JUDY WOODRUFF: Now another new addition to the NewsHour Bookshelf.

Tonight’s focus is the brave new world of artificial intelligence.

Jeffrey Brown has that.

Continue reading Why humanity is essential to the future of artificial intelligence

Max Spindle @compdealernews

I love good science fiction because there is always a glimpse of a thought, an idea that ultimately becomes something tangible in our world.

But Elon Musk’s (Tesla, SpaceX) and Stephen Hawking’s warning about perfecting AI (artificial intelligence) could lead us to create a demon we can’t control made me wonder if it isn’t already too late.

We’re already struggling to understand and manage AI

AI is only one of our technological advances that will lead to Google’s Raymond Kurzweil’s favorite subject, Singularity.

Kurzweil is also one of the founders of six-year-old Singularity University and his goal is to live 700 years +/-.

Actually, the way technology is rushing, he could live a helluva’ lot longer … just not in his present form.

Continue reading The next phase in Artificial Intelligence: Singularity

Photo by Flickr

“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded [by artificial intelligence].”

– Professor Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge

These words from renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, as well as the impending presidential campaign of self-proclaimed “transhumanist” Zoltan Istvan, paint quite an exciting picture regarding the future role of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life. After all, Istvan’s idea of integrated immortality via the growth of AI being just within reach of humanity’s grasp is definitely a topic that stirs up quite a bit of controversy and discussion among experts and casual friends alike.

However, the notion of this virtual force assuming direct control of certain societal functions isn’t just limited to fascinating conversations and hypotheticals found in the distant future. In fact, certain members of the content marketing community feel that this reality is right around the corner for a human-driven industry that views itself as both vibrant and irreplaceable. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the future relationship between content marketing and AI, as well as what this development could mean for content marketers like yourself moving forward.

Continue reading Will Artificial Intelligence Kill Content Marketing?

Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level ability around the year 2050, and superhuman ability less than 30 years after.¹ But, like a tribe on a tropical island littered with World War II debris imagining that the manufacture of aluminum propellers or steel casings would be within their power, our confidence is probably inflated.

AI can be thought of as a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible programs. Nature solved this search problem by brute force, effectively performing a huge computation involving trillions of evolving agents of varying information processing capability in a complex environment (the Earth). It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators toHomo Sapiens. What evolution accomplished required tremendous resources. While silicon-based technologies are increasingly capable of simulating a mammalian or even human brain, we have little idea of how to find the tiny subset of all possible programs running on this hardware that would exhibit intelligent behavior.

Continue reading Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options.

With potentially limitless crowdsourced plot points, the system could allow for more creative stories and an easier method for interactive narrative generation. Current AI models for games have a limited number of scenarios, no matter what a player chooses. They depend on a dataset already programmed into a model by experts.

Using the Georgia Tech approach, one might imagine a Star Wars game using online fan fiction to let the AI system generate countless paths for a player to take.

“Our open interactive narrative system learns genre models from crowdsourced example stories so that the player can perform different actions and still receive a coherent story experience,” says Mark Riedl, lead investigator and associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech.

Continue reading Georgia Tech Uses Artificial Intelligence to Crowdsource Interactive Fiction

A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system—the vaunted Patriot—made the same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed.

The missile battery that targeted the two jets was almost entirely automated. There were people there watching over it, but they deferred to the machine’s analysis, and these friendly fire deaths were the result. A decade later, the issue underlying the problem hasn’t gone away. Indeed, it’s become more pressing as the military comes to rely more and more on automation, and spends huge sums of money researching and developing artificial intelligence. In the future that could include what it calls autonomous weapons systems, one of the most controversial fields of artificial intelligence.

Continue reading The Air Force Wants You to Trust Robots–Should You?