Category Archives: Ai

An artificial intelligence accurately predicted Donald Trumpsless-than-stellar first 100-day approval rating down to the percentage point.

Unanimous AI was challenged by reporters at Modern Trader magazine to use its Swarm AI to predict the presidents rating at the end of his first milestone in office. The machine correctly came up with thehistorically low figure of 42 percentthe same result presented by the latest ABC News/Washington Post polls.

Not every outlet came up with thesame approval rating for Trumps first 100 days. The CNN/ORC poll gave the president a 44 percent approval rating, while Gallup puts it at an even lower 41 percent. The AI was able to accurately predict these results despite recent presidents ratings being around 60 percent after the same amount of time in office.

Unanimous AI

The company uses swarm intelligence for what it calls artificial artificial intelligence. Swarm intelligence is a method of amplifying a groups intelligence by pooling together individual thoughts, opinions, ideas, and insights. Unanimous AI often relates this idea to how ants or bees work together to become a unified system that is stronger than its individual parts.

The process is fairly simple. Users log in to Unanimous AIs UNU system and contribute their ideas to the swarm intelligence by answering a series of questions. This could be about anything from Oscar winners to presidential election results. Swarm AI gathers those results, links them together, and fills in the gaps. Even though the AI makes the predication, it is human intelligence that forms the foundation for how thoseresults arereached.

Unanimous AI has made sure to highlight the subtle differences between its method and standard polling. Instead of being asked to answer a question definitively using a best guess, the UNU platform asks users to describe their confidence in each of the given answer choices. They do this by dragging a puck from the center of their screen to answers laid out in a surrounding vector. The AI then determines the choice people collectively feel most confident in.

Imagine 10 people were asked who they thought would win the 2018 World Cup: USA or Germany. If six people said the USA and four said Germany then a poll would predict America as the winner. Now imagine those people used the UNU platform and everyone who chose the USA was unsure of their vote, while the four who chose Germany were extremely confident. In this case, Unanimous AI might give the cup to Germany.

This isnt the first time Swarm AI has seen into the future. It also accurately predicted the presidential primaries, World Series, Kentucky Derby, Oscars, Grammys,and Super Bowl XLV.

Some of us may fear that AI will eventually take over humankind. Let Swarm AI be a reminder that machines are only as good as the humans behind them and were pretty damn good.

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Donald Trump's awful 100-day approval rating was already determined by AI - The Daily Dot

We're seeing artificial intelligence grow in the workplace and take over a variety of responsibilities, from data entry to customer service, with great success, but could management positions ever be replaced by AI?

It may seem like a far-fetched idea, but the growth of AI has already crossed borders into areas many people previously didn't think technology could go, like robots completely running retail stores or AI being used to manage hedge funds. Artificial intelligence is getting increasingly smarter and becoming more humanlike, meaning its capacity to make decisions and take on larger roles is increasing.

The main role of management has always been to enforce protocol and make decisions for others in the organization. AI is already being used to make decisions in the workplace on things like who to hire or how to assemble the most effective teams, so what happens when we get to the point when AI can make all decisions typically made by mangers? Would we ever get to a point where the role of managers is obsolete?

The answer to the question isn't totally black and white. While it seems likely that technology will increase and eventually get to the point where all business decisions could likely be made my AI, computers will never be able to match the emotion and human aspects of real managers. This is both good and bad--machines are capable of making decisions without emotions, meaning everything would be fueled by an algorithm, eliminating the need for guesswork and gut reactions that could prove false. For less-effective managers whose main purpose is just to make decisions and sign timecards, AI could be a realistic replacement because they already aren't doing anything that a computer can't do.

However, replacing all managers with AI takes out another vital part of a manager's role--the human aspect. Good managers do more than just make decisions for their organization; they also lead the company, build relationships with employees, and connect on an emotional level. The best companies around the world are led by enthusiastic and charismatic managers who could never be replaced by computers. These are the leaders who inspire, engage, and empower their employees to drive the company forward and meet strategic goals. A real threat to AI managers would be a loss of employee engagement and morale, especially because most humans likely wouldn't want to work for a machine and would miss out on the important relationships and emotional connections with a human manager.

In the future, we may see some lower-level managers be replaced or consolidated in the name of AI. More than that, the growth of AI in the workplace will make it even more important for managers to interact with and engage with employees to ensure their job security. The good news is that as AI potentially takes over some decision-making aspects of the job, managers will have more time to work on the human side of their positions and be able to interact with and mentor employees. Managers play an increasing important role in the future of work as they set the stage for transparency, employee experience, corporate culture, and more. With these human-driven principles playing such an important role in an organization's success, managers will stand out even more from AI.

Although AI is a powerful tool in the workplace and will no doubt play a large role in the future of work, it will never be able to replace the emotional connections human make with each other, meaning that most management positions will likely be held by humans.

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AI Will Replace Bad Managers | Inc.com - Inc.com

In Brief According to expert Ben Ross, human-level AI is something that we will see in our lifetime, and we'd better be prepared for it because whether it will be a force of good or destruction is actually in our hands.

What happens when computers achieve a human level of artificial intelligence (AI)?

Ben Ross, MYOBs User Experience and Product Management leader, believes that because of advances in hardware and software, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. As a tech enthusiast, Ross is passionate about the potential of automation and AI. He cites Moores Law as a way to illustrate the advances in field, wherein the computing power of machines double every twelvemonths a fact that has held true over the last 50 years.

That said, if we average expert predictions, we will reach human-level AI by 2040, and we will achieve super intelligent AI by 2060.

Even if it takes twice as long its going to happen in yours and my lifetime. This is a thing for our generation, says Ross in his TED talk. AI is a pretty powerful thing to contend with. So what sort of future might we have if we have to contend against powerful computers?

It could be awesome,but it could also be apocalyptically bad.

Were at this great point in time where human-level AI is still 25 years away. So we have time to make sure that we guide its pathway forward ensuring a great outcome instead of bad, he adds.

Ross expounds further on the importance of having guidelines in place given that were at the cusp of an AI revolution in his full TED talk:

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AI With Human-Level Intelligence Will Be Walking the Streets by 2040 - Futurism

The NewCo Daily: Todays TopStories Audrey Watters |Flickr

The economy stands at a threshold moment in the era of machine learning. The artificial intelligences that companies are increasingly deploying are just beginning to take on roles and jobs that used to demand a human being at the controls. But in most cases theyre nowhere near ready to take over entirely. They still need people at their sidesin some cases to generate the data that will train them, in others to provide judgment thats beyond them.

Welcome to the world of the hybrid human-machine workplace. A couple of recent articles have begun to give us a portrait of this emerging work environment, with its awkward encounters, unemployment fears, and potential for both efficiency and exploitation.

In Wired, Davey Alba talked with a bunch of people who screen YouTube videos for content that might offend advertisers. In the long run, Google (which owns YouTube) aims to hand this task over to an AI. But the judgments involved are complex, opaque, and subjective, and distressed advertisers arent going to wait for the technology to mature. So low-paid, part-time contractors hired through an agency called ZeroChaos do the work. Their video ratings serve two purposesprotecting YouTubes revenue right now, and building up a trove of data to help the AI learn what humans (and advertisers) find objectionable.

A jobs a job, and a lot of the people doing this one are glad to have it. But its high-pressure, high-volume piecework, and working for Google sometimes feels like working for an inhuman AI; the company barely communicates with workers, dismisses them precipitously and without explanation, and provides no benefits, job security, or guarantee of steady work.

The problem with treating your AI tutors this way isnt just a matter of ethicsit could also warp the outcome of the whole project. As Alba puts it: if it turns out youre training your AI mainly on the perceptions of anxious temp workers, they could wind up embedding their own distinct biases in those systems.

Machine-learning tools are extending their reach far beyond the giant tech platforms that pioneered them. In The New York Times, Daisuke Wakabayashi offers a compendium of case studies of the propagation of AI techniques into other industries.

At Lola, a travel-booking app, human travel agents have been guiding the education of an AI named Harrison that has become proficient at recommending hotels. (The human agents are still better at offering users travel tips, or helping with upgrades.)

Legal Robot is developing another AI that can parse complex contracts and other legal documents, identifying problematic passages and suggesting improvements. Its CEO points out that legal agreementswith their repetition, formality, and structured naturemake good fodder for machine learning.

At Magoosh, the test-prep company, customer service reps are speeding up their answers to incoming student questions now that they have an AI at their disposal thats gotten steadily better at suggesting email replies. But employees dont think theyre going to get edged out any time soon: Too many questions still require human intuition, and people are still better than AIs at knowing when it makes sense to break a rule.

In all these cases, the relationship between human worker and AI is neither coexistence nor warfare but rather a continuous process of reaction, adjustment, and evolutionary change. The technologys advances have been prodigious, yet it still cant do most of the things we expect it to eventually master. Were still waiting to find out just where people will fit in when these software machines have caught up with our imaginations.

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Bringing Up AI: How People Are Teaching Their Jobs to Machines - NewCo Shift

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist and the worlds best known living scientist has publicly said: The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race...It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate...Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete, and would be superseded.

There are other points of view; but, I noticed that more movies are being produced based on the dangers of artificial intelligence. I remember the movie2001 Space Odysseywhere a machine decided that it was god. Now we have movies, with countless sequels such as theTerminatorandTransformerseries about machines trying totake over the world.

In 2015 a group of scientists and AI experts, including Hawking and Elon Musk, issued theOpen Letter on Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence. It states:

The potential benefits of Artificial Intelligence are huge since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence, we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

There are undoubtedly many benefits from the future use of artificial intelligence. Medical care will be one of the major beneficiaries. However, there are three principal long term fears about AIs continued development.

The first is that artificial intelligence applications, robotics and other forms of automation will ultimately result in massive unemployment as machines begin to match and exceed the capability of workers to perform routine and repetitive jobs. This will be an extremely difficult adjustment for developing countries that depend on manufacturing andoff shore processing to provide jobs for their population.

Opinion ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1

In the financial services industry, banks are now using artificial intelligence systems to organize operations, maintain book-keeping, invest in stocks and manage properties. In the United States, an insurance industry report states that around one third of claims applicants are actually talking to machines in processing their claims.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) in its Global Risks Report 2017 has included the risks of artificial intelligence as one of the emerging technologies that pose potential global risks. The report includes the impressive strides made in AI development. It said:

Tasks such as trading stocks, writing sports summaries, flying military planes and keeping a car within its lane on the highway are now all within the domain of Artificial Specialized Intelligence (ASI). As ASI applications expand so do the risks of these applications operating in unforseeable ways or outside the control of humans.

Kai-Fu Lee, a top tech entrepreneur in China has said that his firm has invested in companies that can accomplish feats like recognizing three million faces at the same time or dispersing loans in eight seconds. He believes that robots are likely to replace 50% of all jobs in the next 10 years.

The second fear about AI is what I call the Terminator fear the potential danger of artificial intelligence and the future of warfare. The WEF global risk report said:

One sector that saw the huge disruptive potential of AI from the an early stage is the military...Serious investments in autonomous weapons system (AWS) began a few years ago; in July 2016 the Pentagons Defense Science Board published its first study on autonomy, but there is no consensus yet on how to regulate the development of these weapons... Those calling for a ban on AWS fear that human beings will be removed from the loop, leaving decisions on the use of lethal force to machines with ramifications we do not yet understand.

An arms race in autonomous weapons system is very likely in the near future. The international community should tackle this issue with the utmost urgency and seriousness because once the first fully autonomous weapons are deployed it will be too late to go back.

The third fear about artificial intelligence is from a humanistic or philosophical point of view. In the words of Eric Horvitz, Microsoft research director:

We could one day lose control of AI systems via the rise of superintelligence that do not act in accordance with human wishes...and that such powerful systems would threaten humanity. Are such dystopic outcomes possible? If so, how might these situations arise? ...what kind of investments in research should be made to better understand and to address the possibility of the rise of a dangerous superintelligence or the occurrence of an intelligence explosion?

The WEF Global Risks Report said: New computing technologies are already having an impact: for instance IBMs TrueNorth chip with a design inspired by the human brain and built for exascale computing already has contracts from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to work on nuclear weapons security. While adding great benefits to scenario modelling today, the possibility of a superintelligence could turn this into a risk.

On the other hand, there are scientists who believe that AI will turn us into superhumans and very smart computers could solve all our problems including climate change.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. The world must ensure that it will herald a better future for humankind and not be the harbinger of its future destruction.

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AI: Boon or doom for humankind? - Philippine Star

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The Hidden Laborers Training AI to Keep Ads Off Hateful YouTube Videos - WIRED

In October 2014, Musk ignited a global discussion on the perils of artificial intelligence. Humans might be doomed if we make machines that are smarter than us, Musk warned. He called artificial intelligence our greatest existential threat.

Now he is hoping to harness AI in a way that will benefit society.

In a recent interview with the website waitbutwhy.com, Musk explained that his attempt to sound the alarm on artificial intelligence didn't have an impact, so he decided to try to develop artificial intelligence in a way that will have a positive affect on humanity.

So Musk, who is already the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA), is now heading up a startup called Neuralink. The San Francisco outfit is building devices to connect the human brain with computers. Initially, the technology could repair brain injuries or cancer lesions. Quadriplegics may benefit from the technology.

But the most amazing and alarming implications of Musk's vision lie years and likely decades down the line. Brain-machine interfaces could overhaul what it means to be human and how we live.

Related: When Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos left everyone in their dust

Today, technology is implanted in brains in very limited cases, such as to treat Parkinson's Disease. Musk wants to go farther, creating a robust plug-in for our brains that every human could use. The brain plug-in would connect to the cloud, allowing anyone with a device to immediately share thoughts.

Humans could communicate without having to talk, call, email or text. Colleagues scattered throughout the globe could brainstorm via a mindmeld. Learning would be instantaneous. Entertainment would be any experience we desired. Ideas and experiences could be shared from brain to brain.

We would be living in virtual reality, without having to wear cumbersome goggles. You could re-live a friend's trip to Antarctica -- hearing the sound of penguins, feeling the cold ice -- all while your body sits on your couch.

But many technical hurdles remain. Musk believes it will be eight to 10 years before this kind of the technology will be ready to use by people without disabilities. Musk's companies have made a habit of achieving what seemed impossible. But he's also notorious for aggressive deadlines that his companies don't meet.

Neuralink told waitbutwhy.com that it would need to simulate one million brain neurons before a transformative brain-machine interface could be built. If current rates of progress hold, it won't reach that milestone until 2100.

Related: Investors call for Tesla changes. Musk tells them to buy Ford.

In the meantime, there are many reasons for humans to be wary of implanting a computer in their brain. Any digital technology can be hacked. Humans might be unwittingly turned into malicious agents for unsavory causes. Computers crash too. If the interface fails, that could imperil our physical health.

With a brain-machine interface recording our lives, all of our experiences would be stored in the cloud. Privacy would be threatened. Governments or others would have incentives to access that information and track behavior.

If our brains merge with machines, our thoughts would become indistinguishable from what we'd downloaded from the cloud. We could struggle to know if our beliefs and views came from personal experiences, or from what the internet sent to our brains. Humans would be putting enormous trust in the maker of the brain-machine interface to share good information with them.

As Musk sees it, our options are limited.

"We're going to have the choice of either being left behind," Musk told waitbutwhy.com, "and being effectively useless, or like a pet."

CNNMoney (Washington) First published April 21, 2017: 3:30 PM ET

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Elon Musk's new plan to save humanity from AI - CNNMoney

Driving long distances (or using New York City's subway system) used to be a much more complicated affair, generally requiring maps, a sense of direction, some luck and the occasional stop to ask questions of strangers.

Turn-by-turn navigation apps have changed all that: You may still take a wrong turn along the way, but the apps usually get you back on track with little fuss. Self-service integration specialist SnapLogic is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help its customers achieve that sort of turn-by-turn navigation when it comes to enterprise integration.

Citing GPS navigation and digital home assistants like Amazon's Alexa, SnapLogic Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon says the company's new technology, Iris, will eliminate the integration backlog that stifles so many technology initiatives through the use of AI to automate highly repetitive, low-level development tasks.

"Companies can't innovate and transform their businesses if they're bogged down in rote, repetitive tasks that don't do much for the organization," Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said in a statement last week. "Machine learning is emerging as the engine behind what Constellation calls 'human augmentation.' These next-generation systems will harness the computing power and data scale of the cloud to automate routine work so humans can concentrate on innovating and driving better business outcomes."

"We believe it has the promise to do to the world of integration what map apps have done for the world of transportation," Dhillon adds.

SnapLogic's platform, the Enterprise Integration Cloud, is inspired by LEGO bricks, which can all snap together, regardless of the set from which they originally hail. Traditional integration software requires painstaking, hand-crafted coding by teams of developers. The Enterprise Integration Cloud, on the other hand, uses connectivity software it calls "Snaps."

"A Snap is a collection of integration components, sharing some contextual property, generally an application," Dhillon wrote in a 2011 blog post. "Snaps include powerful wizards that inspect their target application; automatically building links throughout the data layer, giving a user the 'create,' 'read,' 'update' and 'delete' functionality they will use in their integration. Snaps are language-neutral and abstracted from the application layer. They use open protocols (HTTP/S) and data formats (REST), and supply a URI to all resources. They shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model and service."

All Snaps follow the same pattern, use the same API and leverage the underlying infrastructure. As a result, the Enterprise Integration Cloud's Designer allows you to assemble orchestrations with a drag-and-drop user interface by choosing from a library of intelligent Snaps for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premises integrations.

Iris uses advanced algorithms to learn from millions of metadata elements and billions of data flows via the SnapLogic Enterprise Integration Cloud. Iris then applies that learning to improve the speed and quality of integrations across data, applications and business processes.

"Digital transformation shouldn't depend on manual labor," Dhillon says. "The ancient pharaohs built the pyramids with manual labor, but that's not the smart way to manage business automation and analytics. Software should help us make software smarter, and we believe the future will be autonomous integration blending the best of machine and human intelligence. The days of simply throwing more developers at the problem are coming to a close."

Dhillon says the first component of Iris, the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, will be available for free to all SnapLogic customers in May as part of SnapLogic's Spring 2017 release. SnapLogic Integration Assistant is a recommendation engine that uses machine intelligence to give business users and analysts suggestions in building data pipelines.

The Integration Assistant is just the first point on the roadmap. Dhillon says Iris will fuel a series of technology innovations over the next two to three years, with an eventual goal of completely autonomous integration.

[ Why Googles Sergey Brin changed his tune on AI ]

"We feel the day will come that someone can say to Iris, 'Integrate my company,'" he says.

Greg Benson, SnapLogic's chief scientist and a professor at the University of San Francisco, led the team at SnapLogic Labs that developed iris over the past two years. Iris leverages SnapLogic's cloud-native system and metadata architecture to find patterns and features that can be used to train machine learning models. This allows it to learn from millions of data flows, integration paths and patterns across SnapLogic's platform, identifying what's popular, what works and what doesn't work. It then distills that learning into specific recommendations for line-of-business and IT managers.

"We're excited about the potential that machine learning has already show to shortcut the integration process," Benson said in a statement last week. "We're seeing up to 90 percent accuracy so far in recommendations, which will save significant time and cost associated with building, testing and maintaining integrations. Self-service is already driving major time and cost advantages, and we expect machine learning to power another order-of-magnitude improvement over the next few years."

Link:

Bringing AI to enterprise integration | CIO - CIO

Austin Business Journal

Opportunities abound for Austin AI startups as established companies embrace the technology Austin Business Journal Competition within the embryonic AI sector already is fierce. Most AI startups will fail. more. But competition within the embryonic AI sector already is fierce. Most AI startups will fail. The successful will do what businesses throughout the ages ... and more »

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Opportunities abound for Austin AI startups as established companies embrace the technology - Austin Business Journal

At the Shanghai Auto Show on this week, global automotive supplier Harman announced a new partnership with Baidu, the leading Chinese internet services provider. The team-up brings together Samsung-owned Harmans extensive reach among automakers, and existing expertise in-car infotainment systems, with Baidus leading role in Chinas AI software economy.

Baidu will develop cloud-based AI solutions for use in cars in partnership with Harman, across efforts that include building Baidus DuerOS voice-based personal assistant into cars. DuerOS is a bit like an Alexa for the Chinese market, with an open platform thats accessible to makers of many categories of consumer devices, including speakers, TVs, phones and more. With Harman, Baidu will focus on tailoring DuerOS for automotive use cases, with speech recognition and natural language process capabilities in both English and Mandarin.

Harman and Baidu previously teamed up to launch a solution called CarLife that offers networked, Internet-based features accessible via networked in-car infotainment systems. And the partnership sounds like itll only grow closer from here: The work both companies are doing in the car with DuerOS is expected to eventually make its way back to smart speakers, another area where Harman is a global international powerhouse.

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Harman and Baidu team up on in-car AI for Chinese automakers ... - TechCrunch