Monthly Archives: May 2020

University of Oxford

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Oxford and Cambridge, the oldest universities in Britain and two of the oldest in the world, are keeping a watchful eye on the buzzy field of artificial intelligence (AI), which has been hailed as a technology that will bring about a new industrial revolution and change the world as we know it.

Over the last few years, each of the centuries-old institutions have pumped millions of pounds into researching the possible risks associated with machines of the future.

Clever algorithms can already outperform humans at certain tasks. For example, they can beat the best human players in the world at incredibly complex games like chess and Go, and they're able to spot cancerous tumors in a mammogram far quicker than a human clinician can. Machines can also tell the difference between a cat and a dog, or determine a random person's identity just by looking at a photo of their face. They can also translate languages, drive cars, and keep your home at the right temperature. But generally speaking, they're still nowhere near as smart as the average 7-year-old.

The main issue is that AI can't multitask. For example, a game-playing AI can't yet paint a picture. In other words, AI today is very "narrow" in its intelligence. However, computer scientists at the the likes of Google and Facebook are aiming to make AI more "general" in the years ahead, and that's got some big thinkers deeply concerned.

Nick Bostrom, a 47-year-old Swedish born philosopher and polymath, founded the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford in 2005 to assess how dangerous AI and other potential threats might be to the human species.

In the main foyer of the institute, complex equations beyond most people's comprehension are scribbled on whiteboards next to words like "AI safety" and "AI governance." Pensive students from other departments pop in and out as they go about daily routines.

It's rare to get an interview with Bostrom, a transhumanist who believes that we can and should augment our bodies with technology to help eliminate ageing as a cause of death.

"I'm quite protective about research and thinking time so I'm kind of semi-allergic to scheduling too many meetings," he says.

Tall, skinny and clean shaven, Bostrom has riled some AI researchers with his openness to entertain the idea that one day in the not so distant future, machines will be the top dog on Earth. He doesn't go as far as to say when that day will be, but he thinks that it's potentially close enough for us to be worrying about it.

Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom is a polymath and the author of "Superintelligence."

The Future of Humanity Institute

If and when machines possess human-level artificial general intelligence, Bostrom thinks they could quickly go on to make themselves even smarter and become superintelligent. At this point, it's anyone's guess what happens next.

The optimist says the superintelligent machines will free up humans from work and allow them to live in some sort of utopia where there's an abundance of everything they could ever desire. The pessimist says they'll decide humans are no longer necessary and wipe them all out.Billionare Elon Musk, who has a complex relationship with AI researchers, recommended Bostrom's book "Superintelligence" on Twitter.

Bostrom's institute has been backed with roughly $20 million since its inception. Around $14 million of that coming from the Open Philanthropy Project, a San Francisco-headquartered research and grant-making foundation. The rest of the money has come from the likes of Musk and the European Research Council.

Located in an unassuming building down a winding road off Oxford's main shopping street, the institute is full of mathematicians, computer scientists, physicians, neuroscientists, philosophers, engineers and political scientists.

Eccentric thinkers from all over the world come here to have conversations over cups of tea about what might lie ahead. "A lot of people have some kind of polymath and they are often interested in more than one field," says Bostrom.

The FHI team has scaled from four people to about 60 people over the years. "In a year, or a year and a half, we will be approaching 100 (people)," says Bostrom. The culture at the institute is a blend of academia, start-up and NGO, according to Bostrom, who says it results in an "interesting creative space of possibilities" where there is "a sense of mission and urgency."

If AI somehow became much more powerful, there are three main ways in which it could end up causing harm, according to Bostrom. They are:

"Each of these categories is a plausible place where things could go wrong," says Bostrom.

With regards to machines turning against humans, Bostrom says that if AI becomes really powerful then "there's a potential risk from the AI itself that it does something different than anybody intended that could then be detrimental."

In terms of humans doing bad things to other humans with AI, there's already a precedent there as humans have used other technological discoveries for the purpose of war or oppression. Just look at the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Figuring out how to reduce the risk of this happening with AI is worthwhile, Bostrom says, adding that it's easier said than done.

I think there is now less need to emphasize primarily the downsides of AI.

Asked if he is more or less worried about the arrival of superintelligent machines than he was when his book was published in 2014, Bostrom says the timelines have contracted.

"I think progress has been faster than expected over the last six years with the whole deep learning revolution and everything," he says.

When Bostrom wrote the book, there weren't many people in the world seriously researching the potential dangers of AI. "Now there is this thriving small, but thriving field of AI safety work with a number of groups," he says.

While there's potential for things to go wrong, Bostrom says it's important to remember that there are exciting upsides to AI and he doesn't want to be viewed as the person predicting the end of the world.

"I think there is now less need to emphasize primarily the downsides of AI," he says, stressing that his views on AI are complex and multifaceted.

Bostrom says the aim of FHI is "to apply careful thinking to big picture questions for humanity." The institute is not just looking at the next year or the next 10 years, it's looking at everything in perpetuity.

"AI has been an interest since the beginning and for me, I mean, all the way back to the 90s," says Bostrom. "It is a big focus, you could say obsession almost."

The rise of technology is one of several plausible ways that could cause the "human condition" to change in Bostrom's view. AI is one of those technologies but there are groups at the FHI looking at biosecurity (viruses etc), molecular nanotechnology, surveillance tech, genetics, and biotech (human enhancement).

A scene from 'Ex Machina.'

Source: Universal Pictures | YouTube

When it comes to AI, the FHI has two groups; one does technical work on the AI alignment problem and the other looks at governance issuesthat will arise as machine intelligence becomes increasingly powerful.

The AI alignment group is developing algorithms and trying to figure out how to ensure complex intelligent systems behave as we intend them to behave. That involves aligning them with "human preferences," says Bostrom.

Roughly 66 miles away at the University of Cambridge, academics are also looking at threats to human existence, albeit through a slightly different lens.

Researchers at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) are assessing biological weapons, pandemics, and, of course, AI.

We are dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilization collapse.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)

"One of the most active areas of activities has been on AI," said CSER co-founder Lord Martin Rees from his sizable quarters at Trinity College in an earlier interview.

Rees, a renowned cosmologist and astrophysicist who was the president of the prestigious Royal Society from 2005 to 2010, is retired so his CSER role is voluntary, but he remains highly involved.

It's important that any algorithm deciding the fate of human beings can be explained to human beings, according to Rees. "If you are put in prison or deprived of your credit by some algorithm then you are entitled to have an explanation so you can understand. Of course, that's the problem at the moment because the remarkable thing about these algorithms like AlphaGo (Google DeepMind's Go-playing algorithm) is that the creators of the program don't understand how it actually operates. This is a genuine dilemma and they're aware of this."

The idea for CSER was conceived in the summer of 2011 during a conversation in the back of a Copenhagen cab between Cambridge academic Huw Price and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, whose donations account for 7-8% of the center's overall funding and equate to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

"I shared a taxi with a man who thought his chance of dying in an artificial intelligence-related accident was as high as that of heart disease or cancer," Price wrote of his taxi ride with Tallinn. "I'd never met anyone who regarded it as such a pressing cause for concern let alone anyone with their feet so firmly on the ground in the software business."

University of Cambridge

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CSER is studying how AI could be used in warfare, as well as analyzing some of the longer term concerns that people like Bostrom have written about. It is also looking at how AI can turbocharge climate science and agricultural food supply chains.

"We try to look at both the positives and negatives of the technology because our real aim is making the world more secure," says Sen higeartaigh, executive director at CSER and a former colleague of Bostrom's. higeartaigh, who holds a PhD in genomics from Trinity College Dublin, says CSER currently has three joint projects on the go with FHI.

External advisors include Bostrom and Musk, as well as other AI experts like Stuart Russell and DeepMind's Murray Shanahan. The late Stephen Hawking was also an advisor when he was alive.

The Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) was opened at Cambridge in 2016 and today it sits in the same building as CSER, a stone's throw from the punting boats on the River Cam. The building isn't the only thing the centers share staff overlap too and there's a lot of research that spans both departments.

Backed with over 10 million from the grant-making Leverhulme Foundation, the center is designed to support "innovative blue skies thinking," according to higeartaigh, its co-developer.

Was there really a need for another one of these research centers? higeartaigh thinks so. "It was becoming clear that there would be, as well as the technical opportunities and challenges, legal topics to explore, economic topics, social science topics," he says.

"How do we make sure that artificial intelligence benefits everyone in a global society? You look at issues like who's involved in the development process? Who is consulted? How does the governance work? How do we make sure that marginalized communities have a voice?"

The aim of CFI is to get computer scientists and machine-learning experts working hand in hand with people from policy, social science, risk and governance, ethics, culture, critical theory and so on. As a result, the center should be able to take a broad view of the range of opportunities and challenges that AI poses to societies.

"By bringing together people who think about these things from different angles, we're able to figure out what might be properly plausible scenarios that are worth trying to mitigate against," said higeartaigh.

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How Britain's oldest universities are trying to protect humanity from risky A.I. - CNBC

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.By Alison Foreman2020-05-28 11:00:00 UTC

HBO Max may have just hit the market, but we already know what it's bringing next month.

In June 2020, the streaming service will offer tons of new movie titles like Titanic, Ad Astra, Doctor Sleep, Bridget Jones's Baby, A Cinderella Story, Speed Racer, The Bucket List, The Neverending Story, The Good Liar, Uncle Buck, When Harry Met Sally, and more.

As for TV, HBO Max will debut new seasons of Search Party, Doom Patrol, and Summer Camp Island alongside the series premieres of Perry Mason, Karma, I May Destroy You, and I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Plus, we'll get Seasons 1-24 of South Park and a standup special from Yvonne Orji.

Check out everything coming to HBO Max in June 2020.

After three painful years, Search Party is finally back. The dark comedy from Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter originally premiered on TBS in 2016 with its spectacular second season arriving in 2017. Now, it has been picked up for its third and fourth seasons at HBO Max so if you're new to the search party, now's the perfect time to catch up.

This satirical joyride follows Dory (Alia Shawkat) and her gaggle of entitled friends as they seek to solve the mysterious disappearance of Chantal Witherbottom. Stupidly funny and surprisingly tense, this series checks all the boxes and escalates in ways you can't imagine.

How to watch: Search Party Season 3 premieres June 25 on HBO Max.

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4th & Forever: Muck City: Season 1 (6/1)Adventure Time Distant Lands: BMO (6/25)Age of Big Cats: Season 1 (6/16)Ancient Earth: Season 1 (6/16)Apocalypse: WWI: Season 1 (6/16)Big World in A Small Garden (6/16)Digits: Season 1 (6/16)Doom Patrol: Season 2 Premiere (6/25)Esme & Roy: Season 2A Premiere (6/25)Expedition: Black Sea Wrecks: Season 1 (6/16)#GeorgeWashington (6/16)HBO First Look: The King of Staten Island (6/4)Hurricane the Anatomy: Season 1 (6/16)I May Destroy You: Series Premiere (6/7)Ill Be Gone in the Dark: Docuseries Premiere (6/28)Infinity Train: Season 2 Premiere (6/10)Inside Carbonaro: Season 1 (6/2)Karma: Series Premiere (6/18)King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis (Part 1 & Part 2): Season 1 (6/16)Looney Tunes (Batch 2): Season 1 (6/16)Perry Mason: Limited Series Premiere (6/21)Popeye (Batch 2): Season 1 (6/16)Realm of the Volga: Season 1 (6/16)Sacred Spaces: Season 1 (6/16)Science vs. Terrorism: Season 1 (6/16)Search Party: Season 3 Premiere (6/25)Secret Life of Lakes: Season 1 (6/16)Secret Life Underground: Season 1 (6/16)Secrets of the Solar System: Season 1 (6/16)South Park: Seasons 1 - 23 (6/24)Space Probes!: Season 1 (6/16)Speed: Season 1 (6/16)Spies of War: Season 1 (6/16)Summer Camp Island: Season 2 Premiere (6/18)Tales of Nature: Season 1 (6/16)The Celts: Blood, Iron & Sacrifice: Season 1 (6/16)The History of Food: Season 1 (6/16)The Secret Lives of Big Cats: Season 1 (6/16)Viking Women: Season 1 (6/16)Yvonne Orji: Momma, I Made It! (6/6)

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Everything coming to HBO Max in June 2020 - Mashable

Call it kismet, if you like. Usually the circumstances inspiring that term's invocation are poetic and positive. Colored thusly, it might not seem right to apply the world to the circumstances surrounding the unintentional fourth season finale of "The Good Fight" because roduction had to halt on the drama when the pandemic sped up its nasty sweep across the country and the globe. In a pre-COVID-19 world, creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King had scripted three more episodes that did not get shot.

But ending a conspiracy-driven season with "The Gang Discovers Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein," its seventh episode, is apt if not ideal. Circumstances forced this episode to transform from one of the series' fictionalized departures into a stranger-than-fiction real story into if not the last word on this arc a cliffhanger at least. And the coincidental timing of its debut is remarkable, arriving in the same week as the debut of "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich" on Netflixand the"Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?" special on ID.

The producers acknowledge these strange days and the crimes born from corrupt leadership in other ways, too. They replaced the drama's operatic theme with John Prine's "My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight" to open the finale. They did the same with the sixth episode, featuring Fountains of Wayne's "Hey Julie." Both were tributes since Prine and Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger both died of complications linked to COVID-19.

Remember, though, that Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) ushered us into this latest round of fictionalized adventures through the gateway of a nightmare her nightmare. The premiere dropped us into her dream of an alternate timeline in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election, but #MeToo never happened. Diane, in her dream, was assigned to lead the firm's defense of Harvey Weinstein which, understandably, made her apoplectic.

Capping off this round, "The Good Fight" going down the conspiracy water slide surrounding Epstein's deathcreates a convenient if coincidental bookend. Two of the biggest stories within this era of women shedding light on the sexual abuses inflicted by powerful men are acknowledged in this fourth season.

The "gang's" services are retained by U.S. Attorney Wilbur Dincon (Adam Heller), who tasks the firm with hunting down the truth of how Epstein died in his jail cell last August while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges, promising more work if they solve the case. The financier's official cause of death is suicide by hanging, but some believe he was killed.

Commence a wild airing of multiple conspiracy theories by way of a firm-wide tumble down some of the same conspiracy worm holes torn open on Reddit and 4chan, spearheaded by Liz (Audra McDonald). Some of them, and the evidence supporting them, were ginned up by the writers. But the kookiest details are connected to true stories.

One draws a connection between Epstein and Attorney General William Barr by way of a book written by Barr's father Donald titled "Space Relations," which is about child sexual slavery in space. The book actually exists.

Another branch of the path opens up by way of breaking down Epstein's obsession with transhumanism and seeding women with his DNA to create a "superior" breed of human, which also happens to be true.

The point of all this craziness, though, is to illustrate how efficiently evil works to distract the average person. While Liz and the associates are neck deep in digging through evidence, decoding odd messages ,and constructing an impressive crazy wall in the company's conference room, the other two name partners, Diane and Adrian (Delroy Lindo) are informed by their icy-blooded overlord Gavin Firth (John Larroquette) that they need to cut a fifth of their staff.

As for the season's core mystery, concerning a secret directive known as Memo 618 that renders the rich and powerful legally bulletproof, we don't get to the bottom of what the memo is or which entities are behind it. That will have to wait until the fifth season, whenever that airs. And when it does, the conspiracy's relevance and accompanying subtext will probably hold.

Part of the "to be continued" aspect of this storyline shows Julius Cain (Michael Boatman), a newly seated federal judge, being arrested on cooked-up charges after going to the Office of the Inspector General, hoping to blow the whistle on the memo's existence. Nearly everyone else is so glued to figuring out what really happened to Epstein that they barely notice the figurative guillotine being constructed in their midst, let alone dream their own heads might roll.

The episode title itself, "The Gang Discovers Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein," is intentionally misleading the gang doesn't get to the bottom of that mystery but not for lack of extreme effort. They do, however, come close to a shocking discovery when the firm's investigators Marissa (Sarah Steele) and Jay (Nyambi Nyambi) journeying by boat out to Epstein's exclusive island seeking the answer to who, or what a clue identified as "BUD" might be.

The answer, revealed after the duo gains entry to a locked room, is in part a "Citizen Kane" reference but in larger portion a shocking visual commentary on the extreme hubris of the excessively wealthy: "BUD" is the codename for the organ Epstein prized most, kept in cryogenic storage alongside his brain, making for one hell of a season-closing last look.

Amazing, and yet credible. Epstein was a pedophile and, by most accounts, an otherwise unremarkable human save for his connections, libertine privilege, bacchanals, and displays of opulence.

Whatwere we talking about again? Ah yes: distraction. These seven episode of "The Good Fight" illustrate the two tiers of the justice system as it truly exists. Memo 618 is a fictional device made to helpfully explain why men like Epstein and Weinstein and Donald Trump can shred legal norms and do as they please without consequence.

It's much handier for dramatic purposes to give systemic injustice a device to blame as opposed to simply showing the good guys losing over and over again for no other reason beyond the understanding that the judicial branch of government is too thoroughly corrupted for the little guy, or even the relatively well-off, to get a fair shot. And the problem is, the people who have access to power and a sizable bank account are generally fine with this arrangement.

Adrian, a man with a hush-hush invitation to run for president in his back pocket, drops in on attorney's team whirlwind to urge his people to not get caught up conspiracy theories. Law enforcement's failure to hold Epstein's accountable for his crimes, including allowing him to ignore his court-ordered 90-day check-ins like every other sexual predator must do, may simply be an example of government incompetence, he says.

Diane sees it differently. "We all have to obey the law," she says. "If we're told we have to check in with the police every 90 days, we do it. But certain people don't have to. They get special treatment."

She angrily adds, "That is America. That is not incompetence. It's a special f**king off-ramp for the well-connected."

Smartly the writers don't make Memo 618 the season's sole tension, which goes against the established case-of-the-week format; "The Good Fight" is still a CBS-branded procedural at the end of the day. Instead, the sinister Memo is a corporeal representation of the invisible forces whose knees are on our necks and the enabling structures keeping them in place. The season premiere presented itself as a lark and a diversionary ride into an alternate reality but beneath the cynical humor of Diane's twisted dreaming is an indictment of white feminism's enabling of predatory, exploitative patriarchal structures. As long as some people reap the rewards of appearing to achieve parity, that's enough.

But as the plot progresses, the fourth season demonstrates how the various levels of privilege granted to some Americans can be exploited to the detriment of all but the 1%. And this structural decay is made possible by the fact that, like so many in Epstein's inner circle, many of us choose to look the other way.

A desperate Diane asks Dincon, point-blank, what Memo 618 is. He asks her why, and she says, "Jeffrey Epstein's life was built on it."

"Then you have your answer," the U.S. Attorney replies before walking away.

Marissa observes in the finale's closing moments that in all the obsessing over what happened to Epstein, the team (and the audience by proxy) has lost perspective on what really matters in his story, the teenage girls he violated and the justice they're owed but may never receive. "We're chasing a whodunit in the middle of a tragedy," she says.

"The Good Fight" rages at this unfairness as its lights temporarily turn off, leaving its viewers much to contemplate about our part in this imbalance of society's scales. Hopefully that's what will stick with us as opposed to its diversionary tactic of a flashing a dead rapist's BUD.

All episodes of "The Good Fight" are currently streaming on CBS All Access.

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In a fitting finale, "The Good Fight" makes the case for nipping Jeffrey Epstein whodunit in the bud - Salon