How Far Have We Come With Giving Robots Feelings?
Pretty far, in our own imaginationAt times, we may think a more powerful illusion is a good enough substitute for reality.
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Machine Learning: Using Occam’s Razor to Generalize
A simple thought experiment shows us howThis approach is contrary to Fisher's method where we formulate all theories before encountering the data. We came up with the model after we saw the cards we drew.
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Empath—the Ultimate Technology—Cares About You
Arctang discovers how empathy can be manufactured—Trumind Serial, Part 6Arctang was one of the few outsiders who knew TruMind's secret. Long ago, his elder brother had entered the fortress-like facility, never to be seen again.
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Boeing’s Sidelined Fuselage Robots: What Went Wrong?
It’s not what we learn, it’s what we forgetBy all means, let’s build machines that enhance our abilities. But let’s not forget that the really amazing thing is not the tool, but the tool builder.
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Boeing Workers, Please Don’t Kick the Robot on Its Way Out
The jetliner manufacturer’s decision to give the robots’ job back to machinists underlines the hard realities of automation. For example, it doesn’t always workRobot error turned out to be a bigger problem than human error.
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Google’s Secret Health Data Grab: The Whistleblower Talks
This is the fourth whistleblower in the last eighteen months“The decision came to me slowly, creeping on me through my day-to-day work,” we are told, until it came down to “how could I say nothing?”
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Should AI-Written News Stories Have Bylines? Whose?
Like it or not, AI is here to stay. So, how do we make the best use of it in writing?Automation can help some aspects of writing. But media outlets get tech “google”-eyes and too often fail to ask the hard questions about what they are automating, how, and why.
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The Greatest Threat We Face From AI—and What We Can Do
Here’s a list of things that have really happened with artificial intelligence (AI), in order of increasing severity.When we get to the end of the list, we will see that it is like beads connected by a string—revealing the most dangerous threat.
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The Nightingale Sings — About Your Health Data
The skinny from Google’s health care data grab: Your privacy may not be anywhere near as well protected as you might thinkThe biggest question coming into focus is whether traditional patient confidentiality protection really works in the age of the internet. As to what changes are needed and who will sponsor them, both US Sen. Amy Klobuchar and US Sen. Josh Hawley, on opposite sides of the aisle, are watching the file.
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Consciousness: Three New Books, Same Dilemma, Still Fascinating
Consciousness studies are getting markedly crazier, if we go by the traditional standards of scienceRigorous naturalism, taken seriously, brought us to this place where illusion calls to illusion about things that can, by definition, have no meaning. There is no other place naturalism can bring us to.
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Google vs. IBM?: Quantum Supremacy Isn’t the Big Fix Anyway
If human thought is a halting oracle, then even quantum computing will not allow us to replicate human intelligenceGoogle’s quantum supremacy claim is certainly fascinating and controversial, but even if true, it ultimately only amounts to an incremental and even inconsequential improvement in the state of AI and ML, due to the still-unmet need for a halting oracle.
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How Algorithms Can Seem Racist
Machines don’t think. They work with piles of “data” from many sources. What could go wrong? Good thing someone asked…Some of the recent conflicts around algorithms and ethnicity are flubs that social media entrepreneurs will regret. Others may endanger life.
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Can a Big Data Program Be Society’s Crystal Ball?
Can a program with enough data on all of us predict our future?Even fans admit that, if the program works, bad actors can use it just as easily as New Scientist’s virtuecrats.
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Your Body Is a Piano Your Mind Plays—Well or Badly
The piano expresses the pianist’s thoughts, not its ownDr. Bradley also spoke about how near-death experiences are creating a challenge for skeptics of the reality of the mind.
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Occam’s Razor Can Shave Away Data Snooping
The greater an object's information content, the lower its probability.One technique to avoid data snooping is based on the intersection of information theory and probability: An object’s probability is related to its information content. The greater an object’s information content, the lower its probability. We measure a model’s information content as the logarithmic difference between the probability that the data occurred by chance and the number of bits required to store the model. The negative exponential of the difference is the model’s probability of occurring by chance. If the data cannot be compressed, then these two values are equal. Then the model has zero information and we cannot know if the data was generated by chance or not. For a dataset that is incompressible and uninformative, swirl some tea Read More ›
Terminator: Dark Fate—A Mind Matters Movie Review
Aside from the fact that it felt like a retextured version of Terminator 2, I was constantly being reminded of the film’s obvious political agendaMovies like Terminator: Dark Fate don’t seem to be made by people who care about the narrative. They seem to think that they need only make something that looks like a movie but acts as a medium for broadcasting their message to the masses.
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Big Tech Tries to Fight Racist and Sexist Data
The trouble is, no machine can be better than its underlying training data. That’s baked inThe problem with machine learning-based AI in police work is not so much its inherent bias (none of us is bias-free) but the delegation to a machine of what should be a human decision.
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Tiananmen Square 30 Years On: Words Still Have Power
Back then, students fought oppression via the fax. They depended on free media in Hong Kong to tell the worldThe Chinese government has described the Hong Kong protests as violent riots by extremists. And, as with mainland China’s reports on Tiananmen Square, the abuses by police in Hong Kong have been scrubbed from the Chinese internet, while violence by protesters has been highlighted.
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India’s Social Media Content Removal Order Is a Nail in the Coffin of the Internet As We Know it
The High Court of Delhi ordered Facebook, Google, and Twitter to remove content globally if it is considered defamatory locallyIn reaching its decision, the Indian court relied on a string of recent decisions from around the world. For example, it drew from the Canadian approach in Equustek, where the Supreme Court of Canada ordered Google to remove content globally.
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Investor, AI Isn’t Your Big Fix
In investing and elsewhere, an AI label is often more effective for marketing than for performanceOne company sought to leverage Watson, the AI Jeopardy champ, as a stock picker. But lightning-fast search and response don’t have much to do with predicting whether a stock goes up or down…
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