Lifeboat Foundation

They are key in directing apps like ChatGPT to carry out tasks.

The associate director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence compared AI scientists to “late-stage” teens.

The revolution in artificial intelligence is at the center of a debate ranging from those who hope it will save humanity to those who predict doom. Google lies somewhere in the optimistic middle, introducing AI in steps so civilization can get used to it.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, has spent decades working on AI and views it as the most important invention humanity will ever make. Hassabis sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. Part of the reason for the sale was to gain access to Google’s immense computing power. Brute force computing can very loosely approximate the neural networks and talents of the brain.

“Things like memory, imagination, planning, reinforcement learning, these are all things that are known about how the brain does it, and we wanted to replicate some of that in our AI systems,” Hassabis said.

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NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters Breakingviews) — Trying to predict how a nascent and promising technology will affect society is hubris, but history suggests people are going to have some serious leisure time if the development of artificial intelligence continues apace. Whether that makes them happy, and how the spoils will be divided, are harder to predict.

Over the past 50 years, technology has tended to grow faster than the wider economy. From 2006 to 2016, the digital economy grew at an average annual rate of 5.6% according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or almost four times faster than the overall output. That sort of expansion appears to be oddly consistent. Revenue earned by technology companies in Fortune’s list of the 100 biggest U.S. firms has, adjusted for inflation, increased at a similar rate for five decades.

American employee productivity has increased about 2% annually for seven decades. While higher capital intensity and more skilled labor steadily contribute, what varies more is the ability to deploy technology successfully. Sectors able to automate tasks and reduce workers, such as manufacturing, will generally see higher productivity, while others, such as education, may have a harder time. This process also takes time. In 1987, the economist Robert Solow famously said computers were visible everywhere expect in the productivity statistics. A decade later, productivity shot up.

Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is—in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

In a bombastic interview with none other than Tucker freakin’ Carlson, Elon Musk made a bold claim about Google co-founder Larry Page that, we have to admit, isn’t entirely implausible.

During the newly-released Fox News interview, Musk alleged that back when he and the Google co-founder and CEO “used to be close friends” and he’d stay at the techster’s Palo Alto house, they’d get into lengthy discussions about “AI safety” — and that what Page told him led to his own cofounding of OpenAI.

In characteristic confused-puppy fashion, Carlson asked Musk what Page had said about AI.

Don’t miss our analysis of Google’s I/O most important announcements and whether Google did enough to counter the momentum of OpenAI and Microsoft.

In San Francisco, where two major companies are testing driverless taxis, some local officials are reporting that the vehicles have caused a number of issues, including rolling into fire scenes and running over hoses. NBC News’ Jake Ward reports.

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