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The Decentralized Web Is Coming

Google handles 88 percent of search traffic in the United States. Facebook has more than 2.4 billion active monthly users worldwide. Half of all U.S. online retail is projected to go through Amazon by 2021.

Both Democrats and Republicans have called for breaking up the tech giants, holding them legally liable for what others say on their platforms, and imposing new regulations that would stop them from misusing their customers’ personal information. But there’s also a growing movement, which includes some of the web’s early pioneers, to come up with technological ways to counter Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google.

The goal is to build a better, more decentralized web. “There are so many different possible ways of decentralizing the internet, and what’s lacking is the legal right to interoperate and the legal support to stop dirty tricks from preventing you from exercising that legal right,” says Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and tech journalist who’s been thinking and writing about the web since Tim Berners-Lee introduced it to the public in the early 1990s. Berners-Lee and other web pioneers intended for their creation to be decentralized and open-source. “The cyber-utopian view was not merely that seizing the means of information would make you free, but that failing to do so would put you in perpetual chains,” says Doctorow.

There are many theories about why the web became centralized. Doctorow largely blames the abuse of intellectual property law to defeat the decentralized “free software” movement championed by the programmer and activist Richard Stallman. Stallman helped create the popular open-source operating system Linux after freely modifying Unix, Bell Labs’ proprietary system. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, became an impediment to the open and permissionless approach to software development. The law was intended to prevent duplication of copryrighted works and was eventually applied to all software. Breaking “digital locks” to learn from, interact with, and improve upon the code of dominant web platforms became a federal crime. It’s standard practice for today’s tech companies to shield their proprietary code from would-be competitors by wielding the power of an increasingly expansive intellectual property regime. “And so this thicket of exclusive rights around products that can be invoked to prevent new entrants for making add-ons, compatible products, or even competing products is a really important change in the landscape,” says Doctorow. “One that has made it very hard for new entrants to emerge and I think is in large part responsible for the concentration in the industry.” Despite these legal and political challenges, innovators are attempting to create new decentralized ecosystems of web services.

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Artificial Intelligence at Scale | IBM

IBM Executive HPC/AI Architect, Clarisse Taaffe-Hedglin, discusses how clients can take AI from prototype to production using IBM’s Watson Machine Learning Accelerator AI software combined with IBM Power Systems infrastructure.

Utilizing open source packages as a base and introducing packages from IBM Research while leveraging advantages of IBM Power Systems accelerated infrastructure, IBM helps clients train models faster and in a distributed fashion. Clarisse discusses technologies and packages such as Distributed Deep Learning, Snap ML and NVLink to implement AI at scale and also describes how you can get started on your AI journey to scale with IBM

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Is Atlas The World’s Most Advanced Humanoid Robot With Artificial Intelligence Until Now?

A humanoid robot is a robot with its body shape built to resemble the human body. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other purposes.

Humanoid robotics is an emerging and challenging research field, which has received significant attention during the past years and will continue to play a central role in robotics research and in many applications of the 21st century.

Humanoid robots are now used as research tools in several scientific areas. Researchers study the human body structure and behavior (biomechanics) to build humanoid robots. On the other side, the attempt to simulate the human body leads to a better understanding of it.

There are many humanoid robots made by many famous companies. for example – Atlas from Boston Dynamics, sophia by Hanson Robotics, Asimo by Honda, Valkyrie from NASA, iCub Robot, Romeo, petman, NAO bot, ARMAR III and many more.

But the question is which one is the best humanoid robot in the world. The answer is, Off-course Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics.

The world’s most dynamic humanoid robot, Atlas is a research platform designed to push the limits of whole-body mobility. Atlas’s advanced control system and state-of-the-art hardware give the robot the power and balance to demonstrate human-level agility.

Atlas’s advanced control system enables highly diverse and agile locomotion, while algorithms reason through complex dynamic interactions involving the whole body and environment to plan movements.

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8 Weird Robots NASA Wants To Send To Space

NASA is developing a bunch of robots it wants to send to space. Some are humanoid like the RoboSimian and Robonaut 2. But other bots like the Ice Worm, Astrobee, and LEMUR are more abstract. Of course, there’s also the Mars 2020 Rover, which will be bringing along several smaller robots. NASA tests these robots in extreme conditions on Earth in order to prepare them for other planets and moons.

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Did Google Just Achieve ‘Quantum Supremacy’?

Quantum computers’ potential and the advantages they promise over classical computers all remain largely theoretical, and hypothetically speaking, it is predicted that quantum computers will be able to solve problems that are beyond the reach of the classical computers we use today. Passing such a threshold will be considered proof of what we call “quantum supremacy.”

A leaked research paper revealed that Google has reached this level of quantum supremacy but the leak was quickly taken down leaving more questions than answers. So where do we go from here? What does a world with quantum supremacy look like? In the leaked paper posted in September 2019 on the NASA website, Google claims that for the first time ever a quantum computer used its unique quantum properties to absolutely dominate a classical computer in a specific task, demonstrating the aforementioned “quantum supremacy.”

The paper was copied and made widely available and along with many others, actual experts in quantum computing read it and weighed in on what the research and reveal means. It is important to keep in mind that the research is not yet published in a scientific journal so it might not be the final version or even peer reviewed.

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Valid Objections in Holacracy

In a governance meeting with Holacracy, when a proposal is brought to address a tension, everyone can have a chance to raise objections, which need to be integrated as we change the proposal before we get to some final output. This is one of the biggest learning curves for people new to Holacracy, because there’s a very specific definition of objection. And there are actually a few things that must be true for whatever you’re sensing to actually count as an objection that we have to integrate.

And one of those is that whatever you’re sensing, it’s got to be a reason why adopting this proposal would move us backwards or cause harm. Because if it wouldn’t move us backwards or cause harm, if it’s just maybe a better idea, or a way of addressing something else important, then it’s actually a different tension. It’s something else that you might want to add to the agenda, and then we can process it, and then we can get it integrated. But it’s not actually a reason why this proposal is going to cause harm or move us backwards. So that definition and that rule helps us sort through all of those better ideas and other tensions that might otherwise distract us from processing the proposer’s tension.

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