Daily Archives: August 14, 2017

Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Video provided by Newsy Newslook

According to Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, concerns over artificial intelligence safety carry "more risk" than the potential for a nuclear war with North Korea.

Musk made the remark on Twitter on August 11, with a poster reading "In the end the machines will win."

"If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be," Musk wrote. "Vastly more risk than North Korea."

NORTH KOREA: Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford warns that U.S. military is 'ready'

Musk's comments followed a demonstration by OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company sponsored by the entrepreneur, of its latest bot.

The bot was built to play the online game Dota 2, and defeatedprofessional players who competed during last week's International tournament.

Musk has been outspoken about the potential dangers of AI and the need for government regulation. During the National Governors Association meeting in July, Musk urged lawmakers to consider rules for how AI is created.

"AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than reactive," said Musk.

Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, began dating Heard shortly after her marriage to Johnny Depp dissolved in controversy over domestic abuse.(Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu, Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP)

His cautious stance on AI grabbed the attentionof Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said he's optimistic about the technology and claims a lot of the negative feedback is "really irresponsible." Musk dismissed the comments, claiming Zuckerberg's knowledge of AI is "limited."

Musk wants the government to treat AI and its use as it would any other major industry. "Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated," said Musk on Twitter. "AI should be too."

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.

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Musk: Artificial intelligence safety carries 'more risk' than North Korea - USA TODAY

Given the trajectory that artificial intelligence is on, machines will soon do everything that people do today. In a world of increasingly powerful technology, which in aggregate will make the world a better, richer place but at the micro, personal level will make a lot of skills less relevant and less valuable, it is smart to try to figure out how to beat the bot. These are four areas and skills that are AI-proof well, at least for a little while

According to the job website CareerCast, data science is the toughest job to fill in 2017. That is because all sort of businesses banks, airlines and manufacturers, not just technology companies know they need to run their operations based on data (rather than guesswork) and are scrambling to hire the talent.

You do not have to be a maths savant to be a data scientist. The biggest trend this year is the growth of the citizen data scientist. Get started by working with software from Tableau or Qlik.

Aaron Levie, chief executive of cloud storage vendor Box, recently said: If you want a job for the next few years, work in technology. If you want a job for life, work in cybersecurity.

The battle between black hats and white hats gets more and more intense each year as the modern-day equivalents of Willie Sutton, a notorious US career bank robber in the 20th century, go where the money is ie, hacking code.

Keeping 16-year-old Ukrainians and state-sponsored operatives at bay is a task without end. You might not be able to talk about your work but your bank balance will know.

Apples design sensibility beautiful objects, beautiful online and retail experiences has changed the face of modern business. Now every company and organisation knows it needs to upgrade its customer-facing game to stay in tune with changing demographics and changing times.

Design, once an afterthought when engineers and accountants had done the real work, is front and centre in every critical decision businesses are making. Consequently, design companies are being acquired right, left, and centre by big consulting and technology firms.

If you do not have a STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) background, but are more artsy, design (of products and services and user interfaces) is one of the surest ways for a non-technologist to thrive in an increasingly technocentric world.

In recent research conducted by the Cognizant Centre for the Future of Work, almost all of the 2,500 leading executives who were interviewed agreed that humans need to be more strategic in the face of growing automation. What does that mean?

Rote tasks, which still represent a substantial proportion of most peoples day-to-day work, are morphing into the machine, freeing up time and energy to ask better questions, craft better directions and generate more impactful innovation.

This is happening at the executive level within your organisation and in the small department where perhaps you work.

The need to elevate the role of human relative to machine is the great challenge and opportunity in front of us all. So there will be plenty of work for strategists to help chief executives and boards understand what their company should do when machines do everything.

And there will be plenty of work for people who can think strategically about the work they do and how to do it as software and robots become more and more intelligent, and more and more useful.

A final thought is that only a third of the survey respondents thought that the rise of artificial intelligence would lead to large-scale reductions in the number of people needed to do work, which is the widespread meme in the zeitgeist about artificial intelligence (AI) and robots.

The vast majority believe, as does Cognizant, that unquenchable human ingenuity will continue to find plenty of work for human hands and brains to do to satisfy existing and emerging wants and needs. When machines do everything there will still be plenty for humans to do. You should get on with it.

To better understand how your company can benefit from artificial intelligence, visit whenmachinesdoeverything.com

Ben Pring is a co-author of What To Do When Machines Do Everything (Wiley 2017) and leads Cognizants Centre for the Future of Work.

This article was originally produced and published by Business Reporter. View the original article atbusiness-reporter.co.uk

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Four jobs artificial intelligence (AI) won't destroy - Telegraph.co.uk

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ILTACON Series Will Explore Myths, Realities of AI and Automation in the Law

The legal technology industry is gearing up for one of its premier events of the year, the International Legal Technology Association Conference (ILTACON). The massive event, which kicks off on Aug. 14 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, will boast four major keynotes, almost 200 peer-based educational sessions with over 350 speakers, and an exhibit hall featuring more than 200 service and software vendors to the legal market.

A theme pervasive to many of the sessions and, as a result, much of the conversation in the hallways and planned networking events, is artificial intelligence. AI, which in the legal world takes the shape of machine learning and natural language processing, for example, will be extensively deliberated during a three-part series, Artificial Intelligence in Law. Experts will not only discuss how AI being used to leverage data, automate legal work, reduce costs and enhance efficiencies, but also share what it takes to implement AI initiatives in legal departments and law firms.

It begins with an understanding of what the role of AI is in the delivery of legal services, and what it isnt. In the legal industry, the mention of AI is too often met with either fear, disbelief, or irrational exuberance. But none of those reactions is warranted, said Martin Tully, co-chair of the data law practice at Akerman and a panelist at the AI kickoff session on Monday, Aug. 14, entitled The Myths, Realities and Future of Artificial Intelligence and Automation in the Law (Part 1 of 3).

As Tully explains, the legal industry should think of AI as meaning as augmented intelligence, something that allows lawyers and their clients to far better understand information and data, and to make smarter, more efficient decisions but not replacing humans with an army of legal robots, he said.

There are at least four common AI uses for which firms or law department can easily license commercial, off-the-shelf AI software and deploy it in a manner similar to other practice technologies, according to Ron Friedman, partner at consulting firm Fireman & Company. Friedman, who will be a panelist during the Artificial Intelligence in Law: AI in Action (Part 2 of 3) session on Tuesday, Aug. 15 at 11 a.m. The four use cases are:

All four uses address clearly defined problems lawyers face. All four have multiple providers that offer off-the-shelf software. These products are straightforward to deploy from both the IT or user training/adoption perspective, Friedman said. Many lawyers have used predictive coding for years. One software company that provides software to accelerate due diligence reviews recently publicly stated this week that it has over 200 law firm licensees that run 1,000 projects per month. The AI-driven legal research products have seen rapid uptake. Deploying AI is no longer cutting edge.

In some circles, AI may no longer be vanguard, but its still a notion that many law firms are only beginning to accept or embrace. With pressure coming from corporate legal departments to not only improve efficiencies and save money, but to also be more technologically advanced, credible AI technologies can be an attractive option for firms when they see it as a way to create more business value, and make their jobs easier.

The first thing they have to do is be receptive. Pick up the phone or reach out. The power behind AI is extremely complex. Sometimes engineers dont even understand all the parts. Whats important is that the interface be very simple. And it has to be easier than anything you were doing in the past, said Jake Heller, CEO of AI-based legal research firm Casetext. Law firms are trying to solve real problems for the firm and for their clients. Clients are asking them to increase the quality of services and efficiency. That can seem paradoxical, but that pressure is driving the receptiveness to AI solutions.

Certainly law firms, as well as legal departments, vary in degree by which they are adopting AI-based technologies, but the majority of law firms, and in most other business verticals, dont have mature AI strategies, according to Alex Lazo, CIO of Mullen Coughlin.

AI is such a new technology and just now starting to trend, he said. You will see some early adopters with any new tech that start to pave the way.

ILTACONs third session in its AI series, Artificial Intelligence in Law: From Theory to Practice (Part 3 of 3), will take place on Aug. 16 at 11 am.

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Is Artificial Intelligence No Longer Cutting Edge? - Bloomberg Big Law Business

Autonomous vehicles

Fully autonomous cars are estimated to be just five years away, depending on both technology and the development of a regulatory system. This will dramatically increase the market for the components required.

For now, much of the growth comes from advanced driver assistance systems, such as automatic braking or adaptive cruise control.

Market value: 19.5bn

Last years pre-tax profit: 763m

This semiconductor firm was tipped by all of the technology fund managers we spoke to. It makes components used in systems such as emergency braking and battery management.

Hyunho Sohn, manager of the 2bn Fidelity Global Technology fund, said: Infineon exemplifies a company poised to gain from the move to electric and autonomous cars. It has a market-leading position and, as the technology going into each vehicle increases, it should experience increases in revenue and margin.

Market value: 18.7bn

Last year's pre-tax profit: 1.9bn

Delphi integrates different technologies into packages that meet the rigorous standards of the automotive industry, Mr Sohn explained

He said: "The firm has strong relationships with the major car manufacturers, and is well positioned to profit from both the rapid proliferation in low-level systems, and the eventual roll-out of fully autonomous driving."

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Buy these seven shares to profit from driverless cars and artificial intelligence - Telegraph.co.uk

[Image Source: Interactions.com]

Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are having an increasing impact on many aspects of daily life. I recently spoke with Interactions Dr. Michael Johnston, a veteran of speech and language technology with over 25 years of experience in the industry, to discuss the benefits of combining artificial intelligence with human understanding.

Artificial intelligence refers to the capability of a machine to mimic or approximate the capabilities of humans. Examples include:

Increasingly, systems combining constellations of AI technologies that previously were only found in research prototypes are coming into daily use by consumers in applications such as mobile and in-home virtual assistants (e.g. Siri, Cortana, and Alexa).

Despite these successes, significant challenges remain in the application of AI especially in language applications as we scale from simpler information seeking and control tasks (play David Bowie, turn on the lights) to more complex tasks involving richer language and dialog (e.g. troubleshooting for technical support, booking multi-part travel reservations, giving financial advice). Among enterprise applications of AI, one approach that is gaining popularity is to forego the attempt to create a fully autonomous AI-driven solution in favor of leveraging an effective blend of human and machine intelligence.

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE HAS ALWAYS PLAYED A CRITICAL ROLE IN MACHINE LEARNING Specifically, in supervised learning, human intelligence is generally applied to assign labels, or richer annotations, to examples used for training AI models which are then deployed in fully automated systems. Effective solutions are now emerging that involve the symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence in real time. These approaches vary in whether a human agent or artificial agent is the driver of the interaction.

In the case of an artificial agent fielding calls, text messages or other inputs from a user, human intelligence can be engaged in real time to provide live supervision of the behavior of the automated solution at various different levels (Human-assisted AI). For example, human agents can listen to audio and assist with hard to recognize speech inputs, assigning a transcription and/or semantic interpretation to the input. They can also assist with higher level decisions, such as which path to take in an interactive dialog flow, or how best to generate an effective response to the user. In these cases, the goal is to contain the interaction in what appears to the customer to be an automated solution, but one that leverages human intelligence just enough to maintain robustness and a high quality of interaction.

In contrast, in AI-assisted Human Interaction, the driver of the interaction is a human agent, and the users perception is that they are interacting with a person. The role of the AI is to provide assistance to the human agent in order to optimize and enhance their performance. For example, an AI solution assisting a contact center agent might suggest a possible response to return in text or read out to a customer.

Several companies have recently explored the application of sequence-to-sequence models using Deep Neural Networks to formulate a response or multiple responses that an agent can adopt or edit. One of the great advantages of this setting for applying new machine learning algorithms is reduced risk of failure as the human agent maintains the final say on whether to adopt the suggested response or use another. In addition, human decisions to adopt, reject, or edit suggested responses provide critical feedback for improvement of the AI models making the suggestions.

Another example of an AI-assisted Human Interaction is the application of predictive models based on user profiles and interaction history, to support a financial advisor with suggestions they can make to a client, or assist a sales person in recommending the optimal strategy to take for up-selling a product. Yet further applications of AI empowering human agents include within-call analytics to track customer or agent emotion and provide live feedback to the human agent on their own emotional state or that of the customer.

Perhaps the best solutions for customer care will combine both humans assisting AI and AI assisting humans: Customers will first engage with automated virtual assistants that respond to their calls, texts, messages and other inputs, and human assistance will play a role in optimizing performance. Then, if the call requires transfer to a human agent, that agent will be supported by an AI-enabled solution which quickly brings them up to speed on the history of the interaction and can assist them in real time as they respond to and engage with the customer.

TaraWildt

Interactions

Tara is a content marketing professional with experience in digital and social marketing. As Content Marketing Manager at Interactions, she is responsible for the overall content development and social media strategy. Tara holds a BA in International Relations from the University of San Diego and an MBA from Northeastern University.

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Finding Harmony Between Human and Artificial Intelligence ... - Customer Think

I'm calling it - we're in the Summer of Artificial Intelligence. Ok, it might not sound as glamorous as the Summer of Love or Bryan Adams' Summer of '69, but it's just as seminal - if not more so.

Over the past couple of years we've seen a trend where technologies previously reserved for the elite or big tech giants have been opened up to mass consumption. We saw this last summer, when the launch of Pokmon Go and the game's meteoric rise - amassing 10 million downloads in its first week - brought Augmented Reality (AR) into the mainstream. A year on, consumers across the world use AR without batting an eyelid every time we add a Snapchat filter.

This year, we're seeing Artificial Intelligence go through the same kind of shift. Amazon Alexa's domination shows no sign of stopping, and June saw the successful launch of Amazon Echo Show, adding video to the highly competent voice technology. Now, for the first time, Alexa has been built natively into a smartphone - the HTC U11. Even the most traditional of British institutions are using AI to enrich the consumer experience, with Wimbledon using IBM Watson to create a voice assistant called Fred (after Fred Perry, obviously) to direct fans to the nearest strawberries. Gone are the days when AI sounded like science fiction - we all interact with it countless times every day; knowingly or not.

The democratisation of these kinds of technologies is a wonderful thing. As well as allowing people to run around cities catching Pidgeys and Rattatas to their hearts' content, AR is enabling surgeons with limited resources to get interactive training from other doctors overseas. And the applications of AI stretch miles beyond Alexa telling you the weather forecast - with mobile health apps now giving millions of people in developing countries access to instant diagnosis.

Consumer trust in Artificial Intelligence is growing, and adoption around the world is rocketing - but we must make sure that as trust in this kind of technology grows, accountability comes with it.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk told a roomful of US governors that AI poses an 'existential threat' to civilisation, and went on to merrily suggest ways that AI could wipe out humanity. With all due respect to the Tesla founder, this is a little catastrophic. We have far more to gain from AI than fear.

What is worth discussing, though, is the responsibility of the tech community to ensure that they are creating this technology in an ethical way - with safety, equality and accessibility at front of mind. To this end, Sage has created a set of five guidelines for businesses to follow as we embark on the Fourth Industrial Revolution - it's called The Ethics of Code.

For AI to truly work, this is what we think it should do.

1. It should reflect the diversity of the users it serves.

We all know that we have unconscious biases relating to gender, race, sexuality and more - let's not build them into our software. The first voice recognition software couldn't understand female voices - because it was tested on an all-male team.

2. It should be held to account - and so should its users.

The trust we place in technology needs to be taken seriously - AI must never be allowed to be too clever to be accountable. We don't accept unpleasant or unethical behaviour from people in the workplace - why should we accept it from our technology?

3. It should be rewarded for 'good behaviour'.

Most organisations now have a variant of 'doing the right thing' as one of their values - we need to hold our technology to the same standards. When designing AI, it should be rewarded for performing a task successfully, but also for how it aligned with good values to get there.

4. It should level the playing field.

AI should have minimal barriers to access, and should work to democratise services that were previously off limits to groups of people. Voice recognition software makes multiple solutions accessible to people with sight impairments, as well as those with dyslexia and limited mobility.

5. It will replace jobs, but it must also create them.

Ok, the robots aren't going to steal all our jobs - but they are going to take on some roles that automation is better suited to. But for any jobs that AI is going to replace, its existence will also evolve existing jobs and create new ones. I have a friend who's a conversation designer, writing the personality of a chatbot - jobs like that weren't even thought of five years ago.

**

Although I'm calling this the 'summer of artificial intelligence', this technology is far more than a passing trend. Unlike fidget spinners and ripped jeans, AI will stick around - continuing to evolve and permeate all aspects of our daily lives. And this isn't something to fear. It will bring huge opportunity, and open up a host of services previously reserved for the most privileged - if we create it in the right way.

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Why This Is The Summer Of Artificial Intelligence | HuffPost UK - HuffPost UK