The Keyword: “Gboard for iPhone gets an upgrade”

In May 2016, you first met Gboard, our app that let you search and send information, GIFs, emoji and more, right from your keyboard. In July, Gboard went global. And today we’re upgrading your Gboard experience on iPhone by adding access to 15 additional languages, Google Doodles, new emoji, and—by popular demand—voice typing.

Alan Ni

When Gboard first launched, I tried it for a couple of hours but quickly abandoned it. There didn’t seem to be any advantage in using it over the system keyboard without predictive typing in Romanian – and switching between multiple keyboards can get annoying quickly. Would it be different this time around, after having my native language as an option?

Time: “Person of the Year Runner Up: Recep Tayyip Erdogan”

Instead of providing a model for democracy, Turkey’s leader represents a throwback: an elected autocrat, tolerated by the West for maintaining a certain stability within and without, overseeing a procedural democracy with a pliant press and a dominant political party that serves only his wishes. His housing reflects his indispensability. The presidential mansion completed in 2014 that Erdogan calls home has more than 1,000 rooms, including one with a lab dedicated to detecting poison in the President’s food. The décor, heavy on red carpets, marble and chandeliers, suggests a return to Ottoman glory.

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This was the year he mended fences with Russia after downing one of its warplanes, and with Israel after six years of strife, even as the chance that Turkey will ever actually join the E.U. became ever more remote. But Erdogan’s foreign policy was branded “neo-Ottoman” even before he justified sending troops to Iraq and Syria by questioning the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which set the borders of the state that followed the empire. We cannot act in the year 2016 with the psychology of 1923, he said on Oct. 18. Adding, We did not voluntarily accept the borders of our country, he urged that young Turks be taught that Mosul was once theirs. In another speech, he cast a growing regional conflict not in terms of nations but of sects. What you call ‘Baghdad’ is an administrator of an army composed of Shiʻites, he said.

“Peace at home, peace abroad” was the slogan Turkish schoolchildren learned from Ataturk. Under Erdogan, the country may end up with neither.

Jared Malsin

Worrying attitude – if not entirely surprising. With this rhetoric against the established borders, Erdogan is reshaping himself into a second Putin, the last thing the Middle East needs. These are the kinds of words that start wars…

Twitter Personality Insights, powered by IBM Watson

If you’re on Facebook, it’s nigh impossible to not have encountered some sort of personality test at least once. I do them sometimes more for fun, because I doubt any personality can be described only after answering a couple of questions. With the rise of AI and big data though, similar profiles can now access much larger databases built from online activities and a couple of days ago I discovered one based on your Twitter activity. It’s powered by Watson, IBM’s version of artificial intelligence technology that has recently made headlines for its accuracy in recognizing cancer, as well as for making music and movie trailers.

Quartz: “Bill Gates: the robot that takes your job should pay taxes”

In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.

“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.

Kevin J. Delaney

This sounds like a very good idea in my opinion!

There are existing economic mechanisms to recoup those taxes at least to some extent: if companies replace human with robot labor, they save both the wages paid out to people and the taxes paid for employing them. This means higher profits, but also higher corporate taxes paid out to the state (well, assuming companies don’t hide the extra profits overseas, like many of them have been doing for years).

The Atlantic: “The American Leader in the Islamic State”

The Yahya Tim described to me was a sad figure, a sheep who had strayed into a wicked flock. Above all, he was easily manipulated. This, for me, was another puzzle. The Yahya I had encountered online, and the one Musa Cerantonio described, was nothing like a sheep, and no pathetic follower. He was not the boy his father described. At some point, Yahya had shape-shifted into a wolf, into a leader of men.

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The couple indulged, too, in their other shared passion: getting high. Islamic orthodoxy considers cannabis an intoxicant, and therefore forbidden. But Yahya’s practice of Islam was unconventional even then. In a historical essay titled “Cannabis”, heavily footnoted with classical Arabic sources, he made the Islamic case for pot. There was evidence, he wrote, that early Islamic leaders had taxed hemp seeds. Since Muslims generally cannot tax forbidden substances, such as pork or alcohol, Yahya reasoned, they must have considered pot permissible.

Graeme Wood

Fascinating story! To be filed under: ‘you can justify just about anything through religion’.

Alastair Reynolds – Poseidon’s Wake

După armistițiul dintre Chiku-Verde, Arachne și Păzitori și decolarea lor în adâncul spațiului, oamenii au fost liberi să se stabilească pe Crucible și să înceapă să exploreze misterele Mandalei. În timpul unui experiment organizat de Ndege Akinya, fiica lui Chiku, Mandala se activează brusc și valul de energie generat pulverizează Zanzibar, care orbita în jurul Crucible cu sute de mii de oameni și Tantori încă la bord. După decenii bune, timp în care Ndege a fost încarcerată și stigmatizată ca criminal în masă, un semnal laconic ajunge pe Crucible dinspre sistemul Gliese 163, unde n‑ar trebui să existe nici o colonie a oamenilor, chemând‑o pe Ndege. Asta îl pune pe fratele ei Mposi, administratorul coloniei, într‑o poziție destul de delicată, căci situația politică nu e deloc favorabilă unei expediții în necunoscut, cu atât mai puțin uneia la care să ia parte cea mai detestată persoană de pe planetă.

‘But answer me this, Kanu – who is this “we” you speak of?’

‘Whatever we make of ourselves, Dakota. Humans, merfolk. Tantors. Machines. Whatever we manage to salvage from this. We’re all orphans of the storm now, all Poseidon’s children. We either find a way to live with what we are, with all our differences, or we face oblivion. I know which I’d rather.’

Înapoi pe Pământ, după șocul cultural și economic al căderii Mecanismului, situația e la fel de complicată, dacă nu mai mult: Evolvariumul, ecosistemul artificial de pe Marte, a evoluat la nivelul conștiinței. Cele patru puteri umane din sistem patrulează planeta pentru a împiedica mașinile să se extindă, dar au permis o misiune diplomatică într‑o zonă neutră de la suprafață, cu câte un ambasador din partea fiecăreia. Uniunea Statelor Acvatice l‑a desemnat în acest rol pe Kanu, fiul lui Chiku-Galbenă, care dezvoltă în timp o relație mai apropiată cu ambasadorul mașinilor, Swift. Mai mult, Păzitorii revin în spațiul uman, patrulând fiecare sistem colonizat ca niște săbii ale lui Damocles, eliminând uneori nave pentru motive imposibil de înțeles. În acest climat opresiv nu e de mirare că transportul interstelar se reduce drastic și minunile tehnologice ale Erei Mecanismului sunt greu de reprodus. Fără știrea oamenilor, Evolvariumul află despre mesajul recepționat pe Crucible și elaborează un plan subtil și alambicat de a ajunge la sursa lui, unde bănuiesc că o vor găsi pe creatoarea lor accidentală, Eunice.

Bloomberg: “Elon Musk is really Boring”

Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016

Musk wasn’t joking. At least that’s what he tells me as we sit in the SpaceX offices in Washington. For years he’s been thinking about tunnels—both out of a personal fascination and because they’d be an important component of the Hyperloop, the fanciful high-speed rail system he proposed in 2013. All the while he’s been quietly encouraging anyone who asks him about new business opportunities to consider digging for a living. I think they were hoping I’d say some sort of iPhone app that they could make, he says with a smile. I would just say, Do tunnels. It would obviously solve urban congestion—and we wouldn’t be stuck in soul-destroying traffic all the time.

As Musk tells it, the L.A. traffic jam was a breaking point. Screw it, he thought, I’ll do tunnels myself. Within days of his tweetstorm, he acquired a domain name—BoringCompany.com—and appointed a leader for the project, Steve Davis, a senior SpaceX engineer who designed the guidance systems for the company’s first rocket. The barely sketched plan was to dig lots of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains. Mostly, Musk was going to approach it in his usual way: He’d figure it out as he went along.

Max Chafkin

Congratulations, Elon, you’ve just reinvented the subway!