Google rips out its sweet tooth – TechCrunch

Hey. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about Snap’s bizarre decision to keep pursuing hardware without really…

Crypto means cryptotheology – TechCrunch

Cryptocurrencies are a religion as much as they are a technology. They almost have to be, given their adherents’ gargantuan ambition of fundamentally changing how the world works. This means they attract charlatans, lunatics, frauds, and false prophets, and furious battles are waged over doctrinal hairspliitting; but it also means they inspire intransigent beliefs which…

The risks of amoral A.I. – TechCrunch

Kyle Dent is a Research Area Manager for PARC, a Xerox Company, focused on the interplay between people and technology. He also leads the ethics review committee at PARC. Artificial intelligence is now being used to make decisions about lives, livelihoods, and interactions in the real world in ways that pose real risks to people. We were…