Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

On Monday 20 April, a crowd gathered in Kings Place to hear a discussion on the future of Artificial Intelligence - or AI - as part of our Brainwaves Series, supported by SEAT. How do we define human intelligence? How close are we to reaching it with machines? And what happens when these machines start taking our jobs?

To discuss all this and more, Ian Sample was joined on stage was Anil Seth, professor of cognitive science and computational neuroscience from the University of Sussex, Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial College London, Anders Sandberg, senior research fellow at Oxford Universitys Future of Humanity Institute, and Alan Winfield, professor of robot ethics at UWE, Bristol.

See more here:

How Artificial Intelligence will change the world: a live event - Science Weekly podcast - The Guardian

Forbes

The Time For Advertisers To Embrace Artificial Intelligence Is Now Forbes Depending on your point of view, working in the marketing industry these days is either exciting or frightening. Technology innovation is happening so fast that it's almost impossible to keep up with, and for every new opportunity created, an entire ...

Excerpt from:

The Time For Advertisers To Embrace Artificial Intelligence Is Now - Forbes

Forbes

As Robots Rise, How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Jobs Forbes In the summer of 2015, I was attending a rally in South Carolina when I heard a conservative leader tell the most heartwrenching tale. It was the story of an old coffee shop in his tiny hometown, one of those little suburban beauties where a petite old ...

See the rest here:

As Robots Rise, How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Jobs - Forbes

SAN FRANCISCO: Building on the success of its first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge, Infosys on Thursday launched 'Infosys Nia', the next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform for businesses.

Infosys Nia converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services.

"Nia takes our purposeful approach to AI, one in which technology serves to amplify people and empowers them to work in new ways, to new heights," Vishal Sikka, Chief Executive Officer at Infosys, said in a statement.

"When we bring this together with our unmatched ability to educate and train in AI techniques and emerging technologies, we now have the platform, the services and the skills, to deliver new unprecedented value to our clients," he added.

Infosys Nia, tackles business problems such as forecasting revenues, forecasting what products need to be built, understanding customer behaviour, understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud.

The platform can improve the order-to-cash process by creating a real-time risk profile to customise the collection strategy, expedite resolution of disputes, predict anomalies, prevent disputes, and enable better visibility and forecasting of cash flow to reduce days sales outstanding (DSO).

It can also predict variability in manufacturing and material cost, while also reducing product development cycle times.

Infosys Nia is available to order immediately.

Go here to read the rest:

Infosys launches Artificial Intelligence platform Nia for businesses - Economic Times

Published time: 28 Apr, 2017 11:48

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will replace humans in 50 percent of all jobs in just ten years, says Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a reputable Chinese technologist.

AI is the singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, the industrial revolution, the internet, mobile internet - because AI is pervasive, the technologist said at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing as quoted by CNBC.

According to Lee, AI represents the decision engine that would replace people. The tech expert stressed that its capabilities far exceed those of humanity.

The corporations, which Sinovation Ventures has invested in, can accomplish feats such as recognizing three million faces simultaneously or dispersing loans in eight seconds.

These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50 percent of human jobs, create an huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty, Lee said.

The technologist does not see machines taking the place of humans in the world as they grow more intelligent.

Touching one's heart with your heart is something that machines, I believe, will never be good at, he said.

Lee stressed that service jobs should be considered first-class employment.

According to the expert, traditional institutions like banks, insurance firms, and hospitals are moving too slow, while all of this change is happening.

Because AI is about taking data into insight and decision, so I anticipate the internet sector, entrepreneurial sector, to continue to grow and in many cases displace and even wipe out traditional companies in China, said Lee.

View original post here:

Artificial intelligence to take over half of all jobs in next decade China's top techie - RT

Garry Kasparov PublicAffairs: 2017. ISBN: 9781610397865

Buy this book: US UK Japan

Stan Hinda/Getty

Grandmaster Garry Kasparov during the last of six games against Deep Blue in 1997; the computer won the match by 3.5 games to 2.5.

Nearly 20 years ago, I was fortunate enough to play friendly blitz chess against former world champion Garry Kasparov. It was quite an experience; his competitive spirit and creative genius were palpable. I had recently founded Elixir Studios, which specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) games, and my ambition was to conduct cutting-edge research in the field. AI was on my mind that day: Kasparov had played chess against IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue just a few years before. Now, he sets out the details of that titanic event in his memoir Deep Thinking.

The 1997 match was a watershed for AI and an extraordinary technical feat. Strangely, although Kasparov lost, it left me more in awe of the incredible capabilities of the human brain than of the machine. Kasparov was able to compete against a computational leviathan and to complete myriad other tasks that make us all distinctly human. By contrast, Deep Blue was hard-coded with a set of specialized rules distilled from chess grandmasters, and empowered with a brute-force search algorithm. It was programmed to do one thing only; it could not have played even a simpler game such as noughts and crosses without being completely reprogrammed. I felt that this brand of 'intelligence' was missing crucial traits such as generality, adaptability and learning.

As he details in Deep Thinking, Kasparov reached a similar conclusion. The book is his first thorough account of the match, and it offers thoughtful meditations on technology. The title references what he believes chess engines cannot do: they can calculate, but not innovate or create. They cannot think in the deepest sense. In drawing out these distinctions, Kasparov provides an impressively researched history of AI and the field's ongoing obsession with chess.

For decades, leading computer scientists believed that, given the traditional status of chess as an exemplary demonstration of human intellect, a competent computer chess player would soon also surpass all other human abilities. That proved not to be the case. This has to do partly with differences between human and machine cognition: computers can easily perform calculation tasks that people consider incredibly difficult, but totally fail at commonsense tasks we find intuitive (a phenomenon called Moravec's paradox). It was also due to industry and research dynamics in the 1980s and 1990s: in pursuit of quick results, labs ditched generalizable, learning-based approaches in favour of narrow, hand-coded solutions that exploited machines' computational speed.

The focus on brute-force approaches had upsides, Kasparov explains. It may not have delivered on the promise of general-purpose AI, but it did result in very powerful chess engines that soon became popularly available. Today, anyone can practise for free against software stronger than the greatest human chess masters, enabling enthusiasts worldwide to train at top levels. Before Deep Blue, pessimists predicted that the defeat of a world chess champion by a machine would lead to the game's death. In fact, more people play now than ever before, according to World Chess Federation figures.

Chess engines have also given rise to exciting variants of play. In 1998, Kasparov introduced 'Advanced Chess', in which humancomputer teams merge the calculation abilities of machines with a person's pattern-matching insights. Kasparov's embrace of the technology that defeated him shows how computers can inspire, rather than obviate, human creativity.

In Deep Thinking, Kasparov also delves into the renaissance of machine learning, an AI subdomain focusing on general-purpose algorithms that learn from data. He highlights the radical differences between Deep Blue and AlphaGo, a learning algorithm created by my company DeepMind to play the massively complex game of Go. Last year, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, widely hailed as the greatest player of the past decade. Whereas Deep Blue followed instructions carefully honed by a crack team of engineers and chess professionals, AlphaGo played against itself repeatedly, learning from its mistakes and developing novel strategies. Several of its moves against Lee had never been seen in human games most notably move 37 in game 2, which upended centuries of traditional Go wisdom by playing on the fifth line early in the game.

Most excitingly, because its learning algorithms can be generalized, AlphaGo holds promise far beyond the game for which it was created. Kasparov relishes this potential, discussing applications from machine translation to automated medical diagnoses. AI will not replace humans, he argues, but will enlighten and enrich us, much as chess engines did 20 years ago. His position is especially notable coming from someone who would have every reason to be bitter about AI's advances.

His account of the Deep Blue match itself is fascinating. Famously, Kasparov stormed out of one game and gave antagonistic press conferences in which he protested against IBM's secrecy around the Deep Blue team and its methods, and insinuated that the company might have cheated. In Deep Thinking, Kasparov offers an engaging insight into his psychological state during the match. To a degree, he walks back on his earlier claims, concluding that although IBM probably did not cheat, it violated the spirit of fair competition by obscuring useful information. He also provides a detailed commentary on several crucial moments; for instance, he dispels the myth that Deep Blue's bizarre move 44 in the first game of the match left him unrecoverably flummoxed.

Kasparov includes enough detail to satisfy chess enthusiasts, while providing a thrilling narrative for the casual reader. Deep Thinking delivers a rare balance of analysis and narrative, weaving commentary about technological progress with an inside look at one of the most important chess matches ever played.

Read this article:

Artificial Intelligence: Chess match of the century - Nature.com

Tech experts and the media talk ad nauseam about the potential for artificial intelligence to steal a massive number of jobs. Do everyday workers and consumers share the fear?

A new report attempts to answer that question. PwC published a survey Tuesday that polled 2,500 people on their thoughts about A.I. The results: People aren't nearly as fearful of the technology as some of the field's most vocal leaders.

Predictions from experts have varied widely regarding just how many jobs automation will render obsolete. A Forrester study puts the number at 6 percent of jobs by 2021; others say nearly half of all jobs will be gone by 2035.

Workers, however, aren't so worried. Only 46 percent of people polled by PwC believe A.I. "will harm people by taking away jobs." Those surveyed were required to show at least basic familiarity with A.I.

Predictably, people are even less likely to buy into the fear when it comes to Terminator-style doomsday scenarios: Only 23 percent believe A.I. will have "serious, negative implications."

Tech leaders--perhaps most notably Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking--have expressed fear that A.I. could become too powerful and rebel against its makers. Earlier this month, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, laid out a scenario in which computers don't just take jobs--they create and run companies themselves, eventually controlling the entire world economy.

The survey's respondents seemed to focus more on the positive outcomes A.I. will bring. The survey found that 63 percent of people believe A.I. can "help solve complex problems that plague modern societies."

As to where, specifically, respondents would like to see A.I. used, 68 percent say it's important that A.I. be used to solve issues related to cybersecurity and privacy. High percentages of those polled also believe A.I. can make significant advances in eradicating cancer and diseases, developing clean energy, improving education, and boosting global health and well-being.

When it comes to whether or not it's acceptable for the economy to lose jobs due to more automation, the answers largely depended on what kind of jobs are on the chopping block. Eighty percent of those polled say it's more important to have access to the cheaper legal advice that A.I. might offer than to preserve the jobs of lawyers. And two-thirds of respondents are okay with taxi driver and call center jobs being lost if it means access to better transportation and customer service.

Those feelings don't translate to situations that have a long-term impact on consumers' lives. Seventy-seven percent of respondents would forego a home assessment with a robotic smart kit to go see a real live doctor--good news for those in the health field, since A.I. can already detect issues like skin cancer as well as a dermatologist can. And 61 percent would rather see universities keep human assistants than have automated chatbots assistants and cheaper tuition.

But the entertainment industry might want to take note: more than half of the people surveyed think that by 2025, A.I. will create a Billboard 100 song and write a hit TV series.

View post:

People Are Surprisingly Optimistic About Artificial Intelligence Stealing Their Jobs, Survey Finds - Inc.com

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot technology for Silicon Valley startups (Ive personally talked to 15 AI startups in the past year). In fact, AngelList currently lists more than 2,000 AI startups with an average valuation of $5 million. In his TED Talk, digital visionary Kevin Kelly described AI as the next revolution, and his simple formula for startups is to solve a problem using AI. And, IDC projected the AI market will reach more than $47 billion by 2020, with 62% of enterprises adopting the technology by next year.

What exactly is AI? According to HCL Global Vice President Arun Saksena, AI is actually an umbrella term that covers several technologies, including the following:

Interestingly enough, AI adoption isnt limited to startups. H&R Block, while not a highly technical company, recently implemented AI into its platform using IBM Watson. Its platform learned 74,000 pages of the US Tax Code and augments its human tax preparers.

If you are thinking about joining the AI gold rush, it may be simpler than you think. The adoption of AI has been made substantially easier as major technology companies have developed AI platforms that can be leveraged by developers through their published APIs. I predict an explosion of AI applications, just as we have seen the emergence of countless SaaS solutions with the availability of cloud computing services.

Learn how your companys mobile strategy compares

Read the original here:

Artificial intelligence and startups: The AI gold rush - Mobile Business Insights (blog)

Forbes

Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Workflow For Agency Owners Forbes There has been a lot of interest in artificial intelligence and predictive learning systems and with good reason. The systems provide a fast, powerful method to handle data analysis, as well as handoff routine decisions to something that can research ...

More here:

Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Workflow For Agency Owners - Forbes

Forbes

The Complete Beginners' Guide to Artificial Intelligence Forbes Ten years ago, if you mentioned the term artificial intelligence in a boardroom there's a good chance you would have been laughed at. For most people it would bring to mind sentient, sci-fi machines such as 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL or Star Trek's ... Artificial intelligence as a driver for innovation - FederalNewsRadio ...FederalNewsRadio.com all 2 news articles »

Excerpt from:

The Complete Beginners' Guide to Artificial Intelligence - Forbes