New Apple and Twitter Initiatives Highlight the Human Factor

[Terry Olaes]

At WWDC this year, Apple reiterated several times that the upcoming release of the rebadged Beats Music service, Apple Music, doesn't solely rely on algorithms to generate your playlists. Instead, human curators will be doing that work. Twitter's "Project Lightning" will also rely on the human touch to personify live events and curate the content presented to users. The Verge takes a look at this trend and postulates on where the trend is heading.

Intelligent algorithms and machine learning are undoubtedly useful instruments, but they have their limits. At their present stage of development, smart assistant services like Google Now and Cortana can already predict many of our actions and proactively surface useful information. But they don’t really have taste.