Author: azeeadmin

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be.

For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of tech.

Around a decade ago, Williams won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor for its employees. Then in 2017, he won an even rarer award, this time for his scorching criticism of the entire digital technology industry in which he had worked so successfully. The inaugural winner of Cambridge University’s $100,000 “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking, Williams was recognized for the fruits of his doctoral research at Oxford University, on how “digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible, as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own.” In 2018, he published his brilliantly written book Stand Out of Our Light, an instant classic in the field of tech ethics.

In an in-depth conversation by phone and email, edited below for length and clarity, Williams told me about how and why our attention is under profound assault. At one point, he points out that the artificial intelligence which beat the world champion at the game Go is now aimed squarely — and rather successfully — at beating us, or at least convincing us to watch more YouTube videos and stay on our phones a lot longer than we otherwise would. And while most of us have sort of observed and lamented this phenomenon, Williams believes the consequences of things like smartphone compulsion could be much more dire and widespread than we realize, ultimately putting billions of people in profound danger while testing our ability to even have a human will.

It’s a chilling prospect, and yet somehow, if you read to the end of the interview, you’ll see Williams manages to end on an inspiring and hopeful note. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: this interview is approximately 5,500 words / 25 minutes read time. The first third has been ungated given the importance of this subject. To read the whole interview, be sure to join the Extra Crunch membership. ~ Danny Crichton

Introduction and background

Greg Epstein: I want to know more about your personal story. You grew up in West Texas. Then you found yourself at Google, where you won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor. Then at some point you realized, “I’ve got to get out of here.” What was that journey like?

James Williams: This is going to sound neater and more intentional than it actually was, as is the case with most stories. In a lot of ways my life has been a ping-ponging back and forth between tech and the humanities, trying to bring them into some kind of conversation.

I spent my formative years in a town called Abilene, Texas, where my father was a university professor. It’s the kind of place where you get the day off school when the rodeo comes to town. Lots of good people there. But it’s not exactly a tech hub. Most of my tech education consisted of spending late nights, and full days in the summer, up in the university computer lab with my younger brother just messing around on the fast connection there. Later when I went to college, I started studying computer engineering, but I found that I had this itch about the broader “why” questions that on some deeper level I needed to scratch. So I changed my focus to literature.

After college, I started working at Google in their Seattle office, helping to grow their search ads business. I never, ever imagined I’d work in advertising, and there was some serious whiplash from going straight into that world after spending several hours a day reading James Joyce. Though I guess Leopold Bloom in Ulysses also works in advertising, so there’s at least some thread of a connection there. But I think what I found most compelling about the work at the time, and I guess this would have been in 2005, was the idea that we were fundamentally changing what advertising could be. If historically advertising had to be an annoying, distracting barrage on people’s attention, it didn’t have to anymore because we finally had the means to orient it around people’s actual intentions. And search, that “database of intentions,” was right at the vanguard of that change.

The adversarial persuasion machine

Greg: So how did you end up at Oxford, studying tech ethics? What did you go there to learn about?

James: What led me to go to Oxford to study the ethics of persuasion and attention was that I didn’t see this reorientation of advertising around people’s true goals and intentions ultimately winning out across the industry. In fact, I saw something really concerning happening in the opposite direction. The old attention-grabby forms of advertising were being uncritically reimposed in the new digital environment, only now in a much more sophisticated and unrestrained manner. These attention-grabby goals, which are goals that no user anywhere has ever had for themselves, seemed to be cannibalizing the design goals of the medium itself.

In the past advertising had been described as a kind of “underwriting” of the medium, but now it seemed to be “overwriting” it. Everything was becoming an ad. My whole digital environment seemed to be transmogrifying into some weird new kind of adversarial persuasion machine. But persuasion isn’t even the right word for it. It’s something stronger than that, something more in the direction of coercion or manipulation that I still don’t think we have a good word for. When I looked around and didn’t see anybody talking about the ethics of that stuff, in particular the implications it has for human freedom, I decided to go study it myself.

Greg: How stressful of a time was that for you when you were realizing that you needed to make such a big change or that you might be making such a big change?

James: The big change being shifting to do doctoral work?

Greg: Well that, but really I’m trying to understand what it was like to go from a very high place in the tech world to becoming essentially a philosopher critic of your former work.

James: A lot of people I talked to didn’t understand why I was doing it. Friends, coworkers, I think they didn’t quite understand why it was worthy of such a big step, such a big change in my personal life to try to interrogate this question. There was a bit of, not loneliness, but a certain kind of motivational isolation, I guess. But since then, it’s certainly been heartening to see many of them come to realize why I felt it was so important. Part of that is because these questions are so much more in the foreground of societal awareness now than they were then.

Liberation in the age of attention

Greg: You write about how when you were younger you thought “there were no great political struggles left.” Now you’ve said, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.” Tell me about that transition intellectually or emotionally or both. How good did you think it was back then, the world was back then, and how concerned are you now?

James: I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with this feeling that there weren’t really any more existential threats to the liberal project left for us to fight against. It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight and get a good job and keep recycling and try not to crash the car as we cruise off into this ultra-stable sunset at the end of history.

What I’ve realized, though, is that this crisis of attention brought upon by adversarial persuasive design is like a bucket of mud that’s been thrown across the windshield of the car. It’s a first-order problem. Yes, we still have big problems to solve like climate change and extremism and so on. But we can’t solve them unless we can give the right kind of attention to them. In the same way that, if you have a muddy windshield, yeah, you risk veering off the road and hitting a tree or flying into a ravine. But the first thing is that you really need to clean your windshield. We can’t really do anything that matters unless we can pay attention to the stuff that matters. And our media is our windshield, and right now there’s mud all over it.

Greg: One of the terms that you either coin or use for the situation that we find ourselves in now is the age of attention.

James: I use this phrase “Age of Attention” not so much to advance it as a serious candidate for what we should call our time, but more as a rhetorical counterpoint to the phrase “Information Age.” It’s a reference to the famous observation of Herbert Simon, which I discuss in the book, that when information becomes abundant it makes attention the scarce resource.

Much of the ethical work on digital technology so far has addressed questions of information management, but far less has addressed questions of attention management. If attention is now the scarce resource so many technologies are competing for, we need to give more ethical attention to attention.

Greg: Right. I just want to make sure people understand how severe this may be, how severe you think it is. I went into your book already feeling totally distracted and surrounded by totally distracted people. But when I finished the book, and it’s one of the most marked-up books I’ve ever owned by the way, I came away with the sense of acute crisis. What is being done to our attention is affecting us profoundly as human beings. How would you characterize it?

James: Thanks for giving so much attention to the book. Yeah, these ideas have very deep roots. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Simone Weil wrote that “It is not we who move, but images pass before our eyes and we live them.” It seems to me that attention should really be seen as one of our most precious and fundamental capacities, cultivating it in the right way should be seen as one of the greatest goods, and injuring it should be seen as of the greatest harms.

In the book, I was interested to explore whether the language of attention can be used to talk usefully about the human will. At the end of the day I think that’s a major part of what’s at stake in the design of these persuasive systems, the success of the human will.

“Want what we want?”

Greg: To translate those concerns about “the success of the human will” into simpler terms, I think the big concern here is, what happens to us as human beings if we find ourselves waking up in the morning and going to bed at night wanting things that we really only want because AI and algorithms have helped convince us we want them? For example, we want to be on our phone chiefly because it serves Samsung or Google or Facebook or whomever. Do we lose something of our humanity when we lose the ability to “want what we want?”

James: Absolutely. I mean, philosophers call these second order volitions as opposed to just first order volitions. A first order volition is, “I want to eat the piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” But the second order volition is, “I don’t want to want to eat that piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” Creating those second order volitions, being able to define what we want to want, requires that we have a certain capacity for reflection.

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.” But that’s basically taking evidence of effective persuasion as evidence of intention, which is very convenient for serving design metrics and business models, but not necessarily a user’s interests.

AI and attention

Greg: Let’s talk about AI and its role in the persuasion that you’ve been describing. You talk about, a number of times, about the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go. I think that’s a great example and that that AI has been deployed to keep us watching YouTube longer, and that billions of dollars are literally being spent to figure out how to get us to look at one thing over another.

The FDA has drafted new guidance for the regulation of e-cigarettes, particularly with regards to flavored nicotine products.

The first big change is that the FDA has bumped up the application due date by one year for FDA approval of flavored products. Manufacturers of all flavored ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery system) products will now have to submit premarket applications by August 8, 2021.

The second change is introducing a new compliance policy with regards to flavored ENDS products.

At the time that the current compliance policy was enforced, in 2017, e-cigarette use among youth was leveling off. But drastic growth in the popularity of e-cigs among minors over the past two years have led to various changes in the policy, including the restriction of sales of flavored ENDS products via certain retail channels from November 2018.

“The most recent data show more than 3.6 million middle and high school students across the country were current (past 30 day) e-cigarette users in 2018,” wrote Gottlieb in the announcement. “This is a dramatic increase of 1.5 million children since the previous year. The data also showed that youth who used e-cigarettes also were using them more frequently and they were using flavored e-cigarette products more often than in 2017.”

Identifying flavored pods as a culprit was the first step, but the FDA is now introducing a policy that looks at how accessible any flavored ENDS product is to minors to determine whether or not it can stay on the market.

For online sales, retailers must have an age-verification process that connects to third-party data sources in order to sell flavored nicotine products. For physical retailers, the policy says that flavored nicotine products must be behind some sort of age-gate, whether that’s at the front door of the shop or within a different age-gated section of the store itself. In other words, there must be some barrier to entry before POS between minors and flavored ENDS products.

From the announcement:

Our proposed policy provides examples of circumstances that we’ll consider – for example, if flavored ENDS products are sold in locations where minors can enter at any time (e.g., the entire establishment or an area within the establishment); or, for online sales, if the products are sold without an appropriate limit on the quantity that a customer may purchase within a given period of time, and without independent, third-party, age- and identity-verification services that compare customer information against third-party data sources, such as public records. We’re also specifically seeking comment on, among other things, whether there are new technologies that can help prevent youth access at retail locations and intend to consider the use of those tools when we finalize the guidance.

The main point to remember is that the FDA plans to prioritize enforcement of these products based on whether they’re sold in ways that pose a greater risk for minors to access them and become addicted to them.

While this proposal includes further regulation of the budding e-cigarette industry, it could be an important step forward for the space in the long term. The e-cigarette industry won’t reach its potential as an alternative to cigarettes until the issue of underage use is solved for good.

The FDA sees flavored ENDS products as a gateway for young people, and closing off access to those products as soon as possible gives the industry, from manufacturers to retailers to regulators, the opportunity to plan for how these products can be sold and distributed in the future, or if flavored products should exist at all.

The new plan does not propose enforcement of all ENDS products — tobacco, menthol and mint-flavored ENDS products can remain on the market and keep their original 2022 deadline for premarket FDA approval applications.

Juul Labs had this to say in response to the draft guidance:

We are committed to reducing youth usage while preserving our opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes, the number one cause of preventable death in the world. As part of our action plan deployed in November 2018 to keep JUUL products out of the hands of youth, we stopped the sale of flavored JUULpods to retail stores, strengthened our retail compliance and secret shopper program, enhanced our online age-verification, exited our Facebook and Instagram accounts and are continuously working to remove inappropriate third-party social media content. We support category-wide action including the responsible, restricted sale of flavored products and will review today’s draft guidance as we continue to work with FDA, state Attorneys General, local municipalities, and community organizations as a transparent and responsible partner in combating underage use.

Commissioner Gottlieb announced his resignation a week ago. National Cancer Institute Director Dr. Ned Sharpless will take over as acting FDA Commissioner in April.

Gottlieb taken measured steps to keep ENDS products away from minors while still allowing adult smokers to have an alternative on the market. Whether Sharpless will thread the needle quite as well remains to be seen, but Altria stocks fell on word of his appointment.

Today’s proposal is open for public comments for 30 days.

The FDA has drafted new guidance for the regulation of e-cigarettes, particularly with regards to flavored nicotine products.

The first big change is that the FDA has bumped up the application due date by one year for FDA approval of flavored products. Manufacturers of all flavored ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery system) products will now have to submit premarket applications by August 8, 2021.

The second change is introducing a new compliance policy with regards to flavored ENDS products.

At the time that the current compliance policy was enforced, in 2017, e-cigarette use among youth was leveling off. But drastic growth in the popularity of e-cigs among minors over the past two years have led to various changes in the policy, including the restriction of sales of flavored ENDS products via certain retail channels from November 2018.

“The most recent data show more than 3.6 million middle and high school students across the country were current (past 30 day) e-cigarette users in 2018,” wrote Gottlieb in the announcement. “This is a dramatic increase of 1.5 million children since the previous year. The data also showed that youth who used e-cigarettes also were using them more frequently and they were using flavored e-cigarette products more often than in 2017.”

Identifying flavored pods as a culprit was the first step, but the FDA is now introducing a policy that looks at how accessible any flavored ENDS product is to minors to determine whether or not it can stay on the market.

For online sales, retailers must have an age-verification process that connects to third-party data sources in order to sell flavored nicotine products. For physical retailers, the policy says that flavored nicotine products must be behind some sort of age-gate, whether that’s at the front door of the shop or within a different age-gated section of the store itself. In other words, there must be some barrier to entry before POS between minors and flavored ENDS products.

From the announcement:

Our proposed policy provides examples of circumstances that we’ll consider – for example, if flavored ENDS products are sold in locations where minors can enter at any time (e.g., the entire establishment or an area within the establishment); or, for online sales, if the products are sold without an appropriate limit on the quantity that a customer may purchase within a given period of time, and without independent, third-party, age- and identity-verification services that compare customer information against third-party data sources, such as public records. We’re also specifically seeking comment on, among other things, whether there are new technologies that can help prevent youth access at retail locations and intend to consider the use of those tools when we finalize the guidance.

The main point to remember is that the FDA plans to prioritize enforcement of these products based on whether they’re sold in ways that pose a greater risk for minors to access them and become addicted to them.

While this proposal includes further regulation of the budding e-cigarette industry, it could be an important step forward for the space in the long term. The e-cigarette industry won’t reach its potential as an alternative to cigarettes until the issue of underage use is solved for good.

The FDA sees flavored ENDS products as a gateway for young people, and closing off access to those products as soon as possible gives the industry, from manufacturers to retailers to regulators, the opportunity to plan for how these products can be sold and distributed in the future, or if flavored products should exist at all.

The new plan does not propose enforcement of all ENDS products — tobacco, menthol and mint-flavored ENDS products can remain on the market and keep their original 2022 deadline for premarket FDA approval applications.

Juul Labs had this to say in response to the draft guidance:

We are committed to reducing youth usage while preserving our opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes, the number one cause of preventable death in the world. As part of our action plan deployed in November 2018 to keep JUUL products out of the hands of youth, we stopped the sale of flavored JUULpods to retail stores, strengthened our retail compliance and secret shopper program, enhanced our online age-verification, exited our Facebook and Instagram accounts and are continuously working to remove inappropriate third-party social media content. We support category-wide action including the responsible, restricted sale of flavored products and will review today’s draft guidance as we continue to work with FDA, state Attorneys General, local municipalities, and community organizations as a transparent and responsible partner in combating underage use.

Commissioner Gottlieb announced his resignation a week ago. National Cancer Institute Director Dr. Ned Sharpless will take over as acting FDA Commissioner in April.

Gottlieb taken measured steps to keep ENDS products away from minors while still allowing adult smokers to have an alternative on the market. Whether Sharpless will thread the needle quite as well remains to be seen, but Altria stocks fell on word of his appointment.

Today’s proposal is open for public comments for 30 days.

Facebook and its related family of apps appear to be down for most users right now.

There’s not much more information to share at this point, but the web is freaking out (as is to be expected).

Facebook has confirmed the outage and we’ll update as we get more information.

The social media management tool Naytev also confirmed the outage. “Facebook is experiencing a large outage, impacting posting to Facebook and the ability to log into Naytev. We are actively monitoring the issue and we hope Facebook resolves it soon,” the company said in a message to customers seen by TechCrunch.

This story is developing.

As schools continue to look for new ways to cut costs while at the same time reboot their curriculum to better tap new innovations and improve understandings of how children learn, e-learning startups are attracting attention, both from educators and the VCs that fund them to fuel growth.

In the latest development, Newsela — which has created a platform that packages together different third-party content like primary-source documents, news articles and more to help teachers and students learn about a particular subject, more or less as a replacement for more traditional textbooks — has announced that it has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding led by TCV. The New York-based startup said that it plans to use the money to get more penetration within the schools where it is already being used, as well as continue expanding the subject areas that it covers.

The company — which currently focuses primarily on K-12 but does cover other learning environments like English-as-a-second-language courses and adult education — covers mostly social sciences, science and English, but also some math. It currently has more than 20 million students and 1.8 million teachers using its the platform, and that it has some representation already in some 90 percent of all schools in the US.

The startup is not talking valuation, but as a rough guide, prior to this, Newsela had raised about $38 million and was valued at about $86 million in its previous round, according to PitchBook, with some notable backers already on its cap table, including Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg and Kleiner Perkins, as well as education-focused funds like Owl Ventures, Reach Capital and New Schools Venture Fund.

It’s a long way to come for a company that was started by two founders, Matthew Gross (CEO) and Dan Cogan-Drew (the chief product officer), who cut their teeth working in more traditional educational environments, including via Teach for America.

Newsela first got its start, as you might guess from the name, aggregating interesting news articles that could be used to supplement learning plans around particular subjects, with a specific focus on “ELA” — English and language arts. It was after a year in beta that it started to see that there was potential to expand outside of that focus and into adjacent areas. “We’ve outgrown our name,” Gross said.

The company, founded in 2012, was born out of the idea that computers — used not just for learning coding, but for doing research and communications — have become a cornerstone of how children get information today in the classroom. Broadband penetration in schools is now at over 90 percent (compared to 30 percent when Newsela first started). And with many schools in the US already providing each student a dedicated laptop, that presented an opportunity to rethink how they could be used to harness a wider and more fluid set of materials than what students might be able to get in a traditional textbook.

The material shift in comes at a time when we are tapping the internet as a first port of call for all our information outside the classroom. We carry a library in our pockets, using our screens to view the US Constitution, a specific work of art, the sequence of battles in the Civil War and writings from people at the time, modern takes on what it all meant, or new scientific discoveries.

“We can see an unprecedented opportunity to rethink content,” Gross said. “Textbooks are being pushed aside, and even where they are still being used, many are no longer making textbooks core curricular purchases.” And the shift to interactive also means that other things can now also be measured. “Educators are looking for more engagement in their learning outcomes,” he added.

Indeed, that has had a big knock-on effect already in the textbook publishing world. Just last month, Pearson sold its entire K-12 textbook division to a PE firm, Nexus Capital Management, in a fire sale: for $25 million plus $225 million in the form of a vendor note due in the next three to five years, with the understanding that Nexus may also sell it (in which case Pearson would get a cut). Pearson said that it will be focusing its education publishing efforts now on digital.

The format that Newsela follows somewhat fluid: it provides a set of materials that are constructed around learning a particular subject. It doesn’t create the coursework around that: this is left to teachers, departments, schools and districts to build. Sometimes a district will provide Newsela with a more targeted request of what it would like to see covered, and Newsela will build a collection to those parameters, Gross told me.

What Newsela does behind the scenes work with more than 100 different sources that have inked licensing agreements with the startup. The licenses allows Newsela to republish content on its own platform, and also rewrite content into five levels that are adaptive to age, reading ability and so on. It’s work that would be very time-consuming, and potentially expensive (or even cost-prohibitive), for individual teachers, schools and districts to do on their own. Working with a team of editors, Newsela gives educators the assurance that there has been some vetting done to provide accurate and complete sets of materials.

“It’s a wild world when they search in a Google box,” Gross said of the challenges to be able to predict a consistent level of quality in results and resources when people sometimes turn to the Internet to build similar bundles of content on their own.

All of this comes at a price. There is a free tier of Newsela that provides the ability to browse and assign content; create classes and give students access to that content, alongside quizzes and activities. Two further paid tiers provide a number of extra features. One, teacher-focused, covers monitoring reading activity and quiz scores, assignment planning, annotations, writing prompts, and more teaching resources. The second aimed at schools and districts adds admin visibility, teacher training, live support, and more customised learning plans. In both paid tiers, Newsela does not publicly disclose pricing. 

The expansiveness of the platform, and future potential of where it can go, are two reasons why TCV — which has backed the likes of Capella Education, Open English and Varsity Tutors in the education sector, but also very huge consumer internet startups like Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn and Netflix — was interested in backing Newsela.

“At TCV we focus on finding transformative EdTech companies, and Newsela has proven to be a tool that boosts learning outcomes,” said Woody Marshall, General Partner at TCV, in a statement. “Our investment will help extend the platform and make it more accessible and even more valuable to students, teachers, and administrators. We are especially excited by the great engagement and feedback that Newsela already has with their users.” Marshall is joining the board with this round.

Newsela is far from being the only edtech startup that has tapped money from the VC world to grow. In the K-12 sector alone, others have included Byju’s in India, which is now valued at over $4 billion (and just this week appears to have started to raise more money from Tencent and General Atlantic); ClassDojo; Age of Learning; VIPKID, and Kahoot to expand their businesses amid a surge of interest from students, parents and teachers.

At Newsela, meanwhile, Gross said the startup is hiring and has grown staff 50 percent in the last year, and expects to grow as much again this year.

“We might have attracted more interest if we had raised $100 million instead of $50 million,” he said in a comment about what seems to turn people’s heads in the tech world these days, “but we happen to be a very capital efficient business, and we heeded a warning I got early on not to raise more than what you really need. We’re proud of being a fiscally sound business that is also mission driven, and making an impact.”

That doesn’t rule out raising more for M&A, he added, or indeed fielding inbound interest themselves: the company has already been approached by interested parties, although he declined to say who. But when you consider that education publishers are all looking for their next move to serve the classroom of the future; and tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all made huge plays to court the education sector, the longer-term picture is a bright one for Newsela.

Among the growing field of indie games, one truly stands alone: Dwarf Fortress. The unbelievably rich and complex and legendarily user-unfriendly title has been a free staple of awe and frustration for years. But the developers, in a huge shift to the status quo, have announced that the game will not only soon have a paid version on Steam — it’ll have… graphics.

It may be hard for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the game and community to understand how momentous this is. In the decade and a half this game has been in active, continuous development, perhaps the only thing that hasn’t changed about the game is that it is a maze for the eyes, a mess of alphanumerics and ASCII-based art approximating barrels, dwarves, goblins, and dozens of kinds of stone.

You know in The Matrix where they show how the world is made up of a bunch of essentially text characters? It’s basically that, except way more confusing. But you get a feel for it after a few years.

So when developers Tarn and Zach Adams announced on their Patreon account that they were planning on ditching the ASCII for actual sprites in a paid premium version of the game to be made available on Steam and indie marketplace itch.io.. minds were blown. Of all the changes Dwarf Fortress has undergone, this is likely the most surprising. Here are a few screenshots compared with the old ASCII graphics:

[gallery ids="1796812,1796815,1796811,1796818,1796814,1796819,1796816,1796817"]

Not that you couldn’t get graphics in other ways — gamers aren’t that masochistic. There are “tile packs” available in a variety of sizes and styles that any player can apply to the game to make it easier to follow; in fact, the creators of two popular tilesets, Meph and Mike Mayday, were tapped to help make the “official” one, which by the way looks nice. Kitfox Games (maker of the lovely Shrouded Isle) is helping out as well.

There are plenty of other little mods and improvements made by dedicated players. Many of those will likely be ported over to Steam Workshop and made a cinch to install — another bonus for paying players.

Now, I should note that I in no way find this bothersome. I support Tarn and Zach in whatever they choose to do, and at any rate the original ASCII version will always be free. But what does disturb me is the reason they are doing this. As Tarn wrote on Patreon in a rare non-game update:

We don’t talk about this much, but for many years, Zach has been on expensive medication, which has fortunately been covered by his healthcare. It’s a source of constant concern, as the plan has changed a few times and as the political environment has shifted. We have other family health risks, and as we get older, the precariousness of our situation increases; after Zach’s latest cancer scare, we determined that with my healthcare plan’s copay etc., I’d be wiped out if I had to undergo the same procedures. That said, crowdfunding is by far our main source of income and the reason we’re still here. Your support is still crucial, as the Steam release may or may not bring us the added stability we’re seeking now and it’s some months away.

It’s sad as hell to hear that a pair of developers whose game is as well-loved as this, and who are making a modest sum via Patreon can still be frightened of sudden bankruptcy on account of a chronic medical condition.

This isn’t the place for a political debate, but one would hope that the creators of what amounts to a successful small business like this would not have to worry about such things in the richest country in the world.

That said, they seem comfortable with the move to real graphics and the addition of a more traditional income stream, so the community (myself included) will no doubt see the sunny side of this and continue to support the game in its new form.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Spotify files a complaint against Apple with the European Commission over ‘Apple tax’ and restrictive rules

Spotify is taking off its gloves in what has up to now been a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war with Apple — it competes against Apple Music but also relies heavily on the company for distribution of its app on iOS devices.

CEO Daniel Ek announced that his company has filed with the European Commission a complaint against the iPhone giant, over how Apple has “introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience — essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers.”

2. Verizon’s 5G to launch first in Chicago and Minneapolis on April 11

Current subscribers can expect to pay an additional $10 a month for access, and at launch, the only supported device is the Motorola Z3 with the 5G Moto Mod.

3. A first look at Twitter’s new prototype app, twttr

“Twttr,” as the prototype build is called, was created to give Twitter a separate space outside its public network to experiment with new ideas about how Twitter should look, feel and operate.

4. Boeing is moving to address potential issues in new 737s as Europe bans its plane

On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 on board the flight. Last October, a Lion Air flight departing from Jakarta crashed in similar circumstances, killing all 189 people on board. The plane involved was also a 737 Max 8.

5. Microsoft shows off Project xCloud with Forza running on an Android phone

This is the first look at gameplay on Microsoft’s game-streaming service.

6. TPG’s Bill McGlashan is put on indefinite leave after being charged in a giant college admissions cheating scandal

McGlashan is among 49 others accused of participating in a bribery ring involving parents, admissions counselors and athletic coaches at prestigious universities in an effort to secure spots for their children at the schools.

7. ICE has a huge license plate database targeting immigrants, documents reveal

Newly released documents reveal Immigration and Customs Enforcement is tracking and targeting immigrants through a massive license plate reader database supplied with data from local police departments — in some cases violating sanctuary laws.

After the Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement late yesterday doubling down on its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max planes at the heart of two accident investigations flying, Canada has become the latest nation to ground the plane.

“There are — and I hasten to say not conclusive — but there are similarities,” said Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau, in a statement broadcast on Canadian television. Garneau noted that the similarities “exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia. This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction, and at this point we feel that threshold has been crossed.”

Canadian concerns actually echo incident reports that were made by pilots in the U.S. regarding the control system of Boeing’s latest version of its 737 flagship aircraft.

At least two pilots who had flown the 737 Max 8 planes in the U.S. commented in incident reports about the noses of their planes dipping when the autopilot system on the aircraft had been engaged, according to a report in The New York Times citing a federal government database of incident reports.

Those reported problems are similar to the ones that occurred before the October Lion Air crash of Flight 610 in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is standing behind its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes airborne.

In a statement issued late yesterday, the FAA said it is reviewing all available data and has found “no systemic performance issues.”

The plane has been involved in two accidents within the last 6 months.

On Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed just after take off killing all 157 people on board. Last year, in October, the Boeing 737 Max 8 was involved in a crash in which an Indonesian Lion Air jet also crashed, killing 189 passengers and crew.

Roughly 350 737 Max 8 planes remain in service around the globe, mainly in the U.S.

Meanwhile, fleets using Boeing’s latest 737 in countries across the globe have grounded the aircraft. The plane has been suspended from service in AeroMexico, Argentina, Australia, Brazil’s Gol airline, China, Egypt, all European countries, three Persian Gulf states, India, Iceland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, and Turkey.

Here’s the full statement from the FAA.

The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX. Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.  Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action.  In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action.

YouTube Music is coming to the next critical battlefield for streaming music services: India. The company announced this week it’s launching its ad-supported version of YouTube Music for free in the country, as well as YouTube Music Premium, its subscription that offers background listening, offline downloads and an ad-free experience for ₹99 a month.

In addition, YouTube Premium, which extends offline play, background listening and the removal of ads across YouTube, is also launching in India. This will include access to YouTube Original programming like Cobra Kai, BTS: Burn The Stage, and others, and ships with the Music Premium subscription for ₹129 rupees per month.

This is not Google’s first entry into the streaming music market in India. The company already operates Google Play Music – and now, those subscribers will gain access to YouTube Music as part of their subscription, the company says.

India is a key market for streaming services because of its sizable population of 1.3 billion people, many of whom are still coming online for the first time. (Only around 400 million are active internet users today). Already, Apple and Amazon operate their music services there, and Spotify has made an India launch a strategic focus this year.

However, Spotify’s entry into India has been complicated by a licensing dispute with Warner Music (WMG’s Warner/Chappell publishing arm, specifically). That conflict led to Spotify entering the market without some of today’s biggest artists like Cardi B. and Ed Sheeran. The case has been ugly: Warner sued Spotify asking for an emergency injunction; Spotify then accused Warner of “abusive behavior;” and Warner called Spotify a “liar.” Despite its legal troubles, Spotify hit 1 million users in India within a week of launching. That bodes well for its potential when it gets through the legal battles.

Unlike Spotify, however, YouTube Music is fully licensed as it enters the region – a potential competitive advantage. It also has a deal with Samsung where Galaxy S10 owners can gain 4 months of YouTube Premium/YouTube Music Premium for free. (Spotify has a deeper Samsung partnership, involving preinstalls and Bixby integrations.)

For YouTube, a win in India is much needed, as its streaming music service hasn’t picked up traction to date.

To some extent, that’s because YouTube users know they can get to music videos for free, but it also has to do with Google’s baffling strategy in operating two separate brands around music. Apple doesn’t make this mistake. It leverages the power of its platform to promote its only music service, Apple Music. That may have gotten it into trouble, though – today, Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission over the “Apple tax” levied on its rivals and its restrictive rules.

Google has said it plans to merge the two services at some point, but for now the split likely leads to confusion.

Deep learning involves a highly iterative process where data scientists build models and test them on GPU-powered systems until they get something they can work with. It can be expensive and time-consuming, often taking weeks to fashion the right model. Determined AI, a new startup wants to change that by making the process faster, cheaper and more efficient. It emerged from stealth today with $11 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with help from Amplify Partners, Haystack and SV Angel. The company also announced an earlier $2.6 million seed round from 2017 for a total $13.6 million raised to date.

Evan Spark, co-founder and CEO at Determined AI says that up until now, only the largest companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft could set up the infrastructure and systems to produce sophisticated AI like self-driving cars and voice recognition technologies. “Our view is that a big reason why [these big companies] can do that is that they all have internal software infrastructure that enables their teams of machine learning engineers and data scientists to be effective and produce applications quickly,” Spark told TechCrunch.

Determined’s idea is to create software to handle everything from managing cluster compute resources to automating workflows, thereby putting some of that big-company technology in reach of any organization. “What we exist to do is to build that software for everyone else,” he said. The target market is Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.

The company’s solution is based on research conducted over the last several years at AmpLab at the University of California, Berkeley (which is probably best known for developing Apache Spark). It used the knowledge generated in the lab to build sophisticated solutions that help make better use of a customer’s GPU resources.

“We are offering kind of a base layer that is scheduling and resource sharing for these highly expensive resources, and then on top of that we’ve layered some services around workflow automation.” Spark said the team has generated state of the art results that are somewhere between five and 50 times faster than the results from tools that are available to most companies today.

For now, the startup is trying to help customers move away from generic kinds of solutions currently available to more customized approaches using Determined AI tools to help speed up the AI production process. The money from today’s round should help fuel growth, add engineers and continue building the solution.