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Why AI is the future of home security All your smart devices are going to get substantially cleverer Beyond facial recognition AI is synonymous with facial recognition, but the home security systems of the future will look beyond our faces to offer protection. Indeed, it won’t be long until facial recognition is a standard feature, not the standout offering it once was. Instead, tech companies are taking two main approaches to their home security innovations...

Why AI needs a physical body to emotionally connect with humans Theory of mind Of course, we already have primitive versions of such systems. But audio-command systems and call-centre-style script-processing justpretend to be conversations. What is needed are proper social interactions, involving free-flowing conversations over the long term during which AI systems remember the person and their past conversations. AI will have to understand intentions and beliefs and the meaning of what people are saying....

Why AI struggles to grasp cause and effect Independent and identically distributed data Why do machine learning models fail at generalizing beyond their narrow domains and training data? “Machine learning often disregards information that animals use heavily: interventions in the world, domain shifts, temporal structure — by and large, we consider these factors a nuisance and try to engineer them away,” write the authors of the causal representation learning paper. “In accordance with this, the majority of current successes of machine learning boil down to large scale pattern recognition on suitably collectedindependent and identically distributed (i....

Why AI writing assistants are the next generation of style guides Stacking style manuals The early style guides came in the form of manuscripts and books, mainly out of academia and journalism. They were made for print, in print. That software on CD The software installed on our computers gave us the first grammar checkers. We used them together with the printed style guides. The house of style What was left out of the manuals and software — for specialized subjects, customer needs or editorial tastes — went into a grand PDF of house style (“house” as in “publishing house,” an early term borrowed by companies creating content for their products as if it were a magazine)....

Why Airbnb’s incredibly successful IPO was a maverick move Airbnb’s IPO decision in a sea of business gloom But Airbnb had some strategic advantages, the first being its tech-based business model. Unlike other leisure and holiday businesses – such as hotels and airlines – Airbnb does not need to spend large amounts of money on the cost associated with the upkeep of its fixed assets. Instead, Airbnb can successfully pass on the risk of such rigid payment obligations to its “hosts” – the property owners....