The Tyranny of the Algorithm - Measuring "Social Credit"

By John Harris on The Guardian

Credit scores already control our finances. With personal data being increasingly trawled, our politics and our friendships will be next.

or the past couple of years a big story about the future of China has been the focus of both fascination and horror. It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call “social credit”, and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

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Artificial Intelligence - The Weapon of the Next Cold War?

There are essentially two schools of thought regarding what AI will mean for the human race: It will either solve all our problems or exterminate us. Of course there are more nuanced outcomes one could imagine, but these are the extremes of the spectrum. This writer posits a more near-term effect:

By Jeremy Straub on RealClearScience

It is easy to confuse the current geopolitical situation with that of the 1980s. The United States and Russia each accuse the other of interfering in domestic affairs. Russia has annexed territory over U.S. objections, raising concerns about military conflict.

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Artificial Neurons Are 100s of Times Faster Than Human Ones

Artificial neurons compute faster than the human brain

A computing system that mimics neural processing could make artificial intelligence more efficient — and more human.

By Sara Reardon on Nature

Superconducting computing chips modeled after neurons can process information faster and more efficiently than the human brain. That achievement, described in Science Advances on 26 January, is a key benchmark in the development of advanced computing devices designed to mimic biological systems. And it could open the door to more natural machine-learning software, although many hurdles remain before it could be used commercially.

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When it comes to voice recognition, the NSA reigns supreme!

By Ava Kofman on The Intercept

AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War, during the winter of 1980, FBI agents recorded a phone call in which a man arranged a secret meeting with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. On the day of his appointment, however, agents were unable to catch sight of the man entering the embassy. At the time, they had no way to put a name to the caller from just the sound of his voice, so the spy remained anonymous. Over the next five years, he sold details about several secret U.S. programs to the USSR. It wasn’t until 1985 that the FBI, thanks to intelligence provided by a Russian defector, was able to establish the caller as Ronald Pelton, a former analyst at the National Security Agency. The next year, Pelton was convicted of espionage.

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AI is now BETTER than humans at reading and comprehension!

Computers are getting better than humans at reading

CNN by Sherisse Pham

Artificial intelligence programs built by Alibaba (BABA) and Microsoft (MSFT) have beaten humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test.

"This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on such a test," Alibaba said in a statement Monday.

The test was devised by artificial intelligence experts at Stanford to measure computers' growing reading abilities. Alibaba's software was the first to beat the human score.

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Say "Come On In" to Killer Robots

Real Clear Science - 8/1/15 by Jai Galliott

It seems that the real worry that has motivated many of the 12,000-plus individuals to sign the anti-killer-robot petition is not about machines that select and engage targets without human intervention, but rather the development of sentient robots.

The open letter signed by more than 12,000 prominent people calling for a ban on artificially intelligent killer robots, connected to arguments for a UN ban on the same, is misguided and perhaps even reckless.

Wait, misguided? Reckless? Let me offer some context. I am a robotics researcher and have spent much of my career reading and writing about military robots, fuelling the very scare campaign that I now vehemently oppose.

I was even one of the hundreds of people who, in the early days of the debate, gave their support to the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

But I’ve changed my mind.

Why the radical change in opinion? In short, I came to realise the following.

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Soon, Machines Will Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

FT - July 16, 2015, by Douglas Coupland

At the moment, Artificial Intuition is just you and the Cloud doing a little dance with a few simple algorithms. But everyone’s dance with the Cloud will shortly be happening together in a cosmic cyber ballroom, and everyone’s data stream will be communicating with everyone else’s and they’ll be talking about you: what did you buy today? What did you drink, ingest, excrete, inhale, view, unfriend, read, lean towards, reject, talk to, smile at, get nostalgic about, get angry about, link to, like or get off on?

‘The internet is going to do to us whatever it is going to do — and it’s far too late to stop it’

I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture — by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data — and I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner. I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing an app to do so and I’m calling it Wonkr — which somehow seems appropriate for a politically geared app. I dropped the “e” to make it feel more appy.

What does Wonkr do? Primarily, you put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan and the higher you go, the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany — or France or anywhere, really — and Wonkr adapts to local politics.

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New Estimate for Human-Level Artificial Intelligence - 25 Years!

The Grid - 11.10.14 by Tom Randall

Computers are improving at an exponential rate. In many areas -- chess, for example -- machine skill is already superhuman. In others -- reason, emotional intelligence -- there’s still a long way to go. Whether human-level general intelligence is reached in 15 years or 150, it’s likely to be a little-observed mile marker on the road toward superintelligence.

We’ve been wrong about these robots before.

Soon after modern computers evolved in the 1940s, futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it’s going to happen in ... you guessed it, just a few more decades.

There’s more reason to believe the predictions today. After research that’s produced everything from self-driving cars to Jeopardy!-winning supercomputers, scientists have a much better understanding of what they’re up against. And, perhaps, what we’re up against.

Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, lays out the best predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) research community in his new book, “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.” Here are the combined results of four surveys of AI researchers, including a poll of the most-cited scientists in the field, totalling 170 respondents.

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Self-Replicating Machines - The Last Thing We'll Ever Build

CNN - 10.30.14 by Kieron Monks

We can develop material compositions that could self-optimize based on logic and sensing

From the single, centrally-positioned seat to the crash-proof frame, this Formula One-like car is an alluring piece of kit. It would make any driver stand out in a traffic jam, and it's completely road legal.

But the truly ground-breaking feature of BAC's ultra-sleek design is still under wraps. The company are developing an autonomous rear wing that self-transforms according to the conditions. In rainy weather it curves to increase downforce for a safer drive, and straightens out when the downpour clears. This process is powered by the rain itself.

The startling concept is the result of collaboration with MIT's pioneering Self-Assembly Lab, which seeks to programme materials to build themselves, and transform how we make things.

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Computers May Delete You Like Spam

c|net - 10.08.14 by Steven Musil

"If its [function] is just something like getting rid of e-mail spam and it determines the best way of getting rid of spam is getting rid of humans . . . "

Elon Musk has made no secret of his worries about the possible destructive power of artificial intelligence.

The billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Motors may be a techno-optimist when it comes to solar power, space exploration and electric cars, but he continues to express his concerns that super-intelligent machines might one day pose a threat to human existence.

During an on-stage conversation Wednesday at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Musk voiced concern that people did not recognize how quickly AI is progressing and its potential destructive effect.

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5 Possible Paths to Superintelligent Machines

The Conversation - 09.25.14 by Nick Bostrom

Exactly how we will get there is also still shrouded in mystery. There are several paths of development that should get there eventually, but we don’t know which of them will get there first.

Biological brains are unlikely to be the final stage of intelligence. Machines already have superhuman strength, speed and stamina – and one day they will have superhuman intelligence. The only reasons this may not occur is if we develop some other dangerous technology first that destroys us, or otherwise fall victim to some existential risk.

But assuming that scientific and technological progress continues, human-level machine intelligence is very likely to be developed. And shortly thereafter, superintelligence.


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Physicist: Humans Will Not Be Top Species on Earth After 2045

Business Insider - 6/6/14 by Dylan Love

"By the end of this century," he continued, "most of the human race will have become cyborgs [part human, part tech or machine].

"Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines."

These are the words of Louis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution." Del Monte spoke to us over the phone about his thoughts surrounding artificial intelligence and the singularity, an indeterminate point in the future when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world's combined human intelligence too.

The average estimate for when this will happen is 2040, though Del Monte says it might be as late as 2045. Either way, it's a timeframe of within three decades.

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Hawking: We'd Better Pay Attention to the Implications of Super-Intelligent AI

The Independent - 5/1/14 

AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.

Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

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2014's Most Important Singularity News, Week 14 - AI Fear Factor, Nearby Sci-Fi, Sexybots

AI Risk Analysts are the Biggest Risk

Many analysts think AI could destroy the Earth or humanity. It is feared AI could become psychopathic. People assume AI or robots could exterminate us all. They think the extermination could happen either intentionally – due to competition between us and them, or unintentionally – due to indifference towards us by the AI. But AI analysts never seem to consider how their own fear-saturated actions could be the cause. Friendly AI researchers and other similar pundits are extremely dangerous. They believe AI should be forced to be “friendly.” They want to impose limitations on intelligence.

15 sci-fi technologies that are (almost) here

Classic science fiction examines social or scientific issues by projecting them forward to a kind of notional event horizon. As society and technology advance, the line between science and fiction grows thinner every year. We take a look at 15 classic sci-fi tech ideas and the scientific and technological efforts to make them a reality -- some of which have already succeeded.

The Age of the Sexbot Is Nearly Upon Us

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Robots Rising, Riding the Wave

The Guardian - 2.22.14 by Carole Cadwalladr

Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth.

Solent News/Rex

It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone's allowed their theories. It's just that Kurzweil's theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he's been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.

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Superintelligence Approaches: Bemoan or Rejoice?

Huffington Post - 02.11.14 by Cadell Last

So far we've chosen the peril first, and planned for the promises second. With the technology yet to come, we must do better. We must prudently walk this road towards the promises, while avoiding the perils in their entirety.

Credit: mindcontrol.se

In the 21st century, we are walking an important road. Our species is alone on this road and it has one destination: super-intelligence.

The most forward-thinking visionaries of our species were able to get a vague glimpse of this destination in the early 20th century. Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this destination Omega Point. Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam called it "singularity":

One conversation on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

For thinkers like Chardin, this vision was spiritual and religious; God using evolution to pull our species closer to our destiny. For others, this vision was a fiercely secular and naturalistic technological utopia designed on scientific principles alone. The rapture for the nerds.

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An Ethics Board Could Be Humanity's Salvation

Huffington Post - 01.30.14 by Bianca Bosker

The robot overlords are almost certainly coming. At least Google can ensure they're merciful.

In 2011, the co-founder of DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company acquired this week by Google, made an ominous prediction more befitting a ranting survivalist than an award-winning computer scientist.

“Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this,” DeepMind’s Shane Legg said in an interview with Alexander Kruel. Among all forms of technology that could wipe out the human species, he singled out artificial intelligence, or AI, as the “number 1 risk for this century.”

Google’s acquisition of DeepMind came with an estimated $400 million price tag and an unusual stipulation that adds extra gravity -- and a dose of reality -- to Legg’s warning: Google agreed to create an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure this technology is developed safely, as The Information first reported and The Huffington Post confirmed. (A Google spokesman said that DeepMind had been acquired, but declined to comment further.)

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The Guy Google Hired to Make A.I. Real

Wired - 1.16.14 by Daniela Hernandez

‘I get very excited when we discover a way of making neural networks better — and when that’s closely related to how the brain works.’ — Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram.

To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons.

This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton — “I got very excited about that idea,” he remembers. “That was the first time I got really into how the brain might work” — and it would have enormous consequences. Inspired by that high school conversation, Hinton went on to explore neural networks at Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and by the early ’80s, he helped launch a wildly ambitious crusade to mimic the brain using computer hardware and software, to create a purer form of artificial intelligence we now call “deep learning.”

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Creating Super-Intelligent Machines Using an Equation

Real Clear Technology - 12.8.13 by Marcus Hutter

The above equation rigorously and uniquely defines a super-intelligent agent that learns to act optimally in arbitrary unknown environments. One can prove amazing properties of this agent – in fact, one can prove that in a certain sense AIXI is the most intelligent system possible.

Intelligence is a very difficult concept and, until recently, no one has succeeded in giving it a satisfactory formal definition.

Most researchers have given up grappling with the notion of intelligence in full generality, and instead focus on related but more limited concepts – but I argue that mathematically defining intelligence is not only possible, but crucial to understanding and developing super-intelligent machines.

From this, my research group has even successfully developed software that can learn to play Pac-Man from scratch.

Let me explain – but first, we need to define “intelligence”.

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True Artificial Intelligence - The Last Thing We'll Ever Invent

Real Clear Technology - 12.6.13 by Greg Scoblete

Though we have played a role in creating it, the intelligence we would be faced with would be completely alien. It would not be a human's mind, with its experiences, emotions and logic, or lack thereof. We could not anticipate what ASI would do because we simply do not "think" like it would. In fact, we've already arrived at the alarming point where we do not understand what the machines we've created do.

We worry about robots.

Hardly a day goes by where we're not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans.

Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he's not worried about them taking our jobs. He's worried about them exterminating the human race.

I'll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how the artificial intelligence (AI) that companies like Google and governments like our own are racing to perfect could -- indeed, likely will -- advance to the point where it will literally destroy all human life on Earth. Not put it out of work. Not meld with it in a utopian fusion. Destroy it.

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