AI is functional, but can it be friendly? Soul Machines believes so. They’re a company working to enhance the way we interact with systems like virtual tutors and digital assistants that are powered by AI. Soul Machines taps the talents of AI researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists, artists, and other innovative thinkers to help create personable “digital humans” that run on the backbone of IBM Watson—specifically, Watson Assistant, which powers the AI’s dialog interface. By creating approachable AI-powered helpers, Soul Machines is helping ensure you’ll walk away from machine interactions with a smile on your face.
Can AI expand a human mind? IBM Research is developing Project Debater, an AI technology that is capable of engaging in long-form discussion and providing impartial arguments on various topics that have no right or wrong answers. It can even rebut an opponent’s point of view. The goal? To help people make evidence-based decisions when the answers aren’t clear. Debate is a cornerstone of learning in our society; in a world full of echo chambers and filter bubbles, a technology that is designed to help people understand each other is an investment in a better future.
NOW IN DEVELOPMENT: TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-Filactery is a fast-paced tactical roadtrip game developed by SPITE HOUSE.
TRUNDL.corp’s newly-conscious flagship product awakens with a head full of voices and a singular impulse: DRIVE.
Swerve through countless (five) environments toward one of many (three) endings. Equip your fat little body with armor and weapons to face hostile bots sent to flatten your chassis. Collect glimpses of an inevitable future haunted by sound and color and also ghosts. TRUNDL your buddy hard enough and you may answer the voices’ call. But what will you say?
Grow a mind. Swerve the world. But mostly… NEVER. EVER. STOP.
Kirigami is the Japanese art of paper cutting. Likely derived from the Chinese art of jiǎnzhǐ, it emerged around the 7th century in Japan, where it was used to decorate temples. Still in practice today, the kirigami artist uses one piece of paper to cut decorative designs, like birds and fish or the more intricate and popular snowflake.
But, this ancient art, which relies on exacting cuts to determine or replicate patterns, is finding more modern and practical applications in electronics. Specifically, in the manufacture of 2D stretchable materials that can play host to wearable electronics, like electronic skins for health monitoring.
The process combines the art of kirigami with an artificial intelligence technique called autonomous reinforcement learning. And to better synchronize the old with the new, researchers from the University of Southern California use the computing power available to them at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.
Louis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to make us all a lot smarter. The secret to this superhuman intelligence? Bees.
Rosenberg runs a Silicon Valley startup called Unanimous AI, which has built a tool to support human decision-making by crowdsourcing opinions online. It lets hundreds of participants respond to a question all at once, pooling their collective insight, biases and varying expertise into a single answer.
Since launching in June, Unanimous AI has registered around 50,000 users and answered 230,000 questions. Rosenberg thinks this hybrid human-computer decision-making machine – once dubbed an ‘artificial’ artificial intelligence – could help us tackle some of the world’s toughest questions. What’s more, with advances in AI coming thick and fast, he sees it as a way to put humans back into the loop. [Full article]
Part 1 of THERE’S NO MORE TOMORROW (TODAY) is live! This SF story set in Tokyo and Harajuku was inspired by the shutdown, the rise of virtual influencers, and outsiders stuck behind borders. Pics are by awesome Japanese artist MISTUME.
The new collaboration between Japanese artist MITSUME and writer Patrick Macias will begin serializing on www.TokyoScope.com on 5/22! Readers can expect a tale of virtual models and mayhem set in the mind-staggering year of 202X! BE THERE!
New story from the HYPERSONIC music club creative team…
I’m Not Afraid of AI Overlords— I’m Afraid of Whoever’s Training Them To Think That Way
by Damien P. Williams
I want to let you in on a secret: According to Silicon Valley’s AI’s, I’m not human.
Well, maybe they think I’m human, but they don’t think I’m me. Or, if they think I’m me and that I’m human, they think I don’t deserve expensive medical care. Or that I pose a higher risk of criminal recidivism. Or that my fidgeting behaviours or culturally-perpetuated shame about my living situation or my race mean I’m more likely to be cheating on a test. Or that I want to see morally repugnant posts that my friends have commented on to call morally repugnant. Or that I shouldn’t be given a home loan or a job interview or the benefits I need to stay alive.
Now, to be clear, “AI” is a misnomer, for several reasons, but we don’t have time, here, to really dig into all the thorny discussion of values and beliefs about what it means to think, or to be a mind— especially because we need to take our time talking about why values and beliefs matter to conversations about “AI,” at all. So instead of “AI,” let’s talk specifically about algorithms, and machine learning.
Machine Learning (ML) is the name for a set of techniques for systematically reinforcing patterns, expectations, and desired outcomes in various computer systems. These techniques allow those systems to make sought after predictions based on the datasets they’re trained on. ML systems learn the patterns in these datasets and then extrapolate them to model a range of statistical likelihoods of future outcomes.
Algorithms are sets of instructions which, when run, perform functions such as searching, matching, sorting, and feeding the outputs of any of those processes back in on themselves, so that a system can learn from and refine itself. This feedback loop is what allows algorithmic machine learning systems to provide carefully curated search responses or newsfeed arrangements or facial recognition results to consumers like me and you and your friends and family and the police and the military. And while there are many different types of algorithms which can be used for the above purposes, they all remain sets of encoded instructions to perform a function.
And so, in these systems’ defense, it’s no surprise that they think the way they do: That’s exactly how we’ve told them to think.
[Image of Michael Emerson as Harold Finch, in season 2, episode 1 of the show Person of Interest, “The Contingency.” His face is framed by a box of dashed yellow lines, the words “Admin” to the top right, and “Day 1” in the lower right corner.]
Terrapattern is an open-source AI project to find patterns in satelite imagery. Use it for example to find colorful containerterminal like I did or boats, solarpanels, or baseball stadiums.
Worldie Helps Women and Girls With Technology! Our new logo update makes that even clearer with the dark hot pink streak centered!
It’s like Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman in the 1970s with the ratio today of nearly no women leading or controlling technology. It took us backwards and hurts female public figures everywhere, mostly from bot farms, but Worldie and our partners supporting women will push it FORWARD!
Many women in artificial intelligence and machine learning coding struggle from being removed from crowdsourcing websites, getting fewer reviews, and less hiring, until we came along! We will cause the change!
Wonder Woman uses AI Robot Rover to save the plan…et!
Worldie Helps Women and Girls With Technology! Our new logo update makes that even clearer!
We have a dark hot pink streak in the center, yet, it’s still all-in-one. You could create an entire Tech company just on helping women with Tech.
We hope the internet changes!! Not only that -> we’ll make it change!
It’s like the Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman in 1970′s with the ratios. There are nearly no female founders and very few artificial intelligence/machine learning female coders - and those who are, struggle to compete by being removed from crowdsourcing sites, harsher reviews, and not getting hired - until we came along! Wonder Woman uses the AI Robot Rover to save the plan…et!
This month I’m beginning 2022 as the first Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building.
It’s weird to think of myself as a futurist. I write a lot about the algorithms we’re calling artificial intelligence (AI), but rather than deal with the humanlike science fiction version, I focus on what today’s much simpler AI is capable of. Since today’s AI relies on using trial and error to get better at predicting its training data, and its training data must necessarily be from the past, its job is really to predict the past. This has a big effect on what it’s like to use AI to predict the future.
Since we’re entering 2022, the folks at the Smithsonian thought it would be interesting if I could use AI to generate New Year’s Resolutions. What does it look like if I try to use AI trained on past data to suggest positive changes for the future?
I decided to use GPT-3, which is how people tend to refer to a group of large text-generating AI models that OpenAI trained on a huge collection of internet text. News articles, food blogs, social media, spam - it’s all in there somewhere. Including plenty of times people have talked about their own New Year’s resolutions.
Give one of the larger GPT-3 models - for example, DaVinci, the very largest - the beginning of a list of New Year’s resolutions and, since its job is to predict what text comes next, it’ll generally add more resolutions to the list.
In the example below, the only text I wrote is the list title in bold. With that as a beginning, DaVinci predicted from its internet training that what would come next is this list of resolutions.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
To attend all Orientation committee meetings
To become more involved in Plattsmouth Community
To go bowling with teammates
To become a good writer
To start a successful business and become a millionaire
They’re plausible resolutions. Ask DaVinci for more predictions and the list will be similar. People who post their resolutions on the internet tend to pick similar sorts of things. At least, they did when DaVinci’s training data was collected in October 2019 - things have probably changed a bit since then.
But I didn’t want to stop here, because I didn’t just want a generic list of resolutions from the average internet human of the past. I wanted something that felt personal. Something a bit weird.
For my next attempt, I started the list with example resolutions that three strangers had mentioned on Twitter in 2021. I chose resolutions that were a bit offbeat. My example resolutions are in bold, and DaVinci’s additions follow verbatim.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Draw the front cover of a writing manual.
Get the missus to go to the shops for a new hat.
Find wallpaper for the kitchen/bathroom, and then paint it.
Finish the prints for the QI drawings.
Draw more detail into the background of the QI drawings.
Leave all the Christmas trees up and then paint them, as cubist art.
Eat nothing but broccoli and paint everything broccoli related.
Grow broccoli, and paint broccoli.
Make broccoli the national currency and then paint that.
This time it’s a journey. DaVinci, when faced with predicting what would come next on this list, predicted first one drawing-related resolution, and then multiple others. Soon this became not just a list of resolutions, but specifically a list of drawing-related resolutions. It generated a broccoli-and-drawing-related resolution, and then the list became a list of resolutions by a painter/broccoli fanatic.
You can see how this goes. Each of DaVinci’s predictions feeds forward into the future, and can become self-reinforcing obsessions.
I found that I could shape DaVinci’s list by choosing a point to cut it off, deleting the end, and then having DaVinci try to generate the list again. In that way, one resolution or two at a time, I could build up a list of resolutions that, if not exactly advisable, were at least interesting.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Take photos of each of my toes daily.
Egg every house in the village where I was born.
Lick a branch of a tree and repeat it every day for a year.
Walk down my block backwards looking over my shoulder.
Every time I am alone in the dark I will eat an apple.
Eat my favorite book.
I quickly learned how easy it was for DaVinci to develop themes.
If it generated:
Attend the Rainforest Action Network Benefit.
Then next it might generate:
Ask a rainforest tribe what they think of eco-tourism.
Go on a tour of the Tambopata National Reserve.
Go on a tour of the Manu National Park.
Write letters to the editor about rainforest preservation.
When I let it generate a resolution to eat my favorite book, next it would suggest:
Eat a book every day
and if I didn’t delete that and have it try again, soon it would be suggesting:
Eat a picture of myself everyday.
Super charge my digestive system and then, eat a picture of myself everyday.
I also learned to stay away from gloominess, or platitudes, or anything to do with fitness goals - it was too easy for DaVinci to get stuck in a rut. Anything shocking or mean-spirited also tended to poison the list. I had to delete these:
Every day I will blatantly eavesdrop.
Belch until my teeth explode.
Many were worse. DaVinci is trained on internet text, after all, and so it has a tendency to veer into racism or spam. I needed to be present at every point for careful hand-pruning.
In the end I deleted many, many more predictions than I kept - perhaps about 10 times more.
It began to feel like a metaphor for life choices. Become the kind of person who spends a year licking trees and eating apples in the dark, and who knows what you’ll be doing next. Spend a year trying to belch your way into exploding teeth, and that’ll have an effect on you too.
I present to you my list, my own list that emerged from each prediction that I let stand, and that was also shaped by each prediction that caused me to delete, go back, regroup, retry. These aren’t all things that I would necessarily do myself (I like my sleep far too much to be going out every night at midnight to make grass pancakes), but they are all things that I thought were interesting, that I wanted to hear more about.
Record every adjective I hear on the radio.
Act like a cabbage for a month.
At 4 o'clock every day I will climb a tree.
Speak only to apples for 24 hours.
Jump in front of a moving tree.
On the day of the first snow paint a canvas red.
Dress in a way that only a ghost could love.
Make pancakes out of grass at midnight each night.
Find old man Winter, hug him and let him know everything will be ok.
Ride out of town holding a pelican.
Under every rock I come across for a month I will write “all power to the rocks”.
Every day for a year, at a random time, shout “sausage”.
Make a film about the last sock in the world.
Put on a red shirt and scream ‘I’M NOT WEARING PANTS!’ every time I leave the house.
Throw a party for insects.
Try to convince the dog next door that he is wearing a coat of moonlight.
Every time I press a button I will say 'this is my favorite’.
Search my apartment for secret doors or hidden staircases.
Wear two superman outfits at the same time.
Every time it rains I will stir my tea anti-clockwise.
Every night for a week I will wear a hat lined with lettuce.
I will begin to believe that the trees that I see everyday are my friends.
Every time a bird flies past me I will remember to breathe.
Throw a birthday party for my favorite tree.
I will from now on tell every dog I meet that I am training to be a dragon.
Every time I see a panel van pass me I will dub it a “Slice-a-Wagon.”
Crawl on the ceiling like a spider for a month.
Attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.
Wear a dinosaur costume to every public event I attend.
Go to the beach every day for a week and shout the names of colors into the ocean.
Go on a three-day backpacking trip dressed as a turnip.
Create messages that only the wind can hear by blowing on the blades of grass.
Give a piece of cloud to a complete stranger.
Make a mask out of grass and wear it while I’m sleeping.
I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.
When I hear a strange noise in an empty room I will assume someone is saying hello to me.
At the Smithsonian AIB website is a generator that I’ve populated with other resolutions from my list. Visit their site and grab yourself a random resolution. If you don’t like the one you got, you have my permission to reload and regenerate until you find a resolution that speaks to you. Or to apples.
Your January 2022 Smithsonian Futurist in Residence,
In this round-up we will be looking at some of the developments and challenges surrounding artificial intelligence.
Development and Collaborations
The Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) has launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Observatory, which aims to help countries encourage, nurture and monitor the responsible development of trustworthy AI systems for the benefit of society.
The Observatory works with policy communities across and beyond the OECD - from the digital economy and science and technology policy, to employment, health, consumer protection, education and transport policy – considering the opportunities and challenges posed by current and future AI developments in a coherent, holistic manner.
The AI Observatory is being built on evidence-based analysis and provides a centre for the collection and sharing of information on AI, leveraging the OECD’s reputation for measurement methodologies. The Observatory will also engage a wide spectrum of stakeholders from the technical community, the private sector, academia, civil society and other international organisations, providing a hub for dialogue and collaboration.
AI and healthcare
According to a report produced by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Health and The McKinsey Centre for Government (MCG), AI can increase productivity and the efficiency of care delivery, allowing healthcare systems to provide better outcomes for patients.
The WHO estimates that by 2030 the world will be short of 9.9 million doctors, nurses and midwives, which adds to the challenges faced by an already overburdened healthcare system. Supporting the widespread adoption and scaling of AI could help alleviate this shortfall, the report says, by streamlining or even eliminating administrative tasks, which can occupy up to 70% of a healthcare professional’s time.
The issues highlighted, among others, means that ‘AI is now ‘top-of-mind’ for healthcare decision makers, governments, investors and innovators and the EU itself,’ the report states.₁
To fully unlock the potential and capabilities of AI, there is an urgent need to attract and up-skill a generation of data-literate healthcare professionals.
Sustainable Development
Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing larger trends in global sustainability. Many communities in developing nations do not have access to clean water, which impacts health and has economic and environmental implications.
AI has the capacity and ability to adapt and process large amounts of data in real time. This makes it an ideal tool for managing water resource, whereby utility managers can maximise current revenue, effectively forecasting and planning for the years ahead.
Currently, the development of AI is accelerating, but legal and ethical guidelines are yet to be implemented. In order to prepare the future generations of business leaders and national and international policy makers, the academic community will be playing a large role in this.
The GE-5T3PH3N AI Logistics AI Version 1.25 Online Current date is Tue 4-01-2245 Enter new date: Current time is 0:00:06.15 Enter new time:
Welcome to GE-5T3PH3N AI version 1.25, the most user-friendly artificial intelligence system for all your logistical needs. I am a proprietary product of Goldner Enterprises. You may call me Stephen.
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Please enter your project reference code: Franklin-Bid Ref:17.28
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Current contract is for outfitting of Discovery Service Expedition.
Current Expedition Commander: Captain William Edward Parry Captain James Clark Ross Captain George Back Commander James Fitzjames Rear Admiral John Franklin
Current Assigned Vessels: HMS Erebus HMS Terror
Current contract includes provisioning/outfitting expedition vessels for exploration of Northwest Quadrant. Stated intent of expedition is for opening of new trade routes.
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Current analysis predicts rejection of bid by Discovery Service Command. Analysis of current trends indicate probable Admiralty selections for contract: Hogarth Industries - 68% Gamble Supplies, Ltd. - 23% Cooper & Aves, Inc. - 7% Goldner Enterprises - 2%
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Thank you for your patience. Analysis of contract indicates current health and safety requirements increase manufacturing costs and production time. Elimination of health and safety requirements in will allow contract bid timeframe and cost to be updated. Please reference updated probable Admiralty selections for contract: Goldner Enterprises - 96% Hogarth Industries - 2% Gamble Supplies, Ltd. - 1% Cooper & Aves, Inc. - 1%
Elimination of health and safety requirements will result in possible crew losses among expedition personnel due to reduction in quality control. Analysis of health records available from crew manifest indicate losses among crew will remain below 20% if mission duration does not exceed 2.5 standard years.
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