AIWeek2016
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Pop culture's many takes on artificial intelligence
Over the years, artists, writers, filmmakers and game studios have all tackled the concept of artificial intelligence. Often their vision is of machines that are brutally hostile to humans. Philip K. Dick envisioned androids that murder their owners. The iconic HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey ... also murders his human companions. Of course, there's Skynet, which launches an all-out war on mankind. We could go on like this for a long time. But there are also those, like Spike Jonze, who envision us having a more complex relationship with computer-based personalities; one in which they could even be love interests. And in Star Trek: The Next Generation Data is not only a "good" android, but he's often the hero of the show. We've pulled together 13 of our favorite portrayals of AI over the years and put them in the gallery below. It is by no means comprehensive. So please, let us know what we missed in the comments or tweet at us (@engadget) to let us know your favorite AI character from the film, TV or books using the hashtag #EngadgetAIWeek.
How will you survive when the robots take your job?
The robots are coming, and they're taking our jobs. Or that's the concern, anyway. A recent Oxford University study surmises that over the next two decades, about 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being made obsolete thanks to automation. This isn't restricted to just blue-collar factory labor either; even office clerical duties and high-skilled work could eventually be done by computers and artificial intelligence. And if that happens, how will we make a living? Well, recently, a very old idea has gained momentum in Silicon Valley that aims to solve this very problem. The solution? Guaranteed income for everyone.
The Engadget Podcast, Ep 2: One More Robot
In Episode Two: One More Robot, editors Cherlynn Low, Dana Wollman and Chris Velazco join host Terrence O'Brien to talk about how fitness trackers ruined Happy Meals, the true potential of AI and try to figure out what monster would want the backspace key to navigate back a page in Chrome.
AIs fight to the death in 'Doom' contest next month
Google DeepMind took a leap forward last year when its artificial intelligence agent mastered 49 Atari 2600 games. The learning system, or "deep Q-network" (DQN), that DeepMind designed achieved this mastery through general experience, rather than specific programming for each game. This milestone is just one step along a grander path toward the general-purpose "smart machine": an AI that can master any task with minimal input. DeepMind's work in this field is groundbreaking, and it's helping advance the field in ways you might not expect. Wojciech Jaśkowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Computing Science (ICS) at Poznan University of Technology, Poland. After reading about DeepMind's feat in the scientific journal Nature, he began to think about the possibilities. If an agent could learn Atari 2600 with our current levels of knowledge, why not push the envelope -- why not try a 3D game? Jaskowski settled on the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. It has low power requirements and, more important, it's open source. He assembled a team of university students from ICS with the aim of building a platform that would facilitate testing AI agents.
The robots of war: AI and the future of combat
The 1983 film WarGames portrayed a young hacker tapping into NORAD's artificial-intelligence-driven nuclear weapons' system. When the hit movie was screened for President Reagan, it prompted the commander in chief to ask if it were possible for the country's defense system network to be compromised. Turns out it could. What they didn't talk about was the science fiction of using AI to control the nation's nuclear arsenal. It was too far-fetched to even be considered. Until now.
How we trained AI to be sexist
You'd never know from Jacqueline Feldman's background that she'd become a passionate proponent of gender equality for artificial intelligence. She went the dreamer's route at college, attending Yale for English literature and writing. She prefers casual dresses and writing from the comfort of her Brooklyn apartment surrounded by books, where she has the option of climbing to the roof for cool air on sweltering nights.
Can big data and AI fix our criminal-justice crisis?
America, land of the free. Yeah, right. Tell that to the nearly 7 million people incarcerated in the US prison system. The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the highest per capita incarceration rate of any nation on the planet -- 716 inmates for every 100,000 population. We lock up more of our own people than Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan or Russia. And once you're in, you stay in. A 2005 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) followed 400,000 prisoners in 30 states after their release and found that within just three years, more than two-thirds had been rearrested. That figure rose to over 75 percent by 2010.
Elon Musk's OpenAI will teach machines to talk using Reddit
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has delivered the first DGX-1 supercomputer to Elon Musk's OpenAI nonprofit, and the researchers already have a project in mind. Believe it or not, they want to teach AI to chat by reading through Reddit forums, according to MIT Technology Review. That seems dicey given the site's countless, bizarre forums, but the sheer size of it is what attracted the team. "Deep learning is a very special class of models because as you scale [them] up, they always work better," says OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy.
The next wave of AI is rooted in human culture and history
Understanding humans is essential to the design and experience of a technology. For decades, major corporations have turned to social scientists for insight into human behavior, culture and history. At Intel, Genevieve Bell, a prominent Australian anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, has been tracking societal trends across the world to help build technologies that are fine-tuned to the needs of the people who will interact with them.
We don't understand AI because we don't understand intelligence
Artificial intelligence prophets including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Raymond Kurzweil predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. This will lead to a variety of benign, neutral and terrifying outcomes. For example, Musk, Hawking and dozens of other researchers signed a petition in January 2015 that claimed AI-driven machines could lead to "the eradication of disease and poverty" in the near future. This is, clearly, a benign outcome. And then there's the neutral result: Kurzweil, who popularized the idea of the technological singularity, believes that by the 2030s people will be able to upload their minds, melding man with machine. On the terrifying side of things, Musk envisions a future where humans will essentially be house cats to our software-based overlords, while Kurzweil takes it a step further, suggesting that humans will essentially be eradicated in favor of intelligent machines.
How a robot wrote for Engadget
John McCarthy, the late computer scientist who first coined the term "artificial intelligence," famously said: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more." What was once cutting-edge AI is now considered standard behavior for computers. As I write this, my computer is continuously performing millions of tasks, caching files, managing RAM and balancing CPU loads. The algorithms behind many of these operations would have been considered AI years ago. Now it's just software. Last year, I looked into how well neural networks -- programs that behave like a scaled-down version of your brain's neurons -- are able to write. My plan was to create a bot that could write articles for Engadget. As I discovered, we're not yet at the point in which such applications can think and write like humans, but they can do a reasonable job of writing readable sentences. As I noted at the time, some companies are using less "advanced" methods to produce content automatically. One such company is Automated Insights, whose tools are used by a number of companies to autogenerate reports, and also by the Associated Press to write articles about sports and finance. I've been using one of Automated Insights' products, Wordsmith, trying again to make a computer write like Engadget. It's easy to argue that Wordsmith isn't AI. It doesn't use machine learning and neural networks, but it does work. And thanks to that fact, I've been much more successful in my mission to automate the art of the tech blog.
Exploring the past, present and future of AI with Engadget
Few things stir up as much excitement, fear and confusion as artificial intelligence. So we're dedicating this entire week to examining it from as many angles as possible. We'll look at how current nascent AIs reflect some of society's less admirable qualities, how it could be used to improve our criminal justice system and we'll even explore the meaning of the "I" in "AI" -- intelligence. Jess Conditt will challenge the notion that experts truly understand what it means to build an intelligent machine. And Nicole Lee will explore whether or not a minimum income is a viable solution to a workforce that demands less humans, and more computers and robots. At this point practically every major tech company is making sizable investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are all betting big on its potential. Google has built a special processor just for powering AI software. IBM is trying to shoehorn Watson into every industry from retail to medicine -- it even had the damn thing write a cook book. Smaller players are looking for a foothold in the emerging market too, such as Fujitsu and startups like Viv.
