Posts

Trading off-line dollars for digital dimes

When Yahoo! News scraped the web. When Google Search takes the first paragraph of a top result. Digital platforms, building micro-content experiences on the backs of content creators and copyright owners, and not compensating them a bit for it. But this micro appropriation, a.k.a. snacking phenomenon, reduces offline dollars into a digital dime’s worth of information. It seems free and maybe it’s useful for a lot of basic search, but consuming micro-bits of info teaches us to devalue knowledge and accept the first answer we get as fact. “It’s on Google. It’s a thing.” Facebook scraping local news sites with the mission of “becoming the town square of the world” put local news out of business and in doing so, threatened the fourth estate responsible for putting a check and balance on local state houses and judiciary. If you’re upset that many citizens today have no clue about civics, or the way government operates, you can thank Yahoo! News, Google News, other scraping sites, etc. for t...

The promise of an AI-powered future in healthcare

I spent the morning watching thought videos talking about the promise of AI in facilitating drug discovery. The videos were about a year old and mainly the work of partnerships of pharmaceutical and tech companies, showing how expanding the size of trials and data sets from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people courtesy of the reach and scale of AI, would perfect models and open up a whole new world where researchers will truly flex their mental muscles and make discoveries imminent. Three things. First it’s clear to me that all AI is today, is really an expanded data set with a machine powering the ability to do rapid searches on that data and find patterns in ways that people can’t do at scale and speed, but all it is, is a really fast control-F matching process. Second, by expanding the data set from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand, all they’ve done is gone from an r score of .9 to .91 or .95. Better, yes, but when you’re talking about discovery, the incremental gain i...