Google’s plans to bring AI to education make its dominance in classrooms more alarming

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s annual I/O Developers Conference on May 18, 2021, he made two announcements suggesting Google is now the world’s most powerful organization in education. Opening the livestreamed keynote from the Mountain View campus gardens, Pichai celebrated how Google had been able to “help students and teachers continue learning from anywhere” during the pandemic. Minutes later, he announced Google’s new AI language platform, a central part of the company’s long-term AI strategy, with a specific use-case example from education. LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), he claimed, could enable students to ask natural language questions and receive sensible, factual, and interesting conversational responses. “So if a student wanted to discover more about space,” Pichai wrote on the company blog , “the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic,” he added, “LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.” The company plan is to embed LaMDA in its Workspace suite of cloud computing tools, software, and products. These proclamations indicate how Google plans to advance its business in education following the disruptions of COVID-19—by consolidating the huge growth of its platforms in schools and integrating AI into teaching and learning. That’s raising fresh concerns among privacy campaigners and researchers because it gives Google access to data about students and schools at international scale. Google’s global classroom With schools reopening worldwide, Google has worked hard to ensure the big market gains it made in 2020 can be sustained and strengthened as students return to physical rather than virtual classrooms Read More …

The Gmail-enhancing superpower you didn’t know you needed

For a service that’s all about interacting with other (alleged) humans, Gmail does a curiously poor job of putting people front and center. Sure, the Gmail inbox is all about communication—but have you ever found yourself staring at an email and struggling to remember what you know about the person who sent it or exchanges you’ve had in the past? If you interact with enough mammals over email, it’s bound to happen. And Gmail just doesn’t have particularly powerful tools for providing the on-demand context you need to successfully navigate your way out of that situation. Up until a matter of months ago, in fact, Gmail didn’t have any real form of integration with its companion Google Contacts service. Late last year, Google added a Contacts panel into the website’s sidebar, which was a significant step—but the information in that panel is still pretty limited and lacking. You can see basic contact info for people who emailed you and a list of past emails involving them, and that’s about it. If you want any additional details, you’ll have to stop what you’re doing, click away from the message, and move over to a whole other page to find it. Let me tell you: You can do better. With the right add-on, you can bring detailed, genuinely helpful contact information right into your inbox—so you can see it right alongside messages and gain the context you need to interact intelligently. It’s similar to what you’d get with a customer relationship management (CRM) system, but you don’t have to work in sales to benefit from its presence. It’s an incredibly basic email function, in fact, and once you see how good Gmail can be with it in the mix, you won’t want to go back. Try out one of these three exceptional Gmail contact-enriching tools, and watch your email efficiency soar. Gmail enhancer #1: The custom contacts panel The simplest Gmail contacts enhancement worth considering is an add-on called, rather appropriately, Contacts+ . The service is available in a variety of forms , but the one you’ll want to use is the Chrome browser extension , which brings the most pertinent info directly into the Gmail website. Once you have the extension installed and you’ve signed up with the service, you’ll find a button to activate it in the panel at the right of the Gmail desktop site (if you don’t see that button, the little left-facing arrow in the lower-right corner of the screen will reveal it) Read More …

The Gmail-enhancing superpower you didn’t know you needed

For a service that’s all about interacting with other (alleged) humans, Gmail does a curiously poor job of putting people front and center. Sure, the Gmail inbox is all about communication—but have you ever found yourself staring at an email and struggling to remember what you know about the person who sent it or exchanges you’ve had in the past? If you interact with enough mammals over email, it’s bound to happen. And Gmail just doesn’t have particularly powerful tools for providing the on-demand context you need to successfully navigate your way out of that situation. Up until a matter of months ago, in fact, Gmail didn’t have any real form of integration with its companion Google Contacts service. Late last year, Google added a Contacts panel into the website’s sidebar, which was a significant step—but the information in that panel is still pretty limited and lacking. You can see basic contact info for people who emailed you and a list of past emails involving them, and that’s about it. If you want any additional details, you’ll have to stop what you’re doing, click away from the message, and move over to a whole other page to find it. Read More …

Haven is dead, but JPMorgan still wants to transform healthcare

In February, JPMorgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway ended Haven, a buzzy joint venture that sought to improve patient outcomes through better primary care and that shook up the entire healthcare world. Now, the banking giant is launching its own version of Haven: Morgan Health. Dan Mendelson, a healthcare consultant who previously served as the associate director for health at the Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration, will head up JPMorgan’s new health company. He says that Morgan Health will have the same goals as Haven did, in terms of improving quality, access, and cost, but differ in its approach. “The Haven experience focused us on primary care, digital medicine, and specific populations. . . . You can see this as a continuation of the work that was started at Haven,” he said in an interview with healthcare industry publication Becker’s Hospital Review . Haven was attempting to build a system from the ground up, he says. Instead of taking that approach, Morgan Health will focus on collaborating with outside partners to create a new health program for the bank’s 165,000 employees and their families. The goal of the new venture is to reinvent how employees receive their healthcare Read More …

How Sears and Standard Oil paved the way for the age of Amazon

Despite Amazon’s undisputed centrality in the contemporary digital economy, a close look at its core business model reveals it to be surprisingly conventional. Before the invention of e-commerce, mail-order catalog companies such as Sears, Roebuck had accustomed American consumers to purchasing goods sight unseen from vendors with whom they communicated solely via information technology. Like Amazon, Sears, Roebuck neither manufactured goods nor owned inventory but functioned solely as information intermediary. Read More …