Page 10 - IAV Digital Magazine #425

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Netflix's Biggest Competition Is Sleep, SaysCEOReedHastings
By Aatif Sulleyman
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has claimed that the streaming giant’s biggest rivals aren’t Amazon, YouTube or even traditional broadcasters.
According to Mr Hastings, our need for sleep is actually its main barrier.
“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” he said.
“We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”
Mr Hastings stopped short of announcing a new technology capable of helping us recharge without snoozing, though he did go on to make
some surprising comments about downloads.
The company bowed to pressure by launching the much-requested offline viewing fea- ture last year, but Mr Hastings doesn’t think much of it.
“It’s pretty small impact,” he said. “I mean, you’re not on airplanes or cars that much of your life, so it’s really nice to have when you use it. But at least in Western and more well-off markets, where net- works are strong and relatively inex- pensive, it’s a mod- est feature.”
In the future, he doesn’t believe that downloads will be especially useful.
“As networks get more modern, I think, we’ll see that downloading,
the need for it will go down and down, because basically you want to be able to just click and watch. You don’t want to have to think in advance outside of a couple of narrow scenarios like an airplane.”
Netflix expects to top 100 million cus- tomers this week, but Mr Hastings played down the scale of its growth.
“We have definitely got YouTube envy,” he added.
“It’s really just the beginning. When you look at YouTube having a billion active users and a billion hours every day. When you look at Facebook’s, multi-billion num- bers, we see that the internet is just a phenomenal oppor- tunity.”
AI Programs Exhibit Racial and Gender Biases, Research Reveals
Machine learning algorithms are pick- ing up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of lan- guage use, scien- tists say
An artificial intelli- gence tool that has revolutionised the ability of computers to interpret every- day language has been shown to exhibit striking gen- der and racial bias- es.
The findings raise the spectre of exist- ing social inequali- ties and prejudices being reinforced in new and unpre-
dictable ways as an increasing number of decisions affect- ing our everyday lives are ceded to automatons.
In the past few years, the ability of programs such as Google Translate to interpret language has improved dra- matically. These gains have been thanks to new machine learning techniques and the availability of vast amounts of online text data, on which the algorithms can be trained.
However, as machines are get- ting closer to acquir-
ing human-like lan- guage abilities, they are also absorbing the deeply ingrained biases concealed within the patterns of language use, the latest research reveals.
Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist at the University of Bath and a co- author, said: “A lot of people are saying this is showing that AI is prejudiced. No. This is showing we’re prejudiced and that AI is learn- ing it.”
But Bryson warned
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