If you understood the wordplay in the title, you’re well aware of the massive impact that artificial intelligence is going to have on future business decisions across the world. This is just the tip of the iceberg as industry experts point out. According to the McKinsey survey of nearly 3000 business leaders spanning 160 case studies across 10 countries, in 2016 alone, AI initiatives reached investment between $26bn and $39bn, with external investments growing by a factor of 3x within three years prior. 41% of companies in the survey are piloting AI projects while developing their decision-making capabilities and reducing transaction processing times drastically.
So, the big, lingering question is, where does the business strategist fit into the grand scheme of AI implementation? Read More
Monthly Archives: September 2019
What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?
In June of 1956, A few dozen scientists and mathematicians from all around the country gathered for a meeting on the campus of Dartmouth College. Most of them settled into the red-bricked Hanover Inn, then strolled through the famously beautiful campus to the top floor of the math department, where groups of white-shirted men were already engaged in discussions of a “strange new discipline”—so new, in fact, that it didn’t even have a name. “People didn’t agree on what it was, how to do it or even what to call it,” Grace Solomonoff, the widow of one of the scientists, recalled later. The talks—on everything from cybernetics to logic theory—went on for weeks, in an atmosphere of growing excitement.
What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think. Read More
Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill
Wallops island—a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology.
If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little of it. But if crew members had looked closer, they would have seen that no one was aboard: The engine throttle levers were shifting up and down as if controlled by ghosts. The boats were using high-tech gear to sense their surroundings, communicate with one another, and automatically position themselves so, in theory, .50-caliber machine guns that can be strapped to their bows could fire a steady stream of bullets to protect troops landing on a beach.
The secretive effort—part of a Marine Corps program called Sea Mob—was meant to demonstrate that vessels equipped with cutting-edge technology could soon undertake lethal assaults without a direct human hand at the helm. Read More
Edge computing and Artificial Intelligence: a new competitor for 5G
Edge computing combined with AI will allow to process enormous amounts of data locally. The additional cost of hardware accelerators is marginal. The computing performance of neural networks is boosted about ten times every year. The data can be processed in parallel, thereby outperforming traditional CPU design.
Usage of edge computing in applications such as self-driving cars, facial recognition or predictive maintenance is just the beginning. We will soon have enough computing power to build truly independently operating machines. They will be able to move safely in cities, factories and be almost as competent in their work duties as humans. Read More
Is Augmented Artificial Intelligence Already Disrupting Artificial Intelligence?
If digital workplaces are being disrupted by the ongoing development of artificial intelligence (AI) driven apps, by 2021 those disruptors could end up in their turn being disrupted. The emergence of a new form of AI, or a second wave of AI, known as augmented AI is so significant that Gartner is predicting that by 2021 it will be creating up to $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally. Read More
AI Now Institute’s Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker Decode Live Interview
Why an AI arms race with China would be bad for humanity
In a provocative op-ed in the New York Times last week, PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel argued that artificial intelligence is “a military technology.” So, he asks, why are companies like Google and Microsoft, which have opened research labs in China to recruit Chinese researchers for their cutting-edge AI research, “sharing it with a rival”?
Thiel’s op-ed caused a big splash in the AI community and frustrated experts in both AI and US-China relations. Read More
Export Controls in the age of AI
What does technological leadership look like in an era of artificial intelligence? The United States, like other countries, is in the midst of grappling with this question against a backdrop of the rise of China and the growing realization that “business as usual” will no longer suffice for America to maintain its technological advantage. Washington has begun to take some important steps to translate this realization into action. In February, President Donald Trump launched the American AI Initiative in recognition that “American leadership in AI is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States.” In a less constructive fashion, two months later Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the China Technology Transfer Control Act of 2019 that would “make it harder for American companies to export major emerging technologies to China.” Clearly, AI is on the agenda. Read More
Viral Deepfake App ZAO Sparks Mass Downloads, Memes and Major Concerns
It’s the hottest thing on the Chinese internet right now, apart from speculation over Kris Wu maybe having a girlfriend. But while the launch of deepfake-style face swap app ZAO has seen it leap to the top of download charts, it’s also raising a host of privacy concerns on Chinese social media, an intriguing development in a country where mass surveillance and facial recognition technology are prevalent.
The app — developed by Momo, the same company behind popular Chinese dating app Tantan — became an overnight sensation after it began circulating on Friday evening. Hashtags related to the app quickly became some of the hottest on microblogging site Weibo, while the app rocketed up the iOS download charts. Chinese social media feeds quickly became filled with ZAO-produced videos from friends and contacts for many users. Read More
Cutting-edge research promises to imbue AI with contextual knowledge
Viewing scenes and making sense of them is something people do effortlessly every day. Whether it’s sussing out objects’ colors or gauging their distances apart, it doesn’t take much conscious effort to recognize items’ attributes and apply knowledge to answer questions about them.
That’s patently untrue of most AI systems, which tend to reason rather poorly. But emerging techniques in visual recognition, language understanding, and symbolic program execution promise to imbue them with the ability to generalize to new examples, much like humans. Read More
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