Artificial Intelligence – Page 12

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Science & Technology News

Human error, not artificial intelligence, poses the greatest threat

April 16, 2019

A robot and a dancer perform during the opening ceremony of an industry fair in Hanover, Germany on 31 March 2019.

The risk that humanity faces comes not from malevolent machines but from incompetent programmers, writes Martyn Thomas.

The long read (28 March) on the threat from artificial intelligence misses the point. In a paper written in 1951, Alan Turing demolished all the arguments against AI one day surpassing human intelligence, but there is no sign that that “singularity” is on the horizon. The imminent threat is that we’ve built a digital society on software foundations that are too vulnerable to failures and cyber-attacks, as a recent report from the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre oversight board powerfully illustrated. The risk that humanity faces comes not from malevolent machines but from incompetent programmers who leave their customers vulnerable to cyber-attacks and other failures.

If we survive long enough to see truly intelligent machines, then there is no known barrier to them developing consciousness. But how could we tell?

Martyn Thomas

Emeritus professor of IT, Gresham College, London

Via The Guardian

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

What will machine learning look like in twenty years?

April 12, 2019

What will machine learning look like 15-20 years from now? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Machine Learning is a very rapidly moving field, so it’s hard to make predictions about the state of the art 6 months from now, let alone 15 – 20 years. I can however, offer a series of educated guesses based on what I see happening right now.

We are still far away from AGI. Current generation machine learning systems are still very far away from something that could legitimately be called artificial “intelligence”. The systems we have right now are phenomenal at pattern recognition from lots of data (even reinforcement learning systems are mostly about memorizing and recognizing patterns that worked well during training). This is certainly a necessary step, but it is very far away from an intelligent system. In analogy to human cognition, what we have now is analogous to the subconscious processes that allow split second activation of your sympathetic nervous system when your peripheral vision detects a predator approaching or former significant other turning around a corner – in other words, pattern-based, semi-automatic decisions that our brain does “in hardware”. We don’t currently have anything I can see that would resemble intentional thought and I’m not convinced we’ll get to it from current generation systems.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

What will our society look like when artificial intelligence is everywhere?

April 11, 2019

Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge? Here are five scenarios from our future dominated by AI.

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | April 2018

In June of 1956, A few dozen scientists and mathematicians from all around the country gathered for a meeting on the campus of Dartmouth College. Most of them settled into the red-bricked Hanover Inn, then strolled through the famously beautiful campus to the top floor of the math department, where groups of white-shirted men were already engaged in discussions of a “strange new discipline”—so new, in fact, that it didn’t even have a name. “People didn’t agree on what it was, how to do it or even what to call it,” Grace Solomonoff, the widow of one of the scientists, recalled later. The talks—on everything from cybernetics to logic theory—went on for weeks, in an atmosphere of growing excitement.

What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, government, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

Estonia plans an AI-powered “Robot Judge”

April 11, 2019

Can AI be a fair judge in court? Estonia thinks so.

GOVERNMENT USUALLY ISN’T the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.

“We want the government to be as lean as possible,” says the wiry, bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at Sweden’s Umeå University on using the Internet of Things and sensor data in government services. Estonia’s government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, brains, Science & Technology News

Can we stop AI outsmarting humanity?

April 11, 2019

The spectre of superintelligent machines doing us harm is not just science fiction, technologists say – so how can we ensure AI remains ‘friendly’ to its makers?

It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line.

Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization.

Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press.

Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer.

In less than thirty years, it will end.

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Artificial Intelligence, Biotech, quantum computing, Report, Science & Technology News

Top 10 technology trends transforming Humanity beyond cyberspace, Geospace and Space

April 6, 2019

Human interest in exploring the unknowns has always been universal and enduring. While, over the years, the nature of exploration has changed fundamentally, humans have always been keen to explore the unknown and discover new worlds: be it beyond our geographical boundaries, new trade routes, lands, or opportunities in cyberspace, geospace, and space (CGS). In pursuit of unknowns, it is our imagination, ideas, innovations, and inventions that are helping us push the boundaries of our exploration limits beyond CGS. It is the never-ending human drive that pushes us further to discover new worlds. Imagination has always been an indicator of human intelligence, and each new idea and innovation is helping us push the boundaries of human exploration further. Technology, which gives us the foundation on which we can define and design the human ecosystem beyond cyberspace, geospace, and space, is pushing these boundaries. Where would it take us in the coming years?

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Report, Science & Technology News

What are the values that drive decision making by AI?

April 6, 2019

A screen shows a demonstration of SenseTime Group Ltd’s SenseVideo pedestrian and vehicle recognition system in Beijing, China, on Friday 15 June 2018.

Moral technology

Self-driving cars don’t drink and medical AIs are never overtired. Given our obvious flaws, what can humans still do best?

A five-year-old boy is helping his grandmother cook by cutting out biscuits from the dough she’s made, and he’s doing it rather badly. He instructs the family robot to take over and, even though the robot’s never done this before, it quickly learns what to do, and cuts out the biscuits perfectly. The grandmother is rather disappointed, remembering fondly the lopsided biscuits, complete with grubby fingerprints, that her son had charmingly baked for her at that age. Her grandson continues to use the robot for such tasks, and will grow up with pretty poor manual dexterity.

When the boy’s parents come home, he says: ‘Look, I’ve made these biscuits for you.’ One parent says: ‘Oh how lovely, may I have one?’ The other thinks silently: ‘No you didn’t make these yourself, you little cheat.’

Artificial intelligence (AI) might have the potential to change how we approach tasks, and what we value. If we are using AI to do our thinking for us, employing AI might atrophy our thinking skills.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Science & Technology News

AI can predict when someone will die with unsettling accuracy

April 3, 2019

Do AI systems have a role to play in healthcare?Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

This isn’t the first time experts have harnessed AI’s predictive power for healthcare.

Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person’s early death.

Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if individuals were at risk of dying prematurely — in other words, sooner than the average life expectancy — from chronic disease, they reported in a new study.

The predictions of early death that were made by AI algorithms were “significantly more accurate” than predictions delivered by a model that did not use machine learning, lead study author Dr. Stephen Weng, an assistant professor of epidemiology and data science at the University of Nottingham (UN) in the U.K., said in a statement. [Can Machines Be Creative? Meet 9 AI ‘Artists’]

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Artificial Intelligence, Automation, DaVinci Institute, Robots, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

The Robots are coming: What Colorado’s Artificial Intelligence boom means for workers

March 30, 2019

Rob Carpenter, founder of Valyant A.I., stands next to his creation at a Good Times in South Denver.

For as long as there have been robots, there’s been the fear that they will take our jobs, or even worse — take over everything.

Well, reality is more nuanced than most Sci-Fi movies’ depiction of artificial intelligence. Industry officials say it’s less about replacing people in jobs, but more about giving them extra tools to make work and life easier.

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

Artificial Intelligence and the future of humans

March 25, 2019

A vehicle and person recognition system for use by law enforcement is demonstrated at last year’s GPU Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., which highlights new uses for artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will.

Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting eons-old human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today?

Some 979 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists answered this question in a canvassing of experts conducted in the summer of 2018.

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Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Trained neural nets perform much like humans on classic psychological tests

March 24, 2019

Neural networks were inspired by the human brain. Now AI researchers have shown that they perceive the world in similar ways.

In the early part of the 20th century, a group of German experimental psychologists began to question how the brain acquires meaningful perceptions of a world that is otherwise chaotic and unpredictable. To answer this question, they developed the notion of the “gestalt effect”—the idea that when it comes to perception, the whole is something other than the parts.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Big Problems, Science & Technology News

The Achilles’ Heel of AI

March 15, 2019

AI & Big Data

Garbage in is garbage out. There’s no saying more true in computer science, and especially is the case with artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms are very dependent on accurate, clean, and well-labeled training data to learn from so that they can produce accurate results. If you train your machine learning models with garbage, it’s no surprise you’ll get garbage results. It’s for this reason that the vast majority of the time spent during AI projects are during the data collection, cleaning, preparation, and labeling phases.

According to a recent report from AI research and advisory firm Cognilytica, over 80% of the time spent in AI projects are spent dealing with and wrangling data. Even more importantly, and perhaps surprisingly, is how human-intensive much of this data preparation work is. In order for supervised forms of machine learning to work, especially the multi-layered deep learning neural network approaches, they must be fed large volumes of examples of correct data that is appropriately annotated, or “labeled”, with the desired output result. For example, if you’re trying to get your machine learning algorithm to correctly identify cats inside of images, you need to feed that algorithm thousands of images of cats, appropriately labeled as cats, with the images not having any extraneous or incorrect data that will throw the algorithm off as you build the model. (Disclosure: I’m a principal analyst with Cognilytica)

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