Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,400

AI is continuing its assault on radiologists

A new model can detect abnormalities in x-rays better than radiologists—in some parts of the body, anyway.

The results: Stanford researchers trained a convolutional neural network on a data set of 40,895 images from 14,982 studies. The paper documents how the algorithm detected abnormalities (like fractures, or bone degeneration) better than radiologists in finger and wrist radiographs. However, radiologists were still better at spotting issues in elbows, forearms, hands, upper arms, and shoulders.

The background: Radiologists keep getting put up against AI, and they usually don’t fare even as well as this. Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent AI researcher, told the New Yorker that advances in AI mean that medical schools “should stop training radiologists now.”

Singularity Hypotheses Photo

Has AI made significant progress over the years towards artificial general intelligence?

This decades-old debate could end by the new project from the Stanford 100 Year Study on AI, called The AI Index. If their goal is achieved.

Off to a good start, the AI Index’s first report includes many useful visualisations of the data they are collecting, such as the following outline of AI breakthroughs since 1980.

Could science destroy the world? These scholars want to save us from a modern-day Frankenstein

The dozen people working at CSER itself—little more than a large room in an out-of-the-way building near the university’s occupational health service—organize talks, convene scientists to discuss future developments, and publish on topics from regulation of synthetic biology to ecological tipping points. A lot of their time is spent pondering end-of-the-world scenarios and potential safeguards.

A small cadre of scientists worries that lab-made viruses, AI, or nanobots could drive humans to extinction.

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.

Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):

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