Artificial intelligence pioneer says we need to start over

The bottom line: Other scientists at the conference said back-propagation still has a core role in AI's future. But Hinton said that, to push materially ahead, entirely new methods will probably have to be invented. "Max Planck said, 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said."

How it works: In back propagation, labels or "weights" are used to represent a photo or voice within a brain-like neural layer. The weights are then adjusted and readjusted, layer by layer, until the network can perform an intelligent function with the fewest possible errors.

But Hinton suggested that, to get to where neural networks are able to become intelligent on their own, what is known as "unsupervised learning," "I suspect that means getting rid of back-propagation."

"I don't think it's how the brain works," he said. "We clearly don't need all the labeled data."

Driving the news: In March, American Dream — a 3 million-square-foot mall in New Jersey 20 or so years in the making — will be fully open. At a time when malls are struggling to find tenants, American Dream has already leased 90% of its storefronts, per the newsletter Retail Brew.

• It follows the high-profile opening of New York City's Hudson Yards mall last year.
• And American Dream's developers are planning a second location in Miami.

What sets American Dream apart from the dying malls of the last century is that it's just 45% retail. The other 55% of the mall's square footage will be entertainment options — from a hockey rink to an amusement park.

That trend is strengthening across the country, says Todd Caruso, a senior managing director and retail expert at real estate company CBRE.

• Mall and shopping center vacancies left behind by bankrupt "anchors" — the big department stores that were once the leading drivers of foot traffic — are being filled with gyms, movie theaters and even co-working spaces.
• Between 2014 and 2018, traditional retail's leased square footage decreased 6.7%, the International Council of Shopping Centers tells Axios.
• Meanwhile, non-retail tenants, like fitness, entertainment and services, have seen a 5.6% increase. The space leased by restaurants also increased 1.1%.
• The bet is that people will drive to the mall for these experiences — and end up buying a few things while they're at it.

The big picture: As e-commerce keeps taking a larger share of retail, some of the most resilient main street and mall tenants have been gyms, tattoo parlors and nail salons, all of which offer services that can't move online.

• These places create a halo effect that helps the stores around them. "There's cross-shopping," Caruso says of the benefits to both retail and non-retail tenants like boutiques and grocery stores.

Yes, but: The death of malls may be overstated, but e-commerce continues to hack away at physical retail.

• Close to 10,000 major U.S. stores closed in 2019.
• That's impacting jobs: 59 U.S. cities saw a year-over-year decline in the number of retail jobs in 2019, per Barbara Denham, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics.
• A number of department stores saw disappointing holiday seasons. Macy's announced today that it's closing 29 of its stores due to the drop in holiday sales.

The bottom line: The mall comeback is uneven — it's still largely limited to cities and wealthy suburbs, experts say.

• In lower-income, rural parts of the country, the retail apocalypse is indeed leaving residents with few retail options beyond convenience and dollar stores.

Go deeper: Boom times expected for U.S. commercial real estate

Cafe X CEO Henry Hu confirmed the closures in a phone call with Axios, saying the locations were running "prototype" machines that were designed to help the company better understand customer behaviors. It has installed more advanced machines in the San Jose and San Francisco airports, and has plans to add additional airport locations in 2020.

• Hu also acknowledged that the company asked employees to volunteer to take two weeks of unpaid leave at year-end, in an effort to conserve cash.
• "It's one of the normal things startups have to deal with."
• The San Francisco-based startup has raised $15 million in venture capital, and is in the midst of raising a new round that sources say has taken longer than originally expected.

Details: The principles are around three overarching goals:

• Get input from the public and experts, seeking comments on new regulations and basing decisions on scientific evidence.
• Avoid heavy regulation by conducting cost-benefit analysis and risk assessments, and coordinating with other federal agencies to keep policies consistent.
• Promote trust in AI by taking non-discrimination, safety, transparency and fairness into account in any regulatory action.

How it works: U.S. deputy chief technology officer Lynne Parker explained on a call with reporters how agencies could apply the principles.

• The Department of Transportation would draw on them as it considers regulations for AI-powered drones, she said, while the Food and Drug Administration would do the same as it reviews medical devices that rely on AI.

The big picture: The principles are part of a broader push to encourage Europe and other allies to follow America's lead on AI policy instead of letting countries like China set the tone, suggested U.S. chief technology officer Michael Kratsios.

• "The best way to counter authoritarian uses of AI is to make sure America and our international partners remain the global hubs of innovation, advancing technology in a manner consistent with our common values," Kratsios said.

What's next: The White House will seek public comment on the principles before finalizing them for agencies.

Go deeper:

• AI's health care hype
• Facebook purges accounts that used AI-generated profile photos

Between the lines: The child population also plummeted in the 1970s — when members of Generation X were kids — after the much larger Boomer generation aged into adulthood. But the child population steadily rose from then until the 2010s.

• Even after a numerical decline in the 1970s, children still made up 28% of the total 1980 population, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. In 2019, kids only made up 22% of the total population, according to the latest Census data.
• "This isn't the first decade of child population decline. But it ushers in a period when adult growth will continue to dwarf child growth as the population ages and proportionately fewer women are in their child bearing ages," Frey told Axios.

In the past decade, child populations declined in more states than they rose. But a handful of areas, like the West and South, have seen a surge of families and kids.

The drivers: Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut saw their child and teen populations plummet between 2010 and 2019 — an 11% to 12% decrease.

• Under-18s made up 22% of New Hampshire's population in 2010, but that figure fell to 18% in 2019. That was the biggest drop in kids' share of the population in any state, according to Axios' Census data analysis.
• California, the most populous state, saw the largest numerical decline of under-18-year-olds of any state. There were 400,000 fewer children and teenagers living in the state this year than there were nine years ago.

The other side: The District of Columbia and North Dakota saw their shares of children and teens spike during the decade — with a more than 20% increase for both areas, largely driven due to their small populations.

• Each added around 30,000 children since 2010, becoming the only two U.S. areas where under-18 population growth outpaced the rest of the population.
• North Dakota's booming oil-driven economy and its relatively high birth rates likely played a role.
• And while the growth rate for kids living in D.C. has steadily outpaced the growth of its adult population, under-18s still make up a smaller share of the district's population than any state.

States with the largest share of their populations under 18:

1. Utah
2. Texas (3rd in 2010)
3. Idaho (2nd in 2010)
4. Nebraska (10th in 2010)
5. Alaska (4th in 2010)

States with the smallest share of their populations under 18:

1. D.C.
2. Vermont
3. Maine
4. New Hampshire (8th in 2010)
5. Rhode Island (6th in 2010)

Go deeper: Americans are moving less

Between the lines: The drone industry hopes a workable Remote ID standard will make the FAA comfortable with allowing operators to fly drones beyond their line of sight and over people — allowances necessary to enable package delivery and other commercial uses.

Details: The draft rule, which was published in the Federal Register Tuesday, will apply to all recreational and commercial drones weighing more than 0.55 pounds. The public can comment on the proposed rule for 60 days.

Go deeper: The drone nightmare is here

By the numbers:

• Holiday shopping online is becoming the norm. This past Cyber Monday was Amazon's biggest sales day in history. And FedEx delivered a record-breaking 33 million packages that day. UPS planned on shipping 32 million parcels each day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, according to Transport Topics.
• At the same time, Google searches from “stolen package” have been steadily growing over the past decade, according to Google Trends data. Searches spike every December.
• More than 90,000 packages are stolen every day in New York City, and 1.7 million packages throughout the country are stolen or go missing each day, per the New York Times.
• An average of 26.2 packages per person are stolen in North Dakota — the highest package theft rate of any state, followed by Vermont, Alaska or New Mexico, according to a 2017 study by video security company Blink.
• The average value of a stolen package in 2017 was $140, per research from Ring, Amazon’s doorstep surveillance company, as reported by Bloomberg.

Stolen parcels might make for a blue Christmas, but there are a host of hidden costs that come with the holiday online shopping rush. Retailers’ warehouse workers and drivers are up against extremely demanding workloads to get the orders out on time.

• And there’s a steep environmental cost that comes with the planes, trucks and energy-draining warehouses it takes to ship gifts all over the country and world

What to watch: The thefts are creating new business opportunities for tech giants and startups alike.

• Amazon advertises its entire smart home apparatus — including Ring — as a way to prevent thefts. One Axion even bought his mother a Ring doorbell as a Christmas present. (Although Ring has recently come under fire after its cameras were hacked by strangers who would speak to customers, their dogs or children.)
• Amazon has also invested in lockers for package safekeeping.
• And the thefts are giving rise to new startups aiming to help solve the problem, such as Pickups or Latch.

The bottom line: Santa might have been onto something with chimney delivery.

The big picture: Companies are painting over existing practices with a veneer of rule-following, argues NYU law professor Ari Waldman in an upcoming article for the Washington University Law Review.

• "Mere symbols of compliance are standing in for real privacy protections," he writes.
• Companies that are meant to be constrained by privacy law are able to "recast and reframe it to benefit themselves," Waldman tells Axios.

The stand-ins, according to Waldman, include privacy policies, impact assessments, trainings, audits and paper trails.

• "These things have all the trappings of systems but instead are really just window dressing," he says.
• In surveys and interviews with privacy professionals, Waldman turned up a check-the-boxes approach to privacy.

What's happening: As privacy laws in Europe and California kick in, companies are setting up new internal structures to comply with them, says Dominique Shelton Leipzig, a privacy attorney at Perkins Coie.

The other side: "To conclude that assessments aren't working, I think, is a false conclusion," says Al Gidari, a longtime privacy lawyer now at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

• "Those processes work really well in companies because if they don't, people go to jail, employees get fired, companies get prosecuted," he tells Axios. But it's up to companies to prioritize privacy and implement effective systems.
• Gidari argues that internal assessments are necessary at big tech companies like Google, which he represented when it was investigated by the Federal Trade Commission in 2011. It's not possible to formally audit dozens of products and services on a regular basis, he says.

The bottom line: The offloading of enforcement to companies is a result of vague, toothless laws and weakened agencies like the FTC that would otherwise be in charge of enforcement.

• "Procedure is not enough," says Waldman. Laws should require a substantive change like a ban on sharing certain data, rather than a process like assessments of whether or not the data is being dealt with correctly.
• And penalties should be much higher for wrongdoing, Gidari argues. When the FTC fined Facebook $5B for a privacy violation earlier this year, the company's stock went up. "It's awfully hard to see how that alone is sufficient," Gidari says.

"When you have companies setting the rules, my biggest concern is that it's just going to be streamlined toward the most efficient process for them — but not necessarily the most efficient process for users or the fairest process for users," says Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland.

Go deeper: The global shortage of privacy experts

The background: Analog computing was dethroned by today's dominant digital machines in the 1960s. Since then, computing has been about "higher speed, higher precision, higher throughput," says IBM's Jeff Welser. That's where digital tech shines.

• But as AI becomes omnipresent, some of those core requirements of computers are being reconsidered.
• A realization is dawning in some corners of the tech world that "maybe we were too quick to dispense with analog 60 years ago," says Eli Yablonovitch, a professor at Berkeley.

What's happening: The neural networks that drive most AI systems rely on multiplying numbers really, really fast. They currently use the precision and power of digital computing for the job. But AI computations may not need to be so precise.

• "When you start getting pushed to the limits of what [digital computing] can offer, when you have a new class of problems, then it becomes interesting to revisit analog," says Shahin Farshchi, a computer scientist and VC at Lux Capital.
• IBM, several startups, academic researchers and others are doing just that.

How it works: In a digital computer, everything runs on 1s and 0s — a universal, highly exact human-made language.

• But an analog computer is built on the physical properties of its components. It can perform multiplication, for example, by utilizing the properties of transistors.
• “The idea is to let the natural dynamics of the physical system solve the problem,” says Garrett Kenyon of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• These systems come with obstacles: They can be inconsistent and difficult to program, Kenyon says.

Modern experiments with analog technology likely won’t result in a completely analog computer but a hybrid, with an analog portion that approximates an answer that can be fed into a digital part for refinement.

The big picture: There’s a broader resurgence of interest in new and forgotten approaches to computing.

• "Both of the most futuristic areas we're looking at are actually not all digital," Welser says of analog and quantum computing.
• Researchers at Los Alamos and elsewhere are developing neuromorphic chips, a subset of analog computing that more closely mirrors neurons in the brain.

"We use ideas regarding the principle of analog computing from the old days, but had to invent completely different ways of implementing them on a modern silicon chip, and had to come up with some completely new ideas as well," says Columbia University's Yannis Tsividis, whose lab is designing hybrid technologies for scientific computing.

What’s next: Analog computing is vying to be a part of the AI explosion. "AI is obviously already a very, very huge thing," says Yablonovitch. "If analog is contributing to that, then it means it has come back after 60 years in the wilderness."

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Jeff Welser's surname.