights holders more than €2.5bn for third party use of their content. We believe Content ID provides the best solution for managing rights on a global scale.
The consequences of article 13 go beyond financial losses. EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times. Those videos come from around the world, including more than 35m EU channels, and they include language classes and science tutorials as well as music videos."

The Potential Unintended Consequences of Article 13 | YouTube Creator Blog

People are going to sell sex in driverless cars, researchers say | Washington Post

Passenger discretion is advised

"“Whenever anyone proposes anything beyond riding in your car and sitting belted in — whether it’s sex or getting a massage or getting your hair cut — all of those suffer from the same reality check,” Cummings said. “You’re still a body that can die in a moving vehicle. ”
Additional services will require extra safety tests.
“There are dangers of collision, of getting thrown around,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who focuses on autonomous vehicles, “and if you’re doing particularly intense activities, you’re going to be at risk of unusual injuries.”"

People are going to sell sex in driverless cars, researchers say | Washington Post

How Brad Parscale, once a ‘nobody in San Antonio,’ shaped Trump’s combative politics and rose to his inner circle | Washington Post

Final paragraphs from a Brad Parscale profile; apparently Minitrue HQ is moving to Virginia; tbd how many Facebook employees will be "embedded" for the 2020 election. On a related note, see Trump’s Interference With Science Is Unprecedented | The Atlantic

"“The whole game will be different” in 2020, said Parscale, who plans to run the operation from an office complex in a Virginia suburb. “We are no longer a grass roots campaign. We are now sitting in the White House. We have a different mission now.”

The last campaign, he said, was about presenting voters with “dreams” of what a Trump presidency could be like. Now, Parscale said, the mission will be to present voters with “facts” that prove those dreams are coming true.

“The old Republican Party is gone,” Parscale said, in his basement office at the RNC headquarters. “It’s now Trump’s party.”"

How Brad Parscale, once a ‘nobody in San Antonio,’ shaped Trump’s combative politics and rose to his inner circle | Washington Post

The Internet Is Splitting in Two Amid U.S. Dispute With China | Bloomberg

Tangentially, see Google in China: When ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Met the Great Firewall | Bloomberg

"Unlike the relatively hands-off American model, the Chinese approach is geared toward one over-arching imperative -- propelling and safeguarding the ruling Communist Party. Anything deemed to undermine that objective, from pornography and addictive games to pockets of dissent, is ruthlessly rooted out when discovered. To wit, China has the lowest level of internet freedom among 65 countries polled by Freedom House.

Critics of the model say players like Alibaba and Tencent thrive because Beijing dampens competition by making it nigh-impossible for global players such as Facebook to operate. They say the government’s heavy hand and unpredictability is counter-productive. Exhibit A: a months-long crackdown on gaming that helped wipe out more than $200 billion of Tencent’s market value this year. That cultivates a pervasive climate of fear, said Gary Rieschel, founding partner at Qiming Venture Partners."

The Internet Is Splitting in Two Amid U.S. Dispute With China | Bloomberg

VW plans to sell electric Tesla rival for less than $23,000: source | Reuters

Also see New subcompact VW all-electric I.D. Concept vehicle could start at $21,000 | Electrek

"VW and other carmakers are struggling to adapt quickly enough to stringent rules introduced after the carmaker was found to have cheated diesel emissions tests, with its chief executive Herbert Diess warning last month that Germany’s auto industry faces extinction.

Plans for VW’s electric car, known as “MEB entry” and with a production volume of 200,000 vehicles, are due to be discussed at a supervisory board meeting on Nov. 16, the source said.

Another vehicle, the I.D. Aero, will be built in a plant currently making the VW Passat, a mid-sized sedan, the source said."

VW plans to sell electric Tesla rival for less than $23,000: source | Reuters

Google has hired Geisinger's David Feinberg to lead its health strategy | CNBC

Also see Google planning health initiative, appoints leader to organize AI, Nest, & Google Fit interests | 9to5Google

"Feinberg's job will be figuring out how to organize Google's fragmented health initiatives, which overlap among many different business groups.

Among the groups interested in health care are Google's core search team, its cloud business, the Google Brain artificial intelligence team (one of several groups at Alphabet working on AI), the Nest home automation group and the Google Fit wearables team.

One particular area of interest is building out a health team within Nest to help manage users' health at home, as well as to monitor seniors who are choosing to live independently. Nest had been an independent company under Google holding company Alphabet, but was absorbed back into the Google Home team earlier this year."

Google has hired Geisinger's David Feinberg to lead its health strategy | CNBC

Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer | NYT

Inspire different

"“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”

Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”"

Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer | NYT

Ford joins micro-mobility revolution by purchasing e-scooter start-up Spin | Washington Post

Have you ridden a Ford lately?

"This week Ford, the legacy automaker from Detroit, announced that it has purchased Spin, a San Francisco-based electric-scooter-sharing company focused on the “last-mile” transportation market.

The $40 million purchase means Ford joins companies such as Alphabet, Uber and Lyft -- all of which have poured millions into the upstart e-scooter revolution.

“The number of mobility options available to people has risen dramatically in recent years,” said Sunny Madra, vice president of Ford’s innovations branch, Ford X, in an online statement. “In some situations, people use multiple forms of transportation during a single trip. The fast-paced, often experimental mobility sector requires businesses to keep up with agile and adaptable customers.""

Ford joins micro-mobility revolution by purchasing e-scooter start-up Spin | Washington Post

AI is not “magic dust” for your company, says Google’s Cloud AI boss | MIT Technology Review

From a timely AI reality check

"How big of a technology shift is this for businesses?

It’s like electrification. And it took about two or three decades for electrification to pretty much change the way the world was. Sometimes I meet very senior people with big responsibilities who have been led to believe that artificial intelligence is some kind of “magic dust” that you sprinkle on an organization and it just gets smarter. In fact, implementing artificial intelligence successfully is a slog.

When people come in and say “How do I actually implement this artificial-intelligence project?” we immediately start breaking the problems down in our brains into the traditional components of AI—perception, decision making, action (and this decision-making component is a critical part of it now; you can use machine learning to make decisions much more effectively)—and we map those onto different parts of the business. One of the things Google Cloud has in place is these building blocks that you can slot together."

AI is not “magic dust” for your company, says Google’s Cloud AI boss | MIT Technology Review

What the iPad Pro Enables Matters More Than What It Replaces | Tech.pinions

Also see this Benedict Evans Twitter thread, which starts with "I remain *puzzled* by reviews of the new iPad that describe use cases that apply to 1% of the PC base, point out that the iPad does not cover them, and then declare that it can’t replace a laptop for ‘most people’"

"We can argue as much as we want about whether or not an iPad Pro is a PC or not but I think we cannot argue with the premise of what the next computing experience is likely to include:

• a mobile, not a portable device that is always connected
• a more versatile operating system that transcends product categories
• multiple input mechanism: touch, pen, and voice
• “satellite” experiences driven by other devices such as AR glasses, wearables, IoT devices and sensors

Because of these characteristics, new workflows will be created, and old ones will evolve. Like for other industries, like the car industry, these changes will happen over the course of many years and impacting, people differently based on their line of work, their disposable income, the market availability in their region and most importantly their entrenched behaviors. Who gets there first does not get a medal but gets to show the way to others by showing what works and what does not."

What the iPad Pro Enables Matters More Than What It Replaces | Tech.pinions

There Was No Midterm Misinformation Crisis Because We've Democratized Propaganda | BuzzFeed News

Final paragraphs:

"Our public square is being redefined by platforms that ruthlessly prioritize and reward sensationalism. The soapbox has been replaced by an advertising system — one that rewards our least dignified impulses and empowers anyone willing to embrace them. And the result is a transformation of political discourse and the establishment of a new insidious vernacular — of division, deceit, of victory at all costs. And since there appears to be little desire to rethink the incentives that govern these platforms (attention!), it’s not hard to see the last two years as a trial run for the next cycle.

“We’ve democratized propaganda, made gaming distribution the key skill required to reach and influence people,” DiResta said of the realignment. “We have a powerful, still-young infrastructure for speech and persuasion, and I don’t think we’ve adapted yet.”"

There Was No Midterm Misinformation Crisis Because We've Democratized Propaganda | BuzzFeed News