For Jürgen Schmidhuber, a recognized pioneer in AI, artificial intelligence is much more than another technological revolution. He sees it as the opportunity to transcend humanity and biology. In this conversation, Jürgen and Azeem Azhar discuss what the next thirty years of AI will look like.
Jürgen and Azeem also discuss:
–The role of Long Short-Term Memory architecture in recent AI breakthroughs.
–Why the next AI wave will see machines actively shaping the data that they perceive.
–The second- and third-order consequences of bringing these more sophisticated artificial neural networks into our world. Read More
Daily Archives: June 15, 2019
Open Hearing on Deepfakes and Artificial Intelligence
The Problem with Quantum Computers
By now, most people have heard that quantum computing is a revolutionary technology that leverages the bizarre characteristics of quantum mechanics to solve certain problems faster than regular computers can. Those problems range from the worlds of mathematics to retail business, and physics to finance. If we get quantum technology right, the benefits should lift the entire economy and enhance U.S. competitiveness.
The promise of quantum computing was first recognized in the 1980s yet remains unfulfilled. Quantum computers are exceedingly difficult to engineer, build, and program. As a result, they are crippled by errors in the form of noise, faults, and loss of quantum coherence, which is crucial to their operation and yet falls apart before any nontrivial program has a chance to run to completion. Read More
The Predator in Your Pocket
Persons who engage in technology-facilitated violence, abuse, and harassment sometimes install spyware on a targeted person’s mobile phone. Spyware has a wide range of capabilities, including pervasive monitoring of text and chat messages, recording phone logs, tracking social media posts, logging website visits, activating a GPS system, registering keystrokes, and even activating phones’ microphones and cameras, as well as sometimes blocking incoming phone calls. These capabilities can afford dramatic powers and control over an individual’s everyday life. And when this software is used abusively, it can operate as a predator in a person’s pocket, magnifying the pervasive surveillance of the spyware operator. Read More
WeChat Is Watching
It’s 9 a.m. on a typical morning in Chengdu and I’m awakened by the sound of my phone alarm. The phone is in my study, connected to my bedroom by sliding doors. I turn off the alarm, pick up my phone, and, like millions of people in China, the first thing I do is check my WeChat. At 9:07, I send my first message of the day.
WeChat, the brainchild of Tencent—one of China’s big three tech giants—is often referred to in the West as a social media app, something equivalent to Facebook or WhatsApp, but that’s to undersell it. WeChat has over 1 billion active users. In China, people don’t refer to it as a social media platform but rather as a social ecosystem. The features are seemingly endless. Beyond the typical social media functions of messaging and a Twitter-style feed called “friend circle,” it can be used to make payments for almost anything. Because developers can slot their apps directly into WeChat and tie them into the social and payment functions, it acts like a very sleek and efficient operating system. If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat. Read More
Why Digital Transformation Won’t Succeed Without Cultural Change
A lot of businesses frequently use the term Digital Transformation, but what does it actually mean?
We have become so accustomed to digital technology, we are no longer able to imagine life without it. And yet, when it comes to the digital transformation of the work environment, we still have a long way to go. The greatest obstacle for digital transformation is simply, people. Read More
Putting neural networks under the microscope
Researchers from MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) are putting the machine-learning systems known as neural networks under the microscope.
In a study that sheds light on how these systems manage to translate text from one language to another, the researchers developed a method that pinpoints individual nodes, or “neurons,” in the networks that capture specific linguistic features.
Neural networks learn to perform computational tasks by processing huge sets of training data. In machine translation, a network crunches language data annotated by humans, and presumably “learns” linguistic features, such as word morphology, sentence structure, and word meaning. Given new text, these networks match these learned features from one language to another, and produce a translation. Read More
From deepfake to "cheap fake," it's getting harder than ever to tell what's true on your favorite apps and websites
In early 2018 a video that appeared to feature former President Obama discussing the dangers of fake news went viral. The clip, created by comedian Jordan Peele, foreshadowed challenges that have now become all too real. These days, tech firms, media companies and consumers are all routinely forced to make determinations about whether content is authentic or fake — and it’s increasingly hard to tell the difference.
Deepfakes are videos and images that have been digitally manipulated to depict people saying and doing things that never happened. Most deepfakes use artificial intelligence to alter video and to generate authentic-sounding audio. These clips are often produced to fool viewers, and are optimized to spread rapidly on social media.
Examples of deepfake content are popping up more frequently. In May, AI startup Dessa created a video that mimicked the voice of YouTube star Joe Rogan. A few weeks later, a video that purported to show Nancy Pelosi slurring her speech went viral on social media. And this week, a video featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking like a James Bond villain racked up millions of views. Read More
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