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Teaches artificial intelligence superhuman relational reasoning.


A key challenge in developing artificial intelligence systems with the flexibility and efficiency of human cognition is giving them a similar ability — to reason about entities and their relations from unstructured data. Solving this would allow these systems to generalize to new combinations of entities, making infinite use of finite means.

Modern deep learning methods have made tremendous progress solving problems from unstructured data, but they tend to do so without explicitly considering the relations between objects.

In two new papers, we explore the ability for deep neural networks to perform complicated relational reasoning with unstructured data. In the first paper — A simple neural network module for relational reasoning — we describe a Relation Network (RN) and show that it can perform at superhuman levels on a challenging task. While in the second paper — Visual Interaction Networks — we describe a general purpose model that can predict the future state of a physical object based purely on visual observations.

A Kiwi company developing artificial intelligence has delivered its latest digital human, called Rachel.

Rachel can see, hear and respond to you.

She is an avatar created by two-time Oscar winner Mark Sagar, who worked on the blockbuster movie of the same name.

Mr Sagar, of Auckland-based company Soul Machines, says his aim is to make man socialise with machine, by putting a human face on artificial intelligence.

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Great story in Politico Magazine on #transhumanism and a future AI President. My direct digital democracy ideas and others are mentioned: “Istvan, for one, envisions regular national elections, in which voters would decide on the robot’s priorities and how it should come out on moral issues like abortion; the voters would then have a chance in the next election to change those choices. The initial programming of the system would no doubt be controversial, and the programmers would probably need to be elected, too. All of this would require amending the Constitution, Istvan acknowledges.”


Yes, it sounds nuts. But some techno-optimists really believe a computer could make better decisions for the country—without the drama and shortsightedness we accept from our human leaders.

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The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.


Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.

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