If AI dumbed us down, would we even know?
Silicon Valley pros face the challenges head-onDoes the constant use of machine aids rob us of natural smarts? If not, how are they helping us? Are there ways we can change the mix?
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Will Industry Pressure Loosen Self-Driving Car Tests?
Right now, the regulatory agency is under pressure to accept the industry’s “softball” testing suggestionsThe regulatory agency (NHTSA) needs to adapt. But trusting technical documentation alone or only testing already sold vehicles is grossly insufficient. Technical documentation is what engineers think should happen; it is not the future. And testing sold vehicles creates an incentive to skimp on tests.
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Will we become mere apps of our smart machines?
At COSM, Ray Kurzweil will offer a glimpse of his foreseen Singularity where we merge with superintelligent computersHe believes that the merger will eventually make the whole universe intelligent. Kurzweil’s critics believe that the superintelligent computers he needs can’t exist. If the critics are correct, we have misread the AI revolution.
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Computers’ Stupidity Makes Them Dangerous
The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than usMany marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades, loan and job applications, and election strategies are evaluated by computers. But, as my little experiment shows, the computer does not know whether a pattern is information or noise.
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The Top Ten AI Hype Stories of 2018, Updated
You can segue to each in the podcast and read the accompanying Mind Matters News story, as well as key updates2019 has seen some remarkable revelations about Google, DeepMind, Watson, Sophia, and other AI faves. Check them out here!
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How Far Has AI Mindreading Come?
Further than we may think. And some trends are troublingIt’s becoming easier all the time to read signals from the human brain. But there are few or no safeguards, even in the free world, on who has a right to use the information and how.
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Machines Are Not Really Learning
A bit of machine learning history helps us see whyGo talk to a neighbor or a friend. You’ve just done something that Deep Learning can’t do. Worse, it can’t even learn because that’s not a narrow, well-defined problem.
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Are self-driving cars really safer?
A former Uber executive says no. Before we throw away the Driver’s Handbook…Current claims that self-driving cars are safer are hype, not measurement. Meanwhile, Congress is expected to push for legislation next month to pave the way for widespread use of self-driving vehicles without a consensus on safety standards.
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Sorry, AI can’t do our thinking for us
J. C. Derrick asked Robert J. Marks whether AI can outthink people or make humans immortalCreativity, Marks argues, can only exist if the programmer places it in the computer program, which means that the program itself is not creative. People have tried “a bunch of different things and nothing seems to work. They can’t get smarter programs that way.”
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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 powersA commitment to engineering over techno-utopia has bumped Mercedes, which has got the okay for driverless valet parking, into the lead in self-driving technology.
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Confirmed: DeepMind’s Deepest Mind Is on Leave
The chess champ computer system just never made moneyCo-founder Mustafa Suleyman is a philosopher and social justice activist who hoped to use the technology for fundamental transformations. But his AI ethics board lasted about seven days at Google.
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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 ›