Artificial intelligence (AI) — defined by John McCarthy, one of the doyens of AI, as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” — is slowly gaining relevance in the military domain. While commercial use of AI is widening, there are only three countries that are reported to be developing serious military AI technologies: the United States, China and Russia. AI promises a significant military advantage to a nation’s offensive and defensive military capabilities.
AI now has the capacity to be merged with sophisticated but untried, new weaponry, such as offensive cyber capabilities. This is an alarming development, as it has the potential to destabilize the balance of military power among the leading industrial nations. Read More
Daily Archives: July 30, 2019
The Top-10 Russian Artificial Intelligence Startups
As China and the US are fighting for AI supremacy and the EU is scrambling to catch up, Russia’s growing its footprint in AI with a seemingly low-key approach. Hearing less about Russian AI companies doesn’t mean they don’t exist though. The Russian government’s investments into AI have been dwarfed by the billions of dollars China and the US have been spending but this may change with a growing number of public-private partnerships and the involvement of the Russian Ministry of Defense in AI projects. Russia also has a strong venture capital infrastructure in place that has helped grow her “AI industry” up to this point. Read More
State of AI: Artificial Intelligence, the Military and Increasingly Autonomous Weapons
As artificial intelligence works its way into industries like healthcare and finance, governments around the world are increasingly investing in another of its applications: autonomous weapons systems. Many are already developing programs and technologies that they hope will give them an edge over their adversaries, creating mounting pressure for others to follow suite.
These investments appear to mark the early stages of an AI arms race. Much like the nuclear arms race of the 20th century, this type of military escalation poses a threat to all humanity and is ultimately unwinnable. It incentivizes speed over safety and ethics in the development of new technologies, and as these technologies proliferate it offers no long-term advantage to any one player. Read More
Weapons of the weak: Russia and AI-driven asymmetric warfare
Speaking to Russian students on the first day of the school year in September 2017, Putin squarely positioned Russia in the technological arms race for artificial intelligence (AI). Putin’s comment (see above) signaled that, like China and the United States, Russia sees itself engaged in direct geopolitical competition with the world’s great powers, and AI is the currency that Russia is betting on. But, unlike the United States and China, Russia lags behind in research and development on AI and other emerging technologies. Russia’s economy makes up less than 2 percent of global GDP compared to 24 percent for the United States and 15 percent for China, which puts Russia on par with a country like Spain.[3] Despite Putin’s focus on AI, the Russian government has not released a strategy, like China has, on how the country plans to lead in this area. The Russian government’s future investment in AI research is unknown, but reports estimate that it spends approximately $12.5 million a year[4] on AI research, putting it far behind China’s plan to invest $150 billion through 2030. The U.S. Department of Defense alone spends $7.4 billion annually on unclassified research and development on AI and related fields. Read More
Putin outlines Russia’s national AI strategy priorities
Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered the best insight yet at what shape the country’s AI strategy will take.
Putin ordered his government apparatus on February 27th to formulate a national artificial intelligence strategy by June 25th. With that date quickly approaching, the world is waiting to see Russia’s AI plans.
Back in September 2017, Putin famously said the nation which leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world.” Understandably, Putin’s comments generated fear of a cold war-like rush to militarise AI technology.
The Russian leader’s most recent speech won’t help to ease those concerns after reiterating that AI offers unprecedented power, including military power, to any government that leads in the field. Read More
Emotion schemas are embedded in the human visual system
Theorists have suggested that emotions are canonical responses to situations ancestrally linked to survival. If so, then emotions may be afforded by features of the sensory environment. However, few computational models describe how combinations of stimulus features evoke different emotions. Here, we develop a convolutional neural network that accurately decodes images into 11 distinct emotion categories. We validate the model using more than 25,000 images and movies and show that image content is sufficient to predict the category and valence of human emotion ratings. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, we demonstrate that patterns of human visual cortex activity encode emotion category–related model output and can decode multiple categories of emotional experience. These results suggest that rich, category-specific visual features can be reliably mapped to distinct emotions, and they are coded in distributed representations within the human visual system. Read More
The AI Renaissance portrait generator isn't great at painting people of color
Surprise! Artificial intelligence-generated portraits based off artwork from 15th century Europe… kind of suck at depicting people of color.
Because we’re apparently always ready to hand over our photos for the sake of a trend, the internet’s current obsession is an AI portrait generator that deconstructs your selfies and rebuilds them as Renaissance and Baroque portraits.
Created by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, AI Portrait Ars is a fun way to see how you would have been perceived if you lived in another time period.
“Portraits interpret the external beauty, social status, and then go beyond our body and face,” its creators wrote in the site’s “Why” section. “A portrait becomes a psychological analysis and a deep reflection on our existence.”
Unless, apparently, you’re not white. Read More
Facing your AI self at the ‘Neural Mirror’ art installation
Italian design studio Ultravioletto has created a mirror that lets you see yourself the way corporations see you: as a collection of data points. At first, the Neural Mirror installation (located at a former church in the Italian city of Spoleto), seems like an ordinary mirror. But after you’ve been duly scanned and processed (with the system estimating your age, sex and emotional state) you’ll quickly see something else; a ghostly vision of a machine’s idea of who you are. Read More
GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text
The rapid improvement of language models has raised the specter of abuse of text generation systems. This progress motivates the development of simple methods for detecting generated text that can be used by and explained to non-experts. We develop GLTR, a tool to support humans in detecting whether a text was generated by a model. GLTR applies a suite of baseline statistical methods that can detect generation artifacts across common sampling schemes. In a human-subjects study,we show that the annotation scheme provided by GLTR improves the human detection-rate of fake text from 54% to 72% without any prior training.GLTR is open-source and publicly deployed, and has already been widely used to detect generated outputs. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 