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The Social Side Of AI: Think Carefully About The Future

A lot of what we talk about with artificial intelligence and machine learning is what you might call “technical considerations” – which makes sense, because these are groundbreaking technologies.

But AI is going to be social, too – it’s going to have a social context. One way to explain that is that with ‘humans in the loop’ and assistive AI, the AI has to be able to interact with humans in particular ways.

So what about the social end of AI research?

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs to start painting residency program

Under the guidance of Agnieszka Pilat, the trio of Spot robot dogs will independently paint an acrylic ground canvas for their participation in the event.


Agnieszka Pilat.

The trio of Spot robot dogs developed by Boston Dynamics are scheduled to independently paint an acrylic ground canvas for their participation in the upcoming NGV Triennial, which takes place in Melbourne in December.

Google DeepMind Unveils New AI Tool to Discover New Materials

Google DeepMind and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers recently introduced Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), an AI tool to discover new materials and predict material stability.

“We are releasing 381K stable materials to help scientists pursue materials discovery breakthroughs,” said Pushmeet Kohli, head of research (AI for science, robustness and reliability) at DeepMind.

Check out the GitHub repository here.

U.S, U.K. And 16 Other Nations Agree On AI Security Guidelines

Eighteen countries have signed an agreement on AI safety, based on the principle that it should be secure by design.

The Guidelines for Secure AI System Development, led by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and developed with the U.S.’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, are touted as the first global agreement of their kind.

They’re aimed mainly at providers of AI systems that are using models hosted by an organization, or that are using external application programming interfaces. The aim is to help developers make sure that cybersecurity is baked in as an essential pre-condition of AI system safety and integral to the development process, from the start and throughout.

AI imaging software generates a gallery of stereotypes, say Univ. of Washington researchers

BOT or NOT?


If you’re asked to imagine a person from North America or a woman from Venezuela, what do they look like? If you give an AI-powered imaging program the same prompts, odds are the software will generate stereotypical responses.

A “person” will usually be male and light-skinned.

A woman from Latin American countries will more often be sexualized than European and Asian women.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: AI guardrails “aren’t enough”

Guardrails AI companies add to their products to prevent them from causing harm “aren’t enough” to control AI capabilities that could endanger humanity within five to ten years, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Axios’ Mike Allen on Tuesday.

The big picture: Interviewed at Axios’ AI+ Summit in Washington, D.C., Schmidt compared the development of AI to the introduction of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War.

AI won’t steal your job—but it might cut your paycheck, Europe’s central bank says

Since the explosive launch of ChatGPT, there has been a prevailing fear among workers that they will be unable to compete against artificial intelligence, leading to mass unemployment.


In fact, the European Central Bank’s research predicted that AI will actually create jobs and that any reports suggesting otherwise “may be greatly exaggerated”

After assessing nine years of data gathered across 16 European countries, the ECB found that low and medium-skill jobs were largely unaffected by booming technology, meanwhile, opportunities for younger and high-skilled workers actually increased rather than vanished.

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