Do you agree Eric Klien
Apple AI chief and ex-Googler John Giannandrea dives into the details with Ars.
Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) now permeate nearly every feature on the iPhone, but Apple hasn’t been touting these technologies like some of its competitors have. I wanted to understand more about Apple’s approach, so I spent an hour talking with two Apple executives about the company’s strategy—and the privacy implications of all the new features based on AI and ML.
Monstrous Ai
Thirty experts came together to determine the top A.I. threat in the next 15 years. The result is including in a forthcoming study published in “Crime Science.”
They can make 3,000 calls a day without getting tired or temperamental and even blocking their number won’t stop them getting through. And there’s little point swearing at them.
The terrorist or psychopath of the future, however, will have not just the Internet or drones—called “slaughterbots” in this video from the Future of Life Institute—but also synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and advanced AI systems at their disposal. These tools make wreaking havoc across international borders trivial, which raises the question: Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not. What justifies the existence of the state, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, is a “social contract.” People give up certain freedoms in exchange for state-provided security, whereby the state acts as a neutral “referee” that can intervene when people get into disputes, punish people who steal and murder, and enforce contracts signed by parties with competing interests.
The trouble is that if anyone anywhere can attack anyone anywhere else, then states will become—and are becoming—unable to satisfy their primary duty as referee.
In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,” tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.”
An aerial combat simulation between an F-16 pilot and an artificial intelligence algorithm is part of the government-sponsored “Alpha Dog Trials” on Aug. 20.
These guys have a great idea…but In true Zuckerberg style how does one steal and supercharge the idea. With food having salmonella, people need to grow more food at home. What technology can be created that uses technology to help people in urban settings grow their own food. This will help many in a post covid world, and the food should be safer, and also may promote nutrition. nnAmerican farmers also are having trouble, and would see the loss in demand. Global food production needs to increase. Japan offered to boost the continent of Africa’s rice production through cooperation. The same cooperation needs to be done with American farmers to boost Africa’s food production. Technology would be used to partner American farmers with African village cooperatives. The farmers and cooperatives would work together and share profits. This way the American farmer has revenue coming from two markets and continents. The same model can also be used in Mexico to prevent immigration. This way American farmers would also have revenue coming from Central and South America, however people who normally would be farm workers would be partners, and make more than they would having to cross borders dangerously, to make less money. This model can both reduce poverty, as well and insure food security. The capital for investment would have to come from many sources. Crowdfunding is one that can be good as the money can be paid back with profit. This way a crowd fund investment would gain better returns than interest rates. The next of course would be USAID. A project can be developed, in which USAID provides American farmers with start up capital. They manage the project pay back the loans, while sharing profits. Agreements can be developed for certain periods of time, After which the American farmer turns the project over to the cooperatives…just thinking out of the box it is a bit crazy. The farmers would be like a new Peace Corps thing. #VillageEconomics nnPortfolio company #ApolloAgriculture was recently featured in a Forbes article highlighting their machine-learning and automated-operations technology that helps small-scale farmers access everything they need to maximize their profitability. #impactinvesting #agtech
Between 2011 and 2014, engineer and Stanford grad Eli Pollak worked in agricultural technology in the U.S. for a company called the Climate Corporation. The enterprise where he was one of the early employees (which in 2013 was acquired by Monsanto for over $1 billion) worked on providing customized recommendations to increase production of large scale commercial farmers. What caught Pollak’s eye during his tenure at the company, however, was that some countries were planting way more seeds, but producing dramatically less agricultural products than the U.S.
This prompted Pollak to team up with Climate Corporation colleague Earl St Sauver, and Benjamin Ngenga (who himself grew up on a farm) to start Apollo Agriculture, a Kenyan ag-tech company which uses machine learning and automated operations technology to help small-scale farmers access everything they need to maximize their profitability.
In late May, Apollo Agriculture raised $6 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Anthemis Exponential Ventures, with participation from Leaps by Bayer, Flourish Ventures (a venture of The Omidyar Group), Sage Hill Capital, To Ventures Food, Breyer Labs, and existing investors Accion Venture Lab and Newid Capital, among others.
The company claims that it is set to disrupt the food supply chain with an automated robotic that can print a plant based burger and cook it up for you to your unique requirements within just six minutes.
This food robot could 3D print a patty and grill it to your specifications inside of six minutes. Welcome to the future of food preparation.
Many organizations will likely look to technology as they face budget cuts and need to reduce staff. “I don’t see us going back to the staffing levels we were at prior to COVID,” says Brian Pokorny, the director of information technologies for Otsego County in New York State, who has cut 10% of his staff because of pandemic-related budget issues. “So we need to look at things like AI to streamline government services and make us more efficient.”
For 23 years, Larry Collins worked in a booth on the Carquinez Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area, collecting tolls. The fare changed over time, from a few bucks to $6, but the basics of the job stayed the same: Collins would make change, answer questions, give directions and greet commuters. “Sometimes, you’re the first person that people see in the morning,” says Collins, “and that human interaction can spark a lot of conversation.”
But one day in mid-March, as confirmed cases of the coronavirus were skyrocketing, Collins’ supervisor called and told him not to come into work the next day. The tollbooths were closing to protect the health of drivers and of toll collectors. Going forward, drivers would pay bridge tolls automatically via FasTrak tags mounted on their windshields or would receive bills sent to the address linked to their license plate. Collins’ job was disappearing, as were the jobs of around 185 other toll collectors at bridges in Northern California, all to be replaced by technology.
Machines have made jobs obsolete for centuries. The spinning jenny replaced weavers, buttons displaced elevator operators, and the Internet drove travel agencies out of business. One study estimates that about 400,000 jobs were lost to automation in U.S. factories from 1990 to 2007. But the drive to replace humans with machinery is accelerating as companies struggle to avoid workplace infections of COVID-19 and to keep operating costs low. The U.S. shed around 40 million jobs at the peak of the pandemic, and while some have come back, some will never return. One group of economists estimates that 42% of the jobs lost are gone forever.
When the Covid-19 pandemic made face masks an everyday essential, Japanese startup Donut Robotics spotted an opportunity. They created a smart mask — a high-tech upgrade to standard face coverings, designed to make communication and social distancing easier.
In conjunction with an app, the C-Face Smart mask can transcribe dictation, amplify the wearer’s voice, and translate speech into eight different languages.
The cutouts on the front are vital for breathability, so the smart mask doesn’t offer protection against the coronavirus. Instead, it is designed to be worn over a standard face mask, explains Donut Robotics CEO Taisuke Ono. Made of white plastic and silicone, it has an embedded microphone that connects to the wearer’s smartphone via Bluetooth. The system can translate between Japanese and Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, English, Spanish and French.
A machine-learning algorithm that can predict the compositions of trend-defying new materials has been developed by RIKEN chemists1. It will be useful for finding materials for applications where there is a trade-off between two or more desirable properties.
Artificial intelligence has great potential to help scientists find new materials with desirable properties. A machine-learning algorithm that has been trained with the compositions and properties of known materials can predict the properties of unknown materials, saving much time in the lab.
But discovering new materials for applications can be tricky because there is often a trade-off between two or more material properties. One example is organic materials for organic solar cells, where it is desired to maximize both the voltage and current, notes Kei Terayama, who was at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project and is now at Yokohama City University. “There’s a trade-off between voltage and current: a material that exhibits a high voltage will have a low current, whereas one with a high current will have a low voltage.”
