Welcome to Machined!

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” ― Alan Turing

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

Machined delivers the latest insight and analysis on AI, the Verse, and living in an automated world - the technologies forming how we live, work, and play. 

I have spent the last 25 years covering the technology industry, most recently as the Editor-in-Chief at PCMag.com. For the ten years I was in the EiC role, I had first-hand access to the latest technology tools and the executives and engineers who built them. This is the type of coverage I will bring to the readers of Machined.

Each issue will feature the most important tech stories of the day with links to learn more. This newsletter is designed to be an antidote to the PR-driven corporate messaging and “hot takes” that dominate the media landscape. I will also deliver in-depth analysis that includes interviews, book reviews, and first-hand accounts of the devices and services I use personally. 

What is coming up?

Next week, I will be heading to SXSW in Austin, Texas. I have attended the show eight times, but this will be the first industry event I have been to since COVID broke out. As such, the next week’s worth of reports will be heavily influenced by SXSW's mix of innovation, music, spin, and late-night conversations. After that, I expect to fall into a more conventional (less convention?) editorial mix. Amongst the posts, I have planned include:

• How to Write Your Resume for a Robot--Making your resume machine-readable is more important than having it read by humans. This is how you do it.

• Drive AI Truckers--Trucking is the number one industry threatened by automation. That might be a good thing.

• Bye Bye Bylines--Most of what you read online was written by AI software. And no one knows it. 

• CTRL Alt-Right--How fear of automation is driving right-wing populism. And not just in the U.S.

What do subscribers get?

In addition to triple the content, subscribers will have access to a members-only Slack channel where you’ll be able to connect with other readers, discuss the stories I post, and chat with me in real-time. My goal is to provide a safe place for real conversations about technology's positive and negative effects. 

I’m also going to restrict comments to paying subscribers, although you can always hit me up me on Twitter.

Finally, subscribers will get my everlasting gratitude. I started my career as the world of print media was disintegrating. At PCMag we quickly pivoted to digital and mastered the new search engine optimization and social rules to reach more audiences than ever before. Even so, today Google, Facebook, and Amazon control modern media in ways that would be unthinkable when I started my career. I believe there is a better way. This could be it. 

The newsletter will publish on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – three times a week. My deadline is 11 am. One email a week will always be free, so there is no reason not to sign up. 

If you want all three newsletters, it’s $10 a month. To get things rolling, I will make all of my posts free for the month of March.

Join the conversation by subscribing here, and spread the word by forwarding a copy of Machined to a friend or co-worker.

PS. If you like the design of Machined, it is entirely because of the stellar creative effort of Gary Cadogan. The “PCMag Red” accent choice was entirely his idea. 

Today’s Bits

• Ukraine Has Received Close to $100M in Crypto Donations—The money is flowing into Ukraine and Coinbase blocked 25,000 “illicit” Russian-owned accounts. Even so, the Russians are using crypto, too.

• LinkedIn and DeepMind Founders Team Up to “relay our thoughts to machines.” the man-machine interface is far from perfect, but Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman and Deepmind’s Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan working on making machines understand how we speak.

• The Eyes Really Are the Portal to the Soul—and Much More. Duke University engineers have built a system of virtual eyes that can help train metaverse applications. As Maria Gorlatova, the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke explains:

  • “Your vision says a lot about you as a person……It can inadvertently reveal sexual and racial biases, interests that we don't want others to know about, and information that we may not even know about ourselves."

• Nothing is Greek to Deepmind—Researchers at Deepmind have developed a deep neural network that can restore missing pages from ancient Greek manuscripts.

This restored inscription records a decree concerning the Acropolis of Athens and dates 485/4 BCE. (Source: Deepmind). CC BY-SA 3.0, WikiMedia).