Cosmic Log
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.
For years, the Global Good Fund has been working on a malaria-hunting microscope powered by artificial intelligence, and now China-based Motic is taking advantage of the technology to create EasyScan GO. The partnership was announced this week at the Medica 2017 conference in Germany.
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.
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.
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.
It may sound like a zombie movie, but Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science is studying fresh human brain tissue to see up close how our neurons work — and perhaps eventually figure out how to meld minds with machines.
Integrating artificial intelligence chips into our own neural wiring may be the best way to address concerns about the rapid rise of AI, and the potential that the machines could outpace humans, said neuroscientist Christof Koch, the institute’s chief scientific officer.
Studying the brain should be a “matter of great urgency,” whether you believe that AI will lead to a work-free paradise or a Terminator-style nightmare, Koch said today at the 2017 GeekWire Summit.
Less than two months after Intellectual Ventures and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence put out the call for entrepreneurs, business is booming.
“We might be sitting here in a year telling you something very different, but right now, it’s like, ‘Come one, come all,’” Azam Khan, Intellectual Ventures’ director of new ventures, told a roomful of entrepreneurs at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs.
Jacob Colker, entrepreneur in residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, was similarly bullish. “I’m constantly looking for brilliant entrepreneurs, ideally some folks who have some scars on their back,” he said.
After the Oct. 5 talk, audience members swarmed around the two speakers as well as moderator Dave Parker, a venture partner at Seven Peaks Ventures. But what else would you expect at a Seattle Startup Week session titled “Founders Wanted”?
Do we need to be concerned about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence? Some people say there’s nothing to worry about, while others warn that a Terminator-level nightmare is dead ahead.
MIT physicist Max Tegmark says both sides of that argument are exaggerations.
In his newly published book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Tegmark lays out a case for what he calls “mindful optimism” about beneficial AI — artificial intelligence that will make life dramatically better for humans rather than going off in unintended directions.
Tegmark, who’s also the co-founder and president of the Future of Life Institute, says AI won’t be beneficial unless it incorporates safety measures yet to be developed. That’s not because the machines are destined to turn against their masters. It’s because those masters are subject to the vagaries of human nature.
“To me, the really interesting question isn’t quibbling about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic,” he told GeekWire, “but rather to ask, ‘What useful things can we do today to create the best possible future?’”
IBM is making a 10-year, $240 million investment in artificial intelligence research through a new lab it’s creating in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The investment will support research by IBM and MIT scientists at the newly created MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Cambridge, Mass., the two partners announced today.
“Through this collaboration, we will target innovations that will move us beyond specialized tasks to more general approaches to solving more complex problems, with the added capability of robust, continuous learning,” Dario Gil, IBM Research’s vice president of AI and IBM Q, said in a blog post.
The Dota 2 esports tournament in Seattle, known as The International, demonstrates how video games have become hugely popular team sports — and today alpha geek Elon Musk took the occasion to tout a different kind of team effort.
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is also a big supporter of OpenAI, a nonprofit research company aimed at boosting artificial intelligence architectures and applications that benefit humanity.
Today, OpenAI showed off an AI bot that vanquished Danylo “Dendi” Ishutin, one of the world’s top Dota 2 players, in a one-vs.-one demonstration match.
“OK, this guy is scary,” Ishutin said as he battled the bot’s minions. The crowd at KeyArena groaned when the bot crushed Ishutin’s game avatars.
Ishutin was beaten badly in the first match, forfeited a second match, and refused to play a third.