Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Culture (Moral repercussions of falling in love with your robot), Investment (Saving investors from themselves), Business (Online ad hype — no, google and Amazon aren't hacking your brain), Management (Humans 'time travel' to make decisions, Challenging consultancy 'high priests', Would punishment make good HR policy?), History (East India Company — Anarchy or Empire-building?), Genetic engineering (The great hope of organ regeneration) and Entrepreneurship (Combining incredible patience and explosi
At Ambit, we spend a lot of time reading articles that cover a wide gamut of topics, ranging from zeitgeist to futuristic, and encapsulate them in our weekly ‘Ten Interesting Things’ product. Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Culture (Moral repercussions of falling in love with your robot), Investment (Saving investors from themselves), Business (Online ad hype – no, google and Amazon aren’t hacking your brain), Management (Humans ‘time travel’ to make decisions, Challenging consultancy ‘high priests’, Would punishment make good HR policy?), History (East India Company – Anarchy or Empire-building?), Genetic engineering (The great hope of organ regeneration) and Entrepreneurship (Combining incredible patience and explosive speed).
Here are the ten most interesting pieces that we read this week, ended December 13, 2019.
1) Do humans ‘time travel’ to make decisions? [Source: nature.com]
This scholarly paper in nature argues that humans prolifically engage in mental time travel. We dwell on past actions and experience satisfaction or regret. These recollections endow us with a computationally important ability to link actions and consequences, which helps address the problem of long-term credit assignment: the question of how to evaluate the utility of actions within a long-duration behavioral sequence. Existing approaches to credit assignment in AI cannot solve tasks with long delays between actions and consequences.
It goes on to say, “In AI research, the problem of evaluating the utility of individual actions within a long sequence is known as the credit assignment problem 5, 6, 7. This evaluation can rate past actions or planned future actions8. To address credit assignment, deep learning has been combined with reinforcement learning (RL) to provide a class of architectures and algorithms that can be used to estimate the utility of courses of action for behaving, sensorimotor agents.”
2) The new dotcom bubble seems to have arrived – Online advertising [Source: thecorrespondent.com]
For more than a century, advertising was an art not science. Hard data didn’t exist. Advertising gurus said "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons". Advertisers could only hope it was true. You put your commercials on the air, you put your brand in the paper, and you started praying. Would anyone see the ad? Would anyone act on it? Nobody knew. In the early 1990s, the internet sounded the death knell for that era of advertising. Today, we no longer live in the age of Mad Men, but of Math Men.
Google and Facebook are adept at the game - looking for customers, clicks, conversions. “With unprecedented precision, these data giants will get the right message delivered to the right people at the right time. Unassuming internet users are lured into online shops, undecided voters are informed about the evils of US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, and cars zip by on the screens of potential buyers – a test drive is only a click away.” The most fundamental question - in the end, what is there really to know in advertising? Can advertisers ever know exactly what their ad brings in? Read to find out…