AI – Page 69 – Impact Lab

Artificial Intelligence is not a technology

November 12, 2018

People have long dreamed of the idea of machines having the intelligence and capabilities of humans. From the early Greek myths of Hephaestus and his automatons to the Golem of Eastern European Jewish tradition to well over a hundred years of science fiction stories, novels and movies, our human imaginations have envisioned what it would be like to have sentient, intelligent, human-like machines co-exist with us. In 1920 Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) first coined the word “robot” and gave us a name to give to the creations of our imaginations. In many ways, the quest for the intelligent machine lead to the development of the modern computer. Ideas by Alan Turing not only formulated the basis of programmable machines, but also the core of the concepts of artificial intelligence, with the namesake Turing Test providing a means for evaluating intelligent machines.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Breakthrough Thinking, Human Behavior, Intelligence, Science & Technology News

Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever

November 10, 2018

Your family and friends will be able to interact with a digital “you” that doles out advice—even when you’re gone.

Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it.

Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company’s execs. “I’m not a fan of that company’s leadership,” the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.

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Agriculture, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics

AI is already changing the agriculture landscape – starting with strawberries

November 10, 2018

Meet Agrobot, an autonomous robotic harvester that’s poised to revolutionize the agriculture industry. Agrobot works with the world’s leading farmers to automate berry harvesting through the power of artificial intelligence.

Agrobot uses deep learning to determine when to pick fruit at its ripest. Up to 24 robotic arms grip and cut the fruit from its stem to meet the farmer’s quality standards. Agrobot uses a 3D sensing scanner with short-range integrated color and infrared depth sensors to capture the details and identify when fruit is ready for the picking.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Futurist

What if AI can make us more human in the age of robotic automation?

November 1, 2018

“We now live in a global, exponential world,” Steven Kotler tells my coauthor Michael Ashley and I from his Santa Monica office. We’re interviewing the New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur for our upcoming book: Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked: A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business. “You need to understand our brains evolved in a local, linear environment. We cannot process change at this speed or this scale; we’re bad at it. But in the 21st century, according to research done by Ray Kurzweil, we will experience over 20,000 years’ worth of change. To put it succinctly, over the next 80-something years we will go through the birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution — twice — in terms of our technological advancement.”

Much has been made of the fact that humans are poised to be replaced by artificial intelligence in the workplace, from home-care robots to robot waiters. However, what Kotler and his coauthor Peter Diamandis have asserted in such books as Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and the Impact the World, is that unprecedented technological abundance is also coming. Importantly, these thinkers suggest the future of prosperity depends not just on exponential technological innovation, but also on exponential creativity.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, new technology

Deepfakes: The dawn of the Post-truth era

October 28, 2018

For about 200,000 years, modern humans have relied on our eyes and ears to separate truth from lies and fact from fiction. Even if we ignore the rise of fake news (and how difficult it is to do anything about it), technology (like deep learning) is on the verge of making it impossible to know if what you are seeing and hearing is real or fake.

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AI, Analysis, Automation, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Google AI claims 99% accuracy in metastatic breast cancer detection

October 25, 2018

Above: Left: a slide containing lymph nodes. Right: LYNA identifying the tumor region.

Metastatic tumors — cancerous cells which break away from their tissue of origin, travel through the body through the circulatory or lymph systems, and form new tumors in other parts of the body — are notoriously difficult to detect. A 2009 study of 102 breast cancer patients at two Boston health centers found that one in four were affected by the “process of care” failures such as inadequate physical examinations and incomplete diagnostic tests.

That’s one of the reasons that of the half a million deaths worldwide caused by breast cancer, an estimated 90 percent are the result of metastasis. But researchers at the Naval Medical Center San Diego and Google AI, a division within Google dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) research, have developed a promising solution employing cancer-detecting algorithms that autonomously evaluate lymph node biopsies.

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AI, Analysis, Employment, Robotics, Science & Technology News

Future of jobs 2018 – Reports- World Economic Forum

October 26, 2018

Strategic Drivers of New Business Models

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds, companies are seeking to harness new and emerging technologies to reach higher levels of efficiency of production and consumption, expand into new markets, and compete on new products for a global consumer base composed increasingly of digital natives. More and more, employers are therefore also seeking workers with new skills from further afield to retain a competitive edge for their enterprises and expand their workforce productivity. Some workers are experiencing rapidly expanding opportunities in a variety of new and emerging job roles, while others are experiencing a rapidly declining outlook in a range of job roles traditionally considered ‘safe bets’ and gateways to a lifetime career.

Even as technological advancements pose challenges to existing business models and practices, over the coming years, these same dynamics of technological change are set to become the primary drivers of opportunities for new growth. For example, based on one recent estimate, even a somewhat moderately paced rollout of new automation technologies over the next 10 to 20 years would lead to an investment surge of up to US$8 trillion in the United States alone.

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AI, Business, DaVinci Institute, Education, Tom Frey

Robot teachers might be the largest internet business in 2030

October 20, 2018

Robot teacher in front of classroom of studentsThe AI boom has a lot to do with it.

Thirty years ago, it was a big deal when schools got their first computers. Today, it’s a big deal when students get their own laptops.

According to Thomas Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, “In 14 years it’ll be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the internet.”

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Machine-learning system tackles speech and object recognition, all at once

October 6, 2018

MIT computer scientists have developed a system that learns to identify objects within an image, based on a spoken description of the image.

Model learns to pick out objects within an image, using spoken descriptions.

MIT computer scientists have developed a system that learns to identify objects within an image, based on a spoken description of the image. Given an image and an audio caption, the model will highlight in real-time the relevant regions of the image being described.

Unlike current speech-recognition technologies, the model doesn’t require manual transcriptions and annotations of the examples it’s trained on. Instead, it learns words directly from recorded speech clips and objects in raw images, and associates them with one another.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Medicine

AI-Human “hive mind ” diagnoses pneumonia

October 5, 2018

First, it correctly predicted the top four finishers at the Kentucky Derby. Then, it was better at picking Academy Award winners than professional movie critics—three years in a row. The cherry on top was when it prophesied that the Chicago Cubs would end a 108-year dry spell by winning the 2016 World Series—four months before the Cubs were even in the playoffs. (They did.)

Now, this AI-powered predictive technology is turning its attention to an area where it could do some real good—diagnosing medical conditions.

In a study presented on Monday at the SIIM Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging in San Francisco, Stanford University doctors showed that eight radiologists interacting through Unanimous AI’s “swarm intelligence” technology were better at diagnosing pneumonia from chest X-rays than individual doctors or a machine-learning program alone.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Future, Robots

When will we have Artificial Intelligence as smart as a human? Here’s what experts think

September 30, 2018

Robots in the movies can think creatively, continue learning over time, and maybe even pass for conscious. Why don’t we have that yet?

“Star Wars,” “Her,” and “iRobot.” What do all these movies have in common? The artificial intelligence (AI) depicted in there is crazy-sophisticated. These robots can think creatively, continue learning over time, and maybe even pass for conscious.

Real-life artificial intelligence experts have a name for AI that can do this — it’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). For decades, scientists have tried all sorts of approaches to create AGI, using techniques such as reinforcement learning and machine learning. No approach has proven to be much better than any other, at least not yet.

Indeed, there’s a catch here: despite all the excitement, we have no idea how to build AGI.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Human Behavior

Artificial intelligence hates the poor and disenfranchised

September 28, 2018

The biggest actual threat faced by humans, when it comes to AI, has nothing to do with robots. It’s biased algorithms. And, like almost everything bad, it disproportionately affects the poor and marginalized.

Machine learning algorithms, whether in the form of “AI” or simple shortcuts for sifting through data, are incapable of making rational decisions because they don’t rationalize — they find patterns. That government agencies across the US put them in charge of decisions that profoundly impact the lives of humans, seems incomprehensibly unethical.

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