Who determines the values behind artificial intelligence? Complicated decisions, even life and death ones, will soon be made by software. This groundbreaking article explores the complex choices facing society, business, and technologists. “We should not let Silicon Valley be the mission control for humanity,” argues one futurist. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 8 of 8 results for “software”
Internet of Things Security & Privacy
Why We Can’t Use Things to Secure the Internet of Things
Marc Andreessen first famously wrote “software is eating the world” five years ago, and now software is transforming entire industries. But when it comes to securing digital transactions, the world mostly still relies on hardware. But as we we all transact more and more through connected devices, this hardware way of securing mobile commerce simply won't suffice. More
How Tech Fights Problems Caused by Tech
We live in a time of increasingly obsessive worry that our lives are being worsened by the tech that surrounds us. We are sacrificing our privacy, we hear, as we dwell online. We don't spend enough time with real people and too much instead in virtual interaction. We suffer from shortening attention spans. And on and on. However, there are likely to be endless ways to employ tech to combat the effects of tech that we decide we really do not like. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is about tools to reduce distraction while taking online courses. It points toward what's possible. Careful research on students showed that using software to give them incentives not to stop studying really worked. More
Business’s Biggest Trend: Convergence Around Tech
At Techonomy, we've argued from the beginning that there is no real difference between a "tech" company and a "company." We held a session entitled "Every Company is a Software Company" at our 2011 conference, and aim to be a central meeting point for traditional companies and startups. This interesting piece from TechCrunch points to the stunning number of acquisitions being made by established, supposedly "non-tech" companies in a wide variety of industries. And the article's list is just the tip of the iceberg. More
The Public Image of the Female Programmer
The Labor Department has estimated that there will be 1.4 million job openings for computer-related occupations this decade. On the heels of less-than-stellar jobs numbers, this should be welcome news to millennials planning their career paths. But, as Catherine Rampell wrote in this week’s New York Times Magazine, few young women are choosing the computer science field, despite its potential for high incomes and flexibility. Why is this? Rampell suggests that computer science has a “public-image problem,” and there aren’t enough narratives of successful women in the field. More
Why I Love Detroit for Launching a Startup
By the time my company LevelEleven launched last fall after being incubated within Pleasant Ridge’s ePrize, I had already planned our business strategy and next steps. And it never crossed my mind to move out of Detroit to build LevelEleven in a more obvious startup market. Why? In part, because this is home. But Detroit also has many characteristics that make it a great place to launch a technology startup. There’s a lot of noise about entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and New York. But listen closely and you can hear a new buzz coming out of the Motor City. More
The Next Manufacturing Revolution Is Not 3D. It’s Software
A major challenge to creating and filling manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is the ever-increasing skills gap. There is a widespread misconception that these jobs are low-skill. To the contrary, a large portion of U.S. manufacturing is complex, requiring a high level of expertise that is hard to find. Investment in improved education and training is surely needed to fill more jobs. But the long-term solution is to lower the barriers of entry to manufacturing work through technology—specifically by using widely accessible, easy-to-use automation software that grows revenues, increases efficiencies, and reduces costs for manufacturers and their customers. More
BlackBerry’s New Software Does More Than You Think
What do nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, and the new Blackberry 10 have in common? They all run on a software platform developed by a little known company from Ottawa, Canada, called QNX. In fact, Blackberry (Research in Motion at the time) bought the company back in 2010 as they looked at how to create a larger ecosystem of interconnected devices powered by a single scalable platform. QNX claims to be more stable than Linux and Windows, and is ideal for running mission critical applications with little to no maintenance. So reliable and stable that over 11 million automobiles shipped in 2011 using the QNX platform to power safety systems, telematics, and entertainment. With customers including Audi, Cisco, Honeywell, Hyundai, General Electric, GM, and Samsung, we have all been impacted by QNX and didn’t even know it. More
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