Letters
AI Ethics Must Be Actionable
I’ve been thinking about AI and ethics. With the techlash and an erosion of trust in technology as a positive force, it’s more important than ever that we make sure the AI community acts ethically.
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Google's AI Explains Itself: How Google's xAI tools help evaluate model performance
Google's AI platform offers a view into the mind of its machines. Explainable AI (xAI) tools show which features exerted the most influence on a model’s decision, so users can evaluate model performance and potentially mitigate biased results.
Tech & Society
Is AI Making Mastery Obsolete?: How human chess and go masters cope with being beaten by AI
Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.
Letters
Building Trustworthy AI
Recently I wrote about major reasons why AI projects fail, such as small data, robustness, and change management. Given that some AI systems don't work, users and customers sometimes rightly wonder whether they should trust an AI system.
Tech & Society
Researchers Blocked at the Border: Some African AI researchers blocked from attending NeurIPS
Foreign researchers hoping to attend one of AI’s largest conferences were denied entry into Canada, where the event will be held. Most of those blocked were from developing nations.
Tech & Society
When Private Data is Not Private: Google trained Project Nightingale on private patient data.
Google spent the past year training an AI-powered health care program using personal information from one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Patients had no idea — until last week.
Tech & Society
Blind Spot
In March 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars became the first autonomous vehicle reported to have killed a pedestrian. A new report by U.S. authorities suggests that the accident occurred because the car’s software was programmed to ignore jaywalkers.
Tech & Society
Survival of the Overfittest
Neuroevolution, which combines neural networks with ideas drawn from Darwin, is gaining momentum. Its advocates claim that they can achieve faster, better results by generating a succession of new models, each slightly different than its predecessors, rather than relying on a purpose-built model.
Tech & Society
Take That, Humans!
At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.
Tech & Society
Who’s Minding the Store?
Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.
Tech & Society
AI Goes Rogue
Could humanity be destroyed by its own creation? If binary code running on a computer awakens into sentience, it will be able to think better than humans. It may even be able to improve its own software and hardware.
Tech & Society
Deepfakes Wreak Havoc
Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.