Restart Radio: guitars, cloud kill switches and bots

Ben Skidmore, long-time Restarter and professional guitar repairer, joined us to talk about how he fell in love with guitars and learned how to repair them. We talked about how musicians often learn to repair, hack and modify their instruments. We speculated that musicians are creative repairers and modifiers of their instruments because their craft involves creativity.

Then we talked about a much-discussed tech story, involving the disabling of smart-home devices made by Revolv, a company bought by Google. Revolv devices will become “bricks” on 15th May, when the cloud-based servers they require will be shut down. It is a cautionary tale.

Lastly, we talked about bots – and both the infamous Microsoft chatbot, that was turned into a fascist over night, and a “female” PA bot that Ugo was forced to interact with last week.

Links we mentioned

• Profile of Restarter Ben Skidmore
• Ben’s About.me page with links to his guitar shop
• Forbes “Nest Revolv Shutdown Debacle Underscores Business Model Challenges for the Internet of Things“
• Arlo Gilbert’s original rant about Revolv
• Ars Technica: “Microsoft Terminates Tay AI chabot after she turns into a Nazi“
• Amy the Robot

[Feature image “ES-333 on Bench (2)” by Flickr user RoadsideGuitars is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]

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