The origins of the financial crisis

What is the contribution of the financial sector?

via Krugman. A deeper view of what the financial sector's profitability was built on.

History repeats itself

 When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.

The fault is not in Steve Jobs, but in ourselves.

Siri, Why Are You So Underwhelming? 

AI is hard, replacing a human assistant is harder. For decades progress in AI stalled as researchers explored the dead end of building systems that mimicked how we describe our thought processes. Recent advances have come from Google style big data projects, but human interactions, systems that could pass the Turing test, are still out of reach.

Siri is another in a long line of attempts at a robotic assistant. These systems all suffer the same failures we are familiar from telephone voice prompt menu trees, they work adequately within a small domain but fail rapidly as you move outside that domain. It is faster and easier to use mechanical interfaces to computer systems, like a web site to book travel, than voice interfaces.

Jordan Cook at Techcrunch concludes his post with:

That’s the thing about the disappointment Siri brings with her — in the end it’s my fault. She’s a direct step into the future, and any one step into the future leads to a thousand more.

It's hard to imagine any company but Apple convincing a journalist to blame himself for their broken software. Something about Apple attracts the gullible. Some day we will build decent voice assistants, but not until we are much closer to AI. In the meantime these attempts are just gimmicks.