Lifeboat Foundation

Quirky knitters teamed up with a neural-network creator to generate new types of tentacled, cozy shapes.

It’s feared super-smart silicon assassins could one day declare war on humanity and wipe us off the face of the Earth.

A longer-term concern is the way AI creates a virtuous circle or “flywheel” effect, allowing companies that embrace it to operate more efficiently, generate more data, improve their services, attract more customers and offer lower prices. That sounds like a good thing, but it could also lead to more corporate concentration and monopoly power—as has already happened in the technology sector.

LIE DETECTORS ARE not widely used in business, but Ping An, a Chinese insurance company, thinks it can spot dishonesty. The company lets customers apply for loans through its app. Prospective borrowers answer questions about their income and plans for repayment by video, which monitors around 50 tiny facial expressions to determine whether they are telling the truth. The program, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), helps pinpoint customers who require further scrutiny.

AI will change more than borrowers’ bank balances. Johnson & Johnson, a consumer-goods firm, and Accenture, a consultancy, use AI to sort through job applications and pick the best candidates. AI helps Caesars, a casino and hotel group, guess customers’ likely spending and offer personalised promotions to draw them in. Bloomberg, a media and financial-information firm, uses AI to scan companies’ earnings releases and automatically generate news articles. Vodafone, a mobile operator, can predict problems with its network and with users’ devices before they arise. Companies in every industry use AI to monitor cyber-security threats and other risks, such as disgruntled employees.

Continue reading “Non-tech businesses are beginning to use artificial intelligence at scale” »

‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…

More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.

Continue reading “Google employees pen letter denouncing controversial AI drone project” »

Researchers just overturned a 70-year-old fundamental understanding of how our brains learn – paving the way for faster, more advanced AI applications and a different approach to medical treatments for brain disorders. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Researchers just overturned the way scientists thought our brains learn – a view that up until now has been widely accepted for almost 70 years.

This discovery-based upon new experimental evidence – paves the way for more modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms that imitate our brain functions at a much faster speed with advanced features. Moreover, the research may change how doctors view disorders of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s and may alter treatments for other forms of dementia.

Continue reading “Our Brain Learns Completely Differently Than Experts Assumed For Nearly A Century” »

Elon Musk has famously compared AI to ‘summoning the devil’.

Now the Tesla billionaire claims the technology could lead to the creation of immortal robot leaders from which humanity can never escape.

Continue reading “We will all serve under an immortal ROBOT DICTATOR‘, says Elon Musk” »

Artificial intelligence can create jobs, too. How else do we manage the robots?

Engineering and construction is behind the curve in implementing artificial intelligence solutions. Based on extensive research, we survey applications and algorithms to help bridge the technology gap.

The engineering and construction (E&C) sector is worth more than $10 trillion a year. And while its customers are increasingly sophisticated, it remains severely underdigitized. To lay out the landscape of technology, we conducted a comprehensive study of current and potential use cases in every stage of E&C, from design to preconstruction to construction to operations and asset management. Our research revealed a growing focus on technological solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI)-powered algorithms. These emerging technologies focus on helping players overcome some of the E&C industry’s greatest challenges, including cost and schedule overruns and safety concerns.

Neural networks have started to take off since AlexNet in 2012. We don’t have to call it a software war, but there’s a competition for mindshare and community contributors in neural networks.

Of course, AI needs more than a neural network library, it needs the configuration hyperparameters, training datasets, trained models, test environments, and more.

Most people have heard of Google’s Tensorflow which was released at the end of 2015, but there’s an active codebase called PyTorch which is easier to understand, less of a black box, and more dynamic. Tensorflow does have solutions for some of those limitations (such as Tensorflow-fold, and Tensorflow-Eager) but these new capabilities remove the need for other features and complexity of Tensorflow. Google built a high-performance system for doing static computation graphs before realizing that most people want dynamic graphs. Doh!

Continue reading “PyTorch Should Be Copyleft” »