Cosmic Log
Want to order up a drawing? Say you want a picture of a bird with a yellow crown and black rings around its eyes. Or a still life showing swirls of pasta with broccoli, carrots and onions.
Now there’s a bot for that.
Researchers have enlisted artificial intelligence tools, including computer vision and natural language processing, to program a “drawing bot” that can create a picture from the ground up, based merely on a descriptive caption.
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.”
But rest assured, it’s there.
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.
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.
It’s one more domino to fall in a series of human vs. machine gaming experiments — starting with checkers and chess, and moving on to the ancient board game known as Go.
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.
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.
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.
The androids in “Blade Runner” sometimes seem more human than humans, but to feel tears in the rain, you need a sense of touch. Now researchers are closing in on just that: robotic skin that feels.
Engineers at the University of Washington and UCLA have developed stretchable, sensor-equipped skin that can be wrapped over robotic fingers, or prosthetic limbs, and provide electrical impulses for tactile feedback.
The aim of the project isn’t to let androids wax poetic, but to help humans handle robotic tools more precisely.
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.
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?’”