Just what i find

The impact of self-driving cars will be felt far and wide. Aside from the obvious (insurance industry, petrol stations, professional drivers, crash repair centres), CB Insights points out that seemingly disconnected industries – like fast food, real estate, media and healthcare – are also set to be jolted from their comfort zones. Not all of these are negative – if you could watch movies while being shuttled around that's a boon for those who tell internet access and streaming services. Others are more subtle – how the price of real estate will be affected is as yet unclear (and how… Continue reading →

"Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress" – with compute capacity used by AI doubling every 3.5 months for the last 16 years https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/? https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/ Since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18 month doubling period). Continue reading →

A future of truly intelligent machines requires causal reasoning, not simply "nontrivial curve fitting" (the probabilistic association of cause and effect), argues Judea Pearl. Development of true reasoning – why a given action has a certain outcome, not just that they're correlated – would allow machines to "ask counterfactual questions" – in effect, to predict how a change creates a likely outcome that has never been seen before – and potentially even develop agency and free will. He puts lack of progress in this area down to a missing "calculus for asymmetrical relations" (knowing that the sun causes the grass… Continue reading →

Although Apple seems to be moving their focus for marketing the Watch towards health conscious consumers, there's a significant number of people who find wearing the device at work absolutely necessary to stay in touch. Many service industry workers are prohibited from checking phones during the workday or while on shift, but checking a watch is acceptable, allowing them to break the monotony of a quiet afternoon without breaking company policies or seeming inattentive to customers – a scenario I hadn't previously considered (we didn't even have smartphones when I was working on a shop floor, and i'm not that… Continue reading →

I have to admit – Instagram's switch from chronological to algorithmic content sequencing has left me feeling like i'm missing something if I stop browsing for a minute – but the main culprit for that is bad user interface design (the app instantly swings back to the top of the feed when it relaunches if there's any new content, meaning you never get to see the older posts), so I'm not convinced that telling people they're "all caught up" is really going to fix the "compulsive, passive, zombie browsing" they're worried about. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/scroll-responsibly/ Without a chronological feed, it can be… Continue reading →

I remember years ago hearing someone describe Google's biggest rival not as another search engine, but Amazon – people "view Google as a tool to research products, while Amazon is the place they go to buy". While it seems likely that Google's Shopping Actions programme will drive business, I do not see how this will break Amazon's stranglehold on online ordering, and especially not when Google's apparent long-term target here is to have people order through a voice UI, potentially having never seen the product. I trust Amazon to fix it when things go wrong. If i use this service,… Continue reading →

While I admire Elon Musk's ability to launch big idea after big idea, I have to agree with Schmidt and Zuckerberg – his concerns about AI stink of moral panic. Yes, we need to have the difficult debates around misuse and fairness, but these debates will only be triggered by continuing to explore the possibilities, not by shutting off the tap. https://www.neowin.net/news/eric-schmidt-thinks-elon-musk-is-exactly-wrong-on-artificial-intelligence Eric Schmidt is the latest person to criticise Elon Musk’s Terminator AI vision. Schmidt said that AI will prove to benefit humanity as populations see ageing populations resulting in fewer workers. Continue reading →

How do you ensure your technically interesting project is truly a force for good, not merely further entrenching existing biases, stereotypes, and social problems? This great set of rules, based on experiences working on AI solutions in low-income countries, can help, regardless of where you're working: 1. Ask who's not at the table – are you truly inclusive? 2. Let others check your work – fairness is subjective 3. Doubt your data – does your data suffer from collection bias? 4. Respect context – a model developed in one context may fail in others 5. Automate with care – take… Continue reading →

I find it fascinating that there are companies out there large enough, and with specific enough use cases, to justify creating custom hardware to solve their problems. Facebook's recently confirmed that they're working on chips dedicated to analyzing live video, to allow them to respond more quickly to unacceptable or inappropriate content (such as suicide or murder being streamed live). Such analysis requires "a huge amount of compute power", but is certainly an interesting technical, and ethical, challenge. Who helps Facebook determine what content to flag? What happens if it gets it wrong? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-25/facebook-is-designing-its-own-chips-to-help-filter-live-videos Facebook Inc. is working on designing… Continue reading →