Fred Perry's Profile

Very interesting take on the aerospace industry. Machine learning and artificial inteligence seem to make a lot of sense when it comes to both prodcution and safety. However, I do think that there will be additional safety concerns if this industry continues to rely more on machines. While it is true that human error plays a large part in accidents, I doubt that we will see self-flying planes in the future. Having a human there, even if not flying the plane actively, can be critical in emergency situations that require situational awareness and cost-benefit analysis based on human life.

To answer your second question, there is a lot of value in being a local company that understands the market. Knowing what consumers value is half the battle and while customer service can be effective, having your finger on the pulse is critical and way more efficient. A good example of that would be Alibaba’s resounding victory over Ebay. Understanding pain points and having the resources to solve them is huge, and I firmly believe that local players can out-do foreign megacompanies.

Very information article. You mention that Tala has already delivered credit to nearly 1.3 million customers and originated more than $300 million in loans in countries like Kenya, India, and Mexico. I would be curious to know how these loans have performed. This would be a fantastic indicator of the robustness and evaluative power of the algorithms. If successful, Tala would be able to deliver much more than loans – the social value of readily available credit for deserving applicants can have the power to change economies and personal journeys.

I do think that this way of shopping will scale with time and the improvement in technology. People place a premium on efficiency and with how busy modern life has become, there is a lot of value in not having to wait in line. While you are right that in the near term the popularity of Amazon Go might lead to queues at the turnstiles, I am convinced that this is not a particularly difficult problem to solve even with technology we have today. There is an argument to be made for human interaction but grocery stores are not necessarily the place for that.

Impartiality of technology is indeed an important topic, but it does seem to me that it is not the main issues here. By virtue of their name, fake news are inherently incorrect and misleading. As such, filtering them does not necessarily make the selection of articles impartial. In fact, the articles that do get through the sift will be a diverse collection of opposing opinions based on true facts.

Fantastic piece on a very interesting topic. I think that there are several ways to ensure that machine learning findings in food scarcity issues are not used as tools to hurt societies. The two main focus points should be the democratization of information and government regulation. To elaborate further, information on such critical undertaking should be made available to the public. This reduces the risk of the improper use of information, but also invites an element of crowdsourcing to solving one of humanity’s most pressing problems. Government regulation, while often derided, could be another effective tool considering the wide impact food scarcity will have on society.