Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI business, talks about the company’s approach at the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
BELLEVUE, Wash. — Don’t expect Microsoft’s consumer software to hype its artificial-intelligence features. For the most part, the AI smarts are under the hood.
“If you do a good job infusing AI into your products, your customers don’t know you’ve done that. The products just work better,” Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI business, told attendees at the AI NextCon conference here today. “You don’t actually go do a bunch of advertising and say, ‘Office, Now With AI!’ That’s not how it works.”
A dermatologist uses a dermatoscope, a type of handheld microscope, to look at skin. Computer scientists at Stanford have created an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer that matched the performance of board-certified dermatologists. (Stanford Photo / Matt Young)
Computer scientists have created artificial-intelligence algorithms that are at least as good as trained humans at recognizing the signs of skin cancer or malaria, but does that mean your future physician will be a bot?
Two experts on AI explain in the journal Science why the rapid rise of machine learning could be good for well-paid professionals like dermatologists and epidemiologists, no big deal for workers on the low end of the wage spectrum, but big trouble for employees in the middle.
That’s because those middle-spectrum jobs are particularly vulnerable to the machine-learning treatment, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell say.
Professional poker player Jason Les matches wits with Libratus, Carnegie Mellon University’s poker-playing AI program. (CMU via YouTube)
You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em — and when it comes to betting on human superiority in the game of poker, it may be time to fold ’em.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers laid their cards on the table in a study published this week in the journal Science, explaining how they designed their Libratus AI program to beat four professional poker players in no-limit Texas Hold’em.
Unanimous AI’s online jury uses graphical magnets to pull the focus of their prediction toward the favored choice — in this case, the #MeToo movement. (Unanimous AI Graphic)
It took more than one try, but Unanimous AI’s crowdsourced hive mind was correct when it picked #MeToo as the likeliest prospect for Time’s “Person of the Year.”
A worker keeps watch on a riveting robot inside the mid-body fuselage of a 777 jet. (Boeing Photo)
The latest robot report has bad news for laborers and office support staff, good news for techies and healthcare workers. India looks bright, while Japan could face the toughest stretch.
Those are just some of the takeaways from McKinsey Global Institute’s data-packed analysis of the effects of automation on employment between now and 2030. The bottom line? Hundreds of millions of workers around the world will be displaced due to the revolutions in robotics and artificial intelligence.
“Displaced” is the key term: Many of those workers will adjust to the new conditions. But it won’t be pretty, McKinsey’s analysts say. As many as 375 million workers, including 38.6 million Americans, may have to switch occupations or learn new skills to hold down a job in 2030.
“Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging — matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past,” the analysts write.
The Atlas humanoid robot sets up for a backflip. (Boston Dynamics via YouTube)
Boston Dynamics’ video of a humanoid robot executing a perfect backflip sparked a lot of dark humor, and now billionaire Elon Musk has responded with dark seriousness about the risks posed by super-intelligent, super-agile bots.
Musk suggested that future robots could move so fast they could match the fictional Flash, who eludes his comic-book foes by moving too fast for the eye to see. Compared to that superpower, doing human-level backflips is “nothing,” Musk said in a tweet.
Bad guys unleash a batch of killer drones in a video created to illustrate the dangers of autonomous weapons. (Campaign to Stop Killer Robots / Future of Life Institute)
As if the mere phrase “killer robots” weren’t scary enough, AI researchers and policy advocates have put together a video that combines present-tense AI and drone technologies with future-tense nightmares.
The disturbing seven-minute movie is being released to coincide with a pitch being made on Nov. 13 in Geneva during talks relating to the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or CCW.
Diplomats will be discussing the prospects for a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons, and an advocacy group known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is pressing for quick action. The campaign’s video is meant to show how quickly the threat could move from TED talks to mass killings.
AI2’s Marie Hagman drew upon person experience during her work on Semantic Scholar. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
As senior product manager at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, Hagman played a key role in figuring out how to incorporate documents from PubMed and other biomedical databases in the academic search tool.
She drew upon her personal experience from 15 years earlier, when she was a software engineer suffering from two stomach ulcers and gastritis. Her specialist gave her a prescription to deal with the issue, but told her she’d probably have to keep taking pills for the rest of her life.
“I was thinking, ‘Hmm … I’m young and healthy. That just doesn’t sound right,’” Hagman recalled. “They still couldn’t tell me why I had this problem. So I decided to be my own advocate.”
She searched through the medical literature on stomach ulcers, and found a study in which researchers pointed to a type of bacteria known as Helicobacter pylori as a potential cause. Armed with that knowledge, she persuaded another specialist to put her on a two-week round of antibiotics.
“I’ve been cured ever since,” Hagman told GeekWire.
Now her objective is to help researchers, and even regular folks, find the most relevant studies that address the medical questions they want to answer.
Dan Brown’s “Origin” weaves scientific themes into a thriller set in Spain. (AuthorDanBrown via YouTube)
Imagine an age when artificial intelligence takes the sum of human experience and turns it into a “global consciousness” that becomes a replacement for God.
That scenario could serve as the plot for a science-fiction novel, but novelist Dan Brown suggests that it’s a real-life possibility, thanks to anticipated advances in technology.
“Over the next decade our species will become enormously interconnected at a level we are not used to, and we will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,” the AFP news agency quoted Brown as sayingtoday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. “Our need for the exterior God that sits up there and judges us … will diminish and eventually disappear.”
God’s place would be taken by “some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
Brown’s talk focused on his latest thriller, “Origin,” which follows a plot line that’s almost as far out there.
