Lifeboat Foundation

The group says it has a more practical way to get software to learn tasks, such as steering robots, that require multiple actions.

In the popular TV show Sherlock, visual depictions of our hero’s deductive reasoning often look like machine algorithms. And probably not by accident, given that this version of Conan Doyle’s detective processes tremendous amounts of observed data—the sort of minutiae that the average person tends to pass over or forget—more like a computer than a human.

Sherlock’s intelligence is both strength and limitation. His way of thinking is often bounded by an inability to intuitively understand social and emotional contexts. The show’s central premise is that Sherlock Holmes needs his friend John Watson to help him synthesize empirical data into human truth.

In Sherlock we see the analog for modern AI: highly performant learning machines that can achieve metacognitive results with the assistance of fully cognitive human partners. Machine intelligence does not by its nature make human intelligence obsolete. Quite the opposite, really—machines need human guidance.

Continue reading “Why the Rise of AI Makes Human Intelligence More Valuable Than Ever” »

IBM recently announced that its speech recognition system achieved an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, coming closer to human parity. Here’s what it means for enterprises.

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.

Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that’s longer than a football field but feels like a single room. “My desk is all the way at the other end,” he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.

Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.

Continue reading “I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into” »

With so many players jumping headlong into AI, it’s understandable that investors may not be aware of them all. Here are a few you may not know about.

For centuries, humans have been fretting over “technological unemployment” or the loss of jobs caused by technological change. Never has this sentiment been accentuated more than it is today, at the cusp of the next industrial revolution.

With developments in artificial intelligence continuing at a chaotic pace, fears of robots ultimately replacing humans are increasing.

TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what’s in store for 2017.

Continue reading “How to prepare for employment in the age of artificial intelligence” »

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

Musk has hinted at the existence of Neuralink a few times over the last six months or so. More recently, Musk told a crowd in Dubai, “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.” On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.

To address the unique needs of the world’s most complex industrial environments,

Airobotics has developed a platform that is fully automated, industrial grade, on-demand and multi-purpose.

Today, Elon Musk stated that updates regarding his neural lace, which is meant to augment the human mind, are coming next month. In October, Bryan Johnson announced a $100 million investment to put computers in our brains. And so, a race is on to hack human intelligence.

The age of the machine is well underway, and there is a very good chance that humanity will be left behind. Artificial intelligence is beating us at poker. It is beating us at Go. It is saving lives by identifying diseases when human doctors fail. It is running our grocery stores. It is driving our cars. AI is even making other AI.

Soon, very soon, our computers will surpass us in every skill imaginable.

Continue reading “Musk Is Preparing to Release ‘Brain Hacking Tech,’ And He’s Not Alone” »