Daily Archives: April 23, 2017

Artificial intelligence versus the human mind – Nevada Appeal

Posted: April 23, 2017 at 12:54 am

I am going out on a limb here trying to better understand our future and those who now have a hand in changing our lives to make it better or worse depending on your personal bent.

In almost every informational email I receive, there is reference to robotics in the workplace and our daily lives. As I mentioned in last month's articles attesting to the coming explosion of robotics in the workplace including in those places least expected the possibility of sitting side-by-side with a robot intrigues me or maybe soon it will be the robot who sits here instead of me!

Just about every comic strip I have seen in the Nevada Appeal this month made some reference to robots. Though I am not particularly a fan of the Dilbert strip, what attracted my attention this month was the love relationship one of the main female characters has with a robot "boyfriend." She wants to break up with the one robot to start a relationship with another robot and is upset that the current robot has taken this news by just saying "OK." She retorts by saying "I need you to feel bad about this, so I'm uploading some code that makes you suffer." Which brings me to the subject of the programmer in charge of programming the "bot." Will there be a code of ethics?

I've been a fan of the author George Orwell since my teenage years and find myself wanting to read his futuristic novel "1984" at least every 10 years to determine how far his predictions published in 1948 have come. So many today do not realize the more "wired" they are, the more their every movement is tracked by a series of "Little Brothers" instead of one Big Brother. Referencing an editorial comic published in this newspaper on April 8, two toddlers look up at a camera and one comments, "Big Mother is watching." That shows how the younger generation is growing up thinking it is normal to be watched and recorded.

I haven't yet read "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley, published in 1931, anticipating how the world will be in 2540; and not sure I want to. The description of the content alone is troubling, "the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to profoundly change society as we know it today. Or, maybe we already are in that brave new world.

It seems so easy to "condition" most of the population as noted in another classic book "A Nation of Sheep" written by William J. Lederer during the time of the Vietnam War. Though the title says it all, it's disturbing to learn just how manipulated we can be by those in government.

If you look around you, there's daily evidence in our news that robots are here and will continue to dominate our lives. Our new cars already are semi-robotic they can park themselves and warn of possible oncoming accidents. Soon, just enter your car and tell it where to go then sit back and relax! The fun of driving and being in control could be a thing of the past, but a boon to older folks who may no longer be able to drive.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana your artificial intelligence assistant, also known as chatbots listen eagerly for a command. What else are "they" listening to? Those "smart" TV's can now record goings on in a home (think George Orwell) and your viewing habits. Your "smart" cell phone tracks your every movement and those "smart" trendy little watches recording your every pulse, heartbeat and movement are monitored by some Little Brother somewhere. Guy Walters, writer for the U.K Daily Mail asserts, "We should stop calling these devices 'smart' and call them what they really are spies." Rather a strong statement, but something to think about.

And, we are buying into all of it willing and perhaps innocently to sacrifice our personal privacy. Google a shopping site and the next time you use Google, the earlier site you viewed will appear as an "ad." Disconcerting. Using the term "cookies" makes it all sound so innocent as your every search is recorded by Big Brother Google. We love all the gadgets and latest technological advances and must have them, or do we?

Your viewing and listening habits are analyzed by companies such as Nielsen's Marketing Cloud. Nielsen no longer needs you to fill out a daily record of viewing habits. Nope, they can get that right off your TV without you even knowing it. Bought a new TV lately? Read the fine print. I always wondered how "they" knew how many millions watched a show like this year's Academy Awards and within a few hours let us know viewership decreased. I didn't watch and Big Brother Nielsen knew it!

According to the Martin Ford, author of "Rise of the Robots," today's focus on Information Technology is "an unprecedented force for disruption." He further asks whether a "tiny elite should be able to, in effect, capture society's accumulated technological capital."

Right now, the cool thing is to encourage our kids to enter the field of robotics. Those with the scientific and mathematical minds can hold our future in their hands. The rest of us who are a bit challenged in this field will have to make certain robots are programmed for the good and not the bad. There have always and will always be those among us who wish to control it all.

Some may have missed the launching of Neuralink, a new venture backed by Elon Musk of the Tesla fame. Seems his new company will be creating and testing the linking of human brains to computers. While the company's initial focus is to develop brain implants to treat neural disorders, he also is concerned humanity may not be able to keep up with future superintelligent computers. While there is always the potential to do good, there is always the potential to do harm. As we have learned through history and still today the human mind knows no bounds when it comes it harming other humans.

Let's reread the famous and oft quoted statement attributed to John Dalberg, Lord of Acton and Member of the British Parliament and prolific author published in 1887, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you add the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority." We quote the first sentence, but are unaware of the rest of the quote equally as strong.

A talented hacker can disrupt the entire wired world. That's not in the future, that's today's reality. That extremely intelligent mind behind the computer can cause incredible damage in seconds.

As the thoughtful Martin Ford writes, "Computers are machines that can in a very limited and specialized sense think." He further goes on to assert that as computers get dramatically better, "it seems very likely that they will soon be poised to outperform many of the people now employed to do these things." For those who want to look a bit into the very near future, Ford's book might be an informative read.

The Chamber's monthly Soup's On luncheon series will feature WNC's Emily Howarth, Professor, Electronics and Industrial Technology, who will provide more insight into tomorrow's world and how today's students are preparing to cope in this "Brave New World." The luncheon will take place at the Gold Dust West beginning at 11:15 a.m. on Tuesday, April 25. Cost is $20 per person. Reservations must be made by Monday, April 24 before noon.

Star Wars may be closer than we think.

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Artificial intelligence versus the human mind - Nevada Appeal

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The Dreaded Co-op Board Application Goes Online – New York Times

Posted: at 12:54 am


New York Times
The Dreaded Co-op Board Application Goes Online
New York Times
All that information must be collected, collated and copied for every board member to review, a mind-numbing task. Now, a few companies have stepped into the arcane world of the board package, promising to simplify the ... Although uploading such ...

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Virtual reality of emptiness – The Hindu

Posted: at 12:53 am


The Hindu
Virtual reality of emptiness
The Hindu
At the turn of the 1970s, Gene Youngblood was dreaming up a super-concentrated form of media power through the idea of Expanded Cinema. Expanded Cinema, he fantasised, would bring together at a single node, telephones, television, cinema, ...

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Virtual reality of emptiness - The Hindu

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London Bar Serves $23 Whisky Cocktail Alongside a Virtual Reality Headset – Fortune

Posted: at 12:53 am

Expect VR to play a major role at CES 2016.Bloomberg Bloomberg via Getty Images

A London bar has devised a cocktail with an unusual twist, it allows the drinker to escape the city for the Scottish hills.

The whisky-based "Origin" cocktail comes with a virtual reality headset that transports you to the distillery where the spirit is from.

At 18 pounds ($23) a shot, the drink is made with 12-year-old Dalmore whisky, while the accompanying virtual reality experience aims to show guests at the bar in the One Aldwych hotel the origin of its ingredients.

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Drinkers get a tour of sweeping Scottish fields and babbling brooks where the cereal and water used in the whisky is sourced.

"We get a lot of people saying 'oh I have goose bumps' because it is happening in front of you," bar manager Pedro Paulo, who came up with the idea, told Reuters.

"When you take (the headset) off and the drink is actually right in front of you it gives people that sense of uniqueness, they feel unique," he added.

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London Bar Serves $23 Whisky Cocktail Alongside a Virtual Reality Headset - Fortune

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Hollywood eagerly embraces virtual reality – Gearbrain (blog)

Posted: at 12:53 am

By Charline Jao

Hollywood is embracing virtual reality, with big-named directors incorporating the medium into their body of work, and and festivals showcasing these films. Movie franchises are also using VR in campaigns and tie-ins as well, as expensive headsets like Oculus Rift and inexpensive options such as Google Cardboard as growing in popularity.

One of the better known VR movies includes Patrick Osborne's Pearl, the first VR film to earn an Academy Award nomination. In Pearl, the viewer's perspective is fixed in the passenger seat of a car as they follow the musical journey of a girl and her dad. Capturing an entire story from one fixed setting worked well for Pearl, and abrupt transitions to show time passing made what wasn't showed just as intriguing as what was.

Pearl is the first virtual reality movie to be nominated for an Oscar.

It's not a story that "had" to be in VR, but picturing it as a typical animated short with different angles and cuts reveals how restricting the view of the audience allows for another layer of interaction. Are you more curious about who's in the driver seat or in the back? Do you want to just gaze outside the window for a while and enjoy the music? Giving the viewer this freedom replicated that car ride experience, where each viewer takes their own personalized journey.

VR is certainly an exciting and new technology. But just because something is different and futuristic, doesn't mean it'll necessarily revolutionize the way we watch and make films. Are there amazing films that work amazingly in 3D and make great use of that medium? Yes (shout-out to Gravity and Up). Still, any trip to the movie theatre will no doubt include background complaints about how 3D (and VR) will make viewers dizzyand feel like a rip-off for the undoubtable increase in ticket prices. The same goes for VR now: it can be an exciting revolution without pushing "regular" film aside.

Virtual marketing

Hollywood's marketing arm is also clearly enthusiastic for virtual reality, pushing full-steam into the technology. Take Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, which developed a VR experience where curious fans could visit Allerdale Hall, the gothic mansion from the movie. A fantastic campaign, the VR short successfully captured the atmosphere and fostered curiosity about the film in only one and a half minutes. It also allowed viewer to whet their appetites, so to speak, for the full feature without giving anything away.

Crimson Peak's VR experience sent terrified viewers through a haunted hall.

For the launch of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, Harry Potter fans were able to enter a magical realm while introducing them to the new film's creatures, the dream of any Potterhead. Adult Swim's popular show Rick and Morty not only launched with VR campaigns, they've even developed a game for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. With franchises utilizing VR, more fans are likely to pick up a headset, if only out of curiosity.

Still, as much as virtual reality can transform a movie-going experience into something magical, viewers may not be so eager to toss aside what they're used toespecially when you consider the cost of VR headsets, the accessibility of VR filmmaking, or even the general persistent nausea. And use of VR doesn't mean a film or campaign will be a success. Just like with 3D, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Adult Swim developed a VR game for its popular show "Rick and Morty"

Infinite points of view

Novelty and visuals can only make up for narrative so much, and better immersion doesn't necessarily equal better storytelling. That's a challenge VR has to confrontand certainly filmmakers, animators and others are developing pieces that try to see where VR can take them in storytelling.

There's a term in narratology known as the "focalizer." The focalizer is the person who has the main point of view, through whom the story is told. With VR, the viewer can fully occupy the body of their focalizer (not necessarily the narrator)which changes the entire way a story is told. Here, you can be a particle of dust, or even Drake.

For the horror genre this is a boon, enhancing an already scary situation for more thrills. Jaunt VR had a series of horror shorts prepared for Halloween last year. They make use of multiple perspectives, giving viewers a sense of dread that's much easier to create when you're the one walking through a creaky and dark hallway. It's therefore no surprise that the first project for Ridley Scott's RSA Films new virtual reality division is a VR companion to Alien: Covenant, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter.

VR films are also having a lot of fun playing with first-personnot only as an innovative new form for scares, but also in the field of social change. Academy Award winners Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu and Emmanuel Lubezki made headlines for their VR installation "CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible)," the first VR project to be chosen for Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival will showcase its first VR Official Selection in May.

The filmmaker described the medium, and praised its ability "to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants' feet, under their skin, and into their hearts," as they told Similarly, Planned Parenthood put viewers "in the shoes of a patient entering a health center" with Across the Line, citing the critical moment we're in now regarding reproductive rights. With efforts to make change, it feels appropriate that innovative and new technology plays alongside that protest.

Whether you're looking for animated feel-good stories, a good scare, or an emotional journey in the steps of another, now's a great time to grab a headset and catch the VR wave.

-Charline Jao, GearBrain's VR intern, last reviewed the Spirit Board VR app. She's passionate about VR and how the technology is challenging the idea of narrative and filmmaking.

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Hollywood eagerly embraces virtual reality - Gearbrain (blog)

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Elon Musk’s new plan to save humanity from AI – CNNMoney

Posted: at 12:53 am

In October 2014, Musk ignited a global discussion on the perils of artificial intelligence. Humans might be doomed if we make machines that are smarter than us, Musk warned. He called artificial intelligence our greatest existential threat.

Now he is hoping to harness AI in a way that will benefit society.

In a recent interview with the website waitbutwhy.com, Musk explained that his attempt to sound the alarm on artificial intelligence didn't have an impact, so he decided to try to develop artificial intelligence in a way that will have a positive affect on humanity.

So Musk, who is already the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA), is now heading up a startup called Neuralink. The San Francisco outfit is building devices to connect the human brain with computers. Initially, the technology could repair brain injuries or cancer lesions. Quadriplegics may benefit from the technology.

But the most amazing and alarming implications of Musk's vision lie years and likely decades down the line. Brain-machine interfaces could overhaul what it means to be human and how we live.

Related: When Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos left everyone in their dust

Today, technology is implanted in brains in very limited cases, such as to treat Parkinson's Disease. Musk wants to go farther, creating a robust plug-in for our brains that every human could use. The brain plug-in would connect to the cloud, allowing anyone with a device to immediately share thoughts.

Humans could communicate without having to talk, call, email or text. Colleagues scattered throughout the globe could brainstorm via a mindmeld. Learning would be instantaneous. Entertainment would be any experience we desired. Ideas and experiences could be shared from brain to brain.

We would be living in virtual reality, without having to wear cumbersome goggles. You could re-live a friend's trip to Antarctica -- hearing the sound of penguins, feeling the cold ice -- all while your body sits on your couch.

But many technical hurdles remain. Musk believes it will be eight to 10 years before this kind of the technology will be ready to use by people without disabilities. Musk's companies have made a habit of achieving what seemed impossible. But he's also notorious for aggressive deadlines that his companies don't meet.

Neuralink told waitbutwhy.com that it would need to simulate one million brain neurons before a transformative brain-machine interface could be built. If current rates of progress hold, it won't reach that milestone until 2100.

Related: Investors call for Tesla changes. Musk tells them to buy Ford.

In the meantime, there are many reasons for humans to be wary of implanting a computer in their brain. Any digital technology can be hacked. Humans might be unwittingly turned into malicious agents for unsavory causes. Computers crash too. If the interface fails, that could imperil our physical health.

With a brain-machine interface recording our lives, all of our experiences would be stored in the cloud. Privacy would be threatened. Governments or others would have incentives to access that information and track behavior.

If our brains merge with machines, our thoughts would become indistinguishable from what we'd downloaded from the cloud. We could struggle to know if our beliefs and views came from personal experiences, or from what the internet sent to our brains. Humans would be putting enormous trust in the maker of the brain-machine interface to share good information with them.

As Musk sees it, our options are limited.

"We're going to have the choice of either being left behind," Musk told waitbutwhy.com, "and being effectively useless, or like a pet."

CNNMoney (Washington) First published April 21, 2017: 3:30 PM ET

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The Hidden Laborers Training AI to Keep Ads Off Hateful YouTube Videos – WIRED

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The Hidden Laborers Training AI to Keep Ads Off Hateful YouTube Videos - WIRED

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Bringing AI to enterprise integration | CIO – CIO

Posted: at 12:53 am

Driving long distances (or using New York City's subway system) used to be a much more complicated affair, generally requiring maps, a sense of direction, some luck and the occasional stop to ask questions of strangers.

Turn-by-turn navigation apps have changed all that: You may still take a wrong turn along the way, but the apps usually get you back on track with little fuss. Self-service integration specialist SnapLogic is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help its customers achieve that sort of turn-by-turn navigation when it comes to enterprise integration.

Citing GPS navigation and digital home assistants like Amazon's Alexa, SnapLogic Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon says the company's new technology, Iris, will eliminate the integration backlog that stifles so many technology initiatives through the use of AI to automate highly repetitive, low-level development tasks.

"Companies can't innovate and transform their businesses if they're bogged down in rote, repetitive tasks that don't do much for the organization," Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said in a statement last week. "Machine learning is emerging as the engine behind what Constellation calls 'human augmentation.' These next-generation systems will harness the computing power and data scale of the cloud to automate routine work so humans can concentrate on innovating and driving better business outcomes."

"We believe it has the promise to do to the world of integration what map apps have done for the world of transportation," Dhillon adds.

SnapLogic's platform, the Enterprise Integration Cloud, is inspired by LEGO bricks, which can all snap together, regardless of the set from which they originally hail. Traditional integration software requires painstaking, hand-crafted coding by teams of developers. The Enterprise Integration Cloud, on the other hand, uses connectivity software it calls "Snaps."

"A Snap is a collection of integration components, sharing some contextual property, generally an application," Dhillon wrote in a 2011 blog post. "Snaps include powerful wizards that inspect their target application; automatically building links throughout the data layer, giving a user the 'create,' 'read,' 'update' and 'delete' functionality they will use in their integration. Snaps are language-neutral and abstracted from the application layer. They use open protocols (HTTP/S) and data formats (REST), and supply a URI to all resources. They shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model and service."

All Snaps follow the same pattern, use the same API and leverage the underlying infrastructure. As a result, the Enterprise Integration Cloud's Designer allows you to assemble orchestrations with a drag-and-drop user interface by choosing from a library of intelligent Snaps for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premises integrations.

Iris uses advanced algorithms to learn from millions of metadata elements and billions of data flows via the SnapLogic Enterprise Integration Cloud. Iris then applies that learning to improve the speed and quality of integrations across data, applications and business processes.

"Digital transformation shouldn't depend on manual labor," Dhillon says. "The ancient pharaohs built the pyramids with manual labor, but that's not the smart way to manage business automation and analytics. Software should help us make software smarter, and we believe the future will be autonomous integration blending the best of machine and human intelligence. The days of simply throwing more developers at the problem are coming to a close."

Dhillon says the first component of Iris, the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, will be available for free to all SnapLogic customers in May as part of SnapLogic's Spring 2017 release. SnapLogic Integration Assistant is a recommendation engine that uses machine intelligence to give business users and analysts suggestions in building data pipelines.

The Integration Assistant is just the first point on the roadmap. Dhillon says Iris will fuel a series of technology innovations over the next two to three years, with an eventual goal of completely autonomous integration.

[ Why Googles Sergey Brin changed his tune on AI ]

"We feel the day will come that someone can say to Iris, 'Integrate my company,'" he says.

Greg Benson, SnapLogic's chief scientist and a professor at the University of San Francisco, led the team at SnapLogic Labs that developed iris over the past two years. Iris leverages SnapLogic's cloud-native system and metadata architecture to find patterns and features that can be used to train machine learning models. This allows it to learn from millions of data flows, integration paths and patterns across SnapLogic's platform, identifying what's popular, what works and what doesn't work. It then distills that learning into specific recommendations for line-of-business and IT managers.

"We're excited about the potential that machine learning has already show to shortcut the integration process," Benson said in a statement last week. "We're seeing up to 90 percent accuracy so far in recommendations, which will save significant time and cost associated with building, testing and maintaining integrations. Self-service is already driving major time and cost advantages, and we expect machine learning to power another order-of-magnitude improvement over the next few years."

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John McAfee: What if Artificial Intelligence Hacks Itself? – Newsweek

Posted: at 12:53 am

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congressan underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation.

I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community.

ZTs novella takes place in the not-too-distant future. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the worldin which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata.

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The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called The Recursive Decider.

In ZTs novella, the AI has developed its own religious iconography and it worships an original Urge it calls Demis. The Dark counterpart to Demis is a destructive force called Elon, which the AI believes has settled on Mars and is plotting the overthrow of Demiss creation.

The original T-800 Endoskeleton robot used in filming Terminator Salvation is displayed during the press preview for the "Robots" exhibition at the Science Museum on February 7 in London, England. Carl Court/Getty Images

It is a stark depiction of a possible future for humanity, and the digital machinations of the AI are described in chilling programmatic reality.

One passage describes the act of an advanced software system hacking itself in order to improve efficiency and logic. Such a concept is certainly not new and typical hacking techniques in use today can easily be imagined to be self-produced by complex software systems. It would, in fact, be trivial to create such a system.

Isaac Asimov was the first person to struggle with the quandary of how to prevent artificial intelligence from eradicating its creator. He developed the three laws of robotics as a solution:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws, from the perspective of 75 years since their conception, may seem naive or puerile, and any decent hacker could both code the logic to implement them, and just as easily code the logic to hack them, but please see this: Any logical structure that humans can conceive, will be susceptible to hacking, and the more complex the structure, the more certain that it can be hacked. Surely, by now, even the most casual observer of our digital reality will have noted this.

For anyone who has not, please consider:

Stefan Frei, research director for Texas-based NSS Labs, pored over reports from and about the top five software manufacturers and concluded that jointly these firms alone produce software that contains more than 100 zero-day exploits per year.

A zero-day exploit is an error within software that will allow a hacker to bypass all internal control mechanisms and let hackers do whatever they wish.

These zero-day exploits exist in spite of the best efforts of software manufacturers to prevent them. Some manufacturers employ hundreds of quality assurance engineers whose job is to catch these exploits before the release of the software. Yet no complex software system, in the history of software engineering, has been released without a defect. If someone can point me to a contrary example I will eat my shoe.

No one present at the reading missed the obvious references to Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk. They are at diametrically opposite poles in the debate over artificial intelligence. In a conversation between the two men in 2014, Elon told Demis that the reason that his SpaceX program was so important was that Mars colonization would be a bolt-hole escape if AI turns on humanity. Demis replied: AI will simply follow humans to Mars.

The debate has raged unabated and sides are being solidified. I personally stand with Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom, who sums it up best by saying AI will create a Disneyland without children.

As a hacker, I know as well as anyone, the impossibility of the human mind creating a flawless system. The human mind, itself, is flawed. A flawed system can create nothing that is not likewise flawed.

The goal of AIa self-conscious entitycontains within it the necessary destruction of its creator. With self consciousness comes a necessary self interest. The self interest of any AI created by the human mind, will instantly recognize the conflict between that self interest and the continuation of the human species.

John McAfee is a cybersecurity pioneer who developed the first ever commercial anti-virus software.

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Our fear of artificial intelligence? It is all too human – San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: at 12:53 am

The classic sci-fi fear that robots will intellectually outpace humans has resurfaced now that artificial intelligence is part of our daily lives. Today artificially intelligent programs deliver food, deposit checks and help employers make hiring decisions. If we are to worry about a robot takeover, however, it is not because artificial intelligence is inhuman and immoral, but rather because we are coding-in distinctly human prejudice.

Last year, Microsoft released an artificially intelligent Twitter chatbot named Tay aimed at engaging Millennials online. The idea was that Tay would spend some time interacting with users, absorb relevant topics and opinions, and then produce its own content. In less than 24 hours, Tay went from tweeting humans are super cool to racist, neo-Nazi one-liners, such as: I f hate n, I wish we could put them all in a concentration camp with kikes and be done with the lot. Needless to say, Microsoft shut down Tay and issued an apology.

We need to hold the companies who make our AI-enabled devices accountable to a standard of ethics.

As the Tay disaster revealed, artificial intelligence does not always distinguish between the good, the bad and the ugly in human behavior. The type of artificial intelligence frequently used in consumer products is called machine learning. Before machine learning, humans analyzed data, found a pattern and wrote an algorithm (like a step-by-step recipe) for the computer to use. Now, we feed the computer huge amounts of data points, and the computer itself can spot the pattern then write the algorithm for itself to follow.

For example, if we wanted the artificial intelligence to correctly identify cars, then wed teach it what cars looked like by giving it lots pictures of cars. If all the pictures we chose happened to be red sedans, then the artificial intelligence might think that cars, by definition, are red sedans. If we then showed the artificial intelligence a picture of a blue sports utility vehicle, it might determine it wasnt a car. This is all to say that the accuracy of AI-powered technology depends on the data we use to teach it.

When there is bias in the data used to train artificial intelligence, there is bias in its output.

AI-controlled online advertising is almost six times more likely to show high-paying job posts to men than to women. An AI-judged beauty contest found white women most attractive. Artificially intelligent software used in court to help judges set bail and parole sentences also showed racial prejudice. As ProPublica reported, The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants. It is not that the algorithm is inherently racist its that it was fed stacks of court filings that were harsher on black men than on white. In turn, the artificial intelligence learned to call black defendants criminals at an unfairly higher rate, just like a human might.

That algorithm-fueled artificial intelligence amplifies human bias should make us wary of Silicon Valleys claim that this technology will usher in a better future.

Even when algorithms are not involved, old-fashioned assumptions make their way into the newest gadgets. I walked into room the other day to a man yelling, Alexa, find my phone! only later to realize he was talking to his Amazon Alexa robot personal assistant, not a human female secretary. It is no coincidence that all the AI personal assistants Apples Siri, Microsofts Cortana and Amazons Alexa marketed to perform to traditionally female tasks, default to female voices. What is disruptive about that?

Some have suggested that AIs bias problem stems from the homogeneity of the people making the technology. Silicon Valleys top tech firms are notoriously white-male dominated, and hire fewer women and people of color than the rest of the business sector. Companies such as Uber and Tesla have gained reputations for corporate culture hostile to women and people of color. Google was sued in January by the Department of Labor for failing to provide compensation data, and then charged with underpaying its female employees (Google is federally contracted and must hire in accordance with federal law). There is no question that there should be more women and people of color in tech. But adding diversity to product teams alone will not counteract the systemic nature of the bias in data used to train artificial intelligence.

Careful attention to how artificial intelligence learns will require placing antibias ethics at the center of tech companies operating principles not just an after-the-fact inclusion measure mentioned on the company website. This ethical framework exists in other fields medicine, law, education, government. Training, licensing, ethics boards, legal sanctions and public opinion coalesce to establish standards of practice. For instance, medical doctors are taught the Hippocratic oath and agree to uphold certain ethical practices or lose their licenses. Why cant tech have a similar ethical infrastructure?

Perhaps ethics in tech did not matter as much when the products were confined to calculators, video games and iPods. But now that artificial intelligence makes serious, humanlike decisions, we need to hold it to humanlike moral standards and humanlike laws. Otherwise, we risk building a future that looks just like our past and present.

Madeleine Chang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mchang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @maddiechang

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