Made in France AI, Toilet Pictograms, mediaconomics and more in the Programmable Edition #83
Cocorico!
Governments have been paying more and more attention to the development of artificial intelligence as recent advances in science and technology play a growing role in our society.
Following the US Administration, the French Government has made its move. France has been providing organisations and research labs with top-end engineers and mathematicians for long. Giant tech companies such as Facebook have even opened major research labs in the country.
This week, Axelle Lemaire (the French Minister for Digital Affairs) launched a plan to build a national strategy in the field, stamped #FranceIA. Report expected end of March. At the same time, the French Senate mandated its commission for the evaluation of scientific and technological choices for an in-depth consultation on the topic. Videos of the audience are available — in French though : a must watch! (see Part I, and Part II).
Aurore
The future of media when distribution goes to zero
The TV industry has resisted the effect of the Internet for quite some time, but this could be about to change. Jobs it formerly did that drove users attention are more and more acquired by dedicated media, let’s say Snapchat for “escapism” or Netflix for storytelling, and at the same time. The economics of bundling could de facto be over.
On-boarding is one thing, but stickiness is another
Voice controlled assistant have hit the market and applications on platforms such as Alexa and Google Assistant are booming. However, it seems they all face a retention problem. “When a voice application acquires a user, there is only a 3% chance that user will be active in the second week”.
Autonomous vehicles moving into second gear
Big move, big news: Google’s former Head of Search is joining Uber as senior vice president for engineering, to tackle “one of the most challenging computer science problems I’ve encountered in my thirty-year career”. At the same time, The U.S. Department of Transportation has closed its investigation on crash rates, proving evidence that Tesla’s Autopilot actually increase road safety.
Meanwhile, in Japan…
Standardisation is a tough issue, in every industry. The Japanese toilet industry has finally come to an agreement on bidet controls, especially to help tourists navigate this increasingly technological experience. One picture says more than a thousand words.
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