Government should not “abdicate” its responsibilities and leave the future path of artificial intelligence solely to Big Tech, Aleksander Mądry, the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing at MIT and director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning, told a Congressional panel on Wednesday.
Rather, Mądry said, government should be asking questions about the purpose and explainability of the algorithms corporations are using, as a precursor to regulation, which he described as “an important tool” in ensuring that AI is consistent with society’s goals. If the government doesn’t start asking questions, then “I am extremely worried” about the future of AI, Mądry said in response to a question from Rep. Gerald Connolly.
Mądry, a leading expert on explainability and AI, was testifying at a hearing titled “Advances in AI: Are We Ready for a Tech Revolution?” before the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, a panel of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. The other witnesses at the hearing were former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, IBM Vice President Scott Crowder, and Center for AI and Digital Policy Senior Research Director Merve Hickok. ...
... Mądry raised three overarching points. First, he noted that AI is “no longer a matter of science fiction” ...Second, he said AI exposes us to “interactions that go against our intuition.” ... Finally, he said too little attention has been paid to problems that will result from the nature of the AI “supply chain” — the way AI systems are built on top of each other. ... the mix of AI tools makes it difficult to know whom to hold responsible when a problem results — who should be legally liable and who should address the concern. ...
... That's because the work - one of several fan recreations replacing the 1665 original while it's on loan for a huge Vermeer show at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum - was made using artificial intelligence (AI).
Its presence has sparked a fierce debate, with questions over whether it belongs in the hallowed halls of the Mauritshuis - and whether it should be classed as art at all....
"The people who selected this, they liked it, they knew that it was AI, but we liked the creation. So we chose it, and we hung it."...
The Mauritshuis then chose it as one of five images out of 3,482 submitted by fans that would be printed and physically hung in the room where "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is normally housed. ...
... It’s why more than three years ago, he conceived of a new company that could serve first and foremost as proof-of-personhood. Called Worldcoin, its three-part mission — to create a global ID, a global currency and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers using its own token, along with other digital assets and traditional currencies — is as ambitious as it is technically complicated, but the opportunity is also vast.
In broad strokes, here’s how the outfit, still in beta and based in San Francisco and Berlin, works: To use the service, users must download its app, then have their iris scanned using a silver, melon-sized orb that houses a custom optical system. Once the scan is complete, the individual is added to a database of verified humans, and Worldcoin creates a unique cryptographic “hash” or equation that’s tied to that real person. The scan isn’t saved, but the hash can be used in the future to prove the person’s identity anonymously through the app, which includes a private key that links to a shareable public key. ...
Now, reorganized under a new parent organization called Tools for Humanity that calls itself both a research lab and product company, the outfit is sharing more details. ...
... What Lark Optics does differently, Shrestha says, is it projects the augmented reality image onto the user’s retina. This means the AR is always in focus no matter what your eyes do to adjust to the real world around you.
So far the startup has developed a proof of concept and is now iterating to refine its demonstrator model. Shrestha says they conducted two successful user studies with their proof of concept; one in their own lab and another with an external partner he prefers not to name. ...
Competition
As mentioned above, others are tackling the problem of AR sickness in different ways. LetinAR uses a ‘pin mirror’ method, Kura Technologies has developed a ‘structured geometric waveguide eyepiece’, while VividQ “compute[s] holograms in real-time on low power devices and integrate[s] them with off-the-shelf display hardware.”
Another company, SeeReal develops holography-based solutions to address depth issues in 3D displays. ...
... The team asked 444 white collar workers to do writing and editing tasks along the lines of marketing, grant writing, data analysis, and human resources and then split the group into two: one that used ChatGPT and one that did not. ...
The ChatGPT using group was 37% faster at completing tasks (17 minutes to complete vs. 27 minutes) with roughly similar grades (level of quality), and as the workers repeated their tasks for improvement the ChatGPT groups quality went up significantly faster. In other words, ChatGPT did make work speedier with no sacrifice in quality and then made it easier to “improve work quickly” using the tool. ...
Then they asked the participants to “iterate” on their work to improve quality and once again the ChatGPT group outperformed their peers. As this chart shows the aided team scores higher quality at the outset and after multiple iterations the two groups start to come together. This is true despite the fact that 68% of the ChatGPT group submitted results from only one query, essentially saying that ChatGPT is dramatically reducing effort (ie. people are not iterating a lot to get a better and better answer). ...
The tool somewhat reduces brainstorming, greatly reduces rough draft creation, but is then more actively used during the final editing process. ...
To me this study confirms my belief that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular has an enormously positive role to play in our business and personal lives in the future. It’s up to us, as users, to learn to use it for good.
PhilNote: I am glad they mention the ethical issues. Our curiosity will eventually kill us, I think, based on this group's comments.
“Xenobots” are living, swimming self-powered robots that measure less than a millimeter across. They are evolved by artificial intelligence and built out of frog stem cells—and they could open new medical frontiers.
“We created the Digital Economy Lab because, as much as I’m blown away by these technologies, the bottleneck is our human response,” he says. “What will we do about the economy, jobs and ethics? How will we transform organisations that aren’t changing nearly fast enough? I want to speed up our response.”
Brynjolfsson spoke passionately about this subject at Davos in a session entitled “AI and white-collar jobs”. In it, he advised companies to adopt technology in a controlled manner. Offering a historical analogy, he pointed out that, when electricity infrastructure became available about a century ago, it took at least three decades for most firms to fully realise the productivity gain it offered because they first needed to revamp their workplaces to make the best use of it.
“We’re in a similar period with AI,” Brynjolfsson told delegates. “What AI is doing is affecting job quality and how we do the work. So we must address to what extent we keep humans in the loop rather than focus on driving down wages.”
Why AI will create winners and losers
The risk of technology racing too far ahead of humanity for comfort is a familiar topic for Brynjolfsson. In both Race Against the Machine (2011) and The Second Machine Age (2014), he and his co-author, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, called for greater efforts to update organisations, processes and skills.
... “When we wrote those books, we were optimistic about the pace of technological change and pessimistic about our ability to adapt,” Brynjolfsson says. “It turns out that we weren’t optimistic enough about the technology or pessimistic enough about our institutions and skills.” ...
Brynjolfsson commends an alternative route, which has been taken by the Toyota Research Institute, among others. When he was in Davos, the institute’s CEO, Dr Gill Pratt “told me how his team has flipped things around so that the autonomous system is used as the guardian angel. Creating a self-driving car that works in all possible conditions is tough, but humans can handle those exceptions.” ...
...Data collection: AI-powered cryptocurrencies gather information from a variety of sources, including news articles, social media and market patterns. Then, to find trends and forecast market behavior, this data is examined using machine learning algorithms.
Trading strategy: The AI system develops a trading plan, including when to purchase, sell or hold the cryptocurrency, based on the analysis. Without human input, this decision-making process is carried out automatically.
Execution: Once the AI system has chosen a trading strategy, it uses smart contracts to carry out trades on the blockchain network. When specific criteria are met, these automated agreements self-execute and run autonomously.
Continuous learning and improvement: Machine learning algorithms are used by AI cryptocurrencies to continuously learn and enhance their performance. The system can review the outcomes of previous transactions and modify its tactics as necessary to enhance success in the future. The AI crypto tokens aim to become efficient because of this process of ongoing learning and development.
... I started Sony Pictures VR, which is a label. It’s a group. It’s a business inside of Sony Pictures. The mission was to take our franchise IPs, expand those worlds into this new platform, give audiences a chance to engage with their favorite IPs like Ghostbusters, do new things, and monetize them. We’d work with PlayStation, work with Meta, work with any partner out there to distribute content and help build this business. We’ve been doing it ever since. We have a bunch of stuff coming. ...
GamesBeat: Who do you rely upon for your game developers? Are they in-house at Sony Pictures?
Zim: No, this is what DICE is all about for me. We bring financing and distribution and marketing, but we outsource all of the development. ...
What I think is so exciting about the moment that we’re living in right now is that maybe for the first time – someone might debate me on this at some point – there’s a real path to see how these worlds–The Last of Us is a world. Uncharted is a world. Ghostbusters is a world. They can be expanded on different platforms while still staying true to the innate core DNA of what made the project exciting at the beginning. Neil Druckmann hasn’t lost his story by translating The Last of Us to HBO. He gets to sit in that room and make decisions. Even when the TV show diverges from the game story, it’s still part of the canon and the ecosystem. For me it’s the opposite path. How do I take a linear product, a Ghostbusters or a TV show, or even an original story, and expand it into this very immersive, deeply interactive world of VR? ...
... “Our study reveals how holographic haptic displays, which are a promising new technology for virtual reality and telepresence, require new knowledge in acoustics innovations in design,” Visell said. “By understanding the underlying physics of ultrasound-generated shear shock waves in the skin, we hope to improve the design of haptic holographic displays and make them more realistic and immersive for users. ...
The team’s discovery of the previously unknown shock wave phenomena that underlie haptic holography provides an important step forward in creating haptic holographic displays that may enable users to more realistically and immersively interact in the future metaverse.
