Solving a murder or tracking down the perpetrators of sexual abuse often requires dogged police work. What if a machine could help detectives spot the vital clues they need?
The images on Eduardo Fidalgo’s computer show mundane scenes – a sofa scattered with pillows, a folded duvet on a bed, some children’s toys strewn across a floor. They depict views most of us would see around our own homes.
But these rather ordinary pictures are helping to build a new weapon in the fight against crime. Fidalgo and his colleagues are using the images to train a machine to spot clues in crime scene photographs.
IBM’s AI scientists teamed up with McCormick & Company’s food developers to enhance food research.
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You may not think that Tuscan chicken’s creamy, garlicky flavor is due for a high-tech upgrade, but advanced artificial intelligence is on the case all the same. An AI algorithm is about to analyze and improve that and other classic recipes before designing some brand-new foods as well.
And if it goes well, we can expect AI to play a bigger role in developing the foods we eat every day. Right now, some big names are working to amass the expertise of all the world’s food experts, head chefs, and flavor scientists into a single artificial intelligence algorithm that concocts new foods better and faster than any mere human.
Wind power has become increasingly popular, but its success is limited by the fact that wind comes and goes as it pleases, making it hard for power grids to count on the renewable energy and less likely to fully embrace it. While we can’t control the wind, Google has an idea for the next best thing: using machine learning to predict it.
Google and DeepMind have started testing machine learning on Google’s own wind turbines, which are part of the company’s renewable energy projects. Beginning last year, they fed weather forecasts and existing turbine data into DeepMind’s machine learning platform, which churned out wind power predictions 36 hours ahead of actual power generation. Google could then make supply commitments to power grids a full day before delivery. That predictability makes it easier and more appealing for energy grids to depend on wind power, and as a result, it boosted the value of Google’s wind energy by roughly 20 percent.
The world is fast evolving, with Artificial intelligence (AI) at the forefront in changing the world and the way we live. This article is Part 1 of a 2 part series.
An important question: What is AI? For many people, it remains unclear what this technology is all about, so this is a good place to start the conversation. AI is a branch in computer science that deals with the intelligent behavior of machines. It is an ingeniously simulated ability of a machine to imitate human behavior and our conventional response patterns. This is made possible with specific algorithms that make the AI function in a specified scope of activities (according to what the algorithm codes for). This means that with AI, many of our everyday activities can now be carried out effectively by programmed machine technology.
New York City has a new law on the books demanding “algorithmic accountability,” and AI researchers want to help make it work.
Background: At the end of 2017, the city’s council passed the country’s first bill to ban algorithmic discrimination in city government. It calls for a task force to study how city agencies use algorithms and create a report on how to make algorithms more easily understandable to the public.
Rubber, meet road: But how to actually implement the bill was left up for grabs. Enter AI Now, a research institution at NYU focused on the social impact of AI. The group recommends focusing on things like making sure agencies understand the technology better, and providing a chance for outside groups to look at algorithms.
Why it matters: The federal government has fallen way behind in setting up rules or guidance for AI. What happens in New York could lead the way for the rest of the US.
The enabling technology for insurers to use AI is the ‘ecosystem’ of sensors known as the internet of things.
It’s a new day not very far in the future. You wake up; your wristwatch has recorded how long you’ve slept, and monitored your heartbeat and breathing. You drive to work; car sensors track your speed and braking. You pick up some breakfast on your way, paying electronically; the transaction and the calorie content of your meal are recorded.
Then you have a car accident. You phone your insurance company. Your call is answered immediately. The voice on the other end knows your name and amiably chats to you about your pet cat and how your favourite football team did on the weekend.
You’re talking to a chat-bot. The reason it “knows” so much about you is because the insurance company is using artificial intelligence to scrape information about you from social media. It knows a lot more besides, because you’ve agreed to let it monitor your personal devices in exchange for cheaper insurance premiums.
This isn’t science fiction. More than three-quarters of insurance executives believe artificial intelligence will revolutionise the industry within a few years. By 2030, according to McKinsey futurists, artificial intelligence will mean your car and life insurance premiums could change based on whether you decide to take one route or another.
An MIT study predicts when artificial intelligence will take over for humans in different occupations.
While technology develops at exponential speed, transforming how we go about our everyday tasks and extending our lives, it also offers much to worry about. In particular, many top minds think that automation will cost humans their employment, with up to 47% of all jobs gone in the next 25 years. And chances are, this number could be even higher and the massive job loss will come earlier.
So when will your job become obsolete? Researchers at the University of Oxford surveyed the world’s best artificial intelligence experts to find out when exactly machines will be better at humans in various occupations.
As a futurist, I’m often asked about the future of jobs. It is a concern for policy-makers, employers and the general population alike. What I realized, however, is that no one cares about losing the job itself. What they are worried about is how they will make a living in a future where they have become obsolete.
And yes, the fear of artificial intelligence (AI) is real. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates AI can automate 50% of all paid tasks today. Our primitive machine learning AI can easily complete repetitive human tasks better than any human could, including recognizing speech, context, shapes, and images. These narrow AI can also complete tasks like navigating an unpredictable field of obstacles, play an instrument, analyze large amounts of unorganized data and more. In 2021, AI will safely complete repetitive tasks with random components, like driving vehicles on crowded streets better than any human driver.
The speed at which AI is improving is astounding. The smart software is improving at an exponential rate since our software engineers use older versions of AI to help them program AI software updates.
In fact, developments in AI is so impressive and there is so much money invested by major well-known multinationals right now that most AI experts expect a human-level AI to emerge before the year 2040.
What will happen to the job market between now and the year 2040?
IN 2015, CAR-AND-ROCKET man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.
The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.
“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.
Harish Natarajan triumphed over the bot in a rapid-fire challenge.
After suffering defeat to AI at Go and Dota 2, the battle between man and machine was starting to look a little one-sided. But a human has finally notched up a win against our future robot overlords. Champion debater Harish Natarajan triumphed in a live showdown against IBM’s Miss Debater AI at the company’s Think Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The 2012 European Debate winner and IBM’s black monolith exchanged quick retorts on pre-school subsidies for 25 minutes before the crowd hailed Natarajan the victor. You can watch the debate in full below.
IBM Research has a long history of inventing the future, so the big tech company’s researchers take their predictions seriously. Today they are revealing their annual “5 in 5” predictions, which detail five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years.
IBM will talk about the predictions at its Think 2019 event in San Francisco on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time.
AI, specifically “augmented intelligence,” is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let’s explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce.
