Category: Human-Machine Interaction

The publishing industry had a very surreal moment last week with a drove of surprising layoffs. Verizon (which owns HuffPost, Yahoo, and AOL) announced it would be laying off seven percent of its staff, Gannett Co. which owns more than 1,000 daily and weekly newspapers across the country had cut approximately 400 jobs, and most… Continue reading Clickbait as a Business Model is Dead – Will Live Events Save Journalism?

There’s no other technology in the world that can transport people to entirely new situations so inexpensively and easily as films can. From the moment the opening scene starts, you’re dropped into that character’s universe – whether that’s 1940s New York, Rome in AD 180, or entering a wormhole in order to save a mid-21st… Continue reading The Blind YouTubers Changing the Accessibility of the Internet

In October of 2017, in the Quick Theories titled Interactive Films You (The Viewer) Control are in Production, I called out Netflix for relying too heavily on letting data-driven decisions guide their cinematic creativity. I followed this accusation up with a suggestion: [Give viewers] the ability to switch between characters mid-scene. Imagine watching The Godfather,… Continue reading Netflix finished 2018 with two moves the film industry has never seen before

“Imagine a world without fax machines”, is a talking point you’ve probably never encountered. Wedged somewhere in the timeline between the telephone and the personal computer, fax machines are a technology afterthought and are almost never referenced as an influential 20th-century technology among the ranks of the automobile, the radio, and the computer. However, fax… Continue reading The fax machine: A technological anomaly

One hundred and forty-two years after Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call, we’re on the brink of an unbelievable advancement in telephone automation. In May [of 2018], Google made quite the splash when it unveiled Duplex, its eerily human-like voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. It seemed to mark… Continue reading Google Duplex brings an exciting update to the earliest piece of modern technology

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”, The Usual Suspects. Today, artificial intelligence is following the basis of this quote. Although not very devilish in its ways, AI has done an incredible job convincing the world it doesn’t exist. Most of us consumers simply don’t realize when AI is… Continue reading YouTube and Netflix algorithms are slaves to your time

The Rundown:  Botnik Studios aims to answer the question: Can machines be humorous? It’s a very finicky creative art with really no formula. However, that’s not to say that AI cannot be extremely helpful to the profession. Over the next few years, comedians will begin using AI to help create their act and even in… Continue reading AI doesn’t have a sense of humor. But it does help comedians create material.

The Rundown:  Algorithms are being applied to video chat applications across the board, making the virtual facelift a standard in all video calls. This marks the beginning of a booming video alteration economy. By 2024, video chat applications will offer a variety of AI-generated makeup, virtual facelifts, facial reconstruction, and other digital appearance altering tools.… Continue reading Virtual facelifts and AI-generated makeup. When will the absurdity end?

The Rundown:  Walmart is paving the path for VR training, bringing VR devices to 5,000 stores across the US to improve the training of over 1 million employees. The training applications will place their trainees in simulated, hands-on experiences and also help them prepare for the worst – like Black Friday or an erratic customer.… Continue reading Walmart changes the world again – this time with virtual reality