The Value of Doubt.

On the lunar surface.

The discount applies to those whose email addresses end in .mil or .edu.

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1. In a historic lunar accomplishment, the first private spacecraft to land successfully on the Moon touched down on 22 February. The spacecraft, named Odysseus and built by Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, also became the first US lunar lander since 1972, when the last crew of Apollo astronauts visited the Moon. Odysseus offered up some nail-biting moments in the hours before landing, such as the malfunction of the laser rangefinders that were supposed to help guide its autonomous journey down to the lunar surface. Mission engineers had to upload a software patch to jury-rig it to use a secondary laser provided by NASA instead. The exact state of the spacecraft remained unclear immediately after its landing, which occurred at 5:23 p.m. Houston time. But it was sending a faint signal back to mission control in Houston, indicating that at least some portion of it had survived the touchdown. (Source: nature.com)

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2. Vinod Khosla:

Artificial intelligence will spur two fundamental changes in our relationship with technology. The first is that voice—already the most natural interface for human interaction—will become a dominant interface. Imagine latency reduced to less than half a second, a stark contrast to the sluggishness of touch-based devices. Even silent voice is on the table—vocalizing commands without sound, an especially useful option in a public setting like a cafe. Silent voice is mouthing the words without allowing sound to come out of your mouth. Technologies to detect such “silent speech” will allow one to privately dictate in public places without anyone else being able to listen.

The second revolution is in how apps will adapt to us. No longer will we need to learn to navigate through apps like Uber or complex systems like those of SAP or Oracle. Thus far, we’ve always adapted to software—learning its intricacies, remembering layered menus and so forth to communicate with machines. “Training” to use complex apps is commonplace. Now, AI is enabling software to adapt to humans instead. (Source: theinformation.com)

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3. The Chinese hacking tools made public in recent days illustrate how much Beijing has expanded the reach of its computer infiltration campaigns through the use of a network of contractors, as well as the vulnerabilities of its emerging system. The new revelations underscore the degree to which China has ignored, or evaded, American efforts for more than a decade to curb its extensive hacking operations. Instead, China has both built the cyber-operations of its intelligence services and developed a spider web of independent companies to do the work. Last weekend in Munich, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said that hacking operations from China were now directed against the United States at “a scale greater than we’d seen before.” And at a recent congressional hearing, Mr. Wray said China’s hacking program was larger than that of “every major nation combined.” “In fact, if you took every single one of the F.B.I.’s cyber-agents and intelligence analysts and focused them exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber F.B.I. cyber-personnel by at least 50 to one,” he said. (Sources: nytimes.com, fbi.gov)

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