AI catches things doctor miss, and doctors catch things AI misses. Using the AI to highlight what may be cancer tissue helps the radiologist focus on ambiguous situations, reducing the chance of missing early cancers.
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Tim Harford points to the Sanchez tragedy to raise an important question: How do we know when a given technology is really helping us? And when we are taking too great a risk or paying too high a price?
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Both computers and humans can be fooled by patterns that appear significant but really aren’t. But the bigger the computer, the more random patterns it can find in the vast swathes of data processed.
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Larry L. Linenschmidt interviews Robert J. Marks on the difference between performing a task and understanding the task, as explained in philosopher John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment.
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Because Tesla has yet to make a yearly profit in any of its sixteen years of existence, it depends on capital raises of various forms (equity, debt, etc.) to stay in business. Capital raises require big promises and Tesla’s overstatements about its self-driving cars are always good for a few billion.
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Many models are ridiculously simplistic, making the results worse than worthless. They become a way of solidifying biases.
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Artificial intelligence may do well summarizing data, but the new insights that will lead the economy forward cannot be gleaned that way. What we need is not old data but new truths.
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Computers are very effective but they operate with a very limited set of causal abilities. Humans work from an entirely different set of causal abilities. Uploading your brain to a computer is not a question of technology. It can’t work in principle.
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In reality, without appropriate human supervision, AI is just as likely to find false or unimportant patterns as real ones. Additionally, the overuse of AI in science is actually leading to a reproducibility crisis.
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AI programs are just that—programs. Nothing in such a program could make it conscious. We may as well think that if we make sci-fi life-like enough, we should start worrying about Darth Vader really taking over the galaxy.
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One factor in the growing sobriety may be that, as AI technology transitions from dreams to reality, the future belongs to leaders who are pragmatic about its abilities and limitations.
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Myths are not inherently bad but the real world crushes them. One myth currently taking a beating is “self-driving cars are just around the corner.” Here’s why not.
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As a humanoid robot, Sophia certainly represents some impressive engineering. It is sad that the engineering fronts ridiculous claims about the state of AI, using partially scripted interactions as if they were real communication.
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George Orwell identified two characteristics of a totalitarian state that offer insight into its central intellectual weaknesses.
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Robert J. Marks: We have a number of aspects that we exhibit that are not algorithmic. I would say, qualia, creativity, sentience, consciousness are probably things that you cannot write a computer program to simulate.
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Auto manufacturers would prefer to just move ahead with 5G but safety watchdogs argue that lifesaving changes could and should be implemented now with DSRC.
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Exponential growth is often the beginning of a sigmoid or s-shaped curve where growth that appears to be exponential but eventually slows and reaches a saturation point. We see this in nature, for example, in bacteria.
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About a year ago, I wrote that mounting AI hype would likely give way to yet another AI winter. Now, according to the panelists at “the world’s leading academic AI conference” the temperature is already falling.
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The intensity of my mental processing brought about an observable brain state. The causality did not go in the other direction; the magenta brain state did not increase my conscious process. This type of observation causes a problem for those hoping to duplicate human intelligence in a computer program.
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Hopefully, in ten years’ time, a bike suddenly emerging from behind a roadside dumpster will be fully visible to both the car and the driver long before a driver would usually see it today.
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