Month: October 2022

Enlarge / The White House, engulfed in pixels. (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

Today, the White House proposed a "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights," a set of principles and practices that seek to guide "the design, use, and deployment of automated systems," with the goal of protecting the rights of Americans in "the age of artificial intelligence," according to the White House.

The blueprint is a set of non-binding guidelines—or suggestions—providing a "national values statement" and a toolkit to help lawmakers and businesses build the proposed protections into policy and products. The White House crafted the blueprint, it said, after a year-long process that sought input from people across the country "on the issue of algorithmic and data-driven harms and potential remedies."

The document represents a wide-ranging approach to countering potential harms in artificial intelligence. It touches on concerns about bias in AI systems, AI-based surveillance, unfair health care or insurance decisions, data security—and much more—in the context of American civil liberties, criminal justice, education, and the private sector.

• 

  The Pixel 4 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 4 is officially hitting its end of life this month after three short years of service. We sometimes see these dead Google phones get one more wrap-up update before Google cuts the cord, but the Android October 2022 update is the end of the line here.

The Pixel 4 was a big batch of Google experiments passed off as a consumer product, and we did not take kindly to it. It was the first (and only) Google phone to attempt to copy Apple's FaceID by using a grid of IR dots and extra hardware to scan the user's face. The system was much slower than the fingerprint reader on the Pixel 3, and it oddly worked on sleeping people for several months after launch.

The Pixel 4 was the first and only Google phone to integrate "Project Soli," a tiny Google radar chip that can detect motion. The laboratory versions of Soli promised that the technology could capture "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but the commercial implementation in the Pixel 4 could only (sometimes) capture giant arm movements. Soli lives on in Google smart displays for sleep tracking, but the phone version is dead. Combine that with very high prices for the two device sizes ($800 and $900) and very small batteries (2800 mAh and 3700 mAh), and you have the makings of a very bad device.

Enlarge (credit: Future Publishing | Getty Images)

Two months ago, Sundar Pichai announced a new era of belt-tightening at Google, leading to the shutdown of the Pixel laptop hardware team, a culling of half of the experimental projects at Area 120, a spinoff of Project Loon's technology, and the death of Google Stadia. Next up for the icy hand of Google's budget department might be YouTube. MacRumors reports that YouTube is experimenting with paywalling 4K video resolution for videos, making it exclusive to subscribers of YouTube Premium.

Reports of this experiment hitting some users have been popping up for the past month. When selecting a resolution, every option is available except for "2160p" (4K), which has a little "Premium" tag next to it. That will be $11.99 a month if you want to access videos in the highest resolution. Google's recently killed game-streaming service, Stadia, had a similar billing setup, where 4K was a premium add-on.

So, after testing up to 12 ads on YouTube for non-Premium users, now some users reported that they also have to get a Premium account just to watch videos in 4K. pic.twitter.com/jJodoAxeDp

— Alvin (@sondesix) October 1, 2022

This isn't the only YouTube revenue-boosting experiment Google has tried lately. Last month, some users saw as many as 10 unskippable ads before a video. Criticism was strong, and Google later called the move an "experiment" that it "concluded," which apparently means it's not happening. We could see something similar happen to the idea of paywalling the 4K resolution, depending on how the reception goes. We asked Google PR for comment, but the company said it has nothing to share right now.