Lifeboat Foundation

How our ideas about sex and service influence the personalities we give machines… Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it’s Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women.

This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like “Her” and “Ex Machina” reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity. But AI, in and of itself, is genderless and sexless. Why, then, are the majority of the personalities we construct for these machines female?

Is it about service? Assigning gender to these AI personalities may say something about the roles we expect them to play. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa perform functions historically given to women. They schedule appointments, look up information, and are generally designed for communication.

In the course of Assured Autonomy program, researchers will aim to develop tools that provide foundational evidence that a system can satisfy explicitly stated functional and safety goals, resulting in a measure of assurance that can also evolve with the system.

Learn more about the Assured Autonomy program: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-08-16

The research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense is marshalling an international effort to overcome what many say is the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of artificial intelligence: teaching algorithms to explain their decision-making to humans.

Boston Dynamics demo clip shows we are not quite living in an i, Robot future – even if the machines can skate better than you can.

Tesla head warns of dangers of AI and pushes for regulation as OpenAI he backed beats best human players in online DotA 2 championship.

“If, as The Wall Street Journal suggests, we think of AI as a technology that predicts, it’s much easier to map its impact. We must push ourselves to do that and understand the future of work.”

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New clip of ATLAS, having some problems but interesting to see.

If at first you don’t succeed, try again—and, if you’re a robot, again and again and again and again and again and again. Because it’s worth remembering that unlike many humans, automatons will keep at a task until they do achieve success.

This GIF of Boston Dynamics’s Atlas robot taking a tumble, sliced from a TED talk published Monday, has gone viral. Presumably, that’s because when humans aren’t fretting about how they’ll steal our jobs, we sure do seem to enjoy laughing at robots falling over.

Continue reading “Falling Robots Are Funny, but That’s How They’ll Learn to Take Your Job” »

Three Chinese internet majors have set up what is claimed to be the one of the largest open databases for artificial intelligence (AI) in the world, aimed at helping global talent advance AI research by harnessing the huge data pool generated by China’s 750 million internet users.

The platform wants to empower AI researchers and developers to advance their research without constraints of data resources, say its backers.

PUBLISHED : Monday, 14 August, 2017, 5:52pm.

Continue reading “Internet majors launch ‘AI Challenger’ platform to advance research with huge China data pool” »