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Yes, I was wrong, and I see your point. The article says AI could be Apple's undoing, though, if it is able to deliver something far beyond what Apple can do.

by sverige 10y ago

Yes, I was wrong, and I see your point. The article says AI could be Apple's undoing, though, if it is able to deliver something far beyond what Apple can do. Are you saying that even if this is the case, users will stick by Apple instead of abandoning their platform? Or that Apple will still be able to make enough on a diminished user base because of their privacy concerns? The latter seems a little like RIM's strategy of marketing secure communications until they had no more market share.

walterbell 10y ago
On the AI front, Apple of course needs to compete. But AI/statistics relies on a combination of signal and compute. If Apple can convince customers that they will honor customer consent signals (on-device permissions), they can gain cultural permission to mine data on the device, then send only a computed result to their servers for combination with public data/signals. They can add another custom processor on the device for user data analytics (there is already a motion co-processor). Apple has a good track record of using marketing to sidestep technical limitations, although it remains to be seen if that can be maintained without Jobs. They were relatively early in marketing Siri (long before Echo), even if the execution has been weak. It's a fallacy that AI requires loss of privacy. It's easy to forget that the most powerful general purpose computing object on the planet is the human brain. Any AI strategy must leverage this in some manner. Harvesting historical data is one tactic. There is no reason why we cannot create AI business models around consent and 1:1 delegation from AI to human, e.g. explicit permissions. Apple seems well aware of the technical challenges in protecting privacy while training algorithms, e.g. Apple Maps only retains query data for 15 minutes, https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policies-repel-the-data-scientists-it-needs-to-create-predictive-smartphones/ https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policie... . Past technical breakthroughs have come from constraints, let's hope Apple can recruit smart people up to the challenge of balancing privacy & AI.

by sverige 10y ago

walterbell 10y ago

On the AI front, Apple of course needs to compete. But AI/statistics relies on a combination of signal and compute. If Apple can convince customers that they will honor customer consent signals (on-device permissions), they can gain cultural permission to mine data on the device, then send only a computed result to their servers for combination with public data/signals. They can add another custom processor on the device for user data analytics (there is already a motion co-processor). Apple has a good track record of using marketing to sidestep technical limitations, although it remains to be seen if that can be maintained without Jobs. They were relatively early in marketing Siri (long before Echo), even if the execution has been weak. It's a fallacy that AI requires loss of privacy. It's easy to forget that the most powerful general purpose computing object on the planet is the human brain. Any AI strategy must leverage this in some manner. Harvesting historical data is one tactic. There is no reason why we cannot create AI business models around consent and 1:1 delegation from AI to human, e.g. explicit permissions. Apple seems well aware of the technical challenges in protecting privacy while training algorithms, e.g. Apple Maps only retains query data for 15 minutes, https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policies-repel-the-data-scientists-it-needs-to-create-predictive-smartphones/ https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policie... . Past technical breakthroughs have come from constraints, let's hope Apple can recruit smart people up to the challenge of balancing privacy & AI.