Gigaom Minute – June 9

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Smart credit cards for teens, Andrew Ng, the Chinese character for love, and a live cybernetic dragonfly are making news in today’s AI Minute.

Transcript

  • Would you give your Tween a debit card? A company called Greenlight is selling a smart debit card that helps parents teach children to manage money. Purchases from certain merchants can be restricted and funds are reloaded via an app. In less than six months, 10,000 customers have signed up, while Greenlight has attracted $7.5 million in funding from investors. Read more.
  • In a recent interview with Time Magazine, Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Chinese Internet search giant Baidu and co-inventor of the Google Brain, expressed his belief that there are more immediate risks concerning AI than the “existential threats” often making headlines. "I think that the conversation is distracting governments and society from the real ethical issues facing AI," Ng told Time. "And we shouldn't whitewash these issues by talking about things that could be hundreds of years away." Read more.
  • Did you know the Chinese abbreviation of AI, is pronounced the same as the Chinese language character for "love." Commenting on this in a recent Chinese news interview, Stanford Professor and Chief Scientist at Google Cloud, Fei-Fei Li, remarked, "The ultimate power, in my opinion, is love, not AI." Read more.
  • As reported by IEEE Spectrum.org, engineers at the R&D company Draper have created a cybernetic dragonfly that may be used conduct surveillance or to help honey bees improve pollination. The team uses a “living, slightly modified dragonfly that carries a small backpack of electronics. The backpack interfaces directly with the dragonfly’s nervous system to control it, and uses tiny solar panels to harvest enough energy to power itself without the need for batteries.” Read more.
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