Artificial Intelligence: it will kill us

Alexa will soon order you around at home “Alexa, should I take an umbrella with me today?” “Alexa, where did I put my car keys?” “Alexa, can you please run my life for me?” Okay, so we may not have arrived at that last point just yet, but we’re probably closer than we think. Microsoft (MSFT) and Google's (GOOG) new pact could signal the beginning of the end for personal privacy The recent peace pact between Google and Microsoft, first reported in the Wall Street Journal on April 23 and then with a bit more flare in The Guardian on May 2, might someday be seen as a turning point in modern human history. Over the past decade, Microsoft has been the largest and most determined agency on earth intent on keeping Google’s growth in check, waging an unrelenting battle against the company through lobbying, lawsuits and regulatory complaints. Now Microsoft is backing down. Last year, largely as a result of a change in leadership at both companies, the tech giants agreed to drop about 20 patent lawsuits they had filed against each other over the previous five years. And now they have truly buried the hatchet. Microsoft is even dropping its support for the various organizations it helped to create to lobby government officials, such as FairSearch and ICOMP, which in turn helped set in motion the recent anti-trust actions brought against Google by the European Union.

A New Study Brings Scientists One Step Closer To Mind Reading A crime happens, and there is a witness. Instead of a sketch artist drawing a portrait of the suspect based on verbal descriptions, the police hook the witness up to EEG equipment. The witness is asked to picture the perpetrator, and from the EEG data, a face appears. While this scenario exists only in the realm of science fiction, new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough brings it one step closer to reality. Scientists have used EEG data (“brainwaves”) to reconstruct images of faces shown to subjects.

How AI has shaped every Amazon business Swami Sivasubramanian lives in a wooded area in the Seattle suburbs that’s a favorite with opportunistic local bears. From time to time, usually on garbage night, the animals wander into Sivasubramanian’s backyard to pillage his trash. But try as they might, he and his family had never managed to spot the intruders. “My wife really wanted to see these bears in action,” says Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s VP of machine learning. AI Researchers Closing In On Being Able To Read Your Thoughts Through Something Called 'Brain Transparency' Reading someone’s mind is not possible, or is it? Recent advances in AI technology have made the living human brain transparent and is already now able to link patterns of brain activity to thoughts. The futurist sci-fi movie ‘Minority Report‘ is on the verge of becoming a documentary as advances in science and AI take a screaming leap forward.

15 Medical Robots That Are Changing the World We are at a crucial juncture in the field of robotics. We stand at the cusp of a massive shift in the way that we interact with the world and go about our daily lives. Every day, new discoveries are being made that push us inevitably toward a future where the majority of work is done not by us mere humans, but by robots instead. The rise of automation and the replacement of the working class by machinery is not something that is necessarily “new”.

DeepMind's AI will learn inside Unity's video game worlds Intelligent design versus evolution isn’t just a divide in people’s worldviews. It’s also been a divide in the artificial intelligence community. Until just a few years ago, AI was mainly about humans coding smart algorithms–from bank fraud detectors to autonomous video game characters. But with massive server farms, machine learning AI can run wild in the boundless fields of data that society generates–and often intuit algorithms faster and better than humans could program them.

I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes. When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads. (I’m what some call a Facebook “lurker.”) But when I opened my file, it was like opening Pandora’s box. With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Did Facebook Shut Down an AI Experiment Because Chatbots Developed Their Own Language? It is probably not a coincidence that two of the top-trending news stories of July 2017 were, in the first case, a warning from billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk that artificial intelligence (AI) poses an “existential threat” to human civilization, and, in the second case, the announcement that an AI experiment sponsored by Facebook was, according to some sources, “shut down” after researchers discovered that the chatbots they programmed had begun communicating with one another in a private language of their own invention. Musk, who has previously warned that the development of autonomous weaponry could lead to an “AI arms race”, told the National Governors Association on 15 July 2017 that the risks posed by artificial intelligence are so great that it needs to be proactively regulated before it’s too late. “Once there is awareness,” Musk said, “people will be extremely afraid, as they should be.” Cue the “creepy chatbot” stories.

No, Facebook Did Not Panic And Shut Down An AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart In recent weeks, a story about experimental Facebook machine learning research has been circulating with increasingly panicky, Skynet-esque headlines. Photo: AP "Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language," one site wrote.