One question at the core of AI has remained unanswered for 70 years—without giving any signs it’ll be resolved anytime soon:
“How much should artificial general intelligence (AGI) resemble the human brain?”
We know a lot more about the human brain than we did half a century ago. Yet, its deepest mysteries seem to be as out of reach as they were at the very beginning.
You may think it doesn’t matter if we don’t understand it—after all, we’re living in a golden era of AI research and development. But that’s only partially true.
It matters. Much more than many in the field think. Read More
Monthly Archives: October 2022
The Rise of Biodigital Surveillance
Recently, as I was about to go through airport security, a saleswoman intercepted me asking if I wished to skip the security line. Intrigued, I invited her to tell me more. She shuttled me over to the CLEAR electronic kiosk and explained how the product worked. For only $180 a year, I could skip long lines at airports, sporting events, and other large gatherings. The company’s Web site explains: “Instead of using traditional ID documents, CLEAR uses your eyes and face to confirm it’s really you.” The CLEAR system uses not just an iris scan and facial recognition, but other biometrics like fingerprints, tied to demographic data you voluntarily hand over, and a link to your credit score (read the fine print on the consent checkbox). CLEAR also has a Health Pass that stores proof of vaccination, negative Covid tests, and health surveys. Read More
Prompt Engineering: Future of AI or Hack?
Is prompt engineering — the art of writing text prompts to get an AI system to generate the output you want — going to be a dominant user interface for AI? With the rise of text generators such as GPT-3 and Jurassic and image generators such as DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which take text input and produce output to match, there has been growing interest in how to craft prompts to get the output you want. For example, when generating an image of a panda, how does adding an adjective such as “beautiful” or a phrase like “trending on artstation” influence the output? The response to a particular prompt can be hard to predict and varies from system to system. Read More
What is Enterprise Agility?
… I have done a lot of writing recently about these many referents and the Agile 2 Academy, with whom I am currently working. I’ve stressed the importance of attaining what I have been calling Business Agility and observed the many ways in which Agile and agile as they are currently practiced don’t necessarily contribute to it.
- Big-A Agile (the myriad commercial frameworks, such as Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, XP, Kanban and others) subverts real agility by layering process and ceremonies on development teams, often with little benefit for its costs.
- Small-a agile is the goal for digital product development, but the OKRs associated with many efforts are not realized. Why that might be is something worth exploring.
- Agility is a goal, but it is an intermediate one. Companies’ goals are to produce products and services that flourish in their markets. Rapid development and deployment of competitive products and services is the true end goal; agility is a characteristic that successful companies must have to achieve it.
- Business and Digital Agility are two sides of one coin. True agility is characterized by rapid recognition of opportunities and threats, formulation of responses and execution at speed. This cannot happen unless a company’s ability and willingness to transform its Business and Operating Models correlate with the speed at which it can build solutions and products.
#devops
The danger of advanced artificial intelligence controlling its own feedback
How would an artificial intelligence (AI) decide what to do? One common approach in AI research is called “reinforcement learning”.
Reinforcement learning gives the software a “reward” defined in some way, and lets the software figure out how to maximise the reward. This approach has produced some excellent results, such as building software agents that defeat humans at games like chess and Go, or creating new designs for nuclear fusion reactors.
However, we might want to hold off on making reinforcement learning agents too flexible and effective.
As we argue in a new paper in AI Magazine, deploying a sufficiently advanced reinforcement learning agent would likely be incompatible with the continued survival of humanity. Read More
Interesting AI Statistics for 2022
Here’s a summary of interesting AI facts to kick-start us off:
- AI-powered voice assistants to reach 8 billion by 2023.
- By 2025, the global AI market is expected to be almost $60 billion.
- The highest number of Alexa’s inventory skills are accessible in the US – about 66.000 skills.
- Global GDP will grow by $15.7 trillion by 2030 thanks to AI.
- AI can increase business productivity by 40%.XXThe number of AI startups grew 14 times over the last two decades.
- Investment in AI startups grew 6 times since 2000.
- Already 77% of the devices we use feature one form of AI or another.
#artificial-intelligence
The Evolution of The Data Engineer: A Look at The Past, Present & Future
There’s a buzz of excitement around data engineering right now, and for a good reason. Since its inception, there has been no slowdown in the data engineering field. New technologies and concepts are appearing particularly fast lately. As we near the end of 2022, it is a good moment to take a step back and evaluate the current state of data engineering.
What may the data engineer role of today look like in the future? Will it even exist? In this blog post, I look at the past and the present of the data engineering role, examining emerging trends to offer you some predictions about the future. Read More
Will AI take over the world?
Worried Alexa’s busy plotting our extinction while sitting on your kitchen counter? Don’t worry, artificial intelligence isn’t that smart… yet.
Artificial intelligence armageddon. We’ve all chatted about it in the pub, haven’t we? Even if it’s an ironic little, “Ah well, work won’t matter when AI’s doing everything and we’re all dead,” between drinks.
And to be fair, it has been a pretty big year for artificial intelligence. Back in July, an ex-Google engineer made headlines after claiming the company’s LaMDA technology had become sentient (it hadn’t). And earlier this month, an AI addressed parliament with a speech more authoritative than anything Liz Truss managed to say during her minuscule tenure as prime minister.
Maybe a world run by AI doesn’t seem too far-fetched, after all. Could this mysterious bit of technology really change the world as we know it? Read More
Chinese EV maker Xpeng debuts most advanced semi-autonomous driving system to rival Tesla
- Xpeng took the wraps off XNGP, its latest advanced driver-assistance system. The software enables the car to carry out some driving functions automatically but requires a driver behind the wheel.
- The company said XNGP will roll out later this year in certain cities in China and it will be available with the G9 Max, its top-spec sport utility vehicle.
- Xpeng said in a press release that XNGP is the final step “before full autonomous driving is realized.” XNGP is Xpeng’s answer to Tesla’s Autopilot. Read More
#robotics
People Can’t Stop Feeding Their Selfies into a Super Mean AI
THIS NEURAL NETWORK HAS A REALLY BAD ATTITUDE.
There’s a hot new AI on the block, but instead of generating images, this one analyzes them and spits out crude roasts of anyone they depict.
The AI, known as the CLIP Interrogator and created by a generative artist who goes by the handle Pharmapsychotic, is technically a tool to figure out “what a good prompt might be to create new images like an existing one.” Read More
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