The robots are coming! They’ll be taking millions – maybe billions – of jobs away with them. Yoram Yaakobi, head of the Microsoft Israel R&D center, says not to worry.
One of the most impressive complex cognitive processes is the ability to learn and creatively use language. It’s those processes that continue to set humans apart from even the most advanced machines. However, a team of scientists has now created an artificial system of neurons that is capable of learning words, phrases and syntax with no prior programming, thereby sustaining a dialog using processes that resemble mental actions.
Simon Worrall: We may not be aware of it, but machine learning is already an integral part of our daily lives, from the product choices that Amazon offers us to the surveillance of our data by the National Security Agency. Few of us understand it or the implications, however.
Humans plus machines will drive society forward. This was the central message conveyed by Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president of IBM Research, at the Augmenting Human Intelligence Cognitive Colloquium, which took place in San Francisco.
The topic of artificial intelligence has been thrust into the mainstream in recent years. No longer just the domain of sci-fi fans, nerds or Google engineers, but the topic at parties, coffee shops and even at the dinner table.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed an algorithm that can find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data and performs better than two-thirds of human teams.
The Fair Pay Act is a strict gender-equality law recently enacted in California. The law puts the burden of proof on a company to show that it has not shortchanged an employee’s salary based on gender. It’s a powerful tool to address a wrong that has already happened. But can discrimination be prevented in the first place? Even managers who don’t think they are biased may be—and just their word choices can send a signal. A new wave of artificial intelligence companies aims to spot nuanced biases in workplace language and behavior in order to root them out.
Over the past year you might have noticed all of the attention media is giving artificial intelligence. You might get the impression from the media that it’s only a matter of time before the threat of artificial intelligence comes to destroy us all.
In the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, Minority Report, Chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) says, “No doubt the precogs have already seen this.” In the movie Cruise plays the head of Washington, D.C.’s experimental “Precrime” crime-prediction department. The movie is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story (which is also now a new Fox TV series).
IBM wants to teach robots to better understand and mimic human communication by using some of the artificial-intelligence techniques that emerged from its Watson project.
Machine learning plays a part in your everyday life. When you speak to your phone (via Cortana, Siri or Google Now) and it fetches information, or you type in the Google search box and it predicts what you are looking for before you finish, you are doing something that has only been made possible by machine learning.
The world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor, according to many economists and technologists today. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.