How close are we to “real” artificial intelligence, and how fast are we progressing?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is complicated.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
How Fast Is AI Progressing? Stanford’s New Report Card for Artificial Intelligence http://suhub.co/2DNrJxA
You can’t think about your biases all the time; you’d end up unable to decide on anything. But there are times when it’s important to think about them, like when you’re hiring someone.
This team has exposed their fake news detector (which is actually a real news detector, because that’s easier) on a website, so if you’re dubious about an article, you can have their machine check it.
Via Walter Roberson.
Originally shared by Hagenbuch Loop
Brings some nuance and some interesting thoughts to the discussion. No, Ansari’s actions don’t fit clearly into the category of “assault”. But yes, there’s still a problem.
Originally shared by Shannon Turlington
Missing from this discussion, which mentions both David Brin’s Uplift books and the Planet of the Apes franchise, is a mention of Cordwainer Smith. His uplifted animals were basically second-class humans, treated as slaves. The Ballad of Lost C’Mel is probably the best-known story, in which an uplifted cat joins in a courageous and tragic fight for the betterment of her people. A more recent example is Barsk, by Lawrence M. Schoen, though it would be a spoiler to tell you how that plays out.
The other thing – and I can’t remember where I read this – is that if you take a great ape, say, and give it the genetic changes that are needed for it to be more intelligent and able to speak – including changing much of its physiology so that it can give birth to offspring with larger skulls – what you end up with is something that basically looks like a human. The article notes that guppies with larger brains ended up with smaller digestive systems and fewer offspring; you can’t just magically add more intelligence to a species in isolation from other physiological changes.
The other way this could be done, of course, is to hook both humans and non-human animals up to AI with neural nets. If the enhanced intelligence is not physiologically supported, but technologically supported, you’re in a whole different realm; you can leave the animals’ physiology largely as it is, but enable them to control devices for manipulating their environment, performing various forms of advanced mental processing, and communicating. But then, is that an animal with AI enhancement, or an AI with a biological peripheral?
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
If We Learn to Engineer Animals to Be as Smart as Humans—Should We? http://suhub.co/2mLHA8j
When the habitually utopian Singularity Hub declares a technology cool but a long way from being practical, it’s probably not one to rush out and invest in.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Are Solar Roads the Highway of the Future, or a Road to Nowhere? http://suhub.co/2mDuwB1
This is well worth a read.
Originally shared by Kymberlyn Reed
#morethan28days
You know that very common, even overused, fantasy trope where magic is forbidden, and those who practice it are hunted?
You could freshen it up a bit with a tribute to these brave souls who maintained their faith in the face of oppressive laws.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-paths-ireland-catholic-forbidden-mass-photography
I do still intend to get an electric car, but I’m glad that reducing meat in my diet is, if anything, more effective, since that’s something I’m doing already.
Originally shared by David Brin
VITAL (non-Brin) Weekend reading: The most recent edition of The World Post (carried on the WP site) is one of the most important ever, compiling a dozen links about how not-helpless we are, to deal with climate change. Hope can be more disturbing and demanding than “all-is-lost” nihilism! But in fact, we may be able to turn the corner on this, if our ship’s tiller can be yanked out of the hands of rich morons.
— EXAMPLES: “From the oil belt of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Bridget Huber reports that climate policies are not killing jobs, but creating them. Through the prism of on-the-job training and apprenticeship programs of the ironworkers’ and electrical workers’ unions in Fresno, she traces the return of robust job and wage growth to what had become a depressed economic zone. This is largely thanks to state mandates to meet requirements for renewable energy production. “Solar saved our bacon,” one veteran ironworker told her. Also contributing in a major way to high-wage employment, she reports, are the construction jobs associated with California’s massive high-speed rail project running through the region.
“Brian Barth reports from farms in eastern North Carolina where pork production giant Smithfield Foods — the largest producer of pork in the world — has rolled out efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of its meat production “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” writes Barth, “agriculture accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as the combined total for electricity and heating, and well above the transportation sector, which contributes just 14 percent. Add emissions from refrigeration, shipping and other activities required to get your dinner from farm to plate, and the food system’s share of global greenhouse gases climbs to roughly a third, making it easily the most climate-unfriendly sector of the global economy.”
“Barth discusses Paul Hawken’s book “Natural Capitalism,” in which the environmentalist lays out the top 100 solutions to climate change. Of these, “11 are related to food systems, seven to energy systems and none to transportation systems. Electric vehicles are #26, while ‘tree intercropping’ — planting strips of apple trees throughout a corn field, for example — is #17. The top food-related practices — reducing food waste (#3) and switching to a plant-rich diet (#4) — are largely consumer-driven solutions.” Yet Barth’s reporting suggests that farmers and producers play a crucial part in reducing emissions as well. Barth also discusses silvopasture — a “mashup of forestry and grazing” — which is the highest-ranked agricultural solution to climate change in Hawken’s analysis.
“The challenge for all these distributed cases of climate action is how to scale them up to realize the potential for massive change as the clock ticks. The political roadblocks of vested interests which always resist change aside, what has been true throughout history is that, in the end, scale and resources follow cultural commitments. That commitment will only grow deeper if society becomes more fully aware of the whole picture of what it is already doing.”
Baymax? That you?
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Low-Cost Soft Robot Muscles Can Lift 200 Times Their Weight and Self-Heal http://suhub.co/2mskd3H