Virtual Reality games and experiences are becoming popular extremely quickly today in addition to becoming more and more realistic and believable. Like most other technological advancements, the innovation of VR comes with both incredible benefits, but also with large drawbacks. In the article “The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality,” Simon Parkin discusses how VR is so vastly different from a “flat-screen” experience, and how this affects its users.

VR can absolutely have positive impacts, one of the most substantial being that it can be used as therapy for people who suffer from PTSD. For example, while asking Vietnam veterans to imagine themselves back in Vietnam is not very effective as therapy, using a VR experience designed to look and feel like Vietnam is incredibly effective. Despite these positives, Parkin says that VR experiences are much more traumatizing and psychologically impactful than flat-screen ones. One of the major reasons for this is that    ” ‘The gap between ‘things that happen to my character’ and ‘things that happen to me’ is bridged’…This distinction can transform an experience from merely flinch-inducing to sincerely frightening. ‘The way I process these scares is not through the eyes of a person using their critical media-viewing faculty but through the eyes of I, the self, with all of the very human, systems-level, subconscious voodoo that comes along with that.’ ” Parkin references a study that shows that playing these VR games has a longer-lasting psychological effect on players than other games. Because of this, he says that it may be crucial to the players’ psychological health to be “carefully screened” before they use the game in order to “minimize the risks of aggravating an existing psychological disorder or an undetected psychiatric vulnerability.”

There are solutions to the negative impacts of VR, as Parkin discusses Wevr, a team creating guidelines game developers should follow in order to make their VR games less traumatic on their players. In order to ensure the mental safety of players, it is important that these developers realize that the games they are creating are much more powerful than the ones before them.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-coming-horror-of-virtual-reality

It is already common knowledge that snapchat, along with all other apps and social media sites, has information on you and uses this information for its advertising advantage as well as for their partners.

This article speaks on the new ways that Snapchat has created for their personal advertisers to target their desired target audience. They way in which they can target now is through “filters”, also known as “audience filters.”

Previously advertisers would target through “Geofilters” which allowed them to reach those in a specific geographic region. However with audience filters they can more specifically target to those who they believe are of more value. Through audience filters advertisers can get information such as  “age, gender, interests and even the time of day.”

According to the article Quaker Oats is one of the companies that has already tried out using this technique. “It targeted mothers and working professionals, and tweaked the message on its filter to suit the time of day.”

In my opinion, we really need to start paying attention to what exactly we sign up for when creating accounts on social media sites or downloading apps. It is clear that these companies are constantly trying to get more and more information out of us and if we aren’t actively being aware of what exactly we are giving up we will eventually give up our entire life whether we want to or not.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/snapchat-audience-filters-advertising-targeting-ads-app-a8057141.html

One of the options on the payment making app, Venmo, is whether to make your transactions public or private. Part of the reason transactions are public is because, initially, the product wanted a bit of social proof, or validation, for others who just began using the app, it shows that this is something you can use with your friends or family. The payment notes appear in a social feed, that has been made public by its users, when you first open the app. This feed is meant to be like examples of how you can use the app because people are sharing what they are making the transactions for, paying family members or paying back friends. The app knows that it is a payment app more than anything else but it is also a social media app. The news feed, or social feed, that you see once you log in, is a history of transactions that have occurred between your friends. Is this opening up privacy about the kinds of transactions that we make? Could this information be used like the way Instagram and other social media apps use our information to analyze the kinds of purchases we make?

The company notices that people using the app often times can find other ways to describe the kinds of transactions they are making, for example, using emoji such as a smiley face and a beer mug. Nearly a quarter of their users use emoji in their “payment notes” and Venmo uses this information to improve the app experience.

References:
Tiffany, Kaitlyn “Why do you stalk people on Venmo?” 11.14.17
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16643192/venmo-stalking-whyd-you-push-that-button-podcast

Intelligent IoT Integrator, otherwise known as I3, was founded at the University of South Carolina. On November 16th they held their first consortium in Los Angeles, with the goal of expanding the application and uses of the internet of things to different parts in our lives.   On Thursday the founders of 13 met and discussed such matters.

Among the founders is Warner Bros. Recently Warner Bros. has become interested in finding new ways to reach and interact with the public. They wish to do so by making their entertainment experiences readily available to people through their different devices.

The idea of applying the internet of things into their content strategy opportunities is fairly recent and therefore that is the cause for their involvement in I3. Although no concrete ideas have been developed, they wish to gain inspiration, information and ideas through I3 for future possibilities.

The following quote is found in the article on Variety sourced below.

“The Internet of Things is a development that can create millions and millions of internet consumer touch points. The devices you encounter could light up or respond in ways that are uniquely tailored to you as a fan of DC Comics, Harry Potter, or their own fandom.” said Bryan Barber, VP of digital innovation at Warner Bros.

Source: http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/warner-bros-internet-of-things-iot-1202616968/

A future filled with automated cars has been in the limelight for several years now, and we are already seeing this technology implemented across the world. Here in the United States, as Wired Magazine writer Aarian Michaels points out, may very well be the first place we see automated vehicles truly implemented. These wide roads do not encounter many pedestrians, traffic, or traffic lights, making them a prime target for automated trucks. This future is so likely it has already been represented in pop culture. In the 2017 film Logan, automated trucks can be seen speeding past on highways. While this future seems quite alluring to many, drivers within the industry will be seriously affected. Many will lose their jobs at the cost of automated trucks. In his Wired article, Michaels points out that not all jobs would be lost however. He explains that some companies envision “platooning” trucks, placing a driver at the helm of one automated trucks and also assisting the other trucks as they drive together. Another company imagines drivers sitting behind screens in offices assisting trucks when needed.

While innovation is always good and necessary, it is important to not forget the large amount of workers employed by the trucking industry. Tackling this problem is certainly difficult, and many people will lose their opportunity to work no matter what course of action we take. One solution I can provide is to recirculate truck drivers into the automated truck industry. This way, you keep people already familiar with the job in the industry instead of bringing more people in. What do you think? What other action could companies in the automated truck industry take to mitigate effects of innovation?

Sources:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-teslas-truck-mean-for-truckers/#comments

According to an article posted by Mark Kaufman recently. Hackers are constantly trying to break into Google accounts. In order to stop this situation and protect the information of users, Google researchers had spent a year tracing how hackers steal passwords and expose them on the internet’s black market. Even though Google never stop trying, a situation is obvious to us now : Online account and password is no longer safe for us to trust.

A question: how many sensitive information had sent out to hackers via media like Google? After those hackers get your password, it is very easy for them to steal and use our private information : ID number, financial information, websites passwords and social media passwords.

Google had worked on the tools and methods those hackers used to swipe passwords by collaborated with University of California Berkeley cybersecurity experts to track activity on some of these markets. Later, their researcher Kurt Thomas posted the results that  “There’s a lot of anecdotes about how accounts are being hijacked and we’re providing solid evidence about how this is going on in the wild,”

If is hard for us to stop hackers, how we can avoid them and prevent them from hacking our passwords? Google’s researcher found that most passwords are obtained in two ways: deceptive e-mail phishing and “third-party breaches.” In the year between March 2016 and 2017, Google found 12 million credentials which are a combination of both usernames and passwords obtained from phishing and a whopping 3.3 billion credentials swiped during third-party breaches. Thomas also emphasized using different passwords across sites, which most people usually ignore the significance of it. “Use a password manager,” said Thomas, while also emphasizing Google’s own security measures, such as Google’s security check-up and having a phone number associated with your account so Google can alert you of suspicious activity.

In a nutshell, password security is a collaborative effort between google and us.

Source:

http://mashable.com/2017/11/13/google-releases-year-long-password-security-study/#O.MIjIWAgOqK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMqxKJGN19M

http://mashable.com/2017/10/17/google-releases-high-security-gmail-feature/#Qgin4nvSHmqi

This video explains the work being done in anti-aging. We are really getting started in the process of making these “remedies” accessible to the general public. This could be a reality that society as a whole will be faced with soon: do we slow down or completely halt our body’s natural aging cycle, or continue dealing with annoying and fatal health problems that could be “removed”?

It’s a debate to be had. Going ahead with this process is the easy answer, as nobody likes the health effects associated with getting older. Creating something as accessible as a daily pill that can remove those is something that most to all of the people (with means) will react positively to.

But the other side is something to seriously consider. Extending our lives by decades, or even more than that (as we get deeper into this) can have some adverse effects on how we live it. The motivation that we are born with — to move forward and improve ourselves — is directly tied to time and how much of it we have left. If there is suddenly an extra 30 healthy years to get that done, will that motivation be the same? Will the work on society and technology advance with the extra time that great minds are given, or will it slow down?

This is a scientific exploration into a realm with many variables. We just have to wait and see.

Is the era of Big data over? Artificial intelligence can control everything. Now we can get away from the pattern of acquiring information, gaining knowledge and finally wisdom by analyzing data. That is, due to the artificial intelligence like Alpha Go. Alpha Go no longer decides the action of how to play in games by analyzing based on the database that humans gave us. DeepMind’s professor David Silver explained that “It starts from a blank slate and figures out only for itself, only from self-play, and without any human knowledge, or any human data, or features, or examples, or intervention from humans. It discovers how to play the game of Go from first principles,”. This is a very surprising change. Because there is no longer necessity for existing data and human background. Artificial intelligence begins to learn like a newborn baby from nothing as if it were a real human being.

The Alpha Go Zero Deep Mind team calls it first-principle, “tabula rasa” (blank slate) learning, and it is an amazing technology, because today’s big data is little problematic especially in case of artificial intelligence. The reason is that as the amount of data is bigger, the bigger data is literally big data, the dataset tends not to be clean. It is considered too noisy–full of bad data–to accurately train an artificial intelligence. Even if the data were refined, the data would be put into trouble and if the AI cannot learn properly from the problematic data. It would cause an AI accident. In this situation, however, it would be surprising if we could harness artificial intelligence without data.

Also, let’s expand views. In other matters of everyday life, artificial intelligence can now show how to deal with problems without requiring any information. “Alpha Go’s purpose is not actually to compete with humans but to discover what it means to do science–for a program to be able to learn from itself what knowledge is,” according to David Silver in a YouTube post about the achievement. Therefore, there is no need to worry that our livelihood threatened by AI and loses our jobs. Because artificial intelligence will help us do more extensive thinking, so we can make more creative and diverse jobs. Either way, the development of artificial intelligence will help us greatly. Silver says, “the fact that we’ve seen a program achieve a high-level performance…should mean now we can start to tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems for humanity.”

Google Artificial Intelligence ‘Alpha Go Zero’ Just Pressed Reset On How To Learn

https://www.inc.com/lisa-calhoun/google-artificial-intelligence-alpha-go-zero-just-pressed-reset-on-how-we-learn.html