Daily Archives: May 26, 2017

AI: The promise and the peril | CSO Online – CSO Online

Posted: May 26, 2017 at 4:04 am

Mommas, dont let your babies grow up to be truck drivers. Or pretty much anything that a machine or a robot could do, if you want them to have a job. The list of those things will continue to get longer in some cases rapidly extending well beyond the assembly line on a factory floor.

The forecast is not all gloomy artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation are also expected to create jobs that will likely be much more interesting and creative than the repetitive tasks of the industrial age.

Indeed, it has been a growing component of cybersecurity technology, and therefore cybersecurity jobs, for several years. Former Symantec CTO Amit Mital (now manager at KRNL Labs), at a panel discussion sponsored by Fortune magazine in 2015, called AI one of the few beacons of hope in this mess the mess being cybersecurity, which he contended is basically broken.

[Related: -->Machine learning: Cybersecurity dream-come-true or pipe dream?]

That, according to a number of experts on panel discussions of AI at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on Wednesday, illustrates both the peril and the promise of the technology.The enormous challenge, they said, will be to minimize the peril while maximizing the benefits.

According to Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT and co-director of the universitys Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), AI amounts to, the largest disruption in labor and the way we work, in generations. He called it the, second phase of the second machine age, and noted that while he and his co-panelist, Erik Brynjolfsson, have written two books on the topic, we dont know whats coming at us.The panel title was that of their forthcoming book: Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.

McAfee cited an example of the increasing power of AI from this week, when a computer program, Googles AlphaGo, defeated Ke Jie, Chinas top player of the ancient strategy game Go, after which Ke said this was no fluke that the programs understanding of Go and the judgment of the game is beyond our ability.

Brynjolfsson, MIT professor and director of the IDE, agreed. He said the second wave, is machines moving beyond what they are taught by humans to learning on their own.It is the most important thing affecting the economy and society, he said.

Those warnings were somewhat offset by assurances that while AI is already better than humans at jobs that involve patterns, and will be getting much better, it is not even close to matching humans in areas like creativity, collaboration and even conversations smart machines are still dependent on the datasets used to train them.

[Related: -->AI isn't just for the good guys anymore]

That capacity to absorb and analyze massive datasets is one of the things that makes AI effective in cybersecurity, It can spot anomalies much more quickly than humans.

But as Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and moderator of a panel titled, Putting AI to Work, put it, the fear that machines will become smarter than humans and take over the world is tempered by the reality that theyre stupid and theyve already taken over the world.

There was general agreement that AI is now generating and will continue to generate massive disruption. It will require massive adaptation if AI is to benefit society at large, and not just a few big winners.Some panelists were optimistic that, as has been the case with other technological revolutions, there will be new jobs created that cant even be imagined now.

However,Ryan Gariepy, cofounder and CTO of Clearpath and OTTO Motors, was dubious that the same will happen with the revolution now under way.My opinion is that we will not see net new job creation, he said. If I and other people do our jobs, you wont need as many people to keep the world moving. There needs to be some social consideration of that.

He said he expects millions of jobs to become obsolete, and for that trend to accelerate, adding that retraining is not always a practical option.Truck drivers cant go back to school, he said, and 90 percent of those jobs will disappear in a generation, when autonomous vehicles become standard.

Brynjolfsson warned that it wont just be low- to medium-skilled jobs affected. There is the potential for it to take over many other jobs, he said. Machines can read MRIs and other medical images. People with 20 years training may find their skills are irrelevant.

Ali Azarbayejani, CTO of Cognito Corporation, noted that while the current technology revolution will likely create many new jobs, they will be different jobs that require different skills.

Some of those jobs are already apparent in cybersecurity. As has been well documented, robots and machines can be hacked. There have been high-profile demonstrations of hacks of self-driving vehicles.So those machines, devices and vehicles, and the individual users and companies that depend on them, will require an expanding security workforce for protection.

Seth Earley, CEO of Earley Information Science, while agreeing there will be, an enormous amount of disruption," from AI, was more optimistic about retraining for the jobs of the future.The thing that is causing the problem is part of the solution, because of improvements in training with robot simulation, he said. Imagine the best teacher you ever had. Imagine that being developed into a program.

The least disruptive scenario, Ito said, would be for AI to augment rather than automate the workplace. Augmentation doesnt mean youve given up your agency, he said. I dont think letting the machine decide is optimal.

[Related: -->AI will transform information security, but it wont happen overnight]

Azarbayejani said augmentation is one of the services his firm provides listening to workers in large call centers, not only for measuring (customer service) but how to improve in real time. Its very much augmenting it doesnt replace humans, but helps them do their jobs better, he said.

For those left unemployed, there was some discussion of the societal implications of providing a UBI (universal basic income) to all people whether they are working or not. But McAfee contended, we are nowhere near peak labor, and Brynjolfsson said most people want to work and be engaged in their community.Were not in a world where were short of work that humans can do, he said. Thats decades out.

If there is a way to prepare for what is already under way, several panelists said it will have to involve re-thinking education.Kids should talk to each other and play with one another, Brynjolfsson said. Right now they are well trained for the first machine age, but not for collaboration and creativity.

McAfee agreed. An amazing number of entrepreneurs were dropouts, he observed.

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IBM’s New PowerAI Features Again Demonstrate Enterprise AI Leadership – Forbes

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Forbes
IBM's New PowerAI Features Again Demonstrate Enterprise AI Leadership
Forbes
Last November I wrote a column about IBM's newly announced AI software toolkit, PowerAI. PowerAI fulfills a special niche part of IBM's AI investmentaimed towards enterprises who want something in between Watson's turnkey solution (easy button on ...

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AI and Robots Will Change the Way We Create and Consume Content – Futurism

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Opportunity in Automation

Automation will force most people out of a job and society will eventually be forced to adopt some form of universal basic income. What then? What are people going to do whenthey no longer have to work?Click to View Full Infographic

Initially, it seems like a nice problem to have as it will free people to do what they really want to do with their lives. But we define ourselves by how we contribute to society, for most people their career is the answer to who they are and what they do.

Some will spend all that extra time doing more of the things they already do with their free time: surfing the internet, watching movies and TV shows, and playing video games.

But there is an opportunity this future we are quickly hurtling towards will also create. Rather than just being passive consumers of content, people will all be able to become active participants in content creation.

YouTube is the worldsthird most visited site after Google(which also owns YouTube) and Facebook.300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and3.25 billion hours of video are watched each month.Gone are the days when we rely solely on giant studios and networks for our entertainment as increasingly people are turning to other people for content.

Online content creation has become an industry unto itself as the number of YouTube channels earning six figures has increased by 50% year on year. Digital marketplaces for a wide variety of content creators are coming online allowing anyone who wants to become a digital entrepreneur.

This will impact how individual value is measured. Your worth will no longer come from the company you work for or the degree you have but by the popularity of your creations. A history of producing things people want will be all that has value.

Passive consumption will also continue to grow and will become even more appealing and addictive than it is today.

98 million people now have Netflix accounts and that number is growing rapidly. The company got here by understanding the importance of creating easy and addictive user experiences. They started in 1997 selling home deliver DVDs and in 2007 switched to become the go-to live streaming on-demand platform that has made them the largest internet television network in America.

However their plan is to become the biggest entertainment network on earth and to get there Netflix is now harnessing artificial intelligence to customize their user interface to fit each persons unique tastes. Here is CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings in a talk titled leveraging AI to make user experience & entertainment addictive.

Facebook just launched what they are calling Act 2,which is going to take the social media giant away from its core product, social media, and refocus its efforts on augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

In a talk on April 18th Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the future of Facebook. He simultaneously launched the beta version of Facebooks new augmented reality tool that will leverage their social media platforms; Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat and Instagram, to createthe communities he has been talking about a lot lately.

Underlying all of the augmented reality applications, as well as the new messaging service and the new VR social media platform that they are also rolling out is machine learning algorithms (AI). Zuckerberg stated in his address that the application of AI to all that Facebook is doingwill eventually allow the platform to replace all of the hardware in the real world with digital versions of them that look and feel just as real.

Another critical part of this plan is to make these platforms open and allow for anyone who wants to contribute to the creation of all the content that will go into them.

Already having surpassed the film and music industries combined, video games are poised to grow even faster in the decade to come with the rise of virtual and augmented reality.The continued rise of E-gaming and live stream gaming platforms like Twitch will further this trend, already last year more people watched the league of legends finals than the NBA finals.

The biggest game changer will eventually come from immersive artificially intelligent entertainment. Once AI becomes good at writing novel code it will be able to create virtual experiences that can be crafted to each user, writing movies for you as you watch them and writing games for you as you play them, making it possible that no two people will ever play the same game or watch the same movie.

For those that recognize and take advantage of all these changes it means a shift away from passive consumption to active selection of entertainment and the ability to participate in the creation of content.

For those that dont adjust and get stuck in the passive consumption model of the past the future will probably look something like this.

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Google AI defeats human Go champion – BBC News

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BBC News
Google AI defeats human Go champion
BBC News
"It is an incredible achievement and most experts thought an AI winning at Go was 20 years away so DeepMind is leading the field but this AI doesn't have general intelligence. It doesn't know that is playing a game and it can't make you a cup of tea ...
An AI Is Now the Best Player of Humanity's Most Complicated GameGizmodo
Google's AI Program Rattles Chinese Go Master as It Wins MatchNew York Times
Google's Go-playing AI still undefeated with victory over world number oneThe Guardian
CNNMoney -TechCrunch -Phys.Org -DeepMind
all 146 news articles »

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With $7.5M in funding, Viz will use AI for time-sensitive image analysis – MobiHealthNews

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Viz, a San Francisco-based company looking to apply artificial intelligence to medical imaging, has raised $7.5 million in first-round funding. The round includes two tranches -- a $4.7 million round that just closed and a $2.5 million round from last fall. The other $300,000 was reserved for employees to contribute. The funding round was led byDHVC and Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidts Innovation Endeavors. AME Cloud Ventures and Susa Ventures also contributed.

"AI in the form of deep learning is actually relatively simple when you think of it," CEO Dr. Chris Mansa told MobiHealthNews. "Its just training an algorithm to identify patterns. And doctors, when we look at medical images, we are looking for patterns that weve learned about and seen before and categorizing those patterns into diagnoses. So what we do at Viz is we use deep learning to help doctors make that diagnosis faster and get the right patient to the right doctor at the right time."

Viz is initially focusing on stroke, but intends to expand its capability to a number of health conditions where diagnostic imagery is used and time is of the essence.

"When an artery to the brain is blocked, brain cells die at a rate of 2 million every single minute," Mansa, who is trained as a neurosurgeon, explained. "With an artery to the heart [by comparison] its closer to 70,000 cells every minute. Essentially the brain is much more sensitive to schemia, or lack of oxygen, than any other part of the body. And this is why stroke is the number one cause of preventable disability in the Western world."

The company has trained a learning neural network on a large database of medical imagery from the last 10 years to create a tool that can quickly connect patients to the right specialist and give that specialist additional tools to make a diagnosis. The tool will be integrated into a hospital's existing DICOM infrastructure.

"We dont see ourselves and its not a marketing thing, its just that I know the truth about how complicated healthcare is we do not see ourselves as replacing doctors," Mansa said. "Were very much an aid and an assistant to help them do the fantastic work that they already do in a more efficient, faster way."

Viz has completed some pilots in the US and the UK and is awaiting FDA clearance. They expect to have it by late 2017 or early 2018. Mansa said that once the stroke tool is cleared, the company has a pipeline of several other products in the wings. The funding will be used to commercialize the stroke product once it's cleared and to continue to develop the future products.

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7 Ways AI Could Save the Government Money and Boost Productivity – FedTech Magazine

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The cognitive technologies behind artificial intelligence have the potential to fundamentally reshape how the federal government operates, according to a report from the Deloitte Center for Government Insights.

The report, AI-Augmented Government, released earlier this month, says that over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. Its likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.

One of the biggest potential changes is the cost of doing business. The report found that millions of working hours each year (out of some 4.3 billion worked total) could be freed up today by automating tasks that computers already routinely do.

At the low end of the spectrum, Deloitte estimates, automation could save 96.7 million federal hours annually, with a potential savings of $3.3 billion. At the high end, those figures jump to 1.2 billion hours and a potential annual savings of $41.1 billion.

The report provides a taxonomy of AI systems rules-based systems, machine translation, computer vision, machine learning, robotics and natural language processing and delves into their practical applications in government. How can AI reshape the federal government? Here are seven clear benefits the report spells out.

Robotics and cognitive automation allow machines to replicate human actions and judgment, allowing people to avoid manual tasks in order to do work that requires uniquely human abilities, Deloitte notes.

For example, we can automate data entry with automatic handwriting recognition, handle scheduling with planning and optimization algorithms, and use speech recognition, natural language processing, and question-answering technology to provide customer service, the report says. Such capabilities could potentially address three common pain points for government: resource constraints, paperwork burdens, and backlogs.

As an example, the report notes that the Department of Homeland Securitys Citizenship and Immigration Services created a virtual assistant, EMMA, that can respond accurately to human language.

EMMA uses its intelligence simply, showing relevant answers to questions almost a half-million questions per month right now. Learning from her own experiences, the virtual assistant gets smarter as she answers more questions. Customer feedback tells EMMA which answers helped, honing her grasp of the data in a process called supervised learning.

The report notes that cognitive automation can perform tasks at previously impractical scales, speeds, and volumes, allowing for both resource redistribution and workforce optimization.

For example, electronic document discovery locates 95 percent of relevant documents in the discovery phase of legal cases, compared to an average 50 percent for humans, and in a fraction of the time. The technology allows lawyers to sift through vastly larger document dumps, the report says. In medicine, similarly, robotic surgery aims to allow doctors to perform more operations.

A 2016Governing survey of state and local officials found that 53 percent had trouble getting their work done in a 35-to-40-hour week due to excessive paperwork burdens, the report notes.

At the federal level, Deloitte says that simply documenting and recording information consumes a half-billion staff hours each year, at a cost of more than $16 billion in wages alone. Procuring and processing information eats up another 280 million person hours, costing the federal government an additional $15 billion annually. Robotic automation could help cut that down substantially.

At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the backlog of patent applications reached 558,091 in October 2015, the report notes. Patent delays can significantly hamper firms, especially start-ups; an agency study concluded that each year of delay in reviewing first patent applications that ultimately receive approval reduces a companys employment and sales growth by 21 and 28 percent, respectively, over five years, according to the report.

However, cognitive technologies can sift through large data backlogs and take appropriate action, leaving difficult cases to human experts. Robotic process automation, in turn, can reduce backlogs by performing entire end-to-end business processes on a massive scale with little human interaction.

AI technology embedded with sensors and cameras can allow agencies to track and report important information in real time, the report says.

AI-enabled real-time tracking and reporting can also enable disease surveillance, exemplifying a potentially life-saving capability, Deloitte notes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has streamlined its polio virus tracking and reporting process with an AI tool that classifies virus types and separates disease reports into related clusters.

Machine learning and natural language processing can reveal patterns and guide effective responses to problems that agencies routinely track, according to the report. For example, such technologies could reveal the most vulnerable populations in public health crises or trace the origins of food-borne illness.

The Armys Medical Department is developing wearable physiological monitors that use a machine-learning algorithm to weigh the potential seriousness of wounds, to assist medics in prioritizing treatment or evacuation, the report says.

Meanwhile, the Energy Departments new self-learning weather and renewable forecasting technology, SMT, is 30 percent more accurate in solar forecasting than previous techniques (the work is being done in partnership with IBM), according to Deloitte. To improve its prediction accuracy, the system uses machine learning, information from multiple sensor networks, cloud motion physics derived from sky cameras, and satellite observations, the report says.

Like DHS, the Army devotes significant resources to answer citizens queries. The Army does so especially for potential recruits.

To help prospective recruits understand their options, visitors to the Army website encounter SGT STAR, an interactive virtual assistant that uses AI to answer questions, check users qualifications, and refer them to human recruiters.

The Army found that SGT STAR does the work of 55 recruiters, with an accuracy rate of more than 94 percent, and has increased engagement time for site visitors from 4.0 to 10.4 minutes, Deloitte notes. As of 2016, the virtual assistant had answered more than 16 million user questions.

SGT STAR uses machine learning to recognize data patterns that help it distinguish helpful answers from unhelpful ones, the report says. The more questions it answers, the more it learns and the better it gets.

The report notes that if cognitive automation and engagement are used to relieve the human worker of tasks that are rules-based, routine, repetitive, and relatively simple, humans are then free to focus on more complex, value-adding tasks.

Cognitive insights can then help federal workers perform these more difficult tasks effectively and efficiently.

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Google AI Clinches Series Against Humanity’s Last, Best Hope To Win At Go – NPR

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Ke Jie, the world's No. 1 Go player, stares at the board during his second match against AlphaGo in Wuzhen, China, on Thursday. The 19-year-old grandmaster dropped the match in the best-of-three series against Google's artificial intelligence program. AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Ke Jie, the world's No. 1 Go player, stares at the board during his second match against AlphaGo in Wuzhen, China, on Thursday. The 19-year-old grandmaster dropped the match in the best-of-three series against Google's artificial intelligence program.

Sure, it's not the singularity (yet) but it is a rather singular achievement.

AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google's DeepMind lab, did not even need a third game to display its dominance over the world's best (human) Go player. On Thursday the A.I. defeated Ke Jie in Wuzhen, China, repeating its victory of two days ago and clinching a best-of-three series against the 19-year-old wunderkind.

Ke has one more chance to redeem himself, on Saturday, though if the first two matches are any indication, is chances don't look good.

That's not to cast aspersions on Ke's play. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a blog post Thursday, DeepMind called the match "a stunning work of art."

"According to AlphaGo's estimation of the match, the programme assessed the first 50 moves as virtually perfect," the post read, "and the first 100 moves were the finest anyone has ever played against the Master version of AlphaGo."

Yet it was not enough for Ke to beat this relative newcomer to the ancient board game, which has been around at least two millennia and enjoys enduring popularity in China, South Korea and Japan. DeepMind pursued mastery in the game notorious for its complexity, exceeding even that of chess. Lab founder and CEO Demis Hassabis says the number of possible positions in a game of Go outnumber the atoms in the universe.

And still Ke "pushed AlphaGo right to the limit," Hassabis tweeted.

"From the perspectives of human beings, he stretched a little bit and I was surprised," Ke said of his inhuman opponent at a news conference after Thursday's game.

"I also thought I was very close to winning the match in the middle of the game, but that might not have been what AlphaGo was thinking," he continued. "I was very excited, I could feel my heart thumping!"

The drama on the board did not unfold on broadcast, however.

Google has for years borne a fraught relationship with China, where the company's services have been unavailable since a 2010 dispute over the country's censorship policies. And that strain was on full display again this week, even as the game was not: Websites in China were not allowed to live-stream the match, according to apparent state instructions published by China Digital Times.

"This match may not be broadcast live in any form and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams, self-media accounts and so on," the instructions read. "No website (including sports and technology channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push notifications about the course or result of the match."

At least two more matches await AlphaGo later this week: one more Saturday against Ke, for good measure, and another on Friday in which the program will take on a gang of five of the world's best players working together.

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Two Big Reasons Why Google’s AI Chips Will Have A Tough Time Competing With Nvidia – Forbes

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Forbes
Two Big Reasons Why Google's AI Chips Will Have A Tough Time Competing With Nvidia
Forbes
Not even Google will likely slow down Nvidia's artificial intelligence gravy train anytime soon. Graphics chipmaker Nvidia, whose stock has tripled in the past year, has emerged as the dominant platform for deep learning, a popular form of AI computing.
Nvidia CEO Predicts AI 'Cambrian Explosion'HPCwire (blog)

all 7 news articles »

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Devious EVE Online AI Finally Defeated By Hundreds Of Puny Ships – Kotaku

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EVE Online has rolled out a challenging new computer-controlled enemy base that reacts to players strategies with artificial intelligence. A great reward lies at its center for players able to defeat it, although the first ones to do so werent able to collect.

On May 17th, CCP introduced a new type of NPC-pirate space station to its spacefaring MMO. The twist is that it can analyze player fleets that attempt to attack it, and use this information to spawn its own fleets in response that are specifically geared to defend against what it sees. If players bring overwhelming firepower in the form of massive capital ships, the AI will spawn its own capital vessels in response. If players bring a fleet of relatively smaller battleships, the AI will spawn hundreds of cruisers to swarm and neutralize the threat.

In addition to this adaptability, the AI is said to react and reposition its fleet in a manner similar to the best human fleet commanders. Blood Raider attack vessels will maneuver around the battlefield to cut off logistics and boost vessels, cutting off valuable support to the fleets.

If any players can best this new space station, they will be rewarded with expensive, rare blueprints for the games new Blood Raider capital class vessels. As only one such facility can ever be active on the live servers at a time, it becomes a hot ticket target, drawing attention from all over the galaxy.

The Red Alliance was the first group of players to attempt to destroy the space station, bringing to bear a fleet of powerful and expensive battleships. But the new AI proved too formidable, making short work of the fleet. News of the battle, along with the location of the hostile station, soon reached far and wide, drawing the attention of several major alliances who turned their focus on the new content.

Next up to bat, The Imperium launched their first assault against the Blood Raiders. Following in their allies footsteps, they fielded another massive fleet of Battleships to assault the complex and, after a short battle, began to suffer heavy losses and were forced to again follow their allies footsteps, this time in retreat.

Having seen two massively powerful and expensive fleets fail to take the station down, Imperium Fleet Commander Jay Amazingness decided the next attempt would employ a radical strategy: Punishers. The Punisher is one of the first ships that anyone playing EVE, even the Free to Play Alpha Clones, are able to fly, requiring little to no in-game experience or skill training. Jay was able to assemble a fleet of hundreds of Imperial pilots, each of them flying a hand-out frigate costing less than the ammunition expended by the previous battleship fleets.

Once arriving at the battlefield, the frigates set themselves into a wide orbit around the complex, each engaging their ships afterburners and accelerating them to the point that the guns on the Blood Raider reaction vessels could not track them well enough to ever land a hit. The player vessels orbited the space station for well over an hour, completely impervious to its firepower. Eventually, their low damage guns overwhelmed the shields on the massive structure, causing it to enter a 24 hour reinforcement window. The next day, more entry level frigates poured into the system from The Imperium, and once again, the Blood Raiders were powerless to stop them.

But things in EVE never go so smoothly. During the second battle, pilots from a cheekily-named rival group called Test Alliance Please Ignore were waiting to harass and delay the Imperial fleets efforts. Flying ships that were superior in every way to the Imperial Punishers, they had no trouble unleashing massive destruction, causing pain and frustration to the Imperial pilots. But the costs of the Punishers being destroyed were so low that the Imperium just continually replaced them, bringing more and more ships to the field without any real concern for their lifespan.

Test Alliances interference wasnt purely for the laughs: In the final moments of the space stations life, as the explosions began rocking the structure and it came apart under the constant fire from the Imperium fleet, hot shot Test pilot Hudders warped his ship directly into the wreck of the exploding citadel. In so doing, Hudders was able to steal the loot that dropped from the massive space station: a one-time use blueprint for making the Blood Raider Titan, the Molok.

It was the first ever of such a blueprint to drop, estimated at well over 100 billion ISK in value. Before he could escape the system, however, he was shot down by the enraged and somewhat embarrassed Imperium fleet. The prized blueprint was destroyed along with his ship.

Still, Hudders became an instant hero inside of the Test Allianceand to a lesser extent the rest of the EVE communityfor denying such a valuable prize to The Imperium. However, not all was lost from The Imperiums point of viewthey had outsmarted the new mechanic introduced into the game in under a week, succeeding where others had failed, and began readying their forces for when the second of such complexes spawn.

In addition, they proved that the content could be enjoyed by literally anyone who played EVE, even if they had only been playing for a few hours, as all players had been welcome into its massive Punisher fleet. CCP seemed pleased to see that the new content had caused such a massive reaction from their players. In an in-universe newsreel video they released (above), CCP even made a special nod to the fleets composition.

The future of the Engineering Complexes is being hotly debated right now, with changes being proposed by players from all sides, hoping to bring further balance to the new system.

Lee Yancy (@Sarin_Blackfist)has been an avid gamer for as long as he can remember, but ever since discovering them, he has found himself almost completely absorbed in MMO style games. EVE Online and World of Warcraft dominate the majority of his time.

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Will artificial intelligence help us solve every problem? – PBS NewsHour

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to another in our Brief But Spectacular series.

Tonight, we hear from Sebastian Thrun. Hes an adjunct professor at Stanford University and the founder of Udacity, an online educational organization. He founded Google X, the semi-secret research facility that began development of Googles self-driving car.

SEBASTIAN THRUN, Founder, Google X: Artificial intelligence is to the human brain what the steam engine has been to the human muscle.

Before the agricultural revolution, most of us were farmers, and our distinguishing capabilities were our physical strength and agility. And then we invented machines that make us stronger and, all of a sudden, one farmer can make food for 150 people.

And this has unleashed a flurry of amazing innovations, like airplanes, cell phones, jobs you never heard of like software engineer or TV anchor, all these wonderful things. That is about to change once again.

I think were going to look back and find that driving a car is just like the same way the Middle Ages look from todays perspective. We kill over a million people every year in this world using traffic accidents.

And thats an intolerably high number. We text, we make phone calls, were fatigued, were sometimes even drunk when driving and all this stuff. A self-driving car doesnt text, it doesnt fatigue, it looks in all directions, its never drunk, and it emerges as a safe alternative to human driving.

I have a 9-year-old. I would love to put him in a driverless car and say, go to school on your own. And he would love it, because it would give him the ability to go around and organize his own play dates.

I think every technology comes with its risks and with its possibility for abuse. I mean, you can take a kitchen knife, and you can cut your food, or you can kill somebody or hurt somebody with the same knife. And the same is true for every technology we invent.

So, I think whats important is that we approach these technologies with responsibility. The next generation of technology is going to be called artificial intelligence. And were going to have an I.Q. of 10,000. Were going to be able to solve every problem and know everything there is to know just by using A.I.

My students and I recently did work on artificial intelligence for detecting skin cancer, and we found that if we train an artificial intelligence with about 130,000 images, we can find skin cancer basically using an iPhone as accurately as the best board-certified dermatologist.

And thats sensational, because now we can take the skill of a Stanford doctor and bring that skill to the entire world by a platform that everybody already has, which is a smartphone.

Every time I talk through my phone and its probably about an hour a day it could analyze my speech and thereby find things like Alzheimers much, much, much earlier than we find it today.

And thats exciting, because it would mean we would be able to cure and treat those diseases at a stage when theyre often still curable.

I can tell you, when I started working on self-driving cars more than 10 years ago, most of my professor colleagues told me its impossible and Im wasting my time and possibly my career.

When you look at the Wright brothers, 100 years ago, the worlds experts had come together and concluded that its impossible, there will not be such a thing as flight.

So, when you go forward, why cant we cure all of cancer? Why cant we cure heart failure and heart diseases? And why cant cars fly in the future? Why do they have to be on the ground?

I mean, all these things, when you think through it, the answer might be very different from what the past tells us.

My name is Sebastian Thrun, and this is my Brief, But hopefully Spectacular take on imaging the future.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Sebastian Thrun.

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Will artificial intelligence help us solve every problem? - PBS NewsHour

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