AI

Standardized Mess

If you’re not familiar, Precogs are psychics in Minority Report who can see a crime before it happens. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but let’s just say the Precogs get things wrong.

Controversy is brewing in the U.K. over a Precog-like system for grading exams. 

The timeline of events

1. Schools closed.
2. Education authorities cancelled A-level exams, which are subject-specific standardized tests used for placement in universities, graduate-level studies, vocational training, and jobs. 
3. The U.K. implemented a new grading system. Without exams, teachers were tasked with ranking pupils by ability and predicting their standardized test grades.

Enter algorithm: An algorithm calibrated teachers’ marks with another key metric: schools’ past exam performance. This system was designed to predict grade distributions and hedge against grade inflation. In practice, it downgraded hundreds of thousands of student results from teachers’ assessments. 

• Essentially, this meant algorithmic grading on a curve...across the entire U.K. 

The results started rolling in last week

Roughly 25% (~124,000) of the Scottish predicted-exam results were downgraded. In the poorest parts of Scotland, 15.2% of pass rates were downgraded. In the wealthiest areas, it was 6.9%. 

• Since the model heavily weighed historical school data, it may have downgraded all-star students from disadvantaged areas.

Students, parents, and teachers were angry with the results. The process left some pupils “feeling their future had been determined by statistical modeling rather than their own ability," Scotland’s education secretary lamented. Scotland quickly reversed course and nullified the downgrades, instead deciding to go with teacher assessments. 

The debate is still playing out across Northern Ireland, Wales, and England, with some politicians urging U.K. PM Boris Johnson to intervene. For his part, Johnson has said the grades are “robust” and “dependable.” 

Bottom line: Precogs weren’t infallible and neither are teachers’ predictive assessments. But the U.K. moderation algorithm over-indexed on socioeconomic status, resulting in students being graded by postcode (British for zip code) rather than individual performance. 

+ While we’re here: A couple weeks ago, the U.K. scrapped an immigration AI system that fast-tracked white visa applicants.

AI

The Simulation Expands

In May, Salesforce unveiled the AI Economist, a virtual simulation that pairs reinforcement learning–a trial-and-error subset of machine learning–with tax policy and game theory. AI agents collect resources, trade, and build houses in simple virtual economies. Then, an AI policy regulator adjusts marginal tax rates. Rinse, repeat. 

Now, the company’s researchers have open-sourced the code, with the hopes that experts build their own gamified economies and stress-test policy proposals. “We want to partner with government leaders, city planners, economists, etc. to see how this can work in the real world,” the team told me. 

With millions of years of economic life lived in the simulation, the AI agents have yet to declare “no taxation without representation.” But they “started to game their tax rates—they tried to circumvent the tax schedule, just as in real life,” the researchers said. 

Bottom line: While the AI Economist lacks the complexity of our messy world, it’s an effective use case for AI and a new way for economists to test ideas in a low-stakes environment.

SPONSORED BY GRAZE

Robot Solves Green Grass Conundrum

Turns out the grass is greener. 

No, really. Everyone can stop asking now. Money’s green, and there’s piles of it over on Graze’s lawn.

Graze is the fully autonomous commercial lawn mower disrupting a $53 billion dollar market—and solving an age-old conundrum in the process. Yes, people, this grass really is greener: Graze already has $19 million in pre-orders.

So, now that you know Graze’s grass is greener, don’t you want to see what life’s like in these pastures? Lucky for you, Graze is looking for investors.

Get some of this Graze green in your wallet.

Learn more here.

AV

Pilot Platoons

When it comes to transportation, platooning is one way to roll deep. 

How it works: A human drives a lead truck. One or more trucks follow the leader using connectivity and automated driving technology. Pittsburgh startup Locomation recently ran a round-trip, two-truck pilot platoon between Portland, OR, and Nampa, ID (420 miles). The revenue-generating trip hauled Wilson Logistics trailers and freight. 

• The second truck had a safety driver onboard to watch over the truck while it was in automated follow mode. 

There are three reasons why you may see platoons before standalone self-driving trucks, Locomation CEO and Cofounder Çetin Meriçli tells me: 

• Tech readiness—Human-guided convoy trips are easier than completely driverless trips.
• Safety—See above and substitute safer for easier. 
• Operations—“Trucking is built with the core assumption of a human driver at the epicenter because human drivers do much more than just drive the truck.”

Zoom out: The U.S. government recently awarded platooning contracts to three research organizations. The Pentagon is also interested in the technology. 

+ Food for thought: A long platoon is basically just a train. And it still has to deal with traffic.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Epic Games is beefing with Apple and Google over the 30% take rate on app stores. As Ars Technica points out, console makers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) also take a 30% fee of all transactions within their closed gaming platforms. 

Quote: “What would happen if computers could see the world the way we see it?”—Russell Kirsch, speaking to Wired in 2010. Kirsch, who invented the square pixel and created the first digital photo, passed away last week at 91. 

Read: The BBC recounts how the Soviet Union tried to build a supersonic rival to the Concorde. Key word = tried

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• The Federal Reserve is partnering with MIT to build and test a hypothetical central bank digital currency over the next few years. 
• Photoshop will ship a preview version that uses metadata tagging and cryptography to add digital signatures to images and videos. 
• AutoX has launched a Shanghai robotaxi service for the general public. 
• Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on servers for more than a year, due to a bug that’s been fixed, TechCrunch reports. 
• U.S. companies—including Apple, Ford, Walmart, and Disney—have urged President Trump to rethink a ban on transactions with WeChat, the WSJ reports. 
• The $549 Samsung A51 5G UW, the cheapest phone to support mmWave 5G in the U.S., is available on Verizon. 
• India announced the National Digital Health Mission, an opt-in system to create digital health IDs for citizens.

WHAT'S BREWING THIS WEEK

Monday: JD earnings; NBA Playoffs begin; 2020 Democratic National Convention begins; hearing in extradition case of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. 

Tuesday: Walmart earnings; SpaceX scheduled to launch 11th batch of Starlink satellites; FAA UAS Symposium Episode 2; Japanese cargo ship scheduled to depart from International Space Station. 

Wednesday: Earnings (Nvidia, Target); National Aviation Day (I’ll be flying my drone to celebrate). 

Thursday: Alibaba earnings; Black Data Processing Associates National Tech Conference; Informa announces 5G World Awards shortlist. 

Friday: Samsung’s new Galaxy Note20 and Tab S7 become generally available; Dua Lipa releases a new album.

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For your ambient music playlist: Here’s the background noise of the International Space Station. If you’ve ever wondered what being in space sounds like, this is for you. 

For a DIY project: How to make a mini Boston Dynamics robot on your own.

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Epic Games sues Apple and Google
• SoftBank is back
• Tech trivia—cloud gaming edition