My new gig: Chief Technology Officer at AlertMe

Tomorrow I officially join the AlertMe team as their Chief Technology Officer. I’ve known about this company for quite some time, and I always loved the core concept. I’ve been helping them out here and there over the last few months, and I look forward to joining the team, just in time for BETA launch.


What is AlertMe?

AlertMe helps publishers connect directly with their readers in ways they never could before. It allows the reader to raise a hand to say: “Keep me updated on a story that matters to me… don’t make me hunt it down, or hope to randomly stumble upon it.” This helps creates loyal, regular readers, that return to the publisher’s site when new information is published.

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Thought Experiment: Will Autonomous Cars Try to Kill Us?

I came across an headline on Medium this morning that grabbed my attention. The subheading softened it a bit, but nonetheless, I was intrigued. The article, titled “A Self-Driving Car Might Decide You Should Die”, used a series of well-known ethics questions to reach the author’s ultimate point. That point, at least what I got from it was, if you build an algorithm that removes human error by calculating the optimal outcome of a life-threatening situation, how do you assign value to human life so you can choose who lives and who dies? It is in the programming of this algorithm that our values are truly reflected, and that is, in fact, very scary.

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