Lifeboat Foundation

Google recently appointed an external ethics council to deal with tricky issues in artificial intelligence. The group is meant to help the company appease critics while still pursuing lucrative cloud computing deals.

In less than a week, the council is already falling apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts.

On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work,’’ Acquisti said on Twitter. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Continue reading “Google AI Ethics Council Is Falling Apart After a Week” »

Discovering planets that nobody has ever seen before is even harder than it sounds. Space telescopes from NASA and other scientific bodies have gathered an incredible amount of data that will take astronomers years and years to sift through, and many times there’s just nothing there to be found.

But humans don’t have to do all of the work, and Anne Dattilo, a senior at the University of Texas in Austin enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to study data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and found not one, but two new exoplanets in the process.

Stickers that are invisible to drivers and fool autopilot.

The Newest AI-Enabled Weapon: ‘Deep-Faking’ Photos of the Earth | RealClearDefense.

This robot works wonders in logistics as it can autonomously locate, grasp and place boxes onto pallets via BostonDynamics.

A new self-healing electronic skin could improve water-resistant touchscreens and soft robots. And reduce waste, too.

But in “The Matrix,” the landmark of liquid-action sci-fi released 20 years ago today, the artificial intelligence comes at us in a uniquely teasing, forward-tilting, who’s-that-in-the-mirror way. The movie is about a computer-company office drone, played with pinpoint charisma by Keanu Reeves, who gets tugged out of his existence by a rebel underground that unplugs him from the Matrix.

The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956, but one way or another it has been the subject of just about every great science-fiction movie, from “Metropolis” to “Frankenstein,” from the paranoid fables of the ’50s (about brainy robots and aliens with giant noggins who were like “advanced” versions of ourselves) to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which HAL, the computer who talks like a wounded therapy patient, displays the anger and ego of a jilted human being. And by the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Machines Who Could Think were really taking over. “Alien” featured a technologically evolved monster with the metallic jaws, the helmet head, and the relentlessness of a demonic thresher, the most sympathetic character in “Blade Runner” was a replicant, and “The Terminator” gave us a dystopia ruled by the machines, featuring a weaponized badass who was the ultimate programmed destroyer.

I ask not for the children’s safety in mind, but rather the robot’s.

“Artificial intelligence will never get jokes like humans do.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A robot walks into a bar. It goes CLANG.

Alexa and Siri can tell jokes mined from a humor database, but they just don’t get them.

Continue reading “No AI in humor: R2-D2 walks into a bar, doesn’t get the joke” »