AI & Robotics

Leading up to Superbowl Sunday, Amazon flooded social media with coquettish ads teasing “Alexa’s new body.” Its gameday commercial depicts one woman’s fantasy of the AI voice assistant embodied by actor Michael B. Jordan, who seductively caters to her every whim — to the consternation of her increasingly irate husband. No doubt most viewers walked away giggling at the implausible idea of…

Google fired Margaret “Meg” Mitchell, lead of the Ethical AI team, today. The move comes just hours after Google announced diversity policy changes and Google AI chief Jeff Dean sent an apology in the wake of the firing of former Google AI ethics lead Timnit Gebru in late 2020. I’m fired. — MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) February 19, 2021 Mitchell, a staff research scientist and…

Research into AI- and machine learning model-driven methods for health care suggests that they hold promise in the areas of phenotype classification, mortality and length-of-stay prediction, and intervention recommendation. But models have traditionally been treated as black boxes in the sense that the rationale behind their suggestions isn’t explained or justified. This lack of…

The impact of AI on people who identify as queer is an underexplored area that ethicists and researchers need to consider, along with including more queer voices in their work. That’s according to a recent study from Google’s DeepMind that looked at the positive and negative effects of AI on people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or asexual. Coauthors of a paper on the…