We’re definitely not a ways off for QC being available to the masses unless you believe 5 years is a long time.
Machine learning kept unstable quantum bits in line – even before they wavered. Cathal O’Connell reports.
Ray Kurzweil is famous for his vision and prediction of a Technological Singularity by 2049 Although whenever Ray predicts a date like 2049, based on Kurzweil’s own past reviews of his predictions, he gives his predictions ten years late or early to develop. So by Ray’s personal standard his prediction timing of being correct on the Technological Singularity would be if it happened in the 2041 to 2059 time window. Usually his predictions are based upon exponential developments and progress, so he rarely would make an error in predicting something happening too early.
The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.
Some use “the singularity” in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies such as molecular nanotechnology, although Vinge and other writers specifically state that without superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity.
“Jia Jia” can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China.
Billed as China’s first human-like robot, Jia Jia was first trotted out last year by a team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China.
Team leader Chen Xiaoping sounded like a proud father as he and his prototype appeared Monday at an economic conference organised by banking giant UBS in Shanghai’s futuristic financial centre.
In the 1960s, most research on computers centered on how to ease daily tasks, but RAND was also exploring how to develop both hardware and software capable of self-direction and of learning. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) represents an exciting area of technology development that has promise to fundamentally change the way that humans live, work, and interact with one another.
In this Events @ RAND podcast, our panel of experts discuss the role AI is playing in society, including the incredible promise and pressing concerns. Bill Welser and Osonde Osoba talk about the unintentional biases due to data and design practices affecting AI systems in use today and why caution must be used in designing AI systems for the future. Dave Baiocchi moderates.
Microsoft announced this morning that it has acquired Maluuba, a Toronto startup focused on using deep learning for natural language processing. Deep learning is an approach to artificial intelligence currently in vogue that has driven incredible gains in the field over the last five years. As Microsoft wrote in the blog post announcing the purchase, “We’ve recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next — machine reading and writing.”
The Verge covered Maluuba in the summer of 2016, when the startup shared the results of an AI system that could read and comprehend text with near human capability, outperforming similar systems shown off by Google and Facebook. Along with acquiring the company, Microsoft has also established closer ties with Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the field of deep learning who served as an advisor to Maluuba, and will now become and advisor to Microsoft’s AI division.