Michael Didier

“Burned by regulations and inattention to cost-effective production, basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Microsoft launched its AI chatbot Tay on Twitter on 23 March 2016. Tay was intended to mimic the speech of a nineteen-year-old girl and to learn from interactions with other Twitter users. Sixteen hours after its launch, Tay was removed from active duty after posting a series of racist and sexually inflammatory tweets, including one which captioned a photo of Adolf Hitler with the tag ‘swag alert’, and another saying ‘Fuck my robot pussy daddy I’m such a naughty robot’. Tay had ‘learned’ to communicate this way from other users on Twitter. This example says as much about humans on social media as it does about machine learning.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Not long after, Adam left for vacation in Hanalei Bay, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Hanalei Bay is a surfing mecca that maintains an eclectic vibe. The celebrities and CEOs who visit try to tread lightly. One morning, two start-up employees who worked at tech companies back on the mainland were paddling out to sea when they spotted Adam in the water nearby. He was flat on his board, holding on to a pair of ropes attached to the back of two surfboards, from which two local guides were pulling him out to the waves. It was the surfing equivalent of a cross-country skier holding on to someone else’s pole—or the start-up equivalent, his fellow surfers noted, of propelling yourself with a $100 billion venture capital cannon. Back in the Hamptons, Adam kept a motorized surfboard. A few days later, Adam was”
― Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork