Rearden's Profile

Wow, this seems like a very loaded topic but a highly critical one. Reducing gun violence by 25% is a very impressive achievement that creates huge amounts of value for the residents. By utilizing these methods though, I’m wondering how bias can really be ethically be kept out. If allowing a biased machine to run saves someone life, is it worth it? I’m also heavily reminded of the movie ‘Minority Report’, and how this appears to be trending in that direction.

This is a very interesting flip perspective that we don’t see commonly about this new technology. I think the danger of saying that Waze has an ethical responsibility is that if they begin to reduce the power of the end users, they may lose a good portion of their customer base. These customers will then move on to another app that does the exact same thing, and the cycle will perpetuate. Ultimately open innovation platforms are tools for their users – you can’t dictate to someone buying a hammer that you can only use it for nails- now it is in their control. In Waze’s defense, they do monitor your speed and warn you when you are going over the speed limit, so they have made a bit of an effort.

Great read, and an excellent point. It seems to me that one of the few ways that 3D printing really shines is in highly customizable apparel, such as shoes and garments. It’s the one place where the manufacturing technology can actually open up new design possibilities and be a cheaper alternative to traditional methods. I’m excited to see customized footwear become commonplace, but I also do worry a bit about the possibility that there will be large advantages for athletes with the funds to purchase these customized pieces. Previously only the highest level athletes would have things customized for them, but now will it become a class divisor?

Although I respect the use of 3D printing in tool fabrication, I don’t think it should be valued quite as highly. I designed and had manufactured hundreds of jigs in my last job, and we used both 3D printing and CNC’ed aluminum. Although 3D printing certainly has is place, for things such as shop aids or mock ups, the low quality and survivability of the 3D printed parts were a consistent issue. We found that the price difference to go from a high quality 3D printed part to an aluminum part was only an additional 20%, and the reduction in QA findings immense. In addition, many prototyping companies such as Protolabs, etc. can get you the CnC’ed part in approximately the same amount of time.

Lego’s were a core part of my life growing up, so I loved seeing this post. I would be interested in whether LEGO is considering transitioning completely into an open innovation model via the e-commerce platform. The uniquely modular nature of the set means that any set design could in theory be uploaded, and automatically priced and instructions generated. In addition, I would be interested in seeing these sets combined with electronics- in theory this same idea could result in custom consumer electronic lego toy sets, with the correct modularity.

Great summary of the rollout of machine learning in a more user interactive environment. Salesforce seems uniquely poised to take advantage with their enormous pool of data, but I question why they appear to be so customer specific and customer facing with the models. Building case by case models seems to abandon the advantage that salesforce has, i.e. a large data pool. I would think that generating a few functional models that span many businesses and then maybe just tailoring or tweaking the model for each customer would make more sense.