The exploitation of the micro-workers who make AI possible. It is a lot of work to tag data in ways for machine learning applications.
About the censorship system in Douyin, the Chinese app of which TikTok is the international variant - both of which come from ByteDance.
I thoroughly enjoy Azeem Azhar's Exponential View podcast. He's got two recent episodes that I want to highlight - one with Regina Dugan former director of DARPA, and now at a health organisation and one with Jeremy O'Brien - about using photonics as the basis for quantum computing.
I enjoyed the Ezra Klein Show episode on Zeynep Tufekci and how her systems thinking flows through her sociology.
Zeynep Tufekci - rock-star sociologist on the use of digital movements in authoritarian societies - writes about her observations over the past year on commenting on the pandemic and a subsequent post on "meta-epistemology" - how we know what we know, and how to evaluate how we know them.
Richard Haas on McKinsey on his new book on global geopolitics.
Closing EU-US partnership, albeit with a more independent EU? - with a more autonomous EU, and how it's not going to be so simple. This is another news in that direction - although the Trump era is over, cooepration with the US is not a straightforward thing.
Poverty makes people less productive - emphasising the mental stress of poverty.
Xi Jinping's remarks at the Davos Agenda - back in January 2021. And a take from Stephen Walt about what Xi might be meaning.
Are we forgetting the pandemic already?
I missed the significance of this report from the NYTimes - but it is remarkable that someone went to NYT with this database. There was pushback about whether NYT should have used this database in the first place.
We should celebrate the science of the vaccine. It is indeed remarkable - with the mRNA and the Johnson and Johnson nanoparticle-studding virus, there are now 2 novel platform therapeutics technologies!
A very good look at the non-recovery of the broader American economy.
I guess it's a very good thing that Joe Manchin is now an influential Democrat in West Virginia. Big governmern and federal spending is going to be important there for it to have a viable economy again after the age of coal.
China's handling this big bankruptcy of HNA going to show how it intends to continue reforms for economic growth and financial regulations.
A profile on American mothers and how the pandemic and working from home might be imposing greater stress on them than ever. Might not be just America - but also all over the advanced world where mothers have to do double duty. Also, what are dads doing???
How US Midwestern universities could provide a boost to the Midwestern states.
A Post-Pandemic playbook. A celebrity-academic-activist-filled collection of essays from Project Syndicate.
An Axios newsletter, with the first article on Biden Admin's efforts on innovation across the broad swath of policy domains.
A Quartz series on cities. Part of their "Essentials" series, that has key information on developing topics.