Why Google Photos still can't identify gorillas

PLUS: Russian hackers' Olympics-ban revenge, JFK's 4-day bomb cyclone disaster, and the physics of firing an arrow straight up. [View this email in your browser]( [logo]( [[WIRED Magazine]1.11.18]( In 2015, Google Photos misidentified two black men as gorillas. Google apologized, announced it was working on “long-term fixes.” But according to some tests conducted by WIRED, that long-term fix is still forthcoming. For now, Google Photos just [plays at being blind](. “Inside Google Photos, a baboon is a baboon, but a monkey is not a monkey,” writes senior business reporter [Tom Simonite](. “Gorillas and chimpanzees are invisible.” Even two years later, the tech giant still can’t trust its algorithm to not seem like a racist jerk. Which points to a major limitation of Google’s much vaunted machine learning technology: By human standards, it still ain’t that smart. “With enough data and computing power, software can be trained to categorize images or transcribe speech to a high level of accuracy. But it can’t easily go beyond the experience of that training,” Simonite writes. “And even the very best algorithms lack the ability to use common sense, or abstract concepts, to refine their interpretation of the world as humans do.” Also: Russian hackers’ [Olympics-ban revenge]( JFK’s 4-day [bomb cyclone disaster]( and the ([potentially lethal]( physics of firing an arrow straight up. Bad Image When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind By Tom Simonite WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported “no results” for the search terms “gorilla,” “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey.” Grounded Inside the 4-Day Disaster that Nearly Broke JFK Airport By Alex Davies The airlines that had diverted their planes started sending them to JFK. They tried to make up for their canceled flights and stick to their standard schedules. The result was the equivalent of two days’ worth of planes trying to land at the airport in the space of a few hours. Physics Can an Arrow Fired Straight Up Fall Fast Enough to Kill You? By Rhett Allain Let’s start with a basic physics problem. How fast would an object be moving if you dropped it from a height of 300 feet (91.4 meters)? hack brief Russian Hackers Release Apparent IOC Emails in Wake of Ban By Louise Matsakis The emails appear to span from the end of 2016 to the spring of 2017, and focus on correspondence between antidoping investigators who helped uncover a wide-scale, systematic doping scheme carried out by Russian athletes. [advertisement]( [Powered by LiveIntent]( [Ad Choices]( [WIRED Magazine Subscription] Get Wired Don't Let the Future Leave You Behind. Get 12 Months of WIRED Magazine for Just $10. SUBSCRIBE NOW Virtual Reality The Best VR News at CES Isn’t a Headset By Julie Muncy Wearable technology is already a hard sell to people outside the tech bubble—turns out people don’t like things that make them look silly!—and VR’s cable management problem makes that even worse. Takeoff Climb Inside Bell’s (Theoretical) Flying Taxi of the Future By Jack Stewart The technology to produce and fly battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft is on its way, and big players in aviation are starting to talk seriously about how to deploy it in the kind of system Uber would love to launch. Listening In When Wi-Fi Won’t Work, Let Sound Carry Your Data By Klint Finley Instead of using a printed ticket or a QR code on a phone to gain entrance to an event, your phone plays a short, inaudible sound. It’s a bit like having your phone whisper a secret password to a digital assistant, like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, to gain access to an event. Physics How Dark Matter Physicists Score Deals on Liquid Xenon By Sophia Chen Xenon makes up about 0.00001 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, a concentration comparable to a pot of soup seasoned with a single grain of salt. And only a handful of companies produce xenon gas globally, by extracting it from the air at so-called air separation plants. Fetish Moog’s Newest Synthesizer Is an Ultra-Funky Drum Machine By Michael Calore It's a monophonic, semi-modular, analog percussion synthesizer: When you switch on the DFAM and start twisting the knobs, it makes really cool synthetic drum and percussion sounds—deep throbs, hypersonic plinks, and everything in between. [advertisement]( [Powered by LiveIntent]( [AdChoices]( [WIRED Magazine]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Pinterest]( [Youtube]( [Instagram]( This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, [wired@newsletters.wired.com]( to your address book. View our [Privacy Policy]( [Unsubscribe]( Copyright © Condé Nast 2018. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.