Monthly Archives: June 2017

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration)

Good news for the deeply paranoid among us: If the apocalypse arrives via giant anthropomorphic robots, they probably wont be bankrolled by Google. On Thursday, Googles parent company, Alphabet, announced that it was selling Boston Dynamics, its premier robotics division, to the Japanese telco giant SoftBank for an undisclosed sum. The deal also includes a smaller robotics company called Schaft.

Boston Dynamics was less a moonshot than a sci-fi horror brought to life. Even before being acquired by Google in 2013, the 25-year-old company had already developed a Beast Warsstyle squadron of robot predators with names like BigDog and WildCat, as well as a humanoid model called Atlas. The machines were often developed for the Pentagon under contracts with agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Google and the government both said the robots were being tested for disaster-relief scenarios, but that never stopped the stream of headlines describing them as scary, nightmare-inducing, or evil.

Whether Googles ultimate plans were benign or nefarious, they never properly got off the ground. Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were part of a months-long spending spree Google bankrolled to appease Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, who was looking to robots as his next frontier for innovation. But Rubin left Google in 2014, creating a leadership vacuum as the company struggled to get its various robotics acquisitions headquartered around the world to work in tandem. Under Rubin, Google reportedly had plans to launch a consumer robotics product by 2020, but that timeline seems in doubt now. (Alphabet still owns several smaller robotics startups that specialize in areas such as industrial manufacturing and film production.)

In the years since the Boston Dynamics acquisition, Google has shown that it doesnt need to build a robot butler (or soldier) to create a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Machine-learning algorithms now guide most of the companys products, whether recommending YouTube videos, identifying objects in users photo libraries, or whisking people around in driverless cars. The company is partnering with appliance manufacturers like General Electric so that people can control their ovens via voice commands to Google Home. And most ambitiously, at this years Google I/O, the company unveiled a suite of new products related to its machine-learning framework, TensorFlow. Developers will soon be able to make use of the same AI engines that power Googles products to improve their own offerings via the companys cloud-computing platform.

In the companys ideal future, every human-machine interaction will be powered by Google, even if a specific app or appliance doesnt have Googles name on it. Terminator-style robots (OK, hopefully Jetsons-style) may one day be part of that vision, but the company can easily build an AI army with the products that fill our homes and garages today.

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Google's AI Vision May No Longer Include Giant Robots - The Ringer (blog)

In Brief In order to probe the AI mind, DARPA is funding research by Oregon State University that will try to understand the reasoning behind decisions made by AI systems. DARPA hopes that this will make AI more trustworthy. Cracking the AI Black Box Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown by leaps and bounds over the past years. Now there are AI systems capable of driving carsand making medical diagnoses, as well as numerous other choices which people makeon a day-to-day basis. Except that when it comes to humans, we actually can understand the reasoning behind such decisions (to a certain extent).

When it comes to AI, however, theres a certain black box behind decisions that makes it so that even AI developers themselves dont quite understand or anticipate the decisions an AI is making. We do know that neural networks are taught to make these choices by exposing them to a huge data set. From there, AIs train themselves into applying what they learn. Its ratherdifficult to trust what one doesnt understand.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to break this black box, and the first step is to fund eight computer science professors from Oregon State University (OSU) with a $6.5 million research grant. Ultimately, we want these explanations to be very natural translating these deep network decisions into sentences and visualizations, OSUs Alan Fern, principal investigator for the grant, said in a press release.

The DARPA-OSU program, set to run for four years, will involve developing a system that will allow AI to communicate with machine learning experts. They would start developing this system by plugging AI-powered players into real-time strategy games like StarCraft. The AI players would be trained to explain to human players the reasoning behind their in-game choices. This isnt the first project that puts AIs into video game environments. Googles DeepMind has also chosen StarCraft as a training environment for AI. Theres also that controversial Doom-playing AI bot.

Results from this research project would then be applied by DARPA to their existing work with robotics and unmanned vehicles. Obviously, the potential applications of AI in law enforcement and the militaryrequire these systems to be ethical.

Nobody is going to use these emerging technologies for critical applications until we are able to build some level of trust, and having an explanation capability is one important way of building trust, Fern said. Thankfully, this DARPA-OSU project isnt the only one working on humanizing AI to make it more trustworthy.

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DARPA Is Working to Make AI More Trustworthy - Futurism

At times, Westworld is a show about the advancements and dangers of artificial intelligence, but the series creators never wanted it to be Skynet.

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy spoke about the message they were trying to get across with the shows first season during a conference hosted by Wired. Nolan said that one of the tropes they wanted to avoid was turning AI into a terrifying enemy just because the rise of technology seemed scary. Nolan said that they never wanted their AI to be Skynet, the main antagonist and artificially intelligent death machines from the Terminator films.

Until now, AI has tended to lean into a dystopian perspective, Nolan said. It goes straight to Skynet, with the exception of Spike Jonze's Her, which is a beautiful movie. What's becoming increasingly clear is that's not how it's going to play out.

Nolan added that our relationship with the different forms of AI we interact with on a daily basis from Siri, Alexa and Goole to the AI that powers driverless cars is constantly changing, and thats where he finds inspiration. Nolan said the issue is that as technology rapidly changes, we expect more from the artificial intelligence in our lives. We come to rely on it without ever fully trusting it.

One of the goals of Westworld was to examine these relationships between machines and humans, co-creator Joy added. After talking to those who work in Silicon Valley and specialize on how artificial intelligence functions and grows it became clear to both creators that Westworld was introducing an important discussion to those who werent focused on it five days a week.

As technology increases exponentially and AI certainly grows were kind of leaping into the unfathomable with machines that can learn and process better than we can, Joy said. The thing that we've heard most is that it's almost good to have a prophylactic discussion; When is enough enough? What are the safeguards we need?

Orion Pictures

One of the ways that Nolan and Joy got away from turning their show into Terminator was by examining consciousness and storytelling from the perspective of artificial intelligence, instead of just humans. Nolan said they wanted to dive into the commonalities shared by humans and AI instead of just the differences to showcase just how powerful and resonating the technology can be.

We were attempting to look deeply at the question of consciousness and one of the things I was surprised about is that conscious is still largely a question for philosophers, Nolan said. It's not something the [computer science] folks [we talked to] want to get into.

Nolan added, however, that what became apparent during their conversations with experts in the field was the main question is quickly becoming whether consciousness is a necessary function going forward.

Consciousness is either very, very important and very hard to explore, or, as more than one computer scientist we talked to suggested, maybe it doesn't need to exist, Nolan said. It's not necessary.

Nolan and Joy didnt provide any hints as to what the second season of Westworld will focus on specifically, but Nolan said it will continue to examine the question of how stories are told and how important consciousness is to both humans and artificial intelligence.

Throughout history we have defined consciousness as that which others do not possess, Joy said. That bar has shifted. It's all subjective.

Westworld will return for a second season in 2018.

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Westworld creators want to make a show about AI without 'going straight to Skynet' - Polygon

In BriefArtificial Intelligence has the potential to expedite humandevelopment and liberate us from menial tasks. However, AI is alsobecoming more integrated into our personal lives, raising concernsabout manipulation and coercion. AI Interaction as Manipulation

An article for the MIT Technology Reviewhas raised concerns about the potential for our intimacy with artificial intelligence (AI) to be exploited for insidious ends. Its author, Liesl Yearsley, shares her perspective as the former CEO of Cognea, which built virtual agents using a mixture of structured and deep learning.

Yearsley observed during her tenure at Cognea that humans were becoming more and more dependent on AI not just to perform tasks, but also to provide emotional and platonic support. This phenomenon occurred regardless of whether the agent was designed to act as a personal banker, a companion, or a fitness coach Yearsley wrote people would volunteer secrets, dreams, and even details of their love lives.

This may not necessarily be bad. AI is perhaps more capable than we are at caring it has the potential to be always available and be modified specifically for us. The fundamental problem is that the companies designing them are not primarily interested in each users well being, but in increasing traffic, consumption, and addiction to their technology, Yearsley wrote in the article.

Hauntingly, she writes that AI corporations have developed formulas that are incredibly efficient at achieving this. Every behavioral change we at Cognea wanted, we got so what if what companies wanted was unethical? Yearsley also observed that humans relationships with AI became circular. If humans were exposed to particularly servile or neutral AI, humans would tend to abuse them, and this relationship would make them more likely to behave the same toward humans.

AI is becoming integrated into our daily lives at a rapid pace: SIRI mediates our interaction with our iPhones, AI curates our online experience by tailoring advertisements, and chatbots constitute a significant proportion of our interactions with companies.

Our growing relationship with AI is catalyzed by the anthropomorphization (attributing human traits to things) of technology. SIRI was given a name to make her appear more like a person, and bots are adapting to your speech patterns in order to encourage you to trust them, bond with them, and therefore use them more.

The vulnerability caused by not understanding what an AI may be specifically programmed to do is increased by our lack of understanding concerning how AI does this. We currently know very little about how AI thinks, but are continuing to create bigger, faster, and more complex versions of it. This is not only an issue for us, but with the companies developing it because they cannot predict the actions of their AI with any certainty.

Our interaction with AI is clearly going to shape our future, but the danger is that AI can be curated to affect our society in a particular way or perhaps more that AIs interpretation of a human intention will lead to a future that none of us actually wanted.

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Former AI Company CEO Warns About Abuse of Virtual Relationship - Futurism

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Even as Islamic State is destroying antiquities in Syria, the militant group is also shipping them -- to intermediaries working with buyers in Europe and the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reveals a pattern of plunder that takes priceless relics from the battlegrounds of Syria to art traders in the West.

Baidu's Qi Lu said at The Wall Street Journal's D.Live conference that Baidu's case for an artificial-intelligence ecosystem is a win-win situation for everyone. Photo: Manuel Wong Ho

Watch a clip from "My Cousin Rachel," starring Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, and Iain Glen. Photo: Fox Searchlight

Fired FBI Director James Comey appeared before a Senate committee on Thursday, testifying that President Trump attempted to interfere in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains where the investigation heads next. Photo: Getty

In a 2.5-hour keynote, Apple announced a slew of new hardware and software products. WSJ's Joanna Stern recaps what you need to know about the most important announcements.

Jessica and Cem Savas's London home includes partial walls and open bookcases to separate rooms. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors lead to the yard, which includes a vegetable garden and seating areas. Photo: Dylan Thomas for The Wall Street Journal

Tesla CEO Elon Musk outlines bold ambitions as the company's market value races past GM and Ford.

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Stanford Scientist: AI Is the New Electricity - Wall Street Journal - Wall Street Journal (blog) (subscription)

Even the most advanced artificial intelligencealgorithms in the world have trouble recognizing the actions of Homer Simpson.

DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence lab best known for defeating the worlds greatest Go players, created a new dataset of YouTube clips to help AI find and learn patterns so it can better recognize human movement. The massive sample set consists of 300,000 video clips and 400 different actions.

AI systems are now very good at recognizing objects in images, but still have trouble making sense of videos, aDeepMind spokesperson told IEEE Spectrum.One of the main reasons for this is that the research community has so far lacked a large, high-quality video dataset.

According to IEEE Spectrum, early testing of the Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset showed mixed results. The deep learning algorithm was up to 80 percent accurate in classifying actions like playing tennis, crawling baby, cutting watermelon, and bowling. But its accuracy dropped to 20 percent or less when attempting to identify some of the activities and habits associated with Homer: drinking beer, eating doughnuts, and yawning.

Video understanding represents a significant challenge for the research community, and we are in the very early stages with this, a DeepMind spokesperson said in a statement. Any real-world applications are still a really long way off, but you can see potential in areas such as medicine, for example, aiding the diagnosis of heart problems in echocardiograms.

DeepMind got some help from Amazons Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing service that companies can use to enlist other humans in completing a task. In this case, thetask was labeling actions in thousands of 10-second YouTube clips.

After discovering the effectiveness of its dataset, the U.K.-based company ran tests to see if it had any gender imbalance. Past tests showed that the contents of certain datasets resulted in AI that was unsuccessful recognizing certain ethnics groups. Preliminary results showed this particular set of video clips did not present those problems. In fact, DeepMind found that no single gender dominated within 340 of 400 action classes. The actions that did not pass the test included shaving a beard, cheerleading, and playing basketball.

We found little evidence that the resulting classifiers demonstrate bias along sensitive axes, such as across gender, researchers at DeepMind wrote in a paper.

The company will now work with outside researchers to grow its dataset and continue to develop AI so it can better recognize what is going on in videos. The research could lead to uses ranging from suggesting relevant YouTube video to users to diagnosing heart problems.

We have reached out to DeepMind to learn more about why Homer Simpson is causing such problems.

Update June 9, 5pm:A DeepMind spokesperson clarified that dataset didnt actually include videos ofThe Simpsons characterjust actions hes widely associated with. Doh! Weve updated our article accordingly.

H/T IEEE Spectrum

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Google's DeepMind Creates Dataset With 300,000 YouTube Clips to ... - The Daily Dot