Weekend Reading, Watching and Listening Recommendations [February 18, 2022]

We Need A Standard Unit Of Measure For Risk; What is happening in Artificial Intelligence? Can We Agree on One Shared History?; Machine Intelligence and Public Policy

1. Read: We Need A Standard Unit Of Measure For Risk: More than three decades ago a Stanford professor proposed a uniform way of expressing your odds of dying from a specific cause: the micromort. It’s time it went mainstream. [via Steven Johnson]

2. Read: What is happening in Artificial Intelligence? Google Research: Themes from 2021 and Beyond

3. Listen: We've been seeing a lot of debate recently about how history should be taught. For example, some believe that the Civil War was about state rights while some argue that slavery played a large role in it. But what if we could all agree on one shared history? Throughline on NPR is one of my favorite podcasts and Tamim Ansary is one of my favorite authors. He has a fantastic book “The Invention of Yesterday” on common themes from 50,000 years of human history. [via NPR]

4. Watch: Machine Intelligence and Public Policy. Powered by large amounts of data, algorithms today can do pretty amazing things; from recognizing faces to understanding language. Remarkably, the engine underneath these feats is a statistical one - combining large amounts of data to produce fundamental statistical insights. If viewed from the correct light, could this same engine be used to transform public policy?