CategoryArtificial Intelligence
Nigerian Teens Create Sci-Fi With Cracked Smartphone
They love sci-fi and, well, if you are going to start, you have to start somewhereThe teens' project, Critics Company, has alerted people to the possibilities of digital media like YouTube to tutor themselves in skills that can fetch money or jobs or even help them start their own businesses.
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How self-driving cars can really work today
At Mind Matters News, we advocate self-driving technology that doesn’t confuse human and machine powers
Confirmed: DeepMind’s Deepest Mind Is on Leave
The chess champ computer system just never made money
Fan Tries Programming AI Jazz, Gets Lots and Lots of AI…
Jazz is spontaneous, but spontaneous noise is not jazzAs Gioia says, jazz depends on the “personality of the individual musician.” And the blindspot of AI creativity is: There’s no one home.
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A Silicon Valley Insider Asks the Awkward Questions
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, speaking at COSM in October, has a history of challenging Valley orthodoxiesHis question, “How can Google use the rhetoric of ‘borderless’ benefits to justify working with the country whose ‘Great Firewall’ has imposed a border on the internet itself?”, is timely. China’s government uses high tech for, among other things, sophisticated racial profiling.
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Why Was IBM Watson a Flop in Medicine?
Robert J. Marks and Gary S. Smith discuss how the AI couldn’t identify which information in the tsunami of medical literature actually MATTEREDLast year, the IBM Health Initiative laid off a number of people, seemingly due to market disillusionment with the product.
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Why Is DeepMind In Deep Water Financially?
Market analysts are wondering if the money is as smart as the machineIn an all-out botwar with the other tech Bigs, DeepMind could simply be paying top minds not to work for the competition while readying AI tools that pay better than winning at board games. Maybe.
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Whatever Musk says, Don’t Watch Netflix in Your Tesla
He’ll only allow streaming while stopped until “full self-driving is approved by regulators”This is hardly the time to encourage drivers to believe that someday soon, distraction will be okay. Distracted driving claims the lives of roughly nine people per day in the United States.
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New AI Can Create—and Detect—Fake News
But how good is it at either task? We tested some copyWill the predicted tsunami of fake news and advertising make much difference? Possibly, but in ways that might surprise you.
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Self-driving Cars: Following the Money up a Cooling Trail
The market for lithium for electric car batteries is slowingOne way we can assess entrepreneurs’ claims (think Elon Musk) is to ask, what physical components does the product require and how is the market responding?
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You can build your own chatbot
New tools have made it comparatively easyNatural Language Interfaces (the technical term for a chatbot) are becoming more and more popular. Many dial-in phone services have switched from numeric interfaces (“Dial 1 for sales, 2 for service, etc.”) to natural language interfaces (“Please say what you are calling about”). Where they have taken off though is with chatbots. Many online help systems at least start with chatbots, which collect basic information about a problem or situation and point to existing solutions before passing the contact off to a human expert. Additionally, the rise of the Generation Text, as well as the proliferation of chat-based groupware such as Slack, means that text-based natural language interfaces are one of the best ways of interacting with young people. Is Read More ›
Why did Watson think Toronto was in the U.S.A.?
How that happened tells us a lot about what AI can and can’t do, to this dayStrictly speaking, the answer Watson spit out was "What is Toronto?????", which does sound distinctly less than certain. But the programmers had chosen not to program in the option of saying, “I don’t know.”
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Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud”
The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anythingGary N. Smith explains that a computer’s inability to understand what “it” means in a sentence is because it doesn’t understand what any of the words in the sentence mean.
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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene: How to Spell Gud
Also, Google and Apple ditching college degree requirements is not really that newTwenty years or so ago, when I worked in Seattle, Microsoft was famous for the testing coding skills of their applicants and asking Mensa-like questions. Degrees were secondary.
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Should Tesla’s Autopilot Feature Be Illegal?
A recent study from the United Kingdom suggests that maybe it shouldTesla may tell drivers that Autopilot is not the same as a self-driving car. But, just as cell phone manufacturers’ warnings not to “text and drive” are too often unheeded, so too may be Tesla’s warnings.
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Can Computer Algorithms Be Free of Bias?
Bias is inevitable but it should be recognized and admittedGregory Coppola’s revelations about Google’s politically biased search engine shone a spotlight on how algorithms are written.
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Can We Write Creative Computer Programs?
As Robert J. Marks tells World Radio, people have tried making computers creative but no luck
George Gilder on the Real-Life Prospects — and Limits — of AI
Gilder, who is organizing the COSM conference in Bellevue, Washington, in October, clears the fog about “the cloud”The “cloud” of cloud computing, that Gilder predicted, is things, not ideas. Thus it is subject to the limits of things, as opposed to the limits of ideas. It’s reasonable to ask where that limit is. It is probably both a question and an answer that we can understand.
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Is the Human Mind a Computer?
As a software engineer, I'd say we need to be clear what the question is before answering itOnce we understand clearly what a computer is, we will see why consciousness is not a form of computation.
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