Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryArtificial Intelligence

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Are Facial Expressions a Clear, Simple Basis for Hiring Decisions?

Marketing AI to employers to analyze facial expressions ignores the fact that correlation is NOT causation

Have you heard of the Law of the Instrument? It just means, to quote one formulation, “He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.” All any given problem needs is a good pounding. This is a risk with AI, as with amateur carpentry. But with AI, it can get you into more serious trouble. Take hiring, for instance.

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Asian Doctor with the stethoscope equipment hand holding the Artificial intelligence of brain technology over Abstract photo blurred of hospital background, AI and physician concept

How AI Can Make Medicine Better—or Not

Experts offer some real-world cautions about powerful new AI tools

Medicine involves many risks, benefits, and tradeoffs. Early diagnosis, for example, can certainly be defended and promoted on a right-to-know basis. But that is not the same thing as saying that it reliably improves outcomes or even enjoyment of life. If a powerful AI method reliably detected the very early onset of Alzheimer, it might ruin a senior's early retirement years without changing the outcome much. Getting the most from AI will include determining the relationship between what it can potentially do and what will provide a medical benefit.

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How Can AI Help with Real-Life Cold Case Files?

AI doesn’t create new ideas in police work; rather, it does the work that police, who must move on to urgent, fresh cases, don’t have time to do

When no new leads emerge in a murder or missing persons investigation, police must shift their resources to cases that offer new information. Currently, the FBI Uniform Crime Report keeps an estimated 250,000 cold cases on file. Recent developments in AI, however, have shed light on some of these old and cold cases.

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McAfee: Assisted Driving System Is Easily Fooled

Defacing a road sign caused the system to dramatically accelerate the vehicle

Over time, machine vision will become harder to fool than the one that was recently tricked into rapid acceleration by a defaced sign. But it will still be true that a fooled human makes a better decision than a fooled machine because the fooled human has common sense, awareness, and a mind that reasons.

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Soldiers are Using Laptop Computer for Surveillance During Military Operation in the Desert.

Killer Robots Is Now Available in Audible Format

Artificial intelligence expert Robert J. Marks contends that America must remain competitive in lethal AI military technology

In the book, Baylor professor Marks asks “What if ambitious nations such as China and Iran develop lethal AI military technology but the United States does not?” He argues that “Advanced technology not only wins wars but gives pause to otherwise aggressive adversaries.”

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robot sit down and thinking

A Philosopher Explains Why Thinking Matter Is Impossible

He’s right but Captain Kirk tumbled to it before him. So did a medieval poet

According to analytical philosopher Richard Johns, we cannot represent ourselves completely mathematically so we cannot generate fundamentally contradictory thoughts about ourselves. Some part of us lies beyond mathematics. An android would not be so lucky, as Captain Kirk realized in an early Star Trek episode.

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Is Transhumanism Uncomfortably Tempting?

An ethicist asks us to stop and reflect

Jacob Schatzer identifies three issues in the essay, “The Allure of Transhumanism,” that might prompt some queasy recognitions in all of us, at times.

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Photo by Eugene Triguba

AI has changed our relationship to our tools

If a self-driving car careens into a storefront, who’s to blame? A new Seattle U course explores ethics in AI

A free course at Seattle University addresses the “meaning of ethics in AI.” I’ve signed up for it. One concern that I hope will be addressed is: We must not abdicate to machines the very thing that only we can do: Treat other people fairly.

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Photo by Chris Yang

Technology Centralizes by Its Very Nature

Here are some other truths about technology, some uncomfortable ones

To see what I mean about centralization, consider a non-digital tool, say, a shovel. The shovel doesn’t keep track of your shoveling, read your biometrics, and store a file on you-as-shoveler somewhere. It’s a thing, an artifact. So you see, the new digital technology is itself the heart of the surveillance problem. No Matrix could be built with artifacts.

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Schrift

Unexplainability and Incomprehensibility of AI

In the domain of AI safety, the more accurate the explanation is, the less comprehensible it is

With AI decision-making, a non-trivial explanation can’t be both accurate and understandable but it can be inaccurate and comprehensible. There is a huge difference between understanding something and almost understanding it.

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Futuristic and technological scanning of the face of a beautiful woman for facial recognition and scanning to ensure personal safety.

Teaching Computers Common Sense Is Very Hard

Those fancy voice interfaces are little more than immense lookup tables guided by complex statistics

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) published a paper recently, deflating claims of rapid progress toward giving computers common sense.

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Two female women medical doctors looking at x-rays in a hospital.

AI Can Help Spot Cancers—But It’s No Magic Wand

When I spoke last month about how AI can help with cancer diagnoses, I failed to appreciate some of the complexities of medical diagnosis

As a lawyer with medical training reminded us recently, any one image is a snapshot in time, a brief part of the patient’s whole story. And it’s the whole story that matters, not a single image, perhaps taken out of context.

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Citation

Anti-Plagiarism Software Goof: Paper Rejected for Repeat Citations

The scholar was obliged by discipline rules to cite the flagged information repetitively

Not only was Jean-François Bonnefon’s paper rejected by conventional anti-plagiarism software but the rejection didn’t make any sense. Bonnefon, research director at Toulouse School of Economics, was informed of “a high level of textual overlap with previous literature” (plagiarism) when he was citing scientists’ affiliations, standard descriptions, and papers cited by other—information he was obliged to cite accurately, according to a standard format. “It would have taken two [minutes] for a human to realise the bot was acting up,” he wrote on Twitter. “But there is obviously no human in the loop here. We’re letting bots make autonomous decisions to reject scientific papers.” Reaction to the post by Dr Bonnefon, who is currently a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute Read More ›

バイナリーコードの背景

Superintelligent AI Is Still a Myth

Neither the old classical approaches nor the new data scientific angle can make any headway on good ol’ common sense

The official Winograd Schema Challenge, organized by Levesque and friends to see if AI could learn common sense, was retired officially in 2016 for the embarrassing reason that even the well-funded bleeding age Google Brain team performed poorly on a test set of a few hundred questions.

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A concept of a city being hit by a weapon of mass destruction suffering terrible consequences caused by terrorism or an act of war by a hostile country launching a devastating attack with atomic bomb

What Can We Learn from History About Stopping AI Warfare?

International agreements can work, but only under certain circumstances

Historically, the key difference between the international weapons ban agreements that have been honored and the agreements that have not been honored is that the honored ones involved weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An effective ban on malicious AI requires the global community to first agree that such a form (or use) of AI would be a WMD.

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Fake News on TV. The correspondent as the doll controls the puppeteer. Lying information to trick people on TV

AI in War Means Deepfakes as Well as Killerbots

In its Gerasimov and Primikov doctrines of warfare, Russia makes this clear

In 2013, Russian Army General Valery Gerasimov published a strategic doctrine (the Gerasimov Doctrine) where he described applying non-military activities, including false or fake stories and publications, trolls, gas-lighting and technology generally as a form of warfare, like combat. The use of audio and video deep-fakes is expanding in Ukraine, the Baltic States, Western nations, and Africa.

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Quantum particle, quantum mechanics

Quantum Mechanics Shows That Our Universe Has Purpose

Not only can two physically separated particles influence each other, they can influence each other through time

Recent experiments in entanglement of particles in time as well as space show that our entire universe is imbued with final causality within its very fabric. This final causality must come from some source beyond the universe.

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Drone monitoring barbed wire fence on state border or restricted area. Modern technology for security.

Iran Conflict Shows Why the US Needs Autonomous Lethal AI Weapons

The bipartisan National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recently released a sobering report about the U.S. lagging in development of killer robots

To remain competitive, the U.S. military must respond and adapt to new warfare technology including weapons using AI, sometimes called killer robots. This includes autonomous AI that acts on its own. Chillingly, unlike atomic weapons, the tools to construct lethal AI weapons are cheap and readily available to all.

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Photo by OLEG PLIASUNOV

Did the Economist Really “Interview” an AI?

Perhaps they have a private definition of what an interview "is"…

Faced with a claim that an AI language tool had given an interview, I took the advice I gave readers yesterday, and followed the links. What a revelation. The Economist story was more dishonest than the examples that Siegel discussed in Scientific American.

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Military Drone in the blue sky, 3D rendering

Robert J. Marks: Peace May Depend on Killer Robots

Calls for a ban on killer robots impact the United States but not the non-democratic nations who are developing them now

In an op-ed at CNS this morning, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks summarizes his case, as an artificial intelligence expert, that the United States must remain competitive in military AI or, as it is called, “killer robots,” because hostile nations are forging ahead.

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