AI & RoboticsNews

AI designed this gin, but would you drink it?

November 11, 2019
Two years ago, I owned a bar with over 300 different gins — one of the largest collections of juniper-flavored spirits at any establishment in the United States. None of those gins was designed by a computer, a fact that my bartenders would likely have explained was for the best: A gin’s non-juniper botanicals are what make it distinctive, and the most popular recipes have traditionally come…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Richard Bartle interview: How game developers should think about sapient AI characters

November 11, 2019
Richard Bartle is one of the leading academics on video games and is a senior lecturer and honorary professor of computer game design at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He might seem an unusual choice to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence, but video game developers have grappled with the ethics of creating virtual worlds with AI beings in them for a long time. Not only…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AI ethics is all about power

November 11, 2019
At The Common Good in the Digital Age, a tech conference held in Vatican City recently, Pope Francis urged Facebook executives, venture capitalists, and government regulators to be wary of the impact of AI and other technologies. “If mankind’s so-called technological…
AI & RoboticsNews

When AI is a tool and when it’s a weapon

November 11, 2019
The immense capabilities artificial intelligence is bringing to the world would have been inconceivable to past generations. But even as we marvel at the incredible power these new technologies afford, we’re faced with complex and urgent questions about the balance of…
AI & RoboticsNews

From black box to white box: Reclaiming human power in AI

November 11, 2019
Presented by Dataiku It’s hard to imagine what life was like before the peak of AI hype in which we currently find ourselves. But it was just a few years ago, in 2012, that Apple gave the world the first integrated version of Siri on the iPhone 4S, which people used to impress their friends by asking it banal questions. Google was just beginning to test its self-driving cars in Nevada. And the…
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AI & RoboticsNews

The pitfalls of a ‘retrofit human’ in AI systems

November 11, 2019
Stanislav Petrov is not a famous name in the computer science space, like Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper, but his story serves as a critical lesson for developers of AI systems. Petrov, who passed away on May 19, 2017, was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air…
AI & RoboticsNews

AI in patent law: Enabler or hindrance?

November 11, 2019
Filing a patent is the clerical equivalent of pulling teeth — at least in the U.S. It first requires inventors to determine the type of intellectual property (IP) protection they require (i.e., utility, design, or plant). Then they’re on the hook to conduct a United…
AI & RoboticsNews

Microsoft AI helps diagnose cervical cancer faster

November 11, 2019
In some cases, AI-assisted cancer detection might be more than a convenience — it could be the key to getting a diagnosis in the first place. Microsoft and SRL Diagnostics have developed an AI tool that helps detect cervical cancer, freeing doctors in India and other countries where the sheer volume of patients could prove overwhelming. The team trained an AI to spot signs of the cancer by…
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