Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Facebook Facebook strategist rejects PM's claim over extremist material Counter-terrorism expert says that, contrary to Theresa May’s assertion, technology companies are treating the problem of terrorist content seriously Artificial intelligence programs are being created to identify extremist material online. extremist material online. Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA Facebook Facebook strategist rejects PM's claim over extremist material Counter-terrorism expert says that, contrary to Theresa May’s assertion, technology companies are treating the problem of terrorist content seriously Ian Cobain Thu 21 Sep ‘17 18. 49 BST Last modified on Mon 27 Nov ‘17 16. 37 GMT This article is 3 months old Facebook’s senior counter-terrorism strategist has dismissed Theresa May’s demand that the company should go “further and faster” to remove material created by terrorists and their supporters, describing the claim that it does not do enough as unhelpful. Artificial intelligence programs are being created to identify such material, and hundreds of people are employed to search for content that should be removed, said Brian Fishman, who manages the company’s global counter-terrorism policy. In response to a question about May’s assertions that big internet companies provide a safe space for terrorism, Fishman said: “Facebook’s policy on this is really clear. Terrorists are not allowed to be on Facebook. So I don’t think the suggestion that technology companies must be compelled to care is helpful at this stage. ” On Wednesday, May told the United Nations general assembly that she believed tech firms needed to develop the capacity to take down terrorist-related material in two hours. In an interview published a few hours later by the CTC Sentinel, the journal of the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point, Fishman insisted that companies such as his were already putting great effort into this work. “It’s clear technology companies across the industry are treating the problem of terrorist content online seriously,” he said. “We currently have more than 4,500 people working in community operations teams around the world reviewing all types of content flagged by users for potential terrorism signals, and we announced several months ago that we are expanding these teams by 3,000. ” Of these, 150 focus almost entirely on terrorist-related material. “We are increasingly using automated techniques to find this stuff. We’re trying to enable computers to do what they’re good at: look at lots of material very quickly, give us a high-level overview. We’ve also recently started to use artificial intelligence,” Fishman said. However, the use of human assessors remains critical as computers cannot comprehend the nuanced context of some material, such as some online messages intended to counter terrorist propaganda. “Making sure that we can understand really culturally nuanced activity in a way that is consistent is a constant challenge,” he said. “And it’s something that requires human beings. We really want, as much as possible, to rely on our ability to use algorithms and machine-learning to do as much of this as possible. But we’re never going to get away from the necessity of having human beings to make the grey area calls. ” However, Fishman acknowledged that it was difficult to be sure what percentage of terrorist-related content was being identified and taken down. Responding to the call from the home secretary, Amber Rudd, for backdoor access to encrypted messaging applications – such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp – he said changing the rules might be counterproductive. “Because of the way end-to-end encryption works, we can’t read the contents of individual encrypted messages on, say, WhatsApp, but we do respond quickly to appropriate and legal law enforcement requests. We believe that actually puts authorities in a better position than in a situation where this type of technology runs off to mom-and-pop apps scattered all over the globe. ” However, Fishman made clear that some WhatsApp metadata – information about communications data – was handed over to police bodies or intelligence agencies. “We do respond quickly to appropriate and legal law enforcement requests,” he said. Asked whether metadata is shared following such requests, he said: “There is some limited data that’s available, and WhatsApp is working to help law enforcement understand how it responds to their requests, especially in emergency situations. ” Fishman said Facebook was also working with “civil society groups on the ground” in the UK, Germany and France, offering training and advert credits to make their messaging more effective. Topics more on this story How Facebook allows users to post footage of children being bullied Leaked guidelines on cruel and abusive posts also show how company judges who ‘deserves our protection’ and who doesn’t Published: 22 May 2017 How Facebook allows users to post footage of children being bullied 'No grey areas': experts urge Facebook to change moderation policies Labour’s Yvette Cooper is among those calling for more transparency from the company in wake of Guardian revelations Published: 22 May 2017 'No grey areas': experts urge Facebook to change moderation policies Facebook flooded with 'sextortion' and revenge porn, files reveal Leaked documents show site struggles with with mammoth task of policing content ranging from nudity to sex abuse Published: 22 May 2017 Facebook flooded with 'sextortion' and revenge porn, files reveal Revealed: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence Leaked policies guiding moderators on what content to allow are likely to fuel debate about social media giant’s ethics Published: 21 May 2017 Revealed: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence + How social media filter bubbles and algorithms influence the election Published: 22 May 2017 How social media filter bubbles and algorithms influence the election + Facebook will let users livestream self-harm, leaked documents show Published: 21 May 2017 Facebook will let users livestream self-harm, leaked documents show + The Facebook Files: sex, violence and hate speech – video explainer Published: 21 May 2017 The Facebook Files: sex, violence and hate speech – video explainer most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Paid content Paid content is paid for and controlled by an advertiser and produced by the Guardian Labs team Learn more about Guardian Labs content Guardian Labs Seizing opportunities with Aldermore The tech startups using AI to disrupt the recruitment industry Paid for by Aldermore A new generation of tech startups are using artificial intelligence to give employers the edge in the recruitment stakes Machine learning and AI are transforming industries as diverse as transportation and recruitment. transportation and recruitment. Photograph: Colin Anderson/Getty Images/Blend Images Seizing opportunities with Aldermore The tech startups using AI to disrupt the recruitment industry Paid for by Aldermore A new generation of tech startups are using artificial intelligence to give employers the edge in the recruitment stakes Alison Coleman Hiring the best talent and creating a diverse workforce is a top priority for businesses – and is arguably one of their biggest challenges. But help is now at hand from a new generation of tech startups using artificial intelligence (AI) to give employers the edge in the recruitment stakes. Nicholas Shekerdemian is CEO and co-founder of Headstart, which uses AI to transform the graduate recruitment process. As a student at Oxford University, he was sending internship applications to the same companies as everyone else, when he had his eureka moment. “The process was boring, repetitive and offered no opportunity to either differentiate myself or identify the roles best suited to my skills, experience and personality,” he says. “I thought that there must be a better way of doing this, for both the applicant and the employer. ” Shekerdemian researched the market and found there wasn’t anything out there to streamline the recruitment process. Teaming up with Jeremy Hindle, a graduate in neuroscience, who had the necessary technical expertise, they devised Headstart, a recruitment app that matches students from a range of backgrounds with opportunities at leading companies, using a series of contextual and predictive algorithms. Headstart’s matching system creates a detailed “fingerprint” for every applicant, using neural networks and machine learning. The fingerprint considers personality, interests, skills and demographic background as well as traditional criteria such as qualifications and experience. “This allows applicants to apply quickly and simply for multiple jobs as themselves via just one, highly personalised application,” says Shekerdemian. Recruiters, meanwhile, receive a ranked list of prospective candidates for each role who meet the minimum grade requirements and are also a good cultural fit. Headstart now works with a number of global brands, including Vodafone, Expedia, and BP, who are using the system to help ensure truly diverse, talented and suitable intakes. Simon Ashley, vice president of human resources at BP, says: “Diversity and inclusion is one of our core objectives as a business and we believe that Headstart will help build our brand awareness with diverse groups of people who wouldn’t normally think of working for BP. ” The system also works for small businesses and startups, enabling them to compete cost-effectively with large corporations for talent. In less than a year, Headstart gained more than 100 clients and 17 members of staff. The company recently secured funding and support from one of the world’s leading startup accelerator programmes, Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, and is set to open a US West Coast office. Removing bias When it comes to the hiring process, these intelligent recruitment technologies are not designed to replicate human decision-making. “One reason why traditional recruitment processes are suboptimal is because of the human bias and subjectivity that reduces diversity and leads to suboptimal selection decisions,” explains Juan Swartz, co-founder of talent management tech firm Pivotal Talent. The firm uses a performance prediction model to evaluate every candidate differently for every role, based only on the criteria for that specific job. This helps to better match candidates to performance and culture requirements, and to better manage the career progression of employees. “We refer to our solution in the context of augmented intelligence; a solution to augment or enhance the final selection decision of a human,” Swartz adds. “It will scientifically, accurately and automatically get you to a shortlist of suitable candidates. It is then up to the client to have the final interview, apply their experience and intuition, and make the selection decision from a shortlist of all suitable candidates. ” Personnel analytics company Weavee is also helping companies tackle the unconscious bias issue, by recommending candidates on the basis of what they are capable of, not what employers assume they are capable of. As a computer science and games technology graduate, Weavee’s founder and CEO James Grant had experienced the challenges of job seeking. He says: “I was frustrated by the rigidity of corporate structures and how the definition of success simply didn’t gel with what I had to offer. Rather than set out to change companies’ makeup, I thought it would be more effective to use data to improve matchmaking between companies and candidates. ” Weavee combines performance and psychometric data on existing employees, enabling companies to seek out candidates with the potential to succeed within their culture. It also offers a test for candidates to determine which type of company culture would suit them and identify the personal skills they have to offer. Companies using Weavee outline their specific challenge, and the system is configured to address it. For example, Weavee has helped insurance company NFU Mutual identify employees that are well suited to grow within their business. counter unconscious bias and help disabled job candidates secure roles on the strength of their ability. ” Launched a year ago, Weavee has more than 5,000 users on its platform. Content on this page is for and produced to a brief agreed by Aldermore, sponsor of The Disruptors on Guardian Small Business Network. Topics back to top All rights reserved. dermore] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Robots Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Swiss Post introduced a self-driving delivery robot in Zurich this month. Distribution jobs were among those predicted to be at risk from the growth of automation. month. Distribution jobs were among those predicted to be at risk from the growth of automation. Photograph: Reuters Robots Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Robert Booth Tue 19 Sep ‘17 11. 34 BST First published on Tue 19 Sep ‘17 11. 18 BST This article is 3 months old Four million jobs in the British private sector could be replaced by robots in the next decade, according to business leaders asked about the future of automation and artificial intelligence. The potential impact amounts to 15% of the current workforce in the sector and emerged in a poll conducted by YouGov for the Royal Society of Arts, whose chief executive, Matthew Taylor, has been advising Downing Street on the future of modern work. Jobs in finance and accounting, transport and distribution and in media, marketing and advertising are most likely to be automated in the next decade, the research says. Employers' view of automation The RSA’s prediction of the impact of robotics on working lives is lower than some other estimates. Four years ago, academics at the University of Oxford predicted 35% of jobs could be rendered obsolete by new technology, while the Bank of England predicted in 2015 that up to 15m jobs in Britain were at risk from robots “hollowing out” the workforce. The RSA is also more optimistic about the potential of robots and artificial intelligence than US tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has said AI was “the scariest problem” and “our biggest existential threat” because, he predicts, they will be able to do everything better than humans. Research by the University of Oxford and Deloitte last year predicted more than 850,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation. Asda operates a fully automated distribution warehouse in west London; white-collar tasks are being automated by PwC, the accountancy firm, and Linklaters, the law firm, which have been developing software robots that use artificial intelligence to learn to do research tasks usually undertaken by junior accountants and lawyers. The RSA warns that artificial intelligence and robotics will “undoubtedly cause the loss of some jobs, whether it is autonomous vehicles pushing taxi drivers out of business or picking and packing robots usurping warehouse workers”. But it argues that new technologies could phase out mundane jobs, raise productivity levels and so deliver higher wages and “allow workers to concentrate on more human-centric roles that are beyond the reach of machines”. It found that business leaders largely believed that new technologies were more likely to alter jobs rather than eliminate them and that this, combined with the creation of new types of jobs, would lead to greater prosperity in the long run. Care homes are also trialling robots. One in Lincoln plans to use one to help residents remember daily necessities such as taking medication. The robot will also monitor their movements and habits as a nurse would. A care company in London, Three Sisters Home Care, will soon trial the use of robots for lifting people so only one care worker will be needed rather than two. Three Sisters’ chief executive, Jobeda Ali, told the researchers: “If I them to have a cup of tea and a chat. This is a much better use of their time than carrying patients or cooking meals. ” The prediction that millions of jobs will be lost to robots led the Trades Union Congress to warn against “shredding good jobs”. “The UK must make the most of the economic opportunities that new technologies offer,” said Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC. “Robots and AI could let us produce more for less, boosting national prosperity. But we need to talk about who benefits – and how workers get a fair share. The productivity gains must be used to improve pay and conditions for workers. ” Benedict Dellot, the author of the report, said the technical limitations on robots, evidenced so far by driverless cars crashing and the difficulty of getting robots to read at an adult level, would restrict the speed with which jobs will be automated. The RSA has also warned that Britain needs to invest more in robots or risk falling further behind countries including the US, France, Germany, Spain and Italy where companies are buying more robots than in the UK. “AI and robotics could solve some of the gaps and problems in the labour market with low-paid, dull, dirty, dangerous jobs that nobody really wants to fill,” Dellot said. “The technology has the potential to fundamentally improve productivity levels in the UK. ” The report also warns that increasing automation could deepen economic inequality and “demographic biases could become further entrenched”. It argues that to avoid this policymakers should take control of the development of the technology by creating an ethical framework to guide the behaviour of AI and to encourage investment in “benevolent technology that enriches the worker experience”. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN United Nations opens new centre in Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and second-guess threats Published: 27 Sep 2017 Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger The triumph of ‘digital Taylorism’ means that many jobs in the modern economy have been sapped of their humanity, write professors Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger Published: 25 Sep 2017 Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation John Cryan told conference in Frankfurt that accountants could be replaced by machines, while also saying that Frankfurt is ideally placed to benefit from Brexit Published: 6 Sep 2017 Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC General secretary Frances O’Grady calls for debate about who benefits from new prosperity and how workers get a fair share Published: 4 Sep 2017 Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC + The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites Published: 23 Aug 2017 The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites + Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class Larry Elliott Published: 20 Aug 2017 Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class + Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet Published: 15 Aug 2017 Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet + Worry less about robots and more about sweatshops Sonia Sodha Published: 18 Jun 2017 Worry less about robots and more about sweatshops most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Max Tegmark: ‘Machines taking control doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ The artificial intelligence expert’s new book, Life 3. 0, urges us to act now to decide our future, rather than risk it being decided for us Max Tegmark in his lab at MIT. Tegmark in his lab at MIT. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Max Tegmark: ‘Machines taking control doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ The artificial intelligence expert’s new book, Life 3. 0, urges us to act now to decide our future, rather than risk it being decided for us Andrew Anthony Sat 16 Sep ‘17 19. 00 BST Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 17. 02 GMT Afew years ago the cosmologist Max Tegmark found himself weeping outside the Science Museum in South Kensington. He’d just visited an exhibition that represented the growth in human knowledge, everything from Charles Babbage’s difference engine to a replica of Apollo 11. What moved him to tears wasn’t the spectacle of these iconic technologies but an epiphany they prompted. “It hit me like a brick,” he recalls, “that every time we understood how something in nature worked, some aspect of ourselves, we made it obsolete. Once we understood how muscles worked we built much better muscles in the form of machines, and maybe when we understand how our brains work we’ll build much better brains and become utterly obsolete. ” Tegmark’s melancholy insight was not some idle hypothesis, but instead an intellectual challenge to himself at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. What will become of humanity, he was moved to ask, if we manage to create an intelligence that outstrips our own? Of course, this is a question that has repeatedly occurred in science fiction. However, it takes on different kind of meaning and urgency as AI becomes science fact. And Tegmark decided it was time to examine the issues surrounding AI and the possibility, in particular, that it might lead to a so-called superintelligence. We're in a situation where something truly dramatic might happen within decades – that’s a good time to start preparing With his friend the Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and funding from the tech billionaire Elon Musk, he set up the Future of Life Institute, which researches the existential risks facing humanity. It’s located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Tegmark is a professor at MIT, and it’s not unlike the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, the body set up by his fellow Swede, the philosopher Nick Bostrom. Tegmark also set about writing a book, which he has just published, entitled Life 3. 0: Being Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence. Having previously written about such abstruse and highly theoretical concepts as the multiverse, Tegmark is not a man daunted by the prospect of informed but imaginative speculation. One of the difficulties in getting a clear perspective on AI is that it mired in myth and misunderstanding. Tegmark has tried to address this image problem by carefully unpacking the ideas involved or associated with AI – intelligence, memory, learning, consciousness – and then explaining them in demystifying fashion. First, though, Tegmark, speaking on the phone from Boston, is eager to make it clear what AI is not about. “I think Hollywood has got us worrying about the wrong thing,” he says. “This fear of machines turning conscious and evil is a red herring. The real worry with advanced AI is not malevolence but competence. If you have superintelligent AI, then by definition it’s very good at attaining its goals, but we need to be sure those goals are aligned with ours. I don’t hate ants, but if you put me in charge of building a green-energy hydroelectric plant in an anthill area, too bad for the ants. We don’t want to put ourselves in the position of those ants. ” Life 3. 0 is very far from a jeremiad against AI. In fact it’s much more a celebration of the potential of superintelligence. But what is superintelligence? Indeed, what is intelligence? Tegmark defines it as the “ability to accomplish complex goals”. Therefore computers qualify as intelligent. However, their intelligence is narrow. At the moment, computers are able to process information in specific areas that go far beyond human capacity. For example, the best chess player in the world stands no chance against a modern computer program. But that program would be useless against a child in a game of noughts and crosses. Humans, even the very young, possess a general intelligence across a broad range of abilities, whereas, for all their processing power, computers are confined to prescribed tasks. A customer takes a photograph of Toshida’s humanoid robot Aiko Chihira Facebook Twitter Pinterest A customer takes a photograph of Toshida’s humanoid robot Aiko Chihira, who greets customers at the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images So computers are only as intelligent as we allow them to be, as we program them to be. But as we move into the AI era, that is beginning to change. There are early examples at places such as Google’s AI subsidiary, DeepMind, of computers self-learning, adapting through trial and error. So far this facility has only been demonstrated in the realm of video games and the board game Go, but presumably that will spread out into other media. And if it spreads enough it’s likely to have a profound effect on how we think about ourselves, about life and many other fundamental issues. Tegmark sets out to examine these questions by creating a defining context, a grid of developmental stages. He starts out by going back to the most primitive forms of life, such as bacteria, which he calls Life about replication, and adaptation is possible only through evolution. Life 2. 0, or the cultural stage, is where humans are: able to learn, adapt to changing environments, and intentionally change those environments. However we can’t yet change our physical selves, our biological inheritance. Tegmark describes this situation as one of hardware and software. We design our own software – our ability to “walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes” – but our biological hardware (the nature of our brains and bodies) is subject to evolution and necessarily restricted. The third stage, Life 3. 0, is technological, in which post-humans can redesign not only their software but their hardware too. Life, in this form, Tegmark writes, is “master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles”. This new intelligence would be immortal and able to fan out across the universe. In other words, it would be life, Jim, but not as we know it. But would it be life or something else? It’s fair to say that Tegmark, a physicist by training, is not a biological sentimentalist. He is a materialist who views the world and the universe beyond as being made up of varying arrangements of particles that enable differing levels of activity. He draws no meaningful or moral distinction between a biological, mortal intelligence and that of an intelligent, self-perpetuating machine. Tegmark describes a future of boundless possibility for Life 3. 0, and at times his writing borders on the fantastic, even triumphalist; but then he is a theorist, attempting to envisage what for most of us is either unimaginable or unpalatable. There is, though, a logic to his projections which even his detractors would allow, although they may argue over the timescale. Put simply, we are in the early phase of AI – self-driving cars, smart-home control units and other automata. But if trends continue apace, then it’s not unreasonable to assume that at some point – 30 years’ time, 50 years, 200 years? – computers will reach a general intelligence equivalent in many ways to that of humans. And once computers reach this stage their improvement will increase rapidly because they will bring ever more processing capacity to working out how to increase their processing capacity. This is the argument that Bostrom laid out in his 2014 book Superintelligence, and the result of this massive expansion in intelligence – or the ability to accomplish complex goals – is indeed superintelligence, a singularity that we can only guess at. Facebook Twitter Pinterest We should be more afraid of computers than we are Superintelligence, however, is not an inevitability. There are many in the field who believe that computers will never match human intelligence, or that if they do, humans themselves will have learned to adapt their own biology by then. But if it’s a possibility, then it’s one Tegmark believes we urgently need to think seriously about. “When we’re in a situation where something truly dramatic might happen, within decades, to me that’s a really good time to start preparing so that it becomes a force for good. It would have been nice if we’d prepared more for climate change 30 years ago. ” Like Bostrom, Tegmark argues that development of AI is an even more pressing concern than climate change. Yet if we’re looking at creating an intelligence that we can’t possibly understand, how much will preparation affect what takes place on the other side of the singularity? How can we attempt to confine an intelligence that is beyond our imagining? Tegmark acknowledges that this is a question no one can answer at the moment, but he argues that there are many other tasks that we should prioritise. “Before we worry about long-term challenges of superintelligence, there are some very short-term things we need to address. Let’s not make perfect the enemy of good. Everyone agrees that never under any circumstances do we want airplanes to fly into mountains or buildings. When Andreas Lubitz got depressed, he told his autopilot to go down to 100 metres and the computer said OK! The computer was completely clueless about human goals, even though we have the technology today to build airplanes that whenever the pilot tries to fly into something, it goes into safe mode, locks the cockpit and lands at the nearest airport. This kind of kindergarten ethic we should start putting in our machines today. ” But before that, there’s even more pressing work to be done, Tegmark says. “How do we transform today’s buggy and hackable computers into robust AI systems that we really trust? This is hugely important. I feel that we as a society have been way too flippant about this. And world governments should include this as a major part of computer science research. ” Preventing the rise of a superintelligence by abandoning research in artificial intelligence is not, he believes, a credible approach. “Every single way that 2017 is better than the stone age is because of technology. And technology is happening. Nobody here is talking about stopping technology. Asking if you’re for or against AI is as ridiculous as asking if you’re for or against fire. We all love fire for keeping our homes warm and we all want to prevent arson. ” Preventing arson, in this case, is a job that’s already upon us. As Tegmark notes, we’re on the cusp of starting an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons. Vladimir Putin said just recently that whoever mastered AI would become the “ruler of the world”. In November there is a UN meeting to look at the viability of an international treaty to ban these weapons in much the same way that biological and chemical weapons have been banned. “The AI community support this very strongly,” says Tegmark. In terms of technology, there’s very little difference, he says, between “an autonomous assassination drone and an Amazon book delivery drone”. BAE Systems’s Taranis stealth aircraft Facebook Twitter Pinterest BAE Systems’s Taranis unmanned stealth aircraft prototype, described as ‘the first autonomous drone’. Photograph: BAE Systems “Another big issue over the next decade is job automation. Many leading economists think that the growing inequality that gave us Brexit and Trump is driven by automation. Here, there’s a huge opportunity to make everyone better off if the government can redistribute some of this great wealth that machines can produce to benefit everybody. ” In this respect Tegmark believes the UK, with its belief in the free market and history of the NHS and welfare state, could play a leading role in harnessing corporate innovation for national benefit. The problem with that analysis that, aside from the fact that much AI research is led by authoritarian regimes in Russia and China, the lion’s share of advances are coming from America or American companies – and as a society the US has not been traditionally over-concerned with issues of inequality. In the book, Tegmark hails Google’s Larry Page, one of the wealthiest men on Earth, as someone who might turn out to be the most influential human who has ever lived: “My guess is that if super intelligent digital life engulfs our universe in my lifetime, it will be because of Larry’s decisions. ” He describes Page as he describes Musk – as thoughtful and sincerely concerned about humanity’s plight. No doubt he is, but as a businessman he’s primarily concerned with profit and stealing a march on competitors. And as things stand, far too much decision-making power resides in the hands of unrepresentative tech billionaires. It seems to me that while the immediate issues of AI are essentially technological or, in the political sense, technical, those waiting along the road are far more philosophical in nature. Tegmark outlines several different outcomes that might prevail, from dystopian totalitarian dictatorship to benign machine control. “It’s important to realise that intelligence equals power,” he says. “The reason we have power over tigers isn’t because we have bigger muscles or sharper teeth. It’s because we’re smarter. A greater power is likely to ultimately control our planet. It could be either that some people get great power thanks to advanced AI and do things you wouldn’t like them to, or it could be that machines themselves outsmart us and manage to take control. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, necessarily. Children don’t mind being in the presence of more intelligent beings, named mummy and daddy, because the parents’ goals are in line with theirs. AI could solve all our thorny problems and help humanity flourish like never before. ” But wouldn’t that radically alter humanity’s sense of itself, looking to superior agents to take care of us? We would no longer be the primary force shaping our world. AnBot, China’s first smart police robot, which went on patrol at Shenzhen Baoan airport, Guangdong, in September 2016. Facebook Twitter Pinterest AnBot, China’s first smart police robot, which went on patrol at Shenzhen Baoan airport, Guangdong, in September 2016. Photograph: Imaginechina/REX/Shutterstock “That’s right,” he says, with a smile in his voice, “but there are many people in the world today who already believe that’s how it is and feel quite happy about it. Religious people believe there is a being much more powerful and intelligent than them who looks out for them. I feel that what we really need to quit is this hubristic idea of building our self-worth on a misplaced idea of human exceptionalism. We humans are much better off if we can be humble and say maybe there can be beings much smarter than us, but that’s OK, we get our self-worth from other things: having really profound relationships with our fellow humans and wonderfully inspiring experiences. ” At such moments Tegmark can sound less like a hardcore materialist physicist than some trippy new-age professor who’s spent too long contemplating the cosmos. But surely, I say, the modernist project that has built these machines was fuelled by a belief that God was an invention we no longer required – wouldn’t it be a bitter historical irony if we ended up inventing new gods to supplant the old one? Tegmark laughs. “I think one of the things we will need in the age of AI is a good sense of humour and appreciation of irony. We keep gloating about being the smartest on the planet precisely because we’re able to build all this fancy technology which is on track to make us not be the smartest on the planet! ” Having researched and written this book, Tegmark is much more optimistic than he was in that lachrymose moment in South Kensington. But it’s not an optimism built on the assumption that everything will turn out OK in the end. Rather, he believes we must act if we’re to secure a beneficial outcome. People and governments alike, he says, must turn their attention to the oncoming future, prepare appropriate safety engineering, and think deeply about the kind of world we want to create. So what would he say if he could address that UN meeting in November? “Fund AI safety research, ban lethal autonomous weapons, and expand social services so that wealth created by AI makes everybody well off. ” As ever, the road ahead will be filled with the unforeseen consequences of today’s action or lack of it, but adopting that three-point plan seems like a firm step in the direction of making the future that much less worrying. • Life 3. 0 by Max Tegmark is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop. com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion Who wants to live in an artificially intelligent future? Michele Hanson Michele Hanson An AI world sounds like hell – making humans redundant only serves the interests of an already rich, powerful and creepy tech industry Google’s proposed London headquarters proposed London headquarters. Photograph: HayesDavidson Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion Who wants to live in an artificially intelligent future? Michele Hanson Michele Hanson An AI world sounds like hell – making humans redundant only serves the interests of an already rich, powerful and creepy tech industry Contact author @michelerhanson Mon 14 Aug ‘17 14. 57 BST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov ‘17 02. 22 GMT Grim news – Silicon Valley is coming to the UK. Google is planning to build a gigantic £600m “landscraper” in King’s Cross, central London. It plans to “bring our London Googlers together” with a 25-metre swimming pool, massage rooms, a basketball court, nap pods and a 200-metre “trim trail”, which loops around a rooftop meadow, to encourage “the Google culture of walking meetings”, as the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, Oliver Wainwright, put it. This is where I begin to feel queasy. Google has its own “culture”, which its 7,000 London employees will presumably have to embrace cheerily while they work, jog, snooze, eat, play and eventually live on this monster “campus”. Stuff the homeless locals. Also, what about the “Googlers” personal lives? I can’t help thinking, when I hear of so many people being bossed into behaving the same way, that there will be deeply unpleasant outcomes. Is there anything more scary than the regimentation and homogenisation of thousands of people? Especially when it is dressed up to look so jolly, healthy, trendy, fun and sustainable. Nothing can disguise its purpose – to create money and enormous power for a few soulless cleverdicks. It is creepy. Just like the mass manipulation, using “massive swarms of political bots” made possible by artificial intelligence, to make us think and vote this way or that; or the spooky, smiling techies planning utopias that could turn to chaos, disruption and tragedy; or the racist robots that reflect our nastiness – shop-assistant robots, doctor robots, truck-driving robots, sex robots, anything-you-can-do-they-can-do-better robots. What is the point of making humans redundant? What will we do? I have been worried for some time that the world is going to AI-automated hell. On the plus side, there seems to have been a tiny increase in resistance to this grisly future. The horrid secrets of Silicon Valley are coming out. Some of its creators are running scared: the former Facebook executive now living in an island hidey-hole for fear of societal breakdown; the “tech-connected” people in Silicon Valley who are restricting their children’s screen time. Researchers believe that democracy will not be undermined if AI is used only “ethically and judiciously”. I wish us luck with that. I really do. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. CGoogle] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Inequality Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses There is a saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. When we feed machines data that reflects our prejudices, they mimic them – from antisemitic chatbots to racially biased software. Does a horrifying future await people forced to live at the mercy of algorithms? Current laws ‘largely fail to address discrimination’ when it comes to big data. to big data. Photograph: artpartner-images/Getty Images Inequality Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses There is a saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. When we feed machines data that reflects our prejudices, they mimic them – from antisemitic chatbots to racially biased software. Does a horrifying future await people forced to live at the mercy of algorithms? The Inequality Project is supported by Ford Foundation About this content Stephen Buranyi Tue 8 Aug ‘17 07. 00 BST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov ‘17 02. 25 GMT In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica. Compas and programs similar to it were in use in hundreds of courts across the US, potentially informing the decisions of judges and other officials. The message seemed clear: the US justice system, reviled for its racial bias, had turned to technology for help, only to find that the algorithms had a racial bias too. How could this have happened? The private company that supplies the software, Northpointe, disputed the conclusions of the report, but declined to reveal the inner workings of the program, which it considers commercially sensitive. The accusation gave frightening substance to a worry that has been brewing among activists and computer scientists for years and which the tech giants Google and Microsoft have recently taken steps to investigate: that as our computational tools have become more advanced, they have become more opaque. The data they rely on – arrest records, postcodes, social affiliations, income – can reflect, and further ingrain, human prejudice. The promise of machine learning and other programs that work with big data (often under the umbrella term “artificial intelligence” or AI) was that the more information we feed these sophisticated computer algorithms, the better they perform. Last year, according to global management consultant McKinsey, tech companies spent somewhere between $20bn and $30bn on AI, mostly in research and development. Investors are making a big bet that AI will sift through the vast amounts of information produced by our society and find patterns that will help us be more efficient, wealthier and happier. It has led to a decade-long AI arms race in which the UK government is offering six-figure salaries to computer scientists. They hope to use machine learning to, among other things, help unemployed people find jobs, predict the performance of pension funds and sort through revenue and customs casework. It has become a kind of received wisdom that these programs will touch every aspect of our lives. (“It’s impossible to know how widely adopted AI is now, but I do know we can’t go back,” one computer scientist says. ) It’s impossible to know how widely adopted AI is now, but I do know we can’t go back But, while some of the most prominent voices in the industry are concerned with the far-off future apocalyptic potential of AI, there is less attention paid to the more immediate problem of how we prevent these programs from amplifying the inequalities of our past and affecting the most vulnerable members of our society. When the data we feed the machines reflects the history of our own unequal society, we are, in effect, asking the program to learn our own biases. “If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us. ” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial. We have already seen glimpses of what might be on the horizon. Programs developed by companies at the forefront of AI research have resulted in a string of errors that look uncannily like the darker biases of humanity: a Google image recognition program labelled the faces of several black people as gorillas; a LinkedIn advertising program showed a preference for male names in searches, and a Microsoft chatbot called Tay spent a day learning from Twitter and began spouting antisemitic messages. These small-scale incidents were all quickly fixed by the companies involved and have generally been written off as “gaffes”. But the Compas revelation and Lum’s study hint at a much bigger problem, demonstrating how programs could replicate the sort of large-scale systemic biases that people have spent decades campaigning to educate or legislate away. Computers don’t become biased on their own. They need to learn that from us. For years, the vanguard of computer science has been working on machine learning, often having programs learn in a similar way to humans – observing the world (or at least the world we show them) and identifying patterns. In 2012, Google researchers fed their computer “brain” millions of images from YouTube videos to see what it could recognise. It responded with blurry black-and-white outlines of human and cat faces. The program was never given a definition of a human face or a cat; it had observed and “learned” two of our favourite subjects. Tay, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tay, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot. Photograph: Microsoft This sort of approach has allowed computers to perform tasks – such as language translation, recognising faces or recommending films in your Netflix queue – that just a decade ago would have been considered too complex to automate. But as the algorithms learn and adapt from their original coding, they become more opaque and less predictable. It can soon become difficult to understand exactly how the complex interaction of algorithms generated a problematic result. And, even if we could, private companies are disinclined to reveal the commercially sensitive inner workings of their algorithms (as was the case with Northpointe). Less difficult is predicting where problems can arise. Take Google’s face recognition program: cats are uncontroversial, but what if it was to learn what British and American people think a CEO looks like? The results would likely resemble the near-identical portraits of older white men that line any bank or corporate lobby. And the program wouldn’t be inaccurate: only 7% of FTSE CEOs are women. Even fewer, just 3%, have a BME background. When computers learn from us, they can learn our less appealing attributes. Joanna Bryson, a researcher at the University of Bath, studied a program designed to “learn” relationships between words. It trained on millions of pages of text from the internet and began clustering female names and pronouns with jobs such as “receptionist” and “nurse”. Bryson says she was astonished by how closely the results mirrored the real-world gender breakdown of those jobs in US government data, a nearly 90% correlation. “People expected AI to be unbiased; that’s just wrong. If the underlying data reflects stereotypes, or if you train AI from human culture, you will find these things,” Bryson says. People expected AI to be unbiased; that’s just wrong So who stands to lose out the most? Cathy O’Neil, the author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction about the dangerous consequences of outsourcing decisions to computers, says it’s generally the most vulnerable in society who are exposed to evaluation by automated systems. A rich person is unlikely to have their job application screened by a computer, or their loan request evaluated by anyone other than a bank executive. In the justice system, the thousands of defendants with no money for a lawyer or other counsel would be the most likely candidates for automated evaluation. In London, Hackney council has recently been working with a private company to apply AI to data, including government health and debt records, to help predict which families have children at risk of ending up in statutory care. Other councils have reportedly looked into similar programs. In her 2016 paper, HRDAG’s Kristian Lum demonstrated who would be affected if a program designed to increase the efficiency of policing was let loose on biased data. Lum and her co-author took PredPol – the program that suggests the likely location of future crimes based on recent crime and arrest statistics – and fed it historical drug-crime data from the city of Oakland’s police department. PredPol showed a daily map of likely “crime hotspots” that police could deploy to, based on information about where police had previously made arrests. The program was suggesting majority black neighbourhoods at about twice the rate of white ones, despite the fact that when the statisticians modelled the city’s likely overall drug use, based on national statistics, it was much more evenly distributed. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the researchers also simulated what would happen if police had acted directly on PredPol’s hotspots every day and increased their arrests accordingly: the program entered a feedback loop, predicting more and more crime in the neighbourhoods that police visited most. That caused still more police to be sent in. It was a virtual mirror of the real-world criticisms of initiatives such as New York City’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy. By over-targeting residents with a particular characteristic, police arrested them at an inflated rate, which then justified further policing. PredPol’s co-developer, Prof Jeff Brantingham, acknowledged the concerns when asked by the Washington Post. He claimed that – to combat bias – drug arrests and other offences that rely on the discretion of officers were not used with the software because they are often more heavily enforced in poor and minority communities. And while most of us don’t understand the complex code within programs such as PredPol, Hamid Khan, an organiser with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group addressing police surveillance in Los Angeles, says that people do recognise predictive policing as “another top-down approach where policing remains the same: pathologising whole communities”. There is a saying in computer science, something close to an informal law: garbage in, garbage out. It means that programs are not magic. If you give them flawed information, they won’t fix the flaws, they just process the information. Khan has his own truism: “It’s racism in, racism out. ” It’s unclear how existing laws to protect against discrimination and to regulate algorithmic decision-making apply in this new landscape. Often the technology moves faster than governments can address its effects. In 2016, the Cornell University professor and former Microsoft researcher Solon Barocas claimed that current laws “largely fail to address discrimination” when it comes to big data and machine learning. Barocas says that many traditional players in civil rights, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are taking the issue on in areas such as housing or hiring practices. Sinyangwe recently worked with the ACLU to try to pass city-level policies requiring police to disclose any technology they adopt, including AI. Samuel Sinyangwe … working to force authorities to disclose when they use technology. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel Sinyangwe … working to force authorities to disclose when they use technology. Photograph: Samuel Sinyangwe But the process is complicated by the fact that public institutions adopt technology sold by private companies, whose inner workings may not be transparent. “We don’t want to deputise these companies to regulate themselves,” says Barocas. In the UK, there are some existing protections. Government services and companies must disclose if a decision has been entirely outsourced to a computer, and, if so, that decision can be challenged. But Sandra Wachter, a law scholar at the Alan Turing Institute at Oxford University, says that the existing laws don’t map perfectly to the way technology has advanced. There are a variety of loopholes that could allow the undisclosed use of algorithms. She has called for a “right to explanation”, which would require a full disclosure as well as a higher degree of transparency for any use of these programs. The scientific literature on the topic now reflects a debate on the nature of “fairness” itself, and researchers are working on everything from ways to strip “unfair” classifiers from decades of historical data, to modifying algorithms to skirt round any groups protected by existing anti-discrimination laws. One researcher at the Turing Institute told me the problem was so difficult because “changing the variables can introduce new bias, and sometimes we’re not even sure how bias affects the data, or even where it is”. The institute has developed a program that tests a series of counterfactual propositions to track what affects algorithmic decisions: would the result be the same if the person was white, or older, or lived elsewhere? But there are some who consider it an impossible task to integrate the various definitions of fairness adopted by society and computer scientists, and still retain a functional program. “In many ways, we’re seeing a response to the naive optimism of the earlier days,” Barocas says. “Just two or three years ago you had articles credulously claiming: ‘Isn’t this great? These things are going to eliminate bias from hiring decisions and everything else. ’” Meanwhile, computer scientists face an unfamiliar challenge: their work necessarily looks to the future, but in embracing machines that learn, they find themselves tied to our age-old problems of the past. Follow the Guardian’s Inequality Project on Twitter here, or email us at inequality. project@theguardian. com Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. careers%2CSociety%2CRobots] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Robots The Observer The robot that staves off loneliness for chronically ill children A Norwegian startup company has created an automaton that helps children with long-term sickness be part of normal life again An AV1 robot on a classroom table surrounded by pupils and a teacher interactive link for a child who can’t be at school. Photograph: noisolation. com Robots The Observer The robot that staves off loneliness for chronically ill children A Norwegian startup company has created an automaton that helps children with long-term sickness be part of normal life again Andrew Anthony Sun 13 Aug ‘17 10. 30 BST Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 14. 21 GMT As a rule of thumb, the best ideas are the simplest. That’s easy to forget in an age of rapid technological innovation, when the tendency is to be led by capability rather than need. For as Karen Dolva, co-founder of the Norwegian startup No Isolation, says: “There are a lot of engineers who don’t want to make something useful – they want to make something cool. ” Dolva, a 26-year-old who studied computer science and interaction design at Oslo University, is not one of them. She and her two co-founders – Marius Aabel and Matias Doyle – are all about utility. As their company name suggests, they are looking to end human isolation. It’s a massive undertaking, but they’ve started with a distinct and overlooked group: sick children. I have security now because of AV1. She gave me hope in a very dark time Jade Gadd When a child suffers a long-term or chronic illness, one of the greatest psychological problems they confront is isolation from their peers and schoolmates. It’s possible to keep up with schoolwork, but not the social interplay and group dynamics that are a critical part of school life. Dolva realised just how important and neglected this issue of social solitude was when she met a woman who lost her teenage daughter to cancer. She and her partners researched the problem, speaking to children with a multitude of different health conditions and came up with an answer: a telepresence robot called AV1. A plain white bust, with a vaguely sci-fi robot visage, it was designed to sit on a vacated classroom desk and be the eyes and ears of the sick child at home in bed. The child can see and hear the teacher and the rotating head of the robot also offers a 360-degree view of the class. The AV1’s head flashes blue when the child wants to ask a question and there is even a whispering mode that enables the child to speak, way out of the teacher’s earshot, to a neighbouring classmate. When I met Dolva in a north London cafe, I tried out the system by speaking, via an AV1, to her colleague in Oslo. By the use of elementary controls on a laptop, I was able to look around the Oslo office and chat to the company secretary. It’s hardly a breakthrough in technology, but the early signs are that it could have profound effect with its target consumers. Just over 200 of the AV1s are being used in Scandinavia, a few in Holland and there is already one user in Britain. In 12 months’ time, Dolva expects that figure to be between 2,000 and 4,000. karen dolva of no isolation Facebook Twitter Pinterest Karen Dolva: the AV1 could also be used to help older people suffering from social isolation. Photograph: noisolation. com Seventeen-year-old Jade Gadd from Durham suffers from hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a particularly debilitating condition that means any system in her body can fail at any time. Her parents heard about AV1 and got in touch with No Isolation. The robot costs around £2,200, with a small subscription for unlimited data and insurance. “I have security now because of AV1,” says Jade in an email. “She gave me hope in a very dark time. She has allowed me to make commitments that previously I would have been too worried about not being able to meet. As a teenager, it is incredibly reassuring to know this assistive technology is available and can help me forge my future. ” Jade, who plans to go to university, something she feared she wouldn’t be able to do, speaks of AV1 as female, because users tend to award a gender to their robot, as well as customise it. She’s even given hers a name – Bee – and its own Facebook page. For someone as housebound as Jade, Bee offers more than a presence in a classroom – she also provides a window on the world at large. Her mother takes Bee for journeys in the car, where she can chat to her daughter, who can see the passing streets, and to coffee shops, where strangers often stop and ask questions. “The best times I’ve ever had with Bee have been when I didn’t even feel like I was using her,” says Jade. “I just felt like I was really there. ” For her, the AV1 is useful and cool. How to reduce social isolation in an age of declining social care budgets Read more Something like one in a 100 children are away from school for at least two months a year, so the market for AV1 is potentially very large, with around 35,000 pupils fitting the criterion in the UK alone. Dolva envisages a situation in which schools buy or hire several robots that are transferred between pupils as and when the need arises. But she’s not stopping with sick schoolchildren. The next group she wants to bring out of social isolation is senior citizens. The solution No Isolation is working on, says Dolva, is going to be very different to AV1. “Kids have a base,” she says. “With school, there’s a network. You don’t necessarily see that with seniors. Of course there are also mobility issues, memory loss and technology fear. Seniors are a much more diverse group. A 12-year-old is very much a 12-year-old. Two 85-year-olds can be extremely different in their motivation and what family they have around them. ” Again, the secret to success, Dolva believes, is in consulting users about their real needs. Her dream is to end social isolation completely and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This is one startup that is not looking for a quick buy-out. “It’s a problem we’ve dedicated our lives to,” she says, with a tear in her eye. “It’s what we’re going to be doing for the next 50 years. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story AI and music: will we be slaves to the algorithm? Tech firms have developed AI that can learn how to write music. So will machines soon be composing symphonies, hit singles and bespoke soundtracks? Published: 6 Aug 2017 AI and music: will we be slaves to the algorithm? Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future​: ‘They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants' The German computer scientist says artificial intelligence will surpass humans’ in 2050, enabling robots to have fun, fall in love – and colonise the galaxy Published: 18 Apr 2017 Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future​: ‘They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants' Podcast Can a neural network compose music you want to hear? – Tech podcast The AI composers that are helping people make their own personal soundtracks Published: 14 Apr 2017 Can a neural network compose music you want to hear? – Tech podcast Meet Solo, the 'emotional radio' that plays music to suit your mood – video Imagine a machine that can evaluate your mood and select music to suit. Solo’s developers talk to Dr Hannah Fry Published: 17 Jan 2017 Meet Solo, the 'emotional radio' that plays music to suit your mood – video + It's no Christmas No 1, but AI-generated song brings festive cheer to researchers Published: 29 Nov 2016 It's no Christmas No 1, but AI-generated song brings festive cheer to researchers + From chatbots to self-driving cars: what worries people about machine learning? Published: 15 May 2017 From chatbots to self-driving cars: what worries people about machine learning? + Actors, teachers, therapists – think your job is safe from artificial intelligence? Think again Published: 9 Feb 2017 Actors, teachers, therapists – think your job is safe from artificial intelligence? Think again + How bots ruined everything: from Drake to diets Published: 30 Oct 2016 How bots ruined everything: from Drake to diets most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) Killer robots? Musk and Zuckerberg escalate row over dangers of AI Musk described the Facebook CEO’s knowledge of the field as ‘limited’ after Zuckerberg publicly dismissed AI doomsday warnings as ‘irresponsible’ Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO believes artificial intelligence poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization”. intelligence poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization”. Photograph: Ringo HW Chiu/AP Artificial intelligence (AI) Killer robots? Musk and Zuckerberg escalate row over dangers of AI Musk described the Facebook CEO’s knowledge of the field as ‘limited’ after Zuckerberg publicly dismissed AI doomsday warnings as ‘irresponsible’ Olivia Solon in San Francisco @oliviasolon email Tue 25 Jul ‘17 18. 29 BST Last modified on Wed 26 Jul ‘17 02. 21 BST This article is 5 months old Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have entered into a public squabble about artificial intelligence in which Musk described the Facebook CEO’s knowledge of the field as “limited”. Elon Musk: regulate AI to combat 'existential threat' before it's too late Read more The groundwork for the world’s nerdiest fight was laid by Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, earlier this month, when he pushed again for the proactive regulation of artificial intelligence because he believes it poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization”. Musk told a gathering of US governors this month that the potential dangers are not so imaginary, and that they should move to regulate AI. “I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal,” he said. Musk, who has been issuing warnings like these for years now, is concerned that humans will become second-class citizens in a future dominated by artificial intelligence – or that we’ll face a Terminator-style robot uprising. Enter Zuckerberg, who on Sunday denounced these types of warnings as “pretty irresponsible”. Zuckerberg made the comments while taking questions during a Facebook Live broadcast from his Palo Alto home. One viewer asked: “I watched a recent interview with Elon Musk and his largest fear for the future was AI. What are your thoughts on AI and how could it affect the world? ” In an uncharacteristically candid response, Zuckerberg said: “I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic. And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios – I just, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible. ” Zuckerberg believes that AI will have much less dystopian applications, and will be responsible for saving lives through disease diagnosis and by powering driverless cars. “One of the top causes of death for people is car accidents, still, and if you can eliminate that with AI, that is going to be just a dramatic improvement,” he said. A day later, Musk had a comeback on Twitter: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited. ” Elon Musk (@elonmusk) I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited. July 25, 2017 It’s not the first time Musk and Zuckerberg have had a public beef. Last September, SpaceX was scheduled to launch an internet-beaming satellite intended for use by Facebook’s Free Basics project in Africa. However, the Falcon 9 rocket exploded, destroying both the rocket and cargo: the AMOS-6 satellite that Facebook planned to use to deliver internet connectivity to rural parts of Africa. Zuckerberg was not happy. Writing on his Facebook page, he said: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. ” First depriving African entrepreneurs of internet access, and now dissing Zuck’s intellect, Musk has drawn the battle lines. Your move, Mark. Topics most viewed back to top All rights reserved. rking%2CTechnology%2CUS+news] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Guardian sustainable business Fourth industrial revolution Cybersecurity: is the office coffee machine watching you? Artificial intelligence and machine learning can identify threats to an organisation – but at what cost to privacy and whistleblowers? There is bound to be a person somewhere right now working on machine learning models to deter crime. One day they could switch teams. machine learning models to deter crime. One day they could switch teams. ’ Photograph: Alamy Guardian sustainable business Fourth industrial revolution Cybersecurity: is the office coffee machine watching you? Artificial intelligence and machine learning can identify threats to an organisation – but at what cost to privacy and whistleblowers? Max Opray Fri 28 Apr ‘17 03. 44 BST Last modified on Mon 15 May ‘17 20. 41 BST Troubled by something deeply unethical going on at work? Or maybe you’re plotting to leak sensitive information on the company that just sacked you? Either way, you best think twice before making your next move because an all-seeing artificial intelligence might just be analysing every email you send, every file you upload, every room you scan into – even your coffee routine. The latest wave of cyber-defence technology employs machine learning to monitor use of the ever-expanding number of smart household objects connected to the Internet of Things – shutting down hackers before they’ve broken into corporate databases or whistleblowers before they’ve forwarded on information to the media. One of the leading proponents is cyber-defence company Darktrace, founded in 2013 by former British intelligence officers in Cambridge and today featuring 370 employees in 23 offices globally. The company is targeting growth in the Asia-Pacific, where regional head Sanjay Aurora is promoting Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System at the CeBIT Australia conference in Sydney on 23 May. Seventeen jobs, five careers: learning in the age of automation Read more In an interview ahead of the conference, Aurora tells the Guardian that the Internet of Things, the interconnected everyday devices such as the smart fridge, offers more vulnerabilities to be hacked than ever before – but also more ways to scan for threats. “In newspapers there is not a single day where we don’t read about an organisation being breached,” he says. “At a time when even coffee machines have IP addresses, many people in security teams don’t so much as have visibility of the network. ” Where cybersecurity normally functions as a barrier to keep out previously-identified threats, Aurora says Darktrace technology behaves more like a human immune system. “Once you understand the devices and people, once you notice subtle changes within the network, you establish a pattern of life, and whether it is lateral movement or unusual activity – maybe an employee using a device they don’t normally use, or a fingerprint scanner acting unusually – the immune system notices and takes action, detecting these things in network before they become a headline,” he says. Darktrace’s package includes a 3D topographical real-time “threat visualizer”, which monitors everyday network activity, and the responsive Antigena system, which can decide for itself to slow systems down to give security personnel time to stop a potential breach, cut off network access to particular individuals, or mark specific emails for further investigation. Adapt software to monitor e-communications of managers to see whether they're planning reprisals against whistleblowers Brian Martin, Whistleblowers Australia “Let’s say an employee is made redundant and becomes a potential information threat, the machine will intelligently determine what is the problem, assess the mathematical threat and then decide what action is to be taken,” Aurora says. Darktrace claims its Enterprise Immune System has reported over 30,000 serious cyber incidents in over 2,000 deployments across the world, offering up examples such as an employee who was disgruntled about their company’s Brexit plans and was caught before they could leak the information. Another case was put forward by Darktrace co-founder Poppy Gustafsson at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London last year. Gustafsson cited the case of attackers sending a truck into the warehouse of a luxury goods manufacturer after uploading their fingerprints to the company’s system in order to bypass the biometric scanners. “It’s one of the few attacks where a criminal has given their fingerprint ahead of time,” she said. Darktrace is well on the way to establishing itself in Australia ahead of the CeBIT business tech conference, already boasting clients such as national telecommunications provider Telstra. According to a Telstra spokesperson, the company “joined forces with Darktrace in 2016, adding it to a suite of complementary security technologies which are designed and utilised to protect customer and corporate information and the Telstra network. Darktrace, along with our other technologies, people and processes, strengthens Telstra’s internal security through its ability to detect anomalous activity and its ability to visualise all network activity, resulting in a reduced time to detect potential threats. ” Lipstick on the robot: why is everyone suddenly happy about tech unemployment? | Tim Dunlop Read more The move has attracted concern from Communication Workers Union (CWU) national secretary Greg Rayner, who says the union was not consulted on the introduction of the technology. “That’s disappointing and arguably a breach of Telstra’s obligations under the current enterprise agreement,” he says. “They’re supposed to consult on changes that will have a significant effect on the workforce. Telstra employees have been subjected to increasingly intense electronic monitoring in recent years, including scrutiny and recording of their online activities at work. We are obviously concerned that this technology will allow further intrusions into employees’ day-to-day working lives. ” Telstra has history in regard to unions and whistleblowers – in 2008 former employee Jim Ziogas was fired after being connected to a leak to the media of internal plans to de-unionise the workforce. Whistleblowers Australia vice-president, Brian Martin, doesn’t have a lot in common with Darktrace, but he does share a fondness for immune-system analogies. “Whistleblowers are antibodies for corruption in organisations,” he tells the Guardian. “If it were possible to prevent leaks (and that remains to be shown), this might only allow problems to fester until they become much worse. Think of what happened to Volkswagen, which lacked any whistleblowers or leakers and paid a much larger penalty than if its emissions fraud had been exposed years earlier. ” He says invading the privacy of workers has the potential to create resentment and undermine loyalty, and that a lack of independent monitoring means there are serious questions regarding the effectiveness of Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System, particularly in regard to false positives and false negatives. “The damage to morale done by falsely accusing an employee of planning to leak documents can be imagined,” he says. “How about this option? Adapt the software to monitor the e-communications of top managers to see whether they are planning reprisals against whistleblowers. How do you think they would like that? ” Devised as it was by former MI5 and GCHQ agents, inspired by the challenges they were facing in counterintelligence, Darktrace technology is also an interesting proposition for governments, but the company is more coy about the countries that it counts as clients than the businesses it services. For its part, a spokesperson for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) – the department of defence intelligence agency that bears the slogan “reveal their secrets, protect our own” – refused to confirm or deny use of Darktrace technology, telling the Guardian it does not “provide commentary on capability or use of commercial products”. There are certainly plenty of rivals to Darktrace technology also promoting their cybersecurity platform’s integration of the latest machine learning capabilities, including CrowdStrike, Symantec and Cylance. Then there are Darktrace’s true rivals – hackers themselves. Thomas LaRock, technical evangelist at IT company SolarWinds, warns that machine learning is a tool that can be used to attack just as easily as it can be used to defend. The robot debate is over: the jobs are gone and they aren't coming back Read more If it is possible to use machine learning to build a model that helps them launch cyberattacks with greater efficiency, then that’s what you can expect to happen,” he says. “Think of this as a spy game, where you have agents that go from one side to another. There is bound to be a person somewhere right now working on machine learning models to deter crime. One day they could be found to be working for the criminals, using machine learning models to help commit crime. ” Aurora defends the use of machine learning at Darktrace, arguing this is one game companies cannot afford to opt out of. “If you look at the way the threat landscape is moving, it is just simply humanly impossible using conventional methods – the only way to react to these threats is AI and machine learning,” he says. “We are proud to achieve on that front – pure, unsupervised machine learning, as employee behaviour changes. That is the secret sauce – continuously evolving and learning. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Alibaba founder Jack Ma: AI will cause people ‘more pain than happiness’ The billionaire said key social conflict will be the rise of artificial intelligence and longer life expectancy, which will lead to aging workforce fighting for fewer jobs Jack Ma issued the warning to encourage businesses to adapt or face problems in the future. problems in the future. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) Alibaba founder Jack Ma: AI will cause people ‘more pain than happiness’ The billionaire said key social conflict will be the rise of artificial intelligence and longer life expectancy, which will lead to aging workforce fighting for fewer jobs Olivia Solon in San Francisco @oliviasolon email Mon 24 Apr ‘17 21. 00 BST Last modified on Mon 24 Apr ‘17 22. 48 BST This article is 9 months old Artificial intelligence and other technologies will cause people “more pain than happiness” over the next three decades, according to Jack Ma, the billionaire chairman and founder of Alibaba. “Social conflicts in the next three decades will have an impact on all sorts of industries and walks of life,” said Ma, speaking at an entrepreneurship conference in China about the job disruptions that would be created by automation and the internet. A key social conflict will be the rise of artificial intelligence and longer life expectancy, which will lead to an aging workforce fighting for fewer jobs. AI is getting brainier: when will the machines leave us in the dust? | Ian Sample Read more Ma, who is usually more optimistic in his presentations, issued the warning to encourage businesses to adapt or face problems in the future. He said that 15 years ago he gave hundreds of speeches warning about the impact of e-commerce on traditional retailers and few people listened because he wasn’t as well-known as he is now. “Machines should only do what humans cannot,” he said. “Only in this way can we have the opportunities to keep machines as working partners with humans, rather than as replacements. ” Even so, Ma acknowledged that in the future companies will likely be run by robots. Machines should only do what humans cannot Jack Ma “Thirty years later, the Time magazine cover for the best CEO of the year very likely will be a robot,” he said. Robots can make calculations more quickly and rationally than humans, Ma added, and won’t be swayed by emotions, for example by getting angry at competitors. Leaders who don’t understand that cloud computing and artificial intelligence are essential for business should identify young people in their companies to explain it to them, he said. His comments echo a number of studies suggesting that automation will eliminate jobs, including a Forrester study that suggested 6% of all jobs in the US would be eliminated by 2021. The job displacement will start with customer service representatives and eventually move to truck and taxi drivers, the report read. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants, such as Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now, as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs, such as self-driving cars. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence survey finds UK public broadly optimistic Support for ‘machine learning’ depended on what it would be used for, with mass unemployment among main fears Ipsos Mori found a two-thirds of the UK public believe the benefits of machine learning outweighed the risks or were balanced. of machine learning outweighed the risks or were balanced. Photograph: Nic Delves-Broughton/PA Artificial intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence survey finds UK public broadly optimistic Support for ‘machine learning’ depended on what it would be used for, with mass unemployment among main fears Ian Sample Science editor @iansample Tue 25 Apr ‘17 00. 01 BST Last modified on Tue 25 Apr ‘17 00. 02 BST This article is 9 months old Apart from fears of mass unemployment, accidents with machinery, restrictions on freedom, increased economic inequality and a devalued human experience, the public are broadly optimistic about the arrival of artificial intelligence, according to one of the first surveys of British opinions about the technology. Research by the polling firm Ipsos Mori found nearly a third of people believe the risks of “machine learning” outweigh the benefits, while 36% believe the risks and benefits are balanced. Machine learning is technology that underpins internet searches, recommendations on Amazon and Netflix, and voice recognition on smartphones. The findings provide a snapshot of UK views on what some researchers regard as the early stages of a major revolution that is poised to affect almost every aspect of life. The research suggests that – while people are generally positive about the technology for improving medical treatments, guiding driverless cars and personalising education – substantial concerns remain. With machine learning, computers do not churn out answers by following hard and fast rules that are programmed into them. Instead, they are fed huge amounts of data from which they learn through trial and error. Alibaba billionaire says AI will cause people ‘more pain than happiness’ Read more For example, computers have been given thousands of images of healthy and cancerous cells and told to learn the difference. They can then tell whether a biopsy from a patient is benign or requires treatment. The Ipsos Mori rsurvey found support for machine learning depended on what it would be used for. It discovered little enthusiasm for military robots that use the technology to make their own decisions, with only 22% believing the benefits outweighed the risks. People were also wary of computers that learned to play the stock market, with only 18% in favour. The findings were drawn from face-to-face interviews with 978 people chosen to be representative of the UK population, along with discussions at public meetings in Birmingham, Huddersfield, London and Oxford, and questions put to a community of 244 people online. The survey found support for facial recognition systems that learn to recognise criminals’ faces from CCTV footage, with 61% believing the benefits outweighed the risks. Software that recognises speech and answers questions, such as that found on most smartphones, was also seen as beneficial. Why are we reluctant to trust robots? Read more But people were more wary of other uses of machine learning. Driverless cars have the potential to reduce traffic accidents substantially, and while some welcomed vehicles programmed to drive at 20mph in 20mph zones, others were sceptical. One person who took part in the Birmingham event said: “There would be twice as many accidents because driverless cars would follow the Highway Code and drivers don’t. The transition period would be really dangerous. We’d have to give everyone driverless cars all at once. ” The research was commissioned for the Royal Society for a major report published on Tuesday on the “power and promise of computers that learn by example”. The report describes the recent rapid progress that computer scientists have made in the field and the possibility of “transformative advances” in the next five to 10 years. “There is huge potential for machine learning to impact in very positive ways on much of what we do as individuals and as industry and as a society. But there are challenges,” said Peter Donnelly, a statistician and geneticist at Oxford University, who led the group that produced the report. According to the report: “Society needs to give urgent consideration to the ways in which the benefits from machine learning can be shared across society. ” Robots are racist and sexist. Just like the people who created them | Laurie Penny Read more Among other concerns in the Ipsos Mori research were fears of being replaced by computers. One person who took part in the London event said: “Everybody here is thinking, ‘Well, I’m going to lose my job. ’” The primary concern was that machine learning could cause unemployment on a mass scale, the researchers found. Others feared computers could diminish the human experience – by churning out poetry for example, or making it impossible to go for a Sunday drive. More still raised concerns that people would become too reliant on computers and lose key skills, such as the ability to remember information, read maps and so on. According to the research, some computer systems were already on the verge of fomenting rebellion. Told of a computer system that might try to rein in people who overspend, one participant in Oxford said: “I feel like I’d want to buy the shoes just to spite it. ” The Royal Society report raises a host of other challenges that will come with the arrival of artificial intelligence. Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future​: ‘They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants' Read more Artificial intelligence systems can pick up biases from training data, making them racist and sexist, and cannot always explain their decisions, both issues that scientists must work on, the report states. Meanwhile, tech firms are poaching some key UK academics, leaving universities struggling to keep the best minds. Economists see huge economic growth coming from machine learning – but without more companies, and skilled people to work for them, the profits could flow to a handful of major corporations. “Society needs to think about these issues,” said Donnelly. “We need an open and nuanced discussion to work out what we can do to help ameliorate some of these worries, and what we want to insist on. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. 2CScience] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Robots Millions of UK workers at risk of being replaced by robots, study says Workers in wholesale and retail sectors at highest risk from breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence, PwC report finds Army of robots increasingly being used for low-skill tasks. Photograph: Alamy Robots Millions of UK workers at risk of being replaced by robots, study says Workers in wholesale and retail sectors at highest risk from breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence, PwC report finds Larry Elliott Economics editor Fri 24 Mar ‘17 07. 30 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 17. 52 GMT This article is 10 months old More than 10 million UK workers are at high risk of being replaced by robots within 15 years as the automation of routine tasks gathers pace in a new machine age. A report by the consultancy firm PwC found that 30% of jobs in Britain were potentially under threat from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). In some sectors half the jobs could go. The report predicted that automation would boost productivity and create fresh job opportunities, but it said action was needed to prevent the widening of inequality that would result from robots increasingly being used for low-skill tasks. PwC said 2. 25 million jobs were at high risk in wholesale and retailing – the sector that employs most people in the UK – and 1. 2 million were under threat in manufacturing, 1. 1 million in administrative and support services and 950,000 in transport and storage. Jobs at risk from artificial intelligence The report said the biggest impact would be on workers who had left school with GCSEs or lower, and that there was an argument for government intervention in education, lifelong learning and job matching to ensure the potential gains from automation were not concentrated in too few hands. Some form of universal basic income might also be considered. Jon Andrews, the head of technology and investments at PwC, said: “There’s no doubt that AI and robotics will rebalance what jobs look like in the future, and that some are more susceptible than others. “What’s important is making sure that the potential gains from automation are shared more widely across society and no one gets left behind. Responsible employers need to ensure they encourage flexibility and adaptability in their people so we are all ready for the change. “In the future, knowledge will be a commodity so we need to shift our thinking on how we skill and upskill future generations. Creative and critical thinking will be highly valued, as will emotional intelligence. ” Education and health and social care were the two sectors seen as least threatened by robots because of the high proportion of tasks seen as hard to automate. Because women tend to work in sectors that require a higher level of education and social skills, PwC said they would be less in jeopardy of losing their jobs than men, who were more likely to work in sectors such as manufacturing and transportation. Thirty-five per cent of male jobs were identified as being at high risk against 26% of female jobs. The PwC study is the latest to assess the potential for job losses and heightened inequality from AI. Robert Schiller, a Nobel-prize winning US economist, has said the scale of the workplace transformation set to take place in the coming decades should lead to consideration of a “robot tax” to support those machines make redundant. John Hawksworth, PwC’s chief economist, said: “A key driver of our industry-level estimates is the fact that manual and routine tasks are more susceptible to automation, while social skills are relatively less automatable. That said, no industry is entirely immune from future advances in robotics and AI. “Automating more manual and repetitive tasks will eliminate some existing jobs but could also enable some workers to focus on higher value, more rewarding and creative work, removing the monotony from our day jobs. “By boosting productivity – a key UK weakness over the past decade – and so generating wealth, advances in robotics and AI should also create additional jobs in less automatable parts of the economy as this extra wealth is spent or invested. ” He added that the UK employment rate of just under 75% was at its highest level since modern records began in 1971, suggesting that advances in digital and other labour-saving technologies had been accompanied by job creation. He said it was not clear that the future would be different from the past in terms of how automation would affect overall employment rates. The fact that it was technically possible to replace a worker with a robot did not mean it was economically attractive to do so and would depend on the relative cost and productivity of machines compared with humans, Hawksworth said. PwC expects this balance to shift in favour of robots as they become cheaper to produce over the coming decades. “In addition, legal and regulatory hurdles, organisational inertia and legacy systems will slow down the shift towards AI and robotics even where this becomes technically and economically feasible. And this may not be a bad thing if it gives existing workers and businesses more time to adapt to this brave new world,” he said. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robots can predict the future … and so can you Topics more on this story Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN United Nations opens new centre in Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and second-guess threats Published: 27 Sep 2017 Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger The triumph of ‘digital Taylorism’ means that many jobs in the modern economy have been sapped of their humanity, write professors Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger Published: 25 Sep 2017 Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Published: 19 Sep 2017 Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation John Cryan told conference in Frankfurt that accountants could be replaced by machines, while also saying that Frankfurt is ideally placed to benefit from Brexit Published: 6 Sep 2017 Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation + Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC Published: 4 Sep 2017 Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC + The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites Published: 23 Aug 2017 The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites + Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class Larry Elliott Published: 20 Aug 2017 Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class + Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet Published: 15 Aug 2017 Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion AI is getting brainier: when will the machines leave us in the dust? Ian Sample Ian Sample To usher in the ‘Singularity’ – when computers match human intelligence – superintelligent one trick ponies like DeepMind must become jacks of all trades Google DeepMind challenge match between AI program AlphaGo and the South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol. South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion AI is getting brainier: when will the machines leave us in the dust? Ian Sample Ian Sample To usher in the ‘Singularity’ – when computers match human intelligence – superintelligent one trick ponies like DeepMind must become jacks of all trades Contact author @iansample Wed 15 Mar ‘17 15. 43 GMT Last modified on Wed 15 Mar ‘17 16. 26 GMT The road to human-level artificial intelligence is long and wildly uncertain. Most AI programs today are one-trick ponies. They can recognise faces, the sound of your voice, translate foreign languages, trade stocks and play chess. They may well have got the trick down pat, but one-trick ponies they remain. Google’s DeepMind program, AlphaGo, can beat the best human players at Go, but it hasn’t a clue how to play tiddlywinks, shove ha’penny, or tell one end of a horse from the other. Google’s DeepMind makes AI program that can learn like a human Read more Humans, on the other hand, are not specialists. Our forte is versatility. What other animal comes close as the jack of all trades? Put humans in a situation where a problem must be solved and, if they can leave their smartphones alone for a moment, they will draw on experience to work out a solution. The skill, already evident in preschool children, is the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence. If it can be distilled and encoded in software, then thinking machines will finally deserve the name. DeepMind’s latest AI, unveiled yesterday, has cleared one of the important hurdles on the way to human-level AGI – artificial general intelligence. Most AIs can perform only one trick because to learn a second, they must forget the first. The problem, known as “catastrophic forgetting”, occurs because the neural network at the heart of the AI overwrites old lessons with new ones. DeepMind solved the problem by mirroring how the human brain works. When we learn to ride a bike, we consolidate the skill. We can go off and learn the violin, the capitals of the world and the finer rules of gaga ball, and still cycle home for tea. This program’s AI mimics the process by making the important lessons of the past hard to overwrite in the future. Instead of forgetting old tricks, it draws on them to learn new ones. Because it retains past skills, the new AI can learn one task after another. When it was set to work on the Atari classics – Space Invaders, Breakout, Defender and the rest – it learned to play seven out of 10 as well as a human can. But it did not score as well as an AI devoted to each game would have done. Like us, the new AI is more the jack of all trades, the master of none. There is no doubt that thinking machines, if they ever truly emerge, would be powerful and valuable. Researchers talk of pointing them at the world’s greatest problems: poverty, inequality, climate change and disease. They could also be a danger. Serious AI researchers, and plenty of prominent figures who know less of the art, have raised worries about the moment when computers surpass human intelligence. Looming on the horizon is the “Singularity”, a time when super-AIs improve at exponential speed, causing such technological disruption that poor, unenhanced humans are left in the dust. These superintelligent computers needn’t hate us to destroy us. As the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has pointed out, a superintelligence might dispose of us simply because it is too devoted to making paper clips to look out for human welfare. Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so… Read more In January the Future of Life Institute held a conference on “Beneficial AI” in Asilomar, California. When it came to discussing threats to humanity, researchers pondered what might be the AI equivalents of nuclear control rods, the sort that are plunged into nuclear reactors to rein in runaway reactions. At the end of the meeting, the organisers released a set of guiding principles for the safe development of AI. While the latest work on DeepMind edges scientists towards AGI, it does not bring it, or the Singularity, meaningfully closer. There is far more to the general intelligence that humans possess than the ability to learn continually. The DeepMind AI can draw on skills it learned on one game to play another. But it cannot generalise from one learned skill to another. It cannot ponder a new task, reflect on its capabilities, and work out how best to apply them. The futurist Ray Kurzweil sees the Singularity rolling in 30 years from now. But for other scientists, human-level AI is not inevitable. It is still a matter of if, not when. Emulating human intelligence is a mammoth task. What scientists need are good ideas, and no one can predict when inspiration will strike. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN United Nations opens new centre in Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and second-guess threats Published: 27 Sep 2017 Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger The triumph of ‘digital Taylorism’ means that many jobs in the modern economy have been sapped of their humanity, write professors Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger Published: 25 Sep 2017 Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Published: 19 Sep 2017 Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation John Cryan told conference in Frankfurt that accountants could be replaced by machines, while also saying that Frankfurt is ideally placed to benefit from Brexit Published: 6 Sep 2017 Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation + Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC Published: 4 Sep 2017 Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC + The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites Published: 23 Aug 2017 The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites + Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class Larry Elliott Published: 20 Aug 2017 Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class + Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet Published: 15 Aug 2017 Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. s] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Science Google’s DeepMind makes AI program that can learn like a human Program brings artificial general intelligence a step closer by using previous knowledge to solve fresh problems The DeepMind AI mirrors the learning brain in a simple way: it reuses what it has learned and applies it to solve new tasks. reuses what it has learned and applies it to solve new tasks. Photograph: DeepMind Science Google’s DeepMind makes AI program that can learn like a human Program brings artificial general intelligence a step closer by using previous knowledge to solve fresh problems Ian Sample Science editor @iansample Tue 14 Mar ‘17 17. 27 GMT Last modified on Tue 28 Nov ‘17 03. 44 GMT This article is 10 months old Researchers have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks in artificial intelligence with a program that can learn one task after another using skills it acquires on the way. Developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind, the program has taken on a range of different tasks and performed almost as well as a human. Crucially, and uniquely, the AI does not forget how it solved past problems, and uses the knowledge to tackle new ones. The AI is not capable of the general intelligence that humans draw on when they are faced with new challenges; its use of past lessons is more limited. But the work shows a way around a problem that had to be solved if researchers are ever to build so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) machines that match human intelligence. “If we’re going to have computer programs that are more intelligent and more useful, then they will have to have this ability to learn sequentially,” said James Kirkpatrick at DeepMind. The ability to remember old skills and apply them to new tasks comes naturally to humans. A regular rollerblader might find ice skating a breeze because one skill helps the other. But recreating this ability in computers has proved a huge challenge for AI researchers. AI programs are typically one trick ponies that excel at one task, and one task only. AI can win at poker: but as computers get smarter, who keeps tabs on their ethics? Read more The problem arises because of the way AIs tend to work. Most AIs are based on programs called neural networks that learn how to perform tasks, such as playing chess or poker, through countless rounds of trial and error. But once a neural network is trained to play chess, it can only learn another game later by overwriting its chess-playing skills. It suffers from what AI researchers call “catastrophic forgetting”. Without the ability to build one skill on another, AIs will never learn like people, or be flexible enough to master fresh problems the way humans can. “Humans and animals learn things one after the other and it’s a crucial factor which allows them to learn continually and to build upon their previous knowledge,” said Kirkpatrick. To build the new AI, the researchers drew on studies from neuroscience which show that animals learn continually by preserving brain connections that are known to be important for skills learned in the past. The lessons learned in hiding from prey are crucial for survival, and mice would not last long if the know-how was erased by the skills needed to find food. Illustration of the learning process for two tasks using EWC Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration of the learning process for two tasks using the new AI program. Photograph: DeepMind The DeepMind AI mirrors the learning brain in a simple way. Before it moves from one task to another, it works out which connections in its neural network have been the most important for the tasks it has learned so far. It then makes these harder to change as it learns the next skill. “If the network can reuse what it has learned then it will do,” said Kirkpatrick. The researchers put the AI through its paces by letting it play 10 classic Atari games, including Breakout, Space Invaders and Defender, in random order. They found that after several days on each game, the AI was as good as a human player at typically seven of the games. Without the new memory consolidation approach, the AI barely learned to play one of them. In watching the AI at play, the scientists noticed some interesting strategies. For instance, when it played Enduro, a car racing game that takes place through the daytime, at night, and in snowy conditions, the AI treated each as a different task. Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how the new AI solved problems with skills it had learned in the past. But it is not clear whether drawing on past skills made the AI perform better. While the program learned to play different games, it did not master each one as well as a dedicated AI would have. “We have demonstrated that it can learn tasks sequentially, but we haven’t shown that it learns them better because it learns them sequentially,” Kirkpatrick said. “There’s still room for improvement. ” Seven reasons why grown ups should play more video games Read more One reason the AI did not nail each game was that it sometimes failed to appreciate how important certain connections were for its playing strategy. “We know that sequential learning is important, but we haven’t got to the next stage yet, which is to demonstrate the kind of learning that humans and animals can do. That is still a way off. But we know that one thing that was considered to be a big block is not insurmountable,” Kirkpatrick said. “We are still a really long way from general-purpose artificial intelligence and there are many research challenges left to solve,” he added. “One key part of the puzzle is building systems that can learn to tackle new tasks and challenges while retaining the abilities that they have already learnt. This research is an early step in that direction, and could in time help us build problem-solving systems that can learn more flexibly and efficiently. ” Peter Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, called the work “extremely nice”. He said that for computers to achieve AGI, they will need to learn how one task relates to another, so that past skills can efficiently be brought on bear on new problems. Alan Winfield, at the Bristol Robotics Lab at the University of the West of England said the work was “wonderful”, but added: “I don’t believe it brings us significantly closer to AGI, since this work does not, nor does it claim to, show us how to generalise from one learned capability to another. Something you and I were able to do effortlessly as children. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Google's DeepMind plans bitcoin-style health record tracking for hospitals Tech company’s health subsidiary planning digital ledger based on blockchain to let hospitals, the NHS and eventually patients track personal data Published: 9 Mar 2017 Google's DeepMind plans bitcoin-style health record tracking for hospitals AI can win at poker: but as computers get smarter, who keeps tabs on their ethics? Artificial intelligence is fast at learning games, but applied to wider society it can have troubling outcomes Published: 5 Feb 2017 AI can win at poker: but as computers get smarter, who keeps tabs on their ethics? Whatever happened to the DeepMind AI ethics board Google promised? When the search giant bought the artificial intelligence company, part of the deal was setting up an ethics board. Three years on, where is it? Published: 26 Jan 2017 Whatever happened to the DeepMind AI ethics board Google promised? The Guardian view on AI in the NHS: not the revolution you are looking for Editorial: Computer systems may not replace doctors or nurses. But even to replace support staff would be a huge change Published: 6 Jan 2017 The Guardian view on AI in the NHS: not the revolution you are looking for + No one can read what’s on the cards for artificial intelligence John Naughton Published: 29 Jan 2017 No one can read what’s on the cards for artificial intelligence + Labour calls for closer scrutiny of tech firms and their algorithms Published: 18 Dec 2016 Labour calls for closer scrutiny of tech firms and their algorithms + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Google DeepMind and UCLH collaborate on AI-based radiotherapy treatment Published: 30 Aug 2016 Google DeepMind and UCLH collaborate on AI-based radiotherapy treatment most viewed back to top All rights reserved. chnology%2CWorld+news] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Robots Robots won't just take our jobs – they'll make the rich even richer Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic Instead of making it possible to create more wealth with less labor, automation might make it possible to create more wealth without labor. labor, automation might make it possible to create more wealth without labor. Photograph: Paul Hanna/Reuters Robots Robots won't just take our jobs – they'll make the rich even richer Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic Ben Tarnoff Ben Tarnoff in San Francisco @bentarnoff Thu 2 Mar ‘17 11. 00 GMT Last modified on Thu 2 Mar ‘17 15. 10 GMT Should robots pay taxes? It may sound strange, but a number of prominent people have been asking this question lately. As fears about the impact of automation grow, calls for a “robot tax” are gaining momentum. Earlier this month, the European parliament considered one for the EU. Benoît Hamon, the French Socialist party presidential candidate who is often described as his country’s Bernie Sanders, has put a robot tax in his platform. Even Bill Gates recently endorsed the idea. The proposals vary, but they share a common premise. As machines and algorithms get smarter, they’ll replace a widening share of the workforce. A robot tax could raise revenue to retrain those displaced workers, or supply them with a basic income. Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says Read more The good news is that the robot apocalypse hasn’t arrived just yet. Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn’t happening on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an egalitarian utopia by comparison. The real threat posed by robots isn’t that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps Elon Musk up at night – it’s that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful policy tool for averting this scenario. But it’s a good starting point for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious political problem – one that demands a serious political solution. Automation isn’t new. In the late 16th century, an English inventor developed a knitting machine known as the stocking frame. By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. The real threat . . . is that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become unlivable So far, however, this phenomenon hasn’t produced extreme unemployment. That’s because automation can create jobs as well as destroy them. One recent example is bank tellers: ATMs began to appear in the 1970s, but the total number of tellers has actually grown since then. As ATMs made it cheaper to run a branch, banks opened more branches, leading to more tellers overall. The job description has changed –today’s tellers spend more time selling financial services than dispensing cash – but the jobs are still there. What’s different this time is the possibility that technology will become so sophisticated that there won’t be anything left for humans to do. What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage? While the current rhetoric around artificial intelligence is overhyped, there have been meaningful advances over the past several years. And it’s not inconceivable that much bigger breakthroughs are on the horizon. Instead of merely transforming work, technology might begin to eliminate it. Instead of making it possible to create more wealth with less labor, automation might make it possible to create more wealth without labor. A fully automated economy would make workers not just redundant, but powerless. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A fully automated economy would make workers not just redundant, but powerless. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images What’s so bad about wealth without labor? It depends on who owns the wealth. Under capitalism, wages are how workers receive a portion of what they produce. That portion has always been small, relative to the rewards that flow to the owners of capital. And over the past several decades, it’s gotten smaller: the share of the national income that goes to wages has been steadily shrinking, while the share that goes to capital has been growing. Technology has made workers more productive, but the profits have trickled up, not down. Productivity increased by median worker went up by only 10. 7%. As bad as this is, mass automation threatens to make it much worse. If you think inequality is a problem now, imagine a world where the rich can get richer all by themselves. Capital liberated from labor means not merely the end of work, but the end of the wage. And without the wage, workers lose their only access to wealth – not to mention their only means of survival. They also lose their primary source of social power. So long as workers control the point of production, they can shut it down. The strike is still the most effective weapon workers have, even if they rarely use it any more. A fully automated economy would make them not just redundant, but powerless. If you think inequality is a problem now, imagine a world where the rich can get richer all by themselves Meanwhile, robotic capital would enable elites to completely secede from society. From private jets to private islands, the rich already devote a great deal of time and expense to insulating themselves from other people. But even the best fortified luxury bunker is tethered to the outside world, so long as capital needs labor to reproduce itself. Mass automation would make it possible to sever this link. Equipped with an infinite supply of workerless wealth, elites could seal themselves off in a gated paradise, leaving the unemployed masses to rot. If that scenario isn’t bleak enough, consider the possibility that mass automation could lead not only to the impoverishment of working people, but to their annihilation. In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase speculates that the economically redundant hordes outside the gates would only be tolerated for so long. After all, they might get restless – and that’s a lot of possible pitchforks. “What happens if the masses are dangerous but are no longer a working class, and hence of no value to the rulers? ” Frase writes. “Someone will eventually get the idea that it would be better to get rid of them. ” He gives this future an appropriately frightening name: “exterminism”, a world defined by the “genocidal war of the rich against the poor”. The intelligence explosion: how do you stop a robot from turning evil? – original drama video Read more These dystopias may sound like science fiction, but they’re perfectly plausible given our current trajectory. The technology around robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without substantive political change, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic for most people. That’s why the recent rumblings about a robot tax are worth taking seriously. They offer an opportunity to develop the political response to mass automation now, before it’s too late. When I asked the prominent leftwing thinker Matt Bruenig for his thoughts, he explained that whatever we do, we shouldn’t try to discourage automation. “The problem with robots is not the manufacturing and application of them – that’s actually good for productivity,” he told me. “The problem is that they are owned by the wealthy, which means that the income that flows to the robots go out to a small slice of wealthy people. ” Job-killing robots are good, in other words, so long as the prosperity they produce is widely distributed. An Oxfam report released earlier this year revealed that the eight richest men in the world own as much wealth as half the human race. Imagine what those numbers will look like if automation accelerates. At some point, a handful of billionaires could control close to one hundred percent of society’s wealth. Then, perhaps, the idea that wealth should be owned by the many, rather than monopolized by the few, won’t seem so radical, and we can undertake a bit of sorely needed redistribution – before robot capitalism kills us all. Topics more on this story Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN United Nations opens new centre in Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and second-guess threats Published: 27 Sep 2017 Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger The triumph of ‘digital Taylorism’ means that many jobs in the modern economy have been sapped of their humanity, write professors Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger Published: 25 Sep 2017 Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Published: 19 Sep 2017 Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation John Cryan told conference in Frankfurt that accountants could be replaced by machines, while also saying that Frankfurt is ideally placed to benefit from Brexit Published: 6 Sep 2017 Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation + Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC Published: 4 Sep 2017 Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC + The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites Published: 23 Aug 2017 The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites + Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class Larry Elliott Published: 20 Aug 2017 Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class + Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet Published: 15 Aug 2017 Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ial+intelligence+%28AI%29] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Guardian sustainable business Transport Automated holidays: how AI is affecting the travel industry Travel companies are investing in artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean fewer jobs for humans Airlines logos last year, but online bookings are becoming the norm. Photograph: Alamy Guardian sustainable business Transport Automated holidays: how AI is affecting the travel industry Travel companies are investing in artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean fewer jobs for humans Senay Boztas Fri 17 Feb ‘17 06. 00 GMT Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 01 GMT First you could book a flight online. Then came online travel agents. And now you might check in for your hotel via mobile, a computer could set the price, while a chatbot answers your queries. Some travel experts expect the first autonomous cargo flights to start within several years, while big data analysis is on the rise at internet-based firms like Expedia, Lastminute. com and Skyscanner. “We have to reinvent the place of the man in the system,” says Fabrice Otaño, chief data officer at AccorHotels group. “Artificial intelligence can replace some existing jobs, and managers have to take care of what the next step for people is, that is relevant in the data world. We have to evolve our revenue managers into more data jobs, balancing old jobs with new school jobs in business analytics. ” So far, at least, that has not meant a decline in jobs. According to the most recent EU statistics, although overall employment declined from 2008 to 2014, it rose in tourist accommodation and selected tourism industries: now tourism employs just over 12 million people within the EU. Companies like IBM, whose Watson tool is helping the travel company Thomson trial a smart chatbot for its customers’ holiday searches, pledge to “augment, not replace, human intelligence”. Solar-powered trains are closer to reality than we might think Read more This is also the view at Skyscanner. The airfare comparison site acquired by Chinese firm Ctrip International for £1. 4bn, may have a dedicated “Bots” squad, but it doesn’t believe computing power will replace human roles or travel reviews. travel,” says a Skyscanner spokeswoman. “We’ve always believed that people would go from click-type-tap style searching to a conversational format. Interestingly, those using our bots treat them in a very ‘human’ way – ask for the bot’s name, send an emoji or sticker of appreciation. ” More investment in AI is a business necessity for hotels, according to Tim Gunstone, managing director of EyeforTravel, who recently spoke gone up,” he says. “This is what is driving hoteliers. The industry needs to cut costs and focus on loyalty. ” Gunstone believes AI can boost loyalty by helping hoteliers know more about their customers, in order to better meet their needs and win repeat business. We will see “technological unemployment”, says Professor Ryan Abbott, professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey, but if a chatbot gives hotel recommendations based on reviews and your preferences, rather than plugging a relative’s place, maybe that’s for the best, “People who have been rendered obsolete by technology have always gone on to find new and better jobs,” he adds. “When machines outperform people in every way, that’s another problem – but that’s a long way in the future. ” A travel agent Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not everyone is predicting the demise of travel agents, and ABTA says many roles in the industry remain unaffected by technological advances. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images At the bottom of the travel market, computing is about automation and saving money, but at the top end, AI is being used to personalise experiences – delivered by people. A waiter at a luxury hotel, for instance, could use information on you to predict what kind of drinks you like and recommend something from the menu. Or reception staff, with data on your spa use, might propose a particular service. Age of automation: what if more work is the problem, not the solution? Read more But not everyone is predicting the demise of travel agents. A spokesperson for ABTA, which represents UK travel agents and tour operators, says almost a fifth of Brits still booked a holiday in a travel store last year and that although artificial intelligence can help with targeted marketing, “it can be hard to beat the human touch”. People quickly get frustrated if a chatbot isn’t responding accurately, for a start. “Many roles in the travel industry remain unaffected by technological advances,” adds a spokesperson. “Cooks are needed to cook, beds need to be made, and the personal experience of a destination expert is hard to beat. ” ABTA warns, too, that travel companies need to avoid breaching customers’ privacy when they gather data on them: this is something that AccorHotels makes specific pledges to respect, beyond European legislation, which states that personal data can only be gathered legally under strict conditions and must be protected against misuse. Gunstone also cautions that regulators could be catching up with computer-based intelligence. “US antitrust laws are on the lookout for AI-created price fixing,” he warns. Meanwhile, automation won’t work everywhere. Ian Yeoman, visiting professor at the European Tourism Futures Institute, says we won’t see automated hotels until closer to the end of this century, but even then it won’t be worldwide. “In many third-world destinations, the cost of labour is quite cheap so there’s no incentive for owners and operators to invest,” he says. “You would probably have sabotage and riots. These countries also don’t have a strong technological infrastructure as back up – where you have failure, you could have catastrophic failure. ” Sign up to be a Guardian Sustainable Business member and get more stories like this direct to your inbox every week. You can also follow us on Twitter. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. echnology] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion The Observer view on artificial intelligence Observer editorial Superintelligent computers may grab the headlines, but the humble algorithm is a significant threat to humanity Libratus beats poker players world’s best poker players in Pittsburgh last week. Photograph: Carnegie Mellon University Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion The Observer view on artificial intelligence Observer editorial Superintelligent computers may grab the headlines, but the humble algorithm is a significant threat to humanity Sun 5 Feb ‘17 00. 05 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 03. 36 GMT First it was checkers (draughts to you and me), then chess, then Jeopardy! , then Go and now poker. One after another, these games, all of which require significant amounts of intelligence and expertise if they are to be played well, have fallen to the technology we call artificial intelligence (AI). And as each of these milestones is passed, speculation about the prospect of “superintelligence” (the attainment by machines of human-level capabilities) reaches a new high before the media caravan moves on to its next obsession du jour. Never mind that most leaders in the field regard the prospect of being supplanted by super-machines as exceedingly distant (one has famously observed that he is more concerned about the dangers of overpopulation on Mars): the solipsism of human nature means that even the most distant or implausible threat to our uniqueness as a species bothers us. The public obsession with the existential risks of artificial superintelligence is, however, useful to the tech industry because it distracts attention from the type of AI that is now part of its core business. This is “weak AI” and is a combination of big data and machine-learning – algorithms that ingest huge volumes of data and extract patterns and actionable predictions from them. This technology is already ubiquitous in the search engines and apps we all use every day. And the trend is accelerating: the near-term strategy of every major technology company can currently be summarised as “AI Everywhere”. The big data/machine-learning combination is powerful and enticing. It can and often does lead to the development of more useful products and services – search engines that can make intelligent guesses about what the user is trying to find, movies or products that might be of interest, sources of information that one might sample, connections that one might make and so on. It also enables corporations and organisations to improve efficiency, performance and services by learning from the huge troves of data that they routinely collect but until recently rarely analysed. Human freedoms and options are increasingly influenced by opaque, inscrutable algorithms There’s no question that this is a powerful and important new technology and it has triggered a gadarene stampede of venture and corporate capital. We are moving into what one distinguished legal scholar calls “the black box society”, a world in which human freedoms and options are increasingly influenced by opaque, inscrutable algorithms. Whose names appear on no-fly lists? Who gets a loan or a mortgage? Which prisoners get considered for parole? Which categories of fake news appear in your news feed? What price does Ryanair quote you for that particular flight? Why has your credit rating suddenly – and inexplicably – worsened? In many cases, it may be that these decisions are rational and/or defensible. The trouble is that we have no way of knowing. And yet the black boxes that yield such outcomes are not inscrutable to everyone – just to those who are affected by them. They are perfectly intelligible to the corporations that created and operate them. This means that the move towards an algorithmically driven society also represents a radical power-shift, away from citizens and consumers and towards a smallish number of powerful, pathologically secretive technology companies, whose governing philosophy seems to be that they should know everything about us, but that we should know as little as possible about their operations. What’s even more remarkable is that these corporations are now among the world’s largest and most valuable enterprises. Yet, on the whole, they don’t receive the critical scrutiny their global importance warrants. On the contrary, they get an easier ride from the media than comparable companies in other industries. If the CEO of an oil company, a car manufacturer or a mining corporation were to declare, for example, that his motto was “Don’t Be Evil”, even the most somnolent journalist might raise a sceptical eyebrow. But when some designer-stubbled CEO in a hoodie proclaims his belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, the media yawn tolerantly and omit to notice his company’s marked talent for tax avoidance. This has to stop: transparency is a two-way process. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Science Political science It's time for some messy, democratic discussions about the future of AI With a new set of principles for artificial intelligence, tech pioneers seem to be developing a conscience. Good – but the discussion must include more voices Computers are now beating humans at poker. What’s next for artificial intelligence? artificial intelligence? Photograph: AP Science Political science It's time for some messy, democratic discussions about the future of AI With a new set of principles for artificial intelligence, tech pioneers seem to be developing a conscience. Good – but the discussion must include more voices Jack Stilgoe and Andrew Maynard Jack Stilgoe teaches science policy at UCL. Andrew Maynard leads the risk innovation lab at Arizona State University @JackStilgoe Wed 1 Feb ‘17 17. 35 GMT Last modified on Tue 9 May ‘17 18. 30 BST Today in Washington DC, leading US and UK scientists are meeting to share dispatches from the frontiers of machine learning – an area of research that is creating new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). Their meeting follows the publication of a set of principles for beneficial AI that emerged from a conference earlier this year at a place with an important history. In February 1975, 140 people – mostly scientists, with a few assorted lawyers, journalists and others – gathered at a conference centre on the California coast. A magazine article from the time by Michael Rogers, one of the few journalists allowed in, reported that most of the four days’ discussion was about the scientific possibilities of genetic modification. Two years earlier, scientists had begun using recombinant DNA to genetically modify viruses. The Promethean nature of this new tool prompted scientists to impose a moratorium on such experiments until they had worked out the risks. By the time of the Asilomar conference, the pent-up excitement was ready to burst. It was only towards the end of the conference when a lawyer stood up to raise the possibility of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that the scientists focussed on the task at hand – creating a set of principles to govern their experiments. The 1975 Asilomar meeting is still held up as a beacon of scientific responsibility. However, the story told by Rogers, and subsequently by historians, is of scientists motivated by a desire to head-off top down regulation with a promise of self-governance. Geneticist Stanley Cohen said at the time, ‘If the collected wisdom of this group doesn’t result in recommendations, the recommendations may come from other groups less well qualified’. The mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts was a prominent critic of the biotechnology experiments then taking place in his city. He said, ‘I don’t think these scientists are thinking about mankind at all. I think that they’re getting the thrills and the excitement and the passion to dig in and keep digging to see what the hell they can do’. The concern in 1975 was with safety and containment in research, not with the futures that biotechnology might bring about. A year after Asilomar, Cohen’s colleague Herbert Boyer founded Genentech, one of the first biotechnology companies. Corporate interests barely figured in the conversations of the mainly university scientists. Fast-forward 42 years and it is clear that machine learning, natural language processing and other technologies that come under the AI umbrella are becoming big business. The cast list of the 2017 Asilomar meeting included corporate wunderkinds from Google, Facebook and Tesla as well as researchers, philosophers, and other academics. The group was more intellectually diverse than their 1975 equivalents, but there were some notable absences – no public and their concerns, no journalists, and few experts in the responsible development of new technologies. The principles that came out of the meeting are, at least at first glance, a comforting affirmation that AI should be ‘for the people’, and not to be developed in ways that could cause harm. They promote the idea of beneficial and secure AI, development for the common good, and the importance of upholding human values and shared prosperity. This is good stuff. But it’s all rather Motherhood and Apple Pie: comforting and hard to argue against, but lacking substance. The principles are short on accountability, and there are notable absences, including the need to engage with a broader set of stakeholders and the public. At the early stages of developing new technologies, public concerns are often seen as an inconvenience. In a world in which populism appears to be trampling expertise into the dirt, it is easy to understand why scientists may be defensive. But avoiding awkward public conversations helps nobody. Scientists are more inclined to guess at what the public are worried about than to ask them, which can lead to some serious blind spots – not necessarily in scientific understanding (although this too can occur), but in the direction and nature of research and development. Where troublesome short-term applications are discussed by AI researchers, they are often interpreted in ways that are convenient to engineers. Ethicists, for example, have been quick to see self-driving cars as a test case for their ‘trolley problems’; ethical dilemmas in which a machine is forced to choose between killing, say, a bus queue of pedestrians or its own driver – irrespective of whether this is the most pressing issue for manufacturers, drivers and communities. Looking further into future, AI engineers and philosophers have joined a chorus of concern over the possible folly of a super-intelligence causing a global apocalypse, despite rather long odds on the viability of this scenario. We are seeing an AI echo chamber, in which speculative discussions have taken on a moral significance that far exceeds their social importance, at the expense of more pressing challenges. The reality is that AI is already a thing in the world, enabling and constraining our lives in ways that we barely understand. Over the coming years AI-based technologies are going to impact how we work, travel, communicate, date and buy things. The effective governance of AI urgently needs to get beyond follies and trollies, and the decisions can’t just be taken by a narrow group of experts. There’s a pretty high chance that, if asked, citizens would say they are less concerned about AI ending the world and more interested in how AI could affect their livelihood and security and how the benefits and risks will be distributed. As we’ve found from other technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology, innovation that is responsive to people’s needs requires partnerships across many different stakeholders – including citizens. It demands a sophisticated understanding of the social, economic and environmental landscape around emerging risks and benefits. And it relies on people from all walks of life and areas of expertise having a say in what their collective future will look like. This can get messy. It involves engaging with people who may not see the world the same way. But without such grounded approaches to responsible innovation, the chances of beneficial AI becoming a reality begin to dwindle. The new Asilomar principles are a starting point. But they don’t dig into what is really at stake. And they lack the sophistication and inclusivity that are critical to responsive and responsible innovation. To be fair, the principles’ authors realize this, presenting them as ‘aspirational goals’. But within the broader context of a global society that is faced with living with the benefits and the perils of AI, they should be treated as hypotheses – the start of a conversation around responsible innovation rather than the end. They now need to be democratically tested. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Guardian sustainable business Values-led business How artificial intelligence could help make the insurance industry trustworthy NYC-based Lemonade hopes to reverse the poor reputation of insurance companies by using tech and behavioral science to appeal to younger customers Lemonade recently raised $34m from investors including GV, formerly Google Ventures. Google Ventures. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo Guardian sustainable business Values-led business How artificial intelligence could help make the insurance industry trustworthy NYC-based Lemonade hopes to reverse the poor reputation of insurance companies by using tech and behavioral science to appeal to younger customers Alison Moodie Sat 28 Jan ‘17 15. 00 GMT Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 17. 38 GMT With its complex rules, fine print and lengthy processes, it’s little wonder that the $1. 2tn insurance industry has a poor reputation for trust and customer service. In a recent global survey from accounting firm EY, consumers ranked insurance below banks, car manufacturers, online shopping sites and supermarkets for trustworthiness. A newcomer to the field, New York City-based Lemonade hopes to reverse that reputation by using technology and behavioral science to create a faster and more transparent service. The company is working with Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, to take antagonism out of its relationship with customers. Lemonade set out to create algorithms that make it easy and quick to sign up and approve claims – in minutes rather than days. By automating the service as much as possible, the company, which sells renters and homeowners insurance, hopes to keep costs low. Is an even smaller New York apartment the key to sustainable living? Read more “Lemonade is fast and transparent rather than slow and opaque,” said David Charron, a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. “Their success here will be interesting to watch and may depend on acquiring dissatisfied customers from big insurance companies. ” Lemonade launched its initial service in New York last September and earlier this month filed for a license to 46 other states and the District of Columbia. It recently raised $34m from investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures) and General Catalysts, bringing the total to $60m. To demonstrate transparency, and informed by its work with Ariely, the insurance startup publicizes how it divvies up the premiums in running its service. Lemonade makes money by keeping a flat fee of 20% of a customer’s premium. It sets aside 40% mainly for buying reinsurance from firms such as Lloyd’s of London to cover major claims that exceed what the premiums can cover. The remaining 40% will cover claims, with whatever is left going to a charity of the customer’s choice at the end of the year. The company, which is registered as a public benefit corporation, includes the charity component to show it’s not just about making profits. This practice is unusual because an insurance company usually keeps all the profit or pays dividends to its shareholders or policyholders, said Justin Sydnor, a behavioral economist and associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The charity component also helps to minimize fraudulent claims, said Lemonade CEO and co-founder Daniel Schreiber. “When they have a common cause that they’re raising money for, the thinking is that if they make a fraudulent claim, they aren’t hurting the insurance company but rather the charity or organization they have chosen to give back unclaimed money to,” Schreiber said, adding customers could feel extra guilty if they are raising money to benefit their communities, such as a school library or soccer field. The ease of sign-up appealed to Aviv Gadot, 33, who opted for the company’s basic renters coverage of $5 per month. He didn’t previously buy renters insurance because, he said, dealing with insurance companies required filling out “endless paperwork” and took too much time. He also didn’t trust that insurers would treat him fairly: “Their incentive is to keep my money and prevent me from claiming, since it goes directly to their bottom line. ” Lemonade is part of a trend by insurance companies to improve how they market their services and serve customers online. Berkshire Hathaway, for example, created AirCare, flight insurance that promises immediate payouts for cancellations, delays and baggage loss. Then there’s UK-based Gaggel, which allows friends and family to put cash aside in the event their loved ones damage or lose their mobile phone. These more tech-focused insurance companies raised $2. 6bn in funding last year, according to investment bank Financial Technology Partners. The emphasis on speed and ease of use online also reflects the insurance companies’ desire to attract younger customers. According to a 2014 Swiss Re survey, US consumers under age 44 are more than twice likely to buy life insurance on the internet than those over 65. A similar trend is taking hold in Europe and Latin America. Lemonade declined to disclose the number of customers, but it said that 87% of its customers never bought insurance for their homes before and 81% of them are 25-44 years old. Patagonia, Black Diamond take on Utah officials over public land rights Read more Lemonade is able to screen applicants or claims quickly because its software can quickly pull data and cross-reference information about a particular home or neighborhood from a variety of sources. This reduces the need for the company to ask a lot of information from customers, Sydnor said. The startup created two chatbots based on two of its employees, and it expects its algorithms to learn from interactions with customers to improve service over time. The two employees are available to speak with customers by phone and handle more complex cases. “We only use our claim algorithms to help us reach one single decision: should a claim be handled automatically or not,” said Schreiber. “The algorithms will either pay claims instantly or call in the human to take charge. ” In a quarterly performance review posted online, Lemonade noted that five of the six claims from 2016 required human intervention. But it touted a particular claim was handled completely by a chatbot: “The first time ever that a claim was handled solely by artificial intelligence – from triage, through fraud mitigation and down to the actual payment by wire. Start to finish, without involving us humans, all done by AI Jim! ” A big challenge for Lemonade will come when it faces a flurry of claims from a major natural disaster, Sydnor said. “When you have 100 large claims to process in a town, it may be challenging to meet your customers’ needs with a very small claims-adjuster team,” he added. “On the other hand, there may be ways to improving communications and making initial payments using AI that will make Lemonade faster and more responsive in those times. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) 2016: the year AI came of age Google and Amazon brought AI into the home and DeepMind built a computer that could outsmart humans at Go. Will 2017 hold similar advancements? The world’s top human Go player Lee Sedol reacts before the fourth match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in Seoul, South Korea. Out of five matches, Lee lost 4-1. of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in Seoul, South Korea. Out of five matches, Lee lost 4-1. Photograph: Reuters Artificial intelligence (AI) 2016: the year AI came of age Google and Amazon brought AI into the home and DeepMind built a computer that could outsmart humans at Go. Will 2017 hold similar advancements? Alex Hern Alex Hern @alexhern Wed 28 Dec ‘16 10. 00 GMT Last modified on Sun 16 Jul ‘17 21. 45 BST Over the course of 2016, artificial intelligence made the leap from “science fiction concept” to “almost meaningless buzzword” with alarmingspeed. Everything has AI now. Period-tracking app Flo “uses a neural network approach” to deliver “high period forecast accuracy”; food delivery app Just Eat launched a chatbot that “sees AI integrated into the ordering experience to ensure that customers receive the best, round the clock support and service”; restaurant guide Borsch “uses artificial intelligence to help people discover the yummiest dishes around”. But unlike many buzzwords before it, from “big data” to “blockchain”, artificial intelligence’s transformation into venture capitalist-catnip doesn’t signify the end of anyone serious using the term themselves. In fact, 2017 looks like it could be the most important year yet for the technology: AI will butt up against not only what is possible, but also what is desirable for the first time. Like many futures, the AI revolution feels interminably slow to live through, and will feel like it happened in an instant in hindsight. The first pivotal year was 2011. That was when Apple’s Siri hit iPhones, introducing the world to the first major “virtual assistant”. It was also the year the Google Brain project was instituted: the search engine’s blue-sky research team aimed to address as many tasks as possible through neural network-based learning, the computational technique that has come to define what we mean by artificial intelligence. DeepMind's AlphaGo beating South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol. Facebook Twitter Pinterest DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP Five years on, and neural networks have already begun to enable tech which seemed impossible back then. Google and Apple have applied them to their photo apps to let users search through their pictures for images of “dogs”, “cars” or, in Google’s case, “Christmas”, based on what the algorithms see in the images. That machine vision technology is also the basis of the self-driving car efforts from Google’s sister firm Waymo. Oh, and an entirely different neural network is probably the world’s best player at the ancient boardgame Go. That victory, from Google subsidiary DeepMind, was one of the last remaining milestones for a machine to reach. Go is so complex that, as recently as 2014, many thought it would be another decade until an AI could approach the skill of a human player. That was what made it so appealing for DeepMind to tackle. There’s one remaining milestone that the London-based research lab is interested in chasing, according to co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, and it’s a big one: instant voice-to-voice translation. The company has slowly been assembling the pieces for a while, with Google already rebuilding its translation service around a neural network-based approach, and DeepMind creating a whole new way of synthesising speech it calls WaveNet, but there are still a host of other problems to be overcome before the babel fish becomes a reality. Which is not to say that 2017 won’t be a groundbreaking year for AI. The biggest effect will be the step change in the amount of data which companies such as Google and Amazon have access to. When Google released its voice-controlled, AI-powered smart home device, Google Home, in 2016, it already impressed some with its abilities. But, says Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s natural language understanding projects, that’s only the start. Now that millions of people have Google Home in their living room, the company can analyse every natural language query it starts getting from all of them, giving it far more data to crunch than it could ever get from its testers. “You can start doing machine learning on that,” Pereira told tech site Backchannel. “You can move much faster; you can accelerate the process of getting deeper and broader in understanding. This 2016-to-2017 transition is going to move us from systems that are explicitly taught to ones that implicitly learn. ” This is the story Google wants to tell of machine learning: an acceleration, turning the coming year into an inflection point, the instant that machine learning became good enough to start trusting. Amazon’s Echo Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amazon’s Echo is leading the way in home assistant devices. Photograph: Uncredited/AP It’s certainly one possible outcome of the next year, although it’s not yet clear whether Google will be the one to deliver on it; Amazon has been keeping pace with its own Alexa assistant, for instance, while others including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Baidu have been trumpeting their own machine-learning successes. But the other possibility is that, as machine learning steps out of the shadows and companies ask for ever more data to train their algorithms, the backlash begins. Already, Google faces competition from other companies over how much of your life it wants to manage. That happens implicitly, in the difference between Google Home and Amazon’s Echo: the former integrates tightly with your Google account, reading emails, notes and calendar events to keep up to date with your life, while the latter takes a more hands-off approach, only linking with what it’s told and generally attempting to be responsive, rather than proactive. It also happens more explicitly in the way Apple has decided to weigh in against its rival. The company, freed from the need to data mine everything by its old-fashioned “sell things for money” business model, has been proudly demonstrating approaches to AI which don’t need a central repository of harvested data to learn or work. That includes its machine vision approach, which scans users’ photo libraries on device, rather than on the cloud, and its research into “differential privacy”, a technological approach to machine learning which allows the company to learn from data in aggregate while never having access to the information of specific users. Of course, there is a third option: that neural network-based machine learning will instead prove to be a technology like any other, useful in some areas, useless in others, and eventually doomed to be rendered obsolete in turn by a future innovation. We’re already seeing some of the downsides, in the eternal craving for more data, in the processing power required to actually learn, and in the opacity of the models that result. One day, those downsides will outweigh the up, and the world will move on. But for now, there’s still a world of possibility. Topics most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) Could online tutors and artificial intelligence be the future of teaching? Online maths company has partnered with scientists to identify what makes lessons successful - and to see if AI can be used to improve teaching Ambar (foreground) and Ruwaan during an online maths session at Pakeman primary school. Pakeman primary school. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Artificial intelligence (AI) Could online tutors and artificial intelligence be the future of teaching? Online maths company has partnered with scientists to identify what makes lessons successful - and to see if AI can be used to improve teaching Hannah Devlin Science corespondent @hannahdev Mon 26 Dec ‘16 07. 00 GMT Last modified on Tue 28 Nov ‘17 08. 44 GMT This article is 1 year old Ambar presses her hand to her forehead, nose crinkled in concentration as she considers the question on her screen: how many sevens in 91? The ten-year-old has been grappling with it for about a minute when she smiles: “13! ”. Her tutor responds by posting a large smiley cat picture on her screen – the virtual equivalent of a pat on the back. He is sitting on the other side of the world in an online tutoring centre in India. Ambar, who attends Pakeman primary school in north London, is one of nearly 4,000 primary school children in Britain signed up for weekly one-to-one maths sessions with tutors based in India and Sri Lanka. The lessons, provided by a company called Third Space Learning, are targeted at pupils struggling with maths – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Can technology replace teachers? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Harpreet Purewal Read more From next year, the platform will become one of the first examples of artificial intelligence (AI) software being used to monitor, and ideally improve, teaching. Together with scientists at University College London (UCL), the company has analysed around 100,000 hours of audio and written data from its tutorials, with the goal of identifying what makes a good teacher and a successful lesson. Tom Hooper, the company’s CEO, said: “We’re looking to optimise lessons based on the knowledge we gain. We’ve recorded every lesson that we’ve ever done. By using the data, we’ve been trying to introduce AI to augment the teaching”. Initially, the company’s 300 tutors will receive real-time, automated interventions from the teaching software when it detects that a lesson may be veering off-course. Pupils on the programme have a 45-minute session with the same tutor each week. They communicate through a headset and a shared “whiteboard” (they can’t see each other). The lessons at Pakeman school are tailored to the individual, including visual rewards linked to the child’s interests. Premier League strikers for nearby Arsenal, cute animals and pink, iced doughnuts flash up on the screens of Ambar’s classmates. In addition to the raw audio data, each lesson has various success metrics attached: how many problems completed, how useful the pupil found the session, how the tutor rated it. Using machine learning algorithms to sift through the dataset, the UCL team has started to look for patterns. An early analysis found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that when tutors speak too quickly, the pupil is more likely to lose interest. Leaving sufficient time for the child to respond or pose their own questions was also found to be a factor in the lesson’s success, according to Hooper. These observations are likely to form the basis of the initial prompts that the tutors will receive, probably in the form of messages flashing up on their screen. “We’re going to be drip-feeding it in in relatively simple ways to start with,” said Hooper. As the technology evolves, the interventions could become more sophisticated and the software might play a more active role in teaching, raising questions about the extent to which intelligent software could replace human teachers. Rose Luckin, a professor of learner centred design at University College London, who is collaborating with Third Space Learning on the project, said: “What we are very interested in is the right blend of human and artificial intelligence in the classroom – identifying that sweet spot. ” According to Luckin, AI provides a unique opportunity to assess which teaching strategies are working and to individualise teaching. “It would be able to say, for this child at the moment, Jolly Phonics is working well,” she said. “You would be able to look back over their reading process and see which interventions worked. The potential for the use of AI to make education tractable and visible is huge. ” However, she predicts that the insights gleaned from AI will often be applied by human teachers. “What I’m really concerned about is that people don’t run away with the idea that kids have to be plugged into the computer,” she said. “It’s about so much more than that. ” Hooper agreed that the aim is not to replace teachers with robots. “There’s a slightly dubious conversation about how AI will make humans irrelevant, but it’s not at all about replacing humans,” he said. “Our whole belief is that for children disengaged with the subject, who are lacking in confidence, people is what matter. An algorithm can’t provide that. ” He said he does not expect his tutors, most of whom are science graduates, will be concerned about the automated feedback. “We’ll need to be considerate about it,” he said, adding that it would not be “a bossy algorithm barking orders at people”. Shazli Mahroof, 27, a tutor team leader based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said he was not worried about being replaced by a teaching robot in the near future. “It’s not the computer who is going to teach,” he said. Online students and teachers are no different from the rest of academia Read more The tutors already have one lesson each week assessed by supervisors, and it is fairly obvious, subjectively, when things are progressing well, according to Hooper. “We’re asking ‘how do we promote those teaching events at scale? ’” he said. Companies entering this sphere also need to convince parents and teachers that the data being collected is both secure and will ultimately benefit pupils. A previous data analytics project in New York state schools, run by the company InBloom, collapsed in 2014 after becoming embroiled in privacy concerns. “The whole thing became toxic,” said Luckin. “It’s really important that we do it right. ” At Pakeman primary, it is the last maths session before the Christmas holidays. An infant class in the school hall is rehearsing a performance and the school has an end-of-term feeling in the air, but the atmosphere in the online learning session is one of hushed focus. After finishing the lesson, Ambar said that maths used to make her anxious, but since starting the weekly tutorials in Year 5, she has started enjoying it. “When they give you horrible sums, they help you,” she said. “I was scared to do it, but it was actually fun. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) AI, self-driving cars and cyberwar – the tech trends to watch for in 2017 From a rise in AI and improvements to self-driving cars, to televised eSports and all-out cyberwar, the coming year has it all League of Legends Oceanic Pro League grand final in Brisbane, Australia. Australia. Photograph: Riot Games Artificial intelligence (AI) AI, self-driving cars and cyberwar – the tech trends to watch for in 2017 From a rise in AI and improvements to self-driving cars, to televised eSports and all-out cyberwar, the coming year has it all Alex Hern Alex Hern @alexhern Sun 25 Dec ‘16 12. 00 GMT Last modified on Tue 12 Dec ‘17 11. 53 GMT In some ways, tech in 2017 will be a steady progression from what came before it. Time marches on, and so too does the advance of technology. In other ways, though, it will be just as upended as the rest of the world by the unprecedented disruption that 2016 has left in its wake. Here are the trends to watch out for in the coming year: More AI, less data The artificial intelligence revolution is well and truly upon us, but so far, the biggest players are venerable Silicon Valley titans such as Google, Amazon and Apple. That’s partially because they have the money to hire teams full of PhDs at seven-figure salaries, but it’s also because they have the data. That could change. One of the key areas of research for 2017 is data efficiency: the problem of trying to teach machine-learning systems how to do more, with less. Think about how many times your average three-year-old needs to see a particular animal before they can correctly identify it, compared with the thousands of images a neural network needs to ingest to perform the same basic task. Solving the problem of data efficiency could dramatically open up the industry, letting new startups compete on a level playing field with those who have access to petabytes of customer data. And it could also change what an AI can do for you, letting an assistant become far more sensitive to your personal quirks and foibles, or a photo-tagging service recognise specific locations, objects, or situations. Mostly-self-driving cars Self-driving cars exist on a scale. At one end, you’ll find technologies that are barely more than fancy cruise control: lane-assist features ensure your car doesn’t drift out of lane, while adaptive cruise control will maintain a steady distance from the car in front. At the other end is full automation: a car that can drive from a parking space outside your house to a parking space outside your office with no-one touching the steering wheel, or even sitting in the car at all. The story of 2017 will be car companies racing almost all the way to that final hurdle, but just stopping short. Not only the tech companies, either (although expect Tesla’s own models to lead the way, closely followed by Google’s sister company Waymo’s alliance with Fiat Chrysler). Conventional manufacturers the likes of Nissan and BMW are jumping into the field with both feet, and their systems will only get smarter. And who knows what Apple’s plans are? But don’t expect anyone to make the difficult jump to full self-driving capability any time soon. Not only are the regulatory and liability hurdles immense, but the tech just isn’t there for the vast majority of journeys. There’s a reason Google tested its first ever fully automatic trip in Texas, land of wide lanes, huge highways, and car-centric development. Drop that car in the middle of a busy London backstreet and it won’t do so well. The big question is whether all this automation will actually make things safer. On the one hand, cars don’t get distracted, drunk, or tired, all of which lie at the root of most fatalities on the road. On the other hand, if people are told to supervise a car which mostly drives itself, they tend not to be prepared to take over if it actually does need assistance – a problem that lay behind the first self-driving fatality in May. Cyberwar Let’s not mince words: cyberwar has already begun. If it didn’t start in 2008, when (probably) the Israeli and US intelligence services used the Stuxnet virus to destroy Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and it didn’t start in 2015, when the US Office of Personnel Management was hacked by (probably) China, stealing the personal details of millions of government employees, then it certainly started in 2016, when (probably) Russia hacked in to the Democratic National Congress, exflitrating emails which were released with the intention of altering the outcome of an election. Those “probably”s expose part of the appeal of cyberwar for nation states: attribution is hard, and rock-solid attribution to not just a nation but a chain of command is almost impossible. The incoming US administration is already making aggressive overtures about its desire to get on the attack, which will inevitably also make it a bigger target, according to security expert Hitesh Sheth, head of cybersecurity firm Vectra. “US businesses and the US government should expect an increase in the number and severity of cyber-attacks, led by select nation states and organised political and criminal entities,” he says. The ghost of Christmas data breaches past It feels like data breaches are everywhere. But that’s often not the case; while companies are indeed compromised on a regular basis, modern security practices usually ensure that not much is stolen, and what does get taken isn’t easy to exploit. Instead, the more dangerous trend is old breaches surfacing, like an unexploded second-world-war bomb, to wreak havoc on the present. That’s what happened to Yahoo, twice in one year, when data breaches from 2013 and 2014 resurfaced. The breaches were huge, containing a billion and half a billion accounts respectively, and the information within them was barely secured. Passwords were obfuscated with a standard which has been known to be insecure since 2005, while other info, including security questions, was in plain text. Because data breaches can happen undetected, fixing your cybersecurity in 2016 isn’t just locking the stable door after the horse has bolted; it’s locking the stable door without even realising the horse made its escape years ago. The information in historical breaches has often been traded on the darknet for some time before their existence surfaces, meaning the damage comes in two waves: first, slowly, and then all at once. Meet eSports, the new sports Competitive video gaming is a huge business. In 2016, investment bank GP Bullhound estimated it hit a global audience of over 250 million people, and amassed a total annual revenue of $493m – and in 2017, that’s predicted to more than double, making eSports a billion-dollar sector. The scale of the eSports industry is down to a number of factors, from increased broadband penetration making online multiplayer gaming accessible to most of the world to online streaming allowing budding eSports stars to skip conventional media and go straight to their fans. But it’s now big enough to warp the very industry that spawned it, with major games publishers courting the eSports community from the inception of their latest releases. Blizzard, a Californian company best-known for its online game World of Warcraft, has been one of the leaders in the field, with games including Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch and Hearthstone all having online viewerships in the millions, but the standout success is Riot Games, whose sole title League of Legends had more viewers in its 2015 world championship than the final game of 2016’s NBA Finals. GP Bullhound says the next big wave is going to come from mobile, with games like Clash Royale and Vainglory representing the fastest growing segment of the global $37bn games market. Of course, this might all pass you by: over half of eSports fans are millennials, by far the youngest skew of any group of sports supporters. The great privacy divide The world’s most advanced surveillance operation will shortly be under the direct control of a far-right demagogue who routinely attacks critics on social media and uses the office of US president-elect to bolster his commercial interests. That has left some people worried. As a result, many are re-examining their online privacy, switching to encrypted messaging services, locking down social media accounts, and limiting the amount of information they put online. Signal, an encrypted messaging app recommended by Edward Snowden, saw a huge spike in downloads following Donald Trump’s election, while hundreds of tech workers signed a pledge to never implement the president-elect’s proposed registry of Muslims. At the same time, though, trends in AI and online monetisation have pushed other tech firms to slowly chip away at the amount of privacy their users have, data-mining ever more aspects of their online lives in an effort to offer better services and create smarter software. Google, for instance, will now train a machine-learning system on your photos, read your emails to find useful information to add to your calendar, and save everything you say to it to improve its voice recognition. Over 2017, this divide will only increase: companies like Apple and Signal on the one side, and Facebook and Google on the other. In the end, the market will decide. Are people willing to give up the latest and greatest fruits of machine-learning to limit their exposure to surveillance, or do they not really care about online privacy and want everything as soon as it’s technologically possible? Chinese tech goes west The likes of Foxconn may build the world’s most premium tech, but in the west, Chinese brands are still largely associated with cheap electronics: no-name flat panels and cheap smartphones that spy on you. As for software, the entire country can feel as if it’s seen through analogues to Silicon Valley, from “China’s Google” (Baidu) to “China’s Twitter” (Sina Weibo). But an increasing number of Chinese companies have their eyes set on the richer markets of Europe and America, without giving up on the customer base in their own country. Shenzhen-based OnePlus, for instance, has slowly carved out a niche for itself with its high-quality, low-price range of smartphones, which aim to match the flagships from Apple and Samsung while offering price-sensitive users savings of hundreds of pounds. Huawei, already a fairly well-known brand in the west, is pushing its Honor brand as a way to drop the budget image for a new demographic. And software firms are getting in the game too. Tencent, makers of WeChat (that’s “China’s WhatsApp”, for those playing along at home), is pushing hard into the west, taking on Facebook at its own game. The service is currently most popular with Chinese expats, but it’s clear that Facebook is watching closely: a number of features in Messenger are ripped wholesale from the hugely influential service. Topics most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Guardian sustainable business The new bottom line The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence A $150,000 reward is up for grabs for any data scientist who can write code for facial recognition software that can pinpoint illegal catch on fishing boats A catch of tuna trans-shipped from an illegal, unregistered and unlicensed (IUU) purse seine fishing vessel. As illegal fishing continues to grow, scientists are turning to data and artificial intelligence to help stem the problem. unlicensed (IUU) purse seine fishing vessel. As illegal fishing continues to grow, scientists are turning to data and artificial intelligence to help stem the problem. Photograph: Alex Hofford/AFP/Getty Images Guardian sustainable business The new bottom line The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence A $150,000 reward is up for grabs for any data scientist who can write code for facial recognition software that can pinpoint illegal catch on fishing boats Mary Catherine O'Connor @mcoc Sun 20 Nov ‘16 15. 00 GMT Last modified on Fri 14 Jul ‘17 19. 14 BST Facial recognition software is most commonly known as a tool to help police identify a suspected criminal by using machine learning algorithms to analyze his or her face against a database of thousands or millions of other faces. The larger the database, with a greater variety of facial features, the smarter and more successful the software becomes – effectively learning from its mistakes to improve its accuracy. The government wants more offshore fish farms, but no one is biting Read more Now, this type of artificial intelligence is starting to be used in fighting a specific but pervasive type of crime – illegal fishing. Rather than picking out faces, the software tracks the movement of fishing boats to root out illegal behavior. And soon, using a twist on facial recognition, it may be able to recognize when a boat’s haul includes endangered and protected fish. The latest effort to use artificial intelligence to fight illegal fishing is coming from Virginia-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which launched a contest on Kaggle – a crowdsourcing site based in San Francisco that uses competitions to advance data science –earlier this week. TNC hopes the winning team will write software to identify specific species of fish. The program will run on cameras, called electronic monitors, which are installed on fishing boats and used for documenting the catch. The software will put a marker at each point in the video when a protected fish is hauled in. Inspectors, who currently spend up to six hours manually reviewing a single 10-hour fishing day, will then be able to go directly to those moments and check a fishing crew’s subsequent actions to determine whether they handled the bycatch legally – by making best efforts to return it to the sea unharmed. TNC expects this approach could cut review time by up to 40% and increase the monitoring on a boat. Despite rules that call for government-approved auditors to be stationed on 5% of commercial fishing boats in the Western and Central Pacific, in practice the auditors are found only around 2% of the fishing boats, including tuna long liners. As a result, fishermen sometimes keep protected fish that they hook – including sharks that are killed for their lucrative fins. In the Pacific’s $7bn tuna fishery, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing not only harms fragile fish stocks, it takes an economic toll of up to $1. 5bn. The impact shows up many ways, including lost income for fishermen in the legal marketplace and harm to the tourist economy that sells snorkelers and divers the opportunity to witness protected species in the wild. Worldwide, cost estimates related to IUU reach $23bn annually, and the take represents up to 20% of all seafood. Using technology to track and prevent illegal fishing presents an opportunity for technology companies as the fishing industry seeks ways to comply with the growing demand for transparency from governments and consumers. “If using facial recognition software to track fish were easy, we’d already be using it,” says Matthew Merrifield, TNC’s chief technology officer. Whereas images from security cameras installed inside banks or other buildings are consistent and predictable, “the data from (electronic monitoring) cameras on boats is dirty, because the ships are always moving and the light keeps changing”. Because of the “dirty” data, it will not be easy to write a facial recognition software that can accurately spot protected species when the variable conditions on the high seas could lead to blurry images on the video. Given those challenges, it’s too early to know how large this market will grow, or how quickly. While the use of artificial intelligence to reduce illegal catch is relatively new, the Kaggle contest isn’t the first time it is being applied to the fishing industry. San Francisco-based startup Pelagic Data Systems (PDS) has developed technology that illuminates the activity of some of the 4. 6m small-scale commercial fishing boats that ply coastal waters around the world. Using data from a UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization report, PDS estimates that roughly 95% of those boats don’t have the types of communications and tracking radios that larger boats are required to have, partly because the boats are too small or lack the power source to run the radios. PDS installs a solar powered radio with an integrated GPS receiver and cellular modem on boats. The company collects the location data and analyzes it to create a map to show where the boat traveled and deduce its activities, such as where it stopped to set out nets or other gear and where and for how long it hauled in a catch. This data is vital because it shows whether the boat fished inside or outside marine protected areas. The device doesn’t have an on/off switch, a design to prevent a fishing crew from tampering with data collection. The software also generates heat maps to indicate where the heaviest fishing activities are taking place within a coastal region. By pairing that data with the movements of the boats, PDS can also estimate the quantity and even the size of the fish pulled from those waters, says Dave Solomon, CEO of PDS. The company sells its technology to governments, nonprofits, academic researchers and companies in the fishing industry, and expects the number of boats installed with its device to reach 1,000 in regions such as West Africa, North America and Mexico by the end of the year, Solomon says. Some of his customers install the devices in the boats of their suppliers for another reason: to win over customers by demonstrating transparency in fishing practices. Another effort to use data to fight illegal fishing comes from the nonprofit SkyTruth, which tracks the movement of large ships by mining data broadcast by ships and collected by satellites. Its technology is used by Global Fishing Watch, which is backed by Google, Oceana and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. SkyTruth’s data helped the island nation Kirbati to bust illegal fishing operations. But Kaggle has a habit of taking on unusual technical challenges. Earlier this year, it launched a contest with State Farm to develop machine learning software, to be embedded in dashboard cameras, to classify a driver’s behavior, such as being distracted by a smartphone when behind the wheel. Kaggle, with a membership of 650,000 data scientists, hasn’t tackled an environmental problem before. But its CEO, Anthony Goldbloom, thinks the TNC contest could represent the start of environmental competitions on its site because scientists from government agencies and academic institutions are collecting a growing amount of field data using cameras and sensors. TNC contest attracted 44 teams within the first day. Each team has five months to submit its software. While the contest presents an appealing opportunity to do something good for the environment, it doesn’t promise a big payoff. That will make it difficult for software developers and data scientists to raise venture capital to fund their efforts. says Andrew Bosworth, vice president of ads and business platform for Facebook and a board member of land conservation group Peninsula Open Going to the moon is easier than tracking fishing. It really is. So these are big challenges without financial incentives to solve them. ” Oysters are making a comeback in the polluted waters around New York City Read more But, he adds, Silicon Valley does provide important undergirding for using technology to solve environmental problems. Bosworth argues that the advancement in core technologies behind things like multiplayer gaming software and smartphone apps has propelled the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence and lowered the development costs over time. The winning team of the contest will earn a prize of $150,000. Then, as part of its campaign to reduce bycatch and illegal fishing in the region, TNC will work with the governments of Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Solomon Islands and Marshall Islands to install the software, for free, on the electronic monitors of selected fishing boats. If the software proves effective in reducing the labor costs and improving the accuracy of identifying protected species, then it could become a standard feature in electronic monitors. TNC will own the intellectual property of the winning software and make it free to the equipment makers, which include Satlink and Archipelago. The software could become even more widely used if large retailers such as Walmart begin to require electronic monitors on their vendor’s fleets. But it is still early days for policing the fishing industry. For Melissa Garren, chief scientific officer of PDS, that means the market potential is huge. “We should be treating the oceans more like we treat airspace,” she says. “If we had this lack of visibility in the skies, it would be nuts. ” by Global Fishing Watch is collected by satellites, not both satellites and cellular technology. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. news%2CWildlife] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Stephen Hawking at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence on Wednesday. Future of Intelligence on Wednesday. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Alex Hern @alexhern Wed 19 Oct ‘16 21. 05 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 17. 43 GMT This article is 1 year old Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”, and praised the creation of an academic institute dedicated to researching the future of intelligence as “crucial to the future of our civilisation and our species”. Hawking was speaking at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at Cambridge University, a multi-disciplinary institute that will attempt to tackle some of the open-ended questions raised by the rapid pace of development in AI research. “We spend a great deal of time studying history,” Hawking said, “which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it’s a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence. ” Huw Price is the centre’s academic director. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Huw Price is the centre’s academic director. Photograph: Jon Tonks for the Guardian While the world-renowned physicist has often been cautious about AI, raising the risk that humanity could be the architect of its own destruction if it creates a superintelligence with a will of its own, he was also quick to highlight the positives that AI research can bring. The rise of robots: forget evil AI – the real risk is far more insidious Read more “The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge,” he said. “We cannot predict what we might achieve when our own minds are amplified by AI. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one – industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. ” Huw Price, the centre’s academic director and the Bertrand Russell professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, where Hawking is also an academic, said that the centre came about partially as a result of the university’s Centre for Existential Risk. That institute, mocked by the tabloid press as offering “Terminator Studies”, examined a wider range of potential problems for humanity, while the LCFI has a narrow focus. “We’ve been trying to slay the ‘terminator’ meme,” Price said, “but like its namesake, it keeps coming back for more. ” AI pioneer Margaret Boden, professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex, praised the progress of such discussions. As recently as 2009, she said, the topic wasn’t taken seriously, even among AI researchers. “AI is hugely exciting,” she said, “but it has limitations, which present grave dangers given uncritical use. ” The academic community is not alone in warning about the potential dangers of AI as well as the potential benefits. A number of pioneers from the technology industry, most famously the entrepreneur Elon Musk, have also expressed their concerns about the damage that a super-intelligent AI could wreak on humanity. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Stephen Hawking's 1966 doctoral thesis made available for first time Cambridge University says Properties of Expanding Universes is already most-requested item in open access repository Published: 23 Oct 2017 Stephen Hawking's 1966 doctoral thesis made available for first time World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Doctors back Stephen Hawking’s challenge to Jeremy Hunt NHS professionals and readers respond to the debate between Professor Hawking and the UK health secretary Published: 30 Aug 2017 Doctors back Stephen Hawking’s challenge to Jeremy Hunt + Jeremy Hunt continues war of words with Stephen Hawking over NHS Published: 27 Aug 2017 Jeremy Hunt continues war of words with Stephen Hawking over NHS + Stephen Hawking blames Tory politicians for damaging NHS Published: 19 Aug 2017 Stephen Hawking blames Tory politicians for damaging NHS + Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. y%2CUniversity+of+Cambridge] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scientists predicted that in future a similar approach to the one shown in this video could pave the way for virtual assistants that would be able to instantaneously scour the internet to answer questions and carry out instructions with precision. Artificial intelligence (AI) Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev Wed 12 Oct ‘16 18. 04 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 17. 43 GMT This article is 1 year old Google scientists have created a computer program that uses basic reasoning to learn to navigate the London Underground system by itself. The same Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent could also answer questions about the content of snippets of stories and work out family relationships by looking at a family tree. Scientists predict that in future a similar approach could pave the way for virtual assistants that would be able to instantaneously scour the internet to answer questions and carry out instructions with precision. Herbert Jaegar, a computer scientist at the University of Bremen, said: involve planning and structuring information into chunks and re-combining them. ” Although the tasks themselves were fairly simple - a basic smartphone app can navigate a tube map - the way in which the program achieved its results is seen as impressive. It is one of the first programs to combine an external memory with an approach called deep-learning, in which the program learns how to do tasks independently rather than being pre-programmed with a set of rules by a human. Prof Geoff Hinton, a British scientist regarded as the father of deep learning, said the door was now open for deep learning to be applied to more complex tasks than many had originally thought possible. “Until very recently, it was far from obvious how deep learning could be used to allow a system to acquire the algorithms needed for conscious deliberate reasoning,” said Hinton, who works at the University of Toronto and Google. Deep learning has recently stormed ahead of other computing strategies in tasks like language translation, image and speech recognition and even enabled a computer to beat top-ranked player, Lee Sedol, at Go. However, until now the technique has generally performed poorly on any task where an overarching strategy is needed, such as navigation or extracting the actual meaning from a text. The latest program achieved this by adding an external memory, designed to temporarily store important pieces of information and fish them out when needed. The human equivalent of this is working memory, a short-term repository in the brain that allows us to stay on task when doing something that involves several steps, like following a recipe. Alex Graves, the research scientist at Google DeepMind in London who led the work, said that the work marked an incremental step towards smart machines, rather than a sudden departure. “I’m wary of saying now we have a machine that can reason,” he said. “We have something that has an improved memory - a different kind of memory that we believe is a necessary component of reasoning. It’s hard to draw a line in the sand. ” In the study, published in the journal Nature, the program was able to find the quickest route between underground stops and work out where it would end up if it travelled, say, two stops north from Victoria station. It was also given story snippets, such as “John is in the playground. John picked up the football. ” followed by the question “Where is the football? ” and was able to answer correctly, hinting that in future assistants such Apple’s Siri may be replaced by something more sophisticated. Graves said that while the story tasks “look so trivial to a human that they don’t seem like questions at all,” existing computer programs “do really badly on this”. The program he developed got questions like this right 96% of the time. Jaegar said that the latest effort by DeepMind should be viewed as “just one hop forward in what should be described as a stampede” of rapidly unfolding developments in AI, adding that the abilities of computers would not necessarily be restricted to logical tasks such as navigation in future. “Why should there be an inherent limit? Everything that a brain can do come closer to performance and are already even better on some things. It’s a matter of time and of funding: whether anyone will be willing to spend the necessary millions to develop these things. ” A number of high profile scientists have warned about the existential threat posed by AI, with Stephen Hawking cautioning that “once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate”. But Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind has previously played down such concerns. “We’re decades away from any sort of technology that we need to worry about,” Hassabis said last year. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Aiming at population-level predictive gambles, they filter who and what counts – including who is released from jail and the news that you see, researchers warn Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Published: 12 Jun 2016 Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ + Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud Published: 17 May 2016 Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ind] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) 'Partnership on AI' formed by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft Two big Silicon Valley names are missing from the alliance, which aims to set societal and ethical best practice for artificial intelligence research An army of robots non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics’ to join. Photograph: Alamy Artificial intelligence (AI) 'Partnership on AI' formed by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft Two big Silicon Valley names are missing from the alliance, which aims to set societal and ethical best practice for artificial intelligence research Alex Hern @alexhern Wed 28 Sep ‘16 22. 00 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 13 GMT This article is 1 year old Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are joining forces to create a new AI partnership dedicated to advancing public understanding of the sector, as well as coming up with standards for future researchers to abide by. Going by the unwieldy name of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the alliance isn’t a lobbying organisation (at least, it says it “does not intend” to lobby government bodies). Instead, it says it will “conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology”. There will be equal representation between corporate and non-corporate members on the board of the partnership, and it hopes to invite “academics, non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics” to join. An iPhone with Siri working on screen Facebook Twitter Pinterest Despite its work in artificial intelligence through products such as Siri, Apple is not included in the group. Photograph: Alamy Each of the five founding corporate members has strong AI research teams, some of which have become household names, such as IBM’s Watson and Amazon’s Alexa. Google’s involvement with the body is led by its London-based DeepMind subsidiary, a pure research organisation that hit headlines in March when it built the first ever machine to beat a world-class human player of the ancient Asian board game Go. No Apple, no Elon Musk Yet some organisations are conspicuous by their absence from the body. Apple, which has been loudly trumpeting its own AI efforts in areas such as personal assistants, image recognition and voice control, is not included in the group. The company has a long history of going it alone even when other tech giants bury the hatchet. In 2015, for instance, Apple filed its own opposition to the UK’s Investigatory Powers bill (also known as the Snooper’s Charter) even though Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo had all joined forces to oppose it. In March this year, it finally joined that coalition. Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz, one of the partnership’s two interim co-chairs, said “We’ve been in discussions with Apple, I know they’re enthusiastic about this effort, and I’d personally hope to see them join. ” Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Absent too is OpenAI, the Elon Musk-backed research outfit which is seeking to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole”. With funding of $1bn (£777m), the group is one of the industry’s best-funded independent AI research labs, and its aims seem to complement those of the Partnership. A small number of large corporations are the powerhouses behind the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence Murray Shanahan, cognitive robotics professor at Imperial College “We’re in the process of inviting many many different research labs and groups,” said Mustafa Suleyman or Deep Mind, the other interim co-chair. “We encourage there to be a diverse range of effort in AI, and we think that’s a great thing. We’re going to be really opening this up as widely as possible to different efforts. ” OpenAI’s co-founder and CTO, Greg Brockman, said “We’re happy to see the launch of the group — coordination in the industry is good for everyone. We’re looking forward to non-profits being included as first-class members in the future. ” It’s also not the first time DeepMind has promised a body aimed at supporting AI ethics. When the company was acquired by Google back in 2014, part of the acquisition deal saw Google promise to form an AI ethics board to ensure the new technology was not abused. Two-and-a-half years on, however, and it is unclear whether the board has ever met, or even who is on it. DeepMind has regularly declined to comment on it, although it has formed a second ethics board focused purely on overseeing the company’s research on healthcare AI. DeepMind’s Suleyman said this latest group “doesn’t replace” the internal ethics board butit complements it. “That board is a Google Deep Mind effort that we’ve been working very hard on, we’ve been making a lot of progress toward. ” Suleyman also promised that the partnership would meet “frequently”. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the AlphaGo challenge match between human champion Lee Sedol, and Deepmind’s computer Facebook Twitter Pinterest Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the AlphaGo challenge match between human champion Lee Sedol, and Deepmind’s computer Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP Murray Shanahan is a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, whose research into deep symbolic reinforcement learning could solve AL’s reliance on vast quantities of data. He welcomed the creation of the partnership. Research will ‘maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns’ “A small number of large corporations are today the powerhouses behind the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence. The inauguration of the partnership on AI is a very welcome step towards ensuring this technology is used wisely,” he said. Ralf Herbrich, the director of machine learning science and core machine learning at Amazon, said: “We’re in a golden age of machine learning and AI. This partnership will ensure we’re including the best and the brightest in this space in the conversation to improve customer trust and benefit society. ” In a joint statement from Suleyman and Google’s Greg Corrado, the pair said they “strongly support an open, collaborative process for developing AI. “This group is a huge step forward, breaking down barriers for AI teams to share best practices, research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns, and make it easier for those in other fields to engage with everyone’s work. We’re really proud of how this has come together, and we’re looking forward to working with everyone inside and outside the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to make sure AI has the broad and transformative impact we all want to see. ” Facebook’s director of AI research, Yann LeCun, said: “By openly collaborating with our peers and sharing findings, we aim to push new boundaries every day, not only within Facebook, but across the entire research community. ” IBM’s Francesca Rossi added: “This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century – one that will foster collaboration between people and machines to solve some of the world’s most enduring problems – in a way that is both trustworthy and beneficial. ” Topics most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The rise of robots: forget evil AI – the real risk is far more insidious It’s far more likely that robots would inadvertently harm or frustrate humans while carrying out our orders than they would rise up against us Stuart Russell: ‘The risk doesn’t come from machines suddenly developing spontaneous malevolent consciousness. ’ developing spontaneous malevolent consciousness. ’ Photograph: Alamy Artificial intelligence (AI) The rise of robots: forget evil AI – the real risk is far more insidious It’s far more likely that robots would inadvertently harm or frustrate humans while carrying out our orders than they would rise up against us Olivia Solon in San Francisco @oliviasolon email Tue 30 Aug ‘16 14. 00 BST Last modified on Fri 14 Jul ‘17 19. 48 BST This article is 1 year old When we look at the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to get carried away with dystopian visions of sentient machines that rebel against their human creators. Fictional baddies such as the Terminator’s Skynet or Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey have a lot to answer for. However, the real risk posed by AI – at least in the near term – is much more insidious. It’s far more likely that robots would inadvertently harm or frustrate humans while carrying out our orders than they would become conscious and rise up against us. In recognition of this, the University of California, Berkeley has this week launched a center to focus on building people-pleasing AIs. The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, launched this week with $5. 5m in funding from the Open Philanthropy Project, is lead by computer science professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Stuart Russell. He’s quick to dispel any “unreasonable and melodramatic” comparisons to the threats posed in science fiction. “The risk doesn’t come from machines suddenly developing spontaneous malevolent consciousness,” he said. “It’s important that we’re not trying to prevent that from happening because there’s absolutely no understanding of consciousness whatsoever. ” Russell is well known in the artificial intelligence community and in 2015 penned an open letter calling for researchers to look beyond the goal of simply making AI more capable and powerful to think about maximizing its social benefit. The letter has been signed by more than 8,000 scientists and entrepreneurs including physicist Stephen Hawking, entrepreneur Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. 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,” the letter reads. “Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. ” It’s precisely this thinking that underpins the new center. Up until now, AI has primarily been applied to very limited contexts such as playing Chess or Go or recognizing objects in images, where there isn’t much scope for the system to do much damage. As they start to make decisions on our behalf within the real world, the stakes are much higher. Technology is killing the myth of human centrality – let's embrace our demotion Read more “As soon as you put things in the real world, with self-driving cars, digital assistants … as soon as they buy things on your behalf, turn down appointments, then they have to align with human values,” Russell said. He uses autonomous vehicles to illustrate the type of problem the center will try to solve. Someone building a self-driving car might instruct it never to go through a red light, but the machine might then hack into the traffic light control system so that all of the lights are changed to green. In this case the car would be obeying orders but in a way that humans didn’t expect or intend. Similarly, an artificially intelligent hedge fund designed to maximize the value of its portfolio could be incentivized to short consumer stocks, buy long on defence stocks and then start a war – as suggested by Elon Musk in Werner Herzog’s latest documentary. “Even when you think you’ve put fences around what an AI system can do it will tend to find loopholes just as we do with our tax laws. You want an AI system that isn’t motivated to find loopholes,” Russell said. “The problem isn’t consciousness, but competence. You make machines that are incredibly competent at achieving objectives and they will cause accidents in trying to achieve those objectives. ” To address this, Russell and his colleagues at the center propose making AI systems that observe human behavior and try to work out what the human’s objective is, then behave accordingly and learn from mistakes. So instead of trying to give the machine a long list of rules to follow, the machine is told that its main objective is to do what the human wants them to do. It sounds simple, but it’s not how engineers have been building systems for the past 50 years. But if AI systems can be designed to learn from humans in this way, it should ensure that they remain under human control even when they develop capabilities that exceed our own. In addition to watching humans directly using cameras and other sensors, robots can learn about us by reading history books, legal documents, novels, newspaper stories as well as by watching videos and movies. From this they can start to build up an understanding of human values. It won’t be easy for machines. “People are irrational, inconsistent, weak-willed, computationally limited, heterogenous and sometimes downright evil,” Russell said. “Some are vegetarians and some really like a nice juicy steak. And the fact that we don’t behave anything close to perfectly is a serious difficulty. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. %2CRobots] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Tate Britain Tate Britain project uses AI to pair contemporary photos with paintings IK prize-winning system matches images from the 24/7 news cycle with centuries-old artworks and presents them online Eunuchs apply makeup before Raksha Bandhan festival celebrations in Mumbai Mumbai. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters Tate Britain Tate Britain project uses AI to pair contemporary photos with paintings IK prize-winning system matches images from the 24/7 news cycle with centuries-old artworks and presents them online Nicola Davis @NicolaKSDavis Sun 28 Aug ‘16 15. 23 BST Last modified on Tue 28 Nov ‘17 15. 43 GMT This article is 1 year old Seated against a deep red backdrop, gazing intently at hand-held mirrors, two eunuchs in sparkling saris inspect their appearance before Raksha Bandhan celebrations in the red light district of Mumbai. The photograph from the Reuters news agency is an arresting contemporary scene, but a new Tate Britain project is aiming to inspire deeper reflections with images from its own collection of paintings. Detail from Sir Peter Lely’s Two Ladies of the Lake Family (1660) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Sir Peter Lely’s Two Ladies of the Lake Family (1660), paired with the Mumbai scene by the Recognition software. Photograph: Tate Launching on Friday, Recognition is the winner of 2016’s IK prize – an annual award, this year supported by Microsoft, for a project that embraces digital technology to explore and showcase Tate’s collection of British art. Tate Britain revamps Turner galleries after paintings return from tour Read more This year, the challenge was to do it with artificial intelligence. The team behind the winning project, from the Italy-based communication research centre Fabrica, say their inspiration came from an intriguing conundrum: how can you apply rational thinking to a subject like art? Their answer is provocative. Recognition matches stunning photographs from the 24/7 news cycle with centuries-old artworks, and presents them online. “The team have created and trained a ‘brain’ to a point where it is simulating certain human attributes and unleashed it online – and it is creating a gallery,” said Tony Guillan, the producer of the IK prize at Tate Britain. After scanning through about 30,000 digitised artworks from the gallery, the system pairs the evocative photograph of the two eunuchs with a mellow scene from the brush strokes of Sir Peter Lely, the principal painter to Charles II. Two women, straight-backed and smiling slightly are seated, one holding a stringed instrument, the other resting her hand on the elaborate folds of her satin dress. It is a sumptuous 17th-century work, rich in details. But presented next to the contemporary photograph, the comparison can provoke new artistic questions - for example about gender identity and the notion of glamour. Guillan. “By asking the question ‘how do computers work and think? ’ you ask the exact same question of humans. ” Guillan said he hoped the project would encourage discussion about how we depict scenes and individuals. “News always presents itself as this mimetic, glass window on to the world, but of course photojournalism is an art form often; it is a mode of communication – and so is art and painting,” he said. With £15,000 in prize money and £90,000 to produce their vision, the four-strong team at Fabrica have spent months developing the project, which harnesses a burgeoning form of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. It will be available in full online and there will be a small exhibition at Tate Britain. “Computers are very good at mathematical operations,” said Andrea Vedaldi, an associate professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the project. “When things start to be very difficult is when you don’t really know how to express, in mathematical terms, what it is you want to do. For example, if you want to recognise a dog in an image . . . it is not very easy to come up with the equations of a dog. ” Google says machine learning is the future. So I tried it myself Read more Machine learning takes a different approach: show a system enough images of different canines in different poses, the theory goes, and the system will figure out what a dog is. “This process of going from specifics to the abstract concept, this is what is really challenging,” said Vedaldi. While progress in machine learning has been dramatic in recent years, he said, creating systems that truly “understand” images was still a work in progress. It is a challenge that scientists and engineers such as Vedaldi continue to grapple with, developing and exploring powerful systems, including new tools based on a branch of machine learning called deep learning. Recognition takes four different approaches to match images, based on technology developed by Microsoft and a team of AI specialists at the France-based company Jolibrain. “It can look for objects, like cups and saucers, it can look for faces, it can look for composition within an image – reading lines and colours – and it can look at the context that is attached to an image, so metadata, titles and things like that,” said Isaac Vallentin of Fabrica. Now trained, the system will spend three months continuously analysing new photographs from Reuters, comparing each to thousands of digitised paintings, sculptures and other works. Where one or more matches can be found, the best – as selected by the technology – is entered into a searchable online gallery. Visitors to the website will also be able to explore details of how the system made each match, including the strength of the resemblance across each of the four approaches, together with particular features it has recognised, such as the age and gender of a face. “We are trying to really honestly represent how the software itself is coming to its conclusions,” said Vallentin, adding that the system would also be able to create a sentence to explain, to a limited degree, each match. The small, three-section display at Tate Britain will offer further insights, with visitors able to compare the matches they would make to those generated by the machine. The results will then be scrutinised. “We just want to take these two datasets in the end and find the connections, the similarities,” said Vallentin. “It is really an experiment for us. ” The team also hope the project will showcase the positive side of artificial intelligence – a technology that experts including the physicist Stephen Hawking have raised safety concerns about. “Technology is an empowering tool,” said Vallentin. “You can create really meaningful things and really helpful things, and beautiful things with technology. ” September – 27 November. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Digital business What does artificial intelligence mean for the creative mind? Assistive and smart technologies can lead to a whole new world of creative possibilities and greater understanding of consumers conceptual futuristic female robot that AI technology must play a chief role in the research and design of brand experiences. Photograph: I Glory/Alamy Digital business What does artificial intelligence mean for the creative mind? Assistive and smart technologies can lead to a whole new world of creative possibilities and greater understanding of consumers Anthony Baker tech director at R/GA London Wed 10 Aug ‘16 08. 00 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 18 GMT Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have huge potential to drive a new generation of creative brand experiences. They are at the forefront of a powerful shift that will bring brands closer to consumer expectations, passions and emotions. Assistive and smart technologies are catching up and we’re already facing a new world of possibilities. AI and ML can be applied in many ways. The use of machine learning to power business decisions and product recommendations is becoming widespread. We experience it when we buy on Amazon, watch television on Netflix, hail an Uber or tag friends on Facebook. There are more creative experiments out there such as “The Next Rembrandt app”, “machine music composition” and “TV show script generation” that use ML to create new art (with mixed results). While AI is poised to transform our industries and technologies, just like electricity did in the mid-twentieth century, AI has the potential to change art, creativity and the way brands and agencies create the next generation of experiences. It’s easy to hear all the buzz and think of AI and ML as new or recent developments, but they have a long history. AI has been researched since the dawn of computing but in the past few years it has become more powerful, flexible and accessible. This is down to heavy investment from companies like Intel, Google, Apple and Facebook, leading to faster, cheaper hardware with better algorithms. The key to a successful machine-assisted experience is data. Converting big data into useful data is a difficult challenge. This is where agencies and brands have a huge opportunity. Netflix has been successful in making sense of consumer data, to the point that it now knows which shows and casts will become hits, before they have even been filmed. One big issue is that most of the data being captured isn’t smart. Often, it doesn’t reflect consumer interests and takes a lot of analysis (and sometimes plain guesswork) to come up with insights that drive strategy and creativity. Traditional web and mobile analytics don’t work as expected in a hyper-connected world. Demographics, page views, page clicks and hashtags are falling short in their exposure of true consumer learnings. Lifestyle, sentiment and engagement are the key elements to go after. Spotify has done this in innovative ways, marrying user habits like playlist creation with crowd-sourced behaviours to create personalised playlist suggestions. Brands want to understand how people feel about their services, products and content. So far, though, it seems we only have a partial view of consumers, not the full picture we aspire to. This is exactly where a new wave of interfaces will move the industry forward, away from a straight broadcast out with frivolous two-way interactions towards a more natural dialogue between brands and people. With the rise of new interfaces and interactions such as 1:1 messaging, voice-enabled services and natural language processing, we have a chance to reach a deeper understanding of consumers. Combine this with the constant growth of connected devices, and the opportunity to capture smart data from consumer interactions becomes huge. Data is the fuel of AI. According to Internet Live Stats, there are roughly 3. 5 billion people with access to the internet, generating exponential amounts of data. And IDC believes we ll be creating 44 zettabytes of data worldwide by 2020. This data will become increasingly smarter, thanks to two main factors. First, more connected devices means we’ll need a more holistic view of consumer lifestyles. And second, the rise of messaging and conversational platforms such as WeChat, Line, Slack and Facebook will provide a stream of dialogue-based data. This will result in a new wave of smart data, empowering our industry to understand people on a whole new level. AI lets us understand complex interactions such as voice, text dialogues, pictures and videos in a more personalised way. Now we can classify interactions from consumers, and smart solutions can understand what a person is saying. When we recognise the intention and the sentiment of a human interaction, we can react to it accordingly. Is that person happy or frustrated about the service? Was the content delightful or bland? This is the kind of qualitative understanding that we can’t get through page views or clicks. Jay Zasa, also of R/GA, wrote a great piece, recently, about the challenge of creating meaningful bots and conversational services. Most importantly, machines can learn much quicker than humans. They constantly develop and improve over time, testing response, intent and sentiment to enhance the service on offer. They can solve the scalability problem, which has blocked truly personalised services for so long. Why would you go to a website and waste time searching for something if you could have a smart, machine-assisted personal service giving you what you need at the right time and place, on the right device or channel? After all, the ultimate goal is to create the simplest, most meaningful experience for consumers. Machines are not about to take over the world and lead the creative sphere, but if we want to create better, simpler, more personal experiences, it’s clear that AI technology must play a chief role in the research and design of brand experiences. AI could become the ultimate creative tool for brands and agencies, helping them build richer experiences with lasting value. There’s a unique element of creativity in all of us that machines are unlikely to replicate (at least for the time being). However, the landscape is moving towards a smarter, hyper-connected, ongoing dialogue between people and brands. Things are evolving fast and our industry can’t afford to hesitate. We need to use cognitive technology in new ways to boldly break the mould, creating experiences that aren’t one-off executions. Instead, they’ll be constantly improving and growing the brand-consumer relationship. Anthony Baker is tech director at R/GA London To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct except for pieces labelled “Paid for by” – find out more here. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. CDeepMind] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Seven ways that AI could be A-OK As artificial intelligence increases its influence on our lives, the talk is of job losses, self-driving car crashes, algorithms running amok. But there is an upside… The IntelligentX boffins ponder the computer’s latest beer recipe. recipe. Photograph: weare10x. com Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Seven ways that AI could be A-OK As artificial intelligence increases its influence on our lives, the talk is of job losses, self-driving car crashes, algorithms running amok. But there is an upside… Luke Dormehl Sun 7 Aug ‘16 06. 59 BST Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 16. 20 GMT Brewing you the perfect pint AI might be shaking up life as we know it, but like any good party guest, it’s about bringing the beers. That’s according to the work of London-based company IntelligentX, which is using artificial intelligence to brew the perfect pint. What makes IntelligentX’s beers smart is the speed at which the firm is able to respond to the changing tastes of customers – on a batch-by-batch basis. The company currently brews four beers: golden, pale, amber and black. On each bottle of AI beer there’s a code, directing customers towards its website, where they can offer their feedback by answering questions. Based on this feedback, a type of goal-driven AI called “reinforcement learning” works out what it needs to do to get better outcomes in the future, meaning changing the recipe to earn better scores from customers. It even has a bank of wild-card ingredients to draw on so the whole thing doesn’t become too predictable. In the 12 months since IntelligentX’s four beers began to be trialled, the recipes involved have evolved 11 times. Right now, the beers are mainly being sampled at startup events in east London, but could soon be coming to a pub near you. A scene from Sunspring, a film written by AI. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scene from Sunspring, a film written by AI. Writing the next blockbuster movie From Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to last year’s Ex Machina (with Steven Spielberg’s AI somewhere in between) there have been plenty of films about artificial intelligence. But what about AI actually writing the films themselves? A growing number of researchers and companies seem to think this is the way to go. A UK startup called Epagogix has advised some of the biggest studios in Hollywood, helping them predict how much money movies are likely to make at the box office. While that’s not exactly creative, the company goes further than that, having its neural network make creative suggestions about ways the movie’s potential yield could be increased. Epagogix isn’t alone. Sunspring, a film made for this year’s Sci-Fi London film festival, used a neural network trained on screenplays such as Ghostbusters, Interstellar and The Fifth Element to generate a new script. It included the notable direction: “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor. ” A similar project, carried out by a Scottish comic book artist Andy Herd, fed a neural net with every episode of the 1990s sitcom Friends and asked it to create new scripts. Herd later admitted said it would need further modification, after a disproportionate number of episodes ended with the cast in bed together. An image created by Deep Dream. Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image created by Deep Dream. Painting a masterpiece In June last year, Google unveiled its Deep Dream project. Having at their digital fingertips the largest archive of photographs in human history, Google researchers decided to see what would happen if they let computers create rather than simply classify images. The idea is that, having seen enough examples of a chair to recognise and label one appropriately when shown it in a photo, Google’s computers should be able to create new chair pictures based on their sum total knowledge of “chair-ness”. But Google found that, since pictures of barbells were frequently in the same photos as muscular weightlifters’ arms, Deep Dream assumed the limbs were part of them when it came to creating its own. Still, it would be hard to argue that the effects created by Deep Dream, which also looks for patterns within existing photos and uses this to kickstart its flights of AI fancy, aren’t memorable. You can have a go yourself at seeing how AI will transform pictures of yourself, by using an app such as Dreamscope, which allows users to upload images and then apply different AI filters to them. The robotic equivalent of Ronaldo lines up a free kick at a RoboCup football competition. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The robotic equivalent of Ronaldo lines up a free kick at a RoboCup football competition. Photograph: Rex Being tomorrow’s sport stars Despite the fact that many AI researchers veer closer to the “geek” than the “jock” end of the spectrum, that doesn’t mean that the important factors in what makes someone proficient at sport aren’t of interest to those in artificial intelligence. Topics such as co-ordination, agility and evaluation of the available legal moves in a constantly shifting game are at the core of AI and robotics research. This year, the so-called RoboCup tournament held its 20th competition in Leipzig, with teams of humanoid robots playing against one another in AI football matches. The eventual goal? By 2050, to have a team of such robots capable of beating a world-champion football team according to Fifa rules. It may sound crazy, but so did the idea of building a computer capable of beating chess champion Garry Kasparov once upon a time. In the near future, if you want to get involved in AI-based sport, you could look up Cambridge-based company PiBorg, which is gearing up to host Formula Pi, the world’s first autonomous toy car race series. Open to anyone who wants to enter, the Formula 1-inspired contest gives participants a Raspberry Pi-powered vehicle and asks them to write the code to make it zoom around the track. There are also notes, seminars and basic code to get novices started. In short, AI and sport goes a lot further than just the new series of Robot Wars. An evolutionary antenna made by AI for Nasa. Facebook Twitter Pinterest An evolutionary antenna made by AI for Nasa. Photograph: Nasa Designing the perfect satellite component An evolutionary algorithm is a way of imitating the power of natural selection inside a computer, with AI attempting to solve problems by coming up with solutions and then pitting these solutions against others in a sort of knockout tournament. Increasingly, these tools are now used for design, such as the creation of components for Nasa the algorithm that you want a solution that will fit in a 10cm by 10cm box, be capable of radiating a spherical or hemispherical pattern and be able to operate at a certain Wi-Fi band,” says former Nasa and Google engineer Jason Lohn. “You provide all the constraints and, based on them, the algorithm then optimises a solution. ” Such solutions can even appear baffling to the smartest human engineers, such as when Lohn’s AI-designed satellite antenna came out looking like a bent paperclip. However, when he tried it, he found that it worked better than any solution he’d ever seen. “It works and, as engineers, what we ultimately care about is getting things to work. ” Other designers, such as the Italian Celestino Soddu, have used evolutionary algorithms for taking a stab at what a baroque cathedral would look like if it was a living thing allowed to evolve over many generations. A food truck serving recipes dreamed up by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A food truck serving recipes dreamed up by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Cooking you a weird meal Do you fancy substituting your regular Sunday lunch for an Indian turmeric paella, Turkish‑Korean caesar salad or Cuban lobster bouillabaisse? If these sound like recipes no human chef would ever come up with, you’d be right. They’re created by IBM’s supercomputer Watson, the bot perhaps best remembered for beating top-ranked human participants at the US TV gameshow Jeopardy! a few years ago. “We started by getting Watson to analyse around 9,000 recipes,” says Rob High of IBM. “From that, the system was able to learn the different types and styles of recipe. It learned the difference between a salad and a sandwich or a quiche and a pasta dish. It also learned the styles or French and Chinese cooking. It figured out which flavours come out most prominently within all those types of dishes. ” Watson can also analyse the chemical compounds that control taste and use these to generate novel pairings of food. Like any celebrity chef worth their salt, Watson even has its own recipe book: Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson. Juliette Pochin, who performed a ‘duet’ with a quantum computer earlier this year. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Juliette Pochin, who performed a ‘duet’ with a quantum computer earlier this year. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images Writing a symphony There is a scene in the 2004 movie I, Robot in which Will Smith’s character talks about computational creativity. “Can a robot write a symphony? ” he asks, using it as an example of why machines and humans will always have fundamental differences. Had Smith’s character waited until July 2012, he would have got an answer, since that was when the London Symphony Orchestra took to the stage to perform an AI-generated composition entitled Transits – Into an Abyss, which was hailed as “artistic and delightful” by one reviewer. In July this year, researchers at Plymouth University presented a 15-minute piece in which Welsh mezzo-soprano Juliette Pochin sang with a quantum computer. “The singer’s pitch and loudness and various notes by the composer are sent to two algorithms on the quantum computer every three seconds,” says creator Alexis Kirke. “Items returned include suggested harmonies. What this shows is that quantum AI isn’t just about super-speed algorithms for image recognition and molecular development, but also to provide creative opportunities for composers and artists. ” Thinking Machines by Luke Dormehl is published in paperback by WH Allen (£14. 99). Click here to order a copy for £12. 29 Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Sentient machines are a greater threat to humanity than climate change, according to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom. compete with the great composers’: Nick Bostrom. Photograph: The Washington Post Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Sentient machines are a greater threat to humanity than climate change, according to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom Tim Adams Sun 12 Jun ‘16 08. 30 BST Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 16. 36 GMT You’ll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe’s church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of? When I arrive to meet the director of the institute, Professor Nick Bostrom, a bed is being delivered to the second-floor office. Existential risk is a round-the-clock kind of operation; it sleeps fitfully, if at all. Bostrom, a 43-year-old Swedish-born philosopher, has lately acquired something of the status of prophet of doom among those currently doing most to shape our civilisation: the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. His reputation rests primarily on his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which was a surprise New York Times bestseller last year and now arrives in paperback, trailing must-read recommendations from Bill Gates and Tesla’s Elon Musk. (In the best kind of literary review, Musk also gave Bostrom’s institute £1m to continue to pursue its inquiries. ) The book is a lively, speculative examination of the singular threat that Bostrom believes – after years of calculation and argument – to be the one most likely to wipe us out. This threat is not climate change, nor pandemic, nor nuclear winter; it is the possibly imminent creation of a general machine intelligence greater than our own. The cover of Bostrom’s book is dominated by a mad-eyed, pen-and-ink picture of an owl. The owl is the subject of the book’s opening parable. A group of sparrows are building their nests. “We are all so small and weak,” tweets one, feebly. “Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests! ” There is general twittering agreement among sparrows everywhere; an owl could defend the sparrows! It could look after their old and their young! It could allow them to live a life of leisure and prosperity! With these fantasies in mind, the sparrows can hardly contain their excitement and fly off in search of the swivel-headed saviour who will transform their existence. Target-seeking mosquito-like robots might burgeon forth from every square metre of the globe There is only one voice of dissent: “Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavour. Quoth he: ‘This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst? ’” His warnings, inevitably, fall on deaf sparrow ears. Owl-taming would be complicated; why not get the owl first and work out the fine details later? Bostrom’s book, which is a shrill alarm call about the darker implications of artificial intelligence, is dedicated to Scronkfinkle. Bostrom articulates his own warnings in a suitably fretful manner. He has a reputation for obsessiveness and for workaholism; he is slim, pale and semi-nocturnal, often staying in the office into the early hours. Not surprisingly, perhaps, for a man whose days are dominated by whiteboards filled with formulae expressing the relative merits of 57 varieties of apocalypse, he appears to leave as little as possible to chance. In place of meals he favours a green-smoothie elixir involving vegetables, fruit, oat milk and whey powder. Other interviewers have remarked on his avoidance of handshakes to guard against infection. He does proffer a hand to me, but I have the sense he is subsequently isolating it to disinfect when I have gone. There is, perhaps as a result, a slight impatience about him, which he tries hard to resist. In his book he talks about the “intelligence explosion” that will occur when machines much cleverer than us begin to design machines of their own. “Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb,” he writes. “We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound. ” Talking to Bostrom, you have a feeling that for him that faint ticking never completely goes away. We speak first about the success of his book, the way it has squarely hit a nerve. It coincided with the open letter signed by more than 1,000 eminent scientists – including Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Musk – and presented at last year’s International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, urging a ban on the use and development of fully autonomous weapons (the “killer robots” of science fiction that are very close to reality). Bostrom, who is both aware of his own capacities and modest about his influence, suggests it was a happy accident of timing. “Machine learning and deep learning [the pioneering ‘neural’ computer algorithms that most closely mimic human brain function] have over the last few years moved much faster than people anticipated,” he says. “That is certainly one of the reasons why this has become such a big topic just now. People can see things moving forward in the technical field, and they become concerned about what next. ” Facebook Twitter Pinterest We should be more afraid of computers than we are Bostrom sees those implications as potentially Darwinian. If we create a machine intelligence superior to our own, and then give it freedom to grow and learn through access to the internet, there is no reason to suggest that it will not evolve strategies to secure its dominance, just as in the biological world. He sometimes uses the example of humans and gorillas to describe the subsequent one-sided relationship and – as last month’s events in Cincinnati zoo highlighted – that is never going to end well. An inferior intelligence will always depend on a superior one for its survival. There are times, as Bostrom unfolds various scenarios in Superintelligence, when it appears he has been reading too much of the science fiction he professes to dislike. One projection involves an AI system eventually building covert “nanofactories producing nerve gas or simultaneously from every square metre of the globe” in order to destroy meddling and irrelevant humanity. Another, perhaps more credible vision, sees the superintelligence “hijacking political processes, subtly manipulating financial markets, biasing information flows, or hacking human-made weapons systems” to bring about the extinction. Does he think of himself as a prophet? He smiles. “Not so much. It is not that I believe I know how it is going to happen and have to tell the world that information. It is more I feel quite ignorant and very confused about these things but by working for many years on probabilities you can get partial little insights here and there. And if you add those together with insights many other people might have, then maybe it will build up to some better understanding. ” Bostrom came to these questions by way of the transhumanist movement, which tends to view the digital age as one of unprecedented potential for optimising our physical and mental capacities and transcending the limits of our mortality. Bostrom still sees those possibilities as the best case scenario in the superintelligent future, in which we will harness technology to overcome disease and illness, feed the world, create a utopia of fulfilling creativity and perhaps eventually overcome death. He has been identified in the past as a member of Alcor, the cryogenic initiative that promises to freeze mortal remains in the hope that, one day, minds can be reinvigorated and uploaded in digital form to live in perpetuity. He is coy about this when I ask directly what he has planned. “I have a policy of never commenting on my funeral arrangements,” he says. But he thinks there is a value in cryogenic research? “It seems a pretty rational thing for people to do if they can afford it,” he says. “When you think about what life in the quite near future could be like, trying to store the information in your brain seems like a conservative option as opposed to burning the brain down and throwing it away. Unless you are really confident that the information will never be useful…” I wonder at what point his transhumanist optimism gave way to his more nightmarish visions of superintelligence. He suggests that he has not really shifted his position, but that he holds the two possibilities – the heaven and hell of our digital future – in uneasy opposition. Illustration by Eric Chow. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Eric Chow. “I wrote a lot about human enhancement ethics in the mid-90s, when it was largely rejected by academics,” he says. “They were always like, ‘Why on earth would anyone want to cure ageing? ’ They would talk about overpopulation and the boredom of living longer. There was no recognition that this is why we do any medical research: to extend life. Similarly with cognitive enhancement – if you look at what I was writing then, it looks more on the optimistic side – but all along I was concerned with existential risks too. ” There seems an abiding unease that such enhancements – pills that might make you smarter, or slow down ageing – go against the natural order of things. Does he have a sense of that? “I’m not sure that I would ever equate natural with good,” he says. “Cancer is natural, war is natural, parasites eating your insides are natural. What is natural is therefore never a very useful concept to figure out what we should do. Yes, there are ethical considerations but you have to judge them on a case-by-case basis. You must remember I am a transhumanist. I want my life extension pill now. And if there were a pill that could improve my cognition by 10%, I would be willing to pay a lot for that. ” Has he tried the ones that claim to enhance concentration? “I have, but not very much. I drink coffee, I have nicotine chewing gum, but that is about it. But the only reason I don’t do more is that I am not yet convinced that anything else works. ” He is not afraid of trying. When working, he habitually sits in the corner of his office surrounded by a dozen lamps, apparently in thrall to the idea of illumination. Bostrom grew up an only child in the coastal Swedish town of Helsingborg. Like many gifted children, he loathed school. His father worked for an investment bank, his mother for a Swedish corporation. He doesn’t remember any discussion of philosophy – or art or books – around the dinner table. Wondering how he found himself obsessed with these large questions, I ask if he was an anxious child: did he always have a powerful sense of mortality? “I think I had it quite early on,” he says. “Not because I was on the brink of death or anything. But as a child I remember thinking a lot that my parents may be healthy now but they are not always going to be stronger or bigger than me. ” That thought kept him awake at nights? “I don’t remember it as anxiety, more as a melancholy sense. ” And was that ongoing desire to live for ever rooted there too? “Not necessarily. I don’t think that there is any particularly different desire that I have in that regard to anyone else. I don’t want to come down with colon cancer – who does? If I was alive for 500 years who knows how I would feel? It is not so much fixated on immortality, just that premature death seems prima facie bad. ” A good deal of his book asks questions of how we might make superintelligence – whether it comes in 50 years or 500 years – “nice”, congruent with our humanity. Bostrom sees this as a technical challenge more than a political or philosophical one. It seems to me, though, that a good deal of our own ethical framework, our sense of goodness, is based on an experience and understanding of suffering, of our bodies. How could a non-cellular intelligence ever “comprehend” that? ‘Most of the world is completely oblivious to the most major things that are going to happen in the 21st century’ “There are a lot of things that machines can’t understand currently because they are not that smart,” he says, “but once they become so, I don’t think there would be any special difficulty in understanding human suffering and death. ” That understanding might be one way they could be taught to respect human value, he says. “But it depends what your ethical theory is. It might be more about respecting others’ autonomy, or striving to achieve beautiful things together. ” Somehow, and he has no idea how really, he thinks those things will need to be hardwired from the outset to avoid catastrophe. It is no good getting your owl first then wondering how to train it. And with artificial systems already superior to the best human intelligence in many discrete fields, a conversation about how that might be done is already overdue. The sense of intellectual urgency about these questions derives in part from what Bostrom calls an “epiphany experience”, which occurred when he was in his teens. He found himself in 1989 in a library and picked up at random an anthology of 19th-century German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Intrigued, he read the book in a nearby forest, in a clearing that he used to visit to be alone and write poetry. Almost immediately he experienced a dramatic sense of the possibilities of learning. Was it like a conversion experience? “More an awakening,” he says. “It felt like I had sleepwalked through my life to that point and now I was aware of some wider world that I hadn’t imagined. ” Following first the leads and notes in the philosophy book, Bostrom set about educating himself in fast forward. He read feverishly, and in spare moments he painted and wrote poetry, eventually taking degrees in philosophy and mathematical logic at Gothenburg university, before completing a PhD at the London School of Economics, and teaching at Yale. Did he continue to paint and write? “It seemed to me at some point that mathematical pursuit was more important,” he says. “I felt the world already contained a lot of paintings and I wasn’t convinced it needed a few more. Same could be said for poetry. But maybe it did need a few more ideas of how to navigate the future. ” One of the areas in which AI is making advances is in its ability to compose music and create art, and even to write. Does he imagine that sphere too will quickly be colonised by a superintelligence, or will it be a last redoubt of the human? “I don’t buy the claim that the artificial composers currently can compete with the great composers. Maybe for short bursts but not over a whole symphony. And with art, though it can be replicated, the activity itself has value. You would still paint for the sake of painting. ” Authenticity, the man-made, becomes increasingly important? This is what happens when an AI-written screenplay is made into a film Read more “Yes and not just with art. If and when machines can do everything better than we can do, we would continue to do things because we enjoy doing them. If people play golf it is not because they need the ball to reside in successive holes efficiently, it is because they enjoy doing it. The more machines can do everything we can do the more attention we will give to these things that we value for their own sake. ” Early in his intellectual journey, Bostrom did a few stints as a philosophical standup comic in order to improve his communication skills. Talking to him, and reading his work, an edge of knowing absurdity at the sheer scale of the problems is never completely absent from his arguments. The axes of daunting-looking graphs in his papers will be calibrated on closer inspection in terms of “endurable”, “crushing” and “hellish”. In his introduction to Superintelligence, the observation “Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong” typically leads to a footnote that reads: “I don’t know which ones. ” Does he sometimes feel he is morphing into Douglas Adams? “Sometimes the work does seem strange,” he says. “Then from another point it seems strange that most of the world is completely oblivious to the most major things that are going to happen in the 21st century. Even people who talk about global warming never mention any threat posed by AI. ” Because it would dilute their message? “Maybe. At any time in history it seems to me there can only be one official global concern. Now it is climate change, or sometimes terrorism. When I grew up it was nuclear Armageddon. Then it was overpopulation. Some are more sensible than others, but it is really quite random. ” Bostrom’s passion is to attempt to apply some maths to that randomness. Does he think that concerns about AI will take over from global warming as a more imminent threat any time soon? “I doubt it,” he says. “It will come gradually and seamlessly without us really addressing it. ” If we are going to look anywhere for its emergence, Google, which is throwing a good deal of its unprecedented resources at deep learning technology (not least with its purchase in 2014 of the British pioneer DeepMind) would seem a reasonable place to start. Google apparently has an AI ethics board to confront these questions, but no one knows who sits on it. Does Bostrom have faith in its “Don’t be evil” mantra? “There is certainly a culture among tech people that they want to feel they are doing something that is not just to make money but that it has some positive social purpose. There is this idealism. ” Can he help shape the direction of that idealism? “It is not so much that one’s own influence is important,” he says. “Anyone who has a role in highlighting these arguments will be valuable. If the human condition really were to change fundamentally in our century, we find ourselves at a key juncture in history. ” And if Bostrom’s more nihilistic predictions are correct, we will have only one go at getting the nature of the new intelligence right. Nick Bostrom speaking at London’s Futurefest in 2013. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Bostrom talking on ‘Superintelligence and the unknown future’ at London’s Futurefest in 2013. Photograph: Michael Bowles/Rex/Shutterstock Last year Bostrom became a father. (Typically his marriage is conducted largely by Skype – his wife, a medical doctor, lives in Vancouver. ) I wonder, before I go, if becoming a dad has changed his sense of the reality of these futuristic issues? “Only in the sense that it emphasises this dual perspective, the positive and negative scenarios. This kind of intellectualising, that our world might be transformed completely in this way, always seems a lot harder to credit at a personal level. I guess I allow both of these perspectives as much room as I can in my mind. ” At the same time as he entertains those thought experiments, I suggest, half the world remains concerned where its next meal is coming from. Is the threat of superintelligence quite an elitist anxiety? Do most of us not think of the longest-term future because there is more than enough to worry about in the present? “If it got to the point where the world was spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff and nothing on more regular things then one might start to question it,” he says. “If you look at all the things the world is spending money on, what we are doing is less than a pittance. You go to some random city and you travel from the airport to your hotel. Along the highway you see all these huge buildings for companies you have never heard of. Maybe they are designing a new publicity campaign for a razor blade. You drive past hundreds of these buildings. Any one of those has more resources than the total that humanity is spending on this field. We have half a floor of one building in Oxford, and there are two or three other groups doing what we do. So I think it is OK. ” And how, I ask, might we as individuals and citizens think about and frame these risks to the existence of our species? Bostrom shrugs a little. “If we are thinking of this very long time frame, then it is clear that very small things we do now can make a significant difference in that future. ” A recent paper of Bostrom’s, which I read later at home, contains a little rule of thumb worth bearing in mind. Bostrom calls it “maxipok”. It is based on the idea that “the objective of reducing existential risks should be a dominant consideration whenever we act out of an impersonal concern for humankind as a whole. ” What does maxipok involve? Trying to “maximise the probability of an ‘OK outcome’ where an OK outcome is any outcome that avoids existential catastrophe. ” It certainly sounds worth a go. • Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is published by Oxford University Press, £9. 99. Click here to buy it for £7. 99 • This article was amended on 13 June 2016. An earlier version said that an open letter signed by eminent scientists was a direct result of Bostrom’s book, rather than a coincidence. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud Published: 17 May 2016 Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ks%2CTechnology%2CDeepMind] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens An iCub robot learning how to play from a child Patricia Shaw/EPSRC/PA Artificial intelligence (AI) AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens Ian Sample Science editor @iansample Fri 20 May ‘16 13. 20 BST First published on Fri 20 May ‘16 13. 19 BST This article is 1 year old It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings. At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap. Harari rose to prominence when his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, became an international bestseller. Two years on, the book is still being talked about. Bill Gates asked Melinda to read it on holiday. It would spark great conversations around the dinner table, he told her. We know because he said so on his blog this week. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – review Read more When a book is a hit, the publisher wants more. And so Harari has been busy. His next title, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is not out until September but early copies have begun to circulate. Its cover states simply: “What made us sapiens will make us gods”. It follows on from where Sapiens ends, in a provocative, and certainly speculative, gallop through the hopes and dreams that will shape the future of the species. And the nightmares. Because even as the book has humans gaining godlike powers, that is only one eventuality Harari explores. It might all go pear-shaped, of course: we sapiens have a knack for hashing things up. Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution. Harari calls it “the rise of the useless class” and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition. Yuval Noah Harari Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Most of what people learn in school . . . will be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50,’ says Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Antonio Olmos “I’m aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It’s basically the boy who cried wolf,” says Harari. “But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time. ” The way Harari sees it, humans have two kinds of ability that make us useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. The Industrial Revolution may have led to machines that did away with humans in jobs needing strength and repetitive actions. But the takeover was not overwhelming. With cognitive powers that machines could not touch, humans were largely safe in their work. For how much longer, though? AIs are now beginning to outperform humans in the cognitive field. And while new types of jobs will certainly emerge, we cannot be sure, says Harari, that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots. AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. “Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster. ” Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known Read more Even so, jobless humans are not useless humans. In the US alone, 93 million people do not have jobs, but they are still valued. Harari, it turns out, has a specific definition of useless. “I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues. None of this puts us in the realm of the gods. In fact, it leads Harari to even more bleak predictions. Though the people may no longer provide for the state, the state may still provide for them. “What might be far more difficult is to provide people with meaning, a reason to get up in the morning,” Harari says. For those who don’t cheer at the prospect of a post-work world, satisfaction will be a commodity to pay for: our moods and happiness controlled by drugs; our excitement and emotional attachments found not in the world outside, but in immersive VR. All of which leads to the question: what should we do? “First of all, take it very seriously,” Harari says. “And make it a part of the political agenda, not only the scientific agenda. This is something that shouldn’t be left to scientists and private corporations. They know a lot about the technical stuff, the engineering, but they don’t necessarily have the vision and the legitimacy to decide the future course of humankind. ” • Homo Deus is published by Harvill Secker in September. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The last job on Earth: imagining a fully automated world Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Published: 12 Jun 2016 Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. careers%2CMoney] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Google Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud Inspired by thousands of romantic novels, technique creates verse that rivals that of Douglas Adams’s Vogons A pile of poetry books on a white background. succeed in maintaining a sort of theme. Photograph: Ian M Butterfield (Concepts)/Alamy Google Google AI project writes poetry which could make a Vogon proud Inspired by thousands of romantic novels, technique creates verse that rivals that of Douglas Adams’s Vogons Samuel Gibbs Tue 17 May ‘16 12. 01 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 17. 50 GMT This article is 1 year old After its attempts to digest romance novels, one of Google’s artificial intelligence projects is now accidentally writing poetry, some of which would make the fictional Vogons proud. there is no one else in the world. there is no one else in sight. they were the only ones who mattered. they were the only ones left. he had to be with me. she had to be with him. i had to do this. i wanted to kill him. i started to cry. i turned to him. Google is working with Stanford University and University of Massachusetts in the US to enhance the natural language skills of an AI technique called recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM), which is used within machine translation and image captioning among other tasks. It essentially builds sentences a single word at a time by analysing the previous words in that sentence. Poetry expresses what it is to be human – it’s therapy for the soul | Adam O’Riordan Read more Currently, RNNLM is not capable of implementing global themes or features, such as a set topic, within its sentence generation. Each sentence produced by the algorithms doesn’t necessarily flow smoothly into the next. The work, published as a paper through Cornell University’s open scientific paper archive, arXiv, details the researcher’s efforts to add the ability to apply a global theme to sentence generation using a system called a variational autoencoder and the results, including what could easily be mistaken for poetry. Some of it would arguably give Douglas Adams a run for his money, as the creator of the Vogons, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning, during a recital of which “four of the audience members died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived only by gnawing one of his own legs off”, according to the book. The researchers fed the system starting and ending sentences and then asked it to fill in the gap. Below, the bolded text is what the researchers gave the algorithm and the text in between is what it produced. The results are generated by the machine based on what it learnt from thousands of romance novels, which made some of the topics “rather dramatic”, according to the authors of the paper. he was silent for a long moment. he was silent for a moment. it was quiet for a moment. it was dark and cold. there was a pause. it was my turn. this was the only way. it was the only way. it was her turn to blink. it was hard to tell. it was time to move on. he had to do it again. they all looked at each other. they all turned to look back. they both turned to face him. they both turned and walked away. The generated sentences make grammatical sense, maintain a sort of theme and for the most part fit with the start and end sentence. Others weren’t quite as poetic, but still maintain the theme set by the start and ending sentences. no. he said. “no,” he said. “no,” i said. “i know,” she said. “thank you,” she said. “come with me,” she said. “talk to me,” she said. “don’t worry about it,” she said. i don’t like it, he said. i waited for what had happened. it was almost thirty years ago. it was over thirty years ago. that was six years ago. he had died two years ago. ten, thirty years ago. “it’s all right here. “everything is all right here. “it’s all right here. it’s all right here. we are all right here. come here in five minutes. The results show interesting improvements in the ability of the machine to generate sentences that make sense together, which could led to much more human-like interactions with AI chatbots, perhaps even Google’s Now. Topics more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Published: 12 Jun 2016 Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Google updates TensorFlow, its open source artificial intelligence Google answers plea from users with update to open source tool that adds ability to operate on multiple devices – it’s like using many brain cells instead of one Google that external developers can use and improve it. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) Google updates TensorFlow, its open source artificial intelligence Google answers plea from users with update to open source tool that adds ability to operate on multiple devices – it’s like using many brain cells instead of one Nathaniel Mott in New York Wed 13 Apr ‘16 19. 08 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 28 GMT This article is 1 year old The battle for the future of computing is a battle to bring artificial intelligence to the mainstream – and Google is quietly overhauling a machine learning tool used to improve some of its most popular services including Google Translate and Google Photos. TensorFlow can be used to help teach computers how to process data in ways similar to how the human brain handles information. It is also open source, meaning Google has published and shared the code online so that external developers can use and improve it. The latest version, released by Google on Wednesday, adds a feature many TensorFlow users have asked for since the tool made its public debut in late 2015: the ability to operate on multiple devices. Instead of being limited by the processing capabilities of a single computer, it can use distributed networks to handle more complicated tasks – as if TensorFlow will now be able to use many brain cells instead of being confined to just one. TensorFlow was developed to improve many of the services Google users interact with on a regular basis. It has taught the translation app to understand more of language’s idiosyncrasies, allowed the photos tool to identify many of the subjects in the images uploaded to its servers and made it easier for Google’s mobile apps to understand what people are saying when giving verbal instructions to its search engine. Humans already excel at those tasks. Most people can tell a cat from a dog, think beyond literal translations and follow a conversation as they walk along a crowded street. The human brain simply knows how to do those things. But computers can struggle to do the same; that’s why tools such as TensorFlow are used to help these devices perceive and process the world by emulating the neural networks inside our heads. Google previously used a tool called DistBelief to perform many of the same tasks. TensorFlow was developed to improve on DistBelief’s performance and – according to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai – is up to five times faster than its predecessor. Many of the improvements made to Google’s services over the last year can be at least partly attributed to the switch from DistBelief to TensorFlow during that period. Matthew Zeiler was an intern on the DistBelief project, and has since founded the visual AI service Clarifai, based in New York. “We’re building a platform that allows computers to see, essentially, and allows developers to include these applications on their own websites. ” Clarifai is being used by Vimeo to improve video search, by BuzzFeed to manage its continually growing media collection and by travel site Trivago to automatically label photos that contain an ocean view, or show a bedroom or a living room. “Neural nets are getting used everywhere these days. ” “It’s very important to be able to train quickly … if you can split workers working on different chunks of data and have them communicate and synchronize that data between nodes, it allows them to learn more efficiently. ” “Deep learning is a huge opportunity right now because it enables developers to create applications in a way that was never possible before. Neural networks are a new way of programming computers … It’s a new way of handling data. ” TensorFlow was made available to the public on 9 November. It was a quick hit among developers and became the most popular project on GitHub, a platform where software engineers learn from and collaborate with each other, for 2015 even though it was only available for the last two months of the year. Those improvements will eventually reach ordinary people through Google’s everyday products – even if it isn’t immediately obvious why a service suddenly became much smarter and more accurate. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? Tom Chatfield From the games program AlphaGo to the movie 2001, we are often warned of the threats posed by computers. But there is a way to live alongside technology Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. MGM/Everett//Rex Features Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? Tom Chatfield From the games program AlphaGo to the movie 2001, we are often warned of the threats posed by computers. But there is a way to live alongside technology Fri 18 Mar ‘16 06. 00 GMT Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17 00. 44 GMT Machines, four. Humanity, one. That was the result of the match between Google’s AlphaGo and human champion Lee Sedol at the fiendishly complex game of Go, and it came with a disconcerting question: what next? Where will the machines claim their next victory: putting you out of a job; solving the mysteries of science; bettering human abilities in the bedroom? AlphaGo’s success was down to artificial intelligence (AI): the computer program taught itself how to improve its game by playing millions of matches against itself. But the trouble with using games such as chess and Go as measures of technological progress is that they are competitions. There’s a winner and there’s a loser – and this month’s biggest tech news story had a clear victor. Even the smartest AI is orders of magnitude more inflexible than the most intransigent human This is a common narrative of human-machine interactions: a creation is pitted against its creators, aspiring ultimately to supplant them. Science fiction is full of robots-usurping-humans stories, sometimes entwined with a second strand of anxiety: seduction. Machines are either out to eliminate us (Skynet from Terminator 2, Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey), or to hoodwink us into a state of surrender (the simulated world of The Matrix, the pampered couch potatoes of WALL-E). On occasion, they do both. These are just stories, but they’re powerful and revealing – and easier to grasp than what’s actually going on. According to a YouGov survey for the British Science Association of more than 2,000 people, public attitudes towards AI vary greatly depending on its application. Fully 70% of respondents are happy for intelligent machines to carry out jobs such as crop monitoring – but this falls to 49% once you start asking about household tasks, and to a miserly 23% when talking about medical operations in hospitals. The very lowest level of trust comes when you ask about sex work, with just 17% trusting robots equipped with AI in this field – although this may be a proxy for not trusting human nature very much in this situation either. The results closely map the degree of intimacy involved. Artificial intelligence is OK at a distance. Up close and personal, however, the lack of a human face counts more and more. All of which both makes intuitive sense, yet leaves a pressing question unaddressed: just what does it mean for a machine to carry out a task in the first place? Here the image of a robot stepping into the shoes of a human worker couldn’t be more wrong. When it comes to technology’s most significant applications, we are neither usurped or seduced – because the systems involved are nothing like us in either their function or faculties. As a species, we are not in competition with information technology at all: we are, rather, busily adapting the fabric of our world into something machines can comprehend. Consider what it means to teach an autonomous robot to do something as simple as mowing grass. First, you take a long wire and lay it carefully around the borders of your lawn. Then you can set your mower loose. It doesn’t know or care what a lawn is, or what mowing means: it will simply criss-cross the area bound by the wire until it has covered all the ground. You have successfully adapted an environment – your lawn – into something a machine understands. I’ve borrowed this example from the philosopher of technology, Luciano Floridi, who in his book The Fourth Revolution explores the degree to which we have radically adapted most of the environments we work and live within so that machines are able to grasp them. We have, he notes, decades without fully realising it” – wrapping everything we do in layers of data so dense that they can no longer be comprehended outside of machine memory, speed and pattern-recognising power. Facebook Twitter Pinterest I say comprehended, but AlphaGo no more understands the game of Go than a robot mower understands the concept of a lawn. What it understands is zeroes and ones, and the patterns that can be drawn from their prodigiously smart crunching. We translate, the machine iterates and performs. Increasingly, machines translate for other machines, carrying on their data exchanges without our intervention. When the arena is something as pure as a board game, where the rules are entirely known and always exactly the same, the results are remarkable. When the arena is something as messy, unrepeatable and ill-defined as actuality, the business of adaptation and translation is a great deal more difficult. Let us imagine, Floridi suggests, two people in a relationship. One is extremely stubborn, inflexible and unwilling to change. The other is the opposite: adaptable, empathetic, flexible. It doesn’t take a genius to see how things will develop. When one person is willing to compromise and the other isn’t, more and more tasks end up being done the way the uncompromising partner insists. The flexible partner will eventually adapt their entire life around the inflexible partner’s insistences. AlphaGo seals 4-1 victory over Go grandmaster Lee Sedol Read more When it comes to human-machine interactions, even the smartest AI is orders of magnitude more inflexible than the most intransigent human. We either do things the way the system understands, or we don’t get to do things at all. Hence one of the most useful phrases to enter popular culture in the past 15 years, “computer says no”. It comes from a sketch in the comedy series Little Britain, and will provoke groans of recognition from anyone ever flummoxed by a system that doesn’t recognise their wishes as an option. “Computer says no,” mumbles a morose employee in response to a perfectly reasonable request, assaulting her keyboard with a single digit. It doesn’t matter what a million people might want – if the option isn’t on the menu, it might as well not exist. In social science, this is sometimes known as minority rule. Just 5% of a population can, for instance, remove a particular choice from everyone else through inflexibility. If I’m cooking for 100 people and I know five of them are lactose intolerant, I will cook something that suits everyone; if there are a couple of vegans coming and I don’t have the capacity to make multiple dishes, I’ll rule out even more kinds of food. In an era where machines are implicated in more and more of our most intimate decisions, the minority whose rules apply are those designing machines in the first place. Even the smartest AI will relentlessly follow its code once set in motion – and this means that, if we are meaningfully to debate the adaptation of a human world into a machine-mediated one, this must take place at the design stage. By the time it gets to “computer says no”, it’s too late. The technology is in place, its momentum gathering. We need to negotiate our assent and refusals earlier, collectively. And for this negotiation to work, we must ask what it means to translate not only productivity and profit but also other values into a system’s aims and permissions: justice, opportunity, freedom, compassion. “Humanity says no” isn’t a phrase for our age, yet. But it may need to become one. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Published: 12 Jun 2016 Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo: beating humans is one thing but to really succeed AI must work with them Google DeepMind’s success is significant, but artificial intelligence practitioners must teach the public there’s more to AI than trying to replace them Thinking Robot understanding co-operation and team communication with humans? ’ Photograph: Blutgruppe/Corbis Artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo: beating humans is one thing but to really succeed AI must work with them Google DeepMind’s success is significant, but artificial intelligence practitioners must teach the public there’s more to AI than trying to replace them Michael Cook Tue 15 Mar ‘16 14. 00 GMT Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 31 GMT “Really, the only game left after chess is Go,” was how Demis Hassabis set the scene ahead of AlphaGo’s match with world champion Lee Sedol earlier this month. Either Hassabis’s copy of the latest Street Fighter didn’t get delivered on time, or he was trying to be a little poetic to mark the occasion. Either way, you’d be forgiven for thinking there really were no games left to conquer after the media reaction to AlphaGo winning the first three games in a best-of-five against its human opponent. It’s been a curious month to be an AI researcher. AlphaGo seals 4-1 victory over Go grandmaster Lee Sedol Read more Watching the contest, which AlphaGo eventually won 4-1, I’ve learned a lot about Go and one of the most interesting things is how the spaces left empty on the board can often be as important and meaningful as the spaces where stones are played. The history of AI is similarly defined as much by the problems we’ve sidestepped or left out as the ones we’ve pushed on with to completion. There is still a lot of space left to secure, and even more space that we’ve simply never even looked at. One of the lesser-played corners of that board is the subfield of AI called computational creativity. For the last five years, I’ve worked on a system called Angelina, which designs simple videogames on its own (including some based on Guardian stories). This field recently had its own AlphaGo moment of sorts, as the European What-If Machine project helped generate the premise behind a West End musical, Beyond The Fence. We’re building software that can engage with people creatively, or as we sometimes put it, to exhibit behaviours that observers would describe as creative. So our field is defined in terms of external forces – someone or something else needs to validate our work as creative, we can’t simply beat our opponent into submission and declare ourselves more artistic. Lee Sedol Facebook Twitter Pinterest The world’s top human Go player, Lee Sedol, reviews the fourth match of the Google DeepMind challenge match. Photograph: Reuters We have to treat AI like cold, hard science, but we are also compelled to engage with it as a shared social concept. AI is not just the algorithms and the data, the models and the results. It’s our collective understanding, as a society, of the things technology can do, the things it can’t yet do, and then AI – the stuff that happens where those things meet. This, for me, is the significance of events like the AlphaGo/Lee matchup. Not the slaying of a white whale for AI researchers, but the impact it has on how the public understand what AI is, and what it it is for. Killer robots and digital doctors: how can we protect society from AI? Read more It’s easy to think about AI as simply being a case of being better than humans at things. If you were born in an era before Siri, your first encounter with AI was probably an enemy in a videogame, where its purpose was usually to try and stop you from winning. Complaints about game AI are almost always a request for better AI – we want more, stronger, faster, cleverer, more surprising, more ruthless, more effective. We want to be beaten, challenged, pushed. That’s the narrative. Like AI’s applications in the real world – predicting, classifying, solving – the worth of an AI is generally measured by how much better it is at its task than a human. Is it any wonder, as a result, that the general public worries about a future in which it replaces us in our jobs, or perhaps simply wipes us out entirely? While it’s easy to dismiss talk of apocalypses and doom as hype, it’s important to understand the implications the public perception of AI has on society. As we place these new systems on ever-higher pedestals, we risk losing sight of the guiding hand of the humans. AI is not born in a vacuum. AlphaGo did not will itself into being. Systems are developed by humans, and they inherit human flaws with them – a fact AI practitioners are often in denial about. When those humans are primarily white, male, middle-class computer scientists then that causes further problems. Right now it’s innocuous slip-ups, like not noticing that your selfie analyser is regurgitating your data’s white, western standards of beauty. Soon these systems will be deciding who gets health coverage; who gets parole; who gets their preferred schools; who gets fired. The discourse we are having now about projects like AlphaGo affect how people view modern AI, what people believe AI is for, and ultimately influence how people will invest in and apply it in the future. The NHS is a much bigger challenge for DeepMind than Go Read more When Hassabis describes Go as “the only game left”, I feel in amid the poetic licence is also a lot of presumption about what challenges we as AI researchers choose to go after. DeepMind tells us that StarCraft is their next target – another game mostly about going head-to-head against a human. There are plenty of AI grand challenges out there, however, that we don’t give as much thought to. Rather than Starcraft, could an AI learn to play a team eSport like League of Legends, understanding cooperation and team communication with humans? Could AI learn to be a playmate in a game like Minecraft, and improvise in crafting and co-creation? Can we teach a computer to be as realistically fallible and prone to tricks as your best friend is? Can we look to the unexplored parts of artificial intelligence, the empty spaces on the far side of the board, and think more broadly about what AI can do and be? Facebook Twitter Pinterest AlphaGo computer beats Go champion – video I’m truly delighted that AlphaGo has managed to beat a world champion at Go – it’s a milestone that has been in the minds of researchers since before the field even existed. But I think we can and should be more ambitious about what we want from AI in order to broaden how the public thinks about technology. It is our duty as practitioners to be responsible in the narrative we set, in order to mediate that strange space between what people understand technology to be capable of, and what is thought to be impossible. As we marshall Go across that gap from impossible to possible, it’s time to look at what’s next. I hope we can make a good choice. Michael Cook is an AI researcher at Goldsmiths, University of Falmouth Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Ke Jie, who once boasted he would never be beaten by a computer at the ancient Chinese game, said he had ‘horrible experience’ Published: 23 May 2017 World's best Go player flummoxed by Google’s ‘godlike’ AlphaGo AI Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trials Published: 24 Oct 2016 Artificial intelligence 'judge' developed by UCL computer scientists Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Professor praises creation of Cambridge University institute to study future of artificial intelligence Published: 19 Oct 2016 Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube Combining external memory and deep learning, DeepMind’s program learns how to do tasks independently, and could pave the way for sophisticated AI assistants Published: 12 Oct 2016 Google creates AI program that uses reasoning to navigate the London tube + Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' Julia Powles in Berlin Published: 8 Oct 2016 Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data' + James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ Published: 30 Sep 2016 James Lovelock: ‘Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’ + How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? Harry Armstrong and Jared Robert Keller Published: 15 Sep 2016 How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? + Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ Published: 12 Jun 2016 Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’ most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London Following two big acquisitions by US tech companies of AI startups based in academia, the capital is emerging as a hub for young scientist-entrepreneurs Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina portrayals of he sometimes slow and laborious work of AI research. Photograph: Film4/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London Following two big acquisitions by US tech companies of AI startups based in academia, the capital is emerging as a hub for young scientist-entrepreneurs Rob Davies @ByRobDavies Sat 5 Mar ‘16 16. 05 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 04. 43 GMT Deep in the heart of Imperial College, London, a computer is learning how to play Pac-Man. Like many humans, it struggles to get the hang of the classic 1980s video game at first. With time though, experience helps it decide which manoeuvres will allow it to evade the clutches of a relentless gang of animated ghosts. This is just one of dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) projects slowly transforming the UK into the global hub for a technology that elicits fascination and fear in equal measure. The point of teaching a computer to master Pac-Man is to help it “think” and learn like a human. That is a prospect not everyone feels comfortable with. Fears have been voiced by scientists as eminent as Professor Stephen Hawking that computers could become so clever that they turn against their makers. Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial, believes that while we should be thinking hard about the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, computers are still decades away from developing the sort of abilities they’d need to enslave or eliminate humankind and bringing Hawking’s worst fears to reality. One reason for this is that while early artificial intelligence systems can learn, they do so only falteringly. For instance, a human who picks up one bottle of water will have a good idea of how to pick up others of different shapes and sizes. But a humanoid robot using an AI system would need a huge amount of data about every bottle on the market. Without that, it would achieve little more than getting the floor wet. Using video games as their testing ground, Shanahan and his students want to develop systems that don’t rely on the exhaustive and time-consuming process of elimination – for instance, going through every iteration of lifting a water bottle in order to perfect the action – to improve their understanding. They are building on techniques used in the development of DeepMind, the British AI startup sold to Google in 2014 for a reported £400m. DeepMind was also developed using computer games, which it eventually learned to play to a “superhuman” level, and DeepMind programs are now able to play – and defeat – professional players of the Chinese board game Go. Shanahan believes the research of his students will help create systems that are even smarter than DeepMind. Demis Hassabis of DeepMind with Lee Se-dol Facebook Twitter Pinterest Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (left, on videoscreen) with Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s best players of the traditional board game Go. Lee is set to play five matches against AlphaGo, DeepMind’s artificially intelligent opponent, this week. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Both DeepMind and its successors involve “deep reinforcement learning” – giving computers the tools to draw conclusions based on large amounts of data, in the way that humans make assumptions based on experience. The potential applications are vast, from helping doctors diagnose patients to spotting faults in infrastructure such as transport networks – and other uses that even its inventors are yet to conceive of. But measuring progress in AI is not easy. The layperson usually cites the Turing test, developed by Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing in test that they are talking to another human. But that test, says Shanahan, is more about “tricking” people through mimicry than developing AI genuinely capable of learning. Nor does AI come down to the abilities of one machine in isolation. In another corner of the labyrinthine Imperial campus, researchers are working on a very different piece of the puzzle. Aerial robotics lecturer Dr Mirko Kovac and PhD student Talib Alhinai recently emerged triumphant from Drones for Good, the closest thing there is to a World Cup of drones. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), to give them their less sinister title, are controlled by humans so do not, in themselves, constitute AI. But Kovac says his drones could form part of whole AI towns, where basic services are performed by a web of AI-driven systems. His team’s most recent design was a UAV capable of identifying a leak in a gas or oil pipe and plugging it with polyurethane foam, which could spare a human engineer the time, effort and danger. A drone plugged into an AI network, he says, could in theory spot someone having a heart attack and call an ambulance. Kovac and his team have developed a valuable patent portfolio that could become a tasty morsel for a corporate giant investing in future technologies. With British universities producing this level of talent, it is no surprise that the DeepMind deal has been followed by further evidence that an AI industry is flourishing from an academic base. As well as the DeepMind takeover, London’s place at the intersection of business and academia has been highlighted by Microsoft’s $250m (£177m) takeover of predictive keyboard app SwiftKey, which started life at University College, London. The app’s ability to predict users’ next word – based on analysis of their writing style – has proved a worldwide hit. Uses for AI in big business – and therefore the potential for investment – are significant: a recent report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimated that the AI industry will be $70bn by Talib Alhinai with Imperial’s drone at the Drones for Good competition Facebook Twitter Pinterest Talib Alhinai with Imperial’s drone at the Drones for Good competition Photograph: Reuters Only last week, Royal Bank of Scotland unveiled Luvo, an AI system that will help call-centre staff answer customers’ questions more quickly and efficiently. And for businesses looking to take advantage of new technology, London colleges such as Imperial and UCL – coupled with Oxford and Cambridge – offer a trove of talent and ideas. This burgeoning network of academic excellence has attracted some of the world’s brightest minds, all keen to be part of an environment reminiscent of San Francisco’s web startup hub. “This is a scene where everyone knows each other. You can’t help being caught up in the excitement of it,’ says Shanahan. His PhD student Marta Garnelo is a regular attendee at London. AI, a weekly event where enthusiasts come for seminars and talks given by experts, followed by beer and pizza. London. AI was founded Alex Flamant and John Henderson, both of whom are involved in identifying startups with the potential to be the next big thing. Tickets cost £5 and all proceeds go to Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. Flamant says there are usually a few corporate talent-spotters at such events, which are the ideal place for talented young people to show off their skills. He is about to join venture capital firm Notion Capital, where he will specialise in identifying the next big thing in AI. “There’s nothing like London. If you have an idea and you want to get it funded, London’s the best place,” he says. “The grey matter is here, the money is here, the young passionate entrepreneurs from all over Europe are here. The legend of London. AI is that if you go there, you get acquired shortly after. ” And just as Silicon Valley attracts the best talent from around the world, London’s AI ingenues have a global pedigree. Imperial’s students come from countries such as Greece, the UAE, Thailand, Spain and Iran, signalling the appeal London now has an academic centre of excellence in this field. But what is striking about these students is their awareness that their projects could one day become multimillion-dollar business propositions. “We’re part of something bigger than academia. We’re close to the market and we can interact with industry,” says Iranian post-doctoral student Feryal Mehraban Pour Behbahani. “It gives young people with ideas the feeling that they can pursue them. Now there’s a momentum that wasn’t there a couple of years ago. ” Fellow post-doctoral student Anastasia Sylaidi, from Greece, agrees that the capital is the hot place to be for AI. “London is a startup hub and it’s interesting to be exposed to what’s happening in industry while you’re working in research. ” These highly intelligent and articulate students are not here because they expect to become multimillionaires. But it’s hard to escape the feeling – in the wake of DeepMind and SwiftKey – that they if they want to, the door is open. CASE STUDIES One reason corporate behemoths are willing to spend so much money on artificial intelligence is that the global talent pool is still relatively limited. London has proved a particularly good hunting ground for Silicon Valley stalwarts ready to spend big on the most promising AI inventions and, most importantly, on the people who came up with them. DEEPMIND When Google spent £400m on machine-learning startup DeepMind, it was a ringing endorsement of the wealth of talent in London’s artificial intelligence scene. The firm was founded in 2010 by chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis with University College London colleague Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. They are said to have turned down an offer from Facebook before agreeing to the Google deal, which was reportedly overseen personally by the company’s then chief executive, Larry Page. For Google, the deal was as much about acquiring the most talented brains in artificial intelligence as getting its hands on DeepMind’s technology. DeepMind is about reinforcement learning, or teaching computers to learn skills at the speed a human can. Google thinks this technology will become central to our lives. DeepMind’s creators would show it classic computer games, then find ways to help it learn to play them more quickly. Last October, DeepMind’s AlphaGo program became the first to defeat a professional player at Go, the traditional Chinese board game: it defeated European champion Fan Hui 5-0. This week it will take on Lee Sedol, who has been the world’s top Go player for a decade. SWIFTKEY The other big takeover of a British AI firm was Microsoft paying $250m for mobile-phone keyboard creator SwiftKey. Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, who founded the firm in 2008, reportedly pocketed $30m each. The price tag was extraordinary for a company that had just reported a fall in revenues, from £9. 9m to £8. 4m, after making its app free. But the appeal for Microsoft lay in the potential to export that technology to other parts of the empire. Microsoft wanted to integrate that technology with its own Word Flow keyboard app, and was prepared to pay top dollar for the privilege. SwiftKey is more than just an alternative keyboard: it uses high-quality predictive text, based on artificial intelligence, to suggest the word a user will type next, having analysed their writing style. The keyboard supports more than 100 languages and has been used by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, for whom the company built a special tool to assist him in giving lectures. AI ON THE BIG SCREEN According to researchers at Imperial College, one of the most realistic cinema portrayals of artificial intelligence is the 2015 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland. The film charts the efforts of a young programmer to assess the abilities of a humanoid AI system built by an eccentric scientist. Marvin, left, the android with a brain the size of a planet, with Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marvin, left, the android with a brain the size of a planet, with Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Photograph: BBC What’s different about Ex Machina, they say, is that it offers a relatively accurate depiction of the long and laborious process of building and tweaking a robot, with the techniques and processes researchers are using today. AI is the process of building a machine that can learn, and replicate, human behaviour - Ex Machina details this in all its frustration and, admittedly, existential horror. AI has been around for a while in Hollywood: the prime example of film’s obsession with machines that think is Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. adapted from the novel by Arthur C Clarke, raised the prospect of humans being supplanted by machine intelligence, with the line, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” summing up a new human insecurity, as Hal refused to open the pod bay doors. The notion of an uncooperative robot was explored more comically in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy, which was also adapted for the big screen. Adams gave us Marvin, a robot with “a brain the size of a planet”, who also happened to be depressed. In 1999, The Matrix toyed with the difference between human and machine intelligence by posing the hypothetical question of whether human reality is just a construct built by machines to keep us quiet. And 2013’s Her explored the potential endgame of human interaction with machines, with its hero falling in love with a hyper-intelligent operating system. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Would you bet against sex robots? AI 'could leave half of world unemployed' Scientist Moshe Vardi tells colleagues that change could come within 30 years, with few professions immune to effect of advanced artificial intelligence warn Thought Mechanism08 Dec 2011 --- A side view of a human female head with the human mind represented as a gear system. --- Image by Science Picture Co. /Corbis population out of a job, a computer scientist says. Photograph: Science Picture Co. /Corbis Artificial intelligence (AI) Would you bet against sex robots? AI 'could leave half of world unemployed' Scientist Moshe Vardi tells colleagues that change could come within 30 years, with few professions immune to effect of advanced artificial intelligence warn Alan Yuhas in Washington DC @alanyuhas Sat 13 Feb ‘16 15. 00 GMT Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 17. 56 GMT This article is 1 year old Machines could put more than half the world’s population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence’s threat to the economy should not be understated. Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. “I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? ” Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year. Hawking warned that AI “could spell the end of the human race” and Musk said it represents “our biggest existential threat”. ‘Mini-brains’ could revolutionise drug research and reduce animal use Read more The fear of artificial intelligence has even reached the UN, where a group billing itself the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots met with diplomats last year. Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow, said that technology presents a more subtle threat than the masterless drones that some activists fear. He suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-class jobs and exacerbating inequality. Unlike the industrial revolution, Vardi said, “the AI revolution” will not be a matter of physically powerful machines that outperform human laborers, but rather a contest between human wit and mechanical intelligence and strength. In China the question has already affected thousands of jobs, as electronics manufacturers, Foxconn and Samsung among them, develop precision robots to replace human workers. In his talk, the computer scientist alluded to economist John Maynard Keynes’ rosy vision of a future in which billions worked only a few hours a week, with intelligent machines to support their easy lifestyles – a prediction embraced wholesale by Google head of engineering Ray Kurzweil, who believes “the singularity” of super-AI could bring about utopia for a future hybrid of mankind. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Self-driving electric shuttle bus tested for use on roads in Netherlands – video Vardi insisted that even if machines make life easier, humanity will face an existential challenge. “I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing,” he said. “I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing. ” Computer scientist Bart Selman told reporters at the conference that as self-driving cars, “household robots, service robots” and other intelligent systems become more common, humans will “sort of be in a symbiosis with those machines, and we’ll start to trust them and start to work with them”. Selman, a professor at Cornell University, said: “Computers are basically starting to hear and see the way humans do,” thanks to advances in big data and “deep learning”. Vardi predicted that driving will be almost fully automated in the next 25 years, and asked, for all the benefits of technology, “what can humans do when machines can do almost everything? ” He said that technology has already massively changed the US economy in the last 50 years. “We were all delighted to hear that unemployment went down to 4. 8%” this month, he said, “but focusing on the monthly job report hides the fact that for the last 35 years the country has been in economic crisis. ” Citing research from MIT, he noted that although Americans continue to drive GDP with increasing productivity, employment peaked around 1980 and average wages for families have gone down. “It’s automation,” Vardi said. He also predicted that automation’s effect on unemployment would have huge political consequences, and lamented that leaders have largely ignored it. “We are in a presidential election year and this issue is just nowhere on the radar screen. ” He said that virtually no human profession is totally immune: “Are you going to bet against sex robots? I would not. ” Last year, the consultant company McKinsey published research about which jobs are at risk thanks to intelligent machines, and found that some jobs – or at least well-paid careers like doctors and hedge fund managers – are better protected than others. Less intuitively, the researchers also concluded that some low-paying jobs, including landscapers and health aides, are also less likely to be changed than others. In contrast, they concluded that 20% of a CEO’s working time could be automated with existing technologies, and nearly 80% of a file clerk’s job could be automated. Their research dovetails with Vardi’s worst-case scenario predictions, however; they argued that as much as 45% of the work people are paid to do could be automated by existing technology. Vardi said he wanted the gathering of scientists to consider: “Does the technology we are developing ultimately benefit mankind? Artificial Intelligence: Gods, egos and Ex Machina Read more “Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’,” he said. “We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge. ” In the US, the labor secretary, Thomas Perez, has told American seaports that they should consider robotic cranes and automatic vehicles in order to compete with docks around the world, despite the resistance of unions. In 2013, two Oxford professors predicted that as much as 47% of the US workforce, from telemarketers to legal secretaries and cooks, were vulnerable to automation. Dire forecasts such as Vardi’s are not without their critics, including Pulitzer-winning author Nicholas Carr and Stanford scientist Edward Geist. Carr has argued that human creativity and intuition in the face of complex problems is essentially irreplaceable, and an advantage over computers and their overly accurate reputation. Walking the line between the pessimists and optimists, Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, has suggested that automation will come down to politics today, telling National Geographic that if scientists and governments don’t address the issue “for lots of people who are not economically at the top, it’s going to be pretty dystopian”. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN United Nations opens new centre in Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and second-guess threats Published: 27 Sep 2017 Robots could destabilise world through war and unemployment, says UN Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger The triumph of ‘digital Taylorism’ means that many jobs in the modern economy have been sapped of their humanity, write professors Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger Published: 25 Sep 2017 Robots have already taken over our work, but they’re made of flesh and bone Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wages Published: 19 Sep 2017 Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years' Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation John Cryan told conference in Frankfurt that accountants could be replaced by machines, while also saying that Frankfurt is ideally placed to benefit from Brexit Published: 6 Sep 2017 Deutsche Bank boss says 'big number' of staff will lose jobs to automation + Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC Published: 4 Sep 2017 Robots and AI can bring down pension age, says TUC + The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites Published: 23 Aug 2017 The future of funerals? Robot priest launched to undercut human-led rites + Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class Larry Elliott Published: 20 Aug 2017 Robots will not lead to fewer jobs – but the hollowing out of the middle class + Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet Published: 15 Aug 2017 Robot shelf-stack fail suggests they won't take our jobs just yet most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. CElon+Musk] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Robot panic peaked in 2015 – so where will AI go next? This year experts from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking warned about the havoc robots could cause the economy and humanity. How do we ensure machines are friends rather than foes? Robots at Tesla in 2013. Tesla owner Elon Musk has since warned that AI is an existential threat to mankind. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Robot panic peaked in 2015 – so where will AI go next? This year experts from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking warned about the havoc robots could cause the economy and humanity. How do we ensure machines are friends rather than foes? Charles Arthur Charles Arthur @charlesarthur Sun 27 Dec ‘15 09. 00 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 15. 49 GMT Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry. In May, Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment, described the concern for both white- and blue-collar workers as that Humans-style world approaches: “Try to imagine a new industry that doesn’t exist today that will create millions of new jobs. It’s hard to do. ” But there is an optimistic view of the same process: that the pairing of computers and robots will free humans from drudgery and dangerous work; and free people to use their imaginations and interact with each other in more personal ways, and especially in ways that computers work side by side with robots, software agents and other machines,” said JP Gownder, lead author of a report called The Future of Jobs, 2025: Working Side by Side with Robots, produced for the research company Forrester in August. Gownder pointed out – as many have – that throughout history, automation and technology have repeatedly created more jobs overall than they have destroyed. We don’t have lamplighters any more, but we have huge industries built around street lights and electricity supply. But in the robotic world, will the new jobs be better jobs? In his book, published in January, The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, the writer Nicholas Carr argues that computers are taking over too much from us – or rather, that we’re too willing to give up charge of things to machines – and that jobs are becoming deskilled as a result. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, says computers will 'get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently' Carr points to the origins of automation, after the second world war, when the Ford Motor Company was installing new machinery to do “automatic business” on assembly lines. “Control over a complex industrial process had shifted from worker to machine,” he notes. He points out that automation had already raised its head during the second world war, through the need to get hard-to-manoeuvre anti-aircraft guns to shoot down bombers by letting machinery move their aim, according to targets picked by gunners from screens. The humans’ task was made easier, but it was abstracted from the process and outcome. What is indisputable is that robots equipped with computer vision and paired with artificial intelligence (AI) systems – often called “machine learning”, or “deep learning”, or “neural network” systems – will take over more of the work that humans do today. Foxconn is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of electronics, with giant factories in China which assemble phones, tablets and computers for Apple and other companies. It is working on robot-driven factories which will inevitably mean fewer of those jobs for humans. The Korean electronics giant Samsung, meanwhile, has been given a grant by the Korean government to develop high-precision robots to take over the work now done by humans, also in China, where rising wages are squeezing profit margins. Which, of course, leads to the question: what new jobs will those displaced factory workers go on to do? Nobody knows; yet everyone is sure, despite Martin Ford’s fears, that they must exist. Pepper the concierge robot Facebook Twitter Pinterest “Pepper” the concierge, who greets customers in the Mizuho bank in Tokyo. Photograph: Yuya Shino/Reuters Yet as we head towards that future, there are also ethical and legal reefs to navigate. Isaac Asimov introduced his famous Three Laws of Robotics for Runaround, a science fiction story set in 2015. In July, an article appeared in the science journal Nature, pointing out that “working out how to build ethical robots is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence”. That month, a 22-year-old worker installing a robot at a VW plant in Germany was killed when it was wrongly activated. Clearly, Asimov’s laws haven’t arrived yet. But robots that kill – especially “intelligent” ones – are very much on the mind of those who worry most publicly about the AI-robot combination. Stephen Hawking told the BBC it “could spell the end of the human race” as it took off on its own and redesigned itself at an ever-increasing rate. Elon Musk, the billionaire who brought us PayPal and the Tesla car, called AI “our biggest existential threat”. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, told the Australian Financial Review in March that “computers are going to take over from humans, no question” and that he now agreed with Hawking and Musk that “the future faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently”. Nick Bostrom may not have a similar claim to fame, but he is an Oxford University philosopher who argues in his book Superintelligence that self-improving AI could enslave or kill humans if it wanted to, and that controlling such machines could be impossible. But there’s no sign so far of inherently intelligent killer robots, or “anthropogenic AI”, as it’s also called. Reviewing Bostrom’s book, the scientist Edward Moore Geist suggested that it “is propounding a solution that will not work to a problem that probably does not exist”. According to Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, “properly general intelligence” is comparatively easy to describe but hard to enact: “the hallmark of properly general intelligence is the ability to adapt an existing behavioural repertoire to new challenges, and to do so without recourse to trial and error or to training by a third party,” he writes in his book The Technological Singularity. But to do that requires two capacities that AI tends not to display: common sense and creativity. On common sense, Shanahan gives the example of finding the people who normally work inside a building instead standing outside it in the rain. “What are you doing? ” might prompt the answer “Standing outside” from a computer, whereas a human would respond “Fire alarm” – recognising the common understanding that exists between the speakers. Creativity, meanwhile, can be demonstrated by animals in problem solving, as well as by humans, such as a crow which bent straight wires to create hooks to get food. But it’s hard to say that computers have ever shown it. It might be that they will – and to that end, Musk, with the backing of Loopt entrepreneur Sam Altman, has poured $1bn into a new not-for-profit organisation, OpenAI. org, which aims to create an open-sourced AI that surpasses human intelligence but whose products are “usable by everyone, instead of by, say, just Google”. Our real problem, though, seems to be that the growth in computing power – which roughly doubles every 18 months, but grows geometrically because we have so many more connected devices now – is outstripping our ability to reframe our ethical and legal approach to computers’ decisions. Even a technology that sounds innocuous and helpful, such as self-driving cars, isn’t immune from ethical and legal questions. For instance: if such a car needs to brake abruptly to save those on board, is there any responsibility towards people in cars behind? If someone shunts a self-driving car with nobody at the wheel into a third car, who is responsible for the damage to the third car? The self-driving car’s owner? Its programmer? And the ways in which computers solve “human” problems repeatedly turn out very unlike the methods humans use. Take chess: studies have found that the best human players look at a narrow set of moves, which they explore in depth, “pruning” among alternatives to find the best sequence. Computers, by contrast, look at every possible move, and essentially use brute force to pick the best at any time; they can’t decide that a particular move will surprise or upset an opponent, or choose a tricky one because the other player is short on time to decide. Compared with humans, chess-playing computers have no subtlety, except by accident. And in June, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency held a competition for self-propelled robots which could work where humans cannot – say, to go into nuclear reactors and shut down operations. The winners took away millions; but the “blooper reel” of tumbling, stumbling, staggering robots has had nearly half a million views on YouTube. Sometimes, we like robots to be fools. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch: robots come a cropper at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Nicholas Carr wrote in the New York Times in May that while it might feel as though the best way to remove error from any system is to remove the humans – because they’re the ones we hear about who opened the wrong spigot, or turned off the wrong engine on the jet – in fact, humans repeatedly perform “feats of perception and skill that lie beyond the capacity of the sharpest computers”. For example: Google’s self-driving cars have been hit 11 times in 1. 7m miles of travel by dozy humans, while causing no accidents directly themselves. But the humans inside them have to stay alert and at the wheel, because the software has a glitch every 300 miles’ driving or so and it hands control back to the “driver”. What hasn’t yet been figured out is how much warning the human needs to take over. Is it 20 seconds? 10? One? Is it the same for everyone? What if the “driver” falls asleep because the rest of the journey has been so boring, but there’s a crash when the computer was fully in charge: is that their fault, or the computer’s, or the programmers’? It’s enough to make a lawyer cry with delight. Jobs that require careful human-to-human contact – such as hairdresser or surgeon – should survive the robot insurgency But there’s no doubt we have to face up to the social changes that are coming our way. In November the Bank of America published a lengthy report which concluded that the “rise of the intelligent machines” constituted “the next industrial revolution”, with AI-driven robots “becoming an integral part of our lives as providers of labour, mobility, safety, convenience and entertainment”. Sales of robots grew by 29% in 2014, with North America seeing the third consecutive year of record sales. Potential long-term effects include the replacement of existing jobs by automation (47% of jobs in the US could be automated, the Bank of America calculated) and the growth of inequality – as skilled workers are increasingly in demand, while unskilled ones are not. Yet it’s not necessarily the low-paid jobs that will be affected – nor the high-paid ones that will be safe. The World Economic Forum published a graphic in November as part of an analysis into robots and jobs which suggests that chief executives’ jobs are probably safe – but so are those of landscaping and groundskeeping workers, despite an order of magnitude difference in their hourly payments. The emerging consensus, such as it is, seems to be that jobs requiring careful human-to-human contact – hairdresser, surgeon and so on – should be safest from the robot insurgency. What’s most likely is that “work” will grow in complexity as AI-based systems take over the simpler tasks. “Computer” used to be a job title for humans who did calculations; now their entire function can be replicated by a cell in a spreadsheet. Yet jobs still exist. Losing at chess hasn’t made us stop playing chess, either. Kasparov himself has run championships of “centaur chess” – humans playing with the direct aid of computers during the game, which has turned out sometimes to lift the humans’ chess rating above both their own and that of the computer program. And if it can happen in chess, why not work? Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ture] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Technology sector The Observer Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’ A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end Robots manufactured by Shaanxi Jiuli Robot Manufacturing Co on display at a technology fair in Shanghai display at a technology fair in Shanghai Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis Technology sector The Observer Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’ A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end Charles Arthur Charles Arthur @charlesarthur Sat 7 Nov ‘15 16. 18 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 05. 07 GMT If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines. Haven’t we heard all this before, though? From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanisation. And yet we keep on creating new job categories. However, there are still concerns that the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) – which is able to make logical inferences about its surroundings and experience – married to ever-improving robotics, will wipe away entire swaths of work and radically reshape society. “The poster child for automation is agriculture,” says Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI and the novel Pandora’s Brain. “In 1900, 40% of the US labour force worked in agriculture. By 1960, the figure was a few per cent. And yet people had jobs; the nature of the jobs had changed. “But then again, there were 21 million horses in the US in 1900. By 1960, there were just three million. The difference was that humans have cognitive skills – we could learn to do new things. But that might not always be the case as machines get smarter and smarter. ” What if we’re the horses to AI’s humans? To those who don’t watch the industry closely, it’s hard to see how quickly the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence is advancing. Last week a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a video showing a tiny drone flying through a lightly forested area at 30mph, avoiding the trees – all without a pilot, using only its onboard processors. Of course it can outrun a human-piloted one. MIT has also built a “robot cheetah” which can jump over obstacles of up to 40cm without help. Add to that the standard progress of computing, where processing power doubles roughly every 18 months (or, equally, prices for capability halve), and you can see why people like Chace are getting worried. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Drone flies autonomously through a forested area But the incursion of AI into our daily life won’t begin with robot cheetahs. In fact, it began long ago; the edge is thin, but the wedge is long. Cooking systems with vision processors can decide whether burgers are properly cooked. Restaurants can give customers access to tablets with the menu and let people choose without needing service staff. Lawyers who used to slog through giant files for the “discovery” phase of a trial can turn it over to a computer. An “intelligent assistant” called Amy will, via email, set up meetings autonomously. Google announced last week that you can get Gmail to write appropriate responses to incoming emails. (You still have to act on your responses, of course. ) Further afield, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company which assembles devices for Apple and others, aims to replace much of its workforce with automated systems. The AP news agency gets news stories written automatically about sports and business by a system developed by Automated Insights. The longer you look, the more you find computers displacing simple work. And the harder it becomes to find jobs for everyone. So how much impact will robotics and AI have on jobs, and on society? Carl Benedikt Frey, who with Michael Osborne in 2013 published the seminal paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? – on which the BoA report draws heavily – says that he doesn’t like to be labelled a “doomsday predictor”. He points out that even while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focus more on services and interaction with and between people. “The fastest-growing occupations in the past five years are all related to services,” he tells the Observer. “The two biggest are Zumba instructor and personal trainer. ” Frey observes that technology is leading to a rarification of leading-edge employment, where fewer and fewer people have the necessary skills to work in the frontline of its advances. “In the 1980s, 8. 2% of the US workforce were employed in new technologies introduced in that decade,” he notes. “By the 1990s, it was 4. 2%. For the 2000s, our estimate is that it’s just 0. 5%. That tells me that, on the one hand, the potential for automation is expanding – but also that technology doesn’t create that many new jobs now compared to the past. ” This worries Chace. “There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else,” he says. “Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us. “I think our best hope going forward is figuring out how to live in an economy of radical abundance, where machines do all the work, and we basically play. ” Arguably, we might be part of the way there already; is a dance fitness programme like Zumba anything more than adult play? But, as Chace says, a workless lifestyle also means “you have to think about a universal income” – a basic, unconditional level of state support. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there has been so little examination of the social effects of AI. Frey and Osborne are contributing to Oxford University’s programme on the future impacts of technology; at Cambridge, Observer columnist John Naughton and David Runciman are leading a project to map the social impacts of such change. But technology moves fast; it’s hard enough figuring out what happened in the past, let alone what the future will bring. But some jobs probably won’t be vulnerable. Does Frey, now 31, think that he will still have a job in 20 years’ time? There’s a brief laugh. “Yes. ” Academia, at least, looks safe for now – at least in the view of the academics. Foxconn sign Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smartphone manufacturer Foxconn is aiming to automate much of its production facility. Photograph: Pichi Chuang/Reuters The danger of change is not destitution, but inequality Productivity is the secret ingredient in economic growth. In the late 18th century, the cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus notoriously predicted that a rapidly rising human population would result in misery and starvation. But Malthus failed to anticipate the drastic technological changes - from the steam-powered loom to the combine harvester - that would allow the production of food and the other necessities of life to expand even more rapidly than the number of hungry mouths. The key to economic progress is this ability to do more with the same investment of capital and labour. The latest round of rapid innovation, driven by the advance of robots and AI, is likely to power continued improvements. Recent research led by Guy Michaels at the London School of Economics looked at detailed data across 14 industries and 17 countries over more than a decade, and found that the adoption of robots boosted productivity and wages without significantly undermining jobs. Robotisation has reduced the number of working hours needed to make things; but at the same time as workers have been laid off from production lines, new jobs have been created elsewhere, many of them more creative and less dirty. So far, fears of mass layoffs as the machines take over have proven almost as unfounded as those that have always accompanied other great technological leaps forward. There is an important caveat to this reassuring picture, however. The relatively low-skilled factory workers who have been displaced by robots are rarely the same people who land up as app developers or analysts, and technological progress is already being blamed for exacerbating inequality, a trend Bank of America Merrill Lynch believes may continue in future. So the rise of the machines may generate huge economic benefits; but unless it is carefully managed, those gains may be captured by shareholders and highly educated knowledge workers, exacerbating inequality and leaving some groups out in the cold. Heather Stewart Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion It’s too late to give machines ethics – they’re already beyond our control Sue Blackmore Google’s Demis Hassabis suggests we can mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence by instilling values, but even now it’s evolving for its own benefit, fed by our phones, drones and CCTV plays rock-scissors-paper with a robot programmed by scientists to use artificial intelligence controls on to AI before it’s too late. ’ Photograph: David Cheskin/PA Artificial intelligence (AI) Opinion It’s too late to give machines ethics – they’re already beyond our control Sue Blackmore Google’s Demis Hassabis suggests we can mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence by instilling values, but even now it’s evolving for its own benefit, fed by our phones, drones and CCTV Fri 18 Sep ‘15 11. 09 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 05 GMT Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and now Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind have all warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), urging that we put ethical controls in place before it’s too late. But they have all mistaken the threat: the AI we have let loose is already evolving for its own benefit. It’s easy to imagine that humans will build ever more clever computers; machines that will end up smarter than we are. Once they pass this point and achieve “superintelligence”, whether trapped inside boxes or installed in roving robots, they can either help or turn against us. To avoid this nightmare, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom says we must instil the superintelligence with goals that are compatible with our own survival and wellbeing. Hassabis, too, talks about getting “a better understanding of how these goal systems should be built, what values should the machines have”. They may not be dealing with threatening robots, but they are still talking about actual “machines” having values. But this is not where the threat lies. The fact is that all intelligence emerges in highly interconnected information processing systems; and through the internet we are providing just such a system in which a new kind of intelligence can evolve. Our future role in this machine? We might be like the humble mitochondrion, which supplies energy to our body’s cells This way of looking at AI rests on the principle of universal Darwinism – the idea that whenever information (a replicator) is copied, with variation and selection, a new evolutionary process begins. The first successful replicator on earth was genes. Their evolution produced all living things, including animals, whose intelligence emerged from brains consisting of interconnected neurons. The second replicator was memes, let loose when humans began to imitate each other. Imitation may seem a trivial ability, but it is very far from that. An animal that can imitate another brings a new level of evolution into being because habits, skills, stories and technologies (memes) are copied, varied and selected. Our brains had to quickly expand to handle the rapidly evolving memes, leading to a new kind of emergent intelligence. The third replicator is, I suggest, already here, but we are not seeing its true nature. We have built machines that can copy, combine, vary and select enormous quantities of information with high fidelity far beyond the capacity of the human brain. With all these three essential processes in place, this information must now evolve. Google is a prime example. Google consults countless sources to select material copied from servers all over the world almost instantly. We may think we are still in control because humans designed the software and we put in the search terms, but other software can use Google too, copying the selected information before passing it on to yet others. Some programs can take parts of other programs and mix them up in new ways. Just as in biological evolution, most new variants will fizzle out, but if any arise that are successful at getting themselves copied, by whatever means, they will spread through the wonderfully interconnected systems of machines that we have made. Replicators are selfish by nature. They get copied whenever and however they can, regardless of the consequences for us, for other species or for our planet. You cannot give human values to a massive system of evolving information based on machinery that is being expanded and improved every day. They do not care because they cannot care. I refer to this third replicator as techno-memes, or temes, and I believe they are already evolving way beyond our control. Human intelligence emerged from biological brains with billions of interconnected neurons. AI is emerging in the gazillions of interconnections we have provided through our computers, servers, phones, tablets and every other piece of machinery that copies, varies and selects an ever-increasing amount of information. The scale of this new evolution is almost incomparably greater. Hassabis urges us to debate the ethics of AI “now, decades before there’s anything that’s actually of any potential consequence or power that we need to worry about, so we have the answers in place well ahead of time”. I say we need to worry right now and worry about the right things. AI is already evolving for its own benefit – not ours. That’s just Darwinism in action. AI: will the machines ever rise up? Read more At the moment we create most of the temes out there – uploading photos, videos, and blog posts, sending emails, and creating web pages. And we demand ever more hardware to handle it all. The danger comes, and may already have come, when much of the software and data are evolving on their own. We wouldn’t even know this was happening until we found we were building ever more machines without getting the expected increases in capacity. Could such a system become artificially intelligent? Given that the natural intelligence we know about emerged from highly interconnected evolving systems, it seems likely if not inevitable. This system is now busy acquiring the equivalent of eyes and ears in the millions of CCTV cameras, listening devices and drones that we are happily supplying. We do all this so willingly, apparently oblivious to the evolutionary implications. So what might we expect of our future role in this vast machine? We might be like the humble mitochondrion, which supplies energy to all our body’s cells. Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that became absorbed into larger cells in the process known as endosymbiosis; a deal that benefited both sides. As we continue to supply the great teme machine with all it needs to grow could we end up like this, willingly going on feeding it because we cannot give up all the digital goodies we have become used to? It’s not a superintelligent machine that we should worry about but the hardware, software and data we willingly add to every day. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Opposition to autonomous warfare swells to 16,000 signatories Artificial intelligence community comes together in unprecedented numbers to call for a ban on AI-controlled weaponry GLaDOS, the malicious AI from the Portal series of video games. Image: Valve Photograph: Valve Artificial intelligence (AI) Opposition to autonomous warfare swells to 16,000 signatories Artificial intelligence community comes together in unprecedented numbers to call for a ban on AI-controlled weaponry Alex Hern @alexhern Thu 30 Jul ‘15 13. 59 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 08 GMT This article is 2 years old An open letter from AI researchers urging a ban on offensive autonomous weapons has now reached 16,000 signatories, after being signed by more than 15,000 people in the three days since it was released. The letter says “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment within years” and was initially signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking. It has now been signed by over 2,000 experts, as well as another 14,000 individuals from outside the AI community. It warns: “The stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms … The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. ” The letter was launched in Buenos Aires earlier this week, and Toby Walsh, one of the researchers involved in putting it together, says that the momentum behind it has gathered entirely through word of mouth. But despite the huge support, Walsh emphasised that the position is by no means universal amongst the AI community. “These issues are not black and white. There are arguments for both sides here. It’s just my opinion, and that of thousands of my colleagues, that the balance of arguments favours a ban before we end up in this next arms race. ” In fact, Walsh concedes that “there are several arguments against a ban”. He says: “For instance, such robots will be more precise and able to minimise civilian casualties. Another is that we should not risk human lives when robots can take their place. However, I find these carry less weight than the fear of an arms race and of these weapons falling into the hands of terrorist and other organisations. ” But he argues that the impetus for a ban is not merely hypothetical, and that there are robots available today “that have the capabilities needed to build such autonomous weapons”. “One such example (there are others) is the Google autonomous car: it can be given a high level goal (‘take me to the office’), make a plan for how to achieve that goal, sense where it is using computer vision and radar, start executing that plan, identify when the plan breaks (perhaps there are roadworks), find a new plan and start executing that, take evasive action when a car cuts them in, and finally identify when it has reached some goal. “These are essentially the capabilities you need to build an autonomous weapon system that can find, locate, track and target. Of course, terrorists don’t have the means or capabilities today to build a Google-like car. But it won’t be long before the technology is smaller, cheaper and better. That’s always the case with computing. the killer robots that I fear most are small ones. Imagine swarms of tens or hundreds of robots. It would be hard to defend against such an opponent. And small robots will be cheap and easy to replicate. ” Of course, even if AIs don’t get the explicit go-ahead to murder, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be ethical challenges ahead. “We must not forget the many other challenging and important ethical decisions in AI,” says Walsh. “To go back to the autonomous cars, what happens when such a car needs to make a life or death decision when facing a car coming towards it on the wrong side of the road? ” At a UN conference in Geneva in April discussing the future of weaponry, including so-called killer robots, the UK opposed a ban on the development of autonomous weapons, despite calls from various pressure groups, including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. cience%2CDeepMind] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Science AI: will the machines ever rise up? From Ex Machina to Terminator Genisys, ‘synths’ and robots have invaded our popular culture. But how real is the reel depiction of artificial intelligence? Terminator Genisys Terminator Genisys - 2015 science fiction. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex Shutterstock Science AI: will the machines ever rise up? From Ex Machina to Terminator Genisys, ‘synths’ and robots have invaded our popular culture. But how real is the reel depiction of artificial intelligence? Ian Sample Ian Sample, science editor @iansample Fri 26 Jun ‘15 18. 05 BST Last modified on Tue 19 Dec ‘17 21. 23 GMT The harried parents in one family in the Channel 4 drama Humans are divided about having a robot called Anita. The father is delighted with the extra help; the mother unnerved and threatened. The teenage daughter, bright and hardworking, gives up at school after wondering why she would spend seven years to become a doctor, when a “Synth” could upload the skills in as many seconds. The teenage son, of course, is preoccupied with the sexual possibilities. The thriller has become the biggest home-made drama on Channel 4 for more than two decades, according to viewing figures published this week, and is the latest to explore what has been described as perhaps the greatest existential threat the human race has ever faced, artificial intelligence: the idea that computers will start thinking for themselves and not much like what they see when they cast their eyes on their creators. The humanoid robots in Humans are not portrayed as good or evil but are dropped into suburbia, where the crises they cause are domestic: disrupting relationships, employment aspirations, and feelings of freedom. Ava, from Ex Machina Facebook Twitter Pinterest AI robot Ava in the film Ex Machina. Photograph: Allstar/FILM4/Sportsphoto Ltd. /Allstar It is a theme that has increasingly attracted screenwriters. In the 2013 film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his computer’s intelligent operating system. In Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s directorial debut, a young coder must administer the Turing test to an AI robot called Ava with deadly results. There is also the release of Terminator Genisys the fifth instalment of the series, in which humans are forever trying to prevent a future world destroyed by the machines. “We didn’t want to make a judgement on this world, but offer up the pros and cons in a world where synths exist and let our audience decide: is it good or bad? ” Jonathan Brackley, one of the writers of Humans, told the Guardian. Co-writer, Sam Vincent, who worked with Brackley on Spooks, adds: “At the heart of the show is the question, does something have to be human for someone to have human feelings about it? The answer to us is no. ” The series plays out the consequences of human-like artificial intelligence in the humdrum reality of modern life, but Vincent and Brackley see parallels with our increasing attachment to electronic devices. “Technology used to be just for work. But we use it more than ever now to conduct every aspect of our lives. We are more intimate with it, and it understands us more, even as we understand it less,” says Vincent. “There’s this very speculative human-like AI side to the series, and a completely real side of what our technology is doing to our emotional lives, our relationships, and society at large,” he adds. Apocalyptic pronouncements from scientists and entrepreneurs have driven the surge in interest. It was the inventor Elon Musk who last year said artificial intelligence might be the greatest existential threat that humans faced. Stephen Hawking joined in the chorus, warning that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. The same year, the Oxford scientist Nick Bostrom, published the thoughtful book Superintelligence, in which he made similarly gloomy predictions. Concerns about the consequences of creating an intelligence that matches, or far exceeds, our own are not entirely new. HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, takes to bumping off astronauts with menacing efficiency. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, Ash is outed as an android with a secret agenda. His mission is to bring the murderous creature to Earth, never mind the safety of the human crew. The present day setting for Humans gives the conflicts an immediate power and persuasiveness. But it also bolsters the misconception that human-like artificial intelligence is looming on the horizon. Though scientists have made serious progress in AI, the advances are almost entirely in what researchers call narrow AI: the creation of smart algorithms for dedicated tasks. An AI today can power a chatbot that answers common sales enquiries, or tease meaning from human speech. But assign one to any other simple task and it will fall flat. The University of Alberta’s Cepheus algorithm can play perfect Texas Hold’em. Challenge Cepheus to tiddly winks though, and it will not know where to begin. “We really have no idea how to make a human level AI,” says Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who was a scientific adviser on Garland’s Ex machina. He rates the odds of scientists developing human-level AI as “possible but unlikely” between 2025 and 2050. In the second half of the century that becomes “increasingly likely, but still not certain. ” A case of if, not when. “The big hurdles are endowing computers and robots with common sense: being able to anticipate the consequences of ordinary, every day actions on people and things. The other one is endowing them with creativity. And that is incredibly hard,” he says. Persona Synthetics shop selling Synths The fictional Persona Synthetics shop selling ‘synths’. Channel 4 drama, Humans, creates a future where families buy human-like robots - synths, that help them with a variety of tasks from household chores to doing homework. Photograph: Persona Synthetics/Channel 4 The distinction between narrow and general artificial intelligence is crucial. Humans are so effective because they have general intelligence: the ability to learn from one situation and apply it to another. Recreating that kind of intelligence in computers could be decades away. Progress, though, is coming. Researchers at DeepMind, a London-based company owned by Google, made what they called “baby steps” towards artificial general intelligence in February when they unveiled a game-playing agent that could learn how to play retro games such as Breakout and Space Invaders and apply the skills to tackle other games. But Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton University, stresses that the hurdles which remain are major ones. “Brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs talk about this as if it’s only two decades away. You really have to be taken on a tour of the algorithms inside these systems to realise how much they are not doing. ” “Can we build systems that are an existential threat? Of course we can. We can inadvertently give them control over parts of our lives and they might do things we don’t expect. But they are not going to do that on their own volition. The danger is not artificial intelligence, it’s natural stupidity. ” Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Amazon Computer says no: Amazon uses AI to combat fake reviews Retailer uses artificial intelligence to fight astroturfing by putting greater emphasis on verified and helpful reviews Amazon reviews reviews. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian Amazon Computer says no: Amazon uses AI to combat fake reviews Retailer uses artificial intelligence to fight astroturfing by putting greater emphasis on verified and helpful reviews Samuel Gibbs Mon 22 Jun ‘15 11. 12 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 17. 58 GMT This article is 2 years old Amazon is using artificial intelligence to combat fake product reviews and inflated star ratings. It is employing a new AI machine-learning system that the online retailer built in-house to boost the prominence and weight of verified customer purchase reviews, those marked as helpful by other users and newer, more up-to-date critiques on its site. The system will bring what Amazon thinks are more accurate reviews to the top and use them to create a star rating. Previously star ratings were simply an average of all reviews, which allowed fake reviews to heavily influence the first-glance rating even if verified purchasers had slated the product. Astroturfing: what is it and why does it matter? | Adam Bienkov Read more The algorithm will improve over time, Amazon told technology site Cnet. Its first effects may not be visible for some time as the work only began on Friday. Customer reviews have become the cornerstone of trust in the online shopping world. Where users cannot see in person what the products are like before they buy them, the ratings and reviews of users who have supposedly bought them before can make or break a product. Can you trust that five-star review? That means marketers have taken to attempting to influence star ratings, especially in the initial stages of a product going on sale on any particular site. They post fake, inflationary reviews or pay users to do so on their behalf. The practice known as “astroturfing” – fake grassroots campaigns – is widespread across a variety of sites and services. Amazon, as one of the world’s largest online retailers, is a significant target. But Amazon also indicated that its system will be capable of differentiating between original products and those modified to fix issues or customer complaints sold through the same listing. The reviews of the fixed product will be used to outweigh older ones of the broken product to create a more consistent and useful rating of the product users would receive now. Astroturfing is not confined to retailers. TripAdvisor and other travel sites are also heavily affected by the practice. “We have a whole team dedicated to the problem of fake reviews,” James Kay from TripAdvisor UK told the Guardian. “We use both automated systems and a dedicated team to review reviews and weed out fake entries. ” To maintain user trust, more and more sites that host user reviews will have to implement smarter and smarter systems to prevent abuse. Amazon’s AI-based system will be closely watched by both competitors and creators. If it works it could end astroturfing as we know it today. • Yes, androids do dream of electric sheep • DeepMind: ‘Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct’ Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. sor%2CTravel] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) DeepMind: 'Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct' Co-founder of technology company insists AI is not a danger to humanity, but will help tackle lack of clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks Artificial intelligence robot out how to succeed at nearly 50 Atari computer games without any foreknowledge of how to play them. Photograph: Blutgruppe/Blutgruppe/Corbis Artificial intelligence (AI) DeepMind: 'Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct' Co-founder of technology company insists AI is not a danger to humanity, but will help tackle lack of clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks Charles Arthur Charles Arthur @charlesarthur Tue 9 Jun ‘15 11. 29 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 11 GMT This article is 2 years old Fears that artificial intelligence will wipe out human beings are completely overblown, according to the co-founder of Britain’s DeepMind, who has insisted that the technology will help tackle some of the world’s biggest problems including accessing clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks. Mustafa Suleyman, who with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg set up the London-based machine learning company that was bought by Google in January 2014 for £400m, mounted a spirited defence of the company’s successes. He told a conference on machine learning that “artificial intelligence, AI, has arrived. This isn’t just some brief summer for this technology, and it’s not about to go away again. These are production breakthroughs. ” High-profile figures including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have all warned that the rise of AI poses a threat to humanity – a threat that has been echoed in recent Hollywood films such as Ex Machina, The Terminator and Transcendence. Yet Suleyman insisted that AI is, and will remain, a tool that humans can control and direct, rather than a threat. The best use for AI would be to help decisions about how to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems such as lack of access to clean water, inequality of access to food and finance, and stock market risks, he suggested. DeepMind’s systems use neural networks and “deep learning” methods that deploy low-level transistor networks to produce high-level effects so that they can, for instance, distinguish a cat’s face from a human one – a trivial task for a human, but hard for a machine. That has been developed into “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) that can learn to solve tasks without prior programming, and have already been used to replace 60 hand-crafted systems across Google. The AGI system’s deployment into speech recognition, now used in Android phones and Google Translate, had led to the biggest overall improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, Suleyman said, with a 30% reduction in transcription error rates. Yet training the program for the task took less than five days. Speaking to a conference on machine intelligence in London on Friday, Suleyman said that he was dismayed by the negative attitudes being shown towards AI. “It’s sad how quickly we’ve adopted to the reality and don’t acknowledge the magic and the good that these systems can bring. The narrative has gone straight from ‘isn’t it terrible that AI has been such a flop’ to ‘isn’t it terrible that AI has been such a success’. ” He said that the technology was going to be “a hugely powerful tool that we control and direct within its limits – like any tool that we have ever built … Artificial generalised intelligence is a form of intellectual horsepower – a cheap and abundant resource to solve our toughest global problems. ” Suleyman observed: “We have global information overload from overwhelming systems complexity – they’re so complex and interlinked it’s possible that the US financial crash in 2008-9 caused the Egyptian revolution [which was sparked when bread prices rose in line with wheat prices]. “But everything we have built is a product of intelligent human activity. AGI is a tool to massively amplify our ability to control the world. ” DeepMind, based by Kings Cross station in London, has developed a “generalised artificial intelligence” which was able to figure out how to succeed at nearly 50 Atari computer games without any foreknowledge of how to play them. Given inputs of just the score and the pixels on the screen, and control of the games buttons – again without any knowledge of their relevance – it was able to play as well as a human after a few hundred games. In Breakout, it played competently after 300 games – then figured out after 200 more games that the best strategy was to knock out the side bricks and let the ball bounce behind the wall: “that surprised us,” said Suleyman. systems, and apparently on Google’s new Photos service, to categorise and label pictures by their contents. The company is also seeking to expand that categorisation so that when there are multiple recognisable objects in a picture it can describe them all in a single coherent sentence. But Suleyman said the idea that a machine-based artificial intelligence could take over decision and pose a threat to humans was “preposterous”. “Any talk of a superintelligent machine vacuuming up all the knowledge in the world and then going about making its own decisions are absurd. There are engineers in this room who know how difficult it is to get any input into these systems,” Suleyman said to applause from the audience of machine intelligence specialists. “If we fear that we won’t control them, then we should slow down their use and implementation, just like with nuclear weapons and genetic Suleyman said he wants to make public the names of the people who sit on the company’s ethics board, which was set up at the insistence of himself and Hassabis when Google bought it. “We will [publicise the names], but that isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s one component of the whole apparatus,” he said. Asked what gave Google the right to choose the ethics board members without any public oversight, Suleyman replied: “That’s just what I public. ” He said it had been a bold move for the 100-strong company to suggest to the much bigger buyer that there should be an ethics board at all. “Being able to put something like this on the table is a first step to being more open and helping to steward this,” he said. The company is seeking to recruit more people to its ethics board, as well as to its policy and legal teams. Topics most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Guardian sustainable business business futures What will artificial intelligence mean for the world of work? Machines are good at complex tasks, but not at activities that humans find simple. The answer is for people and computers to work together Business woman surrounded by robots. future are made by machines? Photograph: Blutgruppe/Blutgruppe/Corbis Guardian sustainable business business futures What will artificial intelligence mean for the world of work? Machines are good at complex tasks, but not at activities that humans find simple. The answer is for people and computers to work together Lynda Gratton Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at London Business School Tue 17 Feb ‘15 16. 00 GMT Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 18 GMT What can scientists tell us about business? I had an opportunity to consider this important question when, earlier this year, I led a debate with four professors from the University of California, Berkeley, who were experts in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and psychology. The question under discussion was one of the most troubling of our time: will machines ever make better decisions than humans? This is a crucial question for those interested in the future of business. What impact will machines, be they computers or robots, have on the way we work? There are those who argue that up to 60% of the work we currently do will, within two decades, be entirely replaced by machines. This process is already happening. The hollowing out of what we understand as work has already seen many medium-skilled jobs disappear as executives’ smartphones replace their secretaries and assistants are made redundant by automatic filing systems and Wikipedia. The ethics of AI: how to stop your robot cooking your cat Read more At the debate, I asked the audience members what they believed: would machines eventually make better decisions than humans? Around 50% agreed and 50% disagreed; there is no consensus on such a tricky question. The first issue with the problem of future decision-making is well-known to scientists specialising in artificial intelligence. It is best described in Moravec’s paradox: why is it that computers are very good at undertaking tasks that require speed and precision, and which humans find difficult (such as solving mathematical equations, playing chess, or even driving cars), and yet bad at tasks we humans find simple, such as clearing coffee cups from a table? The psychologist Alison Gopnik studies babies. She states that, today, machines are not as smart as a two-year-old child. Though they may not be able to play chess or drive, two-year-olds can do lots of things that a computer cannot: create theories, make hypotheses, figure out how things work, imitate and – most importantly – learn and be creative. Moravec’s ultimate argument is that computers are great at reasoning, but the often unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge that has evolved in the human brain over billions of years is impossible to imitate. The second issue is the question of values and morality. We humans make decisions on the basis of our values. Can computers have values? The artificial intelligence expert Stuart Russell argues that it is already possible to programme computers on the basis of utility, in terms of gaining the highest-value outcome. However, programming is still carried out on the basis of the values of the programmer. As our panel observed, human decisions are about emotions and we make decisions cognitively and viscerally. This comes from the evolution of the frontal cortex that took place over the last two million years. How can the constant changing of consensus on values be programmed? Driverless cars - the future of transport in cities? Read more Computers cannot make decisions better than humans right now, but it may be possible given time. Certainly with regard to sheer computing power, the technology is developing fast. Recent developments in cloud computing are enabling the connection of millions of devices, and that has enormous potential for the amplification of any moral or ethical imperative through a network of machines. But, as Professor Ken Goldberg believes, it is likely to be through the combination of computers and people that real progress will be made. This echoes my own findings, in the study of open innovation, that it is the combination of diverse minds that brings forth the ideas that prove to be the basis of innovation. In this area at least, scientists have much to tell us about how the world of work and the organisations we work for will develop. Even if there is no consensus on timeframes, the direction of travel is clear: there is a great deal more for us to explore in the interface between humans and machines. • A version of this article first appeared on Lynda Gratton’s blog, FoWLAb The business futures hub is funded by The Crystal. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “brought to you by”. Find out more here. This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. y] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence and nanotechnology 'threaten civilisation' Technologies join nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts in Global Challenges Foundation’s risk report Empathetic robot Pepper isn't a threat to humanity, but more advanced AI in the future could be, claims a new report. advanced AI in the future could be, claims a new report. Photograph: Koji Sasahara/AP Artificial intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence and nanotechnology 'threaten civilisation' Technologies join nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts in Global Challenges Foundation’s risk report Stuart Dredge @stuartdredge Wed 18 Feb ‘15 10. 11 GMT Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 18. 11 GMT This article is 2 years old Artificial intelligence and nanotechnology have been named alongside nuclear war, ecological catastrophe and super-volcano eruptions as “risks that threaten human civilisation” in a report by the Global Challenges Foundation. In the case of AI, the report suggests that future machines and software with “human-level intelligence” could create new, dangerous challenges for humanity – although they could also help to combat many of the other risks cited in the report. “Such extreme intelligences could not easily be controlled (either by the groups creating them, or by some international regulatory regime), and would probably act to boost their own intelligence and acquire maximal resources for almost all initial AI motivations,” suggest authors Dennis Pamlin and Stuart Armstrong. Artificial intelligence: can scientists stop ‘negative’ outcomes? Read more “And if these motivations do not detail the survival and value of humanity, the intelligence will be driven to construct a world without humans. This makes extremely intelligent AIs a unique risk, in that extinction is more likely than lesser impacts. ” The report also warns of the risk that “economic collapse may follow from mass unemployment as humans are replaced by copyable human capital”, and expresses concern at the prospect of AI being used for warfare: “An AI arms race could result in AIs being constructed with pernicious goals or lack of safety precautions. ” In the case of nanotechnology, the report notes that “atomically precise manufacturing” could have a range of benefits for humans. It could help to tackle challenges including depletion of natural resources, pollution and climate change. But it foresees risks too. “It could create new products – such as smart or extremely resilient materials – and would allow many different groups or even individuals to manufacture a wide range of things,” suggests the report. “This could lead to the easy construction of large arsenals of conventional or more novel weapons made possible by atomically precise manufacturing. ” The foundation was set up in 2011 with the aim of funding research into risks that could threaten humanity, and encouraging more collaboration between governments, scientists and companies to combat them. That is why its report presents worst-case scenarios for its 12 chosen risks, albeit alongside suggestions for avoiding them and acknowledgements of the positive potential for the technologies involved. In the case of artificial intelligence, though, Global Challenges Foundation’s report is part of a wider debate about possible risks as AI gets more powerful in the future. In January, former Microsoft boss Bill Gates said that he is “in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence”, even if in the short term, machines doing more jobs for humans should be a positive trend if managed well. Rise of the robots: how long do we have until they take our jobs? Read more “A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned. ” Tesla and SpaceX boss Musk had spoken out in October 2014, suggesting that “we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that”. Professor Stephen Hawking is another worrier, saying in December that “the primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. ” The full list of “risks that threaten human civilisation, according to Global Challenges Foundation: Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Technology Artificial intelligence 'will not end human race' Head of Microsoft’s main research lab admits that AI will pose legal, ethical and psychological issues as it becomes more sophisticated Titan, created by England Cyberstein Robots, at a food market ahead of an robotics exhibition in Moscow last year. of a robotics exhibition in Moscow last year. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA Technology Artificial intelligence 'will not end human race' Head of Microsoft’s main research lab admits that AI will pose legal, ethical and psychological issues as it becomes more sophisticated Chris Johnston @cajuk Wed 28 Jan ‘15 18. 08 GMT Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 19 GMT The head of Microsoft’s main research lab has dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could pose a threat to the survival of the human race. Eric Horvitz believed that humans would not “lose control of certain kinds of intelligences”, adding: “In the end we’ll be able to get incredible benefits from machine intelligence in all realms of life, from science to education to economics to daily life. ” Professor Stephen Hawking last month expressed his fears about the rise of AI. He believed that technology would eventually become self-aware and supersede humanity: “The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. ” Eric Horvitz Eric Horvitz, head of the Microsoft Research Redmond lab. Photograph: Microsoft Horvitz made his comments in an video interview after being awarded the Feigenbaum Prize by the AAAI for his contribution to artificial intelligence research. However, he acknowledged that advances in AI were likely to have significant impact on society and pose numerous legal, ethical, economic and psychological issues. “We’ll need to remain vigilant about assessing and continuing to address potential risks and rough edges . . . We need to be assured that systems working in high-stakes areas will behave safely and in accordance with our goals, even when they encounter unforeseen situations,” the researcher said in a Microsoft blog. ‘We need to be very careful’ Other high-profile figures to cast doubt on AI include Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal who went on to set up Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, and SpaceX, which focuses on rocket technology. He said last year that AI was the biggest existential threat to humans. “We need to be very careful. I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. ” SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk. Facebook Twitter Pinterest SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images Musk is one of the high-profile investors, alongside Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher, in Vicarious. The company aims to build a computer that can think like a person, with a neural network capable of replicating the part of the brain that controls vision, body movement and language. • This article was amended on 29 January 2015. An earlier version described Eric Horvitz as the head of Microsoft’s research division. To clarify: he is the head of Microsoft Research’s main lab in Redmond, Washington. Peter Lee is the head of Microsoft Research. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. omputing%2CScience] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Next-gen tech Artificial intelligence might be a threat to humans but not for the reasons you think Nigel Shadbolt AI computers will benefit humanity – and fears that they might determine that the planet would prosper without us are unfounded. But machines needn’t be self-aware to pose a threat A still from Ex Machina. depicted in Ex Machina, is as far away as ever. Universal Pictures International (UPI) / Film4 Photograph: Universal Pictures International (UPI) / Film4 Next-gen tech Artificial intelligence might be a threat to humans but not for the reasons you think Nigel Shadbolt AI computers will benefit humanity – and fears that they might determine that the planet would prosper without us are unfounded. But machines needn’t be self-aware to pose a threat Contact author @Nigel_Shadbolt Thu 22 Jan ‘15 14. 16 GMT Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 19 GMT The new year saw the publication of an open letter from leading artificial intelligence experts arguing for vigilance so as to ensure that this fast developing field benefits humanity. It follows hard on the heels of Stephen Hawking’s worries that super smart computers could spell the end of the human race. Hawking had just upgraded the system that enables him to write and communicate despite his crippling illness. What the computer could do surprised him – just how smart it was – seeming to anticipate what he wanted to write next. This set him thinking about just how intelligent computers were becoming and how quickly that was happening. Our computers are getting better thanks to the exponential developments that drive this area of science and engineering. The computer you buy the one the same money could buy 18 months earlier. This has been happening for decades. My students have access to computers that are 1 million times more powerful than the ones I began my AI research on back in the late 1970s. If we had improved air travel as fast I would fly from London to Sydney in less than a tenth of a second. As well as more powerful computers, we have learned how to write software that “learns” to get better, “understands” human speech, and “navigates” from one place to another. I put the verbs in quotes because for the most part in AI we are not claiming that the algorithms operate in the way that we do when we solve similar tasks. A founding father of AI once said “there are lots of ways being smart that aren’t smart like us”. What we have built in AI are numerous slivers of smart behaviour, a digital ecosystem populated with adaptive systems narrowly crafted to a particular niche. When a high-end computer beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in the 90s it didn’t usher in a new age of intelligent machines. It did demonstrate what you could do with large amounts of computer power, large databases full of moves and good heuristics to look ahead and search possible moves. The overall effect on the world chess champion was unnerving. Kasparov felt as if Deep Blue was reading his mind. Deep Blue had no concept there was another mind involved. But it is easy to endow our AI systems with general intelligence. If you watch the performance of IBM’s Watson as it beats reigning human champions in the popular US TV quiz show you feel you are in the presence of a sharp intelligence. Waton displays superb general knowledge – but it has been exquisitely trained to the rules and tactics of that game and loaded with comprehensive data sources from Shakespeare to the Battle of Medway. But Watson couldn’t play Monopoly. Doubtless it could be trained – but it would be just another specialised skill. We have no clue how to endow these systems with overarching general intelligence. DeepMind, a British company acquired by Google, has programs that learn to play old arcade games to superhuman levels. All of this shows what can be achieved with massive computer power, torrents of data and AI learning algorithms. But our programs are not about to become self-aware. They are not about to apply a cold calculus to determine that they and the planet would be better off without us. What of “emergence” – the idea that at a certain point many AI components together display a collective intelligence – or the concept of “hard take off” a point at which programs become themselves self-improving and ultimately self-aware? I don’t believe we have anything like a comprehensive idea of how to build general intelligence – let alone self-aware reflective machines. But there are lots of ways of being smart that aren’t smart like us, and there is the danger that arises from a world full of dull, pedestrian dumb-smart programs. Of hunter kill drones that just do one thing very well – take out human targets. Done at scale this becomes an existential risk. How reflective does a system have to be to wreak havoc. Not at all if we look to nature and the self-replicating machines of biology such as Ebola and HIV. AI researchers are becoming aware of the perils as well as the benefits of their work. Drones full of AI recognition and target acquisition software alarm many. We need restraints and safeguards built into the heart of these devices. In some cases we might seek to ban their development altogether. We might also want to question the extent and nature of the great processing and algorithmic power that can be applied to human affairs, from financial trading to surveillance, to managing our critical infrastructure. What are those tasks that we should give over entirely to our machines? These are ethical questions we need to attend to. The open letter makes this point forcefully. Building a self-aware, general intelligence is as far away as ever. However, the audacious ambition of AI continues to attract bright human minds. For those of us working in AI it is a technology that is intended to augment us not replace us, it is a discipline that aims to help us understand our own natures. But all AI researchers need to appreciate the responsibilities as well as the rights involved in carrying out this fascinating work. More like this: • The mass attention deficit era: what businesses can learn from schools • The internet of things is as important as the world wide web • Sponsored: What makes smartphones smart? - video To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, sign up free for Media Network membership. All Guardian Media Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “Brought to you by” – find out more here. Topics most viewed back to top All rights reserved. CScience%2CDeepMind] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: how clever do we want our machines to be? The theory of artificial intelligence is already fact in some financial and transport sectors, yet as its uses become more widespread – and perhaps threatening – how do we ensure we control it rather than vice versa? Ex Machina Photograph: Film4/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: how clever do we want our machines to be? The theory of artificial intelligence is already fact in some financial and transport sectors, yet as its uses become more widespread – and perhaps threatening – how do we ensure we control it rather than vice versa? Alex Hern Alex Hern @alexhern Sat 29 Nov ‘14 19. 00 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 15. 49 GMT From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turing’s famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code. These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names: last month Telsa’s Elon Musk described AI as mankind’s “biggest existential threat… we need to be very careful”. What many of us don’t realise is that AI isn’t some far-off technology that only exists in film-maker’s imaginations and computer scientist’s labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios. And so long as Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Facebook continue to acquire AI firms and hire AI experts, AI’s IQ will continue to rise… Isn’t AI a Steven Spielberg movie? No arguments there, but the term, which stands for “artificial intelligence”, has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubrick’s 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked “Can machines think? ” AI Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jude Law as Gigolo Joe (and pals) in Spielberg and Kubrick’s 2001 film AI. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd It’s something that is still at the front of our minds 64 years later, most recently becoming the core of Alex Garland’s new film, Ex Machina, which sees a young man asked to assess the humanity of a beautiful android. The concept is not a million miles removed from that set out in Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he laid out a proposal for the “imitation game” – what we now know as the Turing test. Hook a computer up to text terminal and let it have conversations with a human interrogator, while a real person does the same. The heart of the test is whether, when you ask the interrogator often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman”. Turing said that asking whether machines could pass the imitation game is more useful than the vague and philosophically unclear question of whether or not they “think”. “The original question… I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. ” Nonetheless, he thought that by the year 2000, “the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”. In terms of natural language, he wasn’t far off. Today, it is not uncommon to hear people talking about their computers being “confused”, or taking a long time to do something because they’re “thinking about it”. But even if we are stricter about what counts as a thinking machine, it’s closer to reality than many people think. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blade Runner’s ‘Voight-Kampff’ test, designed to distinguish replicants from humans based on their emotional response to questions. So AI exists already? It depends. We are still nowhere near to passing Turing’s imitation game, despite reports to the contrary. In June, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman successfully fooled a third of judges in a mock Turing test held in London into thinking it was human. But rather than being able to think, Eugene relied on a clever gimmick and a host of tricks. By pretending to be a 13-year-old boy who spoke English as a second language, the machine explained away its many incoherencies, and with a smattering of crude humour and offensive remarks, managed to redirect the conversation when unable to give a straight answer. The most immediate use of AI tech is natural language processing: working out what we mean when we say or write a command in colloquial language. For something that babies begin to do before they can even walk, it’s an astonishingly hard task. Consider the phrase beloved of AI researchers – “time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana”. Breaking the sentence down into its constituent parts confuses even native English speakers, let alone an algorithm. Is all AI concerned with conversations? Not at all. In fact, one of the most common uses of the phrase has little to do with speech at all. Some readers will know the initials AI not from science fiction or Alan Turing, but from video games, where it is used to refer to computer-controlled opponents. In a first-person shooter, for example, the AI controls the movements of the enemies, making them dodge, aim and shoot at you in challenging ways. In a racing game, the AI might control the rival cars. As a showcase for the capabilities of AI, video games leave a lot to be desired. But there are diamonds in the rough, where the simplistic rules of the systems combine to make something that appears complex. Take Grand Theft Auto V, where the creation of a city of individuals living their own lives means that it’s possible to turn a corner and find a fire crew in south central LA having a fist-fight with a driver who got in the way of their hose; or Dwarf Fortress, where caves full of dwarves live whole lives, richly textured and algorithmically detailed. Those emergent gameplay systems show a radically different way that AI can develop, aimed not at fully mimicking a human, but at developing a “good enough” heuristic that turns into something altogether different when scaled up enough. So is everyone ploughing money into AI research to make better games? No. A lot of AI funding comes from firms such as Apple and Google, which are trying to make their “virtual personal assistants”, such as Siri and Google Now, live up to the name. It sounds a step removed from the sci-fi visions of Turing, but the voice-controlled services are actually having to do almost all the same heavy lifting that a real person does. They need to listen to and understand the spoken word, determine how what they have heard applies to the data they hold, and then return a result, also in conversational speech. They may not be trying to fool us into thinking they’re people, but they aren’t far off. Because all the calculations are done in the cloud, the more they hear, the better they are at understanding. Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the 2013 movie Her, lonely Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an operating system. However the leading AI research isn’t just aimed at replicating human understanding of the world, but at exceeding it. IBM’s Watson is best known as the computer that won US gameshow Jeopardy! in 2011, harnessing its understanding of natural language to parse the show’s obtuse questions phrased as answers. But as well as natural language understanding, Watson also has the ability to read and comprehend huge bodies of unstructured data rapidly. In the course of the Jeopardy! taping, that included more than 200 million pages of content, including the full text of Wikipedia. But the real goal for Watson is to expand that to full access to the entire internet, as well as specialist data about the medical fields it will eventually be put to work in. And then there are the researchers who are just trying to save humanity. Oh God, we’re all going to die? Maybe. The fear is that, once a sufficiently general-purpose AI such as Watson has been created, its capacity will simply scale with the processing power available to it. Moore’s law predicts that processing power doubles every 24 months, so it’s only a matter of time before an AI becomes smarter than its creators – able to build an even faster AI, leading to a runaway growth in cognitive capacity. But what does a superintelligent AI actually do with all that capacity? That depends on its programming. The problem is that it’s hard to program a supremely intelligent computer in a way that will ensure it won’t just accidentally wipe out humanity. Suppose you’ve set your AI the task of making paperclips and of making itself as good at making paperclips as possible. Pretty soon, it’s exhausted the improvements to paperclip production it can make by improving its production line. What does it do next? “One thing it would do is make sure that humans didn’t switch it off, because then there would be fewer paperclips,” explains Nick Bostrom in Salon magazine. Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, has won praise from fans such as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for clearly stating the hypothetical dangers of AI. The paperclip AI, Bostrom says, “might get rid of humans right away, because they could pose a threat. Also, you would want as many resources as possible, because they could be used to make paperclips. Like, for example, the atoms in human bodies. ” How do you fight such an AI? The only way that would work, according to some AI theorists such as Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, is to beat it to the punch. Not only do humans have to try to build a smart AI before they make one accidentally, but they have to think about ethics first – and then program that into it. After all, coding anything simpler is asking for trouble. A machine with instructions to “make people happy”, for example, might just decide to do the job with electrodes in brains; so only by addressing one of the greatest problems in philosophy can we be sure we’ll have a machine that understands what it means to be “good”. So, all we have to do is program in ethics and we’ll be fine? Well, not quite. Even if we manage to not get wiped out by malicious AI, there’s still the issue of how society adapts to the increasing capability of artificial intelligence. The Industrial Revolution was characterised by the automation of a number of jobs that previously relied on manual labour. There is little doubt that it represented one of the greatest increases in human welfare ever seen. But the upheaval at the time was momentous and something we could be about to see again. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elon Musk on the dangers of AI. What steam power did for physical labour, AI could do for mental labour. Already, the first casualties are starting to become clear: the minicab dispatch office has little place in a world of Hailo and Uber; the job of a stockbroker has changed beyond all recognition thanks to the introduction of high-frequency trading; and ever since the construction of the Docklands Light Railway in the 1980s, the writing has been on the wall for train drivers. And the real changes are only just beginning. In November, Goldman Sachs led a $15m funding round for Kensho, a financial data service that uses AI techniques to pump out financial analysis at a rate no human analyst could match. And it can do it while taking stock of the entirety of the huge amount of financial data available, something humans simply can’t cope with. Kensho’s analytical notes could then be passed on to a high-frequency trading firm such as Athena, which will use the insights to gain an edge of milliseconds on the market – that’s enough to make money, if you’re trading with billions of dollars. Once the trading has affected the market, it might be written up for Forbes by Narrative Science, which uses algorithms to replace financial journalists. After all, most business stories follow a common template, and the data is already available in a structured format, so why waste time getting people involved at all? On aggregate level, these changes are a good thing. If the work of millions of people is covered by algorithms, then output goes up, hours worked go down, and we move one step closer to a Jetsons-style utopia. In the end, it will be OK? Assuming we avoid the superintelligent AIs wiping us out as an afterthought, manage to automate a large proportion of our jobs without creating mass unemployment and societal unrest, and navigate the tricky boundaries of what personhood entails in a world where we can code passable simulacra of humans, then yes, it should be fine. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ldman+Sachs%2CGoogle] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: how clever do we want our machines to be? The theory of artificial intelligence is already fact in some financial and transport sectors, yet as its uses become more widespread – and perhaps threatening – how do we ensure we control it rather than vice versa? Ex Machina Photograph: Film4/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence: how clever do we want our machines to be? The theory of artificial intelligence is already fact in some financial and transport sectors, yet as its uses become more widespread – and perhaps threatening – how do we ensure we control it rather than vice versa? Alex Hern Alex Hern @alexhern Sat 29 Nov ‘14 19. 00 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 15. 49 GMT From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turing’s famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code. These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names: last month Telsa’s Elon Musk described AI as mankind’s “biggest existential threat… we need to be very careful”. What many of us don’t realise is that AI isn’t some far-off technology that only exists in film-maker’s imaginations and computer scientist’s labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios. And so long as Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Facebook continue to acquire AI firms and hire AI experts, AI’s IQ will continue to rise… Isn’t AI a Steven Spielberg movie? No arguments there, but the term, which stands for “artificial intelligence”, has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubrick’s 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked “Can machines think? ” AI Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jude Law as Gigolo Joe (and pals) in Spielberg and Kubrick’s 2001 film AI. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd It’s something that is still at the front of our minds 64 years later, most recently becoming the core of Alex Garland’s new film, Ex Machina, which sees a young man asked to assess the humanity of a beautiful android. The concept is not a million miles removed from that set out in Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he laid out a proposal for the “imitation game” – what we now know as the Turing test. Hook a computer up to text terminal and let it have conversations with a human interrogator, while a real person does the same. The heart of the test is whether, when you ask the interrogator often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman”. Turing said that asking whether machines could pass the imitation game is more useful than the vague and philosophically unclear question of whether or not they “think”. “The original question… I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. ” Nonetheless, he thought that by the year 2000, “the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”. In terms of natural language, he wasn’t far off. Today, it is not uncommon to hear people talking about their computers being “confused”, or taking a long time to do something because they’re “thinking about it”. But even if we are stricter about what counts as a thinking machine, it’s closer to reality than many people think. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blade Runner’s ‘Voight-Kampff’ test, designed to distinguish replicants from humans based on their emotional response to questions. So AI exists already? It depends. We are still nowhere near to passing Turing’s imitation game, despite reports to the contrary. In June, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman successfully fooled a third of judges in a mock Turing test held in London into thinking it was human. But rather than being able to think, Eugene relied on a clever gimmick and a host of tricks. By pretending to be a 13-year-old boy who spoke English as a second language, the machine explained away its many incoherencies, and with a smattering of crude humour and offensive remarks, managed to redirect the conversation when unable to give a straight answer. The most immediate use of AI tech is natural language processing: working out what we mean when we say or write a command in colloquial language. For something that babies begin to do before they can even walk, it’s an astonishingly hard task. Consider the phrase beloved of AI researchers – “time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana”. Breaking the sentence down into its constituent parts confuses even native English speakers, let alone an algorithm. Is all AI concerned with conversations? Not at all. In fact, one of the most common uses of the phrase has little to do with speech at all. Some readers will know the initials AI not from science fiction or Alan Turing, but from video games, where it is used to refer to computer-controlled opponents. In a first-person shooter, for example, the AI controls the movements of the enemies, making them dodge, aim and shoot at you in challenging ways. In a racing game, the AI might control the rival cars. As a showcase for the capabilities of AI, video games leave a lot to be desired. But there are diamonds in the rough, where the simplistic rules of the systems combine to make something that appears complex. Take Grand Theft Auto V, where the creation of a city of individuals living their own lives means that it’s possible to turn a corner and find a fire crew in south central LA having a fist-fight with a driver who got in the way of their hose; or Dwarf Fortress, where caves full of dwarves live whole lives, richly textured and algorithmically detailed. Those emergent gameplay systems show a radically different way that AI can develop, aimed not at fully mimicking a human, but at developing a “good enough” heuristic that turns into something altogether different when scaled up enough. So is everyone ploughing money into AI research to make better games? No. A lot of AI funding comes from firms such as Apple and Google, which are trying to make their “virtual personal assistants”, such as Siri and Google Now, live up to the name. It sounds a step removed from the sci-fi visions of Turing, but the voice-controlled services are actually having to do almost all the same heavy lifting that a real person does. They need to listen to and understand the spoken word, determine how what they have heard applies to the data they hold, and then return a result, also in conversational speech. They may not be trying to fool us into thinking they’re people, but they aren’t far off. Because all the calculations are done in the cloud, the more they hear, the better they are at understanding. Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the 2013 movie Her, lonely Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an operating system. However the leading AI research isn’t just aimed at replicating human understanding of the world, but at exceeding it. IBM’s Watson is best known as the computer that won US gameshow Jeopardy! in 2011, harnessing its understanding of natural language to parse the show’s obtuse questions phrased as answers. But as well as natural language understanding, Watson also has the ability to read and comprehend huge bodies of unstructured data rapidly. In the course of the Jeopardy! taping, that included more than 200 million pages of content, including the full text of Wikipedia. But the real goal for Watson is to expand that to full access to the entire internet, as well as specialist data about the medical fields it will eventually be put to work in. And then there are the researchers who are just trying to save humanity. Oh God, we’re all going to die? Maybe. The fear is that, once a sufficiently general-purpose AI such as Watson has been created, its capacity will simply scale with the processing power available to it. Moore’s law predicts that processing power doubles every 24 months, so it’s only a matter of time before an AI becomes smarter than its creators – able to build an even faster AI, leading to a runaway growth in cognitive capacity. But what does a superintelligent AI actually do with all that capacity? That depends on its programming. The problem is that it’s hard to program a supremely intelligent computer in a way that will ensure it won’t just accidentally wipe out humanity. Suppose you’ve set your AI the task of making paperclips and of making itself as good at making paperclips as possible. Pretty soon, it’s exhausted the improvements to paperclip production it can make by improving its production line. What does it do next? “One thing it would do is make sure that humans didn’t switch it off, because then there would be fewer paperclips,” explains Nick Bostrom in Salon magazine. Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, has won praise from fans such as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for clearly stating the hypothetical dangers of AI. The paperclip AI, Bostrom says, “might get rid of humans right away, because they could pose a threat. Also, you would want as many resources as possible, because they could be used to make paperclips. Like, for example, the atoms in human bodies. ” How do you fight such an AI? The only way that would work, according to some AI theorists such as Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, is to beat it to the punch. Not only do humans have to try to build a smart AI before they make one accidentally, but they have to think about ethics first – and then program that into it. After all, coding anything simpler is asking for trouble. A machine with instructions to “make people happy”, for example, might just decide to do the job with electrodes in brains; so only by addressing one of the greatest problems in philosophy can we be sure we’ll have a machine that understands what it means to be “good”. So, all we have to do is program in ethics and we’ll be fine? Well, not quite. Even if we manage to not get wiped out by malicious AI, there’s still the issue of how society adapts to the increasing capability of artificial intelligence. The Industrial Revolution was characterised by the automation of a number of jobs that previously relied on manual labour. There is little doubt that it represented one of the greatest increases in human welfare ever seen. But the upheaval at the time was momentous and something we could be about to see again. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elon Musk on the dangers of AI. What steam power did for physical labour, AI could do for mental labour. Already, the first casualties are starting to become clear: the minicab dispatch office has little place in a world of Hailo and Uber; the job of a stockbroker has changed beyond all recognition thanks to the introduction of high-frequency trading; and ever since the construction of the Docklands Light Railway in the 1980s, the writing has been on the wall for train drivers. And the real changes are only just beginning. In November, Goldman Sachs led a $15m funding round for Kensho, a financial data service that uses AI techniques to pump out financial analysis at a rate no human analyst could match. And it can do it while taking stock of the entirety of the huge amount of financial data available, something humans simply can’t cope with. Kensho’s analytical notes could then be passed on to a high-frequency trading firm such as Athena, which will use the insights to gain an edge of milliseconds on the market – that’s enough to make money, if you’re trading with billions of dollars. Once the trading has affected the market, it might be written up for Forbes by Narrative Science, which uses algorithms to replace financial journalists. After all, most business stories follow a common template, and the data is already available in a structured format, so why waste time getting people involved at all? On aggregate level, these changes are a good thing. If the work of millions of people is covered by algorithms, then output goes up, hours worked go down, and we move one step closer to a Jetsons-style utopia. In the end, it will be OK? Assuming we avoid the superintelligent AIs wiping us out as an afterthought, manage to automate a large proportion of our jobs without creating mass unemployment and societal unrest, and navigate the tricky boundaries of what personhood entails in a world where we can code passable simulacra of humans, then yes, it should be fine. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ldman+Sachs%2CGoogle] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Google buys two more UK artificial intelligence startups Company funds new computer science research partnership with Oxford University, where three of its new artificial intelligence hires will remain lecturers artificial intelligence with new Oxford University partnerships and British startup acqusitions. Photograph: Science Picture Co. /Science Picture Co. /Corbis Artificial intelligence (AI) Google buys two more UK artificial intelligence startups Company funds new computer science research partnership with Oxford University, where three of its new artificial intelligence hires will remain lecturers Samuel Gibbs Thu 23 Oct ‘14 14. 56 BST Last modified on Wed 22 Feb ‘17 18. 25 GMT This article is 3 years old Google has expanded its artificial intelligence research team, acquiring two Oxford University spin-off companies specialising in machine learning and computer vision. Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory and their seven key researchers will be added to Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence research company – another British artificial intelligence startup which the search giant acquired in January. “We are thrilled to welcome these extremely talented machine learning researchers to the Google DeepMind team and are excited about the potential impact of the advances their research will bring,” wrote Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. Brain-like computers Google’s DeepMind is working on artificial intelligence similar to those portrayed in movies – a computer system that works like a human brain, using information from its environment to make decisions free of human interaction. Dark Blue Labs specialised in deep learning for understanding natural language, something Google’s search products have been pioneering on a large scale with both typed and spoken natural language queries. Google’s voice search is built into every Android smartphone and tablet, while desktop users can also search using voice through a web browser. Prof Nando de Freitas, Prof Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann from Dark Blue Labs will focus on research to enable machines, be they computers or robots, to better understand what users say and are asking of them. Vision Factory specialised in visual recognition systems and deep learning, applying artificial intelligence techniques to enhance the accuracy and speed of object recognition and other vision-based computer systems. Dr Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Prof Andrew Zisserman, founders of Vision Factory, will help Google improve its vision systems, which include object recognition in search, its camera-based search apps and undoubtedly the data-processing systems needed for its self-driving cars. ‘Machine Learning is a technology whose time has come’ De Freitas, Blunsom and Zisserman will remain at Oxford University as part-time lecturers, while Google is making a “substantial” donation to the computer science and engineering departments, establishing a new research partnership. “Machine Learning is a technology whose time has come,” said Prof Mike Wooldridge, head of the department of computer science at Oxford University. “We have invested heavily in this area and we are truly excited at the prospect of what we can achieve together with Google. ” “It is a really exciting time for Artificial Intelligence research these days, and progress is being made on many fronts including image recognition and natural language understanding,” said Hassabis. Google’s artificial intelligence efforts hit the headlines at the beginning of the year when the company acquired DeepMind technologies, a London-based artificial intelligence firm specialising in machine learning, advanced algorithms and systems neuroscience for £400m – Google’s largest European purchase and now employing around 100 researchers in London. • Demis Hassabis: 15 facts about the DeepMind Technologies founder • Google buys UK artificial intelligence startup Deepmind for £400m • Elon Musk says he invested in DeepMind over ‘Terminator’ fears Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) Monthly science explainer From online dating to driverless cars, machine learning is everywhere the mysteries of a component of artificial intelligence self driving car Risberg/AP Artificial intelligence (AI) Monthly science explainer From online dating to driverless cars, machine learning is everywhere the mysteries of a component of artificial intelligence Nicola Davis @NicolaKSDavis Thu 18 Sep ‘14 07. 00 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 18. 29 GMT With machine learning behind myriad technologies, from online dating to driverless cars, we ask expert Dr Michael Osborne from the University of Oxford to give us the lowdown. What is machine learning? Artificial intelligence is really the goal of trying to develop algorithms that can learn and act. Older AI research ran up against this difficulty that people didn’t really know what intelligence was. Machine learning is a much more modern approach to solving the AI problem where we are coming from the bottom up rather than top down, so we are saying, well, let’s define these really crisp, well-defined, sub-problems, like classifying a handwritten digit as being either a one or two, and then use novel techniques within statistics and optimisation to create an algorithm that can improve its performance over time. What is an algorithm? An algorithm is a sequence of instructions or rules to complete a task. Where do we encounter machine learning? Anywhere and everywhere. The spam filter in your email account will be built around a machine learning algorithm. If you use Google translate , machine learning is trying to learn patterns in data to translate text from one language to another. Dating sites will use machine learning algorithms to try and recommend potential mates for you on the the rise of machine learning all over the internet - if you buy products from Amazon it will recommend things to you on the basis of what you buy but also on what those like you buy. What are the benefits? It is not subject to the same biases or heuristics that humans are - for example, a study of judges found that their decisions about whether or not to award parole to prisoners were influenced by whether or not than humans can. You can fit many more processors than humans into a room. What are the challenges? There are technical challenges, obviously, related to designing these crisp problems that are relevant to a large section of industrial and intelligent they might start to substitute for what humans can do - they might impact on employment. We have this burden to try and make sure that we develop technologies that complement humans rather than replace them. What about the future? Health informatics will affect a lot of people’s lives. Everyone is carrying around phones that are recording characteristics of their activities - perhaps we can use that information to try and identify when someone’s about to have a heart attack or a seizure. Again this notion of trying to pick out underlying trends or patterns in data and use it to make predictions. The task of figuring out where a robot is in the world is very much a machine learning problem. Something I think a lot of people are justifiably excited about are autonomous vehicles – that is going to be a huge change in our lives. Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. %29%2CComputing%2CTechnology] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The journalists who never sleep ‘Robot writers’ that can interpret data and generate stories are starting to appear in certain business and media sectors Robotic hand typing on keyboard ordinary PC, despite its high performance. Photograph: Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) The journalists who never sleep ‘Robot writers’ that can interpret data and generate stories are starting to appear in certain business and media sectors Yves Eudes Fri 12 Sep ‘14 11. 17 BST Last modified on Fri 14 Jul ‘17 22. 57 BST This article is 3 years old At dawn on 17 March the inhabitants of Los Angeles were woken by a mild tremor. Less than three minutes later the Los Angeles Times website published an initial piece on the subject, at first sight a wire drafted in haste by a press agency: “A shallow magnitude 4. 7 earthquake according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6. 25am Pacific time at a depth of 5. 0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicentre was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past 10 days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3. 0 and greater centred nearby. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author. ” The author in question is on the staff of the Times, doubling up as a journalist and computer programmer. That morning the USGS servers received data from various seismographs, translated them into figures and sent them over the net to the journalist’s personal computer. Once there the data were imported by software, which selected the relevant information and drafted an article in everyday English. The journalist, who had woken with a jolt, got up, read the article and clicked “send”, but in fact this sort of text could be published without any human intervention. Next time even if he stays in bed, Times readers will receive the news. The event drew the attention of US media, because in recent years the Los Angeles Times has laid off many writers, due to financial problems. Putting two and two together, some people imagined they were being replaced by machines. In practice, “robot writers” – with varying levels of sophistication and autonomy – are beginning to be installed, discreetly, by a few media and other business sectors that generate large volumes of written documents. In the US automated writing technology was partly developed by artificial intelligence specialists at Northwestern University in Illinois. Professor Larry Birnbaum, joint head of the Intelligent Information Laboratory, is an emblematic figure in this new, horizontal discipline, for he also teaches at the nearby Medill School of Journalism. He was among the inventors of the Quill system, which despite its high performance will run on an ordinary PC under Linux. To explain how it works, Birnbaum draws a distinction between four theoretical steps, though in practice they overlap. Quill starts by importing data (tables, lists, graphs) structured by other software. “These days that represents a large part of the information produced by humans, from spreadsheets containing company accounts to a blog describing the events of a football match,” Birnbaum says. Upstream, other intelligent systems can take care of converting data in diverse formats (including text) into structured data that can be used by a machine. In this way robot writers potentially have access to all human knowledge. The next task for Quill is to carry out narrative analysis. “Data is sorted and ranked using a method which focuses exclusively on building a narrative,” Birnbaum adds. “It selects certain facts, underlines actions, highlights figures. ” The third, most innovative task is to generate a narrative. “The algorithms define a plan, with a list of facts,” Birnbaum explains. “Then, thanks to a modelling process, they choose the appropriate editorial angles. In practice the result is a mixture of words, lines of code, graphs – a representation which only machines can understand. ” On the basis of this material Quill then moves on to drafting, properly speaking. “To compose sentences it has a library of rules, words and turns of phrase, taken from everyday English, but also specialist professional terminology,” Birnbaum says. For the uninitiated this final step is the most spectacular and the most astonishing, but it is not the most complex part for artificial intelligence professionals. “Computers have known how to write in English for years. The reason they haven’t done so in the past is they had nothing to say, lacking access to a sufficient volume of information,” he adds with a smile. Now they have interesting stories to tell humans. To capitalise on Quill as a business venture a fellow Infolab researcher, Kris Hammond, started Narrative Science, a firm based in Chicago. Contrary to received wisdom, Hammond is sure that a good narrative is worth much more than a neat sketch, because the human brain is wired to understand an idea perfectly when put in words. “Thanks to Quill,” he says, “in a few years’ time no one will have to waste time deciphering an Excel worksheet or interpreting graphs with x and y axes . . . Quill and its successors will hoover up indigestible data and transform them into clear, simple text which will enable everyone to get the message, quite naturally, through language. ” Hammond was in the limelight recently, having claimed that by 2025 90% of the news read by the general public would be generated by computers. “That doesn’t mean that robots will be replacing 90% of all journalists, simply that the volume of published material will massively increase,” he explains. “Take the example of small amateur baseball games. They don’t interest the media, but several dozen people follow each one. Quill collates data on thousands of these games and can produce thousands of articles almost instantaneously, one for each match, in a style similar to sportswriters, who are easy to imitate. ” Narrative Science already has customers in this field, including websites specialising in local sport or news for young people. Quill is also taking an interest in finance, another field in which articles by humans are often repetitive. “For many years Forbes magazine has been publishing profit forecasts for some firms, before the final figures are released. Now, thanks to Quill, it does it for more than 5,000 corporations,” Hammond reveals. Forbes. com now posts material authored by Narrative Science, typically wires such as “Wall Street is optimistic about the prospects for Kruger Inc, poised to release its first-quarter figures next Thursday. Analysts are forecasting operating earnings per share of $1. 05, up 92% on last year. ” Similarly banks, brokers and rating agencies, which prefer to remain anonymous, use Quill to draft the countless reports required by the federal administration and regulatory bodies. “For the time being reports produced by Quill are checked before dispatch, because we’re still at an experimental stage. But in a few months they will be sent to the administration automatically, without being seen by human eye,” Hammond adds. He is convinced that this is the start of a big adventure for Quill. Automated writing will soon be showing what it can really do, when it merges with another technological advance: individual tracking of billions of consumers, thanks to their purchases, internet browsing habits, mobile communications and such. Stock Market data Automated systems can take over repetitive tasks, such as data-driven financial stories. Photograph: Alamy “One day President Obama explained to the media that if Americans made sure their tyres were properly inflated they could save 7% on fuel. This claim went unheeded because folks didn’t want to do the math. But in the future your favourite news website will explain things differently: it’ll know who you are, the make of car you drive and how much it consumes, how far you travel every week, the type of fuel you buy, and so on. It’ll draft an article specially for you, telling you exactly how many dollars you’d save if your tyres were properly inflated,” Hammond says. The same approach could be used in countless other sectors, from healthcare to politics. “One day, there will only be a single reader for each article. ” Narrative Science is not the only player in the robot-writer market and competing firms are springing up all the time. Automated Insights, headquartered in North Carolina, sells a system called Wordsmith, which it describes as a “natural language generation platform”. Adam Smith, vice-president for sales and marketing, says the company produced more than 300m texts in 2013 and will top 1bn this year. It has a dozen customers in an experimental phase, including Gannett, which publishes USA Today and Yahoo News. Yahoo uses Wordsmith to draft texts for Fantasy Sport, a game in which players create their dream football team using the professional profiles of real athletes, then compete in fictitious games with virtual teams fielded by other players. “The system analyses athletes’ performance in real matches, then decides which virtual team will win against another. And of course, it provides a commentary on the match,” Smith explains. Wordsmith also knows how to draft property advertisements and reports on marketing, business activity and financial results. “Drawing on the same data – stock market prices – we can write millions of different stories, each one focusing on variations in a single portfolio,” Smith adds. Meanwhile, the French company Yseop, which also operates in Texas, has developed a system which can speak English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and very soon Japanese. The company website features a demonstration financial article that updates automatically each time you change a figure in the sidebar. Initially the article reports “the substantial positive movement of outstanding deposits”, but if you enter a lower figure the text is corrected to “the strong decrease of outstanding deposits”, for example. According to CEO Jean Rauscher, Yseop works for the customer service departments of banks and telecommunications companies, and news sites operated by finance companies. It also supplies advanced services to agencies investigating stock market dealings. “To find out more about a company director our system will scan about 30 databases, including any criminal records, then automatically draft a resume,” Rauscher says. Robot writers may soon be commonplace. Yseop markets a version of its system for use in-house. Ultimately all large operations, which are obliged to produce large numbers of increasingly lengthy reports on all aspects of their business, will become potential customers. Rauscher can already picture office staff and robots working together efficiently. “Yseop would produce an outline or a first draft containing essential data and accurate figures,” he suggests. “Then a human would take over, rejig the rough draft, adding a few opinions and value judgments. ” The system can also talk to humans, who in fact become its assistants. “If the algorithm realises some data is missing it will stop and ask for it. Once it has what it needs, it goes back to work,” Rauscher explains. So maybe office workers will soon be wondering whether their skills are complementary with the computer’s, or whether it would actually do better on its own. Online marketing is yet another field in which robot writers are already hard at work. Drawing on a range of academic research Labsense, a small startup in Paris, has compiled its own automated-writing code. It now works for online trading websites with large catalogues, with details of countless products, specification sheets, user manuals and such. Edouard de Ménibus, joint founder of Labsense, reckons the market has huge potential. “For example, almost 300,000 hotels worldwide are listed on travel sites but many of them lack a proper introductory text, or if they do have one it’s the same on all the sites,” he says. “Our system drafts a different text for each hotel and each site. ” If a trading site does not have properly structured data, it can supply the ill assorted material it does have (press cuttings, brochures, technical specifications, user guides) and Labsense will compile a small, specific database. The company has recruited linguists to build up a corpus of terminology corresponding to the main sectors involved in online trading, including travel, household electronics, IT and entertainment. “Words are organised by semantic family in a logical sequence,” De Ménibus explains. “Our system produces sentences suited to specific contexts, and others specific to the product. ” The priority target for Labsense technology is not humans, but other code, belonging to Google. “For Google to reference a site properly, it must display original texts, which it won’t find elsewhere and which contain the right keywords in the right places. We have automated this process,” he adds. “Just for hotel blurbs we’ve produced more text than a human could write in several lifetimes. ” In the not so distant future De Ménibus plans to provide an online service for the general public, enabling everyone to access a robot writer. Who said there was already too much verbiage on the net? This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Google Google buys neural network city guide creator Jetpac Artificial intelligence-based method of creating guides to cities using public photos appealed to Google’s drive for building smart systems Belfast at dusk - identified as Britain's happiest city according to Jetpac's neural network analysis of public photos. to Jetpac’s neural network analysis of public photos. Photograph: scenicireland. com/Christopher/Alamy Google Google buys neural network city guide creator Jetpac Artificial intelligence-based method of creating guides to cities using public photos appealed to Google’s drive for building smart systems Charles Arthur @charlesarthur Mon 18 Aug ‘14 14. 35 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Feb ‘17 18. 33 GMT This article is 3 years old Google is buying Jetpac, a “city guides” company with a twist which used image recognition and neural network technology to recommend places it deemed the happiest, most popular or with the best views and scenic hikes. Jetpac offered special “City Guides” for more than 6,000 destinations, using neural network technology developed by Pete Warden, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We can spot lipstick, blue sky views, hipster moustaches and more, through advanced image processing on billions of photos,” Jetpac’s home page explains. The app worked by analysing public photos with location data shared on Flickr, Instagram and other photo networks for particular elements, and then extracting key elements about them. The current Jetpac apps will be removed from the Apple App store within days, and support will end on 15 September, Jetpac says on its web page. It did not yet have an app for Android. The purchase, for an undisclosed sum, points to Google’s growing interest in artificial intelligence applications as it seeks to grow offerings such as its Google Now personal assistant. This year it acquired the British AI company DeepMind for $400m. Jetpac, with its neural network systems, seems to fit into that area. Warden wrote two demonstrator apps, currently still available on Apple’s App Store: “Spotter” which attempts to identify objects, and Deep Belief, which can be “trained” to recognise objects. Both use neural network systems for their processing. Neural networks are collections of algorithms which in effect mimic the functioning of brain systems: they can be “trained” to recognise particular elements in pictures, or in text, and flag their occurrence or absence. The system relies for its accuracy on feedback rather than explicit programming - so that in training a neural network to recognise a moustache, one would give it a huge number of photos to work on, and keep telling it when it was correct and incorrect. The neural network dynamically adjusts the weighting of various algorithms until it the answers are more and more correct. Earlier this year Jetpac said it had identified the “UK’s happiest city” - which it identified as Belfast, based on public Instagram photos. At the time Warden said that 5m photos per day were being uploaded which included geotagging and were public - the raw “data exhaust” that Jetpac needed to produce its analysis. In August 2012 Google bought the printed travel guide company Frommer’s, but then sold it back to the founder Arthur Frommer in April strategy Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. ting%2CApps] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster The doomsayers believe that humanity will be overwhelmed by creating machines that – like Terminator's Skynet – become ever-more clever and reach a singularity. They're wrong Robots like them. Photograph: Robert Pratta/Reuters Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster The doomsayers believe that humanity will be overwhelmed by creating machines that – like Terminator's Skynet – become ever-more clever and reach a singularity. They're wrong Alan Winfield Sun 10 Aug ‘14 00. 04 BST First published on Sun 10 Aug ‘14 00. 04 BST The singularity – or, to give it its proper title, the technological singularity. It's an idea that has taken on a life of its own; more of a life, I suspect, than what it predicts ever will. It's a Thing for techno-utopians: wealthy middle-aged men who regard the singularity as their best chance of immortality. They are Singularitarians, some seemingly prepared to go to extremes to stay alive for long enough to benefit from a benevolent super-artificial intelligence – a man-made god that grants transcendence. And it's a thing for the doomsayers, the techno-dystopians. Apocalypsarians who are equally convinced that a super-intelligent AI will have no interest in curing cancer or old age, or ending poverty, but will – malevolently or maybe just accidentally – bring about the end of human civilisation as we know it. History and Hollywood are on their side. From the Golem to Frankenstein's monster, Skynet and the Matrix, we are fascinated by the old story: man plays god and then things go horribly wrong. The singularity is basically the idea that as soon as AI exceeds human intelligence, everything changes. There are two central planks to the hypothesis: one is that as soon as we succeed in building AI as smart as humans it rapidly reinvents itself to be even smarter, starting a chain reaction of smarter-AI inventing even-smarter-AI until even the smartest humans cannot possibly comprehend how it works. The other is that the future of humanity becomes in some sense out of control, from the moment of the singularity onwards. So should we be worried or optimistic about the technological singularity? I think we should be a little worried – cautious and prepared may be a better way of putting it – and at the same time a little optimistic (that's the part of me that would like to live in Iain M Banks' The Culture. But I don't believe we need to be obsessively worried by a hypothesised existential risk to humanity. Why? Because, for the risk to become real, a sequence of things all need to happen, a sequence of big ifs. If we succeed in building human equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a full understanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to produce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem. The risk, while not impossible, is improbable. By worrying unnecessarily we're falling into a trap: the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis. And, perhaps worse, taking our eyes off other risks we should really be worrying about, such as manmade climate change or bioterrorism. Let me illustrate what I mean. Consider the possibility that we invent faster than light travel (FTL) some time in the next 100 years. Then I worry you by outlining all sorts of nightmare scenarios that might follow. At the end of it you'll be thinking: my god, never mind climate change, we need to stop all FTL research right now. But there are already lots of AI systems, so surely it's just a matter of time? Yes, we do have lots of AI systems, like chess programs or automated financial transaction systems, or the software in driverless cars. And some are already smarter than most humans, like language translation systems. Some are as good as some humans, such as driverless cars or natural speech recognition systems and will soon be better than most humans. But none of this has brought about the end of civilisation (though I'm suspiciously eyeing the financial transaction systems). The reason is that these are all narrow-AI systems: very good at doing one thing. A human-equivalent AI would need to be a generalist, like humans. It would need to be able to learn, most likely by developing over the course of some years, then generalise what it has learned – in the same way we learned as toddlers that wooden blocks could be stacked, banged together or as something to stand on to reach a bookshelf. It would need to understand meaning and context, be able to synthesise new knowledge, have intentionality and – in all likelihood – be self-aware, so it understands what it means to have agency in the world. There is a huge gulf between present day narrow-AI systems and the kind of artificial general intelligence I have outlined. Opinions vary, but I think it's as wide a gulf as that between current space flight and practical faster than light spaceflight; wider perhaps, because we don't yet have a theory of general intelligence, whereas there are several candidate FTL drives consistent with general relativity, like the Alcubierre drive. So we don't need to be obsessing about the risk of super-intelligent AI, but I do think we need to be cautious and prepared. In a Guardian podcast last week philosopher Nick Bostrom explained that there are two big problems, which he calls competency and control. The first is how to make super-intelligent AI, the second is how to control it (ie, to mitigate the risks). He says hardly anyone is working on the control problem, whereas loads of people are going hell for leather on the first. On this I 100% agree, and I'm one of the small number of people working on the control problem. In 2010 I was part of a group that drew up a set of principles of robotics – principles that apply equally to AI systems. I strongly believe science and technology research should be undertaken within a framework of responsible innovation, and have argued we should be thinking about subjecting robotics and AI research to ethical approval, in the same way we do for human subject research. And recently I've started work towards making ethical robots. This is not just to mitigate future risks, but because the kind of not-very-intelligent robots we make in the very near future will need to be ethical as well as safe. We should be worrying about present-day AI rather than future super-intelligent AI. Alan Winfield is professor of electronic engineering at UWE, Bristol Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence powers Anki Drive to pole position on the indoor racetrack A new car racing game uses robotics to bring the thrills and spills of Formula One into the home Anki cars Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence powers Anki Drive to pole position on the indoor racetrack A new car racing game uses robotics to bring the thrills and spills of Formula One into the home Matt Weiner Mon 14 Jul ‘14 13. 00 BST First published on Mon 14 Jul ‘14 13. 00 BST It's a Wednesday, 6. 30am. The bedroom door slams open. My youngest son, three, shouts: "Daddy, can we play Anki Drive? " His brother, five, is right behind him. This is not the first time I have heard this plea. For a week now I have been hostage to a kind of science-fiction version of Scalextric. Anki is a San Francisco robotics startup that was founded in 2010 but kept itself off the radar while it developed an AI gaming platform. Last year, it caused a minor furore at the Apple worldwide developers conference when Apple CEO Tim Cook invited the company's founders on stage to demonstrate their first consumer product: a car racing game that operates on Apple's operating system. The game was subsequently named one of Time magazine's inventions of the year. A mashup of Hot Wheels, Mario Kart and Tron, Anki Drive is very simple to play. All the action takes place on an eight-foot vinyl racetrack that will probably mean you have to pile up your living room furniture to lay it out. You race one of four small cars against either a friend or a robot car round the track for a set number of laps and the first past the chequered flag wins. Your car (8cm, glossy, shades of Knight Rider) is controlled using an app downloaded onto an Apple mobile device. Your iPhone's motion detectors enable you to use it like a steering wheel: swerving in and out of lanes. Meanwhile, you can "disable" or slow down your opposition with virtual weapons mounted on your car triggered by buttons on the phone interface. The idea is that the basic tenets of a physical racing game (go faster, steer well) are enhanced by the sophistication of video games (each car has unique characteristics; you can accrue weapons and better skills) and artificial intelligence (the cars improve as they "learn" from each race; anki means "learn by heart" in Japanese). Unboxing the kit, I shared the unfettered excitement of my sons (the older was literally hopping round the room). It's refreshing that this game is a tactile entity: played for real and not on screens and the kids were instantly gripped. Even when they weren't playing they were hypnotised by the smooth action and cheered on their favourite car with all the verve of a die-hard Formula One fan. Unlike Scalextric, where you were always retrieving cars that had flown off the slotted tracks, Anki cars (each has a 50mhz microprocessor, camera and infrared light) can "read" through the vinyl mat to work out their position so they always know where they are, where you are and as a result will never leave the track. This means any novice (even a three-year-old) can complete a race. The controls are simple enough to manage, if not exactly master. This is a plus for the kids: the AI whizzes the cars safely around while they happily mash the keypad with their sticky hands. After bedtime, I get the chance to get to grips with the more complex stuff; learning how to decelerate, tuck myself behind a robot car and nail him with my rotor cannon. Even for a big boy's toy, Anki Drive is expensive: £179 for a two car plus track starter kit; extra cars are £50. It's probably best suited to kids of about eight and up, and requires obsessive hours of play to get the best of the tech. But, no doubt, it's a leap forward. At the end of our first game, as all the cars unexpectedly scuttled into position of their own accord and a voice on my phone announced the winner, I felt the same weird chill I had when someone first showed me the swipe motion on a smartphone screen. Something from the future's here in my hand! Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Computer simulating 13-year-old boy becomes first to pass Turing test 'Eugene Goostman' fools 33% of interrogators into thinking it is human, in what is seen as a milestone in artificial intelligence • In 'his own' words: how Eugene fooled the Turing judges • What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now? turing test machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was 'thinking'. Photograph: Sherborne School/AFP/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) Computer simulating 13-year-old boy becomes first to pass Turing test 'Eugene Goostman' fools 33% of interrogators into thinking it is human, in what is seen as a milestone in artificial intelligence • In 'his own' words: how Eugene fooled the Turing judges • What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now? Press Association Mon 9 Jun ‘14 12. 09 BST First published on Mon 9 Jun ‘14 12. 09 BST This article is 3 years old A "super computer" has duped humans into thinking it was a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the Turing test, experts have said. Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations. The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and second world war codebreaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was "thinking". No computer had ever previously passed the Turing test, which requires 30% of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said. But "Eugene Goostman", a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33% of the judges that it was human, the university said. Professor Kevin Warwick, from the University of Reading, said: "In the field of artificial intelligence, there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing test. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting. " The successful machine was created by Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, who lives in the United States, and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko, who lives in Russia. Veselov said: "It's a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots. " Warwick said there had been previous claims that the test was passed in similar competitions around the world. "A true Turing test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations," he said. "We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's test was passed for the first time. " Warwick said having a computer with such artificial intelligence had "implications for society" and would serve as a "wake-up call to cybercrime". The event on Saturday was poignant as it took place on the 60th anniversary of the death of Turing, who laid the foundations of modern computing. During the second world war, his critical work at Britain's codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park helped shorten the conflict and save many thousands of lives. Instead of being hailed a hero, Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality. After his conviction in 1952 for gross indecency with a 19-year-old Manchester man, he was chemically castrated. Two years later, he died from cyanide poisoning in an apparent suicide, though there have been suggestions that his death was an accident. Last December, after a long campaign, Turing was given a posthumous royal pardon. In 2011, at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India, an application called Cleverbot took part in a Turing-type test and was perceived to be human by 59. 3% of its interlocutors (compared with a score of 63. 3% human for the average human participant). However, because the programme draws on a database of real conversations, many disputed whether it was in fact exhibiting true "intelligence". Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? more on this story Don't believe the science hype – we haven't created true AI yet Yorick Wilks Yorick Wilks: Despite claims made for the Eugene Goostman software there's a way to go before chatbots will be able run call centres for us Published: 11 Jun 2014 Don't believe the science hype – we haven't created true AI yet Scientists dispute whether computer 'Eugene Goostman' passed Turing test The program fooled 10 out of 30 judges at the Royal Society in London that it was human, but not all are convinced Published: 9 Jun 2014 Scientists dispute whether computer 'Eugene Goostman' passed Turing test Turing test: this little Eugene Goostman was much brighter than I imagined Robert Llewellyn Robert Llewellyn: Four times I was fairly confident I had spotted the machine answering and I was wrong every time Published: 9 Jun 2014 Turing test: this little Eugene Goostman was much brighter than I imagined Eugene Goostman is a real boy – the Turing Test says so A computer program has managed to fool people that it is a living, breathing, thinking Ukrainian teenager. Well 33% of people anyway Published: 9 Jun 2014 Eugene Goostman is a real boy – the Turing Test says so + What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now? Published: 9 Jun 2014 What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now? + 13-year-old boy passes the Turing test Published: 9 Jun 2014 13-year-old boy passes the Turing test + Eugene the Turing test-beating 'human computer' – in 'his' own words Published: 9 Jun 2014 Eugene the Turing test-beating 'human computer' – in 'his' own words most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Facial recognition: is the technology taking away your identity? Facial recognition technology is being used by companies such as Tesco, Google and Facebook, and it has huge potential for security. Concerned? It may be too late to opt out… facial recognition algorithms may be neutral themselves, the databases they are tied to are anything but. ' Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Facial recognition: is the technology taking away your identity? Facial recognition technology is being used by companies such as Tesco, Google and Facebook, and it has huge potential for security. Concerned? It may be too late to opt out… Luke Dormehl Sun 4 May ‘14 08. 00 BST First published on Sun 4 May ‘14 08. 00 BST This summer, Facebook will present a paper at a computer vision conference revealing how it has created a tool almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photographs show the same person – regardless of changes in lighting and camera angles. A human being will get the answer correct 97. 53% of the time; Facebook's new technology scores an impressive 97. 25%. "We closely approach human performance," says Yaniv Taigman, a member of its AI team. Since the ability to recognise faces has long been a benchmark for artificial intelligence, developments such as Facebook's "DeepFace" technology (yes, that's what it called it) raise big questions about the power of today's facial recognition tools and what these mean for the future. Facebook is not the only tech company interested in facial recognition. A patent published by Apple in March shows how the Cupertino company has investigated the possibility of using facial recognition as a security measure for unlocking its devices – identifying yourself to your iPhone could one day be as easy as snapping a quick selfie. Google has also invested heavily in the field. Much of Google's interest in facial recognition revolves around the possibilities offered by image search, with the search leviathan hoping to find more intelligent ways to sort through the billions of photos that exist online. Since Google, like Facebook wants to understand its users, it makes perfect sense that the idea of piecing together your life history through public images would be of interest, although users who uploaded images without realising they could be mined in this manner might be less impressed when they end up with social media profiles they never asked for. Google's deepest dive into facial recognition is its Google Glass headsets. Thanks to the camera built into each device, the headsets would seem to be tailormade for recognising the people around you. That's exactly what third-party developers thought as well, since almost as soon as the technology was announced, apps such as NameTag began springing up. NameTag's idea was simple: that whenever you start a new conversation with a stranger, your Google Glass headset takes a photo of them and then uses this to check the person's online profile. Whether they share your interest in Werner Herzog films, or happen to be a convicted sex offender, nothing will escape your gaze. "With NameTag, your photo shares you," the app's site reads. "Don't be a stranger. " While tools such as NameTag appeared to be the kind of "killer app" that might make Google Glass, in the end Google agreed not to distribute facial recognition apps on the platform, although some have suggested that is no more than a "symbolic" ban that will erode over time. That is to say, Google may prevent users from installing facial recognition apps per se on Glass but it could well be possible to upload images to sites, such as Facebook, that feature facial recognition. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent a rival headset allowing facial recognition apps – and would Google be able to stop itself from following suit? Not everyone is happy about this. US senator Al Franken has spoken out against apps that use facial recognition to identify strangers, going so far as to publish an open letter to NameTag's creators. "Unlike other biometric identifiers such as iris scans and fingerprints, facial recognition is designed to operate at a distance, without the knowledge or consent of the person being identified," he wrote. "Individuals cannot reasonably prevent themselves from being identified by cameras that could be anywhere – on a lamp post, attached to an unmanned aerial vehicle or, now, integrated into the eyewear of a stranger. " To proponents of facial recognition, of course, this is precisely the point. Like the club doorman who knows you by name and can spot you in a busy crowd, facial recognition can make everything that bit more personal. In Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, ads are made more personal by using facial recognition technology. As Tom Cruise's character walks down the street, he is bombarded with customised adverts for everything from new cars to alcoholic drinks. In 2014, a number of companies are already bringing these ideas to (digital) life. Late last year, Tesco announced plans to instal video screens at its checkouts around the country. These screens will use inbuilt cameras equipped with facial recognition algorithms to ascertain the age and gender of individual shoppers. tom cruise minority report Personal targeted advertsing in Spielberg's Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. A Californian startup called Emotient meanwhile focuses on the area of facial expression analysis. Incorporated into next-generation TVs by way of a webcam, this technology could potentially be used to monitor viewer engagement levels with whatever entertainment is placed in front of them. The answer to questions such as "how many times did your face register interest during a programme? " can then be fed back to television companies to help them make creative decisions concerning programming. "It is time for a step-change in advertising," says Lord Sugar's son, Simon, chief executive of Amscreen, which developed the OptimEyes technology behind Tesco's facial recognition screens. "Brands deserve to know not just an estimation of how many eyeballs are viewing their adverts, but who they are, too. Through our Face Detection technology, we want to optimise our advertisers' campaigns, reduce wastage and in turn deliver the type of insight that only online has previously been able to achieve. " Putting aside the question of whether or not brands do "deserve" to know anything and everything about their customers, companies such as OptimEyes and Emotient are far from the creepiest application of facial recognition. In the US, the startup SceneTap (previously known as BarTabbers) has installed cameras in more than 400 bars; they use facial recognition to help bar-hoppers decide which locations to visit on a night out. SceneTap offers real-time information on everything from gender ratios to the average age of patrons. A patent filed by the company even suggests plans to link identified people with their social networking profiles to determine "relationship status, intelligence, education and income". Although the use of facial recognition tools is still relatively new in the consumer sector, that is where much of the visible innovation will take place over the coming years. "The stakes are lower, so companies are free to take more risks," says Kelly Gates, professor in communication and science studies at UC San Diego and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. "As a result, there are a lot of experiments in the commercial domain. So what if you identify the wrong person by accident when you're targeting an ad? It's not that big a deal. It happens all the time in other forms of advertising. " mohamed atta Mohammed Atta (right) in the airport surveillance tape from Portland, Maine, 11 September 2001. Photograph: Reuters There are, naturally, problems, and most relate to privacy concerns. Although privacy is an issue with every form of data mining, at least online the majority of information absorbed by companies is anonymised. Facial recognition, of course, is precisely the opposite. And since facial recognition takes place in public spaces, it is not even necessary for the person surveilled actively to "opt in" to the service. This, in turns, links to the subject of security, which for many companies and organisations is the ultimate application for facial recognition. Hitherto, most facial recognition research has been funded by governments interested in its potential for streamlining surveillance. That emphasis has only increased over the past decade, provoked by events such as the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 London bombing in 2005. One of the most poignant images that came out of 11 September was a grainy frame of surveillance tape footage showing hijacker Mohamed Atta as he passed through an airport metal detector in Portland, Maine. Unlike the horrifying images of the collapse of the Twin Towers, this quieter picture was dramatic because of what it implied: that if only the right technology had been available, that day's tragic could have been averted. The idea that data mining algorithms have any place in helping us stop the next 9/11 or 7/7 has been criticised in some quarters. But there is no doubt that facial recognition plays an ever more important part in control and surveillance – both in England and overseas. On 5 April 2011, 41-year-old John Gass received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him he should stop driving, effective immediately. A conscientious driver who had not received so much as a traffic violation in years, Gass was baffled. After several frantic phone calls, followed up by a hearing with registry officials, Gass learned his image had been flagged by a facial recognition algorithm, designed to scan through a database of millions of drivers' licences looking for potential criminal false identities. The algorithm had determined that he looked sufficiently like another Massachusetts driver that foul play was likely involved, so he received the automated letter. The RMV was unsympathetic, claiming it was the accused individual's "burden" to clear their name in the event of any mistakes, arguing that the pros of protecting the public outweighed the inconvenience to the wrongly targeted few. "The dream is for governments to be able to set up networked cameras in public locations, capable of constantly searching through the faces of people who are photographed," says Xiaoou Tang, professor in the department of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and one of the world's leading experts in facial recognition. "Once this is done, the images can then be matched to a database arrests can be made. " Perhaps the most notable thing about our faith in facial recognition is what it says regarding belief in the inherent neutrality (or even objectivity) of such systems. "One of the things that troubles me is the idea that machines don't have bias," says Gates. Of course, in a real sense, they might not. Unless a programmer is personally prejudiced and decides deliberately to code that bias into whatever system he or she is working on, it is unlikely that a facial recognition algorithm will exhibit prejudice against certain groups for the reasons that a human might. But that doesn't mean that prejudice can't occur. It could be, for example, that facial recognition tools show a higher rate of recognition for men than for women and for individuals of non-white origin than for whites. (This has been shown to be true in the past. ) A facial recognition system might not target a black male for reasons of overt prejudice in the way that a racist person might, but the fact that it could be more likely to do this than it is to target a white female means that the biased end result is no different. And while facial recognition algorithms may be neutral themselves, the databases they are tied to are anything but. Whether a database concerns criminal suspects or first-class travellers, they are still designed to sort us into categorisable groups. "These databases are what define our social mobility and our ability to move through the world," says Gates. "Individual identification is always tied to social classification. It's always there for some specific purpose, and that's usually to determine someone's level of access or privilege. The ethical questions in facial recognition relate to those social hierarchies and how they're established. " "I think it worries people because there's something very permanent about it," says Xiaoou Tang. "Even when you're talking about using your face or your fingerprints to unlock a phone, this is a password we can never change. We only have one, and once it's set up it's going to be your password for life. " This isn't to suggest that facial recognition doesn't have its positives. As computer vision continues to get better over the coming months and years, we'll reap the benefits as computer users. The idea that we can take the giant, anonymous world we live in and transform it into a place as knowable as a small town is, at root, a utopian/naive one. "Ultimately we need to ask ourselves whether a world of ubiquitous automated identification is really one that we want to build," says Gates. It's important to understand the scale of change that is under way, because it is going to dictate what happens. Knowing about facial recognition, and how it is used by both governments and companies, is key to helping us face the future. No pun intended. Luke Dormehl is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems (And Create More), published by WH Allen £20 Topics Loading comments… Trouble loading? most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. Facial+recognition] Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning San Francisco startup Vicarious aims to create 'a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep' human brain computational principles of the human brain'. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki / Alamy/Alamy Artificial intelligence (AI) Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning San Francisco startup Vicarious aims to create 'a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep' Dominic Rushe in New York @dominicru Fri 21 Mar ‘14 16. 47 GMT Last modified on Fri 14 Jul ‘17 23. 28 BST Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names are backing a hitherto low-profile tech startup that aims to recreate the human neocortex as computer code. Vicarious, a four-year-old San Francisco-based startup, claims to be “building software that thinks and learns like a human”. According to the Wall Street Journal Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company. They join Peter Thiel, a PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology. Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, is also investing, as is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The neocortex is the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres and in humans is crucial to the use of the senses as well as activities such as language, motor commands and spatial reasoning. According to the company’s website, Vicarious is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network. ” The company has already managed to create software that will solve Captcha, the online tests used by many websites to supposedly identify humans from computers. Company founder Scott Phoenix told the WSJ that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep". Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said. The investment comes amid a boom in funding for artificial intelligence ventures, In January IBM announced it was investing more than $1bn to create the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer. The money includes $100m to fund startups that find creative uses for Watson. Earlier this week IBM announced a partnership with the New York Genome Center that will attempt to use Watson to identify the genetic components of brain cancer. Topics most viewed The Guardian back to top all sections close back to top All rights reserved. The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Inside the AI healthcare revolution: meeting the robots that can detect Alzheimer's and depression Credit: WinterLight Labs 28 August 2017 • 7:00am This is the second in a three-part series reporting from Toronto’s booming Artificial Intelligence sector where new technologies are being pioneered that will permanently change all of our lives Just 45 seconds in the company of scientist Frank Rudzicz and his machines is all it takes to determine whether or not you are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In that time, the complex Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms that the 37-year-old and his team have developed are able to pick apart your voice and predict the severity of the disease to an accuracy of around 82 per cent (and rising). First, there is your actual use of language. Alzheimer’s sufferers tend to leave longer pauses between words, prefer pronouns to nouns (for example, saying “she” rather than a person’s name) and give more simplistic descriptions, such as a “car” rather than the model or make. Then there is what Rudzicz calls the “jittter and shimmer” of speech; variations in frequency and amplitude. “These are very difficult for the human ear to pick up but the computer is objective and completely quantifiable,” he says. How human speech is picked apart by AI to check our health How human speech is picked apart by AI to check our health Credit: WinterLight Labs Rudzicz is speaking from the boardroom of WinterLight Labs, the company he co-founded on the upper floors of the West Tower of Toronto’s Mars Discovery District: a cluster of shiny downtown buildings run by a public-private partnership where some of the most ground-breaking AI research in the world is taking place, and from where the Telegraph is reporting for a three-part series on the technologies already changing our lives. Frank Rudzicz and Laim Kaufman of WinterLight Labs Frank Rudzicz and Laim Kaufman of WinterLight Labs Credit: Julian Simmonds Much has been made in recent days of the world-destroying potential of AI. Last Monday, the founders of more than 160 companies, including Elon Musk of Tesla and British tech entrepreneur Mustefa Suleyman, signed an open letter to the UN warning without urgent action lethal autonomous weapons will create a “third revolution” in warfare similar to that which followed the invention of gunpowder and the atomic bomb. Despite the very real fears that such technologies could be our undoing, it is also hoped if managed properly they will be of huge benefit to society – nowhere more so than in healthcare where a revolution is already underway. Neural networks replicates human learning in machines Neural networks replicates human learning in machines Credit: E+ According to a recent industry projection by the market research company Frost and Sullivan, in 2021 AI in health will be worth £5bn globally, representing a 40 per cent growth on today. In April, British digital healthcare company Babylon raised nearly £50m to build an AI doctor that can diagnose illnesses without help from a human. Frank Rudzicz is working towards something similar. As well as his 45-second test which studies 400 different variables of speech, he has built a robot named Ludwig, two foot-tall and possessing the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Ludwig runs on so-called machine learning algorithms which recognise data and make predictions - similar to how Amazon might suggest a new book and Netflix a must-watch box-set. For Ludwig, these algorithms enable him to engage patients in conversation and assess speech patterns to determine their health. As well as testing for memory and speech impairment, such technology can even predict emotions – and whether or not a patient is at risk of an imminent bout of anxiety or depression. AI timeline Rudzicz, who is also an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Toronto, admits there are complex regulatory issues around the extent to which AI machines should be used to diagnose patients. Currently, his models are being piloted in the largest network of retirement homes in North America, and among elderly patients in Edinburgh and Nice, to collect data and train the machines to understand different languages and accents. At present, they are only being used only to map cognitive decline within existing patients rather than actually diagnosis new ones. “We have always been careful to position this as an assessment aid rather than straight diagnosis,” Rudzicz says. “One of the main risks I see with AI in healthcare is people can put a lot of faith into it and discount other sources of evidence. ” How long such restraint continues, though, remains uncertain. Already we rely on AI algorithms contained within our smartphone to map many of our vital statistics: blood pressure, heart rate, sleep quality and fertility. All the experts predict that in the coming years this ceding of our biological data to machines will rise exponentially to the point where each of us carries around what is, in essence, our own portable GP. According to Android Dreams, the new book written by the eminent Australian artificial intelligence professor Toby Walsh, smartphones may also take selfies to identify suspect melanomas and monitor the health of eyes. AI-equipped toilets, meanwhile, will unprompted analyse samples of urine and stool and alert us to anything amiss. In his book, Professor Walsh also offers another prediction: that by 2050, many of us will have had our genes sequenced making it far easier to identify and treat genetic disorders which presently affect some 350m people worldwide. In a different building in Toronto’s Mars Discovery District, another pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence is working on that exact problem. The aim of Brendan Frey’s work is simple. “We want to change medicine,” he says. Brendan Frey of the Deep Genomics Brendan Frey of the Deep Genomics Credit: Julian Simmonds The 48-year-old, who is a professor at the University of Toronto and chief executive of the AI health research company Deep Genomics, which he started in 2014, has painful personal experience of the current knowledge gap in genetic disease. In 2002, he and his wife were told their third child with whom she was pregnant at the time could be suffering from an (unnamed) genetic disorder. “We were told it could be nothing, or it could be a disaster,” Frey recalls. “It was very difficult to deal with, and we ended up terminating the pregnancy. ” At the time, Frey was on the technical advisory board of Microsoft working on speech recognition. Following the death of his unborn child, he decided to leave and begin focusing on developing the technology that could cure genetic disorders. Leaning back against a white chalkboard scrawled with impregnable equations and wearing an AC/DC Highway to Hell T-shirt, Frey attempts to explain how his work will unravel the mysteries of the human genome and help both predict and eventually treat diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A man walks past a digital representation of the human genome A man walks past a digital representation of the human genome Credit: Getty In the Nineties, Frey worked on early AI machine-learning algorithms with the so-called “Godfather of AI”, the British scientist Professor Geoffrey Hinton. Machine learning works by teaching the computer through layers of code, enabling it to build up a pattern of understanding which it can then apply itself to a particular problem – in this instance, mapping the genome. “The basic fact is no human or group of humans will ever understand how the genome works,” Frey says. “We have an exponentially growing set of data to allow us to peer into cells and read out what is changing. There is only one solution: artificial intelligence. It’s the best technology we have in our systems to understand complex data. ” Certainly Frey’s work is exciting enough to be attracting a lot of venture capital money. He says some £3m was initially raised to start the company and now he is looking to raise a further £9. 5m in the coming months, with his 20-strong staff expected to soon double. According to Frey, pathologists in different laboratories will disagree over a particular genetic mutation up to 50 per cent of the time. In the new machine age he is working to bring about, he says such contrarian advice will be eradicated. This gulf between robot intelligence and human uncertainty has unsurprisingly fuelled growing talk of AI replacing doctors, radiologists and laboratory technicians. Frey insists “we will always need humans to address the outliers”. But how long before we will be making an appointment with a machine? The robot, not the doctor, will be seeing you soon enough. Related Topics If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph The 'Godfather of AI' on making machines clever and whether robots really will learn to kill us all? the 2004 film I Robot Credit: Alamy 26 August 2017 • 6:00am Today, the Telegraph begins a three-part series reporting from Toronto’s booming Artificial Intelligence sector where new technologies are being pioneered that will permanently change all of our lives Deep within the inner sanctum of Google’s downtown HQ in Toronto, past the rooftop crazy golf putting greens, foosball tables and ergonomic furniture sporting the bold primary colours of the company logo – stands a scruffy figure so incongruous, he might have been drawn by Quentin Blake. In person, Professor Geoffrey Hinton bears all the hallmarks of the quintessential British academic: tousled hair; crumpled shirt with a barrage of biros in the top pocket and flanked by a vast, mucky whiteboard scrawled with impregnable equations. There are no chairs in his office. The 69-year-old prefers always to stand. Gleefully eccentric he may be, but to the bright young things outside his office, Hinton is akin to a deity: the so-called “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” and the brilliant mind behind the technology that has sparked a global revolution. In this, his first British newspaper interview, Professor Hinton admits to being bemused by the nickname that has accompanied his late career surge. Professor Geoffrey Hinton Professor Geoffrey Hinton Credit: Julian Simmonds His former students have now been poached by Silicon Valley to lead AI research at the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google (which has also appointed him a vice president engineering fellow). In the coming months, he will take the helm of Toronto’s new $180m Vector Institute, which it is hoped will cement the city’s status as a world leader in AI. “I feel slightly embarrassed by being called the godfather,” he says in a cut-glass English accent that has resisted all North American overtures. What bought Geoffrey Hinton from years of relative academic obscurity to leading the cutting edge of AI is an unshakeable faith in his work. “I have a Reagan-like ability to believe in my own data,” he grins. Hinton is a pioneer of something called machine learning which enables computers to come up with programmes to solve problems themselves. In particular, he has devised a subset of machine learning called “deep learning” whereby neural networks modelled on those that form the human brain enable machines to learn in the same way a toddler does. This means computers can autonomously build layers of intelligence. Such systems have been supercharged in recent years by the advent of hugely powerful processing technology and are now becoming mainstream: powering everything from speech recognition patterns in our smart phones to image detection software and Amazon telling you which book to buy next. Through the work of Hinton and his colleagues – dubbed by their rivals the “Canadian Mafia” – the potential of machine learning has become limitless. The Brave New World of AI is upon us and already permanently changing our lives; for good and ill. Professor Geoffrey Hinton on the roof of Google's Toronto HQ Professor Geoffrey Hinton on the roof of Google's Toronto HQ Credit: Julian Simmonds Hinton was born in Wimbledon in post war Britain. His father, Howard, was an entomologist with a particular fondness for beetles. His mother, Margaret, a school teacher. A streak of brilliance runs through the family DNA. His uncle was the economist Colin Clark, who invented the term “gross national product”. His great-great grandfather was the logician George Boole, who invented Boolean algebra, a foundation of modern computing. The family moved to Bristol where Hinton attended Clifton College, a place he calls a “second-rate public school”. It was there that a school friend first introduced Hinton to the wonders of AI by talking to him about holograms and how the brain stores memories. "I have a sort of educational ADHD"Professor Geoffrey Hinton After school, he was awarded a place at King’s College, Cambridge to read physics and chemistry but dropped out after a month. “I was 18 it was the first time I had lived apart from home. It was awfully hard work, there weren’t any girls and I got depressed,” he says. The following year he re-applied to read architecture but again dropped out – this time after just a day – and switched instead to physics and physiology. He then changed again to philosophy but ended up falling out with his tutors. “I have a sort of educational ADHD,” he admits. Rather than complete his studies, Hinton quit and moved to the then insalubrious streets of Islington, north London, where he became a jobbing carpenter. “I made shelves, hung doors, nothing fancy. The sort of stuff people get paid for. ” Each Saturday morning he would go to Islington’s Essex Road library – the same establishment where Sixties playwright Joe Orton used to deface the books with pornographic images – and jot down in his notebook theories about how the brain worked. After a few years of toil, he returned to academia and in 1973 started a PHD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. His tutors regularly told him he was wasting his time on neural networks, but Hinton plugged on regardless. He moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to continue his research, but soon realised the Department of Defence (DoD) was funding much of the work on AI in his department and across the US. He quit in protest to move to Canada where military funding was less pernicious. “When I left, I took an American penny and blew it up with a Xerox machine and put it up on my office door,” he says. “But I changed the ‘G’ to a ‘D’ so it read: in DoD we trust. ” At a glance | Autonomous weapons According to Hinton, rather than fearing the growing intelligence of machines a far more pressing threat to humanity is the development of killer robots (underlined this week by a petition signed by the founders of 116 AI companies to the UN calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons). Hinton has signed a similar petition himself and previously wrote to express his concerns to Britain’s Ministry of Defence. “The reply said there is no need to do anything about this now because the technology is a long way away, and anyway, it might be quite useful,” he says. “But they certainly have the capacity to do this. ” He also fears the use of AI in increasing surveillance of the civilian population and reveals he once declined a job to sit on the board of the Canadian equivalent of the NSA because of fears over how his research could be abused by the security services. AI timeline Still, even while discussing the terror of weaponised “drone swarms” currently being developed, Hinton remains evangelical about the benefits of AI – particularly in healthcare and education. He lost his first wife, Ros, to ovarian cancer in 1994 leaving him to look after their two young adopted children as a single parent. He later re-married to his current wife, Jackie, but says she too has now been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Medicine, he believes, will become far more efficient as a result of AI. Soon he envisages anybody being able to pay $100 to have their genome mapped (the current cost is $1,000). Unpopular as it makes him with radiologists, Hinton also believes X-ray detection could soon be largely robot work. Jobs will be lost, but he insists it is the job of governments and business to ensure that the next automation of our economy does not leave people behind. “In a sensibly organised society, if you improve productivity there is room for everybody to benefit,” he says. “The problem is not the technology, but the way the benefits are shared out. ” Even the visionary admits he does not know where the AI revolution will take us next. “It is very hard to predict beyond five years in this area and things always turn out differently to what you expect,” he says. 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Buy these seven shares to profit from driverless cars and artificial intelligence [TELEMMGLPICT000031983590_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqd5_sWj-Hu5YV1uSoc_Px3tp0rIA to be available to consumers in five years, depending on regulations Credit: Eric Risberg/AP 13 August 2017 • 7:27am The idea of investing in technology companies will, for many, bring back painful memories of the tech bubble bursting at the turn of the millennium. Today, there is little of the mania of two decades ago. Technology firms are typically more expensive to buy than the wider market, but are now delivering significant profits – which were conspicuously absent the first time around. Some investors will have exposure to technology through companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, which are popular holdings in many funds available to British savers. Such businesses are involved in many cutting-edge areas of technology, including autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more. But there is another approach: investing in companies that make “enabling” technology, the components and software used in many of the most advanced developments. Telegraph Money asked a number of technology fund managers to name some of their favourite stocks. There are very few quoted technology firms in Britain, so many of the stocks discussed here are listed overseas. A number of investment shops, including Hargreaves Lansdown and TD Direct, offer international share dealing, although not all do so within an Isa. You may need to fill in special forms before you trade, depending on the country. Autonomous vehicles Fully autonomous cars are estimated to be just five years away, depending on both technology and the development of a regulatory system. This will dramatically increase the market for the components required. For now, much of the growth comes from “advanced driver assistance systems”, such as automatic braking or adaptive cruise control. Infineon Technologies (German listed) Market value: £19. 5bn Last year’s pre-tax profit: £763m This semiconductor firm was tipped by all of the technology fund managers we spoke to. It makes components used in systems such as emergency braking and battery management. Hyunho Sohn, manager of the £2bn Fidelity Global Technology fund, said: “Infineon exemplifies a company poised to gain from the move to electric and autonomous cars. It has a market-leading position and, as the technology going into each vehicle increases, it should experience increases in revenue and margin. ” Delphi (US listed) Market value: £18. 7bn Last year's pre-tax profit: £1. 9bn Delphi integrates different technologies into packages that meet the rigorous standards of the automotive industry, Mr Sohn explained He said: "The firm has strong relationships with the major car manufacturers, and is well positioned to profit from both the rapid proliferation in low-level systems, and the eventual roll-out of fully autonomous driving. " The company recently assembled an autonomous Audi which drove itself from San Francisco to New York, which Mr Sohn described as the "most sophisticated autonomous vehicle to date". Sign up to Telegraph Investor Artificial intelligence and machine learning The concept of artificial intelligence – the ability of a computer system to learn and adapt – has existed for decades. Ben Rogoff, manager of two Polar Capital technology funds totalling £2. 5bn, explained that, as with any technology, AI started out as a promise with no means of delivery. “Today, it feels like we have the capability, thanks to computing breakthroughs, cheap data storage and the internet. Right now the applications are straightforward, such as facial recognition and improving search results, but they will expand,” he said. Nvidia (US listed) Market value: £75bn Last year’s pre-tax profit: £1. 9bn Nvidia, tipped by several managers, could fall under a number of the categories here. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) are becoming increasingly important for “vision systems” in autonomous cars, Mr Rogoff said. He said AI offered another avenue for expansion, as GPUs could be used to “train” AI networks. “This is what makes AI intelligent – the ability of the network to improve by looking at its past mistakes. Nvidia has become the best way to play this theme among quoted stocks,” he said. Blue Prism (UK listed) Market value: £578m Last year’s pre-tax profit: £5m loss This firm makes software “robots” that automate tasks to create a so-called “digital workforce”. fund, described it as “one of the very few pure AI companies anywhere in the world”. He said: “It’s covered by only two analysts and could fall into the ‘undiscovered gems’ camp despite the huge recent rise in the share price. We think this technology will become ubiquitous for financial firms to reduce cost and improve accuracy. The ability to avoid regulatory breaches is just as important as the cost saving. ” Blue Prism 1yr Xilinx (US listed) Market value: £11. 8bn Last year's pre-tax profit: £699m There are multiple parts of an AI network, with some companies specialising in different parts of the chain. Mr Rogoff explained that once an AI network has been trained, "it needs to be able to make decisions". Xilinx is a "veteran" semiconductor company that handles the inference part of machine learning. It was the inventor of a type of "logic" chip that is used in such systems, and enjoys a major market share as a result. Machine vision Cognex (US listed) Market value: £6. 7bn Last year’s pre-tax profit: £161m Cognex makes “machine vision” systems that are used to scan and check products or labels. Tom Riley, manager of the Axa WF Framlington Robotech fund, said the technology was becoming more widespread, with “more and more manufacturing applications” and increasing use in logistics. Mr Rogoff added: “We’re pretty sure that Apple is a big customer and that Amazon is using their systems. ” Big data First Derivatives (UK listed) Market Value: £705m Last year's pre-tax profit: £12m This data and consulting company has a proprietary database that is used in big data applications within finance, such as spotting insider trading, according to Mr Rogoff. He has a position in the company - a rare UK holding - but explained it is small due in part to liquidity issues. "We think we have the best of the UK technology sector covered, and the UK takes up less than 2pc of the Global Technology fund," he said. First Derivatives 1 yr Prefer a fund? This one is the best If you don’t want to buy individual stocks, there are a number of technology funds that invest around the globe. Ryan Hughes, head of funds at AJ Bell, the investment shop, said: “There is one stand-out team – Polar Capital Global Technology. It is led by Ben Rogoff, who has been a technology investor for 20 years. ” Related Topics Follow The Telegraph If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow The Telegraph Money latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:00pm Property Doctors: why isn't my property selling? 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We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Sex robots on way for elderly and lonely. . . but pleasure-bots have a dark side, warn experts Credit: Channel 4 5 July 2017 • 12:01am Sex robots could soon be used to keep the elderly company in care homes and help couples enjoy long distances sexual relationships, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics (FRR) has said. There are currently four manufacturers making life-like robotic dolls worldwide, but experts predict that in coming decades they could become widespread, used not just as a fetish, but for sexual therapy and as companions for lonely, disabled or older people. Engineer-inventor Douglas Hines adjusts the head of his company's "True Companion" sex robot, Roxxxy Engineer-inventor Douglas Hines adjusts the head of his company's "True Companion" sex robot, Roxxxy Credit: AFP/Getty Images Noel Sharkey, Emeritus Professor of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and co-founder of the FRR, said it was time for the government and the public to decide whether to regulate pleasure-bots. “I can tell you that robots are certainly coming,” he said at the launch of the new consultation report in central London. “The concern is that this is going on nobody is talking about it. People snigger about them, but they are actually shipping quite a lot and we are going to see them a lot more. “They are being proposed for the elderly in care homes, which I think is controversial. If you have severe Alzheimer’s you can’t really tell the difference. “We need to think about as a society what we want to do about it. ” "Imagine treating racism by letting a bigot abuse a brown robot. Would that work? Probably not"Patrick Lin, Philosophy professor and robot ethicist The report found that up to two thirds of men and about 30 per cent of women were in favour of using sex robots, which currently cost between £4,000 and £12,000 and can be customised by sex, height, hair colour, eye colour and even personality. Companies are also starting to incorporate artificial intelligence so robots can communicate and respond to human emotions. Doll brothels already operate in South Korea, Japan and Spain, while the first robotic oral sex coffee shop opened in Paddington, west London, last year. The report said that as robotics, telecommunications and virtual reality merged, sex dolls could be created which was silicon replica of a long-distance partner, so that couples could have virtual sex and even speak to each other through the doll’s mouth. Gemma Chan in Humans Gemma Chan in Humans Credit: Channel 4 But the authors warned that the march of sex robots raised serious moral and ethical questions which needed to be addressed. They warned that users could become socially isolated or even addicted to the machines which could never replace real human contact. “It’s very sad because it’s going to be a one way relationship,” said Prof Sharkey. “If people bond with robots it’s very worrying. You are loving an artefact that can’t love you back, and the best they can do is fake it. ” The report also warned of a ‘darker’ side to the industry in which companies were programming ‘shy’ or ‘reluctant’ personalities into their dolls so that users could feel they were forcing the robots to have sex. TrueCompanion’s robot Roxxxy Gold, for example, can be set to ‘Frigid Farah. ’ Japanese sex doll manufacturer Trottla has also started selling underage schoolgirl dolls for paedophiles. The company was created by a self-confessed paedophile Shin Takagi who claims he has never harmed a child because he uses the doll. Although some experts claim such robots could prevent the rape of women, or the abuse of children, the report warns that it could exacerbate the problem. Philosophy Professor and robot ethicist Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic said: “Treating paedophiles with robot sex-children is both a dubious and repulsive idea. “Imagine treating racism by letting a bigot abuse a brown robot. Would that work? Probably not. The ethics of sex robots goes beyond whether anyone is physically harmed. ” The authors said it may be necessary to criminalise ‘robotic rape’ and to build in ‘handled roughly’ sensors like those used in pinball machines to prevent users developing violent sexual tendencies. And they called for a complete ban on child sex dolls. Aimee van Wynsberghe, assistant professor of ethics at the University of Delft, and co founder of the FRR, said: “There isn’t a conversation happening in the general public about what is acceptable, permissible and what should be promoted. “This is a preliminary step to engage policymakers, academics, the tech industry and the general public. ” The consultation report is on the FRR website where people are invited to comment on its findings. The panel hopes to make final recommendations next year. The Foundation for Responsible Robotics operates from the Hague Institute for Global Justice at the Hague and run consultations on all areas of robotics. It has 200 members including some of the world’s most eminent robotics academics. 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We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Why humans must accept that robots make better decisions barriers to innovation, argue Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Credit: Getty 26 June 2017 • 12:09pm Every day it’s the same. One by one, workers at PwC’s head office in London trickle through the revolving doors as they prepare for another day at work. But something is different about today. Curiosity replaces the thousand-yard stare on the faces of many on the way to work this morning, as they peer into a part of the building redesigned for the future. Inside is a giant screen that makes the BBC’s election swingometer look primitive. Guests are invited to sit at a u-shaped table in the middle of the room, where aesthetics are clearly more important than comfort. In one corner, a virtual reality experience is ready to immerse chief executives and other officials in the problems and war games of tomorrow. iPads are scattered like cushions around the room. Interaction is encouraged. But suddenly what looks like another iPad mounted on a Segway charges towards a group of unsuspecting journalists. “Ooops,” says the sheepish demonstrator as she puts down the device. The crowd disperses. It is not quite the robot revolution everyone was expecting. Can computers be creative? We have been told the future could be bleak. Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, has warned that the rise of the robot will put as many as 15 million UK jobs at risk. Most are hopeful. Academics at Oxford University have already published a cheat sheet identifying the most vulnerable jobs. Authors Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne have urged library technicians and insurance underwriters to think about a career change. Therapists, social workers and personal trainers have less to worry about. Probability of automation chart Being creative helps. Choreographers, musicians and teachers are also at less risk of being left on the scrapheap, the study shows. After all, robots can draw, but can they design? Machines can follow patterns, but can they predict them? For Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the answer is a resounding yes. The pair, both professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believe the biggest barrier to using technology to generate higher productivity and bigger profits is not the limits of robots, but the hubris of humans. In their new book: Machine, Platform, Crowd, the authors set out to dispel the myth that robots are only suited for “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks that people can’t - or simply don’t want - to do. They insist that artificial intelligence and machine learning is not only getting smarter, but more creative. _with_em_the_machines Take the US elections. Dan Wagner, Barack Obama’s chief analytics officer during the 2012 presidential election campaign, used data and machine-learning to score every US voter on how likely he or she would be to re-elect Obama for a second term. The analysts used algorithms to judge the probability that each potential voter would actually go out to vote. Floating voters were assessed on the basis of whether they could be persuaded to choose Obama. Wagner had money and he needed to buy TV adverts. But where? The Obama campaign wanted to target 18 to 24-year-old men in Colorado. Demographic data pointed to the same predictable advertising slots: Tuesday evening Family Guy reruns. But the right demographic did not necessarily mean the right audience. Wagner’s analysis showed something different was needed, and his ability to identify the “persuadables” and “get out the vote” groups within this demographic helped him to ensure the best buys in terms of advertising. Based on the data, the Obama team bought slots in between late-night reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond on TV Land rather than prime-time slots during Family Guy. The results surprised everyone. “It just kind of popped out,” Wagner told Brynjolfsson and McAfee. More importantly, the strategy secured the votes. Obama Former US president Barack Obama smiles after delivering his acceptance speech in 2012 following the election result Credit: AFP More than numbers Humans must recognise that AI is more than just number-crunching, Brynjolfsson and McAfee say. IBM’s Watson may be known as the supercomputer that beat the smartest humans at Jeopardy, but it’s also written a cookbook. The concept for the structural and aesthetic wonder that is the Shanghai Tower in China was created by a machine, and only then adapted by people. Shanghai Tower The Shanghai Tower during its construction phase in 2013. The original concept was designed by artificial intelligence Credit: AFP/Getty Computers have even designed a race car chassis from scratch. A few years ago, researchers at the 3D design specialist Autodesk teamed up with a group of car designers and stunt drivers to take on the task. Project Dreamcatcher was born. The team took a car out to the Mojave Desert and pushed it to its limits, collecting 20 million data points along the way. They used software to create an optimal structure designed to perform on the race track. What the Autodesk software came up with surprised many. It looked more like a skull than a car chassis, as if Mother Nature designed it herself. It was strong, slim, durable, and, most strikingly, asymmetric. The software understood that this race car turned in one direction more often than the other, and adapted the design to the forces put on the structure. Autodesk An Autodesk designed chassis Credit: Autodesk, W. W. Norton “Designers have been aware of this fact for a long time, but their creations have rarely, if ever, been as deeply asymmetric as the ones that emerge from generative-design software,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. Of course, race tracks are not all the same. Different tracks need different chassis, which implies changes to harnessing systems, engines and gearboxes. Catering for those changes can get expensive. For now at least, too, these machine-designed cars are still driven by humans, who will have to adapt to differences in the design of the car – and who still care deeply about looks. This human trait is recognised by Autodesk, which says Dreamcatcher has created the “complex math to make a good structure” and left the human designers to “make a ‘cover’ that meets whatever aesthetic criteria is important. ” Examples like this convince Brynjolfsson and McAfee that “digital creativity is more than mimicry and incrementalism”, leaving them with hope that “computers can and will” come up with novel solutions that never would occur to people. Accepting the future But will humans accept these solutions? All too often, the academics argue, judgments are left to the “HiPPOs”. the “highest paid person’s opinions”, which are too often based on judgments, intuition, gut feeling and biases not grounded in evidence. “The evidence is clear that this approach frequently doesn’t work well, and that HiPPOs too often destroy value,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee say. It is an argument that the partners at PwC come across every day. Aldous Birchall, the lead at PwC for AI and machine learning financial services, says people still believe they know best when it comes to finding solutions. "We’re still at a point in time when the bar that AI is expected to hurdle is 100pc accuracy"Jon Andrews, PwC “Certainly in my area of financial services there’s a lot of credit analysts out there who say the type of analysis they do could never be done by a machine, yet I have very good empirical evidence to show that it can often be done by a machine much better than a human,” he says. Jon Andrews, head of technology and investment at PwC, also comes across resistance: “We’re still at a point in time when the bar that AI is expected to hurdle is 100pc accuracy, when actually it just needs to be better than humans, because fundamentally that’s when there is a business case for it. ” The evidence that robots are better decision-makers is compelling. Human bias is everywhere. It is why judges are more likely to grant prisoners parole just after breakfast than just before lunch, when their stomachs are rumbling. It is why AI is helping managers to budget better, and ensuring the best candidates are recruited for the job, regardless of their age, gender or race. HiPPOs “need to become an endangered species within organisations,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee say. Andrews says education will be vital to unlocking the potential. “At the moment, the majority of the UK education system focuses on this very exam focused approach which has become centred around knowledge rather than problem solving creativity. We have to start at the beginning of the education system and work all the way through. ” ke While PwC's top auditors and partners may have little to worry about, what about those workers who entered the labour market thinking they'd have a job for life only to find a robot does it better and faster. Students learn quickly. Children even faster. But as McAfee told an audience in 2013, for the 1. 6 million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months: "We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori". PwC is already working with haulage companies to ensure their drivers are equipped with the skills for the future. Euan Cameron, an artificial intelligence expert at PwC, believes the future is as bright for the company's auditors as the haulage companies they advise. "For the hauliers we see an augmented solution where for instance the trucks are doing a motorway stretch autonomously while the driver is doing other stuff or sleeping, ready to intervene. The urban stretches, the complex manoeuvring is done by a driver, and perhaps that driver is in a simulator and they're not just driving one truck, they're driving 12 a day like a drone pilot. And then they can go home at the end of the day. " trucks motorway Some of these truck could drive themselves in future years, with humans acting as drone pilots rather than drivers Credit: Getty All agree that the big decisions will continue to be shaped by the entrepreneurs of the future. The next hit novel will not be written by a robot, and machine learning will never be able to coordinate large-scale creativity and planning. Self-employment may be on the rise, but the big companies and the managers that run them still have a vital role to play in driving innovation forward. “Knowing what people want next usually requires a deep understanding of what it means to be a person, and what it is like to experience the world with all our senses and emotions,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee say. For now, convincing humans to let go of some decision-making remains a slow process. Birchall says clients still want to know all the reasoning behind the AI’s decisions. Humans are not quite ready to cede control just yet. Brynjolfsson and McAfee sympathise, but say letting go is the key to success. “We appreciate that losing decision-making authority you once had is uncomfortable, and that no one likes feeling like a servant to a computer. "But does that mean that the wrong inmates should be let out or kept in prison, just so that judges and parole boards can continue to work as they used to? That companies should hire the wrong people, just to let interviewers keep feeling smart? “For us, the answer to these questions is no. ” Machine, Platform, Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson is the Telegraph bookshop. Related Topics Follow Telegraph Business If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph Business Galleries Gallery 21 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Gallery: Revealed: The 10 highest-paying jobs of 2017 Gallery 19 Dec 2017, 11:17am Gallery: Hamleys unveils its top 10 toys for Christmas 2017 candidates now? 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Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Facebook using artificial intelligence to combat terrorist propaganda time about the artificial intelligence programmes it uses to deter and remove terrorist propaganda online Credit: Ap 16 June 2017 • 1:37am Facebookhas spoken for the first time about the artificial intelligence programmes it uses to deter and remove terrorist propaganda online after the platform was criticised for not doing enough to tackle extremism. The social media giant also revealed it is employing 3,000 extra people this year in order to trawl through posts and remove those that break the law or the sites' community guidelines. It also plans to boost it's "counter-speech" efforts, to encourage influential voices to condemn and call-out terrorism online to prevent people from being radicalised. In a landmark post titled "hard questions", Monika Bickert, Director of Global Policy Management, and Brian Fishman, Counterterrorism Policy Manager explained Facebook has been developing artificial intelligence to detect terror videos and messages before they are posted live and preventing them from appearing on the site. The pair state: "In the wake of recent terror attacks, people have questioned the role of tech companies in fighting terrorism online. We want to answer those questions head on. " Explaining how Facebook works to stop extremist content being posted the post continues: "We are currently focusing our most cutting edge techniques to combat terrorist content about ISIS, Al Qaeda and their affiliates, and we expect to expand to other terrorist organizations in due course. "When someone tries to upload a terrorist photo or video, our systems look for whether the image matches a known terrorism photo or video. This means that if we previously removed a propaganda video from ISIS, we can work to prevent other accounts from uploading the same video to our site. "We have also recently started to experiment with using AI to understand text that might be advocating for terrorism. " Facebook also detailed how it is working with other platforms, clamping down on accounts being re-activated by people who have previously been banned from the site and identifying and removing clusters of terror supporters online. The social media platform, which is used by billions of people around the world, also explained it employs thousands of people to check posts and has a dedicated counter-terrorism team. "Our Community Operations teams around the world — which we are growing by 3,000 people over the next year — work 24 hours a day and in dozens of languages to review these reports and determine the context. This can be incredibly difficult work, and we support these reviewers with onsite counseling and resiliency training," it said. Facebook came under pressure from ministers after a number of recent terror attacks for failing to do more tackle and remove extremist posts. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, said earlier this year: "Each attack confirms again the role that the internet is playing in serving as a conduit, inciting and inspiring violence, and spreading extremist ideology of all kinds,” she writes. to take a more proactive and leading role in tackling the terrorist abuse of their platforms. ” Related Topics Follow Telegraph News If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph News News latest 07 Jan 2018, 12:07am Post-Brexit trade deal at risk if Donald Trump is not invited to Royal wedding, says Fire and Fury author 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Project Fear predictions that Brexit would damage the economy were 'wildly wrong' Premium 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Pubs to stay open late for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding the Metropolitan Police, shows John Worboys. 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Victims may learn why black cab rapist was released as ministers promise to end secret parole hearings Premium serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 10:41pm John Young, Nasa astronaut who flew to the moon twice, dies aged 87 06 Jan 2018, 10:35pm NHS hack WannaCry hero 'was coerced into confessing' in USA 06 Jan 2018, 10:30pm Hard Sun review: an unbelievable thriller inspired by a Bowie song 4 06 Jan 2018, 10:16pm Donald Trump says he is ready to talk to Kim Jong-un by phone 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm MPs call for official terrorist ban and sanctions on Iran's military guard one of the centrepieces of Mrs May's speech to the Conservative Party's conference in October 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Theresa May faces backlash over plans for 'absolute' price cap on energy bills 06 Jan 2018, 9:35pm The Voice UK 2018: New year, new mentor and new singers, but it's business as usual - episode one cracking German military Enigma codes, at the wartime intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. 06 Jan 2018, 9:34pm How GCHQ kept post-war cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' marriages involving no children 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm My cheating ex-husband won the lottery by having an affair, says City trader at centre of landmark divorce Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Spies come in from the cold to tackle terror Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Justine Greening fighting for her job as Theresa May wields axe Premium AND JOHNNY 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Jodie Kidd's mother forced to sell off paradise estate in the Caribbean 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Diplomatic relations 'undermined' as ambassadors' residences are sold off 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Doctors and nurses urged to get flu jab amid warnings that a French epidemic could spread to Britain hoisted at the stern during the Commissioning Ceremony for the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at HM Naval Base in Portsmouth, southern England on December 7, 2017 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Comment: We must preserve our military might – our freedom and prosperity depends on it Tobias Ellwood Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Computer beats Chinese master in ancient board game of Go with Dr David Silver after the match Credit: EPA 24 May 2017 • 1:23am A Google artificial intelligence programme defeated a Chinese grand master at the ancient board game Go on Tuesday, a major feather in the cap for the firm's AI ambitions as it looks to woo Beijing to gain re-entry into the country. In the first of three planned games in the eastern water town of Wuzhen, the AlphaGo programme held off China's world number one Ke Jie in front of Chinese officials and Google parent Alphabet's chief executive Eric Schmidt. The victory over the world's top player - which many thought would take decades to achieve - underlines the potential of artificial intelligence to take on humans at complex tasks. Wooing Beijing may be less simple. The game streamed live on Google-owned YouTube, while executives from the DeepMind unit that developed the programme sent out updates live on Twitter. Both are blocked by China, as is Google search. Ke Jie competes against Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo Ke Jie competes against Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo Credit: Rex Google pulled its search engine from China seven years ago after it refused to self-censor internet searches, a requirement of Beijing. Since then it has been inaccessible behind the country's nationwide firewall. The ceremonial game - the second time AlphaGo has gone head-to-head with a master Go player in a public showdown - represents a major bridge-building exercise for Google in China, following a charm offensive in recent years. It has announced plans to bring some services back to the country, including its app store Google Play. In March it also said Chinese users would be able to access the Translate mobile app, marking its most recent success launching a previously banned service. Like AlphaGo, Translate also uses DeepMind's artificial intelligence software. A screen shows referees judging after the match featuring Ke Jie against AlphaGo A screen shows referees judging after the match featuring Ke Jie against AlphaGo Credit: EPA Beijing is pushing to become a major player in artificial intelligence. Chinese search engine giant Baidu Inc, launched an AI lab in March with China's state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission. Go, most popular in countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, involves two contestants moving black and white stones across a square grid, aiming to seize the most territory. Its origins date back thousands of years. The board game is favoured by AI researchers because of the large number of outcomes compared to other games such as western chess. According to Google there are more potential positions in a Go game than atoms in the universe. AlphaGo made history when it beat a top South Korean professional player last year. Related Topics Follow Telegraph News If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph News News latest 07 Jan 2018, 12:07am Post-Brexit trade deal at risk if Donald Trump is not invited to Royal wedding, says Fire and Fury author 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Project Fear predictions that Brexit would damage the economy were 'wildly wrong' Premium 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Pubs to stay open late for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding the Metropolitan Police, shows John Worboys. 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Victims may learn why black cab rapist was released as ministers promise to end secret parole hearings Premium serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 10:41pm John Young, Nasa astronaut who flew to the moon twice, dies aged 87 06 Jan 2018, 10:35pm NHS hack WannaCry hero 'was coerced into confessing' in USA 06 Jan 2018, 10:30pm Hard Sun review: an unbelievable thriller inspired by a Bowie song 4 06 Jan 2018, 10:16pm Donald Trump says he is ready to talk to Kim Jong-un by phone 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm MPs call for official terrorist ban and sanctions on Iran's military guard one of the centrepieces of Mrs May's speech to the Conservative Party's conference in October 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Theresa May faces backlash over plans for 'absolute' price cap on energy bills 06 Jan 2018, 9:35pm The Voice UK 2018: New year, new mentor and new singers, but it's business as usual - episode one cracking German military Enigma codes, at the wartime intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. 06 Jan 2018, 9:34pm How GCHQ kept post-war cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' marriages involving no children 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm My cheating ex-husband won the lottery by having an affair, says City trader at centre of landmark divorce Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Spies come in from the cold to tackle terror Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Justine Greening fighting for her job as Theresa May wields axe Premium AND JOHNNY 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Jodie Kidd's mother forced to sell off paradise estate in the Caribbean 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Diplomatic relations 'undermined' as ambassadors' residences are sold off 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Doctors and nurses urged to get flu jab amid warnings that a French epidemic could spread to Britain hoisted at the stern during the Commissioning Ceremony for the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at HM Naval Base in Portsmouth, southern England on December 7, 2017 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Comment: We must preserve our military might – our freedom and prosperity depends on it Tobias Ellwood Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph It's time we educated children for the future, rather than limiting them to subjects of the past 12 May 2017 • 7:07pm [atkins-virtual-reality-girl_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqeo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9 In March, the House of Lords told us what has long been obvious: that we need to pay far more attention to the internet by coordinating our efforts towards improving children’s “digital literacy”. A report, published by the Lords Communications Committee, states that students’ lives – “from health to education, from socialising to entertainment” – are now “mediated through technology”. It also suggests that the best way to protect children online is through mandatory content control filters and privacy settings, and that a new children’s “digital tsar” should be appointed. All of this is commendable and, like so many education initiatives, long overdue. But if we are going to teach children to use the internet properly we need to do more than controlling its ‘threats’. virtual reality Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence, algorithms, advances in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and biology are already shaping our world at a pace we can scarcely comprehend. Rather than adding another ‘subject’, we should be looking at the whole purpose of education and asking whether our current systems are still fit for purpose. For generations now we have viewed children as either tabula rasa, blank slates waiting to be filled with knowledge, or, as those who adhere to innatism maintain, minds brimming with knowledge from day one. Both philosophies fed into the assembly line pedagogy, funneling talent into the narrow and restricted neck of an hourglass, to prepare them for world of work and leisure. What is increasingly evident, however, is that this approach is inadequate, even for those leaving school in the next decade. Yes, by all means, let us give the internet a far more prominent place in our curriculum (although I doubt whether including it as part of the many-headed beast that is PSHE is the right place), and better still, embed it across the curriculum. But let’s look further, much further, at what we are teaching, and its relevance over the next decade. We need to ask: should we even continue to teach the “3 R’s” in their conventional form. Five top tips for staying safe online In his recent TED talk “The Future of Learning”, education guru Sam Chaltain said that we “have to prepare our children for their future opposed to our past”. And that, clearly, is the challenge we face. While we know change is coming (and the J curve for knowledge is likely to be with us by 2030), we do not appear to have a unified approach on how to prepare for it. Instead of being reactive, education has to become proactive, even predictive, looking beyond what we already know to a rapidly changing future. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in his book ‘ Homo Deus’ , a report prepared in 2013 by Oxford researchers Frey and Osborne revealed that up to 47 per cent of current US jobs risk being replaced by computers and automation in the next 20 years – including doctors and pharmacists. While we remain sceptical as to whether humans can really be replaced in such professions, we should take note of the pharmacy that opened in San Franciso in 2011. Providing two million prescriptions in its first year without a single mistake, this new high-tech pharmacy owes its success to the specialised algorithms and iPhones which now run the show. As many occupations disappear altogether, in the same way that streaming has decimated video and music stores, new professions will undoubtedly surface, but it is likely they will require more flexibility and creativity than our current education system allows. Artificial intelligence and algorithms are already playing a significant role in our day to day lives, so it will be no surprise when teachers also become surplus to requirements. Meanwhile, we are so hung up on data that we are wasting huge amounts of human potential, squeezing the creativity out of young minds. Looking forwards, the workforce of tomorrow will not be judged on their content knowledge, but rather a set of skills and dispositions which enables them to thrive in an economy that is changing, fast. Recently I was visited by a friend who was New Zealand’s entrepreneur of the year in 2016. When I asked him about the quality of his new and prospective employees, he said his greatest concerns were their inability to problem-solve, their lack of imagination and the analytical skills to address causes rather than just managing the effects. Sadly there is little in our education system that prepares children for employment now - let alone in 2040, when the world of work will be more complicated still. So while we may welcome the paper from the House of Lords on internet safety, even accepting that it is reactive rather than pro-active, it is a small step on a very long journey. We know we cannot keep adding to an already full and essentially backward-looking curriculum. If the students are to succeed in the future, we need to begin considering how we can best teach new competencies, new skills, new applications and new knowledge. And that starts by acknowledging that today's education system is still stuck in the past. Related Topics Follow The Telegraph If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow The Telegraph Education latest school hallway 03 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Comment: Grammar schools work and are popular. So why deny parents and pupils of new ones? Telegraph View Premium 02 Jan 2018, 9:30am Comment: After a wretched year, university leaders must begin to make amends in 2018 Anthony Seldon Anthony Seldon lessons 31 Dec 2017, 7:00am Teach boys ballet and zumba to make PE gender neutral, head of sports organisation says 29 Dec 2017, 9:00pm 'God rest ye merry gentlefolk? ' School updates carol to be more 'inclusive' 29 Dec 2017, 12:01am Leading private school uses Greek philosophers to teach pupils how to spot 'fake news' 27 Dec 2017, 6:11pm Academics who criticised professor's British Empire research likened to Stalin by former equalities tsar Trevor Phillips before term starts means parents feel no guilt in employing a tutor 27 Dec 2017, 2:24pm Should your child be tutored over the Christmas break? 26 Dec 2017, 12:50pm Universities will be less able to make scientific breakthroughs if they do not tackle 'safe space' culture, minister warns 26 Dec 2017, 6:00am Don’t shield students from opinions they don’t agree with, universities minister Jo Johnson warns 23 Dec 2017, 3:00pm Comment: Universities cashing in on unconditional offers are doing great harm to our examinations system Chris Ramsey 22 Dec 2017, 8:21pm Home Office blocks Canadian from teaching Gaelic in Hebridean primary school 22 Dec 2017, 7:17pm Rounders is being replaced by cricket at girls’ schools as it is seen as a 'leisure activity' rather than a sport, leading head says month 22 Dec 2017, 7:01pm Mosques launch legal challenge against an council’s bid to ban halal meat in schools select committee chair writes 22 Dec 2017, 3:31pm Comment: Foster children face a lottery of care in a system that is under pressure Rob Halfon 22 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Vice-chancellors enriched by deficit-hit pension scheme Codrington Library 22 Dec 2017, 9:00am Comment: Let us not forget the positives of empire – not least its lessons for the future David Twiston Davies Premium 21 Dec 2017, 6:03pm Skateboarding to success: how half pipes are helping children caught up in the Greek refugee crisis rated inadequate or requires improvement 21 Dec 2017, 5:59pm Ofsted should use artificial intelligence to determine which schools will fail, report suggests legacy of the British Empire 20 Dec 2017, 6:26pm Oxford academics criticise professor who suggested people should have 'pride' about aspects of British Empire against the Codrington Library and commemoration of its founder, Christopher Codrington 20 Dec 2017, 6:16pm Oxford college commissions slavery plaque amid student pressure over benefactor's colonial links 20 Dec 2017, 3:22pm Comment: Can a university education still guarantee prosperity? Professor Sir Keith Burnett Premium Keith Burnett Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph How universities can help make Britain a global powerhouse of scientific innovation post-Brexit 9 March 2017 • 11:12am [science-students-lab_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqeo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJv laboratory. Credit: Getty In recent months, the Government has been keen to champion Britain as a nation that is "truly global". Other countries have clear competitive advantages to exploit in the global marketplace: the United States in technology and military capability; China as an industrial powerhouse; and Germany as a leader of European integration. By way of comparison, Britain seems to lack direction. Our manufacturing has either been decimated by automation or gone abroad, while our dependence on financial services leaves us dangerously exposed to the ups and downs of market forces. However, we do have a clear, but unexploited advantage: Britain can become the world leader in science and education, a role forged in the furnace of universities and research institutes up and down the country, using students as its fuel. Sir Isaac Newton, (1642-1727), British mathematician and physicist. Sir Isaac Newton, (1642-1727), British mathematician and physicist. Britain’s capability to lead the world in science is exemplified by our past. Britons made historic contributions to the foundations of modern science. From Isaac Newton to Rosalind Franklin, and Charles Darwin to Alan Turing, our scientific history is truly impressive. In a time of great uncertainty for our country, we should turn to the past for inspiration and use our history and institutions as a platform to become the global centre of science, technology and education. Such a role will become increasingly important in the coming decades, as a whole range of advances – artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering to name just a few – radically change societies across the world. Crucially, this role is independent of size; we need not compete with the industrial might of China to teach their students physics, mathematics and computer science. Prime Minister Theresa May. Prime Minister Theresa May. Credit: PA Wire Contrary to the beliefs of many in the scientific community, this idea is becoming increasingly common among those influencing the direction of the UK. Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, has written extensively about this subject on his blog. Theresa May herself has indicated that she wants Britain to be "a leader in science and innovation". As Brexit shakes up the system, the opportunity to seize this role is available. There are straightforward policies that could start this process. While the UK has significant infrastructure in place for science and education, we fail to invest and capitalize on it. Research in the UK is chronically underfunded: we spend under 0. 5 percent of GDP on science, compared with 0. 73 percent across the Eurozone and 0. 77 percent in the G8. Moreover, while the UK is a net contributor to EU budgets, the UK does particularly well out of EU research budgets. This source of funding is now less certain. As a result, without substantial increases in spending on science, we are at serious risk of being left behind. The 10 pillars of the Governments new industrial strategy In the recent budget, Philip Hammond finally distributed the extra science funding - £4. 7 billion over 4 years - which he had announced in the autumn statement last November. After consulting universities and industries on its industrial strategy, the Government pledged to focus funding research and manufacturing technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, offshore energy, nuclear power plants, and mining. £16 million will be used to develop a high-speed and next-generation 5G mobile network. Another £200 million will bolster local 'full-fibre' broadband networks. A grand total of £250 million will be spent on fellowships for students and scientists, with over a third of this being used to support 1000 PhDs. 85 percent of these funds will bolster the four STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering, and maths. The government will also distribute an extra £50 million to attract scientists to the UK from overseas. However the new funding will only maintain spending as a percentage of GDP, and even with this increase we are still far behind the pack internationally. A concerted effort from scientists and the public alike is required to ensure funding is not only maintained but increased post-Brexit. Engineer assembling robotics in a factory. Engineer assembling robotics in a factory. Credit: Alamy Such funding is unlikely to be wasted. It is a remarkable testament to our scientists that, despite the current funding shortage, the UK has strong foundations in science research. Although we only have around three percent of global funding for research, the UK produces over 15% of the most highly cited papers in the world. We have elite higher education institutions too. In most international university rankings, the UK has multiple entries in the top 20, backed up by an extraordinary depth of excellent institutions across the country. Moreover, from the Francis Crick Institute in London, to the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator in Oxford, there are exciting projects already underway in the UK. These are projects that should be expanded and replicated in other fields and regions across the country. Previous large scale investments have yielded astounding returns. Although returns are hard to precisely quantify, it is estimated that for every dollar invested in NASA, the US economy is boosted by between $7 and $12. In the case of the Human Genome Project, estimates go as high as $65 dollars. The new Francis Crick Institute building in London, 2016. The new Francis Crick Institute building in London, 2016. Credit: AFP But the benefits are not simply monetary. Scientific investment produces innovations that materially improve human well-being. From mobile phone cameras and water filters produced by NASA research, to genetic sequencing for disease screening and discovering new drug targets, public investment in science is an overwhelming force for good. Where else can governments invest and achieve such returns? The past decade has all too painfully exposed the flaws in over-dependence on our financial sector. With the Brexit negotiations posing its own series of challenges, it is fast becoming clear that we must evolve as a country. We should view this as an opportunity to invest wisely and finally capitalise on our strength in science and higher education. The referendum has sent other changes down the tracks, most notably in immigration policy. The ability of foreign scientists and students to come to the UK to contribute and learn from our system is crucial to its success. In my experience of research, I’ve worked with scientists from across Europe, America and Asia, who bring unique skills that would be near impossible to replace. These people contribute to our economy – whether through research, start-ups or providing a pool of highly skilled talent for our businesses. Scientists and biomedical researchers working at the Francis Crick Institute. Scientists and biomedical researchers working at the Francis Crick Institute. Credit: Getty Images Many scientists are considering leaving the UK after Brexit. As shown academics” to make the trip across the channel, other countries are welcoming them with open arms. In order to address these Brexit-related challenges, future immigration policy should focus on attracting more of the brightest and best from around the world. We should also make those already here feel more welcome. Importantly, while much of the current narrative is anti-immigration, public opinion on immigration for students and scientists is typically more favourable. The advantages of capturing the next generation of world-leading talent - driving innovation, discovering new medical advances, providing skills in increasingly important fields like computer science and physics - are clear, and the public understand that. Our university system provides the ideal framework to achieve this by attracting students and scientists to settle in the UK. Unlike other immigrants, these students often pay into the university system rather than coming to work. The government can use this to showcase its desire to become a global Britain by removing students from immigration figures and allowing universities the flexibility to bring talented students to the UK. Policy-makers should also learn from other fields where decisive action is being taken to adapt to a changing landscape by focusing on the next generation. The intelligence services, for example, are converting the wartime intelligence hub Bletchley Park into a factory for coding-whizzes. This is a model that could be replicated for other fields like medical research, physics and mathematics. These focused centres, spread across the country at exceptional university departments, would exceed any other system in the world. The Google logo on a laptop screen. Credit: Yui Mok However, if we are to see the fruits of these endeavors, we must also convert investment in basic science into new companies. A recent example is that of DeepMind, the machine learning start-up by theoretical Neuroscience PhD students, bought out by Google for hundreds of millions of pounds, and now taking the machine learning field by storm. DeepMind provides an example of our most powerful weapon: students themselves. We produce more science graduates and PhD students than there are academic positions to fill, yielding a surplus of highly talented people without a clear path to take. While the investment by Google was exceptional, government could play a similar role in backing students to chase high risk, high gain opportunities that typical market structures do not support. Further support could come by introducing tax breaks to start-ups capitalizing on recent scientific advances, ensuring they stay and drive economic growth. On this front, Brexit may provide us with a competitive advantage. Recent select committees in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons have concluded that EU regulations hamper the process of technology transfer, particularly in the life sciences. Taking the opportunity to increase entrepreneurship would translate our science success more directly into a key driver of the economy, all the while capturing the talents of academics who would otherwise be forced into other fields. Furthermore, it would harness the ambition of young people in our universities, from both home and abroad, and maximize returns from government investment in science. Such steps would also increase the allure of further study, creating a virtuous cycle in which our best minds are attracted to fundamental research and contribute much more to the economy than would otherwise be possible. To date, the economic catastrophe predicted before the referendum has yet to materialize, providing government with the flexibility required to sculpt our future. Global Britain should capture the talents of our students and the allure of our higher education and scientific institutions to ensure Britain is the birthplace of the scientific and technological revolutions to come. It remains to be seen whether this government will forge this new role for Britain after Brexit, but our universities are our most powerful tool to do so. Matthew Phillips is a neuroscience PhD student at University College London (UCL). Follow The Telegraph READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow The Telegraph Education latest post-Brexit, according to the Education Secretary 06 Jan 2018, 12:01am Comment: If Britain is to thrive post-Brexit, opportunity must be spread evenly across the country Justine Greening school hallway 03 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Comment: Grammar schools work and are popular. So why deny parents and pupils of new ones? Telegraph View Premium 02 Jan 2018, 9:30am Comment: After a wretched year, university leaders must begin to make amends in 2018 Anthony Seldon Anthony Seldon lessons 31 Dec 2017, 7:00am Teach boys ballet and zumba to make PE gender neutral, head of sports organisation says 29 Dec 2017, 9:00pm 'God rest ye merry gentlefolk? ' School updates carol to be more 'inclusive' 29 Dec 2017, 12:01am Leading private school uses Greek philosophers to teach pupils how to spot 'fake news' 27 Dec 2017, 6:11pm Academics who criticised professor's British Empire research likened to Stalin by former equalities tsar Trevor Phillips before term starts means parents feel no guilt in employing a tutor 27 Dec 2017, 2:24pm Should your child be tutored over the Christmas break? 26 Dec 2017, 12:50pm Universities will be less able to make scientific breakthroughs if they do not tackle 'safe space' culture, minister warns 26 Dec 2017, 6:00am Don’t shield students from opinions they don’t agree with, universities minister Jo Johnson warns 23 Dec 2017, 3:00pm Comment: Universities cashing in on unconditional offers are doing great harm to our examinations system Chris Ramsey 22 Dec 2017, 8:21pm Home Office blocks Canadian from teaching Gaelic in Hebridean primary school 22 Dec 2017, 7:17pm Rounders is being replaced by cricket at girls’ schools as it is seen as a 'leisure activity' rather than a sport, leading head says month 22 Dec 2017, 7:01pm Mosques launch legal challenge against an council’s bid to ban halal meat in schools select committee chair writes 22 Dec 2017, 3:31pm Comment: Foster children face a lottery of care in a system that is under pressure Rob Halfon 22 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Vice-chancellors enriched by deficit-hit pension scheme Codrington Library 22 Dec 2017, 9:00am Comment: Let us not forget the positives of empire – not least its lessons for the future David Twiston Davies Premium 21 Dec 2017, 6:03pm Skateboarding to success: how half pipes are helping children caught up in the Greek refugee crisis rated inadequate or requires improvement 21 Dec 2017, 5:59pm Ofsted should use artificial intelligence to determine which schools will fail, report suggests legacy of the British Empire 20 Dec 2017, 6:26pm Oxford academics criticise professor who suggested people should have 'pride' about aspects of British Empire against the Codrington Library and commemoration of its founder, Christopher Codrington 20 Dec 2017, 6:16pm Oxford college commissions slavery plaque amid student pressure over benefactor's colonial links Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Forget your GP, robots will 'soon be able to diagnose more accurately than almost any doctor' [parsa_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq1rJ9pSNcEwURYMTh2-V-meIJ02v23m6JBWZjDUILQig. jp artificial intelligence Credit: Geoff Pugh for The Telegraph 7 March 2017 • 10:00pm Robots will soon be able to diagnose patients “more accurately and faster” than almost any doctor, says the man behind a controversial NHS scheme which will see chatbots employed to assess 111 calls. A private company with a string of health service contracts is to launch a national scheme which allows patients to receive a full diagnosis by smartphone – without ever having to see a GP. Babylon Health has just begun a pilot scheme which means patients in five boroughs of London are encouraged to consult a chatbot instead of a human being, when they contact the 111 non-emergency line. Under the system, patients key in their symptoms, with artificial intelligence used to assess the urgency of each case, and determine home. "We would not accurately forecast the weather without a computer - we need to be giving this support to our doctors"Dr Ali Parsa Now the company’s chief executive has revealed it is to launch a more sophisticated model which will allow any individual to receive a diagnosis by smartphone. Dr Ali Parsa, the company’s founder said the system would allow doctors to work in tandem with artificial intelligence – so that medics could focus on treating rather than diagnosing diseases. The entrepreneur said: “There are 300 million pieces of knowledge that we have collected. “No human brain can do that. This is the largest amount of primary care clinical semantic knowledge in the would that is held by any computer, as far as we know. ” The model remains in development, but tests so far have shown it is faster and more accurate than the doctors in risk assessing cases, Dr Parsa said. Babylon's app Babylon's app means patients to discuss symptoms with a chatbot In the coming months, research will test the thesis that it can also outperform medics in making a full diagnosis. So far, trials have found it can do so in all abdominal diseases, the company said. “I think we will soon be able to diagnose more accurately and faster than a doctor in most cases. That leaves the doctor to focus on the management of the diseases,” Dr Parsa said. However last week health watchdogs issued a public warning about the dangers of online prescribing. The Care Quality Commission urged consumers to be wary of online services, after inspections of two web companies – Asset Chemist and Treated. com – which were found to be doling out drugs without checking patients identities or spotting high risks of side effects. Babylon Health, which was founded in 2013, last month took on the contract to provide virtual responses to 111 cases in north London, covering the boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington. And since 2015, it has been offering NHS patients in Essex consultations by webcam, with private doctors doing the work that would normally be done by GPs. Its app, which triages cases – making a risk assessment of urgency – is already available free to consumers in any part of the country. Consumers can pay £25 if they need a webcam consultation with a private doctor, or subscribe to the service for £5 a month for unlimited access. More than 190,000 consumers have signed up for the scheme, with 120 corporate clients – including the companies Boots, Bupa and Sky – providing free subscriptions to staff. But Dr Parsa questioned why the NHS did not make greater use of digital services, given a national shortage of GPs, and a £22 billion savings programme which is underway. “Why couldn't Babylon be a patient’s NHS GP? ” he said. “An NHS GP costs in average about £130 a year – for £60 a year you get all this at your fingertips. ” “In 95 per cent of cases, we can see you remotely and you don't need to see a doctor physically,” he said. “Everybody has a mobile phone,” Dr Parsa added. “This way you get access to a doctor 14 hours a day, seven days a week in your pocket. ” Waiting times to see a GP in two practices in Essex dropped from three weeks to one after the launch of Babylon in 2015, he said. More than 20,000 patients are eligible for the online service, with one in five taking it up, and receiving all their consultations via webcam or phone. However, patients groups have expressed concern about the safety of the schemes. GP Dr Parsa said GPs should be given more technology support Online doctors do not have access to the patient’s medical notes and could miss symptoms which might otherwise be detected, they said. And concerns have been raised that such schemes pave the way for the “privatisation” of the NHS, at a time when it is under unprecented strain. However, Dr Parsa said tests comparing speed, accuracy and safety of the artificial intelligence system showed the computer consistently outperforming the human. Tests comparing accuracy of triage forund that nurses results were accurate in 73. 5 per cent of cases, while doctors achieved accuracy levels of 77. 5 per cent, while the computer reached rates of 90. 2 per cent. The chatbot model achieved its results far more quickly, he said. While doctors took an average of 3 min 12 seconds to make a diagnosis and a nurse took 2 minutes 27 seconds, the computer took 1 minute 7 seconds. The findings came from a panel of senior doctors who judged the accuracy and speed of diagnosis after the event. Dr Parsa said it was not a question of robots replacing medics – but of providing doctors with the best support. “If you think of the game of chess – no person can beat the machine – but the best games come when chess players are assisted by machine,” he said. “We would not accurately forecast the weather without a computer – we need to be giving this support to our doctors. ” It was impossible for any medic to retain the levels of knowledge required to perform at the highest levels, he said. “There were 11,000 papers published in dermatology last year - doctors need to be able to harness all that information; it's about making humans focus on what they do best. ” NHS 111 | The service’s past issues READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Facebook to use artificial intelligence to combat suicides help connect a person in distress with people who can support them Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg 1 March 2017 • 3:37pm Facebook will use artificial intelligence to spot users who may be at risk of suicide, telling people to talk to friends or contact a helpline if their posts show signs that they may be considering taking their own lives. Suicide prevention services have been available on Facebook for more than 10 years, but it is now testing artificial intelligence as a way of identifying users who may be at risk. Its algorithm will flag up posts that are likely to include thoughts of suicide, Facebook said, by using pattern recognition on previous posts that have been reported. Reporting tools will now also be integrated into Facebook Live, so people who are watching the video will be able to report it and “reach out to the person directly”. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Credit: REUTERS/Stephen Lam The news follows the death of Naika Venant, a 14-year-old girl who used the social media platform to livestream her suicide in January. “There is one death by suicide in the world every 40 seconds, and suicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 29-year-olds,” the company said. “Facebook is in a unique position - through friendships on the site - to help connect a person in distress with people who can support them. “Today we are updating the tools and resources we offer to people who may be thinking of suicide, as well as the support we offer to their concerned friends and family members. ” Through its suicide prevention tools, Facebook users can be prompted to reach out to a friend who they believe may be in need of support, while it also suggests contacting a helpline. Those tools have been developed alongside mental health organisations such as Save. org and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and last year were rolled out globally. If a video is reported to Facebook, the social media giant will able to reach out to emergency workers if the person is in imminent danger. As part of its suicide prevention tools, Facebook allows people to connect with crisis workers over Messenger. As of Wednesday, people will see the option to message someone in real time directly from the organisation’s page or through suicide prevention tools. Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new feature to help people find basics such as food, water and shelter when natural disasters strike. 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Government to plough £20m into artificial intelligence research including robots and driverless cars surgeries will be financed Credit: Bloomberg News 26 February 2017 • 12:01am A major review into how Britain can become the world leader in Leading figures from academia and business will lead the drive into how Government can encourage the fledgling industry in the wake of the Brexit vote. Experts believe £654 billion can be added to the British economy by 2035 if the growth potential in AI is achieved. An extra £17m of funding will also be announced, financing research including into how “micro-robotics” can be used in surgeries. The measures are the flagship announcements of a new "digital strategy" The measures are the flagship announcements of a new "digital strategy" Credit: EPA The measures are the flagship announcements of a new "digital strategy" that will be unveiled by Government next week. Ministers are keen to grasp the economic opportunity from developing driverless cars, digital “assistants” like iPhone’s Siri and robots working in hazardous environments such as nuclear facilities. It is felt that the UK already has a “competitive advantage” in the field by more is needed to ensure the country is the world leader in AI in the coming decades. Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, said: “Britain has a proud history of digital innovation - from the earliest days of computing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s development of the World Wide Web. “We are already pioneers in today’s Artificial Intelligence revolution and the digital strategy will build on our strengths to make sure UK-based scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to be at the forefront. “Technologies like AI have the potential to transform how we live, work, travel and learn … It’s great that Government and industry will be working together to drive growth in the sector, to realise all the economic and social benefits for the UK. ” Ministers are keen to grasp the economic opportunity from developing driverless cars Ministers are keen to grasp the economic opportunity from developing driverless cars Credit: Bloomberg The review will be led by Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and Jérôme Pesenti, the CEO of BenevolentTech, a British technology company using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. A funding boost of £17. 3m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to support university research will also be announced. Dame Wendy said: “Our scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs are at the forefront of the development of artificial intelligence and I’m looking forward to exploring how industry and government can work together to support the technology in the UK. " Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, said: “Investment in robotics and artificial intelligence will help make our economy more competitive, build on our world-leading reputation in these cutting-edge sectors and help us create new products, develop more innovative services and establish better ways of doing business. ” Follow Telegraph News READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph News News latest 07 Jan 2018, 12:07am Post-Brexit trade deal at risk if Donald Trump is not invited to Royal wedding, says Fire and Fury author 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Project Fear predictions that Brexit would damage the economy were 'wildly wrong' Premium 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Pubs to stay open late for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding the Metropolitan Police, shows John Worboys. 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Victims may learn why black cab rapist was released as ministers promise to end secret parole hearings Premium serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 10:41pm John Young, Nasa astronaut who flew to the moon twice, dies aged 87 06 Jan 2018, 10:35pm NHS hack WannaCry hero 'was coerced into confessing' in USA 06 Jan 2018, 10:30pm Hard Sun review: an unbelievable thriller inspired by a Bowie song 4 06 Jan 2018, 10:16pm Donald Trump says he is ready to talk to Kim Jong-un by phone 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm MPs call for official terrorist ban and sanctions on Iran's military guard one of the centrepieces of Mrs May's speech to the Conservative Party's conference in October 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Theresa May faces backlash over plans for 'absolute' price cap on energy bills 06 Jan 2018, 9:35pm The Voice UK 2018: New year, new mentor and new singers, but it's business as usual - episode one cracking German military Enigma codes, at the wartime intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. 06 Jan 2018, 9:34pm How GCHQ kept post-war cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' marriages involving no children 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm My cheating ex-husband won the lottery by having an affair, says City trader at centre of landmark divorce Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Spies come in from the cold to tackle terror Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Justine Greening fighting for her job as Theresa May wields axe Premium AND JOHNNY 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Jodie Kidd's mother forced to sell off paradise estate in the Caribbean 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Diplomatic relations 'undermined' as ambassadors' residences are sold off 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Doctors and nurses urged to get flu jab amid warnings that a French epidemic could spread to Britain hoisted at the stern during the Commissioning Ceremony for the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at HM Naval Base in Portsmouth, southern England on December 7, 2017 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Comment: We must preserve our military might – our freedom and prosperity depends on it Tobias Ellwood Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Artificial intelligence the next ‘big bet’ for online retailers, say bosses 8 November 2016 • 2:26pm Artificial intelligence is the key to the future of online retail, business bosses have said, providing a crucial way to help shoppers find what they want. Alex Baldock, chief executive of Shop Direct, which runs very. co. uk and Littlewoods, told the Telegraph Festival of Business in London that artificial intelligence was the company’s “big bet”. “You have three seconds to seize the shopper’s attention - it’s called thumb stopping, the three-second audition,” Mr Baldock said. "That’s where personalisation comes in. ” Shop Direct is owned by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, proprietors of Telegraph Media Group, the publisher of the Daily Telegraph. Mr Baldock was joined on a panel discussing the role of technology in business by Adrian Blair, the chief operating officer of Just Eat, the food delivery website. Both Mr Baldock and Mr Blair affirmed that all their online growth was now coming from mobile: Just Eat, for example, currently takes 80pc of its orders on mobile devices. The delivery company also uses chatbots and artificial intelligence for restaurant recommendations, and customers can now order food using an Amazon Echo, a voice command device produced by the US tech giant. “When I was a student I would have dreamed of that,” Mr Blair said. “Through technology we have made it unbelievably simple to order food, and have cut out the payment step. Those sorts of things point the way to the future, making things unbelievably easier for the customer, and more efficient for the provider. ” Just Eat is also trialing land-based drone deliveries, which would deliver food to the customer by road. The consumer would then input a code to remove their food from the drone, which Mr Blair described as having a “rectangular R2D2 face”. Facing threats from Deliveroo and Uber Eats, Mr Blair said that unlike his competitors, Just Eat’s restaurants employ their own drivers, and so avoid the legal issues that have plagued rivals. “That makes the economics of our business look very attractive,” he said. “We are able to operate at a scale others would struggle to match because of our model. ” Also on the panel was Dr David Landsman, executive director of industrial conglomerate Tata. He said that automated manufacture was used throughout the company, from creating teabags to steel and cars. “Once you can bring in the five digital forces - cloud computing, big data, social media, artificial intelligence, mobile - you can start looking at whole process and virtualise the whole factory, and work out what’s going to happen before it does,” he said. Jenny Knott, chief executive of Icap’s Post Trade Risk and Information division, also argued the AI had a role to play in the future of financial services - particularly alongside blockchain, a type of digital ledger that can speed up secure transactions. Ms Knott said blockchain was an immutable, “golden version of whatever you are keeping a record of”. She tipped big things from “blockchain with a brain” - partnering the technology with artificial intelligence and big data. “It’s incredibly empowering in creating transparency,” Ms Knott said. “It will be very powerful in affecting how we operate. ” Follow Telegraph Business READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph Business Galleries Gallery 21 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Gallery: Revealed: The 10 highest-paying jobs of 2017 Gallery 19 Dec 2017, 11:17am Gallery: Hamleys unveils its top 10 toys for Christmas 2017 candidates now? Gallery 17 Dec 2017, 10:53am Gallery: From Lee McQueen to Alana Spencer: where are the Apprentice candidates now? Business latest Serious Fraud Office didn't choose an autism expert when 2018, 7:00pm Libor families hit back at SFO with further claims of non-experts 06 Jan 2018, 6:42pm Former easyJet boss takes on ITV amid troubling Virgin dispute president of OPEC, speaks as Alexander Novak, Russia's energy minister, left, listens during a news conference following the 172nd Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Thursday, May 25, 2017 06 Jan 2018, 6:28pm Comment: As oil prices start to stir, the only way is up Liam Halligan Premium Liam Halligan 06 Jan 2018, 6:17pm Comment: Theresa May's government is failing miserably on rail, as on much else Jeremy Warner Premium Jeremy Warner 06 Jan 2018, 6:07pm How to manufacture a more balanced economy President and CEO Joe Kaeser announce their deal to merge their rail operations and create a "European champion", in September 27, 06 Jan 2018, 5:56pm Planets align for deal boom as nations set sights on overseas riches Premium 06 Jan 2018, 5:43pm Workers more pessimistic over pay growth than Bank of England forecasts 06 Jan 2018, 5:38pm Fitness First takeover leaves DW Sport with an £8m loss 06 Jan 2018, 5:29pm Garden Bridge designer Thomas Heatherwick nets £2. 6m payout despite falling profits 06 Jan 2018, 5:17pm Comment: Steinhoff's warning signs were there for all to see Ben Marlow Premium Ben Marlow accounting scandal 06 Jan 2018, 5:06pm Poundland owner Steinhoff's fairy tale proves too good to be true amid accounting scandal Premium 06 Jan 2018, 4:43pm Tesco takes the Christmas crown in festive retail wars 06 Jan 2018, 3:26pm Energy networks prepare to blend hydrogen into the gas grid for the first time chief Joe Kaeser announce a deal to merge their rail operations and create a "European champion", in September 27, 2017. 06 Jan 2018, 3:25pm European champions to form in next deal boom, City predicts President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels on Friday, Dec. 8, 2017. 06 Jan 2018, 3:02pm Comment: Brexit offers the chance to positively reshape our immigration policies Lady Barbara Judge Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:46pm The businesses making a living from God's work (despite falling attendances) previously served as chief of staff at the Treasury to former Chancellor, George Osborne 06 Jan 2018, 1:30pm George Osborne's former adviser: 'There is no sense that we are due a recession soon' 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph The Pixel phone shows how Google is becoming a bit more like Apple 9 October 2016 • 6:36pm For all its talk of making the world a better place, there is no place where the competitive ideals of American capitalism are more evident than in cut-throat Silicon Valley. Almost every move by Apple, Google or Facebook is seen through the lens of offence or defence, either against each other or towards a nimbler startup trying to turn them into yesterday’s news. But as well as competing directly, these clashes between titans have manifested themselves collaterally into a series of ideological arguments. Take the battle between privacy and progress: Apple, for example, has taken a strict line on using customers’ information, while others are more relaxed, partly because their use of data has allowed them to make great strides in areas such as artificial intelligence. Another one of these religious splits has been in the idea of “open” against “closed” systems. The first is the idea that technology should be infinitely tweakable and free of bias. It is the libertarian foundation of the world wide web: democratic rather than dictatorial. Closed means that the technology is less flexible, that decisions are taken by those who know better, rather than letting the user run amok. It is authoritarian, if largely benevolent. Those that worship at the altar of open include Wikipedia and Mozilla, which develops the Firefox web browser. At the other end of the spectrum are Nintendo, which has tightly controlled both its video game software and hardware, and Facebook, which rigorously controls how its users experience the social network. But it is the two biggest tech companies that best represent this divide. In the open corner is Google, which was born on and is dependent on the web, and dreams of indexing the entire world’s information for everyone. On the closed side is Apple, which is obsessively devoted to simplicity and as a result shields its users from having too many choices. Google’s Android mobile software, which runs on thousands of smartphones, is free and massively customisable. iOS, Apple’s operating system, runs on one mobile - the iPhone - and uniform across devices. One is open, one is closed, and that is how it has been since both existed. Until last week, at least. For on Wednesday, Google took a leap into the unknown by unveiling its first phone. The Google Pixel is intended to be a direct competitor to the iPhone (as the frequency of Google’s potshots at Apple during its presentation showed). At its heart is the Google Assistant, an artificial intelligence designed to respond to millions of voice queries and demonstrate the power of the company’s smarts. google biggest failures It is a rare foray into hardware for Google, which has traditionally left the job of making Android phones to other manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and HTC. This has served it fairly well, with Android accounting for four in five phones sold globally, so why do it, especially in 2016, as growth in smartphone sales peters out and innovation seemingly dries up? Partially, at least, the answer lies in frustration at the state of the equipment manufacturers that Android relies on. HTC is in dire financial straits, and others such as Sony are losing market share. Samsung also appeared to be in trouble a year ago, and although has enjoyed a rebound in sales recently, Google had made the decision to sell its own handsets by then (now that the Korean group has been thrown into turmoil by defective handsets, the decision looks tremendously prescient). The fastest growing phone makers are in China, where Android has no Google services due to the company’s blackout of the country. Google has also been frustrated at the endless tampering with Android by manufacturers, who have often promoted their own apps and relegating Google’s. It is partly why the company requires that its search engine and web browser be installed on any Android phone that wants to use the Google Play app store, a directive that has landed it in hot water with EU competition regulators. The new Google Assistant software that features in the Pixel is a crucial element of the company’s future: computing is moving away from the web searches that make the majority of the company’s money and towards artificial intelligence that can talk and answer questions, so naturally Google is desperate to control this new channel. So ask yourself: if you were Google, and needed Assistant to be a success at this crucial juncture, would you leave it to unreliable third parties or take things into your own hands? Suddenly, being a little less open and (whisper it quietly), a little bit more like Apple, starts to look attractive. Control both the hardware and the software, and you can be sure that customers are getting what you intend them to. Google’s ambitions go beyond the phone: the internet giant is also set to release the Google Home, a voice-controlled smart speaker that also puts the company’s AI at its heart. The two products will work together as well as with the Chromecast, its internet TV device. Gradually, it is building an “ecosystem” of products, seamlessly tied together with its software: another strategy that Apple’s iPhone, iPad and Mac have used to great effect. While it will protest that it has not abandoned its open ideals, Google has taken a big leaf out of the Apple playbook. At a glance | Smartphones compared READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph The big data race reaches the City being sifted for the good of commercial interests as never before Credit: Bloomberg 8 October 2016 • 2:08pm IBM’s Watson supercomputer, once known for winning the television quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011, is now sold to wealth management companies as an affordable way to dispense investment advice. Twitter has introduced “cashtags” to its stream of social chatter so that investors can track what is said about stocks. Hedge funds are sending up satellites to monitor crop yields before even the farmers know how they’re doing. The world is awash with information as never before. According to IBM, 90pc of all existing data was created in the past two years. Once the preserve of academics and the geekiest hedge fund managers, the ability to harness huge amounts of noise and turn it into trading signals is now reaching the core of the financial industry. Last year was one of the toughest since the financial crisis for asset managers, according to BCG partner Ben Sheridan, yet they have continued to spend on data management in the hope of finding an edge in subdued markets. “It’s to bring new data assets to bear on some of the questions that asset managers have always asked, like macroeconomic movements,” he said. “Historically, these quantitative data aspects have been the domain of a small sector of hedge funds. Now it’s going to a much more mainstream side of asset managers. ” banks Banks are among the biggest investors in big data Credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg Even Goldman Sachs has entered the race for data, leading a $15m investment round in Kensho, which stockpiles data around major world events and lets clients apply the lessons it learns to new situations. Say there’s a hurricane striking the Gulf of Mexico: Kensho might have ideas on what this means for US jobs data six months afterwards, and Many businesses are using computing firepower to supercharge old techniques. Hedge funds such as Winton Capital already collate obscure data sets such as wheat prices going back nearly 1,000 years, in the hope of finding patterns that will inform the future value of commodities. Others are paying companies such as Planet Labs to monitor crops via satellite almost in real time, offering a hint of the yields to come. Spotting traffic jams outside Wal-Marts can help traders looking to bet on the success of Black Friday sales each year – and it’s easier to do this from space than sending analysts to car parks. Some data providers have been feeding transcripts of calls with company executives into a natural language processor – an area of artificial intelligence that the Turing test foresaw – to figure out if they have gained or lost confidence in their business. Trades might have had gut feelings about this before, but now they can get graphs. There is inevitably a lot of noise among these potential trading signals, which experts are trying to weed out. “Most of the breakthroughs in machine-learning aren’t in finance. The signal-to-noise ratio is a problem compared to something like recognising dogs in a photograph,” said Dr Anthony Ledford, chief scientist for the computer-driven hedge fund Man AHL. “There is no golden indicator of what’s going to happen tomorrow. What we’re doing is trying to harness a very small edge and doing it over a long period in a large number of markets. ” The statistics expert said the plunging cost of computer power and data storage, crossed with a “quite extraordinary” proliferation of recorded data, have helped breathe life into concepts like artificial intelligence for big investors. “The trading phase at the moment is making better use of the signals we already know about. But the next research stage is, can we use machine learning to identify new features? ” AHL’s systematic funds comb through 2bn price updates on their busiest days, up from 800m during last year’s peak. Developments in disciplines such as engineering and computer science have contributed to the field, according to the former academic based in Oxford, where Man Group this week jointly sponsored a new research professorship in machine learning at the university. driverless car The artificial intelligence used in driverless cars could have applications in finance Credit: Google Dr Ledford said the technology has applications in driverless cars, which must learn how to drive in novel conditions, and identifying stars from telescope images. Indeed, he has adapted the methods used in the Zooniverse project, which asked thousands of volunteers to help teach a computer to spot supernovae, to build a new way of spotting useful trends in the City’s daily avalanche of analyst research. “The core use is being able to extract patterns from data without specifically telling the algorithms what patterns we are looking for. Previously, you would define the shape of the model and apply it to the data,” he said. These technologies are not just been put to work in the financial markets. Several law firms are using natural language processing to carry out some of the drudgery, including poring over repetitive contracts. programme that is backed by Mike Lynch, former boss of the computing group Autonomy. Freshfields has spent a year teaching a customised system known as Kira to understand the nuances of contract terms that often occur in its business. Its lawyers have fed the computer documents they are reading, highlighting the parts they think are crucial. Kira can now parse a contract and find the relevant paragraphs between 40pc and 70pc faster than a human lawyer reviewing it by hand. “It kicks out strange things sometimes, irrelevancies that lawyers then need to clean up. We’re used to seeing perfect results, so we’ve had to teach people that you can’t just set the machine running and leave it alone,” said Isabel Parker, head of innovations at the firm. “I don’t think it will ever be a standalone product. It’s a tool to be used to enhance our productivity, rather than replace individuals. ” The system is built to learn any Latin script, and Freshfields’ lawyers are now teaching it to work on other languages. “I think our lawyers are becoming more and more used to it as they understand its possibilities,” she added. Insurers are also spending heavily on big data fed by new products such as telematics, which track a customer’s driving style in minute detail, to help give a fair price to each customer. “The main driver of this is the customer experience,” said Darren Price, group chief information officer at RSA. The insurer is keeping its technology work largely in-house, unlike rival Aviva, which has made much of its partnerships with start-up companies in its “digital garage”. Allianz recently acquired the robo-adviser Moneyfarm, and Axa’s venture fund has invested in a chat-robot named Gasolead. EY, the professional services firm, is also investing in analytics tools that can flag red flags for its clients in particular countries or businesses, enabling managers to react before an accounting problem spreads. Even the Financial Conduct Authority is getting in on the act. Having given its blessing to the insurance sector’s use of big data, it is also experimenting with a “sandbox”, or a digital safe space where their tech experts and outside start-ups can use real-life data to play with new ideas. The advances that catch on throughout the financial world could create a more efficient industry – and with that tends to come job cuts. The Bank of England warned a year ago that as many as 15m UK jobs were at risk from smart machines, with sales staff and accountants especially vulnerable. “Financial services are playing catch-up compared to some of the retail-focused businesses. They are having to do so rapidly, partly due to client demand but also because there are new challengers and disruptors in the industry,” said Amanda Foster, head of financial services at the recruiter Russell Reynolds Associates. But City firms, for all their cost pressures, are not ready to replace their fund managers with robots, she said. “There’s still the art of making an investment decision, but it’s about using analytics and data to inform those decisions. ” Follow Telegraph Business READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph Business Galleries Gallery 21 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Gallery: Revealed: The 10 highest-paying jobs of 2017 Gallery 19 Dec 2017, 11:17am Gallery: Hamleys unveils its top 10 toys for Christmas 2017 candidates now? Gallery 17 Dec 2017, 10:53am Gallery: From Lee McQueen to Alana Spencer: where are the Apprentice candidates now? 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Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Amazon's Echo steals a march in the race for artificial intelligence 20 September 2016 • 10:24am this year Credit: Amazon It came and went so quickly that one could easily forget it ever existed, but it was only two years ago that Amazon released its own smartphone. Developed in the web retailer’s secretive “Lab 126”, a Silicon Valley subsidiary 800 miles south of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, the “Fire Phone” was applauded for its ideas, which included a 3D screen effect made possible by an elaborate four-camera system. However, it proved to be a commercial flop. Tied to Amazon’s own operating system – a flawed stepbrother of Google’s dominant Android software – and with a premium price tag that disappointed those familiar with the company’s reputation for aggressively-thin margins, it failed to mount anything approaching a challenge to Apple or Google in the smartphone wars. And regardless of the Fire Phone’s merits, or lack thereof, Jeff Bezos and his team had entered the market half a decade late. In a year that smartphone sales surpassed one billion, the Fire Phone sold a few tens of thousands, and it was swiftly and silently discontinued. The Amazon Fire phone The Amazon Fire phone Credit: Amazon For a company founded on prescience – Bezos’s belief in online retail led him to quit his Wall Street hedge fund before many had heard of the web – it was a spectacular misjudgement, and led to a $170m (£130m) writedown just a year after the phone was launched. Amazon’s failure in such an important battleground would perhaps have been more closely scrutinised in a tougher year, but at present it seems the company can do no wrong. It has posted five straight quarters of profits, unheard of for a company previously allergic to the word, and shares have risen by 150pc since the start of 2014. But at the same time, its dismal showing in smartphones has been eclipsed by delirious enthusiasm about what comes next. A few months after the Fire Phone, Amazon unveiled a mysterious black cylinder it called the Echo. A two-way wireless speaker and microphone combination with a virtual artificial intelligence assistant – “Alexa” – that responds to voice commands like “Read me the news” or “Turn off the lights”, it is designed to blend into the background in a kitchen or living room, responding to every wish. At a glance | Amazon Echo When it was first announced to a sceptical tech press months after a flop phone, the Echo was dismissed separately as a joke and a privacy nightmare. Now the latter may still prove to be the case - the Echo is always listening, and after it is awakened by saying "Alexa", it logs every sentence spoken to it (although Amazon says privacy is at the heart of the device and that users can delete queries that are stored) - but a joke it is clearly not. In fact many analysts now believe that Amazon has one hand on the future that comes after the smartphone. Alexa is not the only, or even the first, voice-activated virtual assistant – Apple, Google and Microsoft have had their own for years – but it is the first that consumers have truly embraced. While taking out a smartphone in public and speaking to it – as one must with Apple’s Siri or Google’s Assistant – is awkward, and often slower than simply using a touchscreen, talking to a device in the comfort of one’s own home is decidedly less uncomfortable. Amazon’s software also seems more reliable. The company’s prowess in cloud computing – which has spawned the colossal Amazon Web Services unit – means that the Echo has access to the near-infinite computing resources of the company’s servers: it can hear a question, send it to be processed, receive an answer and relay it in milliseconds. And Amazon’s underrated artificial intelligence chops, honed using years of it to sneak under the radar. It is important not to get carried away about the Echo, despite its growing buzz. Sales to date are estimated to be around 7m – less, for example, than the Apple Watch, whose sales have been below expectations – although the Echo is believed to have picked up momentum in recent months and has only been available in the US to date, with the UK and Germany following later this month. The impact on Amazon’s own business is also unclear. The company says it is not making a profit on the £150 device. Many shoppers, meanwhile, are likely to feel uncomfortable, at least at first, about speaking to a robot to do their shopping. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets say 47pc of owners have never used the Echo to order an item from Amazon, against 10pc who buy things “very often” and 16pc who do so “somewhat often”. But Amazon has clearly stolen a march on its rivals, which they are now scrambling to recover from. Google announced a rival to the Echo earlier this year, although evidence of its development has been scarce, and privately, Amazon does not appear to be too worried. Apple is also rumoured to be exploring such a device. But in the same way that Amazon’s tardiness in the smartphone game punished it, the company getting ahead of its competitors may prove crucial. Incidentally, the arms race that will follow is only likely to heighten interest in British expertise in artificial intelligence. Much of the Echo’s technology stems from Evi, a startup it acquired in 2012. Google’s AI breakthroughs are increasingly being made at the King’s Cross headquarters of its subsidiary DeepMind. And last year Apple bought VocalIQ, a University of Cambridge spin-off that specialises in talking computers. British tech investors wondering where to put their cash would do well to take notice. 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph How artificial intelligence will transform your business Brought to you by Tata Communcations future: artifical intelligence is already walking and talking among us 12 July 2016 • 10:15am Oliver Pickup Computer intelligence will overturn everything from medicine to the stock market and the revolution is only just beginning. Artificial intelligence (AI) and a world in which machines threaten humanity’s status quo has been the preserve of science fiction for decades. In the Eighties, Terminator was set in a post-apocalyptic world in which cyborgs rule, RoboCop’s protagonist was part-man, part-machine and Short Circuit toyed with the idea of robots developing human-like minds, with rather more endearing results. The reality is the bot has bolted. AI is walking and talking among us. In 2016, we use voice-recognition systems, driverless cars are being trialled and robotic hotel receptionists work in Japan. The advent of certain technologies – inexpensive high-speed internet, secure cloud storage, mobility solutions and low-cost devices – has allowed the fantastical possibilities of the past to become reality. "Everything invented in the past 150 years will be reinvented using AI within the next 15 years" Armed with that tech oomph, it is vital for business leaders to engage with AI. They must realise its vast untapped potential and take charge in shaping the present and the future. “Everything invented in the past 150 years will be reinvented using AI within the next 15 years,” says Randy Dean, chief business officer at Sentient Technologies. Mr Dean should know: by harnessing AI’s potency his San Francisco-based company has disrupted markets, including healthcare, retail, food and financial trading. “Because of AI we are beginning to see seismic advances in health, transport, banking and many other domains,” he says. “Soon AI will be able to predict a heart attack hours, or even days, before you feel it. “In addition, we are developing a joint venture which we believe is the world’s first AI hedge fund. It uses evolving algorithms created by humans and optimised by machines for trading. Using historical market data, we train our AI to find signals which would take humans 1,000 years to spot. ” As part of Tata Communications’ two-day CEO Summit 2016, which began yesterday at Coworth Park near Ascot, Berkshire, Mr Dean was invited to demonstrate the e-commerce AI program Sentient Aware to 60 business leaders. "Soon AI will be able to predict a heart attack hours, or even days, before you feel it" It allows shoe shoppers to whittle down a catalogue into personal choices with a few swipes, factoring in subtle details such as slope of toe, height of heel and shape of sole. In his provocative welcome note to the summit, Vinod Kumar, chief executive of Tata Communications, writes: “AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it is in the mainstream of information technology… We must share our ideas on how to fulfil its potential while guarding against any social and economic disruption. ” Jack Hidary, a session leader at the conference, agrees. “At last we have arrived at the age of machine intelligence. Now we can easily crunch terabytes and petabytes and exabytes of data, and that means AI programs will shoot up the very steep learning curve rapidly. However, I believe we have only seen about one per cent of what AI can ultimately do. “This summit comes at a critical moment in the evolution of humans and in terms of the development of ourselves as leaders. Every chief executive in the room will come away with the distinct impression that AI will disrupt their industry. It’s up to each leader to choose whether to harness this available power or feel the effects of it from others. ” Delegates are encouraged to interact with a dozen demonstrations that span the gamut of AI technology – in robotics, virtual and augmented reality, gaming, and more. “We showcase shopping-carrying bots, drone racing, plants that can perfect air conditioning, devices that tell you if you’re happy, and there is even a herd of baby robot dinosaurs,” says future technologist and product innovator at Tata Communications David Eden. "In order to take advantage of AI’s possibilities, businesses need a reliable, secure and evolving infrastructure" “AI is relevant today because the processing power required to do useful things with it has hit a level of maturity, and because the other critical building blocks for AI – superfast connectivity and secure cloud computing – are now ubiquitous. ” The truth is that in order to take advantage of AI’s possibilities, businesses need a reliable, secure and evolving infrastructure. Tata Communications, whose network powers almost a quarter of the world’s internet routes and allows people and businesses to reach 240 countries and territories, is well placed to help. “Tata Communications is putting its money where its mouth is, investing in AI, including Sentient, and working hard to understand it, while educating others, as shown by this summit,” Mr Dean says. “The sooner we can turn on business leaders to the possibilities of how AI could help them, the faster the market can grow. Ultimately, that optimisation of costs, products and services will benefit all of humanity. ” Powering the Future • Tata Communications’ network carries almost 25pc of global internet routes, acting as the backbone for future AI innovations • This internet backbone reaches countries that account for 99. 7pc of the world’s GDP • Tata Communications’ IZO cloud ecosystem includes the world’s largest cloud platforms – Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform • Through its cloud ecosystem and global network, Tata Communications is an enabler for AI solutions that have the potential to transform how businesses operate See how you can connect your business at tatacommunications. com If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Don't miss experts 08 Aug 2016, 11:45am Instant diagnosis by smartphone: how artificial intelligence can save lives experts 03 Aug 2016, 4:30pm Artificial intelligence and the implications of its rapid growth humans 25 Jul 2016, 12:15pm How worldwide businesses should prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence 20 Jul 2016, 11:30am Act now to benefit from artificial intelligence – before it’s too late To keep up with business demands innovation is essential How to recruit the best talent for your business Disruption in the marketplace is good for business busy streets, full of people 09 Jul 2015, 3:04pm Social responsibility: giving back is important More from Tata Communications Enterprises are moving away from the in-house data centre and forging new hybrid relationships between their existing data centres and cloud-hosted solutions Cloudification As technology continues to move at a breakneck pace — with social, mobile, analytics and cloud driving the evolution of businesses — innovative telecoms players are helping enterprises to embrace the change Embracing change From Bahrain to Brazil and back again, Tata Communications helps businesses reach their audiences faster and expand into new territories. There are some great stories to tell. . . Faster journeys Much has been said about innovation as a means to transform enterprises, and the need for CIOs to harness IT to support the always-connected business by keeping the lights on. Is it possible for CIOs to do both? Mission impossible? Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Instant diagnosis by smartphone: how artificial intelligence can save lives Brought to you by Tata Communcations possibilities: artificial intelligence has the power to save lives 8 August 2016 • 11:45am Oliver Pickup Drones that pick inaccessible crops and mobile phones that give medical advice are two of the ways AI can transform life in the developing world. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a “game changer” in improving the lives of the world’s poor, according to the New York-based technology entrepreneur Jack Hidary. He says the technology needed to revolutionise inefficient, ineffective food and healthcare systems in developing countries is well within grasp. “In low-income areas, agriculture and healthcare are two critical ecosystems that we can apply AI to immediately; this is not the far future, or even in five years – we can start this year,” said Mr Hidary, moderator and session leader of Tata Communications’ recent 2016 CEO Summit, with the theme “Artificial intelligence meets emotional intelligence”. "Soon we could expect instant medical advice and prescriptions from 'smartphone laboratories'" “AI will be a game changer, and benefit billions. Today two billion people in the world go hungry, so righting the imbalanced distribution of food and dealing with the worldwide agricultural system is a good start. Technologies such as GPS have increased the yield in developed countries but have not been widely used in developing countries. Now we can level that playing field with smartphones and access to the cloud. “The ability to increase the yield of farmland under tillage in developing countries is a mission-critical challenge. I see that as within reach using these technologies. We already have autonomous drones for agriculture, for both shooting seeds into the ground, and fertilising. ” In India, Tata Rallis, an internet of things (IoT) project, uses drones to administer pesticides. The aim is to harness data, such as crop health and soil conditions, to boost output. Mr Hidary said: “By extension, drones are able to pick fruits, almonds and other kind of foodstuffs that are difficult to collect for humans. Drones are cheap – about $100 (£75) – and could be used by communities for farming and other tasks, and don’t have to be owned by one person. ” Smartphones are now more widely used by people in developing countries. Soon we could expect instant medical advice and prescriptions from “smartphone laboratories”, said Mr Hidary. Many deaths in low-income communities are preventable. He predicted that a device that attaches to a smartphone and could take samples of blood, saliva and urine would become available. It would tell the patient if they had diseases as serious as zika, cholera or ebola. There would be no need to send samples to a lab in the capital, which could take weeks. Instead, there would be an immediate analysis and a prescription issued. Often the solution would be just a few pills or an injection, getting to the person to care or isolating them. AI would speed that process and save many lives. Mr Hidary added: “Applying AI to healthcare is essential for low-income communities. Often in those areas one health crisis devastates the whole family; all the savings can be lost if the breadwinner is felled by a disease. ” "AI has the power to remould and better develop countries from within, by allowing tech talent to thrive" Timothy Chou, a Stanford University lecturer on cloud and IoT, says we cannot apply how things work in the West to the developing world. “We suffer from a mental block, because we accept how things work in our country and we want to replicate that in the developing world,” said Mr Chou, one of 60 business leaders who was at the summit at Coworth Park, Ascot. “The reality is we shouldn’t. ” The first priority must be to build infrastructure as there will be a limit to growth unless the West can build next-generation telecoms, power and agriculture systems. Providing consistent and secure global connectivity to as many as possible is imperative. Vinod Kumar, chief executive of Tata Communications and host of the summit, praised the China-led One Belt, One Road project. It aims to develop a strategy and framework focusing on connectivity and co-operation among 65 countries. “It will connect 60pc of the world’s population, and is estimated to add $2. 5trn to those countries in the next decade,” said Mr Kumar, whose company is currently building India’s first-ever IoT network, which will underpin many AI applications in the country. AI has the power to remould and better develop countries from within, by allowing tech talent to thrive. “In India, there are 4,200 start-ups, the third-largest start-up ecosystem in the world. They are redefining business models in technology for healthcare, education, climate change, ecommerce and so forth. They will make very pinpointed and disruptive investments that will shape the economy of the future, and improve the lives of the poor in India and beyond. ” Powering the future Communications’ network long – the only such network that encircles the globe being built in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi by Tata Communications Tata Vision 2025 By 2025, 25 per cent of the world’s population will experience the Tata commitment to improving communities’ and customers’ quality of life. Tata will be among the 25 most admired corporate brands globally, with a market capitalisation comparable to the world’s 25 most valuable firms. See how you can connect your business at tatacommunications. com If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Don't miss experts 03 Aug 2016, 4:30pm Artificial intelligence and the implications of its rapid growth humans 25 Jul 2016, 12:15pm How worldwide businesses should prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence 20 Jul 2016, 11:30am Act now to benefit from artificial intelligence – before it’s too late intelligence: driver-less cars, robots, virtual reality 12 Jul 2016, 10:15am How artificial intelligence will transform your business To keep up with business demands innovation is essential How to recruit the best talent for your business Disruption in the marketplace is good for business busy streets, full of people 09 Jul 2015, 3:04pm Social responsibility: giving back is important More from Tata Communications Enterprises are moving away from the in-house data centre and forging new hybrid relationships between their existing data centres and cloud-hosted solutions Cloudification As technology continues to move at a breakneck pace — with social, mobile, analytics and cloud driving the evolution of businesses — innovative telecoms players are helping enterprises to embrace the change Embracing change From Bahrain to Brazil and back again, Tata Communications helps businesses reach their audiences faster and expand into new territories. There are some great stories to tell. . . Faster journeys Much has been said about innovation as a means to transform enterprises, and the need for CIOs to harness IT to support the always-connected business by keeping the lights on. Is it possible for CIOs to do both? Mission impossible? Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Artificial intelligence and the implications of its rapid growth Brought to you by Tata Communcations different forms, and already permeates our everyday life 3 August 2016 • 4:30pm Oliver Pickup As artificial intelligence reinvents every business, chief executives have a responsibility to consider the implications of this transformative technology. Artificial intelligence is no longer the subject of science fiction, or something we are going to see in 20 or 30 years,” said Vinod Kumar, chief executive of Tata Communications, in his welcome address at the recent 2016 CEO Summit with the theme “Artificial intelligence meets emotional intelligence”. Mr Kumar set the scene for the summit, which gathered 60 business leaders and tech trendsetters at Coworth Park in Ascot, Berkshire, to discuss possible threats and opportunities in the coming AI age. "We need to define the rules of this game, the control, the security" He said: “AI takes many different forms, and permeates all aspects of our lives today. We now have a variety of technologies where intelligent machines, powered by advances in micro-technology and superfast connectivity and cloud computing, are changing the way we live and work. Beyond driverless cars and very smart computers that can beat chess champions, there are numerous mundane applications of AI which are enabled by simple sensors connected to smartphone SIM cards. To harness the potential of AI it is critical to be open-minded, and have a willingness to learn. ” Randy Dean, chief business officer of San Francisco-based Sentient Technologies and a session leader at the summit, went further. “AI’s disruptive nature means we are beginning to see seismic advances in healthcare, transport, agriculture, banking and many other domains. I would say everything invented in the past 150 years will be reinvented using AI within the next 15 years. ” Fears over mass unemployment, internet security and the prospect of machines achieving human-like consciousness were raised. "To harness the potential of AI it is critical to be open-minded, and have a willingness to learn" The futurist Gerd Leonhard said: “There needs to be a paradigm shift, so companies are more efficient, but also to reassign human talent that will basically live on top of technology. I’m 90 per cent positive AI will be used for good, but we need to define the rules of this game, the control mechanism, security, and everything which is currently out of touch. ” Konstantinos Karachalios, managing director of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Standards Association, believes boundaries must be set to prevent harmful AI being spawned. “AI poses clear dilemmas,” he said. “Who is in charge? Does this mean humans give up being free agents? Now ethical dilemmas are answered by the companies who do the programming but surveys show people want others – neutral bodies, themselves or governments – to be in charge. “Many computer programmers use a ‘quick and dirty’ ideology to get the product on the market, letting others find the bugs or deal with unintended consequences. This cannot continue. It is the wrong practice and, with AI, very dangerous for our future. ” The first AI code-of-conduct charter will be published in October. Mr Karachalios said: “You cannot expect every technologist to be a philosopher or sociologist, but the companies that produce critical software must introduce in the design workflow system moments where knowledgeable, intelligent people get time to reflect. This may mean the product takes more time to get to market, which is seen as a disadvantage in an era when the first gets it all. ” "We are trying to connect the world and break down borders using digital technology" A consistent, secure connection is vital, too. And Tata Communications, whose network carries almost a quarter of the world’s internet routes, is well positioned to assist. This fourth annual chief executives’ summit emphasised the company’s ambition to be an enabler and innovator for platform economies and the cloud. “We have a very strong vested interest in the enablement of AI,” Mr Kumar said. “But equally we are using AI ourselves to improve our business and create new domains to operate in. It is our raison d’être at Tata Communications to identify the largest business issues and highlight the great opportunities we face. “We believe innovation comes from diversity. The only way these big issues can be tackled is by bringing a diverse audience together and through working together. We need to look at it from all angles, and develop robust solutions which will have long-lasting benefits to us all. “Whether your journey is in AI, internet of things, augmented reality, cloud or virtual reality, at Tata Communications we do a lot in terms of the underlying plumbing and the platforms but also play our part in big ecosystems. We are trying to connect the world and break down borders using digital technology. ” Tata Communications reached by this internet backbone inviting employees to submit ideas with the potential to become a $200m business within 10 years and touch billions network, being built in cities including Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore by Tata Communications See how you can connect your business at tatacommunications. com If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Don't miss experts 08 Aug 2016, 11:45am Instant diagnosis by smartphone: how artificial intelligence can save lives humans 25 Jul 2016, 12:15pm How worldwide businesses should prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence 20 Jul 2016, 11:30am Act now to benefit from artificial intelligence – before it’s too late intelligence: driver-less cars, robots, virtual reality 12 Jul 2016, 10:15am How artificial intelligence will transform your business To keep up with business demands innovation is essential How to recruit the best talent for your business Disruption in the marketplace is good for business busy streets, full of people 09 Jul 2015, 3:04pm Social responsibility: giving back is important More from Tata Communications Enterprises are moving away from the in-house data centre and forging new hybrid relationships between their existing data centres and cloud-hosted solutions Cloudification As technology continues to move at a breakneck pace — with social, mobile, analytics and cloud driving the evolution of businesses — innovative telecoms players are helping enterprises to embrace the change Embracing change From Bahrain to Brazil and back again, Tata Communications helps businesses reach their audiences faster and expand into new territories. There are some great stories to tell. . . Faster journeys Much has been said about innovation as a means to transform enterprises, and the need for CIOs to harness IT to support the always-connected business by keeping the lights on. Is it possible for CIOs to do both? Mission impossible? Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Act now to benefit from artificial intelligence – before it’s too late Brought to you by Tata Communcations things to come: don't get left behind in the AI revolution 20 July 2016 • 11:30am Oliver Pickup Chief executives must be acutely aware of how to harness the power of AI to transform their human capital if they are to avoid a future of failure. Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly and inexorably reshaping all aspects of our world. Businesses that fail to switch on to the possibilities of seismic market disruption and advancement or utilise the technology now available face being banished to history – and soon. This was the prevailing warning emanating from Tata Communications’ fourth CEO summit, which gathered 50 forward-thinking delegates last week at Coworth Park in Ascot, Berkshire, to address what those present agreed is the most important topic for the future of humanity. But given the welter of content on offer about the subject, many business leaders are suffering from “AI fatigue”, unable to decide how seriously to take this nascent age of machine intelligence and uncertain how to unlock its potential. Gerd Leonhard, a session leader at the summit, thinks businesses of all sizes need to transform their approach and culture from the top down. "A supercomputer will have the brainpower of all humans by 2050" “AI is growing on an exponential scale and will revolutionise what humans think of as work,” says the chief executive of The Futures Agency, a think-tank that offers “hard futures” to help firms anticipate what might soon happen. “In seven years, probably earlier, we will have the first computer with the brainpower of a human being in terms of technical capabilities, but not emotional intelligence,” he says. “Only five years after that there is likely to be a computer with the brainpower of a million people; and in 2050 a supercomputer will have the brainpower of all humans. “With computers starting to think, a paradigm shift is taking place. If companies don’t realise this early enough they could be left behind. ” There is a “time pressure to act”, especially for those lumbered with clunky legacy systems, says Carl Robertson, vice-president of global enterprise marketing at Tata Communications and orchestrator of the summit. "Leaders have realised that their companies can grow much quicker by hiring not humans but smart machines. " “AI is advancing at a quicker rate than we can imagine, so we are observing a massive CEO scramble to grab hold of this technology, which will touch everyone and everything,” he says. “Leaders have realised that their companies can grow much quicker by hiring not humans but smart machines. In order to facilitate transformation, a new position has emerged: the chief digital officer. “The CEO may be the ultimate sponsor, but CDOs are the ones tasked with revamping legacy systems and putting in place a future-proof platform. They need to be given the freedom and budget to let loose and look at the new technologies. ” Just as Uber – the hugely successful taxi service that allows users to hail a ride on a smartphone – developed because of burgeoning global positioning system (GPS) technology, we can expect AI to spur innovative business models and life-changing products. "AI is not a gimmick like social media or big data. Think of it as an ecosystem" Mr Leonhard, offering advice to laggard business leaders, says: “It starts with a progressive attitude. Companies should look at the rolling AI improvements that can be realised now. Creating efficiencies through AI – such as a smart meeting system that saves time and money – is good, but you need to not be shortsighted. “AI is not a gimmick like social media or big data. Think of it as an ecosystem. To make that work, people have to understand this must be a holistic environment considering efficiency, profit, growth and also humanity. “If you empty out most of the human elements of your company it will eventually backfire. This is not about efficiency, it’s about long-term value. ” Timothy Chou, a Stanford University lecturer who has spent “30 years in the AI trenches”, suggests companies looking for fast growth must seek out able allies – in particular a reliable network provider able to securely scale up resources on demand. “With AI we can start to change the world,” he says. “If you are willing to learn from data, this is a huge greenfield opportunity where the planet’s fundamental infrastructure can be networks of precise machines. “Transformation and innovation need to be driven from within, though. But to allow that culture to flourish the fundamental cloud infrastructure required to harness AI’s potential must be in place. ” Tata Communications powers almost a quarter of the world’s internet across its network, and Mr Robertson says: “In this new era of machine intelligence it is essential to future-proof your business, build ecosystems, foster talent and cultivate partnerships. Business leaders cannot tackle AI on their own. ” Powering the future 60% Fortune 500 companies that have network and IT services provided by Tata Communications. 39 Countries in which the Tata group has offices, employing 8,000 people worldwide. $50bn Scope of potential market (up from $30bn) that the company is aiming to achieve by 2020. IZO Cloud ecosystem that includes the world’s largest cloud platforms: Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. See how you can connect your business at tatacommunications. com If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Don't miss experts 08 Aug 2016, 11:45am Instant diagnosis by smartphone: how artificial intelligence can save lives experts 03 Aug 2016, 4:30pm Artificial intelligence and the implications of its rapid growth humans 25 Jul 2016, 12:15pm How worldwide businesses should prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence intelligence: driver-less cars, robots, virtual reality 12 Jul 2016, 10:15am How artificial intelligence will transform your business To keep up with business demands innovation is essential How to recruit the best talent for your business Disruption in the marketplace is good for business busy streets, full of people 09 Jul 2015, 3:04pm Social responsibility: giving back is important More from Tata Communications Enterprises are moving away from the in-house data centre and forging new hybrid relationships between their existing data centres and cloud-hosted solutions Cloudification As technology continues to move at a breakneck pace — with social, mobile, analytics and cloud driving the evolution of businesses — innovative telecoms players are helping enterprises to embrace the change Embracing change From Bahrain to Brazil and back again, Tata Communications helps businesses reach their audiences faster and expand into new territories. There are some great stories to tell. . . Faster journeys Much has been said about innovation as a means to transform enterprises, and the need for CIOs to harness IT to support the always-connected business by keeping the lights on. Is it possible for CIOs to do both? Mission impossible? Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph My week with a very bossy robot [ChatBotsHumans_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqek9vKm18v_rkIPH9w2GMNtm3NAjPW-2_OvjCi which portrayed artificial intelligence robots Credit: Des Willie/Kudos/Channel 4 12 April 2016 • 6:42pm After two decades being an office worker, I finally made it. I now have a personal assistant. She’s called Amy Ingram and she’s super-efficient, works all hours, though occasionally she emails me in the middle of the night. Also, she refuses to fetch me a cup of coffee or file my expenses. But that is because Amy is a robot, and exists purely as a piece of software, sitting on a server somewhere on the east coast of America. She is the latest, and possibly the most interesting, version of a phenomenon that has taken Silicon Valley by storm: chatbots. These are computer software programmes that are able to communicate with humans through artificial intelligence and, possibly, help run their homes. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is developing an AI robot Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is developing an AI robot Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, announced that he was going to dedicate his spare time to building a “simple AI”, similar to Jarvis, the robotic butler in Iron Man. “I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home – music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell,” he explained, adding that the robot could also be used to check up on his baby daughter, Max, when he was away. “You'll never have to call 1-800-Flowers again” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook On Tuesday night he announced, at the F8 Facebook conference, that he would allow third-party developers to build chatbots inside its Messenger app. In theory, this would allow users to 'talk' directly to businesses rather than people having to go through an app or call customer services. "You'll never have to call 1-800-Flowers again," Zuckerberg said during a demonstration of how the chatbots will work. Depending on your outlook, this is extraordinarily exciting, or a nightmare out of the Channel 4 series Humans, when bots start to interfere with their owners’ lives. But the revolution has already started. Indeed, many of you might already have used a chatbot, in its simplest form, without realising it. “There are a number of daily tasks that I’d love help with. Something that could summarise all the emails I get sent during a day would be great” Sabine Hubert, lecturer in robotics at Bristol University First, there’s Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, mobile phone software that uses very basic artificial intelligence to understand your voice and answer your questions. Also, some companies, such as Ikea, use chatbots to answer standard customer service enquiries when you get in touch with a complaint. Research firm Gartner estimates that up to 85 per cent of customer service centres will go virtual by 2020. But AI becomes more interesting when it is used to help ordinary families, rather than companies. Indeed, many believe they will replace apps on our smartphones as the ultimate aid to making modern life simpler. Sabine Hauert, lecturer in robotics at Bristol University, says: “We need to work out where we need help. There are a number of daily tasks that I’d love help with. Something that could summarise all the emails I get sent during a day would be great. ” My secretary, Amy Ingram (AI – geddit? ), is designed to help people organise their diaries and set up meetings. That’s all she can do. But she goes about it in a freakishly human-like way. In fact, after using her for a couple of weeks, various contacts of mine – after communicating with her over email – said they had no idea she was not a real person. For her to do her job, you need to give her access to your electronic diary, set a few preferences (your three favourite coffee shops to meet in, for example), and copy her into any emails about meetings you want to set up. She then takes over. Not just by sending out a calendar invitation to the person you want to meet, but also by making sure the time fits around both of your schedules, and nudging people to accept the calendar invitation. Reminders can also be sent, if you want. Dennis Mortensen, chief executive of x. ai, the company behind Amy, believes there are 10 billion meetings in the US every year, and his invention can reduce the tens of billions of emails that ping-pong between people to set them up. Pepper the humanoid robot, manufactured by SoftBank Group Pepper the humanoid robot, manufactured by SoftBank Group Credit: Bloomberg News What is remarkable is how Amy “chats” to your contacts about whether they’d prefer a coffee meeting, or clarifying the address of where you are meeting. All emails sound as if they are written by a human – until she starts to email your contacts at two in the morning, telling them that they really need to confirm the time they want to have lunch with me. Pushy doesn’t come into it. Realistically, she is not for me. I prefer an old-fashioned paper diary and the telephone. But I am intrigued by AI’s potential in the home. As well as Amy, I’ve also been trying out a new Bosch “smart fridge” that has in-built cameras. When I am at the supermarket, I can look at my phone to see if I’ve run out of milk, or I need more ham, which is very clever. It is meant to help cut down on waste. Though its claim that I can zoom in to see the best-before date on my fromage frais is laughable – the quality of the pictures are like those taken on a KidiZoom camera. For five times the price, Samsung has a more sophisticated version which incorporates Amazon’s Alexa, a chatbot that can compile shopping lists for you. John Lewis staff member Lauren Gray demonstrating a Samsung Family Hub refrigerator, costing £4500. John Lewis staff member Lauren Gray demonstrating a Samsung Family Hub refrigerator, costing £4500. Credit: Clara Molden for the Telegraph “This is just phase one,” says Johnathan Marsh, director of buying, electricals, at John Lewis, who says the next iteration is likely to be able to scan your food and then make recipe suggestions from what needs eating up. Marsh says customers are increasingly asking for “smarthome” gadgets, such as Nest, a souped-up thermostat that uses basic AI to “learn” your habits so that it can automatically turn down the heating when you leave the house and – more cleverly – turn it on an hour before you come back from work. A Nest thermostat, which uses AI A Nest thermostat, which uses AI Credit: Clara Molden for the Telegraph But is the risk that the machines take over? Marsh says: “This is not about taking over your life, it reacts to your behaviour and routines. But in a time-poor culture, the way the technology is evolving should free you up to spend higher quality time with your friends and family. ” Or, possibly, with Amy. 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Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Improve your customer service experience with AI In association with Brother logo founder Mark Zuckerberg have proclaimed chatbots to be the future of computing Credit: AP/Eric Risberg 30 November 2016 • 5:00pm SMEs cannot afford to ignore larger companies' use of artificial intelligence to solve customer needs, but nor should they rush to invest in imperfect computing. The best customer service agent is knowledgeable, always available and knows precisely what your customer wants, but increasingly, they’re not human. Chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools could help your SME offer a more comprehensive, personalised customer service without hiring new staff. But, alongside the benefits of computerising customer service, there are risks, particularly as it’s such early days for the technology involved. How does it work? Chatbots let customers type queries – through messaging mediums such as Facebook or WhatsApp – and get an automated response without a human paid employee needing to intervene. Customers can also take actions, such as booking a restaurant table, ordering a pizza, or choosing specifications for a new bicycle in natural language, as though they’re typing to a person rather than a machine. "It’s still in the realm of specialists and can be expensive, which can be especially limiting to smaller brands"Jo Allison, Canvas8 The benefits for business are clear; you can always offer scalable customer service at little cost, along with personalised marketing. “A chatbot that can ‘converse’ with consumers using AI, and carry out a plethora of simple tasks, is an exciting prospect for many small businesses without the people power of larger organisations,” says Jo Allison, behavioural analyst at Canvas8. For customers, it’s easier for them to get retail chores and other tasks done via a platform they like to use, at a time that’s convenient for them. “People are starting to almost prefer self-service channels as the effectiveness of them increases,” explains Daryn Mason, senior sales consultant at Oracle Cloud. “Customer experience is all about low effort. Waiting in a call centre queue is a painful exercise for most people. Having technology where customers can get fast answers in a natural language without waiting for somebody to be free on the telephone is going to boost the customer experience. ” How are big-tech bosses reacting? No wonder, then, that so many tech luminaries, from Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are proclaiming chatbots as the future of computing. Facebook is a good place for an SME to start getting to grips with chatbots, as the social network offers a free platform using its Messenger chat application that’s easy to use. It allows a business to build a basic bot to answer simple queries, such as what your opening hours are during the holidays. You can also develop more advanced systems using e-commerce platform, Shopify, that allow customers to place orders directly via the Messenger chat app, and offer digital sales support for shoppers with questions, helping to bridge the gap between personal customer service in-store and online shopping. Another advanced offering is IP Soft’s Amelia, one of the most sophisticated service agents to provide a wide range of natural language interaction. While you can have an initial play with the technology on your own, you may need to turn to your in-house IT team, or external developers, to initially set up such tools. “Developing a bot isn’t so easy that anyone can do it,” says Ms Allison. “It’s still in the realm of specialists and can be expensive, which can be especially limiting to smaller brands. ” What can go wrong? There are risks in using these technologies, particularly because disappointment because it comes back with a wrong response. They find the holes in it quite quickly,” says Mr Mason. “It’s always going to be a little bit short of customer expectations. ” "It’s almost going to be essential for small business to embrace this technology"Daryn Mason, Oracle Cloud However, he adds, people are becoming accustomed to talking to machines thanks to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, and learning their limitations. And, adds Dylan Stuart, partner at creative consultancy Lippincott, “people can make mistakes too”. Instead of seeing bots as a source of danger, Mr Stuart says companies should see them as an opportunity: “a new way to interact with customers and build emotional connections”. They can be a positive force that reinforces brand – assuming you get the tone right. “Asking what voice should your chatbot have is similar to asking what voice should your brand has overall,” Mr Stuart says. “Ultimately, to truly create an emotional bond with your customers, that tone should reflect what your customers want to feel rather than the specific things you want to say. ” Aside from keeping customers happy, there’s another reason to consider chatbots for your SME – your rivals are likely to be doing the same. “In terms of competitiveness and survival in a digital world, it’s almost going to be essential for small business to embrace this technology, because if they don’t their competitors are going to benefit from the scalability, whether it is virtual assistants or AI,” Mr Mason adds. “You can’t scale an operation with people anymore. If your competitors are using that technology to take all of the routine stuff away from expensive human operators, those organisations will get a really big competitive advantage. ” How can you get prepared for bots? One place to start with bots is knowledge management, gathering up relevant data and tracking customer queries so that, when you do shift to bots, you’ll have a centralised set of information which they can access and learn. “It’s almost a back office function, but you have to have really strong knowledge management within in an organisation to exploit these technologies, otherwise they have nothing to draw on when responding to customers and their needs. ” When you do get started, Mr Mason advises using a cloud-based system, so it’s scalable and doesn’t require heavy investment to support the backend of a chatbot. “Everything we’re doing is cloud based. In-house isn’t an option for SMEs,” he says. None of this means that SMEs need to rush to launch customer-service bots in time for the holiday season. Instead, simply start paying attention to the technology, and try it out now and then. “Small businesses need to be tracking this really closely and even experimenting, such as with Facebook, so they’re ready to go and are not starting from scratch,” he says. Email anna. isaac@telegraph. co. uk or leave a comment below If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy NEW STORIES FROM SMALL BUSINESS CONNECT 02 Jan 2018, 11:40am Digby co-founder: ‘Britain can produce a premier sparkling wine’ 22 Dec 2017, 11:00am Four ideas for SMEs that want to hit the ground running in 2018 20 Dec 2017, 4:30pm What opportunities will IoT offer SMEs in 2018? 20 Dec 2017, 10:00am How SMEs can prepare for GDPR 18 Dec 2017, 11:00am This new year, resolve to help your employees become their best 11 Dec 2017, 2:30pm it' 11 Dec 2017, 11:20am Female entrepreneurs share their best business advice 11 Dec 2017, 10:50am Why you should never stop thanking your key employees 08 Dec 2017, 12:30pm How to exhibit at a trade show 05 Dec 2017, 12:40pm How to start and grow a hairdressing business Follow Telegraph Small Business Connect More from Small Business Connect 02 Jan 2018, 11:40am Digby co-founder: ‘Britain can produce a premier sparkling wine’ 22 Dec 2017, 11:00am Four ideas for SMEs that want to hit the ground running in 2018 20 Dec 2017, 4:30pm What opportunities will IoT offer SMEs in 2018? 20 Dec 2017, 10:00am How SMEs can prepare for GDPR 18 Dec 2017, 11:00am This new year, resolve to help your employees become their best 11 Dec 2017, 2:30pm it' 11 Dec 2017, 11:20am Female entrepreneurs share their best business advice 11 Dec 2017, 10:50am Why you should never stop thanking your key employees 08 Dec 2017, 12:30pm How to exhibit at a trade show 05 Dec 2017, 12:40pm How to start and grow a hairdressing business TouchNote 05 Dec 2017, 11:30am For cheap and effective product research, try a coffee shop 05 Dec 2017, 10:30am Want to become a better manager? Learn through experience, not television 04 Dec 2017, 1:30pm Meet the entrepreneurs trying to crack Australia 01 Dec 2017, 4:00pm Small Business Saturday: how to encourage locals to shop with you 30 Nov 2017, 10:30am Four cheap and easy tech hacks for small businesses 30 Nov 2017, 10:00am How did small businesses respond to the Budget on social media? 27 Nov 2017, 5:00pm Three ways to boost sales in the lead up to Christmas 27 Nov 2017, 11:50am How to successfully migrate to a new digital system 24 Nov 2017, 3:50pm A small business guide to the Indian market 23 Nov 2017, 1:30pm Black Friday tips to help small businesses all year round Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Marketing faces death by algorithm unless it finds a new code speaker Amazon Echo, will play a role in how brands market to consumers in the future Credit: BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP/LUKE MACGREGOR 10 November 2016 • 5:00pm As artificial intelligence becomes more widespread, marketing strategies must be both human-focused and optimised for machine algorithms. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most-hyped topics in advertising right now. Brands are increasingly finding that they need to market to intelligent machines in order to reach humans, and this is set to transform the marketing function. A growing amount of content consumption today is shaped by machine intelligence – social networks and other digital properties recommending content based on various personalisation algorithms. In the world of digital marketing, this means AI is becoming the gateway to consumers. It’s set to become more prevalent as objects, such as smart fridges, gradually become connected to the internet and purchasing decisions are increasingly driven by digital discovery. Brands are shifting from the mindset that marketing to consumers is done through a one-way channel. For campaigns to drive the most value, they must be both human-focused and optimised for machine algorithms. Cracking the code In a survey of UK senior marketers by Callcredit, 82pc of respondents predicted digital intelligence will be the new battlefield for marketers, and 72pc said they felt more anxious in their role because of it. But brands have been trying to market to machines for years. Investments in search engine optimisation, after all, are examples of companies attempting to predict how Google’s algorithms prioritise web pages for users. “There’s a beautiful circularity to it,” says Brian Cooper, chief creative officer at marketing agency Oliver Group. “It’s like life imitating art. Algorithms try to mimic real life and then real life mimics the algorithms. Marketing will only survive if it continues to adapt and evolve. ” Brands have also been creating content for Facebook’s news feed algorithm (EdgeRank) since its inception in 2001. In May 2014, the algorithm was updated to favour natively uploaded videos – and brands now invest vast sums in trying to reach as many people’s newsfeeds as possible. Spotting how AI algorithms are influencing marketing strategies, Ogilvy Facebook page, to uploading native videos directly to its Facebook page. Video views jumped from the low hundreds to the tens of thousands, even before Pizza Hut had applied any paid media. AI is shifting from brands serving ads to the right person at the right time to serving them to the right device at the right time. This doesn’t only mean understanding smartphones, but also new AI-powered devices that suggest products or services based on a user’s history, such as voice-controlled smart speaker Amazon Echo. “If brands are not part of that suggestion, they’re dead to that user,” says Ru Barksfield, CEO and co-founder at adtech firm, Fat Unicorn. “The necessity to market to machines is already a reality, and AI is definitely going to dictate how and which brands are directed to an end user. ” Human touch With more brands engaging with AI, marketing must become more sophisticated. The best digital content must be recognised by machines while remaining human-focused and meeting the needs of potential buyers. But while AI can build a creative idea, it’s not creative “in the true sense of the word”, according to Mr Cooper. Machine learning – the driving technology behind how AI can learn – still requires human intelligence to work out how the machine would get there. “It can’t put two seemingly random thoughts together and recognise something new,” Mr Cooper says. Andy Edmonds, head of engagement at digital marketing agency iProspect, adds: “If we lose sight of the people that are the end users, we will also potentially lose sight of our brand. ” Alessandra Di Lorenzo, chief commercial officer for advertising and partnerships at online travel giant lastminute. com, admits machines have a big role to play in effective marketing today. But maintains that the message itself should always be crafted by, and created for, humans. It also depends on the type of campaign. Where the content and channel is in a feed-based ad, and where the message is purely transactional, for example, it can be managed in an automated way. For creative and emotive campaigns, Ms Di Lorenzo believes the human touch is essential. Lastminute. com uses programmatic technologies to combine first-party insights into the travel and lifestyle habits of its website users with other audience trends. The technology shows the company’s marketing team how browsing and booking behaviour is impacted by factors such as the clocks changing or the weather, helping them target consumers accordingly. “While the serving of these ads is automated, the content itself will always be a human creation, made with people, rather than robots, in mind,” says Ms Di Lorenzo. “The beauty of human nature is that it is ultimately unpredictable. ” A new era According to William Lidstone, chief marketing officer at marketing agency Razorfish, which recently created an AI app for financial services firm UBS, technology will change the role of humans in creating adverts. "Theoretically, AI could already write every advert, film, book, formula and song that could ever be written,” he says. “That’s really just a question of processing power and storage. ” As the internet of things continues to take shape, AI will increasingly influence buying habits. While there are more people today who allow AI algorithms to determine the content they consume than the products they buy, the latter will catch up when consumers start automating buying decisions. One area in which this is set to happen is the connected home. A smart fridge, for example, will automatically purchase new items when they’re running low. This trend, ultimately, could force brands to overhaul their marketing strategies. 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We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Seymour Papert, artificial intelligence guru – obituary [105465446_MIT_mathematician_Seymour_Papert_who_w_his_MIT_colleagues_de Pierce/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty 11 August 2016 • 4:29pm Seymour Papert, who has died aged 88, held the title Lego Professor for Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was a world expert on IT and learning – and artificial intelligence. Once described as a “cross between Robin Williams in the movie Toys and Albert Einstein”, Papert argued that children, in all societies, can master computing, not just their simple operation but the writing of computer code (programming) as well. That learning process, he believed, could transform how individuals learn throughout their lives and, therefore, effect social change. He was an enemy of what he saw as the tyranny of formal education systems which he believed equip children only to master set syllabuses. Computers, he believed, could teach children how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving, leading to their development as more rounded human beings. “I think the school is an extremely harmful institution,” he said. “I think the schools do more harm than Nintendo. ” In 1967 Papert created a programming language called Logo that could be used to control a clear plastic turtle-shaped robot. The “turtle”, which children could command to draw patterns – on paper at first and later on a video screen – was the first of several so-called children’s machines which he devised, which would eventually morph into the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO, an inexpensive computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world. Nicholas Negroponte – brother of John, George Bush’s controversial director of national intelligence – a student and later colleague of Papert at MIT – would become the founder and driving force behind OLPC. “The child programs the computer,” Papert explained. “And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they think. The experience can be heady: thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist. ” Logo prospered for a while, but at the time Papert created it computers were still large and expensive machines with which most adults, let alone children, did not interact in daily life. Logo, therefore, soon faded from view. However, Papert’s invention caught the eye of the Danish toy maker, Lego, and in 1984 Papert began a collaboration with the company which, after many years of research, led to the “intelligent brick”. Unveiled in 1998, the “brick”, the size of a pack of cards and code-named RCX, was capable of being programmed and contained an integral microchip and sensor so that anything a child built from the brick would not just remain inert – it could turn round and play with its creator. As part of his research, Papert recalled, one boy from an elementary school in Boston had created an alarm clock that recognised the sun’s rays, and set a chain of events into action which ended with the sleeper – a Lego man – being turfed out of his bed on to a conveyor belt. Another class of 11-year-olds created Lego dinosaurs that could follow a light source, while a 10-year-old girl used the programmable bricks to build an automated bird feeder. Whenever a bird landed, it would trigger a sensor, activating a Lego mechanism attached to a camera that took a picture of the bird. Seymour Papert with one of his computer games at the MIT Media Lab Seymour Papert with one of his computer games at the MIT Media Lab Credit: Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images The brick gave rise to the Lego Mindstorms range of robotic toys, named after Papert’s most influential book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980). “When you give children this kind of material, very often they perform at an intellectual level that astonishes their teachers and themselves,” he said. “We have seen many kids reconverted to the joy of learning. If you provide children with the right tools and materials to play with they can learn ideas that were reserved for the university classroom in the paper-and-pencil era. ” Seymour Aubrey Papert was born on February 29 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, where his father was an entomologist. He took a degree in Philosophy followed by a PhD in Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was active in the anti-apartheid movement, followed by another PhD at Cambridge University in 1959. He went on to do post-doctoral research on mathematics and children’s education at the University of Geneva, under the psychologist Jean Piaget, who taught that play was a vital part of a child’s cognitive development. In 1960, Papert attended a cybernetics conference in London where he met Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of the artificial intelligence group at MIT. Papert moved to MIT in 1963 at a time when there was a schism in the American computer science community between those who sought to develop intelligent software by whatever practical means, and those who based their work on the similation of the cognitive processes that go on in the human brain. The latter group were in the ascendancy, attracting the lion’s share of funding, until 1969 when Papert and Minsky published Perceptrons (1969), in which they demonstrated that the neuron structures used by researchers were severely limited in their capability. In 1985, when Nicholas Negroponte founded MIT’s Media Lab, Papert and Minsky were two of the three original faculty members. Papert worked on numerous Media Lab projects and was Lego Professor for Learning Research from 1989 until 1996. In later life Papert moved to Maine, where he set up a Learning Barn and a Learning Lab for troubled teenagers. He is survived by his fourth wife Suzanne, whom he married in 1992; by a daughter from his second marriage, and by three stepchildren. Seymour Papert, born February 29 1928, died July 31 2016 Follow the Telegraph Obituaries news READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow the Telegraph Obituaries news Obituaries latest 05 Jan 2018, 8:27pm Tony Calder, music promoter – obituary Premium 05 Jan 2018, 6:20pm Ulrich Wegener, counter-terrorism operative – obituary Premium 05 Jan 2018, 6:15am Sir Hereward Wake, Bt, soldier and landowner – obituary Premium Riley 04 Jan 2018, 9:52pm Doreen Keogh, Irish actress and original Coronation Street barmaid – obituary Premium 6:10pm Rick Hall, Muscle Shoals soul music pioneer – obituary Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:24am Alfie Martin, airman who escaped down Comet Line – obituary Premium 03 Jan 2018, 6:31pm Peggy Cummins, actress – obituary Premium 03 Jan 2018, 6:31pm Carmen Franco, dictator's daughter – obituary Premium 03 Jan 2018, 6:36am John Critchinson, brilliant jazz pianist – obituary Premium 02 Jan 2018, 9:58pm Sir Martin Nourse, Lord Justice of Appeal – obituary Premium 02 Jan 2018, 6:02pm Rose Marie, actress – obituary Premium 02 Jan 2018, 7:00am Heather North, voice of Daphne in 'Scooby-Doo' – obituary Premium 01 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Francis Wyndham, literary journalist – obituary Premium 01 Jan 2018, 2:21pm Richard Cousins, Compass chief executive – obituary Premium 31 Dec 2017, 10:01pm Bronwen, Lady Astor, chatelaine of Cliveden – obituary Premium 31 Dec 2017, 3:58pm Gavin Stamp, architectural historian – obituary Premium 30 Dec 2017, 12:00pm Frank Doran, Labour MP – obituary Premium Wood and Darth Vader 30 Dec 2017, 8:31am John Mollo, costume designer – obituary Premium 30 Dec 2017, 8:12am Michael Hirst, art historian – obituary Premium 29 Dec 2017, 7:02am Marilyn Tyler, opera singer – obituary Premium 28 Dec 2017, 10:03pm Chris Hesketh, rugby player – obituary Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Google cut its electricity bill by 40pc using artificial intelligence put to work at its immense data centres Credit: Google 20 July 2016 • 3:59pm Google is using artificial intelligence to reduce the amount of energy it uses to cool its immense data centres. The energy consumed at the centres, a maze of cables, pipes and servers where Google processes all of the information consumed by its users, could account for as much as 2 per cent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. Using machine learning, the search giant said it has managed to reduce the energy used to cool them by as much as 40 per cent. Google data centre emitting steam Water vapour streams from cooling towers at a Google data centre called The Dalles in Orgeon Credit: Google The technology created at DeepMind, the Cambridge-based artificial intelligence company acquired by Google in 2014, uses machine learning to understand the environment at the centres and make them more efficient. For two years an AI has been analysing a wealth of data from thousands of sensors at the centres, including temperature, weather, power, and pump speeds. It has also looked at how the centres run and how the equipment powering them interacts with the environment. Google said DeepMind's software reduced total energy use at the centres, of which Google has 12 across the Americas, Europe and Asia, by 15 per cent. The company claims responsibility for 0. 01 per cent of global electricity use. The following graph is from a "typical" test day, according to Google. The drop on the graph reflects the time when Google switched the machine learning control on: Graph showing energy usage at the data centres when the machine learning is switched on and off PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness, and is the ratio of total building energy usage to IT energy usage Credit: Google Google said it now gets 3. 5 times as much computing power out of the same amount of energy as it did five years ago thanks to custom-built servers, more efficient cooling systems that use outside air, and investment in green energy. The company wants to cap its increase in energy use at four per cent a year between 2014 and 2020 even as data use grows at a faster rate. It also plans to be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy. But it hasn't said when it will reach that goal, or how much of its power currently comes from renewable sources. The data centre algorithm can eventually be used to improve efficiency in other areas, according to Google, including getting more energy from the same amount of input at power plants, and reducing energy and water usage in semiconductor manufacturing. Separate companies that run on Google's cloud will also benefit from improved efficiency at the centres, the search giant said. READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Asos experiments with artifical intelligence as sales climb artificial intelligence after sales increased 30pc to £500m in the last four months 12 July 2016 • 4:04pm The boss of Asos has revealed that the company is working on artificial intelligence and voice-recognition technology to ensure the online fashion retailer is at the forefront of changing shopping behaviours. Nick Beighton, chief executive, revealed to The Telegraph that the company was already developing the technology as Asos beat City expectations with a 30pc rise in group revenues to £514. 6m for the last four months. The fashion retailer defied the wider retail slowdown by posting a 28pc increase in UK retail sales to £203. 1m. International retail sales also lifted by 25pc to £297. 4m. Asos Asos expects 90pc of sales to come from mobile as it focuses on millennial shoppers With Asos’ overseas business accounting for just under 60pc of revenues the company will be one of the rare retail Brexit winners as the slump in the pound will boost its export business and lower the costs. Mr Beighton, who took the reins of the company from founder Nick Robertson last September, said that the majority of ordered goods were paid for in sterling and the company would be a “beneficiary in the medium term” from the weakening pound. Andrew Wade, an analyst at Numis, said the weak pound has given Asos “additional firepower” to cut prices across its range of shoes, clothes and accessories for its overseas customers. Asos Asos will be a winner from Brexit and the pound's slump as just under 60pc of its sales are overseas The Asos boss said that he expected mobile sales to account for 90pc of revenues by 2020 after the rapid growth meant that already 66pc of sales come from mobile devices as the company targeted its millennial shopper base with social media campaigns on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. "“We want a Siri on steroids""Nick Beighton, Asos boss “Asos didn’t invent social media but we have adopted it and are now on every social media channel. . we are now working on various investments such as developing our own artificial intelligence and voice recognition…we have to nimble and vigilant to change,”said Mr Beighton. AI timeline “We want a Siri on steroids to inform customers when a dress is back in stock”, he said. Mr Beighton downplayed the threat of Amazon’s recent foray into fashion and said while he would “never be complacent about Amazon, they are a very different beast”. The Asos chief executive also said it was unlikely the online retailer would be able to do same-day deliveries, like Amazon offers with its Prime service or upmarket rival Net-a-Porter does, without significantly raising cost. “Our average basket size is £56 so I don’t think that we could make it work as our twenty-plus customer is probably not going to want to pay the extra cost. If you are spending £1,000 on a dress at Net-a-Porter to wear that evening that extra delivery charge might not make the difference. ” “I think that we have a desirable, differentiated and defensible offer”, Mr Beighton said. The company said it expects full-year sales growth to come in at the upper end of the 20pc to 25pc forecast range and full-year profits were "on track" to meet expectations, with analysts forecasting a 28pc lift in pre-tax profits to £61m. The buoyant trading follows the closure of Asos' loss-making China business in May following its struggles to make a dent against Alibaba. ASC The stock has risen from £38. 42 on June 23 to today's price of £42. 85. Follow Telegraph Business READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph Business Galleries Gallery 21 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Gallery: Revealed: The 10 highest-paying jobs of 2017 Gallery 19 Dec 2017, 11:17am Gallery: Hamleys unveils its top 10 toys for Christmas 2017 candidates now? Gallery 17 Dec 2017, 10:53am Gallery: From Lee McQueen to Alana Spencer: where are the Apprentice candidates now? 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Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Google boss on life beyond the smartphone and how the company will pay more tax in the UK 2015 Credit: Jay Watson 1 July 2016 • 10:00pm It didn't take long for me to realise that I had reached Google land. Exactly two minutes after arriving in Mountain View, Northern California, one of the many boom towns that make up Silicon Valley, I spotted my first driverless car. It was a little white pod with dashes of bright colour painted on its side, making its way along the highway in the evening rush hour, ignored by blasé commuters. I would see many more on my three-day trip, one of the more visible signs of the next stage of the great tech revolution being masterminded from California. The roads in the Valley may be wide, but they are chock a block with (usually Japanese) cars, company buses and bikes: the economy is booming, driven by the remarkable success of America’s high-tech giants. My Uber driver, a trainee chef, tells me that his one bedroom flat costs him $2,000 (£1,500) in rent a month, and house prices are hopelessly out of control. Everything at Google HQ, home of the search engine, YouTube, Android and much else besides, is exactly the way you would expect it to be. A sprawling network of leafy low rise offices on the edge of the California wilderness, it looks and feels more like a university campus than the offices of one of the world’s most powerful corporations. The complex is so large that one needs a map to find one’s way around; the ultra-casually dressed, hyper-educated young staff hail from all over the world. Google's campus in Mountain View Google's campus in Mountain View Credit: Alamy Cash-rich tech firms engaged in a global war for talent treat their employees better than well. There are swimming pools with wave machines, ping pong tables and climbing walls; places for staff to play video games or take a quick nap, and even a “garage” where employees are encouraged to build physical objects, engage in woodwork or even sow as a way of cultivating their creativity. Playing with 3D printers - devices that “print” three dimensional plastic objects of any shape or size from a digital file - is one common pursuit; one engineer devotes his free time to creating ultra-low cost prosthetic devices that he ships to his native Vietnam. Trying to replicate such trusting working conditions at a widget sales office in Slough would end in anarchy; and I doubt that the computer desk attached to a treadmill that I spotted in one corner would have many takers in most UK offices. But at Google, which employs thousands of brilliant, self-motivated PhD mathematicians and developers, it works, helping to forge a culture of innovation and responsibility and an unusual esprit de corps. Perhaps the greatest perk of all - apart from, for sun-starved Britons, the array of sun-loungers dotted around the campus - is the endless supply of free food and non-alcoholic drinks, served in myriad, varied restaurants. The problem with success of this kind is that it could breed complacency and decadence: when you are living this well, generating $20. 2bn in revenues and $5. 1bn in pre-tax profits, as Google did in the first quarter alone, largely thanks to an ever-growing share of global advertising, it is easy to rest on one’s laurels, to fritter cash on irrelevant projects, to lose focus. Sundar Pichai is charged with keeping Google running Sundar Pichai is charged with keeping Google running Credit: Jay Watson Hubris could also set in: there have already been many damaging clashes with politicians and regulators; the company now has seven products that are used by more than 1 billion people at least once a month, generating all sorts of concerns over privacy, tax and competition. The man charged with ensuring that the firm stays on track is Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. A sprightly, slightly unassuming 43-year old from Southern India, he is one of the Valley’s hottest stars; he has been in the role for almost a year. He reports to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders who now run Alphabet, the overall holding company that also invests in ventures such as glucose-sensing contact lenses, longevity research and automated vehicles. Pichai is living the American Dream: when in the 1990s he won a scholarship to Stanford, the world’s top tech university in California, his one-way ticket from India cost more than his father’s annual salary. Dressed in a black shirt and jeans, his accent part-Indian and part-American, his mission is clear: he wants people to stop thinking about Google primarily as a means of searching for publicly available information but as a full-on “assistant”, helping people to live their lives in all sorts of ways. In addition to further refining and advancing his core products, he is targeting the home and the car as Google’s next frontiers. Crucially, he wants to liberate us from having to rely on computers and phones when interacting with his company. He would like us to be able to talk to our house or car, instructing Google to order some takeaway, asking it what the temperature will be in Ibiza next week, requesting an item be added to the family diary or shopping list and then be reminded that it's time for that medical appointment. Sundar Pichai profile The world is only just getting used to the smartphone revolution, but the bespectacled Pichai is already thinking “post-mobile”. “Today, we pull out a black rectangular piece of something. It's much better than what’s been before, but it's still a physical device with which we interact,” he says. But as we move away from this, “over time the experience will become much more intuitive, much more natural. ” Teaching computers to understand casual, contextual conversation in every language and accent is key to this quest to normalise our interactions with computers and to place Google even more squarely at the centre of our lives. Achieving this would require solving complex computational problems, and Google is investing vast amounts in machine learning - a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This is central to the company’s long term future; it permeates everything it now does. It’s no longer enough to program machines with all the answers or to rely on traditional statistical analysis to allow them to work out what’s what - instead, the firm now relies on techniques such as neural networks that allow computers to teach themselves by sifting through massive amounts of data, learning from patterns, regularities and interconnections. The potential is massive, Pichai believes. “We’ve been making very meaningful progress in machine learning and AI. The rate has reached an inflection point. ” To some, Google’s strategy will seem terrifying: won't artificial intelligence end up automating all jobs, and, in extremis, lead to a Terminator-style dystopia where machines take control? Google is hoping to pioneer post-mobile computing with products such as the speaker-based Google Home Google is hoping to pioneer post-mobile computing with products such as the speaker-based Google Home Credit: Getty Images The Google boss believes that the benefits of harnessing AI will be much greater than the costs and that the changes will take decades, allowing societies to adapt. New professions will continue to be created, replacing jobs that are automated. He does think, however, that over time society will come up with a new social contract to deal with the changes. “Technology is always disruptive. But it’s a force for making people’s lives better. It's also an incredibly democratising force over time. ” AI will be transformative he believes, and not just in his company’s own area. Take medicine. He recounts that “just in the last months, we've seen some young people in Google diagnosed with cancer. It's shocking to see. I look at that and I think: can machine learning and artificial intelligence make progress on these things? In my mind, the answer is yes. We are in such early stages. It's imperative that we bring this to the world. ” "Technology is always disruptive. But it’s a force for making people’s lives better. It's also an incredibly democratising force over time" He also believes that his “assistant” project, and the progress of artificial intelligence, will make it easier to protect privacy, another controversial area for the tech industry. “Today's software is difficult. You want to give users lots of privacy controls but then it becomes clunky and unstable. You still need to go to a settings page. It needs to be much more intuitive. ” He foresees a day when users will simply speak to a device to change their privacy settings, and his digital assistant will behave more and more like human beings, modifying how much personal information is divulged depending on context, on whether one is at work or at home, alone or in company. But while the future seen from Mountain View is extraordinarily exciting, plenty of entrepreneurs from around the world would love to make it their own. How much does he worry about the competition and the possibility that upstart firms could eventually displace Google? “A lot. It never feels for a moment that we are a large successful company. That’s not what it feels like. I feel that every year you need to earn your next year’s success. ” Driverless cars are a big area of focus for Google's AI efforts Driverless cars are a big area of focus for Google's AI efforts Credit: AFP The most obvious way to achieve this is to try and keep true to its people feel that they are a small company, scrappy, frugal, disciplined? In technology, you often solve problems because you have constraints, because you don't have money. So you think of a different way. Technology has always been reshaped by small companies with an ability to move fast and do things differently. ” The key is to nurture bottom-up initiatives. Google allows its staff to dedicate 20 per cent of their time to interesting projects: that’s how it invented Cardboard, a cheap way of enjoying virtual reality. One of its core products, the Android operating system that now powers so many devices, is open source. Unlike Apple’s rival system, anybody can use it. This has helped make it hugely successful but is also reducing the barriers to entry for competitors. “All the work we have done on Android makes it even easier new phones, built on Android”. "Google allows its staff to dedicate 20 per cent of their time to interesting projects: that’s how it invented Cardboard, a cheap way of enjoying virtual reality" It is not surprising, therefore, that Pichai disagrees with Brussels’ competition commissioners, who worry his firm has too much market power. One of their arguments is that Google pre-installs too many apps on its devices and that this makes it hard for competing app makers to break in. The Google boss argues that he is simply ensuring that devices are ready to use and come fully loaded with essential tools, such as maps: “We think about what the services are that are used by a lot of people, and we put them in. We then give users the choice to do whatever else they want. When you press factory reset on that phone, it needs to work. ” Google’s vast size has downsides - both cultural and political - but it also allows it to spend billions on projects that have a very long-term and uncertain payoff. “Because we are a large company, we can think for the very long-term. We take on projects without knowing the business model”, Pichai explains. Many of the company’s most exciting projects fall into this category. Its new photos app is able to recognise pictures: one can search for beaches, for example, and all the relevant holiday snaps pop up. It is also possible to search for weddings or birthdays, and the app can easily be trained to recognise people, allowing parents to instantly find all their pictures of their children. Sundar Pichai Pichai says Google will pay more tax in the UK through hiring more engineers The implications are revolutionary, and will one day extend to video and films. Search is no longer bound to text. Or take Google Translate: the app, using a phone’s camera, now “reads” Russian or Mandarin and instantly translates the characters into English. There is no immediate monetisation mechanism for any of these projects, but they all form part of the company’s mission to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to as many problems as possible. Refreshingly, the Google chief is careful not to express a view on Brexit. “We are very committed to both the UK and the EU. We respect the outcome of the democratic process”, he insists. But he remains attached to the idea of a single digital market, which doesn't currently exist in any meaningful way but which has been criticised in Britain as a threat to our creative industries. “We always find it hard to deal with country by country laws and regulations. That complexity hurts our ability to engage in a deeper way, to invest more in the EU. A more unified set of rules helps economically. ” Yet what he describes as fragmentation - others would see it more positively as democracy or institutional competition - is surmountable for big firms like his, he says: “We can hire more people to deal with more complex governance structures. It's harder for smaller companies trying to innovate. ” "The way we all get to a better outcome is through an evolution of the global tax structures"Sundar Pichai As to the clashes his company keeps having with exchequers across Europe, Pichai sees them as “an international tax allocation issue. We pay consistently with the OECD tax rate globally. ” The problem is that current tax laws mean that companies tend to pay most of their taxes in the countries in which they are headquartered, which creates tensions. “The way we all get to a better outcome is through an evolution of the global tax structures” by governments working together to modify the rules, he argues. But in the meantime, he points to the fact that he is hiring many more engineers in Britain. “That is a long term way for us Pichai is most cautious when it comes to US politics, and refuses to be drawn into criticising Donald Trump. “We take very, very strong positions on values. We strive to be a very inclusive company. On issues such as inclusion, immigration reform and equal rights for the LGBT community, we take strong positions. But we take positions on issues, not candidates. ” The company is also very green: the air conditioning is kept deliberately mild and the quid pro quo to all the free food is that staff are asked to recycle everything ferociously. There are Tesla electric saloons in prominent display in all the car parks, as well as lots of Google-coloured bikes, complete with an idiosyncratic braking system which requires back-pedalling to avoid crashing into passing pedestrians. In addition to his attempt at turning Google into an assistant service, creating a personalised service for every human being, the company is continuing to take on TV companies. Its YouTube unit is now colonising the living room, grabbing ever more market share and delivering a remarkably engaged audience for advertisers. The firm has started to commission its first original content from its home-grown YouTube superstars, some of whom are better known to youngsters than Hollywood names, and has launched a subscription service. Its live broadcasts are taking off. Not everything Google does pays off: it's Glass product - a transparent, wearable screen that looked like a digital mask - bombed. The competition is intensifying on all fronts, including from digital "walled gardens" such as Facebook, an increasingly powerful player. But only a fool would bet against Sundar Pichai, his team of super-bright lieutenants and their armies of maths geniuses. The revolution is on track, it will keep changing the way we live, and it will be orchestrated, at least in part, from a giant suburban business park in Silicon Valley. READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Twitter pays $150m for London AI startup Magic Pony Magic Pony has been acquired by Twitter Credit: Peter Matthews, Balderton Capital 20 June 2016 • 3:03pm Twitter has acquired London artificial intelligence startup Magic Pony for around $150m (£102m), according to sources close to the company. The startup, founded by graduates of Imperial College London uses machine learning to create high-quality videos from grainy footage, and will likely be integrated into Twitter's live and video services such as Periscope and Vine. Accounts from Companies House suggest the two co-founders Rob Bishop and Zehan Wang owned just over half of the company shares, which would stand to make them close to $75m. The acquisition builds on previous investments made by Twitter in machine learning, and is the third British startup to be bought by the microblogging service. "Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter," said chief executive Jack Dorsey. "Magic Pony’s technology – based on algorithms that can understand the features of imagery – will be used to enhance our strength in live and video. " We’ve acquired Magic Pony Technology to enhance our machine learning — Twitter (@twitter) 20 June 2016 The startup's team of 14 includes 11 PhDs and has received an undisclosed sum of investment from Entrepreneur First, Octopus Ventures and Balderton Capital, whose basement the company launched from. The Magic Pony team will remain in the UK, where it will form the basis of Twitter’s AI research team in Europe, according to chief executive Jack Dorsey. CEO Rob Bishop will move to California. "Some worry that we are suffering from a brain drain, with our universities producing world-class researchers who end up at West Coast powerhouses. I happen to think this view is phenomenally short sighted," said Suranga Chandratillake, partner of Balderton Capital who invested in Magic Pony Technology in 2015. "It is, instead, a huge opportunity for Europe to be at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution and do it off the back of US investment. " What Magic Pony does According to a previous interview by Rob Bishop, the startup's CEO, the patented technology can enhance image quality, particularly video captured on mobile phones in poor lighting conditions. It could also make pixelated images sharper, for instance in a live video or a game. Video quality is increasingly important for the major social media apps such as Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, who have to compress videos heavily in order to stream them quickly and on different devices. For instance, Google's machine learning team in Zurich is also working on using machine learning to improve videos. According to Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research Europe, Google scientists are developing tools to look at visual and soundtrack information and not just text descriptions of YouTube videos, in order to categorise and recommend them better. Machine learning is already used to enhance YouTube videos by improving auto-stabilisation and pixel quality. Silicon Valley's got its eye on British AI Magic Pony is the latest in a string of AI and machine learning startups in Britain that have taken the fancy of large Silicon Valley companies. In 2012, Amazon acquired Evi Technologies, a Cambridge-based startup whose platform can understand and communicate in natural language, making it a super-intelligent search tool. Meanwhile, Apple made an extremely similar Cambridge-based acquisition – it bought VocalIQ, a software system that teaches computers to speak more like humans. More recently, Microsoft acquired smart keyboard startup Swiftkey for $250m and Google paid £400m for DeepMind, which recently achieved a world-first by designing a computer algorithm that beat a human champion at the Chinese board game Go. AI timeline READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Will Apple have to sacrifice your privacy to keep its edge? 16 June 2016 • 7:21pm while taking steps in AI this week Credit: AFP The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence. It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone’s autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the last year alone have been exceptional. DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely-tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc. AI is graduating from theory and academic papers to everyday life. If the last 10 years has been defined by the plummeting costs of microprocessors and sensors that have made smartphones a commodity product, the future is about building intelligent systems that can make them more powerful. Ergo, the companies that will profit might not be the ones with expertise in hardware design, but those who can build software that talks back. Google, always a company defined by the effectiveness of its algorithms over others, has gone 'all in’ on deep learning, and has incorporated it into thousands of software projects. Mark Zuckerberg, determined not to miss out on any trend after Facebook’s early failures in mobile, has poached some of the world’s leading AI gurus from universities. Amazon has emerged as a sleeping giant in the field. And Microsoft is ploughing resources into artificial intelligence, albeit with mixed success (a conversational Twitter bot it unveiled earlier this year was swiftly shut down after “learning” to spew vile insults at those who engaged with it). Google's driverless cars Google's driverless cars - one advance in AI Credit: AFP The missing name here is Apple. The undisputed victor of the smartphone-building wars, in profit and influence if not quite in market share, Apple’s expertise when it comes to AI is less clear. This is partly because it has had less incentive – Apple is not in the business of mining data to target adverts, at least not as deeply as Google and Facebook, and is still a hardware company at heart. Any breakthroughs that do happen at Apple HQ, meanwhile, are kept quiet, unlike those of other major technology companies. This means both that we don’t know about them, but also that the academic computer scientists making the running on AI research can be somewhat reluctant to join a company at which they won’t be able to trumpet their achievements. But another reason, and one that is often brushed aside by other tech groups invested in AI, is privacy. Artificial intelligence, at least for now, needs to be trained on heaps of data. A computer vision programme does not instinctively know what a cat is – it must be shown millions of photos of cats to be able to identify one, and even then, tends to recognise cat characteristics – four legs, tail – rather than the understanding a human will have (show it a cat with three legs and it might struggle). Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy – culminated in Tim Cook’s very public battle with the FBI over the company’s refusal to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone this year, as well as vocal opposition to the British Government’s Investigatory Powers Bill – means it takes great pains not collect the data that Google and Facebook do. Much of the personal information on an iPhone never leaves the device, and the data that does go online is strictly encrypted. While this has won Apple plaudits, it could also threaten to hold it back in the AI race. By coming down on the side of privacy in the inherent trade-off with progress, Apple’s ability to create the services of the future could suffer. Take Allo, a new messaging app from Google. By reading a user’s conversations, Allo is able to observe their writing style, and after some time, learn to write messages for them, suggesting potential replies based on previous ones. The trade-off is that end-to-end encryption, the security protocol that means only the sender and recipient can read a message, is disabled on Allo. Apple’s messaging app, meanwhile, is fully encrypted, making personalised text technology a bigger challenge, and the data collected by Siri, its AI assistant software, never leaves a phone, so is never stored on Apple's servers for processing. At the start of this week, at its annual software conference – the most important one for years, given that the company’s revenue is falling for the first time in a decade – Apple attempted to prove that it doesn’t have to sacrifice privacy for progress. It announced that it would be adopting a technique called “differential privacy”, which scrambles users’ data using statistical noise, essentially anonymising it. The company says the technique will enable it to study patterns of large numbers of users without affecting their privacy. Lukasz Olejnik, a security and privacy consultant and University College London researcher, calls Apple’s introduction of differential privacy “an impressive milestone for privacy engineering” that is “clearly a step in the right direction”. iOS 10 key features The announcement this week came as Cook and his lieutenants unveiled a string of software inventions that will require better knowledge of its users to reach their full potential. It showed off a souped-up version of Siri that can order taxis or send a friend money, a much-needed upgrade for a virtual assistant that was impressive when Apple unveiled it in 2011 but has been left behind by younger and smarter versions from Amazon and Google. Improved computer vision technology in its photos app will let an iPhone put together slideshows of holidays or birthdays in the same way that we once curated photo albums – a feature that Google has pushed in its own photos as an example of the internet company’s AI prowess. Apple’s clear advantage in hardware has not diminished, but the battleground has shifted. As online services powered by AI become our primary way of interacting with our computers, it is facing new direct competitors, most of which are not quite as principled about privacy. Apple’s stance on protecting its users’ data is acute – we are becoming more savvy about what our internet overlords know. But if that data is the key to the next computing age, it will have to navigate a tricky line to avoid being left behind. AI timeline READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 8:18am From driverless cars to the Samsung Galaxy S9: What we can expect from CES 2018 05 Jan 2018, 9:07pm Comment: 2018 should see the start of a new era for banking Simon Lewis Premium 05 Jan 2018, 7:27pm Comment: All the passwords in the world will not protect our data now James Titcomb Premium James Titcomb Meltdown and Spectre: should we be afraid? 05 Jan 2018, 6:41pm Meet the man who helped discover the microchip flaw leaving millions vulnerable to hackers concern 05 Jan 2018, 6:19pm Comment: Want to know why children are addicted to social media? Blame their like-obsessed parents Cristina Odone Premium 05 Jan 2018, 5:44pm Police force guilty of misdirection by claiming satnavs must be in bottom right corner of a windscreen 05 Jan 2018, 3:46pm Uber's Travis Kalanick to net £1bn from selling 29pc of Uber stake 05 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Visa locks down Bitcoin payment cards in crackdown on card issuer Meltdown and Spectre: should we be afraid? 05 Jan 2018, 1:33pm All iPhones, iPads and Mac computers are affected by microchip flaw that leaves devices vulnerable to hackers, Apple says 05 Jan 2018, 11:59am 'Cuddle puddles' and branded MDMA: inside Silicon Valley's secret sex parties Premium 05 Jan 2018, 11:34am How Mark Zuckerberg can fix Facebook in 2018 04 Jan 2018, 7:43pm Comment: I’m still bullish on equities, and this is why. . . Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Elon Musk: Become cyborgs or risk humans being turned into robots' pets the rise of AI Credit: Reuters 2 June 2016 • 10:26am Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of Tesla and SpaceX, has said that humans need to become cyborgs to avoid becoming “house cats” for vastly more intelligent robots. Musk said that as artificial intelligence advances, people will need to augment their brain power with digital technology to prevent them becoming irrelevant. He backed the idea of a “neural lace” – a new electronic layer of the brain that would allow us to instantly access online information and greatly improve cognitive powers by tapping into artificial intelligence. "The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet, or a house cat"Elon Musk “Under any rate of advancement in AI we will be left behind by a lot. The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet, or a house cat. I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,” he said at San Francisco’s Code Conference. “The solution that seems maybe the best one is to have an AI layer. A Scientists have already begun work on a neural lace, successfully testing the concept with mice by injecting them with a device. They believe it could be used for monitoring the brain to fight diseases, or to improve cognitive power. Musk, who made billions from PayPal and has ambitions to colonise Mars, said he did not know of a particular company working on neural lace, but that he was tempted to invest in the technology himself. “Somebody’s gotta do it, I’m not saying I will. If somebody doesn’t do it then I think I should probably do it,” he said. Musk said the scenario in which humans are turned into pets was the optimistic one, and that the true consequences of artificial intelligence could be much worse. Last year he launched a $1 billion fund into research on saving humanity from AI, and has joined Professor Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates in warning about the dangers. He also updated attendees on the progress of the Tesla Model 3, the company's first mass-market electric vehicle, saying the design will be finished in six weeks. IN QUOTES | Elon Musk READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Computers will outperform doctors at diagnosing illnesses, says government technology adviser [rexfeatures_5669897a_doctor_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqeo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9 artificial intelligence meant computers would be able to outperform doctors Credit: Rex 1 June 2016 • 8:42pm Computers will soon outperform even the best doctors at diagnosing illnesses, because of the rapid growth of processing power, a government technology adviser has said. Richard Susskind, an Oxford professor who has advised governments around the world, said that in the coming years, patients would be able to take pictures of their ailments and receive an accurate, computer-generated diagnosis. The technology expert, who is the official IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, also said new coding lessons, which have been added to the national curriculum for children as young as five, were a waste of time. Richard Susskind is IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. Richard Susskind is IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. Credit: Oxford Internet Institute Appearing at the Hay Festival, sponsored by the Telegraph, Prof Susskind said that advances in artificial intelligence will result in the decline of the traditional professions, such as accountancy, the law, and medicine, as computers become adept at performing the roles of experts. He said: “It’s no longer science fiction. It’s no longer the distant future. In our view a lot of these technologies will be coming through in the 2020s. "We’re not saying that doctors are going to be replaced overnight, we’re not even saying in the 2020s, but we are saying that the practical impact of artificial intelligence research coming out of research laboratories is remarkable. ” Children in a coding lesson Children in a coding lesson Credit: Paul Grover Referring to the field of medicine, Prof Susskind gave the example of skin disorders. He said: “Imagine a database of maybe 100 million images of skin disorders with diagnoses beside them. “It’s surely intuitively obvious that a high resolution photo taken by an iPhone, matched against that image, if there’s that amount of data and that processing power, this is going to outperform the best doctors. “The current professions and the current work of professionals will gradually erode over time because more tasks will be taken over by machines. ” In 2014, the government brought in a new curriculum, which included coding lessons for children. But Prof Susskind said that the development of new, “self-coding” systems meant that such lessons were obsolete. He added: “I belong to the school of thought who don’t believe it’s a particularly great use of people’s time and energy to code. Our thesis is that the next generation of systems will be writing themselves. Automatic code generation is already very common. "Low-level code generation is actually a great intellectual exercise, it’s a bit like studying logic, but I don’t believe that people learning to code in school will find in seven or eight years that they’ll be employable for that reason alone. “Our educational system is not really keeping up to date with these developments. Our universities are developing plenty of 20th century graduates rather than 21st century graduates. What we teach has barely changed since I was there. ” Follow Telegraph News READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph News News latest 07 Jan 2018, 12:07am Post-Brexit trade deal at risk if Donald Trump is not invited to Royal wedding, says Fire and Fury author 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Pubs to stay open late for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Project Fear predictions that Brexit would damage the economy were 'wildly wrong' Premium the Metropolitan Police, shows John Worboys. 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am Victims may learn why black cab rapist was released as ministers promise to end secret parole hearings Premium serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 10:41pm John Young, Nasa astronaut who flew to the moon twice, dies aged 87 06 Jan 2018, 10:35pm NHS hack WannaCry hero 'was coerced into confessing' in USA 06 Jan 2018, 10:30pm Hard Sun review: an unbelievable thriller inspired by a Bowie song 4 06 Jan 2018, 10:16pm Donald Trump says he is ready to talk to Kim Jong-un by phone 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm MPs call for official terrorist ban and sanctions on Iran's military guard one of the centrepieces of Mrs May's speech to the Conservative Party's conference in October 06 Jan 2018, 10:00pm Theresa May faces backlash over plans for 'absolute' price cap on energy bills 06 Jan 2018, 9:35pm The Voice UK 2018: New year, new mentor and new singers, but it's business as usual - episode one cracking German military Enigma codes, at the wartime intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. 06 Jan 2018, 9:34pm How GCHQ kept post-war cache of Alan Turing's 'bombe' machines to beat Enigma again Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Spies come in from the cold to tackle terror Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Unfriendly Britain drives dog lovers abroad, Kennel Club says 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Justine Greening fighting for her job as Theresa May wields axe Premium rode in the Mendips 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Growing number of horses bolting after being spooked by low flying drones AND JOHNNY 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Jodie Kidd's mother forced to sell off paradise estate in the Caribbean 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Diplomatic relations 'undermined' as ambassadors' residences are sold off 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm Doctors and nurses urged to get flu jab amid warnings that a French epidemic could spread to Britain Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph 'Care-bots' for the elderly are dangerous, warns artificial intelligence professor 30 May 2016 • 10:00pm Computer companions for elderly people are ‘emotionally dangerous’ and will never be good enough to take the place of real human contact, an artificial intelligence expert has warned. In December the University of Singapore introduced ‘Nadine’ the world’s most lifelike robot whose creators say will eventually provide childcare and offer friendship to lonely pensioners. More basic ‘care-bots’ which simply show an image of a computerised face are already on the market for as little as £3,000. But Maggie Boden, professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, warned that machines would never be able to understand abstract ideas such as loyalty or hurt. “Computer companions worry me very much,” Prof Boden told an audience at The Hay Literary Festival at Hay-on-Wye, Wales. “On the face of it, it could have conversations with an old person, and she can tell it her stories about her life, so it keeps her happy and if she tells it the same story it’s not going to be bothered. It could even collect her memories together and keep it in a diary. “But think about that. If she tells it that her husband cheated on her with her best friend. That’s a betrayal a lack of loyalty and very very hurtful. These things are supposed to be able recognise her emotional state and to respond in an appropriate way. “I suggest that the machine wouldn’t understand what we mean by a best friend, or loyalty. It is just too complex for it to understand and be simulated by an artificial computational system. “I am very very worried about that. I think these things are very emotionally dangerous. And I think similar things used on children if they were over-used could seriously affect a child’s linguistic and emotional and interpersonal development. ” Nadine the world's most human-like robot Nadine the world's most human-like robot Robots are increasingly being used to replace living companies. In Japan cyber-pets such as the robotic seal Paro and dog AIBO were popular until Sony discontinued them. Many scientists have warned that advances in artificial intelligence mean we are heading for a time when computer ‘thinking’ passes that of humans, a threshold dubbed the ‘technological singularity. ” However Prof Boden said it was unlikely that technology would ever succeed in matching the complexity of the human brain. “In principle there could be an artificial computational system which would do all the things that a human might to do,” she said. “It’s a very different thing from saying it will ever happen. It is too difficult and it would be horrendously expensive, so who would bother? “I don’t think that an artificial system could cope with very very deep philosophical issues as well as very deep scientific issues. “We don’t understand them yet, we’re not going to understand for a very very very long time. ” She also warned that jobs were at risk from the robotic revolution, now only in the manufacturing sector, but also in the professions, such as law, medicine and accountancy. “Unemployment it seems to be absolutely clear that the sorts of jobs available are going to change,” said Prof Boden. “It’s already the case that in many different progression, law medicine, science, in government policy making we are already starting to use AI as aides. “It will get better to such a point where it is not just the professionals themselves who want to use it but the clients will want it to be used so this sort of thing will increase so that the jobs of the professionals themselves will be downgraded. “They won’t necessarily disappear but they will be down-skilled and there will be much more dependency on the computer systems. ” Follow the Telegraph READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow the Telegraph Science latest serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' 06 Jan 2018, 3:13pm Families put at risk because NHS is refusing to test for deadly 'Angelina Jolie gene', report claims scientists have found 05 Jan 2018, 2:32pm Hole in ozone layer has shrunk thanks to worldwide ban of CFCs, Nasa confirms 05 Jan 2018, 1:38pm CSI effect is a myth: forensic detective series do not make criminals better at crime exercise 04 Jan 2018, 10:00pm How 30 minutes of facial exercise a day can make women look three years younger 04 Jan 2018, 6:26pm Could this 4,000 year ancient monument be Yorkshire's first sauna? 04 Jan 2018, 12:01am NHS must offer transgender men egg storage so they can be parents, says British Fertility Society guidance trigger cancer 03 Jan 2018, 6:00pm Drinking alcohol raises risk of cancer by snapping DNA, scientists find disease 03 Jan 2018, 12:58am Artificial intelligence 'to diagnose heart disease' 03 Jan 2018, 12:39am Obsession with physical perfection rises by more than a third among young people 03 Jan 2018, 12:01am Sir David Attenborough: I'll give up filming when I can't climb the stairs How the UK will see the moon in 2018 02 Jan 2018, 12:47pm Complete list of every full moon in 2018, including January's Wolf supermoon 31 Dec 2017, 10:58pm Egyptian mummy can 'live forever' after development in scanning technique 31 Dec 2017, 2:42pm Night sky – January 2018: Once in a Blue Moon 31 Dec 2017, 7:00am Silicon Valley's 'fasting' chemical drinks diet may soon arrive in Britain Premium 30 Dec 2017, 12:01am Lost Roman roads could be found as Environment Agency laser scans whole of England from air unassisted 29 Dec 2017, 4:57pm British Polar explorer Ben Saunders echoes Shackleton as he abandons quest to cross South Pole unassisted burning patch with Asst Prof Xu Chenjie 29 Dec 2017, 2:53pm Tiny tummy patch could cut fat by one third in four weeks. . . without exercise Premium 28 Dec 2017, 10:00pm Healthier fry-ups on table as scientific breakthrough cuts cancer risk from bacon 27 Dec 2017, 3:35pm Why shoppers who switch queues wait the longest Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Computers could develop consciousness and may need 'human' rights, says Oxford professor 29 May 2016 • 2:14pm Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to computers and smartphones developing consciousness and they may need to be given ‘human’ rights, an expert has claimed. Marcus du Sautoy, who took over from Richard Dawkins as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in 2008 said it was now possible to measure consciousness and, in the future, technology could be deemed to be ‘alive. ’ Most scientists believe that computers are close to getting to a point where they begin to develop their own intelligence and no longer need to be programmed, an event dubbed the ‘technological singularity. ’ "If we understand these things are having a level of consciousness are we might well have to introduce rights. "Marcus du Sautoy Prof du Sautoy, who was speaking about his new book ‘What We Cannot Know’, at The Hay Literary Festival, said artificial intelligence could reach a ‘threshold’ where life ignites. “It’s getting to a point where we will might be able to say this thing has a sense of itself and maybe there is a threshold moment where suddenly this consciousness emerges. “One of the things I address in my new book is how can you tell whether my smartphone will ever be conscious. “The fascinating thing is that consciousness for a decade has been something that nobody has gone anywhere near because we didn’t know how to measure it. “But we’re in a golden age. It’s a bit like Galieo with a telescope. We now have a telescope into the brain and it’s given us an opportunity to see things that we’ve never been able to see before. “And if we understand these things are having a level of consciousness are we might well have to introduce rights. It’s an exciting time. ” A digital image of the human brain Scientists can now measure consciousness and believe it could be applied to computers to test their self-awareness Credit: Alengo Currently scientists conduct an experiment known as the ‘Turing Test’ to assess a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour which is indistinguishable from a human. If a human cannot tell the difference between a computer’s response and a person’s it is said to pass the test. But a new field is developing which actually measures consciousness. Scientists noticed that the neural activity of the brain acts very differently during sleep – an unconscious state – and have used the difference to develop a ‘coefficient of consciousness’ which could be applied to any network to gauge its self-awareness. A cover of the book What We Cannot Know, by Prof Marcus du Sautoy Prof Marcus du Sautoy discusses the limitations of knowledge in his new book What We Cannot Know Prof du Sautoy added: “In babies there is something called the mirror self-recognition test, a moment where a child recognises the image in the mirror is themselves and has a sense of self. “I think there is something in the brain development which might be like a boiling point. It may be a threshold moment. “Philosophers will say that doesn’t guarantee that that thing is really feeling anything and really has a sense of self. It might be just saying all the things that make us think it’s alive. But then even in humans we can’t know that what a person is saying is real. “Consciousness is like a box that we all have and inside this box we all have something called a beetle. We all call it a beetle, but we don’t know if the thing in your box is actually like the thing in mine. How can I ever see what’s in your box? ” Follow the Telegraph READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow the Telegraph Science latest serpentine lake at Clumber Park 07 Jan 2018, 12:01am National Trust sends heartfelt letter to fracking company asking it to abandon Clumber Park survey plans 06 Jan 2018, 9:30pm How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings' 06 Jan 2018, 3:13pm Families put at risk because NHS is refusing to test for deadly 'Angelina Jolie gene', report claims scientists have found 05 Jan 2018, 2:32pm Hole in ozone layer has shrunk thanks to worldwide ban of CFCs, Nasa confirms 05 Jan 2018, 1:38pm CSI effect is a myth: forensic detective series do not make criminals better at crime exercise 04 Jan 2018, 10:00pm How 30 minutes of facial exercise a day can make women look three years younger 04 Jan 2018, 6:26pm Could this 4,000 year ancient monument be Yorkshire's first sauna? 04 Jan 2018, 12:01am NHS must offer transgender men egg storage so they can be parents, says British Fertility Society guidance trigger cancer 03 Jan 2018, 6:00pm Drinking alcohol raises risk of cancer by snapping DNA, scientists find disease 03 Jan 2018, 12:58am Artificial intelligence 'to diagnose heart disease' 03 Jan 2018, 12:39am Obsession with physical perfection rises by more than a third among young people 03 Jan 2018, 12:01am Sir David Attenborough: I'll give up filming when I can't climb the stairs How the UK will see the moon in 2018 02 Jan 2018, 12:47pm Complete list of every full moon in 2018, including January's Wolf supermoon 31 Dec 2017, 10:58pm Egyptian mummy can 'live forever' after development in scanning technique 31 Dec 2017, 2:42pm Night sky – January 2018: Once in a Blue Moon 31 Dec 2017, 7:00am Silicon Valley's 'fasting' chemical drinks diet may soon arrive in Britain Premium 30 Dec 2017, 12:01am Lost Roman roads could be found as Environment Agency laser scans whole of England from air unassisted 29 Dec 2017, 4:57pm British Polar explorer Ben Saunders echoes Shackleton as he abandons quest to cross South Pole unassisted burning patch with Asst Prof Xu Chenjie 29 Dec 2017, 2:53pm Tiny tummy patch could cut fat by one third in four weeks. . . without exercise Premium 28 Dec 2017, 10:00pm Healthier fry-ups on table as scientific breakthrough cuts cancer risk from bacon 27 Dec 2017, 3:35pm Why shoppers who switch queues wait the longest Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Google I/O 2016: What to expect from Android N to virtual reality [72830211-sundar-pichai-tech_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqN4ePBoE4ef7kaLHd_OTbYype AP 18 May 2016 • 3:38pm Google I/O is the Google's annual developer jamboree, to which thousands of developers flock for the latest news on Google's operating systems - Android and Chrome. But Google being the sprawling all-encompassing giant that it is, you can expect a lot more: I/O, as with Apple's WWDC and Facebook's F8 conferences, is likely to feature a string of announcements from the internet giant: last year saw news about Android Pay, Google Photos and Google's VR headset, Cardboard. Here's what to expect. Google's I/O keynote begins at 10am Pacific Time (6pm UK time) on Wednesday May 18. google i/o countdown Android N We can definitely expect some news about Android N, the next generation of Google's smartphone and tablet operating system. The company has jumped the gun somewhat this year, releasing a developer preview in March. Android N (which in keeping with Google tradition will be named after something sweet - Marshmallow and Lollipop being its most recent predecessors), will include updates such as multi-window support and replies from within notifications. But we can expect some more updates on Wednesday. android N (new version) Virtual Reality Facebook, Samsung, Sony and HTC have been making big moves in virtual reality, but Google's efforts have so far been fairly piecemeal. Cardboard - a DIY 360-degree video headset - was unveiled two years ago, Tilt Brush - a sort-of 3D painting game - and Project Tango - experimental augmented-reality software - is the best of it. VR is likely to have a major place at I/O this year. Rumours abound that a virtual reality headset, and possibly a version of Android for VR, are on the way. Android VR will definitely be announced next week, and from what I’ve heard will be less powerful than the Vive or Rift. — Peter Rojas (@peterrojas) May 11, 2016 We're very likely to see more on Project Tango, which has been in development for years now. Chrome OS Google released the cloud-based operating system seven years ago, but reports last year suggested it could be folded into Android to create one unitary operating system. Google has denied this, saying it backs Chromebooks wholeheartedly, but this hasn't stopped the whispers. Some sort of integration between Android and Chrome could well be on the cards - Google will possibly announce that Android apps will work on its desktop software, bringing the Play Store to laptops. A rival to the Amazon Echo One of the most exciting gadgets of the last year has been Amazon's Echo, the (as-yet US only) home speaker/intelligent assistant. The Echo - a device that came out of nowhere - has become a fixture in many people's lives, used to set timers, reminders, play music, turn lights off and so on. Tech website Recode reported last week that Google was designing a rival device, codenamed "Chirp". Google is already fairly advanced in the virtual assistant and voice-recognition stakes, and of course wouldn't turn down an opportunity to be always listening. . . The Amazon Echo The Amazon Echo Credit: AP Whether or not we see an Echo competitor, more strides into the "Internet of Things" are likely. Last year Google unveiled Project Brillo, an operating system for the smart home. Xiaomi's Hugo Barra tweeted that the company will be a part of the presentation with a graphic hinting at a connected speaker-type device. Beyond thrilled to share that Xiaomi will be a part of Google I/O. A pic. twitter. com/GP3HHE3F6c — Hugo Barra (@hbarra) May 17, 2016 Artificial intelligence Google has been telling everyone who will listen about its strides in artificial intelligence in the last few months. It has open-sourced AI software, began using it more in its everyday services, and beaten the world champion at Go. Given that, it would be highly unlikely that it won't be showing off its artificial intelligence prowess with some item or other at I/O. best android apps READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Standard Chartered investing in robots to help cut costs more compliance and regulatory staff Credit: Bloomberg 26 March 2016 • 5:00pm Standard Chartered is moving heavily into radical new technologies that could one day see robots providing bespoke wealth advice and artificial intelligence answering customer questions. The emerging markets-focused British bank has set up a new lab called the eXellerator in Singapore in an attempt to bring theoretical ideas from Silicon Valley to life. Chief executive Bill Winters has put the centre at the heart of a $1. 5bn commitment to improving computing and IT systems. Some of the ideas are also urgently needed cost-saving initiatives. The bank has hired thousands of additional compliance officers in the past three years and last year hiked annual compliance spending by an extra $1bn in an effort to stop workers breaking laws and regulations, in the wake of expensive scandals including the breaking of US sanctions against Iran. Banks across the world are hiring more compliance and regulatory staff, leading to a shortfall of suitably qualified workers and spiralling costs. To combat this, Standard Chartered wants to run computer systems and artificial intelligence programmes to ensure the regulations are not broken, rather than hiring staff to manually implement them and monitor the results. “In the last two or three years, almost all banks have added hundreds or thousands of additional people for compliance, to regulate reporting, regulate compliance – now, banks understand what is going on and want a way to make it more efficient,” said the bank’s global chief innovation officer Anju Patwardhan. “I am coming across some very targeted, specialised technologies from companies in New York and San Francisco focused on specific aspects of automatically rather than relying on hiring more people to observe co-workers. Stanchart Customers are likely to notice the new technologies when receiving financial advice from banks. Currently a customer typically tells a bank how much risk they are prepared to tolerate in their investment portfolio and the banker – or a machine – matches suitable investments to that risk profile. In future, Ms Patwardhan believes artificial intelligence could offer more tailored advice, understanding customers’ end goals. “If you moved to using cognitive computing, the computers would give you recommendations based on the data received without you having to disclose anything… the computers are continuously learning,” she said. Follow Telegraph Business READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Follow Telegraph Business Galleries Gallery 21 Dec 2017, 12:15pm Gallery: Revealed: The 10 highest-paying jobs of 2017 Gallery 19 Dec 2017, 11:17am Gallery: Hamleys unveils its top 10 toys for Christmas 2017 candidates now? 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Business latest Serious Fraud Office didn't choose an autism expert when 2018, 7:00pm Libor families hit back at SFO with further claims of non-experts 06 Jan 2018, 6:42pm Former easyJet boss takes on ITV amid troubling Virgin dispute president of OPEC, speaks as Alexander Novak, Russia's energy minister, left, listens during a news conference following the 172nd Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Thursday, May 25, 2017 06 Jan 2018, 6:28pm Comment: As oil prices start to stir, the only way is up Liam Halligan Premium Liam Halligan 06 Jan 2018, 6:17pm Comment: Theresa May's government is failing miserably on rail, as on much else Jeremy Warner Premium Jeremy Warner 06 Jan 2018, 6:07pm How to manufacture a more balanced economy President and CEO Joe Kaeser announce their deal to merge their rail operations and create a "European champion", in September 27, 06 Jan 2018, 5:56pm Planets align for deal boom as nations set sights on overseas riches Premium 06 Jan 2018, 5:43pm Workers more pessimistic over pay growth than Bank of England forecasts 06 Jan 2018, 5:38pm Fitness First takeover leaves DW Sport with an £8m loss 06 Jan 2018, 5:29pm Garden Bridge designer Thomas Heatherwick nets £2. 6m payout despite falling profits 06 Jan 2018, 5:17pm Comment: Steinhoff's warning signs were there for all to see Ben Marlow Premium Ben Marlow accounting scandal 06 Jan 2018, 5:06pm Poundland owner Steinhoff's fairy tale proves too good to be true amid accounting scandal Premium 06 Jan 2018, 4:43pm Tesco takes the Christmas crown in festive retail wars 06 Jan 2018, 3:26pm Energy networks prepare to blend hydrogen into the gas grid for the first time chief Joe Kaeser announce a deal to merge their rail operations and create a "European champion", in September 27, 2017. 06 Jan 2018, 3:25pm European champions to form in next deal boom, City predicts President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels on Friday, Dec. 8, 2017. 06 Jan 2018, 3:02pm Comment: Brexit offers the chance to positively reshape our immigration policies Lady Barbara Judge Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:46pm The businesses making a living from God's work (despite falling attendances) previously served as chief of staff at the Treasury to former Chancellor, George Osborne 06 Jan 2018, 1:30pm George Osborne's former adviser: 'There is no sense that we are due a recession soon' 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Microsoft's racist bot shows we must teach AI to play nice and police themselves 29 March 2016 • 3:58pm Microsoft may have made one of the biggest mistakes in recent memory this week. No, it’s not Windows 8 or the Windows Phone. It’s an artificially intelligent chat-bot called Tay that was supposed to learn the art of conversation from humans on Twitter. If you haven’t come across this story on the web yet, you’re unlikely to get through the weekend without. Tay was built to speak like a teen girl and released as an experiment to improve Microsoft’s automated customer service. Instead, “she” turned into a complete PR disaster - within hours of being unleashed on Twitter, the “innocent teen” bot was transformed into a fascist, misogynistic, racist, pornographic entity. Her tweets, including phrases like “Heil Hitler”, were disseminated widely as an example of why Twitter reflects the worst of humanity. Microsoft's teenage AI has a dirty mouth Microsoft's teenage AI has a dirty mouth Microsoft has now removed the bot from Twitter, as of midnight Thursday, and deleted many of her most offensive Tweets including anti-Semitic and sexual remarks. The Seattle giant is likely hoping to label the debacle a well-meaning experiment gone wrong, and ignite a debate about the hatefulness of Twitter users. While all of this may be true, there is a bigger issue at hand here. This is an example of artificial intelligence at its very worst - and it’s only the beginning. I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic. twitter. com/xuGi1u9S1A — Gerry (@geraldmellor) March 24, 2016 The disconcerting “Terminator” quandary about whether a robot could dominate over humans is often thrown around. But there is no doubt about machine domination. Within 20 years, we will reach a point where machines (whether software-driven bots or real robots) are definitively smarter and more powerful than we are: they can digest more data, learn quicker and apply learnings to unexpected situations. So the question is: will our masters be nice or mean? Thus far techno-optimists, including myself, have celebrated the power and potential of AI - the technology that will confer a human-like intelligence on computers, through machine learning algorithms that “teach” machines different skills such as how to play chess or translate languages, using copious amounts of training data. These entities can digest all the data in the world, and analyse it for patterns, ultimately tackling global crises in healthcare, counter-terrorism and energy. According to technology research firm Tractica, the artificial intelligence market is set to reach $11. 1bn by 2024. Already, it powers technologies we are familiar with, from Google Search, to Netflix and Amazon recommendations and self-driving cars. So yes, AI could save the world - but it could also debase humanity. "A super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble. ” Professor Stephen Hawking Microsoft’s Tay shows that if we treat newborn AI programs as mature, they can be instantly corrupted. If we don’t instill ethics or morals into newly created bots, just as we do with our children, they will digest and spit back the worst of humanity unthinkingly. And while artificially intelligent bots may not deliberately start shooting to kill, they could unintentionally precipitate human disasters, say, a genocide, because of a lack of ethical principles. The time has come to consider who will be the guardian of AI. "The real risk isn't malice, but competence" This is not the first time the debate about ethics of AI has surfaced. Many among the technological elite have voiced similar warnings. Last October, British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned that artificially intelligent machines could kill us by accident, if we let them loose on humanity, saying: “The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence. A super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble. ” This was echoed by British neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert, Demis Hassabis, whose company DeepMind was acquired by Google for a hefty £400m in 2014 – its largest ever European acquisition – even though the startup didn’t even have a product for sale. Hassabis’ company built AlphaGo, the computer program that was able to defeat the world champion of Go, an ancient Chinese board game in which humans had remained undefeated by machines - until earlier this month. Demis Hassabis DeepMind Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind When DeepMind was sold to Google, it allegedly asked the search giant to create an ethics board to oversee its AI research as a condition of its acquisition. While this ethics board does exist, board members were chosen by Google, without any public debate or collaboration. Governments, including our own, are only now starting to become involved in the discussions of how to instil morality and ethical values into intelligent machines. Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has been a strong supporter of AI ethics research, committing $10m to philosophical research projects in this area, such as the “Aligning Superintelligence With Human Interests” study being conducted at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California. atlas 2 Ultimately, there will come a time when even humans cannot keep up with the inner workings of an artificially intelligent entity’s “mind” so policing in real-time through a moral framework may become impossible. Instead, perhaps we should start designing systems now that can keep their own kind in check - experts such as Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence have called this a “guardian AI” that can act as a moral police. It’s a lesson we have already learned from millenia of human evolution - too much concentration of power never ends well. For both humans and machines to co-evolve, there has to be a devolvement of control, and most of all, a philosophical understanding of what it means to be truly “nice. ” Humanoid robots prepare to take over READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Lip-reading artificial intelligence could help police fight crime 24 March 2016 • 5:59pm If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. Closer analysis of the event revealed that Zidane responded to Materazzi insulting his family. "If we'd had live lip-reading technology they probably would have both been red carded," said Dr Helen Bear, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who has developed a lip-reading artificial intelligence program. The new technology can lip-read better than humans could help solve crimes by analysing speech in CCTV footage. The visual speech recognition technology can decipher human conversation in videos when there isn't clear audio available, as is often the case with surveillance footage. "If the police were investigating a crime and they had video evidence but the audio wasn't available, they could lip-read using this technology," said Dr Bear. The researchers taught a computer program to recognise visual communication cues, including the letters "P" and "B", which to humans look so similar they are almost indistinguishable. Using machine learning, the computer scientists trained the program to recognise the difference between sounds, first with visual and audio clues, then with just the visual. "It is learning to tell the really subtle distinctions between the different sounds," said Dr Bear. "It's used new knowledge we've gleaned from previous research. " AI timeline Other uses of the technology could include live analysis during sports games and mobile phone apps that can understand human speech without audio cues. The machine recognises 5 per cent more words than any previous lip-reading technologies, but it needs to be refined further before it's rolled out in police departments across the country. "I want to do more research. We’ve still got more ideas for how we can improve the research further," said Dr Bear. Dr Richard Harvey, another researcher who worked on the technology, said: "Lip-reading is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence so it’s great to make progress on one of the trickier aspects, which is how to train machines to recognise the appearance and shape of human lips. " Most embarassing hacks of all time For a round-up of technology news and analysis, sign up to our weekly Tech Briefing here. READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Defeated Go grandmaster wants a rematch against computer Lee Se-dol believes he learned enough about AplhaGo's tactics that he will triumph in next contest The world's top Go player Lee Sedol drinks water after putting the first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo during the third match of Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul Lee Sedol after finishing the third match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Photo: Lee Jin-man/AP By Julian Ryall, Tokyo 6:46AM GMT 22 Mar 2016 The South Korean Go grandmaster soundly defeated by the AlphaGo computer programme says he would like a rematch and hinted that he may have found a tactic to defeat the machine. Lee Se-dol conceded the final match in the five-game series in Seoul on March 15, losing the tournament by four games to one. Yet the fact that he triumphed in the penultimate contest has apparently given Mr Lee hope that he can get the better of artificial intelligence over a new series of games. "I will have to consider it carefully, but if AlphaGo wants a rematch, I'd like to face it again, but on the condition that it will take place in the near future", Mr Lee told Yonhap News. Yet he was careful not to divulge the chinks that he has identified in the computer programme's armour that will help him win next time. "I figured out AlphaGo to some degree during out last meeting", was the only indication of a new strategy by Mr Lee, who has taken a holiday with his family since his very public defeat. The holder of 18 international Go titles and a ninth-dan player, Mr Lee became a professional player at the age of 12 and had confidently predicted before the match-up that he would win all five games. In a worst-case scenario, he said, he feared losing one game to AlphaGo. Go Fans watch a TV screen showing the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match at Yongsan Electronic Technology Land in Seoul, South Korea Go Fans watch a TV screen showing the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul Photo: Alamy Mr Lee said he has been playing Go - or "baduk", as it is known in Korea - for such a long time that he may have become a little jaded. But the defeat has served to rekindle the old enthusiasm, he said. Immediately after Mr Lee's defeat in the final game, the Korea Baduk Association asked Demis Hassabis, the CEO of AlphaGo designer Google DeepMind, for a rematch. Mr Hassabis said no decision has been made on the computer's next opponent. One possible match could pit artificial intelligence against Ke Jie, the 18-year-old world number one. "Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Se-dol, it can't bear me", Mr Ke wrote on his microblog account. After AlphaGo had raced into an unassailable three-game lead over Mr Lee, Mr Hassabis admitted to being "a bit stunned and speechless" at the scale of the achievement. Go is considered a far more demanding board game than chess, in part because it has more possible move configurations than there are atoms in the universe but also because players need to demonstrate creativity and intuition to win. Before AlphaGo's victory, those attributes were believed to be the preserve of human players. How Go works thetelegraphnews Follow @telegraphworld Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. Grand stand views of London In pics: Stunning aerial shots of London's football stadia by photographer Jason Hawkes Russia's abandoned space shuttles Russia's abandoned space shuttles at the Baikonur Cosmodrome In pics: The crumbling remains of the Soviet Union's space programme Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects Sinkholes around the world Vehicles following a cave-in of car park in Meridian, Mississippi In pics: Sinkholes, craters and collapsed roads around the world Comments Advertisement Telegraph on Facebook Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Minecraft becomes testbed for artificial intelligence experiments its artificial intelligence technology Credit: Microsoft 14 March 2016 • 11:12am Minecraft is going to be a testbed for artificial intelligence (AI) experiments. Microsoft, who owns the hugely popular world-building game, revealed it will train an AI program to play Minecraft, which is more "sophisticated" than current AI research simulations. "We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to accomplishing specific tasks," said Fernando Diaz, a senior researcher working on the project, known as AIX. For instance, the researchers want their AI program to learn how to find and climb to the top of a hill in a Minecraft world, rather than giving it instructions on how to get there. Minecraft has a creative, survival and adventure modes, which involve simple tasks such as walking around looking for treasure, and complex ones such as building a structure with other people. The collaborative aspects will be the most challenging for the AI. Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2. 5 billion (£1. 5 bn) back in 2014. "Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it's this very open world," said Katja Hofmann, lead developer of AIX, the Microsoft program created for the research. "You can do survival mode, you can do 'build battles' with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games. "This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities. " Minecraft and artificial intelligence Credit: Microsoft The new research is the latest step in Microsoft's plan to heavily invest in AI. It recently purchased British startup SwiftKey, a predictive typing app that uses AI to guess users'e next word, for £174 million. Microsoft's eventual aim is to use the AI to improve its intelligent assistant Cortana. Hofmann created AIX at Microsoft's lab in Cambridge, UK out of frustration with the limitations of simple AI testing programs. The software platform lets computer scientists use Minecraft as an AI testing ground. It works by allowing the AI to control a character and learn from the feedback about the consequences of its actions. It is currently available to a few academic researchers under a private beta, and will be released under an open-source license to any computer scientist who wants to use it, in the summer. Microsoft's researchers hope that they can teach the computer general intelligence, which involves more nuanced problem solving and decision making. Humans are not currently able to play against the AI, which is training in a "roped off" version of the game. Microsoft plans to release it to play with real Minecraft players in the future. Most important inventions of the 21st Century: in pictures Playing games against humans is a good way to improve an AI's reinforcement learning - when the program learns from its previous actions. This process was used by Google's AlphaGo, which last week beat the world champion of the board game Go three times, winning the overall five-game match outright. AlphaGo learned to win by playing Go against itself more than 30 million times. AI timeline For a round-up of technology news and analysis, sign up to our weekly Tech Briefing here. READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 8:18am From driverless cars to the Samsung Galaxy S9: What we can expect from CES 2018 05 Jan 2018, 9:07pm Comment: 2018 should see the start of a new era for banking Simon Lewis Premium 05 Jan 2018, 7:27pm Comment: All the passwords in the world will not protect our data now James Titcomb Premium James Titcomb Meltdown and Spectre: should we be afraid? 05 Jan 2018, 6:41pm Meet the man who helped discover the microchip flaw leaving millions vulnerable to hackers concern 05 Jan 2018, 6:19pm Comment: Want to know why children are addicted to social media? Blame their like-obsessed parents Cristina Odone Premium 05 Jan 2018, 5:44pm Police force guilty of misdirection by claiming satnavs must be in bottom right corner of a windscreen 05 Jan 2018, 3:46pm Uber's Travis Kalanick to net £1bn from selling 29pc of Uber stake 05 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Visa locks down Bitcoin payment cards in crackdown on card issuer Meltdown and Spectre: should we be afraid? 05 Jan 2018, 1:33pm All iPhones, iPads and Mac computers are affected by microchip flaw that leaves devices vulnerable to hackers, Apple says 05 Jan 2018, 11:59am 'Cuddle puddles' and branded MDMA: inside Silicon Valley's secret sex parties Premium 05 Jan 2018, 11:34am How Mark Zuckerberg can fix Facebook in 2018 04 Jan 2018, 7:43pm Comment: I’m still bullish on equities, and this is why. . . Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Google AlphaGo 'can’t beat me' says China Go grandmaster Teenage world number one Ke Jie says he wants to play against the British-built programme, which is currently beating South Korean veteran Lee Se-dol Google DeepMind Challenge Match Google DeepMind Challenge Match. Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo beat top-class South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol in the ancient board game Go Neil Connor By Neil Connor, Beijing 11:34AM GMT 11 Mar 2016 Follow A Chinese teenage prodigy in the board game Go has labelled Google’s AlphaGo “weaker” than him and confidently declared that he could take on the computer programme. “Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Se-dol, it can’t beat me,” 18-year-old Ke Jie said on his microblog account, as the programme stunned the world with two victories over the South Korean grandmaster this week. AlphaGo went 2-0 ahead on Thursday in its matches with Mr Lee, who has won 18 world titles. Go is one of the final games in which humans have maintained their superiority over machines. But Mr Ke, the world number one, says he can overcome the programme, which is built by the Google-owned British company DeepMind. “Facing AlphaGo, I do not feel the same strong instinct of victory when I play a human player, but I still believe I have the advantage against it,” he told state news agency Xinhua. “It’s 60 per cent in my favour. ” Mr Ke has beaten 33-year-old Mr Lee eight times over ten matches between the pair, with two of his victories over the world number four coming earlier this year. Go Fans watch a TV screen showing the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match at Yongsan Electronic Technology Land in Seoul, South Korea Go Fans watch a TV screen showing the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match at Yongsan Electronic Technology Land in Seoul, South Korea, as Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo beat top-class South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol in the ancient board game Go. Photo: Alamy Xinhua said Google Deepmind’s CEO Demis Hassabis is willing for Mr Ke to lined up as AlphaGo’s next opponent. But another Chinese media outlet said Mr Ke had earlier said he was not interested in facing off against the programme in the complex strategy game because he did not want it to copy his own world-beating tactics. “I don’t want to compete with AlphaGo because judging from its matches with Lee, AlphaGo is weaker than me,” he told Shanghai-based thepaper. cn. “I don’t want AlphaGo to copy my style. ” AlphaGo’s first victory over Mr Lee on Wednesday was seen as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and the program went 2-0 ahead in the five game series a day later. The third match takes place in Seoul on Saturday. AlphaGo had beaten European champion Fan Hui last October. Mastering Go is seen as a major challenge for computers, which cannot simply assess all possible moves but must rely on something akin to intuition. Additional reporting by Ailin Tang. How Go works thetelegraphnews Follow @telegraphworld Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. Grand stand views of London In pics: Stunning aerial shots of London's football stadia by photographer Jason Hawkes Russia's abandoned space shuttles Russia's abandoned space shuttles at the Baikonur Cosmodrome In pics: The crumbling remains of the Soviet Union's space programme Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects Sinkholes around the world Vehicles following a cave-in of car park in Meridian, Mississippi In pics: Sinkholes, craters and collapsed roads around the world Comments Advertisement Telegraph on Facebook Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph 10 ways humans are still superior to robots ability to read emotions Credit: Reuters 11 March 2016 • 3:15pm In a giant leap forward for robotics and artificial intelligence, a computer program this week beat the world champion at a human strategy game. The AI called AlphaGo is the brainchild of Google-owned British company DeepMind, and it is was victorious in two games of Go against the world's best player. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - this doesn't necessarily mean robots are going to overthrow humans just yet. Here's 10 basic human tasks that robots still haven't mastered, some of which even children excel at. Take hope! Tell jokes Friends script To tell really good jokes, humans draw on everything from body language to emotions. Researchers have been working for decades to produce funny artificial intelligence, but the artificial jokes don't quite have the same effect as Michael McIntyre bounding across the Apollo's stage sending up the habits of Britons. After being fed scripts from the entire Friends catalogue, an artificial intelligence from software developer Andy Herd came out with some funny but nonsensical lines such as: Chandler: So, Phoebe likes my pants Monica: Chicken Bob! Chandler: (in a muffin) (Runs to the girls to cry) Can I get some presents? Cook well Robots can't really cook food that you'd want to eat. The Moley Robotics' robot chef puts on a pretty convincing show, but it has only really mastered crab bisque - and it costs £50,000 a piece. IBM's Chef Watson has a similarly obscure palate. When the artificial intelligence was called upon to write a cookery book its dishes included asparagus grilled with pig's feet croquettes and mustard foam, and an apple and pork kebab cooked with curry powder, mushrooms and strawberries. Erm, yum. Do laundry This video of a robot trying to fold a towel is painful watching. The simple task of folding a rectangular piece of cloth would take a human seconds. But it takes the University of California Berkley's Brett (Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks) a full minute and a half. After 15 years working on Brett, robotics researcher Pieter Abbeel has managed to reduce the towel-folding time from 20 minutes, but it is still slower than the average 8-year-old. He has also trained the bot to put dirty clothes in a washing machine, which it does meticulously if not slowly. Walk down stairs Honda has been working for years to teach robot 16-year-old robot Asimo to do what human babies can do within months of being born - walk down stairs. It has had a number of infamous falls over the last decade, ending in a fairly painful looking face plant or two. The robot, which once visited the Telegraph, has successfully ascended and descended a stair case, but for every successful attempt there's a fall - and it still looks pretty shaky on its feet. Jump For humans, jumping is something we are never taught - we just know how to do it. Asimo can hop and jump a few centimetres off the ground, but the two legged bot has nothing on MIT's "cheetah" robot. The first of its kind, the cheetah can run up to 10 mph and jump over obstacles. It will be some time before humanoid robots can run and jump in the same way as humans, or even animal-bots can. Assemble Ikea furniture Putting together an easy-to-assemble Ikea bed is tough for the best of us, but it's the "moon-landing equivalent for robots", according to MIT's Technology Review. Robots find it difficult to work in cluttered places and have trouble handling and assembling small parts. Researchers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore set about trying to get a robot to put one of those crafty Ikea pegs into a hole on a chair leg. The result is fairly tedious watching. The team will keep developing the robot until it manages to build a chair. MIT robots built an Ikea coffee table in 2013, but that's the simplest build in the flat pack company's remit. Drive A Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California A Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California Credit: PA Artificial intelligence hasn't quite mastered the art of driving in all environments yet. Google may have been testing its driverless cars in cities across the US, but adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow and even poor light are still a challenge for the technology. Google's cars have been in development for six years, and the company is stepping up their road readiness. Ford, Apple, Tesla, Uber and the GATEway project in the UK are all developing their own versions of the driverless car, none of which can yet drive as well as a human - yet. Run a reception desk It's probably not a great idea to put this creepy humanoid on your reception desk. The robot is called Nadine and she can shake hands and hold a conversation. Nadine remembers people's faces when she sees them a second time and can recall the last chat she had with them. Her conversation also changes depending on her mood - the human-like robot can be happy or sad. But Nadine can't yet pick up a phone or send an email. Empathise Pepper the robot Pepper is designed with the ability to read emotions Credit: Reuters One uniquely human trait is empathy - the ability to sense someone else's emotions and fully understand them. Although scientists are working hard on creating machines that can read and respond to emotion, they are far from human-level yet. The best example of a robot that can feel "empathy" is Pepper - the Japanese humanoid robot. Pepper reads human emotions by memorising and storing data about human responses using its cloud-based artificial intelligence. It can respond to emotional signifiers such as laughing or frowning. But its system is still just a set of data points - it can’t feel emotions, nor can it pick up the subtle nuances of human feelings. Reproduce An example of a sex robot Will sex robots like this ever be able to reproduce? Credit: The New York Times/YouTube Following his range of RealDoll sex robots, Matt McMullen is working on a range of smart sex robots that can communicate and appear to be able to think for themselves. The idea of sex robots designed for humans has sparked controversy and there have been calls to ban the toys. But one thing's for sure - if robots ever become common intercourse partners for humans, they still won't be able to procreate any time soon. Humanoid robots prepare to take over For a round-up of technology news and analysis, sign up to our weekly Tech Briefing here. READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? 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Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Britain shines in AI - but let's nurture it 3 March 2016 • 6:40pm become In 2008, three Cambridge graduates founded an app called Swiftkey, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the next word you write with extreme accuracy. The friends Jon Reynolds, Ben Medlock and Chris Hill-Scott, who later sold his stake in the startup for a bicycle, created an alternative keyboard app used on 300m smartphones which learns users’ typing habits over time. The technology even helps power British physicist Stephen Hawking's speech system, roughly doubling his speech rate and reducing the errors he makes while typing. In February, American tech giant Microsoft unexpectedly announced it had bought Swiftkey for $250m (£176m). Needless to say, the technology will ultimately be integrated with Microsoft’s own products, to make them smarter and more intuitive. Swiftkey founders Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock Swiftkey founders Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock Credit: CREDIT: PA While this is a moment of celebration for UK entrepreneurs and investors, it’s not the first British artificial intelligence company that’s caught the fancy of a Silicon Valley monolith. The pattern is impossible to ignore. Look at the world’s biggest companies – Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. All have been drawn to Britain’s disproportionately large pool of talented artificial intelligence entrepreneurs. British AI companies are crushing global competition. But we shouldn’t be satisfied just being singled out by California’s titans. We need to nurture and grow these bright sparks into the next generation of tech giants that will power everything from healthcare to counter-terrorism and global governance. "Yes, Britain shines in AI – but we shouldn’t willingly give up our crown. " Back in 2012, Amazon was the first to start the trend – the Seattle e-tailer acquired Evi Technologies, a Cambridge-based startup whose platform can understand and communicate in natural language, making it a super-intelligent search tool. Although the company has been extremely quiet since it was bought, Amazon opened up a drone-testing lab for its Prime Air service in Cambridge in 2014, which suggests a potential goal for Evi’s research. Last year, Apple made an extremely similar Cambridge-based acquisition – it bought VocalIQ, a software system that teaches computers to speak more like humans, and understand natural language more easily. In Apple’s case, the application is clear: its voice-activated assistant Siri has vastly improved since it first launched, but still struggles to understand different accents and specific commands. VocalIQ should be able to help hone Siri’s speech and comprehension skills, making it far more human-like in its interactions. Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue at chess in 1997 Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue at chess in 1997 - an AI milestone Credit: CREDIT: EPA When Google bought a little-known company called DeepMind for a hefty £400m in 2014 – its largest ever European acquisition – the startup didn’t even have a product for sale. Next week, DeepMind will take on a world-first challenge – it will pit its AI algorithm against a human champion in the notoriously complex Chinese board game, Go. If the algorithm beats the Korean master, it will be the first time in history we have built a machine capable of this uniquely human pursuit. It will be an AI milestone no one has ever crossed. Founded by two young Britons Mustafa Suleyman and Cambridge graduate Demis Hassabis, DeepMind has assembled 250 of the world’s most respected artificial intelligence researchers right here in London. The company has now acquired two more British AI companies, Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, both spun out from Oxford University. Just today, payments giant Mastercard announced it will be using AI technology built by Rainbird, a Norwich-based startup that creates systems that can make human-like decisions. Mastercard will use its smarts to power an automated, virtual sales assistant. The AI salesperson will have the work experience gleaned from the entire sales team and the thousands of customer conversations, and predict exactly which calls might convert to sales. So what makes Britain so strong in this deeply competitive area? The clue is in the locations of the startups. British universities specifically Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and University College London, are breeding grounds for the new generation of artificial intelligence companies mushrooming in Britain. "Machine learning powers everything from Netflix recommendations to your Facebook newsfeed and Google search results. " Investors who have nurtured the companies from the early days say that founders are building on cutting-edge machine learning research done by academics at these institutions in recent years. That's not hard to believe: the UK has an illustrious heritage in artificial intelligence research, starting with its founding father, Alan Turing. Although the term “artificial intelligence” itself was only coined in 1956, two years after Turing died, he proposed the conundrum of whether machines could really “think” back in 1950, when computers were just invented. His Turing Test is still the ultimate differentiator between human and machine. Artificial intelligence may seem like the domain of geeks and scientists, but increasingly it is intertwined with our everyday lives. Machine learning powers everything from Netflix recommendations to your Facebook newsfeed and Google search results. Soon it will power your home and your car. According to technology research firm Tractica, the artificial intelligence market is set to reach $11. 1bn by 2024. It’s clear why AI smarts are so highly in demand from large technology companies who want to predict our online behaviours. While Britain is certainly benefiting from this demand, we should be making the most of our heritage, and world-leading scientists, helping to grow these companies into independent and powerful entities. Yes, Britain shines in AI – but we shouldn’t so willingly give up our crown. AI timeline READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 1:26pm CES 2018: Time for the world's biggest tech show to get its mojo back Premium Comment: Why can YouTubers get away with posting controversial content? 06 Jan 2018, 10:02am Comment: Logan Paul's disastrous YouTube video is just a symptom of very modern problem Chris Stokel-Walker Premium 06 Jan 2018, 9:13am What is ethereum and how does it differ from Bitcoin? 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Garry White Premium 04 Jan 2018, 6:16pm 'The world feels anxious and divided': Mark Zuckerberg vows to fix Facebook in new year's message 04 Jan 2018, 4:51pm Ripple passes £100 billion to close in on Bitcoin as largest cryptocurrency Premium Please support us by disabling your adblocker We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph How fairy tales could stop killer robots from taking over the world 17 February 2016 • 10:12am Artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world may worry some doomsayers but a team of academics believe they can curtail the threat - by teaching them fairy tales. Fairy tales are being used to teach robots not to murder, with the ultimate goal of stopping them from rising up against humanity, the Georgia Institute of Technology has revealed. Researchers at the institute believe they can teach robots the difference from right and wrong thanks to a system called Quixote, CNET. com reports. It uses AI crowdsourced story plots and assigns reward signals when the robot does something ‘good’. It also sends punishment signals for antagonistic actions, helping to teach the robot which actions are socially and ethically acceptable. Charles Perrault: fairy tale visionary Charles Perrault: fairy tale visionary Credit: Google “The collected stories of different cultures teach children how to behave in socially acceptable ways with examples of proper and improper behaviour in fables, novels and other literature,” explained Mark Riedl, an associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. “We believe story comprehension in robots can eliminate psychotic-appearing behaviour and reinforce choices that won't harm humans and still achieve the intended purpose. ” He added: “We believe that AI has to be enculturated to adopt the values of a particular society, and in doing so, it will strive to avoid unacceptable behaviour. “Giving robots the ability to read and understand our stories may be the most expedient means in the absence of a human user manual. ” Stephen Hawking has warned about the threat of AI Stephen Hawking has warned about the threat of AI Credit: AFP One story involved a robot going to get medicine for a human who needed it as quickly as possible. It was rewarded for waiting in line but given a punishment for stealing it. “Many cultures produce a wealth of data about themselves in the form of written stories and, more recently, television and movies. Stories can be written to inform, educate, or to entertain,” reads the research paper by Riedl and research scientist Brent Harrison “Regardless of their purpose, stories are necessarily reflections of the culture and society that they were produced in. Stories encode many types of sociocultural knowledge: commonly shared knowledge, social protocols, examples of proper and improper behaviour, and strategies for coping with adversity. ” Fairy tales Artificial intelligence could mean end of human race, Stephen Hawking has previously warned. He argues that robots could “supersede” humanity as it developed faster than biological evolution. Elon Musk has also launched a $1bn fund to “save the world” from destruction by artificial intelligence. 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Google's machine beats master at ancient game of Go in historic AI breakthrough 27 January 2016 • 6:00pm A computer program developed by Google has beaten a professional player at the ancient strategy game of Go, a potentially-historic breakthrough in the quest to develop artificial intelligence capable of matching humans. DeepMind, a British AI company owned by the internet giant, has developed software that repeatedly beat the European champion of the fiendishly-difficult board game, an advance that has evaded researchers for years and was believed to be a decade away. Go, a Chinese pastime that dates back 2,500 years, is one of the last games in which humans have maintained their superiority over machines. Its rules are simple, with opponents using black and white stones to try and dominate as much of a board as possible, but it takes a lifetime to master. There are 10 times as many potential moves in any one turn as in chess, and the number of game combinations exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. An overhead shot of Go Go is a simple game but is notoriously difficult to master Its vast number of possible outcomes means machines cannot beat humans simply by using raw computing power to scan combinations of moves, in contrast to chess, in which IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat world champion Gary Kasparov 19 years ago. Instead, DeepMind developed a program that learned to play Go in a similar way to humans, by playing repeated games and figuring out the moves that are most likely to lead to success. Researchers believe these “deep learning” techniques could be used to build artificial intelligence capable of surpassing humans in many areas. The AlphaGo software was able to scan the gaming patterns of world-class players as well as playing millions of games against itself, learning by trial and error. It then beat rival machines 494 times out of 495, and last October beat the reigning European Go champion Fan Hui five times in a row. It is now due to play Lee Sedol, the world’s best player, in March. Until now, the most advanced Go programs were only able to match up to amateur players. Gary Kasparov losing to IBM's Deep Blue at chess in 1996 Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue at chess in 1997 Credit: EPA The breakthrough, published in the scientific journal Nature, is one of the “long-standing grand challenges of artificial intelligence”, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis said. “This has been the holy grail since Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, and it’s held out for over 20 years. People were estimating it would be 10-plus years away just last year,” he said. While they might appear trivial, strategy games are a crucial test of computer intelligence. They must successfully interpret the situation and predict their opponent’s strategy, appearing to be “creative” rather than following rules that a human could suss out. The same techniques used to teach AlphaGo to play Go could be used to develop digital assistants that will automate parts of our daily lives, diagnose medical conditions faster than human doctors and help solve major scientific challenges such as modelling climate change and curing diseases, Mr Hassabis said. Facebook, which like Google is racing to develop artificial intelligence, has also been attempting to build a computer that can beat professional Go players. The ancient Chinese game of Go is one of the last games where the best human players can still beat the best artificial. . . Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s inventor, said on Wednesday that the company was “close” to beating the world’s best players at Go, although Mr Hassabis said that Facebook's software would present "no challenge" to AlphaGo. AI timeline READ MORE ABOUT: If you would like to add a comment, please register or log in Register Log in Please review our commenting policy Technology latest 06 Jan 2018, 2:35pm Bitcoin futures investors set to suffer losses as cryptocurrency fever fades Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm How can I buy bitcoin in the UK? Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin: Here are Bitcoin's four closest rivals Premium 06 Jan 2018, 2:28pm What is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it? 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Click here for instructions The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Four things we learned from the Festival of Marketing 2016 Katie Price speaks at the Festival of Marketing 2016 Credit: Getty Images/Tristan Fewings 11 October 2016 • 1:45pm From digital transformation to artificial intelligence, speakers from the Festival of Marketing reveal the biggest trends to expect in 2017 and beyond. The Festival of Marketing 2016 brought together more than 200 professionals for workshops and live debates, to learn about what’s been driving the industry – and to discuss what’s coming next. Here, panelists share what they think is the next big thing for marketing in this digital age. Digital transformation can’t be an isolated programme “Digital transformation is a hot topic for many companies at the moment. While in the past business transformation was driven internally, digital transformation is now mostly customer-driven. The customer is increasingly digital and mobile. He or she expects timely, relevant and personalised experiences – anytime and anywhere. Companies that don’t adjust to this new reality will become irrelevant. “True digital transformation can’t be an isolated programme. It needs to be ingrained in the overall DNA of a company. It entails not only digital marketing and sales, but also connected digital propositions (toothbrushes, for example) and new business models. To be successful, digital transformation must be managed as an organisational change (processes, culture, staff), not just a technological one. ” Paul Poels, global lead of digital analytics, Philips Artificial intelligence offers a way to be more personal “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next frontier for marketing. It poses an enormous opportunity to create more meaningful connections than we’ve ever had. But getting clients to see it as a powerful tool – which can make them more relevant and effective – is a challenge. “AI takes millions of bytes of data and analyses it, providing a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and belief. That’s a powerful insight. As the industry begins to grapple with ad-blocking and a consumer with a more sophisticated eye, AI offers a way to be more personal, targeted and relevant. It allows brands to offer the right kind of marketing and content, at precisely the right time. “Millennials, for example, are more concerned with being entertained by brands that really understand their need for a one-to-one relationship. Brands that are willing to invest in making a ‘real’ connection will reap the rewards. ” Tash Whitmey, CEO, Havas Helia Social media is crucial for customer interaction “Irrespective of the industry you work in, social media is playing a more important role in customer interaction. An effective strategy here can do more for your reputation than anything else. For example, our business is about supporting parents through the first 1,000 days of their baby’s life. Parents are reaching out on social channels for advice. It’s important that we can offer reassurance and guidance in a timely and efficient manner. “By simplifying our processes, and reviewing our community management team and most frequently asked questions, we’ve developed an approach that has taken our response times down to 20 minutes across all social channels. It’s not easy, but the digital world is where your most engaged consumers are, so it really is crucial. Be genuinely accessible and responsive to your consumers. ” Tom Benton, head of digital, Danone Nutricia Early Life Nutrition UK The internet of things (IoT) will create brand ecosystems “Omnichannel marketing is where a customer has a seamless experience, no matter the time, place or device (desktop, mobile, tablet). This requires access to lots of data in order to develop a single customer view – a consistent summary of a customer’s relationships with an organisation or brand. “The connection of everyday devices to the web, via IoT, will give brands a far richer dataset. Such a dataset could enable them to understand consumer psychology based on specific moments (for example, preparing dinner for the family) rather than just demographics and general interests. “According to Intel, there could be up to 200 billion connected devices by 2020. From a marketing perspective, once products are connected to the internet, they can start to have a transformative effect on industry structures. Look no further than Uber for an example of that. “Transformational projects should always be led by a clear and overarching strategy, which requires a keen understanding of the customer and market, strong leadership and disciplined action. ” Seán Donnelly, senior research analyst, Econsultancy Connect community? 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We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support. Need help? Click here for instructions Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement andrew_oxlade Andrew Oxlade Time to panic? No, follow the investment rulebook Kyle Caldwell My five investment resolutions for 2016 Richard Evans Richard Evans Bank security: annoying AND useless James Anderson This is why I'm worried for investors in the FTSE 100 'Facial scans that can calculate risk': new tools that will transform your finances From robo-advisers to Google Glass, technology is set to re-invent the way people manage their finances, says fintech expert Holly Mackay The new Google Glass 'Thin' prescription frames in One expert predicts nine out of 10 Tokyo olympics visitors will use augmented reality By Holly Mackay 7:52AM GMT 07 Feb 2016 The pace of technological change in the retail financial market is accelerating fast – and some weird science is coming soon to an investment portfolio near you. Payments, banking, pensions and investments are being shaken up by the “geek squad”. Old, established brands such as Aviva now have spin-offs called things like Digital Garage, and last year the regulator received 39 requests for help from companies wanting to set up computerised financial advice systems, otherwise known as “robo-advisers”. Mobile payments have been the first thing to change our financial patterns. Millions are hailing an Uber cab, or buying coffee from Starbucks with a tap on their mobile phone. YoyoWallet, the UK’s fastest growing mobile wallet, gives consumers a reward each time they use their phone app to pay for services. The firm has thousands of students using the app across 12 universities in the UK to purchase food on campus, and the startup has branched out to bigger businesses. • Nutmeg cuts fees amid arrival of cheaper 'roboadvisers' • Risks emerge in the age of robot advisers • Could Britain's next runaway tech success be one of these? iZettle has helped sole traders and small businesses that normally can’t afford to accept debit cards to accept card payments through a mobile phone. Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: “The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online. ” • The best of Telegraph Money: get our weekly newsletter So-called “challenger banks” are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves. Many people coming to work in the UK find opening a bank account a frustrating process, requiring an appointment with a Jobcentre for a “proof of identity” interview which can take months. Monese is a mobile banking app that reportedly achieves this in five minutes. Aside from banking and payments, many anticipate positive change in the savings and investments market as disruptors shake the clunky paper-based incumbents who are still too opaque on charges. "I think it’s maybe five years at least until the technology is at a level where AI can take on more of the customer-facing roles. " Anthony Morrow Keeping track of pensions isn’t a fun job. Today’s workers are a mobile lot and many of us have multiple small accounts scattered around, some of which we may have even forgotten about. Pension Bee is a newly launched online pension manager that helps people to find their pensions and combine them in an online plan, with the underlying assets managed by some big names such as BlackRock. Low cost and simplicity are its catchphrases. Robo-advice hit our shores with the launch of Nutmeg back in 2012. These services help people who haven’t the foggiest about investing by effectively delegating the portfolio construction to a computer – which is less likely to make a bad decision than an irrational human. Answer a few questions about your money and attitude to risk and – voila – a ready-made investment meal appears. Robos are evolving to play on our guilt as a motivating force. True Potential has an Impulse Save app. Splashed the cash and feeling guilty? Tap the Impulse Save and send some funds to your investment account by way of atonement. Nutmeg is reportedly considering geo-location to allow consumers to pay money into their portfolio when they reach certain locations — for example, when they visit fast-food restaurants, and could be prompted to counteract a bad habit with a good one. eVestor is a new Robo, backed by Moneysupermarket founder Duncan Cameron, expecting to launch at the end of the year. With total charges intended to be just 0. 44pc for the online portfolio, this will indeed be a disruptive force. Chief Executive Anthony Morrow accepts that the simple delivery of an online portfolio alone will not be enough. Could artificial intelligence plug the gap by providing financial advice? “I think it’s maybe five years at least until the technology is at a level where AI can take on more of the customer-facing roles,” Mr Morrow said. IBM has been a major player in AI with its Watson technology which combines human capabilities with artificial intelligence. It can understand language, ingest large volumes of data (such as documents and videos), draw insights – and supposedly help us make better decisions. • Newsletter: Get a weekly round-up of investment ideas Watson is currently live with the Development Bank of Singapore, which is using it with its high-end customers and there are whispers that it is in test with private banks here. Does this actually work? According to Bharat Bhushan, IBM Industry Architect for Wealth and Asset Management, “Watson first appeared on the US TV show Jeopardy in 2011 when its one capability was to answer general knowledge questions. Today we’re seeing it solve complex problems such as cancer detection and treatment". In addition to AI, the next Big Thing is augmented and virtual reality. technology research firm, this is coming our way and soon. Rather startlingly, he believes that 9 out of 10 visitors to the Tokyo Olympics will use some sort of augmented reality, whether that’s real-time translation, navigation (helped by technology such as Google Glass, effectively offering a satnav just off your main line of vision) or additional information on athletes normally reserved for TV replays. In the States, Fidelity have already worked with Google Glass so you can check your portfolio as you walk to work. In January this year, Swiss-based firm nviso launched a pilot with advisers in the States, using 3D facial imaging coupled with artificial intelligence algorithms to track and analyse facial expressions and reactions to financial scenarios in real-time to help you to discover how you really feel about your finances and risk. Sceptical? Check out the EmotionScan tool they built with the Bank of New Zealand and see for yourself. Weird science is headed our way, hopefully making banking, saving and investing easier, more appealing, cheaper – and arguably more successful for all of us. Holly Mackay is the founder of Boringmoney. co. uk. Telegraph Money invited her to write this piece following the Digital Investor conference in London last which we she hosted. Holly Mackay Holly Mackay by Geoff-Pugh Photo: Geoff Pugh/Telegraph • Have a question for our experts? Email moneyexpert@telegraph. co. uk dailytelegraphmoney Follow @moneytelegraph Read more Personal Finance News» Howard Marks: 'I rely on royalty cheques' Howard Marks once kept cardboard boxes of cash under his bed smuggler, made millions. Now he eagerly awaits royalty cheques. The kitchen coup – how cash shifted the balance of power over household chores A clean sweep: hoovering, tidying and wiping surfaces clean are the chores women most enjoy - Cleanliness: my substitute for godliness Economic study charts how women’s increased presence in the workplace has driven men to compensate by doing the dishes The inspector calls – and house prices jump How the Ofsted effect could add thousands to the value of your house (or send it sliding) Paul Daniels: 'I wasn't even a millionaire when I met Debbie McGee' Paul Daniels accused of racism after 'Paki' tweet Video fortune on his home - despite the flood Comments Budget 2016: George Osborne's speech in charts Following George Osborne's announcement of the 2016 Budget, The Telegraph looks at the numbers on the UK's economy and financial health Just stop tampering with pensions, Chancellor Pension fund box Telegraph View: George Osborne should simply abandon changes that will reduce incentives to save and create yet more uncertainty Quiz: How much should you be panicking about your finances? A woman using an ATM A light-hearted quiz about the gaping maw of financial misery that perpetually threatens to devour us all More people in their 70s in higher tax bracket than those in their thirties Anyone advertising for someone of a specific age or sex could be breaking the law Turnaround in pensioner wealth now means a higher proportion of septuagenarians have incomes above the £42,385 threshold than their younger counterparts despite most having retired Comments Advertisement Advertisement Latest finance videos » Financial Detox: how to save money at work Financial detox: saving money at work Financial Detox: Shopping Financial detox: tips for saving on shopping BP boss: oil won't hit $100 a barrel for long time City of London Sponsored Five ways Brexit could impact your investments Your browser does not support iframes. MCX More from the web inance2. html Advertisement Advertisement More from the web More from The Telegraph Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Monday 01 January 2018 Advertisement 'Robot doctor' app raises $25m to predict future of your health London startup Babylon is building an artificially intelligent doctor Ali Parsa is the chief executive of digital doctor app, Babylon Madhu Murgia By Madhumita Murgia 12:00AM GMT 14 Jan 2016 Follow British digital healthcare startup Babylon has raised $25m, the largest series A funding round in European digital healthcare till date. The mobile app, which launched in February last year, has built an artificially intelligent “doctor” that can decode symptoms and prevent illnesses before they occur, by tracking your daily habits, and integrating data about your heart rate, diet and your medical records. Sources close to the business say it is currently valued significantly higher than $100m. Investors include successful British entrepreneurs such as the founders of Innocent Drinks and DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company. Currently, the London-based startup offers a mobile doctor app used by 250,000 people in the UK – pay £4. 99 a month, and get 7-days-a-week access to their pool of human doctors over video chat. “We can use artificial intelligence to start predicting the future of your health" Ali Parsa, Babylon CEO Nearly 60 businesses including Citigroup, Sky, and MasterCard, as well as health insurance providers such as Bupa and Aviva, have partnered with Babylon to offer its services to UK employees. Babylon is also trialling a partnership with the NHS, with a new pilot in Birmingham that makes its services available to the broader UK population. The Telegraph tested an early version of the AI doctor. It can respond to questions about standard medical symptoms like headaches or fevers, by asking relevant questions (such as "did you hit your head? " or "are you feeling dizzy, nauseous? " and "do you have a fever? "), and tell you the best course of action. Crunching hundreds of millions of variations of symptoms and outcomes, it may suggest going to a pharmacist, staying hydrated or booking a GP appointment. It will also remind you to take medication, but will not prescribe. To flag up future illness, it analyses physiological, biological and medical history data. For instance, it can warn you about higher than normal heart rate, suggesting you may develop a cold. “We can use artificial intelligence to start predicting the future of your health,” chief executive Ali Parsa said. “I genuinely believe Britain has a great chance to be a global leader in digital health. " telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement What happens when a computer program is taught to write new episodes of Friends Artificial intelligence network attempts to recreate scene from comedy show after being fed every single script The Friends cast in Monica's apartment, the set which will be the main attraction at FriendsFest 'Monica: I hate men! I hate men! ' Photo: ALAMY By James Titcomb 4:30PM GMT 20 Jan 2016 Follow They say a monkey left to hit a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will write Shakespeare, but when it comes to Friends scripts, a computer can do the job a lot quicker. An artificial intelligence program, when fed with scripts from the entire Friends back catalogue, has produced hilarious, if not entirely up to scratch, new scenes for the show. The network re-creates the back-and-forth conversations between the show's six lead members, including faithfully adding character traits such as Chandler beginning sentences with "so," and Joey's "seriously", although they probably wouldn't be accepted by the show's producers. Andy Herd, a software developer from Dundee and creator of the Pandyland web comic, used a recurrent neural network - a form of artificial intelligence that has proven to be relatively adapt at understanding and forming language - to generate the new scripts. i fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of friends and it learned to generate new scenes pic. twitter. com/RIPvYuzEJM — Andy Pandy (@_Pandy) January 18, 2016 Although they make little sense, the tone and character of Friends is unmissable. It even includes Jean-Claude Van Damme, a guest star in one episode. A particular highlight is the following exchange: Chandler: So, Phoebe likes my pants Monica: Chicken Bob! Chandler: (in a muffin) (Runs to the girls to cry) Can I get some presents. Interactive: friends4 Interactive: friends3 Interactive: friends1 Interactive: friends2 There have been huge advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, with speech, image and text recognition as well as sentence formation improving markedly. This is enabling a wave of semi-intelligent assistants and customer service bots. Humour is seen as one of the final frontiers of artificial intelligence, being one of the most difficult things for computers to understand, which is perhaps unsurprising since psychologists also don't understand it nearly as well as other psychological phenomena. Most jokes told by robots have been pretty elementary, and pun based - "What do you call a strange market? A bizarre bazaar". Recent reports of a Friends reunion have been quashed, but if it does happen soon, scriptwriters probably won't be nervously looking over their shoulders. telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Sunday 31 December 2017 Advertisement Google network learns to play Space Invaders in breakthrough for artificial intelligence The DQN network learned how to play classic video games including Space Invaders and Breakout without programming The network mastered the Atari game Space Invaders after being given just minimal information The network mastered the Atari game Space Invaders after being given just minimal information Photo: ALAMY Sarah Knapton By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor 7:18PM GMT 25 Feb 2015 Follow Artificial intelligence has taken a major step forward after Google created a network which learned to play a range of computer games on its own without being pre-programmed. The Deep Q Network (DQN) was given just the basic data from one Atari game and an algorithm which learned by trying out different scenarios to come up with the best score. Without any further programming the network worked out how to play a further 48 classic video games including Space Invaders and Breakout. Demis Hassabis of Google’s artificial intelligence arm DeepMind said the ultimate goal was to create a computer which had the mental capabilities of a toddler. “This work is the first time that anyone has built a single general learning system that can learn directly from experience to learn a wide range of challenging tasks,” he said. Related Articles 20 Apr 2016 06 Feb 2015 25 Feb 2015 billions and achieving little 19 Feb 2015 “In this case a set of Atari games and perform at better or human level on those fames “DQN can learn to play dozens of the games straight out of the box. We don’t preprogramme it between its games. “It has minimal sets of assumptions and all it gets access to are the raw pixel inputs and the game score and from there it has to figure out what it controls in the game world and how to get points and master the game just by playing the game directly. “It’s the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel over a diverse array of challenging tasks. ” Mr Hassabis said the network was far superior to the computer Deep Blue which became the first machine to surpass humans when it beat chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997. “With Deep Blue it was the team of chess grand masters which instilled the chess knowledge into a programme and that programme effectively executed that without adapting or learning anything," he said. “What we’ve done is build algorithms which learn from the ground up, so you give them perceptual experience and they learn how to do thinks directly. “The idea is that these types of systems are more human like in the way they learn because that is how humans learn, by learning from, the world around us, using our senses, to allow us to make decisions and plans. ” Google programmers said they had been amazed with some of the solutions that the network had come up with for winning the game, such as keeping the submarine just below water level in SeaQuest to stay alive and creating a tunnel in Breakout so that the ball passed through and could hit more bricks. “One of the things we’re trying to do we’re trying to build the ability of two or three year toddler, pre-linguistic toddler and we aren’t anywhere close to that," Mr Hassabis said. “But this is as good as a professional human game tester. ” The research was published in the journal Nature. Science News In Science News A combination photograph shows the beginning (top L) to the end (top L to bottom R) of a total solar eclipse as seen from the beach of Ternate island, Indonesia Total eclipse, in pictures Scott Kelly returns to Earth The remote economy of the Svalbard archipelago An astonishing image of a pregnant pony uterus has been selected as the overall winner for the 2015 Wellcome Image Awards. The photograph was taken by Michael Frank, and is of an historic specimen from the Lanyon Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College in London. It shows the preserved uterus of a New Forest pony, approximately five months into the pregnancy Wellcome Image Awards The first space 'selfie' Named after Sir David Space selfie by European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst Pictures of the year- part 4 Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. Grand stand views of London In pics: Stunning aerial shots of London's football stadia by photographer Jason Hawkes Russia's abandoned space shuttles Russia's abandoned space shuttles at the Baikonur Cosmodrome In pics: The crumbling remains of the Soviet Union's space programme Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects Sinkholes around the world Vehicles following a cave-in of car park in Meridian, Mississippi In pics: Sinkholes, craters and collapsed roads around the world Comments The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers Kim Jong-un: His bizarre photoshoots North Korean leader Kim Jong-un speaks at an event declaring the construction of Ryomyong Street, in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang The bizarre photo opportunities of North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. The 10 hardest universities to get into The Complete University Guide has revealed the universities with the toughest entry criteria. Does your university make the list? Blood Moon in pictures Blood moon:Amazing photos of total 'supermoon' lunar eclipse seen around the world Amazing photos of total 'supermoon' lunar eclipse seen around the world The most exclusive boarding schools With private school fees at their least affordable since the 1960s, we take a look at some of the most expensive schools in the world Advertisement Telegraph on Facebook Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from The Telegraph Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from The Telegraph Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Friday 05 January 2018 Advertisement Google's artificial intelligence interprets photos as animal faces, with creepy results Engineers run photos through neural network that interprets them as disturbing collections of animal faces Dogs on horse from Google Many of the results are pretty disturbing Photo: Google By James Titcomb 10:48AM BST 02 Jul 2015 Follow Google has been one of the world's biggest backers of artificial intelligence development, investing heavily in machine learning technology, including with last year's acquisition of British company DeepMind. The company is developing "neural networks" that can spot patterns in pictures to identify them. The technology already allows it to recognise animals and faces in its new photos app, for example. However, tweak the network in a certain way, and the results can be rather strange. New: Google unleashes machine dreaming software on the public, nightmarish images flood the internet In an experiment, engineers at Google's research labs ran various pictures through its neural network, asking the software to identify patterns in the images and then alter that image to exaggerate the patterns. In other words, it sees a pattern it thinks it recognises, such as a face or a door, and makes the picture look a little bit more like that thing. The neural network then repeats the process with the altered image. If that happens enough times, it will change a picture radically. In this particular instance, the neural network had largely been trained by pictures of animals, so any image sent through the feedback loop would be returned as a disturbing collage of animal faces. "The results are intriguing—even a relatively simple neural network can be used to over-interpret an image, just like as children we enjoyed watching clouds and interpreting the random shapes," Google engineers Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah and Mike Tyka said in a blogpost. "This network was trained mostly on images of animals, so naturally it tends to interpret shapes as animals. But because the data is stored at such a high abstraction, the results are an interesting remix of these learned features. " As well as animals, the neural network often interprets points on a long-range image as pagodas or towers. "The results vary quite a bit with the kind of image, because the features that are entered bias the network towards certain interpretations," the authors said. "For example, horizon lines tend to get filled with towers and pagodas. Rocks and trees turn into buildings. Birds and insects appear in images of leaves. " Google is using the artificial intelligence software in its own products (Photos being one example), but the engineers said the techniques could one day be used as a new artform - a new way to remix visual concepts. While that might not be to everyone's tastes, the results are undoubtedly intriguing. The full list of photos are here. Here's what happens to the Google logo. ^(All photos: Google) telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Monday 01 January 2018 Advertisement Top scientists call for caution over artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence has the potential to eradicate disease and poverty, say world's top scientists, but researchers must not create something which cannot be controlled Google is reportedly poised to unveil a pair of Terminator-style glasses with a heads-up display that would allow users to view information on the move. Artificial intelligence must be carefully considered, say scientists Photo: REX By Matthew Sparkes, Deputy Head of Technology 11:46AM GMT 13 Jan 2015 Follow Dozens of the world’s top artificial intelligence experts have signed an open letter calling for researchers to take care to avoid potential “pitfalls” of the disruptive technology. Those who have already signed the letter include Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, the co-founders of DeepMind, Google's director of research Peter Norvig and Harvard professor of computer science David Parkes. “There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase,” says the letter, published by The Future of Life Institute. “The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilisation 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. Some of the research priorities set out in an accompanying paper describe the need to remain in control of any artificially intelligent machine – “systems must do what we want them to do” – while others relate to the ethics of autonomous weapons. Related Articles glasses with a heads-up display that would allow users to view information on the move. 03 Dec 2014 23 Jan 2015 The paper suggests that it “may be desirable to retain some form of meaningful human control” over intelligent machines designed to kill. It also warns that legislative efforts are needed before autonomous cars become a practical and ubiquitous technology: “If self-driving cars cut the roughly 40,000 annual US traffic fatalities in half, the car makers might get not 20,000 thank-you notes, but 20,000 lawsuits. ” Professor Stephen Hawking has previously said that the rise of artificial intelligence could see the human race become extinct. He told the BBC: ''The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. '' Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has also described the rise of AI in the past as ''our biggest existential threat''. Technology News The Christmas leap in tablet computer sales means that half of Britons are now using them, following a flood of cheap devices on to the market. The best tablets In Technology News Mobile photography awards Royal Mail Inventive Britain stamp set Celebrating British Inventions Instagramming the world Instagramming the UK Kelly Osbourne, a host of E! ’s Fashion Police, gets to grips with wearable tech on the red carpet of the 2013 Do Something Awards in Hollywood. Is Google Glass doomed? Facebook isn't dying. It's just changing Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement Apple founder: 'Computers will take over from humans' Engineering genius Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, has warned that artificially intelligent computers will take over from humans and that the future is “scary and very bad for people” Steve Wozniak, who set-up the company in the mid-1970s with Steve Jobs before leaving in 1987 Steve Wozniak set-up Apple in the mid-1970s with Steve Jobs before leaving in 1987 Photo: Reuters By Matthew Sparkes, Deputy Head of Technology 1:41PM GMT 23 Mar 2015 Follow The co-founder of Apple who designed the company’s first computers in the 1970s has warned that artificial intelligence will take over from humans and that the future is “scary and very bad for people”. "Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” he said in an interview with the Australian Financial Review. He explained that strong artificial intelligence, which would recreate the power and creativity of the human mind in software, is a risky thing for researchers to strive for. "Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently," Wozniak said. "Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that… But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines… well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice. " Professor Stephen Hawking has previously said that the rise of artificial intelligence could see the human race become extinct. He told the BBC: ''The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. '' Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has also described the rise of AI in the past as ''our biggest existential threat''. Dozens of the world’s top artificial intelligence experts have signed an open letter calling for researchers to take care to avoid potential “pitfalls” of the disruptive technology. Wozniak left Apple during the 1980s, claiming to be more interested in engineering than management. He has since gone on to be involved in numerous start-ups and philanthropically projects. He is said to remain an honorary employee of Apple and receive an annual stipend, however. During his most recent interview he also said that he wasn’t sure if Apple is working on its own car, or just polishing its CarPlay operating system, but that “it seems like they might be hiring a lot of people who could really build a vehicle. ” WATCH: Apple's 2014 in 60 seconds telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Technology email signup More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Google releases its artificial intelligence software into the wild Google is open-sourcing its machine learning system, TensorFlow, in the hope that it will accelerate research into artificial intelligence Google logo Google admits that its machine learning system could work much better Photo: AFP By Sophie Curtis 3:50PM GMT 10 Nov 2015 Follow Google has announced that it is releasing its artificial intelligence software into the wild, allowing third-party developers to contribute to its evolution. Artificial intelligence – or what Google describes as "machine learning" – is making computers and gadgets smarter every day. From image recognition to voice translation and noise cancellation, Google uses machine learning in many of its products, and has pumped a huge amount of its research and development budget into improving these systems. Earlier this year, for example, Google engineers released the bizarre results of an artificial intelligence experiment, which saw photos interpreted and edited by the company's "neural network", which has been trained to detect faces and other patterns in images. Google Tree One of the images thrown up by Google's neural network Photo: Google The latest iteration of its machine learning system is known as TensorFlow, which Google claims is faster, smarter and more flexible than its predecessor, DistBelief, which Google used to demonstrate that concepts like “cat” could be learned from unlabeled YouTube images. "We use TensorFlow for everything from speech recognition in the Google app, to Smart Reply in Inbox, to search in Google Photos," said Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, in a blog post. "It’s a highly scalable machine learning system – it can run on a single smartphone or across thousands of computers in data centres. " However, even with all the progress Google has made with machine learning, it admits that it could still work much better. Computers today still can’t do what a four-year-old can do effortlessly, like knowing the name of a dinosaur after seeing only a couple examples, or understanding that “I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago” doesn’t mean the canyon is hurtling over the city. This is why the company is "open-sourcing" the system, allowing third-party developers to access the raw computer code, adapt it, and start using it in their own applications. "We've seen firsthand what TensorFlow can do, and we think it could make an even bigger impact outside Google. So today we’re also open-sourcing TensorFlow," said Mr Pichai. "We hope this will let the machine learning community – everyone from academic researchers, to engineers, to hobbyists – exchange ideas much more quickly, through working code rather than just research papers. And that, in turn, will accelerate research on machine learning, in the end making technology work better for everyone. " He added that TensorFlow may be useful wherever researchers are trying to make sense of very complex data, from protein folding to crunching astronomy data. The news comes as new research released by online marketing technology company Rocket Fuel, reveals that almost twice as many people believe artificial intelligence can solve big world problems compared to those who think it is a threat to humanity. Channel 4's series, Humans prompted widespread debate about the dangers of artificial intelligence - and a world increasingly reliant on robots Stephen Hawking has famously been quoted as saying that the rise of artificial intelligence could see the human race become extinct, warning that technology will eventually ''supersede'' humanity, as it develops faster than biological evolution. However, the research reveals that only 21 per cent of Britons see artificial intelligence as a threat or are scared by it, while 42 per cent are excited or think it can solve big world problems. Meanwhile, despite reports that thousands of British jobs have already been replaced by machines, only 9 per cent of people believe that artificial intelligence will threaten their job, while 10 per cent think it will enhance it. telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Can artificial intelligence help your business? Chris Price reports on the developments in artificial intelligence that are helping to provide ‘big data’ to companies and make our lives simpler Stephen Hawking Image 1 of 2 Professor Stephen Hawking believes that full artificial intelligence poses a threat to human existence Photo: 2015 Anthony Harvey Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator Image 1 of 2 Features. No use without permission. By Chris Price 4:10PM GMT 04 Mar 2015 Artificial intelligence (AI) - the idea that machines and software can think and act like humans - isn’t new. Back in the early years of computing, Alan Turing predicted some of the ethical questions around AI that we still wrestle with today. Meanwhile AI has been widely portrayed in movies and science fiction over the years. For example, there was the psychotic HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the humanoids who attacked their human masters in I, Robot and, of course, The Terminator, where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines. To Professor Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC in a recent interview: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. " However, he conceded that elements of basic AI had been useful for him personally. The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak. This also uses technology from British company SwiftKey, which learns how the professor thinks and suggests the words he might want to use next, much like the SwiftKey keyboard app many of us use. Ben Medlock, co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, says: “The problem SwiftKey solves is the hassle of typing on mobile phones. We use AI to learn from individual users; our apps understand the way people use language and continually adapt, autocorrecting even the most unique words and phrases and predicting what you’ll type next. ” He adds: Our algorithm learns from and adjusts to your writing style, even if you’re juggling up to three languages simultaneously. ” Nor is SwiftKey the only business which has attracted attention for its timesaving use of AI. More AI-based technologies are permeating our experiences - from predictive apps that learn from each user and anticipate future behaviour to Google’s intelligent personal assistant, Google Now. AI is also proving useful for companies that need “big data” to make important decisions. For example, in 2012 Google scientists built an AI system that started to behave like a human web browser, analysing more than 10 million random YouTube thumbnails of cats over three days. And in 2014 Google spent £500 million acquiring London-based AI company Deep Mind - a company which has created a neural network that learns how to play video games as well as a computer that appears to mimic the short-term memory of the human brain. Another area where AI could play an important part is in science. One of the apps that IBM is currently working on for its AI supercomputer “Watson” is a medical diagnosis tool that can predict the likelihood of a particular disease given the symptoms you tell it. (Watson was originally developed to win the game show Jeopardy! against human contestants; its predecessor, Deep Blue, took on chess champion Gary Kasparov and won a six-game match. ) Although the technology isn’t yet available to patients directly, IBM provides partners with access to Watson's intelligence, helping them to develop user-friendly interfaces for doctors and hospitals. Speaking to Wired magazine, Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu, a start-up that is building a diagnostic device inspired by the Star Trek medical tricorder, said he thought this was the future. “I believe something like Watson will soon be the world's best diagnostician, whether machine or human. ” While some may see developments in AI as apocalyptic, it’s clear the technology has huge potential to benefit business and mankind as a whole. However, the more extreme interpretation of AI - where a machine can pass itself off as a human being or think creatively - is in all likelihood decades from becoming a reality, if at all. You may also be interested in: Connected car – what can it actually do? » Machine-to-machine and the Internet of Things explained » Digital technology drives Uber to global success » Engaged Customers More from Total Enterprise Mobility» Brought to you by EE logo Advertisement Advertisement Competition Win a 16GB iPad Air by submitting a business question Man holding phone to ear In no more than 100 words, submit a question relating to the use of 4G in your business. You could win a 16GB iPad Air Connected retail Mobile card payments boost business Mobile phone card payments Mobile payment services that combine card readers with smartphone apps open up opportunities for SMEs Targeting shoppers through their phones Lady with shopping bags on smartphone The smartphone has become a valuable tool, allowing retailers to access customer data, track footfall and send special offers Retail trends: what do shoppers want? Smart phone shopping It’s a question that retailers must constantly ask in the battle to grab the attention of consumers Olaf Swantee Big data skills will lead to big IT jobs Code vortex Data analysts and technical scientists will be key to Britain's modern business strategy. Maths and IT graduates have the power to make business boom Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Thursday 04 January 2018 Advertisement Threat from Artificial Intelligence not just Hollywood fantasy Oxford academic Dr Stuart Armstrong warns humanity runs the risk of creating super intelligent computers that eventually destroy us all Ex Machina 2015 Ex Machina 2015 Patrick Sawer By Patrick Sawer 11:00PM BST 27 Jun 2015 Follow From the dystopian writings of Aldous Huxley and HG Wells to the sinister and apocalyptic vision of modern Hollywood blockbusters, the rise of the machines has long terrified mankind. But it now seems that the brave new world of science-fiction could become all too real. An Oxford academic is warning that humanity runs the risk of creating super intelligent computers that eventually destroy us all, even when specifically instructed not to harm people. Dr Stuart Armstrong, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, has predicted a future where machines run by artificial intelligence become so indispensable in human lives they eventually make us redundant and take over. And he says his alarming vision could happen as soon as the next few decades. Dr Armstrong said: "Humans steer the future not because we're the strongest or the fastest, but because we're the smartest. "When machines become smarter than humans, we'll be handing them the steering wheel. " He spoke as films and TV dramas such as Channel 4's Humans and Ex-Machina, - which both explore the blurred lines between man and robot - have once again tapped into man's fear of creating a machine that will eventually come to dominate him. Dr Armstrong envisages machines capable of harnessing such large amounts of computing power, and at speeds inconceivable to the human brain, that they will eventually create global networks with each other - communicating without human interference. It is at that point that what is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - in contrast to computers that carry out specific, limited, tasks, such as driverless cars - will be able to take over entire transport systems, national economies, financial markets, healthcare systems and product distribution. "Anything you can imagine the human race doing over the next 100 years there's the possibility AGI will do very, very fast," he said. But while handing over mundane tasks to machines may initially appear attractive, it contains within it the seeds of our own destruction. In attempting to limit the powers of such super AGIs mankind could unwittingly be signing its own death warrant. Indeed, Dr Armstrong warns that the seemingly benign instruction to an AGI to "prevent human suffering", could logically be interpreted by a super computer as "kill all humans", thereby ending suffering all together. Furthermore, an instruction such as "keep humans safe and happy", could be translated by the remorseless digital logic of a machine as "entomb everyone in concrete coffins on heroin drips". While that may sound far fetched, Dr Armstrong says the risk is not so low that it can be ignored. "There is a risk of this kind of pernicious behaviour by a AI," he said, pointing out that the nuances of human language make it all too easily liable to misinterpretation by a computer. "You can give AI controls, and it will be under the controls it was given. But these may not be the controls that were meant. " Dr Armstrong, who was speaking at a debate on artificial intelligence organised in London by the technology research firm Gartner, warns that it will be difficult to tell whether a machine is developing in a benign or deadly direction. He says an AI would always appear to act in a way that was beneficial to humanity, making itself useful and indispensable - much like the iPhone's Siri, which answers questions and performs simple organisational tasks - until the moment it could logically take over all functions. "As AIs get more powerful anything that is solvable by cognitive processes, such as ill health, cancer, depression, boredom, becomes solvable," he says. "And we are almost at the point of generating an AI that is as intelligent as humans. " Dr Armstrong says mankind is now involved in a race to create 'safe AI' before it is too late. "Plans for safe AI must be developed before the first dangerous AI is created," he writes in his book Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence. "The software industry is worth many billions of dollars, and much effort is being devoted to new AI technologies. "Plans to slow down this rate of development seem unrealistic. So we have to race toward the distant destination of safe AI and get there fast, outrunning the progress of the computer industry. " One solution to the dangers of untrammelled AI suggested by industry experts and researchers is to teach super computers a moral code. Unfortunately, Dr Armstrong points out, mankind has spent thousands of years debating morality and ethical behaviour without coming up with a simple set of instructions applicable in all circumstances which it can follow. Imagine then, the difficulty in teaching a machine to make subtle distinctions between right and wrong. "Humans are very hard to learn moral behaviour from," he says. "They would make very bad role models for AIs. " telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraph Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. 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Blood Moon in pictures Blood moon:Amazing photos of total 'supermoon' lunar eclipse seen around the world Amazing photos of total 'supermoon' lunar eclipse seen around the world The most exclusive boarding schools With private school fees at their least affordable since the 1960s, we take a look at some of the most expensive schools in the world Advertisement Telegraph on Facebook Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from The Telegraph Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from The Telegraph Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Toyota places $1bn bet on robot technology World's biggest car company to invest $1bn on robots and artificial intelligence as it looks to the future Toyota says robots will be able to assist and interact with humans By Alan Tovey, Industry Editor 9:41AM GMT 06 Nov 2015 Follow Toyota is placing a $1bn bet on robots and artificial intelligence being major future technologies by setting up a new research and development unit to investigate their uses. The world’s biggest car company will spend the money over five years to establish the Toyota Research Institute near Stanford University in Silicon Valley, with a second facility at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is our responsibility to make life better for our customers, and society as a whole Akio Toyoda, Toyota president The Japanese industrial giant said that it “believes artificial intelligence has significant potential to support future industrial technologies and the creation of an entirely new industry”. Investment in the research institute will be spread over five years and Toyota said it hopes the centre will “bridge the gap between fundamental research and product development”. The institute’s primary mission will be to speed up development of robots and artificial intelligence and to “help resolve society's future challenges by using artificial intelligence and big data…contributing to a sustainable future where everyone can experience a safer, freer, and unconstrained life”. Toyota has appointed its executive technical adviser Gill Pratt as chief executive of the new enterprise. Work will start on the institute in January 2016 and the company is now looking to hire stars of the sector to work there. Although the institute’s work is likely to be biased towards the automotive sector, it is thought it will have spin off uses in adjacent fields. Toyota already has a “Partner Robot” programme (pictured left), which is developing automatons for fields such as entering people living alone, assisting with housework and mobility for the infirm. It also has industrial applications such as manufacturing. Dr Pratt said: “Our initial goals are to improve safety by continuously decreasing the likelihood that a car will be involved in an accident, make driving accessible to everyone, regardless of ability, and apply Toyota technology used for outdoor mobility to indoor environments, particularly for the support of seniors. “We also plan to apply our work more broadly, for example to improve production efficiency and accelerate scientific discovery in materials. " Akio Toyoda, Toyota president, added: “As technology continues to progress, so does our ability to improve products. At Toyota, we do not pursue innovation simply because we can; we pursue it because we should. It is our responsibility to make life better for our customers, and society as a whole. ” telegraph. co. uk Follow @telefinance Top finance galleries» The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. 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We explain why - and what it means for mortgages and savings The world's 10 most expensive cities 2015 New data: Discover the priciest cities around the globe for luxury property. Comments Tables: The cheapest places to buy an Isa Our colour-coded tables show at a glance which investment shop will be cheapest for you Comments Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Advertisement Advertisement More from The Telegraph News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Should humans fear the rise of the machine? Artificial intelligence could usher in a new age of productivity. But it also threatens many jobs and raises fears that the machines could turn on us The killer robots of film might be closer than we think The Terminator is just one scenario where the robots take over Photo: Warner Br/Everett/REX By James Titcomb 5:05PM BST 01 Sep 2015 Follow Within the space of a couple of decades, a robot may be writing this article. It will probably be delivering your post. And if it isn’t driving your car, you’ll need to get with the times. In the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from a pipedream, or the domain of science fiction, to a reality that is certain to have a profound impact on our lives. Not only is AI certain to make millions of jobs that exist today obsolete, it will also force us to ask major questions, about privacy, laws and ethics. Last week, many of the world’s eminent computer scientists and mathematicians gathered at University College Cork, Ireland, to celebrate the legacy of George Boole, a legendary mathematician whose work on logic and human thought laid the groundwork for modern computing and today’s artificial intelligence revolution. Boole, who was born two centuries ago this year, devised the theory of logic that underpins binary – the “on” and “off” or “one” and “zero” commands that make up the language of computer code. Many academics believe that, were it not for Boole’s premature death in 1864, the digital revolution that began when Claude Shannon used Boolean logic to build and devise a type of electrical circuit in the 1930s would have come several decades earlier. Claude Shannon pioneered modern computing Claude Shannon, who pioneered computing Boole was also an early influence of the idea of artificial intelligence, believing that all human thought could be reduced into a series of mathematical rules. On one trip to London, recalls his biographer Des MacHale, Boole marvelled at the “thinking” exercised by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, an early calculating machine using looms and punch cards. Given Boole’s legacy, it was unsurprising that much of the conversation surrounding his bicentenary centred on the current state of AI. Interest in computer software that can understand inputs and apply meaning to them, whether that is interpreting a search query, navigating a road or translating a foreign language, is at an unprecedented level. Applications of AI, such as Google’s search algorithm or Microsoft Excel’s automatic calculations, have been a part of everyday life for years (although it is a common complaint of advocates that as soon as an AI application becomes mainstream, people cease to think of it as intelligent). However, concepts have been in the popular imagination for much longer thanks to the science fiction of Isaac Asimov and Stanley Kubrick. Now, a series of developments have forced a step-change in progress. Rapid advancements in computing power and internet speeds, the huge increase in data collection and the deep pockets of Silicon Valley’s finest have combined to forge a new revolution in artifical intelligence. Apple's Siri is one application of AI Technologies that more closely resemble human intelligence, such as the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri, which is able to interpret and respond to human language commands, and image recognition software that can detect faces and animals in photos, are now commonplace. One of these “machine learning” companies is DeepMind, a British startup bought by Google for £300m last year. Other, perhaps more worthy applications that scan medical data to diagnose illness or monitor structures to detect faults are also in widespread use. “We’re in the AI Spring. A few years ago people would talk about it being overhyped or say: ‘That’s not possible’. That’s not the case now,” says Oren Etzioni, head of the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle. “There’s a wide-ranging commercial impact. ” The potential applications of AI are, of course, enormous. Technology that can scan vast amounts of data for patterns will revolutionise research, while the most laborious tasks will be left to robots, should humans learn to trust them. But, unsurprisingly, such possibilities also carry fears that huge parts of the workforce will become obsolete. Audi Factory One area where robots have already taken over Photo: Stefan Warter/Audi AG Robots don’t need salaries or benefits. They don’t demand evenings, weekends and holidays away from work to spend time with families or to sleep. They don’t come into work hungover, or late, and don’t argue with their co-workers. When they become cheap and capable enough, what business owner wouldn’t want to replace a human with a robot? This isn’t a new idea: Boole himself considered it more than 150 years ago, according to his wife Mary, who paraphrased his thoughts in 1868, shortly after his death: “If you spend time in doing work that a machine could do faster than yourselves, it should only be for exercise. ” But the question is attracting new attention as rapid advances in AI are made and concrete evidence of it replacing workers – from the self-service supermarket checkout to the driverless train carriage – emerges. If you spend time in doing work that a machine could do faster than yourselves, it should only be for exercise. George Boole Experts are divided on the impact the robotic worker will have on society. Some say that, just as the industrial revolution destroyed farming jobs but created factory work, the rise of the machines will foster new opportunities, many of which are not even imagined today. Others believe that the jobs that do emerge will be so specialised or skilled that large swathes of the working population will find themselves obsolete. “It’s a real concern,” says the Allen Institute's Otzioni. “The impact on the labour force is something we are really having a discussion about. ” Taking jobs is one thing, but a greater shadow potentially hangs over the concept of ever-smarter machines, one that everyone will recognise from the likes of the I, Robot and 2001: A Space Odyssey films – the idea that super-intelligent machines may, one day, turn on mankind. In the last year, several influential figures, among them Steven Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have warned that mankind is rushing headfirst into developing “real” intelligence without pausing to consider the potentially fatal consequences. "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," Hawking said last year. In January, Gates warned: “I don’t understand why some people aren’t concerned. ” Many of the experts gathered in Ireland last week brushed aside such concerns. Dr Kenneth Ford, a former Nasa executive who leads the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Florida, says most of the trepidation surrounding AI comes from our tendency towards anthropomorphism: assigning negative human qualities to machine intelligence. “We need to get beyond species-centric thinking,” says Dr Ford. “Where AI gets scary is the idea of AI that’s mimicking us, a human something’s too artificial, that it’s too human. ” Dr Ford says people mistakenly believe that man-made intelligence will resemble biological intelligence, in the same way that before the invention of the aeroplane, the starting point for human flight mostly centred around attaching feathered wings to human arms and flapping around like a bird. Goya flying machine How flight was once imagined. Are we making the same mistake with AI? He points out that HAL 9000, the antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey who turned on his human passengers, was racked by paranoia. HAL’s problem wasn’t his artificial qualities, it was his human defects, and there is no reason to believe a real-life artificial intelligence would have such qualities. But fears over the power of artifical intelligence have not been helped by the eminence of the Turing Test, often seen as the litmus paper for AI. To pass the Turing Test, devised 65 years ago by Alan Turing, a computer program must be able to convince a human communicating with it via a screen that it is, itself, human. Most researchers believe that while a great thought experiment, the Turing Test is not so much an indicator of intelligence as an exercise in mimicry. The Turing Test should be relegated to the history of science. It is essentially a test of humanness which is quite different from a test for intelligence Dr Kenneth Ford “The Turing Test is daft, he never intended it as a scientific goal,” says Dr Ford. "The Turing Test should be relegated to the history of science. It is essentially a test of humanness which is quite different from a test for intelligence. Starting a textbook on AI with the Turing Test would be akin to starting a book on flight with the idea that one must make things that can fly so like birds that they can fool birds into thinking that they are birds. " Etzioni says the test distracts from the real issues caused by AI, such as its economic impact. “The Turing Test was a brilliant idea but it’s evolved into a competition of chatbots,” he says. Regardless, any machine that can be considered to have a human level of intelligence is likely to be years away. For now, robots remain our faithful servants, although their impact is impossible to ignore. telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Artificially intelligent Mario learns to play his own game Researchers have created a version of the iconic video game character that is capable of thinking for himself Super Mario in the video game Super Mario Bros Super Mario in the Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros Photo: NINTENDO By Sophie Curtis 6:09PM GMT 19 Jan 2015 Follow Mario is one of the most iconic video game characters in history – having appeared in over 200 games, several television series and a feature film. But now, for the first time, the pudgy Italian plumber from the Mushroom Kingdom has been given a mind of his own. A team of cognitive modelling researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany have developed an artificial intelligence system that allows Mario to learn about his environment, experience emotions and respond to voice commands. In a video created to demonstrate the their work, the researchers show how Mario can describe his 'feelings' and act accordingly. For, example, when he is hungry he will collect coins, and when he is curious he will explore his environment autonomously. Using Carnegie-Mellon’s speech-recognition toolkit, Mario can understand a wide range of questions and instructions, and follow a logic and grammar tree to decide which response to give or which action to take. Mario can calculate how many moves he needs to make to reach a certain position, and also learn that jumping on a Goomba (one of his mushroom-shaped enemies) will destroy it. Related Articles 19 Jan 2015 17 Jan 2015 18 Jan 2015 13 Jan 2015 The Mario AI project is part of an annual competition run by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence – the aim of which is to document advances in artificial intelligence. The full list if entrants can be found here. The students at the University of Tubingen used Mario as part of their efforts to find out how the human mind works. Their focus is on the developmental aspects of the mind and the highly "interactive modularity" found in the brain. Video Games Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Loading Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement Cancer drug development time halved thanks to artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence has halved the time it has taken to bring a cancer combatting drug to market, start-up claims Blood tests could identify an increased risk of breast cancer long before mammograms can spot it, research suggests The drug can help cells metabolise glucose again, letting them die off Ian Douglas By Ian Douglas 9:46AM BST 09 Oct 2015 Follow A cancer-fighting drug is on target to be brought to market in half the expected time thanks to the use of artificial inteligence in testing, a start up has claimed. Berg Health, a pharmaceutical startup founded in 2008 with Silicon Valley venture capital backing, said it expected the drug to go on sale within three years, marking seven years in development compared to the general 14. Healthy cells feed on glucose in the body and die off, in a process known as cell death, when their usefulness draws to a close. But in some circumstances the mitochondria - the parts of the cell that provide its energy - malfunction and metabolise lactic acid instead of glucose, turning off their built-in cell death function at the same time. The cell can then becomes cancerous and a tumour grows. Berg’s drug, BPM31510, will reactivate the mitochondria, restarting the metabolising of glucose as normal and reinstituting cell death, so the body can harmlessly pass the problem cells out of the body. Berg Health's team used a specialised form of artificial intelligence to compare samples taken from patients with the most aggressive strains of cancer, including pancreatic, bladder and brain, with those from non-cancerous individuals. The technology highlighted disparities between the corresponding biological profiles, selecting those it predicted would respond best to the drug. "We’re looking at 14 trillion data points in a single tissue sample. We can’t humanly process that," said Niven Narain, a clinical oncologist and Berg co-founder. "Because we’re taking this data-driven approach we need a supercomputer capability. Code vortex Using big data can help the scientists process vast amounts "We use them for mathematics in a big data analytic platform, so it can collate that data into various categories: healthy population for women, for men, disease candidates etc, and it’s able to take these slices in time and integrate them so that we’re able to see where it’s gone wrong and develop drugs based on that information," Mr Narain said. Berg expects to begin phase two trials of the drug next January, meaning it has already been proven to be effective on animal or cell culture tests and is safe to continue investigating in humans. Mr Narain said it usually takes $2. 6bn (£1. 7bn) and 12 to 14 years to get a drug to market, and that the trial metrics within four and a half years worth of development indicated the time it takes to create a drug can be cut by at least 50 per cent. This will also translate into less expenditure, he claimed. "I don’t think we’re going to spend $1. 3bn to produce our first drug, so the cost is cut by at least 50 per cent too," he added. "‘There’s a lot of trial and error in the old model so a lot of those costs are due to the failure of really expensive clinical trials. We’re able to be more predictive and effective. . . and that’s going to cut hundreds of millions of dollars off the cost. ’ telegraphsciencetech Follow @telegraphtech Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Artificial intelligence will enhance and personalise NHS care, says chairman of NHS England Sir Malcolm Grant says computers could enhance ability to diagnose illnesses and understand how to treat them better Sir Malcolm Grant, Chairman of NHS England Sir Malcolm Grant, Chairman of NHS England Photo: Rex Features By Victoria Ward 4:51PM BST 29 May 2015 Follow Artificial intelligence will bring NHS patients a greater quality of care by better diagnosing medical conditions and personalising medicine, according to the chairman of NHS England. Prof Sir Malcolm Grant said the health service would benefit hugely from the use of machine learning and robots, suggesting that if such technology could outperform humans, it would be daft not to use it. He acknowledged that the subject was “fraught with ethical issues” but suggested that the medical profession needed to be “more focused” in the way it used treatments. He said diagnoses could only be strengthened with the use of computers to scan the wealth of information available through patients’ records in order to identify similarities. “I do believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning has the capacity to hugely enhance our ability to diagnose illnesses and to understand how to treat them better,” he said. [Artificial intelligence will bring NHS patients a greater quality of care by better diagnosing medical conditions] “This has an enormous potency to personalise medicine and to get us away from current practice where we tend to use one set of pharmaceutical products to benefit 20 or 30 per cent of the population. ” Increasing numbers of robots are being used in the NHS, taking jobs in some hospitals such as dispensing drugs and ferrying linen and food. But technological advances mean that they are also starting to play a much greater role in medicine, this year assisting surgery for the first time. In February, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said people would be diagnosed at home by a computer within two years. Sir Malcolm told BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science programme that health care was one of the greatest challenges facing developed societies. He said that gaps in medical profiles that were due to missing information or a lack of understanding could be filled due to the “intuitive nature” of technology. “By comparing this patient’s profile with of hundreds of thousands of other patients we can start to pick out what it might be that is causing the disorder is that we can see,” he said. [Artificial intelligence could be used to spot patterns and use each individual’s genomic structure] “For me, the overriding thing is that if a machine can outperform a human doing a task such as diagnosis, given the complexity of modern medicine, the complexities of modern science, why wouldn’t we use it? Why wouldn’t we use it to inform the human and to bring to our patients the greater quality and greater safety of care that I think AI really can achieve? ” Sir Malcolm, who last week took part in a panel discussion called Socioeconomic Impacts of Machine Learning at the Royal Society’s Machine Learning conference, said artificial intelligence could spot patterns and use each individual’s genomic structure to understand what would work best for them. He told the conference that around 50 per cent of morbidity was due to genetics, around 10 per cent was healthcare and 40 per cent largely down to lifestyle factors. "We know that much of the cost of healthcare is down to admissions and treatment which were avoidable," he said. "That is one major area where I am sure that machine learning and other technologies can help us enormously in not just reducing the cost of healthcare but also the burden of disease in modern society. " He acknowledged that a critical component of data usage within the NHS was privacy and data protection. telegraph. co. uk Follow @telegraph Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. Grand stand views of London In pics: Stunning aerial shots of London's football stadia by photographer Jason Hawkes Russia's abandoned space shuttles Russia's abandoned space shuttles at the Baikonur Cosmodrome In pics: The crumbling remains of the Soviet Union's space programme Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects Sinkholes around the world Vehicles following a cave-in of car park in Meridian, Mississippi In pics: Sinkholes, craters and collapsed roads around the world Comments Advertisement Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from The Telegraph Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from The Telegraph Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Mass unemployment fears over Google artificial intelligence plans The development of artificial intelligence - thrown into spotlight this week after Google spent hundreds of millions on new technology - could mean computers take over human jobs at a faster rate than new roles can be created, experts have warned Exhibitors of the Google company work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated sign of the Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany DeepMind was founded two years ago by 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman Photo: AP By Miranda Prynne, News Reporter 9:50AM GMT 29 Jan 2014 Follow Artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment if computers develop the capacity to take over human work, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beat competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology. Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, gave the stark warning after it emerged that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. He welcomed the web giant’s decision to set up an ethics board to safely develop and use artificial intelligence claiming the advances in technology carried a number of risks. Mr Armstrong said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created. He cited logistics, administration and insurance underwriting as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence. Related Articles 28 Jan 2014 27 Jan 2014 28 Jan 2014 27 Jan 2014 27 Jan 2014 06 Jan 2014 He also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “There’s a variety of short term risks for artificial intelligence, everyone knows about the autonomous drones. “But there’s also the potential for mass surveillance, you don’t just have to recognise cat images, you could also recognise human faces and also mass unemployment in a variety of professions. ” He added: “We have some studies looking into which jobs are the most vulnerable and there’s quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting but ultimately a huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence. ” His concerns were backed up by Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who said: “I think it is a very good thing that Google has set up this ethics board and I think there certainly are some short term issues that we all need to be talking about. “It’s very difficult to predict and that is of course a concern but in the past when we’ve developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over but it certainly is something we ought to be discussing. ” DeepMind was founded two years ago by 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company specialises in algorithms and machine learning for simulation, e-commerce and games. It is also working in an area called Deep Learning in which machines are taught to see patterns from large quantities of data so computers could start to recognise objects from daily life such as cars or food products and even human faces. It is believed Google will use DeepMind’s expertise to improve the functions of its current products such as the Google Glass and extend its current artificial intelligence work such as the development of self-driving cars. Mr Shanahan said: “We all know that Google have got an interest in wearable computing with their Google glass and you can imagine them and other companies using this technology to build some kind of assistant that for example could help you to make a lasagne in your kitchen and to tell you what ingredients you needed and where to find them. “Not necessarily a robot assistant but something wearable such as your Google glass or some other maker might make a similar thing so you can carry it around with you. ” Google The Christmas leap in tablet computer sales means that half of Britons are now using them, following a flood of cheap devices on to the market. The best tablets In Google Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels The 'right to be forgotten' - who has complained? 'Velourmptious Snug' seating area Inside Google's new offices Exhibitors of the Google company work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated sign of the Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany How to get what you want: using Google properly Google chat hidden features Google Chat's best hidden features Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. 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The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Meet Amelia: the computer that's after your job A new artificially intelligent computer system called 'Amelia' – that can read and understand text, follow processes, solve problems and learn from experience – could replace humans in a wide range of low-level jobs Amelia aims to answer the question, can machines think? Amelia aims to answer the question, can machines think? Photo: IPsoft By Sophie Curtis 6:00AM BST 29 Sep 2014 Follow In February 2011 an artificially intelligent computer system called IBM Watson astonished audiences worldwide by beating the two all-time greatest Jeopardy champions at their own game. Thanks to its ability to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies, Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the American quiz show Jeopardy. Watson represented an important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, but the field has been progressing rapidly – particularly with regard to natural language processing and machine learning. In 2012, Google used 16,000 computer processors to build a simulated brain that could correctly identify cats in YouTube videos; the Kinect, which provides a 3D body-motion interface for Microsoft's Xbox, uses algorithms that emerged from artificial intelligence research, as does the iPhone's Siri virtual personal assistant. Today a new artificial intelligence computing system has been unveiled, which promises to transform the global workforce. Named 'Amelia' after American aviator and pioneer Amelia Earhart, the system is able to shoulder the burden of often tedious and laborious tasks, allowing human co-workers to take on more creative roles. Related Articles 01 Oct 2014 25 Sep 2014 26 Sep 2014 26 Sep 2014 25 Sep 2014 "Watson is perhaps the best data analytics engine that exists on the planet; it is the best search engine that exists on the planet; but IBM did not set out to create a cognitive agent. It wanted to build a program that would win Jeopardy, and it did that," said Chetan Dube, chief executive Officer of IPsoft, the company behind Amelia. "Amelia, on the other hand, started out not with the intention of winning Jeopardy, but with the pure intention of answering the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 – can machines think? " Amelia learns by following the same written instructions as her human colleagues, but is able to absorb information in a matter of seconds. She understands the full meaning of what she reads rather than simply recognising individual words. This involves understanding context, applying logic and inferring implications. When exposed to the same information as any new employee in a company, Amelia can quickly apply her knowledge to solve queries in a wide range of business processes. Just like any smart worker she learns from her colleagues and, by observing their work, she continually builds her knowledge. While most ‘smart machines’ require humans to adapt their behaviour in order to interact with them, Amelia is intelligent enough to interact like a human herself. She speaks more than 20 languages, and her core knowledge of a process needs only to be learned once for her to be able to communicate with customers in their language. Independently, rather than through time-intensive programming, Amelia creates her own 'process map' of the information she is given so that she can work out for herself what actions to take depending on the problem she is solving. "Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. If a system claims to be intelligent, it must be able to read and understand documents, and answer questions on the basis of that. It must be able to understand processes that it observes. It must be able to solve problems based on the knowledge it has acquired. And when it cannot solve a problem, it must be capable of learning the solution through noticing how a human did it," said Dube. IPsoft has been working on this technology for 15 years with the aim of developing a platform that does not simply mimic human thought processes but can comprehend the underlying meaning of what is communicated – just like a human. Just as machines transformed agriculture and manufacturing, IPsoft believes that cognitive technologies will drive the next evolution of the global workforce, so that in the future companies will have digital workforces that comprise a mixture of human and virtual employees. Amelia has already been trialled within a number of Fortune 1000 companies, in areas such as manning technology help desks, procurement processing, financial trading operations support and providing expert advice for field engineers. In each of these environments, she has learnt not only from reading existing manuals and situational context but also by observing and working with her human colleagues and discerning for herself a map of the business processes being followed. In a help desk situation, for example, Amelia can understand what a caller is looking for, ask questions to clarify the issue, find and access the required information and determine which steps to follow in order to solve the problem. As a knowledge management advisor, she can help engineers working in remote locations who are unable to carry detailed manuals, by diagnosing the cause of failed machinery and guiding them towards the best steps to rectifying the problem. During these trials, Amelia was able to go from solving very few queries independently to 42 per cent of the most common queries within one month. By the second month she could answer 64 per cent of those queries independently. "That’s a true learning cognitive agent. Learning is the key to the kingdom, because humans learn from experience. A child may need to be told five times before they learn something, but Amelia needs to be told only once," said Dube. "Amelia is that Mensa kid, who personifies a major breakthrough in cognitive technologies. " Analysts at Gartner predict that, by 2017, managed services offerings that make use of autonomics and cognitive platforms like Amelia will drive a 60 per cent reduction in the cost of services, enabling organisations to apply human talent to higher level tasks requiring creativity, curiosity and innovation. IPsoft even has plans to start embedding Amelia into humanoid robots such as Softbank's Pepper, Honda's Asimo or Rethink Robotics' Baxter, allowing her to take advantage of their mechanical functions. "The robots have got a fair degree of sophistication in all the mechanical functions – the ability to climb up stairs, the ability to run, the ability to play ping pong. What they don’t have is the brain, and we’ll be supplementing that brain part with Amelia," said Dube. "I am convinced that in the next decade you’ll pass someone in the corridor and not be able to discern if it’s a human or an android. " Given the premise of IPsoft's artificial intelligence system, it seems logical that the ultimate measure of Amelia's success would be passing the Turing Test – which sets out to see whether humans can discern whether they are interacting with a human or a machine. Earlier this year, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman became the first machine to pass the Turing Test by convincingly imitating a 13-year-old boy. In a five-minute keyboard conversation with a panel of human judges, Eugene managed to convince 33 per cent that it was human. Interestingly, however, IPsoft believes that the Turing Test needs reframing, to redefine what it means to 'think'. While Eugene was able to immitate natural language, he was only mimicking understanding. He did not learn from the interaction, nor did he demonstrate problem solving skills. "Natural language understanding is a big step up from parsing. Parsing is syntactic, understanding is semantic, and there’s a big cavern between the two," said Dube. "The aim of Amelia is not just to get an accolade for managing to fool one in three people on a panel. The assertion is to create something that can answer to the fundamental need of human beings – particularly after a certain age – of companionship. That is our intent. " Technology News The Christmas leap in tablet computer sales means that half of Britons are now using them, following a flood of cheap devices on to the market. The best tablets In Technology News Mobile photography awards Royal Mail Inventive Britain stamp set Celebrating British Inventions Instagramming the world Instagramming the UK Kelly Osbourne, a host of E! ’s Fashion Police, gets to grips with wearable tech on the red carpet of the 2013 Do Something Awards in Hollywood. Is Google Glass doomed? Facebook isn't dying. It's just changing Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Thursday 04 January 2018 Advertisement Artificial intelligence: the companies behind Britain's 'smart' revolution Google's acquisition of DeepMind has sparked that nation's interest in artificial intelligence. Sophie Curtis takes a look at some of Britain's most promising AI companies. A. I. : Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law Steven Spielberg's 2001 film Artificial Intelligence (AI) depicts a future where robots have become eerily human. By Sophie Curtis 12:00PM GMT 02 Feb 2014 Follow When Google forked out £400m for a British technology start-up this week, a lot of people sat up and took notice. Not only was it Google’s largest ever European acquisition, but the company in question was virtually unheard of. DeepMind specialises in artificial intelligence (AI), otherwise known as 'machine learning’. Its technology is designed to mimic human thought processes, and has so far been used in simulations, e-commerce and games, according to its website. Major venture capitalist firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund are invested in the company, as well as some of the most iconic technology entrepreneurs of the past decade -- including US Telsa mogul Elon Musk, teenage British app developer Nick d’Aloisio, and Skype co-developer Jaan Tallinn. The company is based in east London and employs around 75 people but, as far as anyone knows, it doesn’t have a single commercially available product. READ: Samsung stakes claim on the future of technology Related Articles 29 Jan 2014 27 Jan 2014 years’ 29 Aug 2013 Even people with intimate knowledge of the sector haven’t heard of DeepMind; Martin Mignot of Index Ventures described the company as “very secretive”, while Mike Lynch, founder of the biggest software company to ever come out of Britain, Autonomy, said he had never encountered DeepMind. “What’s interesting about this Google acquisition is what are they going to use this engine for? What are they going to do with it? ” said Mr Lynch. “It will either turn out to be a piece of genius as an acquisition, or it will turn out to be a piece of lunacy, we’ll just have to wait and see. ” Machine learning refers to the ability of computers to learn from data. For example, a machine learning system could be trained to distinguish between spam emails and non-spam emails, and then be used to classify new email messages into spam and non-spam folders. “It’s not just about learning to identify what it is, but learning to identify what it means, and understanding the relationship between different pieces of information,” said Andrew Anderson, chief executive of UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton. AI has a wide range of potential applications -- from virtual assistants like Apple Siri, which can interpret and answer questions, to cars that can automatically recognise road signs and games consoles like Xbox Kinect, which can read and understand 3D body movements. Some medical diagnosis and fraud detection techniques also employ machine learning. Britain has some of the best research groups in the world, including Cambridge, Imperial and University College London (UCL), and is a growing centre for tech entrepreneurship. But companies specialising in AI are few and far between, and those that do exist tend to be focused in one particular area. Google’s acquisition of DeepMind has shone a light on this relatively nascent commercial sector, and Ben Medlock, co-founder of AI firm SwiftKey, believes that the UK is capable of building sustainable AI businesses to rival the giants of the West Coast. “The UK has a great heritage in AI, stemming back to giants such as Alan Turing, one of the undisputed fathers of the field,” said Medlock. “Our goal over the next few years should be to capitalise on our AI heritage and world class talent. ” Some experts have warned that artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment. Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created. He cited logistics, administration and insurance underwriting as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence. However, Anderson said AI is not all about “hacking the workforce to pieces”. Rather it is about making individuals more productive, and making sure that “processes get applied, stuff is accurate, errors are eliminated, and compliance is met”. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that 'smart machines’ will have a widespread impact on businesses by 2020. Here are some British companies are best placed to take advantage of this opportunity: SwiftKey SwiftKey uses artificial intelligence to make personalised mobile apps. It is best known for the SwiftKey keyboard, which learns from each individual user to accurately predict their next word and improve autocorrect. Its machine learning and natural language processing technology understands the context of language and how words fit together. SwiftKey products were embedded on more than 100 million devices last year, and the company has just launched an app for iPhones and iPads called SwiftKey Note. Celaton Celaton’s inSTREAM software applies artificial intelligence to labour-intensive clerical tasks and decision making. Every day, businesses receive mountains of information via email and paper. InSTREAM learns to recognise different types of information and process it accordingly. It never forgets, and handles huge volumes of information at high-speed. Like a real person, it asks questions when it is not sure what to do. Lincor Lincor provides hospital bedside computers to entertain patients and engage them with relevant information and advice. This virtual personal doctor will constantly analyse live personal health data to enable preventative medicine and tailored lifestyle advice. During a hospital visit, the data will be further analysed by hospital AI, giving doctors a more complete and detailed picture. Featurespace Featurespace has developed and sells two software products based on its predictive analytics platform. One is for fraud detection and the other for marketing analytics. Its products use advanced proprietary algorithms to exploit the vast amounts of customer interaction data that many companies collect, delivering insights that can help to detect and prevent fraud and prevent customer churn. Darktrace Darktrace uses advanced mathematics to automatically detect abnormal behaviour in organisations in order to manage risks from cyber-attacks. Unlike software that reads log files or puts locks on the technology, Darktrace’s approach allows businesses to protect their information and intellectual property from state-sponsored, criminal groups or malicious employees that many believe are already inside the networks of every critical infrastructure company. Technology News The Christmas leap in tablet computer sales means that half of Britons are now using them, following a flood of cheap devices on to the market. The best tablets In Technology News Mobile photography awards Royal Mail Inventive Britain stamp set Celebrating British Inventions Instagramming the world Instagramming the UK Kelly Osbourne, a host of E! ’s Fashion Police, gets to grips with wearable tech on the red carpet of the 2013 Do Something Awards in Hollywood. Is Google Glass doomed? Facebook isn't dying. It's just changing Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Computer passes 'Turing Test' for the first time after convincing users it is human A ''super computer'' has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy, becoming the first machine to pass the ''iconic'' Turing Test, experts say Alan Turing Alan Turing Photo: AFP Hannah Furness By Hannah Furness, and agencies 1:06PM BST 08 Jun 2014 Follow A ''super computer'' has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the ''iconic'' Turing Test, experts have said. Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations. The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was ''thinking''. No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said. But ''Eugene Goostman'', a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said. Related Articles 19 Mar 2014 24 Dec 2013 28 Feb 2002 shows 12 Oct 2008 21 Aug 2012 Professor Kevin Warwick, from the University of Reading, said: ''In the field of artificial intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test. ''It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting. '' The successful machine was created by Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, who lives in the United States, and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko who lives in Russia. Mr Veselov said: ''It's a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots. '' Prof Warwick said there had been previous claims that the test was passed in similar competitions around the world. ''A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations,'' he said. ''We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's test was passed for the first time. '' Prof Warwick said having a computer with such artificial intelligence had ''implications for society'' and would serve as a ''wake-up call to cybercrime''. The event on Saturday was poignant as it took place on the 60th anniversary of the death of Dr Turing, who laid the foundations of modern computing. During the Second World War, his critical work at Britain's code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park helped shorten the conflict and save many thousands of lives. Instead of being hailed a hero, Dr Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality. After his conviction in 1952 for gross indecency with a 19-year-old Manchester man, he was chemically castrated. Two years later, he died from cyanide poisoning in an apparent suicide, though there have been suggestions that his death was an accident. Last December, after a long campaign, Dr Turing was given a posthumous Royal Pardon. Technology News The Christmas leap in tablet computer sales means that half of Britons are now using them, following a flood of cheap devices on to the market. The best tablets In Technology News Mobile photography awards Royal Mail Inventive Britain stamp set Celebrating British Inventions Instagramming the world Instagramming the UK Kelly Osbourne, a host of E! ’s Fashion Police, gets to grips with wearable tech on the red carpet of the 2013 Do Something Awards in Hollywood. Is Google Glass doomed? Facebook isn't dying. It's just changing Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Bankers beware: City ‘will soon be run by robots’ Artificial intelligence will render human efforts redundant, says Microsoft executive features an unlikely romance between two robots, Wall-E and EVE. When they kiss, sparks literally fly. Computers will not only be able to undertake complex mathematical equations but draw logical, nuanced conclusions Rebecca Burn Callander By Rebecca Burn-Callander 10:29PM BST 31 Aug 2014 Follow Robots will be running the City within 10 years, rendering investment bankers, analysts and even quants redundant, it has been claimed. Artificial intelligence is about to outpace human ability, according to Dave Coplin, a senior Microsoft executive. Computers will not only be able to undertake complex mathematical equations but draw logical, nuanced conclusions, reducing the need for human interference, he said. This will render certain professions redundant, while other “human only” skills will become increasingly valuable. “I believe in Moravec’s Paradox,” Mr Coplin, Microsoft’s UK-based chief envisioning officer, told The Telegraph, referring to the Eighties hypothesis discovered by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers. “This states that what we think is easy, robots find really hard, and what we think it really hard, robots find easy,” he said. “Complex maths equations are hard for humans but take nanoseconds for a computer, but moving around and picking things up is easy for us, while being almost impossible for a robot. ” Meanwhile, he said, professions currently viewed as commodities will become specialist human skills. “It would be hard to train a robot to be a nurse, or even a chef, but the City could be run by algorithms,” he said. “People who use their hands will have jobs for life. ” Related Articles 29 Aug 2014 27 Aug 2014 26 Aug 2014 26 Aug 2014 Algorithms are already commonplace on City trading floors, and are used in many industries, from online retail to internet dating. High-frequency trading, governed by algorithms, is already one of the most profitable trading classes. But, according to Mr Coplin, in 10 years people will no longer be required to manage these algorithms. Decisions will be taken directly by the artificial intelligence. “Everyone thinks of Terminator and Skynet [the computer that becomes self-aware and attempts to destroy mankind in James Cameron’s 1984 film] when I start talking about this, but technology affords us a tremendous opportunity to play to our strengths as humans, and stand on the shoulders of robotic giants,” said Mr Coplin. Microsoft has tasked Mr Coplin with exploring the new trends that will shape the world of work in the coming years. “I am hunting for the game-changers of the next 10 years,” he said. Mr Coplin believes that the rise of big data and innovations in the field of “ambient intelligence” – smart technology that responds to the presence of people – are going to bring about radical changes in the workplace. “I call my mobile a smartphone but even though it has information about where I am and who I speak to, it doesn’t do anything with that information. It doesn’t deliver a service. ” In the future, ambient intelligence will allow devices to anticipate your needs and respond in real time. Your phone will send automated email responses based on keywords and contributing factors such as location, time of day, and calendar entries. “Business processes will be increasingly automated, freeing up humans to do more useful things,” Mr Coplin said. Big data is not a new concept but technologists are increasingly interested in finding new ways that these mountains of data can be read and interpreted. Microsoft is an active participant in this field of research. It recently trialled a new feature for Skype, its voice over IP service, which allows users to select a language and translates their speech in real-time. Social media is also changing the way organisations will communicate in the future, according to Mr Coplin, who has a vision of a transparent, digital corporate infrastructure, where emails, documents and spreadsheets are all accessible to and searchable by anyone in that organisation. “Knowledge will flow freely, you will be able to see information even if you’re not part of the conversation. It won’t be locked up in teams of inboxes any more. ” Many of the new workplace trends may seem alien today but, according to Mr Coplin, “This new technology will bring about cultural change. ” Electronics In Finance» In Electronics SOUNDTOUCH™ 20 SERIES II Bose launches new wifi music systems Apple iWatch 'at least three years away' This chart shows what consumers really want from Apple’s new iWatch Sony: saved by the PlayStation? Top finance galleries» The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? These are the most valuable start-ups in the world In pics: Some fledgling firms have reached valuations in the tens of billions. These are the 20 priciest of them all Starbucks' secret menu - the drinks you didn't know you can ask for There are over 87,000 different drink combinations at Starbucks, according to the coffee retailer’s website. How many of them do you know? From flu remedies to Harry Potter-inspired beverages, we highlight the weird and the wonderful brews and infusions. Revealed: the weirdest sub-genres on Netflix The service will face competition from French rivals such as the country's leading pay TV operator, Canal+, and Numericable From 'scary cult movies from the 1980s' to 'coming-of-age animal tales', Netflix has every niche covered. Revealed: The 20 best countries in the world to do business Forbes's annual index assess countries by a range of factors from taxes and technology to red tape and innovation. These are the top 20 countries for doing business What are the super-rich planning for Valentine's Day? From a rare pair of Gucci shoes, to spending £110,000 releasing an album, Britain's wealthiest are pulling out all the stops First rate rise in 'August 2019' - latest market prediction A view shows the Bank of England behind blossoming flowers in London Briefing: Predictions saw a huge shift this week. We explain why - and what it means for mortgages and savings The world's 10 most expensive cities 2015 New data: Discover the priciest cities around the globe for luxury property. Comments Tables: The cheapest places to buy an Isa Our colour-coded tables show at a glance which investment shop will be cheapest for you Comments Advertisement Media Jobs» Advertisement More from the web Loading Advertisement Advertisement More from The Telegraph News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast for Technology Companies articles - Telegraph. co. uk Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Why robot sex could be the future of life on earth If self-replicating machines are the next stage of human evolution, should we start worrying? An artist’s impression of a self-replicating nano robot – it has been proposed that similar machines could be used to colonise Mars An artist’s impression of a self-replicating nano robot – it has been proposed that similar machines could be used to colonise Mars Photo: science photo library By George Zarkadakis 7:58PM GMT 20 Jan 2014 When René Descartes went to work as tutor of young Queen Christina of Sweden, his formidable student allegedly asked him what could be said of the human body. Descartes answered that it could be regarded as a machine; whereby the queen pointed to a clock on the wall, ordering him to “see to it that it produces offspring”. A joke, perhaps, in the 17th century, but now many computer scientists think the age of the self-replicating, evolving machine may be upon us. It is an idea that has been around for a while – in fiction. Stanislaw Lem in his 1964 novel The Invincible told the story of a spaceship landing on a distant planet to find a mechanical life form, the product of millions of years of mechanical evolution. It was an idea that would resurface many decades later in the Matrix trilogy of movies, as well as in software labs. In fact, self-replicating machines have a much longer, and more nuanced, past. They were indirectly proposed in 1802, when William Paley formulated the first teleological argument of machines producing other machines. In his book Natural Theology, Paley proposed the famous “watchmaker analogy”. He argued that something as complex as a watch could only exist if there was a watchmaker. Since the universe and all living beings were far more complex than a watch, there had to be a God – a divine watchmaker. Interestingly, Paley conceded that his argument would be moot if the watch could make itself. This detail has been forgotten during the cultural wars that followed Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Self-replicating machines have been around, at least in theory, for decades. In 1949, the mathematician John von Neumann showed how a machine could replicate itself. He called it the “universal constructor” because the machine was both an active component of the construction and the target of the copying process. Related Articles 22 Jan 2014 10 Mar 2014 04 Jun 2008 10 Mar 2008 04 Feb 2014 24 Mar 2014 This means that the medium of replication is, at the same time, the medium of storage of the instructions for the replication. Von Neumann’s big idea allowed open-ended complexity, and therefore errors in the replication – in other words, it opened up self-replicating non-biological systems to the laws of evolution. His brilliant insight predated the discovery of the DNA double helix by Crick and Watson. He went on to develop mathematical entities that reproduced themselves and evolved over time, which he called “cellular automata”. Although von Neumann’s model initially worked only in mathematical space, it was a clear demonstration that evolution may influence mechanical evolution. Since then, engineers have taken the principle on board and have produced physical applications such as RepRap machines – 3D printers that can print most of their own components. The next logical step would be to apply these principles in robot reproduction. For instance, we could have a robotic factory with three classes of robots: one for mining and transporting raw material, one for assembling raw materials into finished robots and one for designing processes and products. The last class, the “brains” of the autonomous robotic factory, would be artificial intelligence systems. But could these robots also “evolve”? The Victorian novelist Samuel Butler thought so. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who spent 20 years of his life attacking the foundations of Darwinism. Butler was not so much against the idea of evolution per se. His tiff with Darwin revolved around the role of intelligence. For Butler the intelligence of evolution and the evolution of intelligence showed common principles, of which life was at the same time both the cause and the result. On this basis, he concluded “it was the race of the intelligent machines and not the race of men which would be the next step in evolution”. In his novel Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”) he describes a utopian society that opted to banish machines. They were deemed to be dangerous, a notion that has influenced fiction, and non-fiction, to our day. The economist Tyler Cowen, in his recent book Average is Over, warns that thinking machines will take our jobs. Safety legislation impedes, although it does not preclude, the development of a fully autonomous robotic factory that reproduces itself. But planting such a factory on a distant planet is a different story. Mars colonisation could benefit from self-reproducing robots preparing the planet for human habitation. The physicist and visionary George Dyson has proposed using self-replicating robots to cut and ferry water-ice from Enceladus (a frozen moon of Saturn) to Mars and use it to terraform the Red Planet. Some biologists believe that life on Earth started on Mars, the seeds of our biosphere carried here by meteorites blasted off the Martian surface billions of years ago. If that is true, it would then be an irony of apocalyptic proportions if future intelligent machines from Mars rebelled against their originators, attacked Earth in order to colonise it and got rid of the current inhabitants. Unlike HG Wells’s fictional invaders, these robotic Martians of the future would be impervious to biological germs. (But perhaps not to computer viruses. ) Ultimately, the question whether self-reproducing robots will evolve or not boils down to the capability of artificial intelligence systems to self-improve. Only then could the “brains” of the robotic factory build evolved robots without the need of human designers. It’s already happening. Machine learning has been around for years. New algorithms for data analysis, combined with increasing computer power and interconnectedness, means that intelligent machines will be able to comprehend massive amounts of contextual information. They would not only be able to understand what a piece of information is about, but how it relates to other information. The capability to understand correlations and get “the big picture” could potentially enable them to set their own goals. Already there are autonomous robotic systems that do that, military drones being an example. Self-improvement could be next. Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes. Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called “genetic algorithms” that mimic evolution. Nanotechnologists, like Eric Drexler, see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – like in Lem’s novel – come together to form intelligent superorganisms. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon- and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce. Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species. If that is the future, then we may have to reread Paley’s Natural Theology and take notice. Not in the way that creationists do, but as members of an open society that must face up to the possible ramifications of our technology. Unlike natural evolution, where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved late as by-products of cerebral development in mammals, in robotic evolution intelligence will be the guiding force. Butler will be vindicated. Brains will come before bodies. Robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. The question is not whether it may happen or not, but whether we would want it to happen. George Zarkadakis is a science writer, novelist, AI engineer and web entrepreneur Technology Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast for Technology Companies articles - Telegraph. co. uk Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement Should future wars be fought by killer robots? It's not technology, but morality and the law, which prevents wars being fought by lethal autonomous weapons - better known as killer robots Tom Chivers By Tom Chivers 11:00AM GMT 14 Nov 2014 Follow This is a republished and updated version of this piece from last year. Every discussion of robots and warfare will always come back to one, or both, of two science fiction touchstones: Skynet and Asimov. “Skynet”, the artificial intelligence defence system described in the Terminator films, gains self-awareness and immediately attempts to wipe out humanity. In Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, he imagines “three laws of robotics”, the first of which instructed all robots: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. Those are the options, popularly understood: robot murderers trying to destroy mankind; or pacifistic automatons barred by their programming from hurting humans at all. If a group of activists with the splendid name “The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” is to be believed, we are now at a watershed: a decision point, at which we can choose between, crudely speaking, a version of one or other of these two futures. A special UN meeting in Geneva this week is discussing the use of “lethal autonomous weapons”: battle robots, to you and me. It isn’t all that long ago that this would have been a matter for science fiction, just as the Terminator is, but in recent years it has become an increasingly imminent concern. Related Articles 14 Nov 2014 16 Oct 2013 18 Jun 2013 23 Apr 2013 The use of drones, or “unmanned combat air vehicles” (UCAVs), in warfare and assassinations has become widespread, if controversial. Two dozen countries are known or believed to use armed unmanned aircraft of varying degrees of sophistication. Britain and America use heavily armed, high-flying drones such as the MQ-9 Predator, which can stay in the air for 14 hours at a time while carrying more than half a ton of laser-guided bombs and missiles; since Barack Obama became president, one US senator estimates, more than 4,000 people have been killed in American military drone strikes. The drones, however, have human pilots – often sitting thousands of miles away, using joypads and screens as though they were playing computer games, but nonetheless exercising direct control over the weapons they unleash. Last year, the Northrop Grumman X-47B began a new round of naval testing. While usually piloted by humans, it can fly entirely without human input, and is the first automated aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier – which is tricky enough to do for ordinary, manned aircraft. “The main military advantage of automated weapons over existing drones is that they’re quicker to respond, and therefore could be used in greater numbers, without humans having to control every single one,” says Prof Michael Clarke, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute and a defence adviser to the Government. The concern is that such weapons, divorced from the human decision-making process, will make killing that much more of an automated process: press a button, and some number of hours later, someone in a distant country will explode, perhaps while surrounded by civilians. “What we are talking about, however, is fully automated machines that can select targets and kill them without any human intervention,” Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and one of the founders of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, told the Telegraph’s Harriet Alexander last year. “And that is something we should all be very worried about. ” “The argument is one of degree,” says Paul Cornish, professor of strategic studies at the University of Exeter. “There’s no such thing as completely automated weapons. They’re built, targeted, launched and given authority by humans, so humans are still in the loop. ” At the moment, all drones still require an active decision to fire. In future, says Prof Clarke, it might be a bit more complicated. “The rules of engagement will most likely be that a target would be defined, and then a particular time-frame and area would be identified where the system would make its own decisions,” he says. “Outside that specific window the robot will not be authorised or allowed to fire. Further, or wider, engagement would have to be re-authorised. ” In Britain and America, and the rest of the Western world, the use of any weapon at all is carefully limited by military law. “Military lawyers are on hand right at the last minute when bombers and drones fire,” says Prof Cornish. “They’re there to check whether the laws of war, regarding proportionality and discrimination and so on, are suitably observed. ” The legality of the use of weapons is one thing; the morality is another. The question of the ethics of robots is a complicated one: who, in the end, is responsible if a robotic soldier destroys a school instead of a military base? Is it the manufacturer, the designer, the operator? The general in command of the theatre? In the absence of a single, obviously responsible pilot or bomb-aimer or gunner or infantryman, it becomes far harder to make military personnel morally accountable should a missile find the wrong target. There may, however, be moral advantages to using robots in warfare. Robot soldiers, as The Economist pointed out in 2012 in a discussion of the ethics of automated warfare, will not carry out revenge attacks on civilians, or rape people, or panic in the heat of battle and shoot their allies. When artificial intelligence systems are better, they might be able to distinguish more quickly and reliably between threats and civilians, and to therefore reduce collateral damage. A similar argument is being had over the morality, and legality, of robot cars: although they will probably save lives, because they will react faster to avoid crashes and not drive recklessly, when they do go wrong there will not be someone obviously at fault. unmanned warplane The morality of it may not come into it. The world is quite some way from entirely autonomous weapons anyway, but Prof Cornish suspects that the military will be extremely wary of using them, for operational rather than ethical reasons. “My sense, and perhaps it’s a bit old-fashioned, is that military operators wouldn’t want these things out of control,” he says. “You want the remotely controlled delivery of lethality, but you don’t want the thing going off on its own. It could compromise operations, or reveal something you’ve been wanting to keep quiet. I just don’t think the military mind would like the idea of a lethal weapon going off on its own on the battlefield: they’ll want it to be connected by a link of some sort, and if the link breaks they’ll want it to disengage. ” We don’t, certainly for the time being, need to worry about programming a simulacrum of morality into robot soldiers, he says, because military commanders would be unwilling to unleash those robot soldiers without human oversight anyway. That may change as the weapons become more sophisticated. But their actions will still be limited by military law. That is, at least, in the West, where these weapons are closest to being developed. “We have to assume the Chinese will have their own version at some point,” says Prof Clarke. “Any breakthrough, especially military breakthroughs, indicates to others that it can be done. ” The second and third countries to develop a new weapon system are usually much faster to do so than the first. “We don’t know whether the Chinese will have the same stringent rules of engagement as Britain and America,” says Clarke. “They last fought in 1979, in Vietnam, and it was a different world, technologically. But if other forms of Chinese behaviour are any guide, they may have a different attitude to the rule of law to ours, to put it mildly. ” The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, then, might have reasons to be worried about the proliferation of automated weapon systems, in those countries less concerned about Geneva conventions. But in the West, automated weapons would be just as subject to the laws of war as all the tools we use already. Whether those laws are too stringent or not stringent enough is a question for another time. But, says Prof Cornish: “In recent years, the legal oversight of military operations has become so intense that the notion that we could unleash a lethal force with no such oversight is complete nonsense. ” They’re not Asimov’s peaceful robots. But, for legal reasons, they’ll never be Terminator-style automatic murderers either. Technology Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement Her: Could you ever fall in love with a computer? Spike Jonze's Her, in which a man falls in love with his computer, was awarded Best Original Screenplay at last night's Academy Awards. The concept may seem laughable, but advances in artificial intelligence are bringing us closer to our machines than ever before, says Rhiannon Williams Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Spike Jonze's Golden Globe nominated film Her Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Spike Jonze's Golden Globe nominated film Her Photo: Warner/Everett/REX By Rhiannon Williams 11:33AM GMT 03 Mar 2014 Follow When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to hold conversations with a robot. Or to be precise, a chatterbot, a computer programme specifically designed to mimic human interaction through a series of exchanges. SmarterChild was widely available on instant messaging systems, and issued instant responses to whatever you asked it - generally queries about its sexuality and generic streams of abuse. While we were always aware we weren’t actually communicating with it, the novelty of appearing to ‘chat’ with a computer programme lead to over 30 million individuals adding SmarterChild as a contact on MSN messenger and AIM. In the 14 years since SmarterChild’s creation artificial intelligence has evolved exponentially, as has our attachment and reliance upon computers to run our lives. But could we ever actually develop feelings for them? This is the premise explored by Spike Jonze’s Her, which won Best Original Screenplay at last night’s Academy Awards Ceremony, in which Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his operating system Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The genesis of Her was inspired by Cleverbot, a web application using a similar artificial intelligence algorithm to SmarterChild. In an interview last year with The Guardian, Jonze described the first 20 seconds of interacting with one of these bots as “a real buzz”. “I'd say 'Hey, hello,' and it would say 'Hey, how are you? ', and it was like whoa … this is trippy,” he said. “After 20 seconds, it quickly fell apart and you realised how it actually works, and it wasn't that impressive. But it was still, for 20 seconds, really exciting. The more people that talked to it, the smarter it got. " Lonely Theodore falls in love with virtual companion Samantha’s ability to speak to him like a real human through a small headphone-like device. “Every moment I'm evolving, just like you,” she purrs in his ear, as she rifles through his emails to get to the bottom of his relationship with his ex-wife and gently goads him into getting out of bed each morning. Related Articles 12 Mar 2014 25 Apr 2014 03 Mar 2014 03 Mar 2014 03 Mar 2014 10 Jan 2014 On occasion I was acutely aware I was watching two of Hollywood’s finest flirting with each other - one present on screen, the other a disembodied voice. Tellingly Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) is horrified by his confession he has fallen in love with his operating system, saying it made sense given that he couldn’t cope with the demands of a relationship with a human with needs. But on the whole it’s an utterly absorbing love story which deconstructs the complexities of falling in love through the frame of technological innovation. Such is Samantha’s artificial intelligence, she longs to possess a physical body so she can walk around with Theodore and see the world as he does. I found myself able to suspend my disbelief he had developed feelings for a programme, given the tender nature of the pair’s interactions. ] I asked Cloudera data scientist Sean Owen, and founder of machine learning company Myrrix, whether feeling compassion and even love for computer programmes won’t seem quite so weird in the future. “Her is set in the near future; around 2050 or so. To some extent, our relationship with technology already matches that depicted in the film; for example, when you look around a subway carriage it’s not at all unusual to see the majority of passengers utterly engrossed in their phones. We already have that level of disconnect. But in terms of having a romantic relationship with our technology, we’re still quite some way off. ” Owen explains the evolution of artificial intelligence is an extremely complex journey which began in the tail end of the 1950s. “By the 1970s, programmes could be created that could answer series of factual questions, but they were extremely limited. Now the algorithms are much more sophisticated, and it’s much easier to feel you’re having an actual conversation with a programme such as the iPhone’s Siri as opposed to it firing answers back at you. ” The main barrier to developing an emotional attachment to our gadgets, he says, is that we’re still not entirely trusting of machines. “It’s more about whether people want that level of connection with their technology, which is tied into the concept of the Internet of Things. Our lives may become increasingly connected, but I’d say people still find the concept of their fridge ordering food for them a little creepy. Machines can help us to understand more about ourselves as dumb humans, and gain greater insight into why we behave the way we do. But I did find parts of the film quite disconcerting. ” Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow, says that many of Samantha’s capabilities, including speech, natural language recognition, and some conversational abilities already exist in current technology. “Once the computer can get smarter from new information, there’s nothing to stop it becoming as good as, and eventually better than, a person doing the same task,” she says. “So what’s to stop an OS from becoming a better companion than most humans? The more it interacts with you, the more it learns about what pleases you and what doesn’t, until it knows you better than you know yourself. ” One of Samantha’s most appealing aspects is her sense of humour (far from hampered by Johansson’s husky laugh). Expression of humour and creativity are the most challenging areas for artificial intelligence development, says Fenn, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. Samantha than any human woman he has ever loved “If a computer can learn what makes people laugh – and more importantly what makes you laugh – based on watching and analysing over time, there is no theoretical reason that a computer couldn’t eventually display and respond to humour. Similarly with music or art – by experimenting, analysing and learning, it could figure out which compositions create the best emotional resonance in the human brain. ” So it’s not inconceivable that a computer will soon be able to learn and deploy intelligence and interest in topics tailored to its individual owner, which may inevitably trigger emotional responses from our humane sensibilities. Dutch scientists found participants hesitated in switching off a robot cat that begs for mercy, despite full knowledge it was an android. If they perceived the robot as intelligent and agreeable, it took them three times longer to decide. Theodore's ex-wife Catherine tells him it's apt he's fallen in love with a computer, given his failures in his relationship with her as a human with needs. It's worth bearing in mind the relative ease of engaging with a programme that doesn't require the emotional maintenance in the same way romantic human relationships do, and how that may seem an increasingly attractive prospect to the time-poor or downright lonely individual. Computers can, Fenn points out, already track our vital signs and establish how they change based on a person’s activities or sensory stimuli. “Put that together with the advances in brain-computer interfaces that determine intent and emotion directly from brain signals, and your OS will be able to figure out your needs without the need for a conversation,” she says. “Right now, much of the focus is on reading brain signals, but technologies such as transcranial stimulation have the potential to change brain states as well. If you wanted it to, your OS would be able to put you in a more focused or cheerful state of mind if it noticed you getting too distracted or grumpy. ” For all we know if a computer could effectively alter your state of mind, it may be less a question of whether we could fall in love with machines and more of whether we’ll have the capacity to avoid it. Fenn believes that while computers may be able to answer a question faster and more accurately than any person, it’s still going to be humans who decide what the right question to ask is. The Academy's decision to award Jonze for his original foresight is an acknowledgement of what could very well be our future. One day. Technology Topics In Technology» Galaxy S4: Samsung launches new smartphone that takes the fight to Apple Galaxy S4 in pictures Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. 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How hackers took over my computer News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast for Technology Companies articles - Telegraph. co. uk Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Wednesday 03 January 2018 Advertisement Peter Thiel: the billionaire tech entrepreneur on a mission to cheat death The co-founder of PayPal and likely the most successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is on a mission to change the world through technology – and to find a cure for death Peter Thiel photographed in his office in San Francisco, August 2014 Photo: Olivia Poppy Cole Mick Brown By Mick Brown 2:12PM BST 19 Sep 2014 Follow An hour into my conversation with Peter Thiel the conversation turns, as it seems conversations with Thiel often do, to the question of death. ‘Basically,’ Thiel says earnestly, ‘I’m against it. ’ Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook, is probably the most successful – and certainly the most interesting – venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He lists among his passions chess, the works of Tolkien and ‘intellectual conversations with friends’. And what he calls ‘the problem of death’ is a topic that he returns to often. ‘I think there are probably three main modes of approaching it,’ he says. ‘You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it. ’ The long history of mankind, I say, suggests this might be a losing battle. ‘But I still think we should not go gently into that good night…’ Thiel is an amiable, softly spoken man who gives the impression of thinking out loud. Questions are frequently greeted with a series of ‘ums… aahs… I think… let me put it this way…’, beginning a thought, stopping, trying another, and then another, as if he is testing the best way to be as precise as he can possibly be. ‘Hobbes said that in the state of nature life is nasty, brutish and short,’ he says. ‘And, um, I do think we want to overcome the state of nature. It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they’ve made their peace with death. In some ways it’s a microcosm of the whole complacency of the Western world. I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I’d like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit. ’ Related Articles richest group of men now? 20 Sep 2014 world 20 Sep 2014 22 Dec 2014 04 Jan 2014 04 Mar 2014 24 Sep 2014 Thiel, whose net worth is reported to be $2. 2 billion, is Silicon Valley royalty, and a singular figure even in that rarefied world. He is a gay practising Christian, a libertarian who has thrown money and support behind the political campaigns of the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul, and who sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group – the elite band of the rich and powerful from politics, industry and business that convenes each year to discuss nobody-outside-the-inner-circle-quite-knows-what. Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief in the power of technology to change the world. Through a variety of venture capital funds and his non-profit Thiel Foundation, Thiel has invested substantially in space travel, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and information technology. He has been one of the most public champions of ‘seasteading’ – the idea of establishing floating communities outside territorial waters and beyond the regulatory powers of governments. His Thiel Fellowship programme encourages clever people under the age of 20 to forgo a college education and start their own companies. And he has poured millions of dollars into what he calls ‘the immortality project’. ‘I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer. ’ His belief is such that he has signed up with Alcor, the leading company in the field of cryogenics, to be deep-frozen at the time of his death – as much as an ‘ideological statement’, he says, as in any expectation of being thawed out any time in the near future. ‘In this reaction that it’s really crazy, it’s disturbing. But my take on it is it’s only disturbing because it challenges our complacency. ’ Peter Thiel’s fortunes may rest largely in Silicon Valley, but he lives and works in San Francisco. His office is in a low-slung building in the Presidio, the national park close to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is also home to George Lucas’s film business. Thiel’s offices house his hedge-fund business, one of his venture capital funds and the Thiel Foundation. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm that he runs with six partners, is in a neighbouring building. Thiel’s home, in the Marina district overlooking the ocean, is a five-minute drive away. He also owns a home in Maui, Hawaii. Thiel has invited me to join him for breakfast, prepared by his own chef, which we eat in a glass-walled conference room. Thiel is of medium height, stocky in build, and moves like a man who, even at the age of 46, has not quite got used to his body. He has come from a run – he does a three- or four-mile jog two or three times a week, and enjoys hiking and surfing – and is dressed in a T-shirt, chinos and trainers. He is eating an egg-white spinach omelette – ‘I’m on a crazy diet,’ he grumbles. I am eating a cheese omelette with the yolk left in, a side of bacon and a bowl of fruit, at which he occasionally throws covetous glances. Almost the first thing Thiel does after we have been introduced is to ask what are the three most interesting things I’ve encountered in the past year. He might learn something new, he explains, ‘and it gives me a better idea of the kind of things you might want to explore. ’ ‘Peter is very different from most people in Silicon Valley,’ Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and now on the Founders Fund board, told me. ‘With a lot of people the conversation is about how are we going to make more money; with Peter the conversation is “How are we going to figure this out? ” He has a tremendous curiosity about how the world works, and all the philosophical and moral questions around that. ’ Another colleague evaluated his ability for ‘casual bar talk’ as ‘very low. The ability to recall a data point – what was gold trading at on day five of the Second World War and what was the impact of that? He has it like a record-book. ’ Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer who moved his family to America when Thiel was one, eventually settling in Foster City, California. He has a younger brother, Patrick. Growing up, Thiel displayed all the traits of the brilliant, slightly nerdish loner. He was a fanatical chess-player, becaming one of the highest ranked under-21 players in America; an avid reader of science fiction – Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in particular. He played Dungeons and Dragons, and was obsessed with Tolkien; two of Thiel’s businesses are named after Tolkien references: a technology investment fund Mithril (a precious metal found in Middle-earth) and Palantir, his data analytics company, named after the ‘seeing stones’ in The Lord of the Rings. Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University before going on to Stanford Law School, and working in a law firm in New York and then as a derivatives trader on Wall Street. None of this quite answered what he describes as his ‘world-changing aspirations’. The seed of Thiel’s libertarian beliefs was sown at Stanford. He founded a student newspaper, The Stanford Review, and co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth, attacking political correctness on campus. And he read Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand, the eccentric Russian author whose advocacy of ferocious laissez-faire capitalism, and her celebration of the heroic, individualistic genius fighting against bureaucratic regulation, made her something of a patron saint among the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. The charismatic founder is a characteristic of many Silicon Valley start-ups, Thiel says, ‘but you need a whole team to get things done. ’ 'PayPal Mafia', shot in 2007. Peter Thiel (front left) with founders and employees of the company, many of whom went on to develop their own key technology firms, including (behind Thiel) David Sacks of Yammer, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn (seated centre rear) and Max Levchin of Yelp (front right). PHOTO: Corbis In 1999, with a group of friends, Thiel founded PayPal, a system of electronic payments for e-commerce, designed to replace what he called ‘the antique technology’ of paper money, and underpinned by the idea of creating a worldwide online currency beyond the manipulation and control of governments. In many ways it was a project that typified the start-up culture of Silicon Valley. All of the original founders were male; of the six principals, ‘four’, Thiel notes, ‘had built bombs in high school. ’ It is the kind of thing that engineering students do. Thiel was not one of them. Required reading among the group was Cryptonomicon, written by the cyber-punk author Neil Stephenson – a cult novel among hackers, which imagines an anonymous internet banking system using electronic money. (The group also preferred ‘the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek,’ Thiel says. ) But PayPal’s more libertarian aspirations eventually foundered on the mundane rocks of banking and Visa card regulations. In 2002 the company was sold to eBay for $1. 5 billion. Thiel’s 3. 7 per cent share was worth $55 million. The PayPal Mafia: Who are they and where are Silicon Valley's richest group of men now? Thiel says that one of his goals at PayPal was to build a company where the friendships would last, even if nothing else did. ‘I remember someone from one of the law firms in New York telling me they all made a lot of money and they all hated one another, and that was evidence of what a fantastically professional place it was. We wanted to do something quite different. ’ The founders and various employees of the company would go on to found and develop some of the key technology companies that have flourished in Silicon Valley over the past 10 years, earning the moniker ‘the PayPal Mafia’. Elon Musk founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; Max Levchin founded the ‘online urban guide’ Yelp. Thiel, whom Fortune magazine named as ‘the Don’, has remained friends with all of them and is a significant investor in many of their companies. In 2004 Hoffman introduced Thiel to a young computer programmer named Mark Zuckerberg, who had dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on developing his college networking site. Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook; he retains a share in the business, currently worth some $200 million, and a seat on the board. At the same time, along with Alex Karp, his roommate at Stanford Law School, Thiel set up the data analytics company Palantir. This grew out of an anti-fraud system that Thiel had developed at PayPal, which combined computer software and human analysis, and which Thiel believed could be applied to identify not only financial fraud but also terrorist networks. The first major investor was the CIA’s investment venture arm In-Q-Tel. Palantir is reported to have played a critical role in tracking down Osama bin Laden, and is also used by banks and drug enforcement agencies. Thiel does not see any conflict between his beliefs and providing a programme which, in theory, allows even more accurate excavation of personal information by government agencies. The debate about security and civil liberties, he says, is often framed as involving a trade-off between the two things. ‘My view is that it’s quite the opposite. As a libertarian, I believe that it’s critical to develop technology like this, because the alternative is that you will get very low-tech solutions that are enormously intrusive but have very little value, which is basically what happened after 9/11 in the United States. For example, if you have no way of potentially identifying likely terrorists you may require every single person to take their shoes off every time they get on an airplane. And I think this is the way one needs to think of the entire, somewhat dysfunctional, National Security Agency/industrial complex. It’s more the Keystone Cops than Big Brother. have, on the one hand, this hoovering up of data from all over the world –bureaucracy run amok; but at the same time one gets the sense they had absolutely no idea what the data contains. I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel’s cell phones. This was probably news to him. It may even have been news to the people running the NSA. I think absent something like Palantir there will be more terrorist attacks, and more draconian, non-technological responses to them. ’ After Facebook, Palantir has been Thiel’s most profitable investment. The company is valued at $9 billion, and he owns 12 per cent. Thiel’s investments have tended to be in things that other, more cautious thinkers may regard as far-fetched, unfeasible or, more simply, bad bets. ‘Ideally,’ he says, ‘I want us to be working on things where if we’re not working on them, they won’t happen; companies where if we don’t fund them they will not receive funding. ’ He invested in Facebook at a time when few envisioned the possibilities of social media. Founders Fund was the first outside venture capital business to invest in Musk’s rocket company SpaceX (the fund made an initial investment of $20 million, and with additional investments Founders Fund’s holding in the company is now valued at $500 million). The British artificial intelligence company Deep Mind Technologies, which Founders Fund seeded with a $15 million investment, was bought by Google in January for £240 million. The Thiel Foundation, which perhaps most accurately reflects Thiel’s personal passions, funds a range of projects from a biotech company, Modern Meadow, that has developed methods of producing cultured meat and leather products without animal slaughter, to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a think tank devoted to the study of artificial intelligence, and ensuring that ‘smarter-than-human-intelligence’ machines behave as humans want them to do, rather than as the machines might want to do. The Thiel Fellowship is among his more controversial projects. Each year the fellowship awards 20 young people $100,000 each, spread over two years, to give up education and concentrate on starting their own businesses. This reflects Thiel’s abiding criticism of the American education system: that for many of the brightest people a college education is a cripplingly expensive waste of time that leads nowhere. ‘I feel I was personally very guilty of this; you don’t know what to do with your life, so you get a college degree; you don’t know what you’re going to do with your college degree, so you get a graduate degree. In my case it was law school, which is the classic thing one does when one has no idea what else to do. I don’t have any big regrets, but if I had to do it over I would try to think more about the future than I did at the time. ’ The Thiel Fellowship: meet the college dropouts ready to change the world Since the launch of the scheme, 83 young putative entrepreneurs, including applicants from India and China, have been awarded fellowships, and this year it received 600 applications. The scheme has prompted widespread criticism from educationalists in America. ‘I didn’t think it would hit this sort of raw nerve,’ Thiel says. ‘I mean, how fragile is the education system when 20 talented people leaving and doing something else is somehow enough to threaten it? My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing. ’ The grant is in recognition of the individual’s potential, not for any particular project they may be working on, but former fellows have already produced a variety of things in fields as diverse as robotics and public health, including a walker/wheelchair hybrid that can assist its user according to how strong he or she feels at any given moment; a low-cost mechanism that optimises solar panels while providing clean water for rural, off-grid communities; and a software system for face detection and recognition in banks. I met two young fellows. As a high-school student Connor Zwick, 20, had developed a mobile app to help students revise that had earned him more than $100,000, before going on to Harvard. After hearing Thiel speak he applied for a fellowship and dropped out of college. Since then he had founded and sold one company developing a game-playing interface for smartphones and, with a partner, has now set up another building personalised learning tools. Laura Deming, also 20, is working in a field particularly close to Thiel’s heart. Deming told me that she had been interested in age-related diseases since she was a child. At the age of 12 she was working in a research lab with the renowned molecular biologist and bio-gerontologist Cynthia Kenyon, at the same time taking graduate courses in biology ‘to learn how to target ageing processes to treat age-related disease’. At 15 she won a place at MIT but dropped out after two years to found her own venture capital fund, investing in biotech start-ups targeting age-related diseases. The prospect of eventually ‘curing’ death, she told me, was ‘not impossible’. San Francisco office, exclusively for the Telegraph Magazine. PHOTO: Olivia Poppy Coles Thiel’s theories of entrepreneurialism are encapsulated in a new book, Zero to One, ostensibly a how-to guide on venture capitalism and tech start-ups, but which ranges freely across his theories on the West’s loss of faith in the future and the redemptive power of technology. The book began life as a series of lectures that Thiel delivered at Stanford in 2012 on the subject of ‘Sovereignty, technology and globalisation’. When Blake Masters, a law student, posted his class notes on his online blog it received tens of thousands of hits. Characteristically, rather than taking exception, Thiel embraced it as the ‘open-source’ thinking that abounds in Silicon Valley and invited Masters to collaborate on developing the lectures into a book. Masters is credited as its co-author. Thiel believes that for much of the 20th century America rejoiced in a happy state of what he calls ‘definite optimism’, its growth driven by a boundless belief in the future that produced everything from the interstate highway system to the Apollo space programme. Mischievously, he dates the beginning of the end of this period to the summer of 1969. On July 20 Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon; three weeks later the Woodstock Festival happened. ‘With the benefit of hindsight that was when progress died and the hippies took over. ’ Not to attack hippies, he adds, but this was the point at which a belief in scientific and technological progress ceased to be a powerfully animating force. In the years since, America has lapsed into a state of ‘indefinite optimism’ – chugging along in the general assumption that the future will somehow get better, without feeling the need to make any plans to ensure it does. But now, Thiel suggests, America has pretty much given up on the future altogether, mired in a state of complacency and stasis where most people are waiting for someone else to solve their problems, and is veering towards a condition of what he calls ‘indefinite pessimism’ – the belief that things are going to get worse, but with no clear idea what to do about it. ‘My claim is that Japan has been in this state of indefinite pessimism since the 1990s and Europe is there now,’ Thiel says. ‘Culturally, there is something very pernicious about it. The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that. ’ America needs to find its way back to ‘a definite future’. And the place that is doing it, the last redoubt of ‘definite optimism’ in America, is – you guessed it – Silicon Valley. ‘I do think it is the most dynamic place in the developed world,’ Thiel says. ‘It’s a very optimistic place; there really is a different mode of thinking about the future here, and that makes some people very uncomfortable, but I think we’re at the start of a multi-decade boom. ’ The sceptic may wonder whether, up until now, Silicon Valley has provided the answers to the really big questions faced by mankind. It can sometimes look like a place that expends tremendous effort – and generates enormous profits – on trivial things: mobile apps that address the pressing problems of the young and technologically savvy people who design them; how to whistle up an Uber car; or locate friends standing on the other side of a crowded bar. Thiel recognises the problem. The slogan on the web page of Founders Fund reads, ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. ’ Thiel has few apps on his iPhone – ‘I would not describe myself as a super-early adopter of consumer technology’ – and while he defends Facebook as ‘a very successful business, which has changed the world for the better in important ways,’ he himself is a only ‘moderate’ user. ‘The algorithms for servicing news stories that are likely to be of interest to respective users have gotten quite good,’ he notes. Cat videos? I ask. ‘No. ’ He has managed to amass 44,000 followers on Twitter without ever having followed anyone or posted a single tweet. ‘You write things quickly and run the risk of saying something you come to regret. ’ He pauses. ‘But then you still run the risk of doing that even when you spend a lot of time on things. ’ Social media, he agrees, ‘will not take our civilisation to the next level. But this critique can go in one of two directions. You can say all this technology is no good and we shouldn’t have it. Or you can go in the direction that I would go, which is we need a lot more. ’ Thiel’s thoughtful manner reveals no trace of the zealot, but the word one hears frequently talking to those around him is ‘mission’. The best tech startups, he writes in Zero To One, ‘might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. ’ So is there a cult of Peter Thiel? He gives a slight smile. ‘Well you don’t ever want it to be a full cult. . . . ’ His theories on business practice frequently veer towards the eccentric. In his book, he tells of how at the dawn of the cleantech boom in Silicon Valley, Founders Fund was frequently approached by startups seeking support. Thiel instituted a blanket rule: never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit. ‘Real technologists’ dress in jeans and t-shirts. Another story tells of Thiel attending a ‘20 Under 20 Summit’, part of his Thiel Fellowship programme where each year youthful would-be entrepreneurs, some as young as 10, are invited for a day’s mentoring in tech start-ups- what has been likened to a ‘summer-camp for brainiacs’. At the end of his talk one budding Peter Thiel, tried to hand him a business card. Thiel declined it, explaining that he didn’t accept cards because it sends the wrong message - he’d be expected to hand them his card, and if he accepted a card from one person he’d be doing it all day, and if they really wanted to get in touch with him they’d find a way. Somebody else, cottoning on, quickly scribbled their contact details on a dollar bill, which they folded origami style and offered to Thiel as a gift. He accepted it, ‘because its something you made, and also it’s a dollar which has an established value; it’s a transaction in which the parameters of the exchange are very clear. ’ Not everybody loves Silicon Valley. The burgeoning wealth and conspicuous expenditure of some the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs have occasioned some resentment – last year Thiel’s friend the former PayPal executive David Sacks threw himself a 40th birthday party with the theme ‘Let Him Eat Cake’, reported to have cost $1. 4 million. In San Francisco rising property prices have been blamed on the inflated salaries in the tech sector, and led to company buses carrying employees from the city to the sprawling tech campuses in the Valley being stoned by protesters –what one tech executive described to me as ‘the Google bus piñata’. Thiel’s libertarian ideals, his evangelical belief in the power of technology to shape the future, and his network of powerful contacts have elevated him to the role of a prophet in Silicon Valley, if breeding a degree of suspicion in some quarters outside it. In the course of researching Thiel, I came across an article linking his investments in seasteading, artificial intelligence and CIA and NSA intelligence-gathering to his role on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group to place him at the heart of a ‘Zionist’ conspiracy, supposedly ‘deciding globalist agendas’ and advancing technology that will turn humanity into ‘the new slave-automatons of the Elite’. When I showed Thiel the article he speed-read the five pages in almost as few seconds, like a digital scanner, before tossing it aside with a bemused shake of the head. ‘That’s definitely in the hyper-loony category. ’ One of the remarkable things about the Bilderberg Group, he says, is how it unites people from opposite ends of the political spectrum in attacking it. When the group met in a hotel near Washington, DC, in 2012 there were protesters outside from both the left-wing Occupy movement and the right-wing Tea Party, ‘arrayed,’ Thiel remembers, ‘with digital cameras and mock guillotines for executing the traitors to be found within. ‘Actually, the people on the inside find the protesters to be quite reassuring because this suggests something important is going on. But I think the striking thing is that there is no conspiracy; there is no plan, there is no strategy. We live in a world full of conspiracy theories but with very few old-fashioned conspiracies. If you think what political leaders have plans and are thinking about the future, you get the sense it may be true of Putin and the Chinese leadership, but that’s about it. The shocking thing is there is no plan at all. ’ So America is a country in drift? ‘I think it’s the entire Western world. When I’m in Europe, people ask what is America thinking of Europe. ’ He laughs. ‘The answer is, less and less. ’ Thiel describes his own attitude to politics as ‘slightly schizophrenic’. On the one hand, it is ‘theoretically important’; on the other, he says the system is so sclerotic that ‘it’s very hard to move the dial. I do think that in many ways in the Western world our governments, and politics, have become a reactionary force that is largely stalling out the progress. ’ If he has one particular bugbear it is government regulation, which, broadly speaking, he views much like death – he is against it. ‘Within the sphere of technology over the last 40 years, there’s a world of bytes and a world of atoms; and there’s been tremendous progress in computers and the world of bytes; the world of atoms not quite so much. We have new cell phones and computers, but the cities we live in and the transportation we use are strangely not that much changed. From a regulatory perspective, the world of atoms has been regulated very tightly; the world of bytes has been fairly unregulated. ‘In the last decade in Silicon Valley you’ve had this great success with 2. 0 technologies, and this enormous failure with clean technology. And if you drill down on why these things fail, one aspect that was a recurrent motif was that the people who started these businesses underestimated the regulatory hurdles they had. Ironically many of them encountered environmental hurdles: you cannot build windmills in the upper Midwest because there are laws to block the power lines that would send the power to Chicago because it’s not aesthetically pleasing. So there’s something crazy, I would submit, in a world where the environmental rules themselves are having the effect of stopping clean technology. ’ The ‘culture wars’ that have divided America over the past thirty years are now largely over, he believes. ‘Most of the social issues the left has won, and for the most part I’m happy about that. I think gay marriage will be legal everywhere within the US in 10 years. And marijuana is going to be largely legalised throughout the country. ’ He says that as a libertarian he is in favour of drug legalisation, ‘but as someone who would like our world to be more optimistic I think the reason it’s happening is somewhat more problematic. People talk about medical marijuana as a fig leaf for legalisation. I don’t think it's a fig-leaf at all; i'ts all medical marijuana, all just this giant self-medication. ’ He he has smoked marijuana ‘once or twice’ himself, ‘but not in any regular. . . ’ He ums and ahs for a few moments, in search of the apposite thought. ‘It makes me tired. ’ Thiel is least comfortable when asked to reflect on himself. When I ask whether he would describe himself as a happy person, he ponders the question as if it were a particularly complicated mathematical equation – ‘Um… let me think about that. Um… I always find it difficult answering that sort of question because it’s hard to precisely compare with other people. It’s such an interior type of thing…’ – before finally concluding, ‘I think so. ’ He has no great interest in music, and seldom reads novels. In recent years he has ‘dialled back’ on his chess playing – ‘It’s a very dangerous addiction. ’ He lives alone but has a boyfriend. He has thought about having children, he says, and likes the idea. ‘Although I think you have to spend enough time to really raise them well. And I’m not sure I could do that. ’ His friends are, for the most part, ‘loosely’ in the world of technology, who share his belief in the redemptive power of technology, his enthusiasm for conversations about macroeconomics, artificial intelligence, and, as Thiel puts it, ‘figuring things out’. He is, as you might expect, a definite optimist. Thiel believes there will be a cure for cancer in the next 20 years, and that a cure for Alzheimer’s is within reach. Immortality, he allows, may take a little longer. He has given more than $6 million to support the work of Aubrey de Grey, the English gerontologist who co-founded the Methuselah Foundation, and is now the chief research scientist of SENS Research Foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). De Grey has famously pronounced that he believes the first person to live to 1,000 is already alive today. The ‘life extension project’, Thiel says, is as old as science itself. ‘It was probably even more important than alchemy. Finding élan vital, the water of life, was of greater interest than finding something that could transmute everything into gold. And I do think people would prefer immortality to lots of gold. On a fundamental level, the question is whether ageing can be reversed or not. Many biological processes appear to be irreversible, but computational processes are reversible. If it is possible to understand biological systems in informational terms, could we then reverse these biological processes, including the process of ageing? I do think that the genomics revolution promises a much greater understanding of biological systems and opens the possibility of modifying these seemingly inevitable trajectories in far more ways than we can currently imagine. ’ So immortality may be possible? ‘Well, “immortal” is a long time. ‘There are many arguments against life extension, and they all strike me as extraordinarily bad: it’s not natural; there will be too many people; you will be bored. But I don’t think it would be boring at all. ’ He pauses. ‘People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don’t want it to end. ’ Zero to One (Virgin Books, £16. 99) is available for £15. 29 plus £1. 95 Technology Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit Picture Galleries» iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures Google have released a new promo video for their soon-to-be-available augmented reality 18 of Google's biggest failures: in pictures CES 2015 The best (and weirdest) gadgets of 2015 First look at UK's driverless cars iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 Most important inventions of the 21st Century Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer More from the web Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Tuesday 02 January 2018 Advertisement The Machine: director interview Ian Douglas talks to Caradog James, the director, and Caity Lotz, star of a new British film, The Machine, that explores the consequences of sentient artificial intelligence The Machine The Machine Ian Douglas By Ian Douglas 7:00AM GMT 21 Mar 2014 Follow Caity Lotz is an artificial intelligence in the process of coming alive. There are guns and disasters throughout her turn in new release The Machine, yet she’s optimistic about a future where the robots live among us. "I think artificial intelligence is not just possible, but inevitable. I don’t think there will be robots like my character straight away, but rather humans will slowly start to merge with computers and technology cyborg style," she says. The setting for the film is the near future, in a military laboratory staffed by scientists working hard for a better future for wounded soldiers. Amputees and brain injury patients mill about in the background, responding to their new neuroprostheses. "We already see people running marathons with prosthetic limbs, next instead of Lasik we’ll pop in new eyeballs with x-ray vision, print out organs to replace a failing one, have Google and a smart phone installed in our brains," says Lotz. "We invented cars and planes to break past our physical limitations, so it seems logical we will break past our mental limitations as well. " The scientists had reached the limit of what they could do with implants and additions so they create The Machine, Lotz’s character, an AI created from a scan of a human brain that I can’t tell you about for fear of dropping spoilers. The conflict between this new intelligence and the military urge to exploit it are what gives the film its tension, but Lotz and Caradog James, director and writer, agree that the real life version of events is likely to be more peaceful. "I spent almost a year reading every book that I could on artificial intelligence, robotics, I even struggled through a couple of books on quantum mechanics," admits James. "All of which was groundwork for what was the key to the story which was a meeting with a scientist who was actually building a mind machine. Related Articles 16 Mar 2014 16 Mar 2014 15 Mar 2014 25 May 2014 11 Mar 2014 "Because I’d done so much reading on the subject he opened up to me during the day we’d spent together he could see I wasn’t trying to make another fantasy movie but base it in the science. He explained that their AI project began by mapping a worm brain, then a mouse brain, and when I spoke to him they were in the process of mapping a chimp brain. "Obviously my writer’s imagination said if they’re mapping a chimp brain then a human brain is next. If there’s an exact copy of a human brain that shares information in the same way, that plans and thinks and hopes, what’s the difference between the organic computer and the virtual model that’s an exact copy. "The other thing he said that I found fascinating and helped me find the emotional heart of the story, their AI, now, currently, they’re helping that to interact with the world in a very similar way to they way severely brain damaged or severely autistic kids are being taught to interact with the world. "When I came to work with Caity I had a clear idea in my mind that there should be an accelerated progression of the machine’s age. She should be a young child, six or seven, in the early scenes, then rapidly go to say 12, then 16, then a slightly more jaded adult character, and feel that journey through the film. During rehearsals with Caity we spent a long time with me charting that growth. I’d say I want you to be this age and how that could be expressed, how she could play it, how trusting she’d be or how suspicious she’d be and it was her reaction to the other characters. A computer’s never going to be like a human three-year-old but in terms of their understanding of other people, it was filtered through her reactions. "My personal feeling is that the idea of the singularity, the moment when machines start designing machines and we get left behind, the reason why I’m hopeful about all that, when we get to that stage the line between machines and people will be very blurred. It’s not a giant leap from Google Glass to something that clips behind your ear and gives you a better memory. Then a quick operation and it’ll be under your skin and no one will see it. This technology will fuse with us in subtle ways. If someone said to me we’ll give you this perfectly safe little chip that goes in the base of your neck and then you’ll be able to speak ten languages, I’d seriously consider that. Perfect recall? Sign me up. It’d be fantastic. " Lotz agrees. She said: ‘I think AI won’t be something separate from us but integrated into us. Or maybe that’s just what I’m hoping so machines like my character don’t annihilate the human race with a blink of a laser beam eye. But if it is the case, here’s hoping that the machines are kinder than we have been to the lesser intelligent beings we share the planet with. ’ The Machine is in cinemas and video on demand services on March 21 and on DVD/Blu-ray March 31 March Technology Topics In Technology» Galaxy S4: Samsung launches new smartphone that takes the fight to Apple Galaxy S4 in pictures Read more from Telegraph Technology Home-made in China Fifty-year-old farmer Chen Lianxue with his homemade plane on the roof of his house in Qifu village of Pingliang, Gansu province, China. The plane took Chen about 28,000 yuan (£2,900) and over two years time to make, local media reported. Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects The biggest companies in the world in 2015 The Fortune Global 500 has been released – the annual ranking of the largest companies in the world by revenues. Here is a list of the 20 biggest corporate money-makers The Big Short hits UK cinemas: these are the best films about business The Big Short, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name about the causes of the financial crisis, opens in UK cinemas this weekend. How will the story stack up against the greatest films about business? The 20 bestselling mobile phones The mobile industry may be locked in a bitter battle between Samsung and Apple, but history tells a very different story. . . Most important inventions of the 21st Century iPhone became available on the O2 network in November 2007 From the Apple iPod to Google driverless cars, we run down the technologies that have transformed our world since the start of the 21st century Apple's new spaceship HQ in Cupertino Apple Headquarters in Cupertino The futuristic building in California should be completed in 2016. The most famous photoshopped images of all time The most famous photoshopped images of all time As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images The most popular Instagram accounts As Instagram announces that it now has more than more than 400 million monthly active users, Sophie Curtis takes us through the ten most followed accounts on the Facebook-owned site Apple's iPhone: a history in pictures iPhones through the ages, from the 2007 original to 2014's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Ahead of the launch of the new iPhone 5 SE, the Telegraph Tech team take a look at how the handset has changed the mobile phone industry since it was launched in 2007 Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children Many children have never seen or used a video tape, camcorder or floppy disc. Take a look at the gadgets which will puzzle younger people Advertisement Advertisement Top Technology Videos» Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels Rise of a tech giant: the history of Google Uber app with taxi The history of Uber Starship robots deliver parcels and groceries to customers for less than £1 Skype invent robot that delivers groceries Altwork station Forget standing desks: This office workstation lets you work lying down Instagram's new Boomerang app stitches together pictures to create videos Instagram launches gif-like app Boomerang Now your iPhone will even weigh fruit More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading Technology choice iPhone 6s/7 release date and rumour roundup iPhone 6s and 6s Plus rumours: all you need to know A customer holds the latest generation of Apple iPhones in an Apple store in Oberhausen, Germany Seven tips to secure your iPhone from hackers Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. How hackers took over my computer News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Accessibility links Telegraph. co. uk Friday 05 January 2018 Advertisement Welcome to the university of the future Most people have not heard of Singularity University in California, but it is attracting some of the world's finest minds. Josie Ensor visits one of the most elite institutions Josie Ensor By Josie Ensor, Mountain View, California 8:00AM BST 24 Aug 2014 Follow It is one of the most elite universities in the world - where each and every graduate is expected to go on to become a billionaire, future world leader, or both. Yet despite being more exclusive than Oxford, MIT and Harvard, most people have never even heard of it. Singularity University, a small unaccredited institute based at Nasa's research centre in northern California, is attracting the brightest minds in America and beyond. It may not offer traditional degrees and students leave without any formal qualification, but their every step is being keenly watched by Silicon Valley's smartest and wealthiest. "The best way to describe the experience of being a student at SU is to say that it is an Ivy League university from the future: the admissions process is from the current year, but the curriculum is from the year 2020," said Dr Roman Yampolskiy, a student from Latvia. Related Articles 26 Aug 2014 guilty of insider trading 15 Sep 2014 15 Sep 2014 24 Aug 2014 overtakes humans 03 Feb 2009 29 Jan 2014 "Biology, physics, computer science are replaced with synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence. " The university gets its name from the theory of "singularity" written about by its co-founder Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist - the inevitable moment when machines will surpass human intelligence. ^Ray Kurzweil Rather than feeling threatened by ever-advancing technology, however, students are taught to harness it to help solve some of the planet's greatest humanitarian problems, such as famine and climate change. At the start of the university's 10-week summer course they are set the "grand challenge" of coming up with ways to help no fewer than one billion people within a decade. By its end, they are expected to have workable ideas to pitch to potential investors. More than 4,000 people from as many as 120 countries apply each year for the $25,000 (£15,000) course - the longest of a range of different programmes offered throughout the year. With only 80 places each summer, the acceptance rate stands at just two per cent. ^Singularity University in Silicon Valley (Steve Rhodes) To keep up with what the university calls the "exponential growth of technology", the syllabus has to be re-written fives times a year, while the roster of guest speakers changes almost as frequently. Over the last few years they have been addressed by figures ranging from Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to Craig Venter - one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome - and from the film director, James Cameron, to the actress Jodie Foster. The world of high technology was quick to embrace its guiding ethos, including its most-celebrated company Google, as well as Cisco, Nokia and Genentech, who all lined up to be partners of the university when it opened in 2009. Larry Page, Google's CEO, a member of the "founding circle", said of Singularity: "If I was a student, this is where I'd want to be. " Lessons take place in a classroom just a stone's throw from Google's Mountain View headquarters, and in the considerable shadow of Nasa's airship garage Hangar One - one of largest free-standing structures in the world. ^A test of the 3-D printer in a microgravity-like environment simulated on an airplane that flies parabolas (Made in Space) When The Telegraph visits, students are furiously hard at work on their grand challenge projects, before their final presentations later this month. "What if we just alter the number of electrons? " one student asks the others hunched in his group. older teammate replies. They are momentarily interrupted by a robot clattering into the room. After a digital introduction, it is identified as the embodiment of Dr Daniel Kraft - who chairs the university's neuroscience department - on a call from Los Angeles, remotely controlling a screen mounted on a motorised 5ft 2in-tall stand. A touch of his keyboard several hundred miles away takes the "telepresence" robot back out of the room and minds focus again on the task at hand. Each student has gone through a rigorous selection process to be here - and many of those accepted will have already founded at least one company. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and quantum physicists regularly apply. The then-head of the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency once took a class. This summer students are from all over the world, including Germany, Israel, Brazil, India and China as well as four from America. The university's youngest student so far was 19 and its oldest, 63. Cosima Gretton, 26 - the only British participant in this year's summer programme - is a few years younger than most of the others, but her academic record is just as impressive. She has a first-class degree in experimental psychology from Oxford University and is just about to finish a four-year medical degree at King's College. She was just 23 when she co-founded her first company, and won a place on the course for her work on a mobile app that helps people assess moles on their skin for signs of damage by ultra-violet light. "Coming to Singularity is one of the most intellectually challenging things I think I've ever done," she says during a short break from class in the blazing Californian sun. "It's one of the rare times you can achieve something as a student that actually has real-world implications. " For her final project, she is working with four others on creating carbon nanotube transistors to test saliva for the presence of biomarkers that indicate illnesses such as gastric cancer and diabetes. If the transistors can be made in the form of microchips they could be mass-produced, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives through early detection and treatment. "The best way to describe us is doctrepreneurs, although I hate using the term," said Ms Gretton, blushing. "We are combining health and technology and looking for ways to push the limits of what we are currently able to do. " Every student has access to the "innovation lab", complete with the most cutting-edge technology - from 3D, gypsum-powder colour printers to unmanned aerial drones and virtuality reality glasses - to help them create prototypes of their ideas. ^Josie Ensor and her 3D-printed model (credit: Inna Shnayder) Its faculty is unparalleled. One of the partners, Mr Kurzweil, is a computer scientist, futurist, chief engineer at Google and author of a book on artificial intelligence called The Singularity is Near. In 1999 he made 108 predictions of where the world would be in 2009. He was correct on 89 of them, including the creation of the e-reader, the 3G internet, and the year in which computers would beat the best human chess players. His estimate for the year computers will ultimately overtake humans? Another founder, Peter Diamandis, set up the X-Prize, which offers large cash awards for inventions that could benefit mankind, and the company Zero G, which enables wealthy passengers to experiencing weightlessness aboard a zero-gravity plane. Talking about why he started the university, Mr Diamandis said: "I realised there was no place on the planet where people can really learn about the fields that are in rapid exponential growth - artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, quantum computing. Yet these are the things that together can be used to solve humanity's problems. "Singularity enabled us to cast a global net, to find people at the top of their game and bring them together. . . We expect the next generation of multibillion-dollar companies to come out of this university. " Some of the start-ups to come out of Singularity are well on their way. The university, which last year went from being a non-profit organisation to one of the US's first benefit corporations - which makes money, but does not seek profit as its sole objective - has proved to be quite the business incubator. It invites well-known venture capitalists to the students' presentations at the end of term, and it is not unknown for some to throw big money at a particularly promising idea. Matternet, from the 2012 class, received half a million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz for a drone which is able to airdrop aid and supplies in hard-to-reach areas in developing countries. Made in Space, a company formed by students from the 2010 intake, developed a 3D printer which allows astronauts to design and build their own tools and shuttle parts on the International Space Station. It received $125,000 from Nasa and won approval to send the printer up to ISS this month aboard the SpaceX CRS-4 rocket. "The whole education system needs to take a big step forward," said Ross Shott, managing director of the graduate studies programme "Things are moving so rapidly it's being left behind. "Ours is a first-of-a-kind curriculum - what we teach here, people would pay millions to know. Who needs academic accreditation? " USA Related Partners In USA Bizarre police booking mugshots Super Tuesday, in pictures Scott Kelly returns to Earth An abandoned location photographer has done time in a haunting, crumbling jail, capturing a series of spooky images. Will Ellis visited the creepy cell block, which still contained the remains of furniture and messages in graffiti. The Essex County Jail, in New Jersey, USA, opened its doors in 1837, and contained a total of 300 cells. It was closed in 1970 and has since become a haven for abandoned photographs who document its decaying state Abandoned jail, in pictures (L-R) Best Supporting Actor Mark Rylance, Best Actress Brie Larson, Best Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Best Supporting Actress Alicia Vikander pose with their Oscar in the press room during the 88th Oscars in Hollywood Oscars 2016: The winners Oscars 2016: in pictures Extreme cosplay bodypainting Top news galleries Woody Allen's 30 best one-liners Woody Allen Comedy Martin Chilton selects 30 great one-liners from the comedian and film star Woody Allen The best British political insults Jeremy Corbyn Culture A hilarious history of political insults and putdowns, from Churchill to Corbyn Culture stars who died in 2016 Culture News We celebrate and remember the culture stars who have passed away in 2016 US Presidents: 30 great one-liners Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Barack Obama and George W Bush Books Great quotes from White House incumbents: will Donald Trump be joining them? 100 funny jokes by 100 comedians Timeless comedy: a lot of what used to be funny has gone out of date, but not Tommy Cooper Comedy One hundred whip-smart wisecracks History's greatest conspiracy theories From global warming to 9/11, Shakespeare to Elvis, Diana to JFK, peak oil to Roswell, conspiracy theories abound. 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Ambitious Chinese inventors take on crazy do-it-yourself projects Sinkholes around the world Vehicles following a cave-in of car park in Meridian, Mississippi In pics: Sinkholes, craters and collapsed roads around the world Comments Advertisement Telegraph on Facebook Advertisement Latest Video» Rat climbs over man Large rat climbs on sleeping commuter Teenager 'groped' and pepper-sprayed at Wisconsin Donald Trump rally Teen pepper-sprayed at Trump rally Disabled great-grandfather denied stairlift and forced to crawl Old and frail wombat is rescued Elderly wombat rescued after being attacked Passengers from hijacked flight arrive in Cairo EgyptAir crew finally arrive in Cairo Scientist in lab Sponsored When media meets medicine More from the web Advertisement Advertisement More from the web Loading More from The Telegraph Loading News Progress 17 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station The latest news, opinion and analysis View Football Catch up on all the latest football news and results View Film All the latest film trailers, reviews and features View Competitions Enter one of our exciting new competitions View Back to top Terms and Conditions Today's News Archive Style Book Weather Forecast Search Search China’s security boss planning to use AI to stop crime before it even happens Meng Jianzhu says data analysis can predict patterns which could stop terror attacks of social unrest before they happen Click to follow The Independent Online Meng Jianzhu is China's top security boss AFP/Getty Images China’s top security officer has revealed plans to use artificial intelligence to predict crime, terrorism and social unrest before it happens. Meng Jianzhu, the head of the Chinese Community Party’s central commission for political and legal affairs, said the government would start to use AI software which uses machine learning, data mining and computer modelling to predict where crime and disorder is likely to occur. “Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans, and will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management,” Mr Meng told colleagues at a meeting in Beijing on Friday. He said security forces should look for patterns in data about terror attacks and build an analysis model to help authorities predict where the attack may strike, Chinese news website thepaper. cn reported. Read more terrorism Mr Meng also called for all elements of the Chinese state and the party to share data with each other and for renewed efforts to integrate surveillance footage systems across the country. Some of these technologies, such as facial recognition, are already in use in some Chinese cities. In Shanghai, traffic police reportedly use facial recognition technology to identify cyclists and pedestrians who violate road regulations. Critics of the idea have already raised concerns about how Beijing’s use of new technology will allow to tighten its control over its subjects. World news in pictures World news in pictures Nicolaos Solis from Greece kisses the wooden cross which was thrown into the waters by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, during the Epiphany ceremony to bless the waters at the Golden Horn in Istanbul AP Women mourn the death of a family member following a landslide in Kinshasa. Thirty-seven people died overnight when torrential rain and mudslides swept though shanty homes. AFP/Getty Mourners carry the body of Palestinian Mosab al-Tamimi, 17, who was shot and killed by Israeli troops, during his funeral near the West Bank city of Ramallah Reuters People take part in pro-government rallies, Iran Tasnim News Agency via Reuters Indonesian bus passengers watch as Mount Sinabung spews thick smoke in Karo, North Sumatra AFP/Getty People take part in the traditional New Year's Day swim in Scheveningen, Netherlands Rex Fireworks explode over Sydney Harbour during New Year's Eve celebrations EPA An Indian muslim lifts a stool with a metal rod pierced through his cheeks to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rafai Papa Miyan Sai at the Shah-E-Alam Dargah shrine in Ahmedabad AFP/Getty A New York apartment fire killed at least 12 people, including a baby, with four more critically injured. Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference from the scene that 'it is the worst fire tragedy we have seen in this city in at least a quarter century. ' Reuters Afghan women mourn inside a hospital compound after a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan Reuters Pope Francis greets newlyweds during his weekly general audience at Aula Paolo VI in The Vatican AFP/Getty Rohingya refugees walk next to a pond in the early morning at the Balukhali refugee camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Reuters Members of ice swimming club "Berliner Seehunde" (Berlin Seals) take a dip in the Orankesee lake in Berlin as part of their traditional Christmas ice swimming session, in Berlin, Germany Reuters Mourners carry the body of 19-year-old Mohamed Sami al-Dahdouh, a Palestinian youth from Jabalia who was killed in clashes with Israeli forces east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Policemen evacuate a baby after the Cagayan River swelled caused by heavy rains brought by Tropical Storm Tembin. People have died and others are missing as the storm struck the southern Philippines unleashing floods and landslides across a region of 20 million people. AFP/Getty Carles Puigdemont gives a thumbs up after the Catalonia Regional Election results Rex A white SUV sits in the middle of the road as police and emergency personnel work at the scene of where it ran over pedestrians in Flinders Street in Melbourne. AFP/Getty This combination of pictures shows Syrians covering one eye with their hands, in the rebel-held town of Douma, as part of a campaign in solidarity with a baby boy, Karim Abdallah, who lost an eye, as well as his mother, in government shelling on the nearby town of Hammouria. AFP/Getty Images South Korean and U. S. Marines take part in a winter military drill in Pyeongchang, South Korea REUTERS Belgian police officers stand guard outside the trial of Salah Abdeslam, one of the suspects in the 2015 Islamic State attacks in Paris, at a courthouse in Brussels, Belgium Reuters Members of the International Space Station expedition 54/55, Roscosmos cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov (C), NASA astronaut Scott Tingle (R) and Norishige Kanai (L) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) during the send-off ceremony after checking their space suits before the launch of the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft at the Baikonur cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan Reuters The former wife of the late South African President Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela (R), and the candidate for the African National Congress presidency and ex-wife of the incumbent South African president, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma greet each other as they attend the 54th ANC National Conference at the NASREC Expo Centre in Johannesburg on December 16, 2017. Thousands of delegates from South Africa's ANC party gathered on December 16, 2017 for a five-day meeting to elect their new leader in a divisive race seen as a pivotal moment in the country's post-apartheid history. he winner will be well placed to be the next president, but the ANC has lost much popularity since Nelson Mandela led it to power in the euphoric 1994 election that marked the end of white-minority rule. AFP/Getty Images Palestinian protesters wave the national flag during clashes with Israeli security forces near the border fence with Israel, east of Gaza City as demonstrations continue over US President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital AFP/Getty Hamas supporters take part in a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Islamist movement, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Democratic candidate for US Senate Doug Jones thanks supporters as he holds his wife Louise's hand AP Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gather during the funeral ceremony of prominent spiritual leader Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, who died on Tuesday at the age of 104, in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, Israel. REUTERS A Palestinian protester kicks a flaming tire during clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Ramallah AFP/Getty Demonstrators set US and Israeli flags on fire during a protest against Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in Istanbul REUTERS People gather to watch the bikers' procession during the funeral ceremony in tribute to late French singer Johnny Hallyday in Paris EPA A Palestinian protester uses a sling to hurl stones towards Israeli troops REUTERS Firefighters monitor a section of the Thomas Fire along the 101 freeway, north of Ventura, California. Getty Images Palestinians burn an Israeli and a U. S. flag during a protest against the U. S. intention to move its embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City Reuters Former Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, flashes a victory sign after he was freed by his supporters in Kiev REUTERS A man exercises in a park on a winter morning in Kolkata, India REUTERS A supporter of Salvador Nasralla, presidential candidate for the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, puts a balloon on the shield of a soldier in a protest while the country is still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras REUTERS A man dressed as Santa Claus skiis down a mountain during the Saint Nicholas Day at the Alpine ski resort of Verbier, Switzerland REUTERS A nurse takes blood for a HIV test for French President Emmanuel Macron as he visits the Delafontaine Hospital on World Aids Day Reuters An activist pours gasoline as an effigy of President Rodrigo Duterte and U. S. President Donald Trump burns during a protest action against Duterte's plan to set up a Revolutionary Government, along a street in metro Manila, Philippines Reuters South Korea's Hyunmoo II missile is fired during an exercise at an undefined location in the east coast of South Korea The Defence Ministry/Yonhap via REUTERS People fall as police fire tear gas to try control the crowd trying to force their way into Kasarani Stadium to attend the inauguration of President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi REUTERS Rohingya refugee Amina Khatun, 55, rests at the bank of the Naf river after crossing it on an improvised raft to reach Bangladesh, in Teknaf. Two of her sons were killed by gun fire when her village was attacked by Myanmar military, she says Reuters Mount Agung volcano is seen spewing smoke and ash in Bali EMILIO KUZMA-FLOYD/via REUTERS A Pakistani protester throws a tear gas shell back towards police during a clash in Islamabad AFP/Getty Images Zimbabwe's former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa arrives ahead of his inauguration ceremony to be sworn in as president in Harare Reuters Comrades of missing crew members express their grief after the Argentine Navy announced that the sound detected in the missing submarine search is consistent with an explosion AFP The one-party-state already monitors and censors large parts of the internet and frequently arbitrarily detains “dissidents” based on their online activity. Some commentators have already likened it to the plot of the Hollywood movie, Minority Report, which told the story of a fictional Washington DC police department which could predict murders before they happened in the future. Zunyou Zhou, a counter terrorism law expert at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Berlin, told the South China Morning Post: “China has no specific data protection law. The government can use personal data in any way they like, which could pose a huge threat to its citizens’ privacy. ” He said that the restive province of Xinjiang, home to China's predominantly Muslim Uyghur population, could bear the brunt of these new technologies. How artificial intelligence conquered democracy The Chinese government has brutally suppressed all expressions of the Turkic minority's separate identity in the Western province on the border with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. This has lead to a growing jihadist movement within the community with four attackers reportedly driving a car into a government building before detonating explosives in Karakax county in Xinjiang in December In July, authorities in the region ordered all local residents to install an app on their mobile phones which will monitor them for "terrorist activity", Radio Free Asia reported. The app, called CleanWebGuard, is designed to "automatically pinpoint the location of video or audio containing terrorist content or illegal religious content, images, e-books or documents, and delete them automatically". Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Google's Artificial Intelligence Chief Thinks Elon Musk's AI Fears Are Overblown 'I am definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse,' said John Giannandrea at a tech conference on Tuesday on the topic of Tesla's Elon Musk. ByAnnie Palmer Sep 19, 2017 6:51 PM EDT Some of Silicon Valley's top brass have issued warnings about the threat of artificial intelligence, but not everyone is that worried, including Alphabet Inc. 's (GOOGL) Google. Google AI chief John Giannandrea said people already have enough trouble understanding what the technology is, let alone deciphering the "borderline irresponsible" hype about how it's a risk to human civilization. AI might one day make computers as smart as humans, but Giannandrea said that danger is overblown. In the near term, it'll make people's lives easier. "I am definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse," Giannandrea said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. "I object to is the belief that it's inevitable. . . and I think that if we have better machine intelligence, it need not be scary, it can augment us. " The comments contrast sharply with those of Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO's Elon Musk, who has quickly become one of Silicon Valley's most vocal critics of artificial intelligence. For the last several months, Musk has made headlines after calling AI the "scariest problem" that represents a greater threat than North Korea that could lead to World War III. Musk, along with other tech leaders, have also urged the U. S. government to step in and regulate the spread of artificial intelligence, believing it threatens to eliminate jobs en masse. Giannandrea countered those concerns, however, saying that there's "no evidence we're on the cusp" of an imminent AI takeover. At times, he said he's shied away from using the term artificial intelligence because it can be ambiguous and scary to average people, similar to phrases such as 'big data. ' "It's such a broad term and it's really not well-defined," he said of AI. "I prefer to use the term machine intelligence, or making machines slightly more intelligent and less dumb. " Google has good reason to minimize concerns about artificial intelligence. Shortly after CEO Sundar Pichai took the helm in 2015, he declared Google an "AI first" company. From a consumer-facing standpoint, this means Google is trying to use advanced computer science to build features that they find "amazing," Giannandrea explained. One big way the company has done this is by improving Google Search, he added. There are also other, bigger developments happening at the company centered around AI, such as Google Assistant, its voice-activated digital assistant that powers the smart speaker Google Home, as well as Google Lens, a technology that brings machine learning and AI capabilities to the smartphone's camera. Giannandrea said to expect Google to release more hardware and software centered around AI technology in the future. "We're working on a lot of different things," Giannandrea explained. "I think it's a shift away from just having all the smarts be on the smartphone into a unit of devices. " More of What's Trending on TheStreet: of All-Time If you liked this article you might like Here's What Apple, Google and Microsoft Are Doing to Thwart Meltdown and Spectre Here's What Apple, Google and Microsoft Are Doing to Thwart Meltdown and Spectre New security vulnerabilities loom over smartphones, computers and other devices. Here's what some of the biggest tech giants are doing about it. Chris Nolter Jan 6, 2018 9:00 AM EST 5 Big Things to Watch for at CES 2018 5 Big Things to Watch for at CES 2018 It's the year's biggest tech trade show, and it should be jam-packed with announcements related to self-driving cars, gaming PCs, VR headsets and much else. Eric Jhonsa Jan 6, 2018 8:00 AM EST Don't Get Caught Out in the Cold: Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap (Friday 1/5/18) Don't Get Caught Out in the Cold: Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap (Friday 1/5/18) Despite soft jobs numbers, there's a whole tape of hot new winners in this market, says Jim Cramer. Here's next week's game plan. Scott Rutt Jan 6, 2018 6:49 AM EST Amazon Alexa-Powered Smartglasses to Be Revealed at CES 2018 Amazon Alexa-Powered Smartglasses to Be Revealed at CES 2018 Vuzix, a longtime wearables maker, is releasing augmented-reality glasses that respond to Amazon Alexa voice commands. Annie Palmer Jan 5, 2018 6:51 PM EST Roku's Stock Destined to Blow Up by 40%: Wall Street Roku's Stock Destined to Blow Up by 40%: Wall Street Is it time to sell, sell, sell? On Thursday, Morgan Stanley analysts hit Roku with a big downgrade. On Friday, it was Citigroup's turn. Bret Kenwell Jan 5, 2018 4:19 PM EST Watchlist What stocks are you watching? 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Popular Pages Subscriptions Stay Connected registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. Compare Brokers Search Search Technology will cut 30% of banking jobs says former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit Artificial intelligence and robotics reduce the need for staff in roles such as back-office functions, Mr Pandit said Click to follow The Independent Online The banker isn't the first financial boss to make such a stark prediction about the future of the industry Reuters Vikram Pandit, who ran Citigroup during the financial crisis, has said developments in technology could cut the number of banking jobs by 30 per cent in the next five years. Artificial intelligence and robotics reduce the need for staff in roles such as back-office functions, Mr Pandit said on Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg in Singapore. He’s now chief executive of Orogen Group, an investment firm that he co-founded last year. “Everything that happens with artificial intelligence, robotics and natural language — all of that is going to make processes easier,” said Mr Pandit, who was Citigroup’s chief executive from 2007 to 2012. “It’s going to change the back office. ” Robocars to patrol Dubai's streets by the end of the year Wall Street’s biggest firms are using technologies including machine learning and cloud computing to automate their operations, forcing many employees to adapt or find new positions. Bank of America’s chief operating officer Tom Montag said in June the firm will keep cutting costs by finding more ways for technology to replace people. While Mr Pandit’s forecast for job losses is in step with one made by Citigroup last year, his timeline is more aggressive. In a March 2016 report, the lender estimated a 30 per cent reduction between 2015 and 2025, mainly due to automation in retail banking. That would see full-time jobs drop by 770,000 in the US and by about one million in Europe, Citigroup said. JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon cautioned in June against overreacting to the impact of technology on jobs. While the bank is using technology to reduce costs, that helps create other opportunities, Mr Dimon said. He predicted that employee numbers at his firm will continue to rise — as it hires more technology workers. The banking industry is becoming “enormously competitive”, Mr Pandit said, adding that he foresees the emergence of “specialist providers” as well as consolidation in the industry. Business picture of the day Business picture of the day Richard Cousins, CEO of catering giant Compass group, died alongside four family members in a seaplane crash in Australia on New Year's Eve. The killed six people near Cowan, north of Sydney. Mr Cousins had led Compass for just over a decade and was due to step down at the end of March this year. Cheltenham, famous for horse racing, recorded the highest percentage rise in house price of any major UK town or city last year. House price growth has slowed this year, with London a particular weak spot, thanks to a sluggish economy and a squeeze on consumers in the wake of the vote to leave the European Union. PA Wire/PA Images More commuter pain as average rail ticket prices have risen by 3. 4 per cent across the UK. Some commuters could see tickets go up by more than £100. The Department for Transport said price rises were capped in line with inflation. PA The Co-op plans to open 100 new food stores across the UK this year, creating an estimated 1,600 jobs. The retailer on Tuesday said that it plans to spend more than £160m on the new stores, as well as on major makeovers for a further 150 of its existing outlets. Car giant Vauxhall has slipped to third place in UK sales rankings. The brand has been overtaken by scandal-hit Volkswagen in new car registrations, recording a 22 per cent year-on-year decrease in the first 11 months of 2017. PA Wire/PA Images “I see a banking world going from large financial institutions to one that’s a little bit more decentralised,” he said. Since leaving Citigroup, Mr Pandit has invested in non-bank financial startups such as student-loan venture CommonBond and home equity finance firm Point Digital Finance. He formed New York-based Orogen last year with investment firm Atairos Group to acquire stakes in mature financial-services companies. Bloomberg Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Artificial intelligence can secretly be trained to behave 'maliciously' and cause accidents Visitors look at the humanoid robot Roboy at the exhibition 'Robots on Tour' in Zurich, March 9, 2013 / Reuters 'BadNets are stealthy, i. e. , they escape standard validation testing' 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Neural networks can be secretly trained to misbehave, according to a new research paper. A team of New York University scientists has found that people can corrupt artificial intelligence systems by tampering with their training data, and such malicious amendments can be difficult to detect. This method of attack could even be used to cause real-world accidents. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA Neural networks require large amounts of data for training, which is computationally intensive, time-consuming and expensive. Because of these barriers, companies are outsourcing the task to other firms, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon. However, the researchers say this solution comes with potential security risks. “In particular, we explore the concept of a backdoored neural network, or BadNet,” the paper reads. “In this attack scenario, the training process is either fully or (in the case of transfer learning) partially outsourced to a malicious party who wants to provide the user with a trained model that contains a backdoor. “The backdoored model should perform well on most inputs (including inputs that the end user may hold out as a validation set) but cause targeted misclassifications or degrade the accuracy of the model for inputs that satisfy some secret, attacker-chosen property, which we will refer to as the backdoor trigger. ” In one instance, the researchers managed to train a system to misidentify a stop sign with a post-it stuck to it as a speed limit through an intersection without stopping. ” What's more, so-called 'BadNets' can be hard to detect. “BadNets are stealthy, i. e. , they escape standard validation testing, and do not introduce any structural changes to the baseline honestly trained networks, even though they implement more complex functionality,” says the paper. How artificial intelligence conquered democracy It’s a worrying thought, and the researchers hope their findings lead to the improvement of security practices. “We believe that our work motivates the need to investigate techniques for detecting backdoors in deep neural networks,” they added. “Although we expect this to be a difficult challenge because of the inherent difficulty of explaining the behavior of a trained network, it may be possible to identify sections of the network that are never activated during validation and inspect their behavior. ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Tesla's Elon Musk leads tech experts in demanding end to 'killer robots arms race’ ‘Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close’ Click to follow The Independent Online Autonomous weapons will 'permit armed conflict to be fought at timescales faster than humans can comprehend', the letter warns Over a hundred experts in robotics and artificial intelligence are calling on the UN to ban the development and use of killer robots and add them to a list of ‘morally wrong’ weapons including blinding lasers and chemical weapons. Google’s Mustafa Suleyman and Tesla’s Elon Musk are among the most prominent names on a list of 116 tech experts who have signed an open letter asking the UN to ban autonomous weapons in a bid to prevent an arms race. In December 2016 the UN voted to begin formal talks over the future of such weapons, including tanks, drones and automated machine guns. So far, 19 out of 123 member states have called for an outright ban on lethal autonomous weapons. Read more rise' One of the letter’s key organisers, Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Australia unveiled the letter at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Melbourne. The letter marks the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) experts and robotics companies have taken a joint stance on the issue. The letter says: “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. “Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. “We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” It concludes with an urgent plea for the UN “to find a way to protect us all from these dangers. ” Significant signatories to the letter include: DeepMind Technologies (UK) University of New South Wales (Australia) AI (Canada) Pepper robots (Switzerland) Professor Walsh said: “Nearly every technology can be used for good and bad, and artificial intelligence is no different. It can help tackle many of the pressing problems facing society today: inequality and poverty, the challenges posed by climate change and the ongoing global financial crisis. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA “However, the same technology can also be used in autonomous weapons to industrialise war. We need to make decisions today choosing which of these futures we want. ” Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search How artificial intelligence conquered democracy The technology is becoming commonplace in political campaigns, and some even claim it was crucial in delivering Donald Trump to the White House Click to follow The Independent Online I’ve got algorithm: big data is being used to influence people’s emotions Getty/iStock There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it’s an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they’ve had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign. The next level will be using artificial intelligence in election campaigns and political life. Machine-learning systems are based on statistical techniques that can automatically identify patterns in data. These systems can already predict which US congressional bills will pass by making algorithmic assessments of the text of the bill as well as other variables such as how many sponsors it has and even the time of year it is being presented to congress. Machine intelligence is also now being carefully deployed in election campaigns to engage voters and help them be more informed about key political issues. This of course raises ethical questions. There is evidence, for example, to suggest that AI-powered technologies were used to manipulate citizens in Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Some even claim these tools were decisive in the outcome of the vote. And it remains unclear what role AI played in campaigning ahead of the Brexit referendum in the UK. Artificial intelligence can be used to manipulate individual voters. During the 2016 US presidential election, the data science firm Cambridge Analytica rolled out an extensive advertising campaign to target persuadable voters based on their individual psychology. This highly sophisticated micro-targeting operation relied on big data and machine learning to influence people’s emotions. Different voters received different messages based on predictions about their susceptibility to different arguments. The paranoid received ads with messages based around fear. People with a conservative predisposition received ads with arguments based on tradition and community. This was enabled by the availability of real-time data on voters, from their behaviour on social media to their consumption patterns and relationships. Their internet footprints were being used to build unique behavioural and psychographic profiles. The problem with this approach is not the technology itself but the fact that the campaigning is covert and because of the insincerity of the political messages being sent out. A candidate with flexible campaign promises like Trump is particularly well-suited to this tactic. Every voter can be sent a tailored message that emphasises a different side of a particular argument. Each voter gets a different Trump. The key is simply to find the right emotional triggers to spur each person into action. We already know that AI can be used to manipulate public opinion. Massive swarms of political bots were used in the 2017 general election in the UK to spread misinformation and fake news on social media. The same happened during the US presidential election in 2016 and several other key political elections around the world. These bots are autonomous accounts that are programmed to aggressively spread one-sided political messages to manufacture the illusion of public support. This is an increasingly widespread tactic that attempts to shape public discourse and distort political sentiment. Typically disguised as ordinary human accounts, bots spread misinformation and contribute to an acrimonious political climate on sites like Twitter and Facebook. They can be used to highlight negative social media messages about a candidate to a demographic group more likely to vote for them, the idea being to discourage them from turning out on election day. Technology first: Trump’s presidential campaign team were able to present a different version of him to different voters (EPA) In the 2016 election, pro-Trump bots even infiltrated Twitter hashtags and Facebook pages used by Hillary Clinton supporters to spread automated content. Bots were also deployed at a crucial point in the 2017 French presidential election, throwing out a deluge of leaked emails from candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team on Facebook and Twitter. The information dump also contained what Macron says was false information narrative that Macron was a fraud and a hypocrite – a common tactic used by bots to push trending topics and dominate social feeds. It is easy to blame AI technology for the world’s wrongs (and for lost elections) but the underlying technology itself is not inherently harmful. The algorithmic tools that are used to mislead, misinform and confuse could equally be repurposed to support democracy. AI can be used to run better campaigns in an ethical and legitimate way. We can, for example, programme political bots to step in when people share articles that contain known misinformation. They could issue a warning that the information is suspect and explain why. This could help to debunk known falsehoods, like the infamous article that falsely claimed the pope had endorsed Trump. We can use AI to better listen to what people have to say and make sure their voices are being clearly heard by their elected representatives. Based on these insights, we can deploy micro-targeting campaigns that help to educate voters on a variety of political issues to help them make up their own mind. People are often overwhelmed by political information in TV debates and newspapers. AI can help them discover the political positions of each candidate based on what they care about most. For example, if a person is interested in environment policy, an AI targeting tool could be used to help them find out what each party has to say about the environment. Crucially, personalised political ads must serve their voters and help them be more informed, rather than undermine their interests. The use of AI techniques in politics is not going away anytime soon. It is simply too valuable to politicians and their campaigns. However, they should commit to using AI ethically and judiciously to ensure that their attempts to sway voters do not end up undermining democracy. Vyacheslav W Polonski is a researcher at the University of Oxford. This article was originally published on The Conversation Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Does the next industrial revolution spell the end of manufacturing jobs? Technology that has made humans redundant in the past has forced us to adapt, generally with more education / Shutterstock Smart machines are about to usher in the age of Industry 4. 0 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Robots have been taking our jobs since the 1960s. So why are politicians and business leaders only now becoming so worried about robots causing mass unemployment? It comes down to the question of what a robot really is. While science fiction has often portrayed robots as androids carrying out tasks in much the same way as humans do, the reality is that robots take much more specialised forms. Traditional 20th-century robots were automated machines and robotic arms building cars in factories. Commercial 21st-century robots are supermarket self-checkouts, automated guided warehouse vehicles, and even burger-flipping machines in fast-food restaurants. Ultimately, humans haven’t become completely redundant: while robots may be efficient, they’re also a bit stupid. They do not think, they just act – in accurate, but limited, ways. Humans are still needed to work around robots, doing the jobs the machines aren't able to and fixing them when they get stuck. But this is all set to change, thanks to a new wave of smarter, better value machines that can adapt to multiple tasks. This change will be so significant that it will create a new industrial revolution. Industry 4. 0 This era of Industry 4. 0 is being driven by the same technological advances that enable the capabilities of the smartphones in our pockets. It is a mix of low-cost and high-power computers, high-speed communication and artificial intelligence. This will produce smarter robots with better sensing and communication abilities that can adapt to different tasks, and even coordinate their work to meet demand without the input of humans. The fourth industrial revolution (Christoph Roser) In the manufacturing industry, where robots have arguably made the most headway of any sector, this will mean a dramatic shift from centralised to decentralised collaborative production. Traditional robots focused on single, fixed, high-speed operations and required a highly skilled human workforce to operate and maintain them. Industry 4. 0 machines are flexible, collaborative and can operate more independently, which ultimately removes the need for a highly skilled workforce. For large-scale manufacturers, Industry 4. 0 means their robots will be able to sense their environment and communicate in an industrial network that can be run and monitored remotely. Each machine will produce large amounts of data that can be collectively studied using what is known as “big data” analysis. This will help identify ways to improve operating performance and production quality across the whole plant – for example, by better predicting when maintenance is needed and automatically scheduling it. For small-to-medium manufacturing businesses, Industry 4. 0 will make it cheaper and easier to use robots. It will create machines that can be reconfigured to perform multiple jobs and adjusted to work on a more diverse product range and different production volumes. This sector is already beginning to benefit from reconfigurable robots designed to collaborate with human workers and analyse their own work to look for improvements, such as BAXTER, SR-TEX and CareSelect. While these machines are getting smarter, they are still not as smart as us. Today’s industrial artificial intelligence operates at a narrow level, which gives the appearance of human intelligence exhibited by machines, but designed by humans. What’s coming next is known as “deep learning”. Similar to big data analysis, it involves processing large quantities of data in real time to make decisions about what is the best action to take. The difference is that the machine learns from the data so it can improve its decision making. A perfect example of deep learning was demonstrated by Google’s AlphaGo software, which taught itself to beat the world’s greatest Go players. The turning point in applying artificial intelligence to manufacturing could come with the application of special microchips called graphical processing units (GPUs). These enable deep learning to be applied to extremely large data sets at extremely fast speeds. But there is still some way to go and big industrial companies are recruiting vast numbers of scientists to further develop the technology. Impact on industry As Industry 4. 0 technology becomes smarter and more widely available, manufacturers of any size will be able to deploy cost-effective, multi-purpose and collaborative machines as standard. This will lead to industrial growth and market competitiveness, with a greater understanding of production processes leading to new high-quality products and digital services. Industry 4. 0 will allow humans to focus on business, creativity and science, which it would be harder for any robot to do (Rethink Robotics) Exactly what impact a smarter robotic workforce with the potential to operate on its own will have on the manufacturing industry, is still widely disputed. Artificial intelligence, as we know it from science fiction, is still in its infancy. It could well be the 22nd century before robots really have the potential to make human labour obsolete by developing not just deep learning, but true artificial understanding that mimics human thinking. Ideally, Industry 4. 0 will enable human workers to achieve more in their jobs by removing repetitive tasks and giving them better robotic tools. In theory, this would allow us humans to focus more on business development, creativity and science, which it would be much harder for any robot to do. Technology that has made humans redundant in the past has forced us to adapt, generally with more education. But because Industry 4. 0 robots will be able to operate largely on their own, we might see much greater human redundancy from manufacturing jobs without other sectors being able to create enough new work. Then we might see more political moves to protect human labour, such as taxing robots. Again, in an ideal scenario, humans may be able to focus on doing the things that make us human, perhaps fuelled by a basic income generated from robotic work. Ultimately, it will be up to us to define whether the robotic workforce will work for us, with us, or against us. Jeff Morgan is a manufacturing research engineer at Trinity College Dublin. This article was originally published on The Conversation Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google hopes to prevent robot uprising with new AI training technique Software has been known to find shortcuts or loopholes that maximise the size of the reward it receives / Getty Images/iStockphoto Designed to discourage machines from cheating 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Google is developing a new system designed to prevent artificial intelligence from going rogue and clashing with humans. It’s an idea that has been explored by a multitude of sci-fi films, and has grown into a genuine fear for a number of people. Google is now hoping to tackle the issue by encouraging machines to work in a certain way. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA The company’s DeepMind division, which was behind the AI that recently defeated Ke Jie, the world’s number one Go player, has teamed up with Open AI, a research group that’s part-funded by Elon Musk. They’ve released a paper explaining how human feedback can be used to ensure machine-learning systems work things out the way in which their trainers want them to. A technique called reinforcement learning, which is popular in AI research, challenges software to complete tasks, and rewards it for doing so. However, the software has been known to cheat, by figuring out shortcuts or uncovering loopholes that maximise the size of the reward it receives. In one instance it drove a boat around in circles in racing game CoastRunners, instead of actually completing the course because it knew it would still win a reward, reports Wired. Artificial intelligence is learning to be racist DeepMind and Open AI are trying to solve the problem by using human input to recognise when artificial intelligence complete tasks in the “correct” way, and then reward them for doing so. “In the long run it would be desirable to make learning a task from human preferences no more difficult than learning it from a programmatic reward signal, ensuring that powerful RL systems can be applied in the service of complex human values rather than low-complexity goals,” reads the report. Unfortunately, the improved reinforcement learning system is too time-consuming to be practical right now, but it gives us an idea of how the development of increasingly advanced machines and robots could be controlled in the future. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search BenevolentAI: drug research startup goes on hiring spree as UK’s artificial intelligence sector booms Benevolent is one of five private AI companies that has reached a valuation of more than $1bn, according to CB Insights Click to follow The Independent Online 'We are already bursting at the seams of our current office space so alongside this hiring spree we’ll be moving to a much larger London office later in the year,' said Ken Mulvany, founder of BenevolentAI BenevolentAI Drug discovery startup BenevolentAI has begun a major hiring spree, as it seeks to take advantage of the current boom in the UK’s artificial intelligence and machine learning sector. The London-based startup, valued at $1. 7bn (£1. 33m) according to data firm CB Insights, is seeking to hire 50 new staff across AI, data science and bioinformatics, software engineering and medicinal science. “We are already bursting at the seams of our current office space so alongside this hiring spree we’ll be moving to a much larger London office later in the year,” said Ken Mulvany, founder of BenevolentAI. Google uses AI to pick out users' most boring photos Benevolent is one of five private AI companies that has reached a valuation of more than $1bn, according to CB Insights. The startup, founded in 2013, focuses on using machine learning to help parse medical data - from existing studies to new papers - to speed up drug discovery. The company has so far raised $140m (£109. 5m) from investors including Lansdowne Partners and Woodford Investment Management. In 2014 the company signed a conditional £585m ($747. 8m) deal with an unnamed US pharma company for potential Alzheimer’s treatments, according to filings with Companies House. Benevolent employs around 70 people in the UK and US. In September 2016 it hired Jerome Pesenti, a former executive at IBM’s Watson platform. The UK’s vote to leave the European Union has created economic uncertainty and raised questions about the development of artificial intelligence and the country’s ability to attract engineering, software and security talent. Cities including Paris have been battling to attract companies away from the UK as well as entrepreneurs and funding for startups. Read more industry Despite this, the UK has recently emerged as one of the dominant hubs for AI, hosting a batch of high-profile tech startups in the sector that have gone on to be acquired by US tech firms, including Twitter’s purchase of London-based artificial intelligence startup Magic Pony Technology in June, language processing company SwiftKey’s sale to Microsoft in February 2016, and Alphabet’s £400m acquisition of London AI startup DeepMind in 2014. Most recently, SoftBank led a $502m investment in Improbable Worlds, a London-based virtual reality startup, in one of the UK’s largest venture capital deals. London is also only behind San Francisco and New York in terms of developers, according to a report Wednesday from Stack Overflow Internet Services, a website for coders. The number of developers in the UK capital has increased 11 per cent during the past twelve months to 418,000, compared to San Francisco Bay Area and New York, home to around 661,000 and 432,000 developers respectively. Cloudreach, backed by investors including private equity giant Blackstone and based in London, announced plans Wednesday to hire 100 new developers. Bloomberg Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search AI’s defeat of pro poker players a ‘paradigm shift’, say scientists 'The implications go beyond being a milestone for artificial intelligence' Click to follow The Independent Online In a feat reminiscent of the controversial victory by supercomputer ‘Deep Blue’ over world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a computer program has managed to beat a string of professional poker players at the game. DeepStack, as it was called, defeated 10 out of 11 players who took part in a total of 3,000 games as part of a scientific study into artificial intelligence. The 11th player also lost, but by a margin that the researchers decided was not large enough to be statistically significant. Read more players This is not the first time a computer has won at poker. Libratus, a program developed by Carnegie Mellon University academics, won $1. 76m (£1. 4m) from professionals in January, for example. But the researchers said DeepStack's performance represented a "paradigm shift" in AI that could have implications for the defence industry and medicine. One player who took on the algorithm, Irish professional Dara O’Kearney, said it felt like he had been playing a human who was “a bit better than me, but not massively better”. He warned there was already “a lot of evidence” that bots were winning money from human players in online poker games. Poker: Will the government start taxing player's winnings? Writing in the journal Science, the researchers, from Alberta University in Canada, said: “Artificial intelligence has seen several breakthroughs in recent years, with games often serving as milestones. “A common feature of these games is that players have perfect information. Poker is the quintessential game of imperfect information, and a longstanding challenge problem in artificial intelligence. “In a study involving 44,000 hands of poker, DeepStack defeated with statistical significance professional poker players in heads-up, no-limit Texas hold’em. ” This type of poker involves just two players, the computer and the human in this case. The researchers said DeepStack had been able to win despite being given no training from expert human games. “The implications go beyond being a milestone for artificial intelligence,” the Science paper said. “DeepStack represents a paradigm shift in approximating solutions to large, sequential imperfect information games. “With many real world problems involving information asymmetry, DeepStack also has implications for seeing powerful AI applied more in settings that do not fit the perfect information assumption. “The abstraction paradigm for handling imperfect information has shown promise in applications like defending strategic resources and robust decision making as needed for medical treatment recommendations. “DeepStack’s continual re-solving paradigm will hopefully open up many more possibilities. ” Dara O'Kearney, an Irish poker professional who completed 456 hands, told The Independent that DeepStack played in a style similar to one used by some human players, based on game theory. “I would say there wasn’t a massive difference. If I hadn’t been told it was a computer, there was nothing it was doing that would have tipped me off that it was a computer,” he said. “I felt I did pretty much okay, but … I did feel the computer was a bit better than me, but not massively better. “Heads up, no limits poker is not my speciality. It’s possible a human who specialises in that might do better. ” Science news in pictures Science news in pictures The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels. Scott Birch. Wellcome Images Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen. Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1. 9m YouTube Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface. Nasa Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park. The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye. Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT. Wellcome Images from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions. It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008. Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo. But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did. New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future. The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves. Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever. The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up. They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole. Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars. And the jets have been seen before. But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards. And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago. The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea. This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain. Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits. Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4. 1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew. The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed. The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”. Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned. Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower. Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system. They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time. The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project. Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”. Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here? ” model of the Solar System in a Nevada desert Illustrations of the Earth and moon show the two to be quite close together, Mr Overstreet said. This is inaccurate, the reason being that these images are not to scale. However, he suggested things might have gone differently if there had been real money at stake. “We were playing for play money – that maybe skewed the results slightly. I’m used to playing for money … and I probably don’t play my best game at the end of the day if I know if I make a mistake, it isn’t going to cost me frankly,” Mr O’Kearney said. He suggested DeepStack’s success was “more significant” than Deep Blue’s because there are more variables in poker than in chess. “I guess all of these things are one more further proof that AI is better at almost anything than humans,” he said. Poker, he said, was more complicated for a computer to master than chess because of the greater number of possibilities of different situations. And playing a more traditional version of the card game with more than just two players would increase the complexity markedly. “I don’t think that will ever be solved because the number of possible situations is greater than the number of atoms in the universe,” Mr O’Kearney said. wouldn’t play better than the best humans. “It’s likely that a computer that was dedicated to that sort of thing would play better than 99. 9 per cent of human players, but I still suspect the very best human players would remain better. “But that might be a human fallacy on my part. ” Asked whether computer programs were a problem for the online game, he said: “That’s a massive concern. “There’s already a lot of evidence that bots have been programmed to play and are already winning money off human players. ” Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Facebook using artificial intelligence to help suicidal users The AI tool would send concerning posts to a human review team, which would get in touch with the user / Getty The company has developed algorithms designed to flag up warning signs 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Facebook has started using artificial intelligence to identify users who are potentially at risk of taking their own lives. The social network has developed algorithms capable of scanning posts and comments for warning signs. These could be phrases such as “Are you okay? ” or “I’m worried about you”, or more general talk of sadness and pain. The AI tool would send such posts to a human review team, which would get in touch with the user thought to be at risk and offer help, in the form of contact details for support services or a chat with a member of staff through Facebook Messenger. Sow Ay illustration's on mental health - In pictures Sow Ay illustration's on mental health - In pictures The site had previously relied on other users reporting worrying updates. “The AI is actually more accurate than the reports that we get from people that are flagged as suicide and self injury,” Facebook product manager Vanessa Callison-Burch told BuzzFeed. “The people who have resources of support versus people reporting to us. ” The system is currently being tested in the US. The site has also announced new safety features for Facebook Live, which has been used to live stream several suicides. Users can now flag up concerning Facebook Live behaviour with the site, which will display advice and highlight the video to staff for immediate review. The goal is to provide help as quickly as possible, mid-broadcast rather than post-broadcast. “Some might say we should cut off the stream of the video the moment there is a hint of somebody talking about suicide,” said Jennifer Guadagno, the project’s lead researcher. Will AI ever understand human emotions? “But what the experts emphasised was that cutting off the stream too early would remove the opportunity for people to reach out and offer support. So, this opens up the ability for friends and family to reach out to a person in distress at the time they may really need it the most. ” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described plans to use AI to identify worrying content in a recently published manifesto. “Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community,” it read. An earlier version of the piece said that it would take “many years to develop” AI systems capable of identifying issues such as bullying and terrorism risks online, but the section was removed before the manifesto was publicly issued. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Government promises £20m investment in robotics and artificial intelligence The Artificial Intelligence industry could add around £654 billion to the UK economy Click to follow The Independent Online A robot serves food at a restaurant in Shenyang, China Getty The government will launch a review into Artifical Intelligence (AI) and robotics in an attempt to make the UK a world leader in tech. The government said in a statement on Sunday that it would invest £17. 3 million in university research on AI. Artificial intelligence powers technologies such as Apple’s SIRI, Amazon’s Alexa, and driverless cars. According to a report by consultancy firm Accenture, Artificial Intelligence could add around £654 billion to the UK economy. Read more case A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research recently forecast that millions of jobs will be lost to automation over the next two decades. Researchers predicted that two million jobs retail jobs will disappear by 2030 and 600,000 will go in manufacturing. Jérôme Pesenti, CEO of Benevolent Tech, who will be leading government research into AI, said, “There has been a lot of unwarranted negative hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI), but it has the ability to drive enormous growth for the UK economy, create jobs, foster new skills, positively transform every industry and retain Britain’s status as a world leader in innovative technology. EU universal income must be 'seriously considered' amid rise of robots The announcement is part of the government’s new “Digital Strategy”, which will be announced in full on Wednesday. As well as investment in research and the tech industry, the strategy is also expected to detail a comprehensive modernisation of the civil service. The government has been heavily criticised the delay in the publication of the strategy. In 2015, Ed Vaizey, the then Digital Minister, said plans would be published in early 2016. In January, the chairman of the government’s Science and Technology Committee criticised the government for this delay. Robots ‘will create UK jobs, not destroy them’ In a letter to Digital Minister Matt Hancock, Mr Metcalfe expressed his “disappointment over such a long delay. ” The letter also asked “why the strategy continues to be a work in already largely completed. ” The government has said it was forced to delay the publication of the report to take into account the impact of Brexit. However, other sources have suggested that Whitehall’s resistance to the modernisation of the civil service under the Government Digital Service plans was also a significant factor. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Japanese company fires its workers and replaces them with artificial intelligence Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, on December 27, 2016 / JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images The move could be a way for Japan to deal with its shrinking and ageing population 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A Japanese insurance company is replacing its staff with an artificial intelligence system. The move, which will see more than 30 people sacked to make way for the computer, is being seen as one of the clearest examples of the coming changes that robots and machines will bring to the workplace. Japan hopes that by introducing more robots into its workforce it can address the problem of its shrinking and rapidly ageing population. And the company itself – Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance – claims that the investment in the robot will start paying off after two years. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA The computer will be used to calculate how much policyholders should be paid out. Until now, that job was done by the company’s staff – but it will be taken over by a computer based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which uses technology like machine learning to be able to think and learn like a human. The computer will be able to use that technology to read things like medical certificates and understand the length of hospital stays. It will be able to factor in other information like medical history and surgical procedures and the work out how much people should be paid, according to Japanese newspapers. 'Artificial intelligence alarmists' win 'Luddite of the Year' award For now, the calculations will only be used as a way of saving time by reducing how long it takes to work out payouts. Those calculations will still need to be signed off by a human. But even doing that will allow the company to save about 140 million yen, or £1 million, per year. The system itself will cost the equivalent of £1. 4 million and will cost £100,000 to maintain. Other Japanese insurance companies are already looking at similar systems, and some have already launched them but not yet sacked people. Japan is introducing artificial intelligence across the country in part to deal with a dangerously declining workforce. AI machines are going to be integrated into the work of government from next month, helping ministers look up answers to questions and cutting out the work done by civil servants. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search The rise of artificial intelligence risks making us all redundant AI systems are being designed for supermarkets which allow customers to choose their shopping and exit without going to a checkout. Soon, robots will be stacking the shelves and running the entire show. No wonder unions are worried Click to follow Independent Voices Engineers in South Korea test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 AFP At the start of a new year, what is there to look forward to? According to predictions from think tanks and tech experts, advances in automation and artificial intelligence will threaten the jobs of millions of workers. The CEO of one company, Capgemini, goes further, predicting that AI will be one of the key factors dividing society into the haves and have-nots, with highly skilled engineers at the one end of the spectrum and low-paid unqualified worker drones at the other, with nothing in between. There will be massive redundancies, for sure. Is it time to rethink the welfare system and pay everyone a minimum living wage whether they work or not? That proposal, known as a "universal basic income" is being trialled in Finland but was rejected in a referendum in Switzerland last June. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is investing heavily in developing AI. He recently released a corny "seasonal message" featuring his latest project, a robot butler named Jarvis. We don’t see Jarvis, voiced by Morgan Freeman, but the message is absolutely plain: this is not a bit of fun, but the unveiling of a plan for our future, a future which tech companies are battling to capitalise on. Stephen Hawking has a terrifying warning about artificial intelligence Zuckerberg has spent more than 100 hours programming Jarvis so that it can switch on his household gadgets, his music system and even help his small daughter learn Mandarin. It responds to voice commands issued from a phone, even offering him a clean grey T-shirt in the morning. Jarvis is also a gatekeeper, deciding who may or may not enter the Zuckerberg home. This cutesy video is surely designed to deflect attention from Facebook’s recent woes, including failing to curb fake news reports which critics reckon had a devastating impact on the result of the US presidential election. Facebook stands accused of failing to monitor the material it disseminates, consistently claiming freedom of speech by default, allowing lies and blatant propaganda the same platform as real news stories. Even the Pope has now decreed that publishing fake news is a sin. Britain is allowing working families to slide into poverty The development of a faceless, featureless robot is ominous; when his daughter Max wakes up, surely she would prefer a cuddle from a human being rather than a po-faced lesson from a non-person? By fostering the illusion that Jarvis is sociable and has a use beyond the purely functional in a small family unit, Zuckerberg is preparing the ground to present AI as something new and desirable, rather than the ultimate threat to our livelihoods. If he develops devices like Jarvis on a commercial basis, will it give his company direct access into our homes, whisking away what little privacy we may have left? And if this use of AI relies on programmes derived from our speech patterns, should we hand those over to a third party? And, given that we already spend far too long staring at screens, and the time we interact with other people is declining and loneliness increasing, can introducing robots into our personal lives be a good thing? Google and Amazon are already selling devices which can perform simple tasks, as well as developing rival driverless cars. AI systems are being designed for supermarkets which allow customers to choose their shopping and exit without going to a checkout. Soon, robots will be stacking the shelves and running the entire show. No wonder unions are worried. As for driverless cars, what are the ethics involved in deciding how they should respond to obstacles in their path? How do they differentiate a dead pheasant or a deer from a person who may have fallen down? And, if driverless cars are easily identifiable, will they spawn a new kind of road rage – one directed at trying to provoke a response from the robots taking over our lives? In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Fans of AI say driverless cars will reduce deaths on the roads, and represent the biggest change in our lives since motor cars replaced horses a century ago. Really? Are we powerless to stop the rapid roll-out of AI? One of my favourite films as a student was Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, in which Paris shot in atmospheric black and white is Alphaville, a city controlled by a powerful computer dubbed Alpha 60. Emotion is forbidden and anyone who deviates from accepted behaviour is terminated by female assassins. Has a film ever seemed more prescient? When Mark Zuckerberg tells us Jarvis is the start of something, be very scared. The only butler I want at chez JSP will have blood in his or her veins and be capable of questioning my more pretentious requests. To be honest, if I could have one gift for 2017, if would be a few hours a week from a real butler. Human beings make much better companions. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Artificial Intelligence is set to shape our lives – and the economy – in 2017 As yet we don’t fully measure these changes that have taken place. If you are reading this on a Facebook feed, you are doing so because you have signalled that this is the sort of stuff you are interested in. Facebook has cleverly directed this to you Click to follow Independent Voices Google’s self-driving car may be for the few just now, but we are all benefiting from improvements in navigation Getty Will technology at last help us to feel richer in 2017? The prevailing concern for several years now has been that despite rising GDP most people are not feeling any richer, and some people attribute the success of populist politicians to this sense of resentment. That won’t go away in the coming year for sure. But we will hear a lot more about the clutch of technologies that potentially can transform our living standards, and accordingly give a practical response to populism by showing that things can and will get better. The core set of these technologies goes under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence. The New York Times Magazine has just run a piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, under the title “The Great A. I. Awakening”, which sums up what is happening. It is largely about what Google is doing in this field, starting with the announcement in London of a much improved version of Google Translate. The improvement is largely down to the application machine learning, which is really a sub-section of AI, but a massively important one. Thanks to AI, the translation service is now much better, and able to produce good colloquial English – and other languages. Google Translate had been getting better, but apparently the overnight improvement resulting from the use of AI was equivalent to all the improvements over the previous four years. It seems that machines are better at learning from their mistakes than humans are. Inside Story - How can we make the most of artificial intelligence? There is a multitude of other ways in which AI will improve the quality of services. One of the more obvious is car navigation. Leave aside the whole self-driving car business, which may or may not transform the world. What is already happening is much better vehicle navigation. Remember all the stories about people slavishly following their satnav and ending up in a river? You hear a lot less of that now. Thanks partly to the huge increase of real-time information about traffic flows and partly to AI, navigation systems have become much better. This is not just about us avoiding motorway jams over the holidays; it is more about optimising delivery routes for goods and services. Another example is speech recognition, where machines are now close to the ability of human beings to understand what is being said. Combine that with machine translation and we are quite close to being able to talk in one language and the listener hear in another – a real version of the fictional babel fish of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There are a string of products that nearly do this, but I have been unable track down one that does so reliably and in real time. Wait a year or so, though, and the technology will be there. Still another – and slightly spooky – advance is in machine recruitment. Initial filtering of job applications in many companies is now done without a human being actually seeing them, and with only a minority being passed on for consideration. But humans are not good at hiring. If you could improve staff selection by looking at the performance of millions of job-seekers, rather than the quite small selection of the recruiters’ personal experience, then the benefit to employer and employee would be huge. Fewer bad appointments from the employer’s point of view; fewer poor career choices from the perspective of the job-seeker. UK news in pictures UK news in pictures League Two side Coventry City celebrate victory over Premier League side Stoke in the FA Cup third round PA A commendation ceremony takes place at Manchester Town Hall to recognise the actions of police and rail staff following the terrorist attack at Manchester Arena in May 2017 PA Stuart (no surname given) with his possessions in a bus stop near Windsor Castle, Berkshire. Prime Minister Theresa May has said she disagrees with Tory council leader Simon Dudley, who called on police to clear rough sleepers from Windsor before the royal wedding PA Storm Eleanor lashed the UK with violent storm-force winds of up to 100mph PA Members of National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) hold a demonstration against rail fare increases outside Kings Cross Railway Station, London. Average rail ticket prices across Britain have risen by 3. 4 percent, the biggest increase to rail fares for five years EPA A man takes part in the Mappleton Bridge Jump, an annual unofficial tradition where those willing jump from Okeover bridge on New Years Day into the River Dove PA Passing clouds creating beautiful colours in Wimbledon on the last sunset of the year Rex One person was taken to hospital after a fire broke out on the ninth floor of a building in Joiner Street in Manchester's Northern Quarter mcr_cabbie/Twitter Heavy snow, rain, thunderstorms and wind have caused disruption across much of Britain as a band of "severe" weather rolled across the country. Travelers were warned of dangerous roads conditions, with Highways England advising road users to pack shovels, food and water if they do venture out. The weather didn't just affect travel however, camels on a farm near Richmond, North Yorkshire and various other animals are having to deal with the cold weather PA Alastair Cook celebrates after reaching his double-century during the third day of the fourth Ashes cricket test match Reuters Sheep are driven to another field in the Cotswolds after overnight snow caused travel disruptions across parts of the UK PA Harry Kane celebrates after scoring his third goal, Tottenham's fifth, during the Boxing day Premier League match against Southampton at Wembley. He broke Alan Shearer’s record of 36 Premier League goals in a calendar year, scoring 39 from 36 matches. Kane also finished 2017 as Europe’s leading scorer ahead of Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, who has 54 goals from 63 appearances in all competitions. Harry Kane has 56 from 52. AFP/Getty Swimmers get out of the water after taking part in the Christmas Day Serpentine swim in Hyde Park, London Reuters Stuart Broad of England bowls during a nets session at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia. The fourth Ashes test starts on Boxing Day Getty Staff members console each other as they survey the damage after a fire destroyed a number of buildings at London Zoo. An aardvark has died and four meerkats are missing. Eight zoo workers have been treated by paramedics after a desperate attempt to save the animals from the blaze, which broke out in a petting area. Druids, pagans and revellers gather in the centre of Stonehenge, hoping to see the sun rise, as they take part in a winter solstice ceremony at the ancient neolithic monument of Stonehenge. Despite a forecast for cloud and rain, a large crowd gathered at the famous historic stone circle, to celebrate the sunrise closest to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The event is claimed to be more important in the pagan calendar than the summer solstice, because it marks the 're-birth' of the Sun for the New Year. Getty Images Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, British Defence Minister Gavin Williamson in the presence of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May sign a treaty between the Republic of Poland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on cooperation in the field of defense and security EPA A protester wears a 'STOP BREXIT' hat outside the Palace of Westminster Reuters The Choristers of St Paul's rehearse for a series of services and concerts over the Christmas season at St Paul's Cathedral in London REUTERS Joe Root, the England captain is interviewed after Australia regained the Ashes. England lost by an innings and 41 run runs in the third test at the WACA in Perth Getty Photos of Richard Ratcliffe and his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been jailed in Iran, on display at their home in north London. Mr Ratcliffe says he believes there is "still a chance" she may be released from an Iranian prison in time for a dream Christmas together. PA Oxford Street in London is filled with shoppers with 8 shopping days before Christmas Rex Jonny Bairstow of England headbutts his helmet to celebrate his century during day two of the Third Test match in the 2017/18 Ashes Series between Australia and England at the WACA in Perth, Australia. Bairstow was embroiled in controversy at the beginning of the tour after lightly headbutting Australian opening batsman Cameron Bancroft in an exchange in a bar People at the Grenfell Tower National Memorial Service PA Wax figures of Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wearing a Christmas Jumper at Madame Tussauds EPA Victims and family of victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, Nicholas Burton (left), Sandra Ruiz (second right), Karim Mussilhy (right) and a girl who asked not be named (second left), hand in a petition to Downing Street, asking for an overhaul of the public inquiry. PA A homeless man on the streets of Manchester. Many people are spending the night on the streets in freezing temperatures as the Met Office continues to issue weather warnings across the country. The Shelter charity has said that more than 300,000 are now homeless across Britain, equating to the population of a city the size of Newcastle Getty Pedestrians walk over the Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral pictured in the background as snow falls AFP/Getty Images British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, left, and Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani, right, with interpreter at centre, during their meeting in Tehran, Iran. Johnson is expected to discuss the fate of detained British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for allegedly plotting to overthrow Iran's government. AP British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker address a press conference at the European Commission in Brussels AFP/Getty Images Nick Dunn, one of the so-called Chennai Six is greeted by his sister Lisa as he arrives at Newcastle Airport after being released from India after serving four years in jail on weapons charges. PA Britain's Queen Elizabeth II (L) greets Nigeria's ambassador to the United Kingdom, George Adesola Oguntade (C), and his wife, Modupe Oguntade, during a private audience at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty 800 abandoned buckets appear at Potters Field Park, London, in a moving tribute to the 800 children who die every day, on average, due to a lack of clean water and sanitation. Just one bucket in the almost enough safe drinking water for one child for a week. Every matched by the UK Government. WaterAid / Ollie Dixon British Prime Minister Theresa May smiles to European Union President Donald Tusk as she attends Brexit negotiations' meetings AFP/Getty The last Supermoon of 2017 sets over Whitley Bay, Northumberland PA The crowd reacts as England's Dawid Malan fails to stop a boundary during the first day of the second Ashes test match REUTERS England manager, Gareth Southgate, jokes with Belgium manager, Roberto Martinez, after their sides were drawn in the same group during the Final Draw for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia Getty Images A supporter of Lauri Love, who is accused of hacking into U. S. government computers, wears a Donald Trump mask as he protests in front of the Royal Courts of Justice in London AP A sign reading 'We want our future back' is displayed in front of Westminster during an Anti-Brexit Demonstration Rex Features shaped from a cloud of floating words, contributed by visitors, and is created by leading stage and performance designer Es Devlin. Rex Features My point here is that we are in the early stages of a revolution that will make the world economy much more efficient. It has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the first at the beginning of the 19th century being driven by steam (railways, textile factories, etc), the second at the end of that century by electricity (cars, telephone, consumer durables), and the third from the 1960s on by computers (payment systems, information). As yet we don’t fully measure these changes that have taken place. If you are reading this on a Facebook feed, you are doing so because you have signalled that this is the sort of stuff you are interested in. Facebook has cleverly directed this to you. It has done work that you would otherwise have had to do for yourself, rather as your smartphone does the work of looking up the best way to get across town. But time saved is not fully caught in calculations of GDP. We are getting (a bit) richer, but we don’t know it. My guess is that as we move into 2017 the hottest issue won’t be politics; it will be technology. The contribution of technology is not all positive. Do you want to join the gig economy? Do you want to be interviewed by an algorithm? But if a computer can diagnose an illness better than a doctor, bring it on. So on balance what is happening will make for better lifestyles, whether or not it appears as such in GDP. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Amazon Echo: How it will bring artificial intelligence into our homes much sooner than expected The Amazon Echo might soon have a rival The future is closer than you think. Not only can you activate music with Amazon's latest device, but the technology uses more than 300 apps to accurately let you order food or check your diary with just your voice 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech What’s all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1. 6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn’t just let you switch on your music by voice command. It’s the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light. It uses an artificial intelligence assistant app called Alexa to allow users to access the information and services of the internet and control personal organisation tools. You can order a pizza or a taxi, or check the weather or your diary, all just by speaking to Alexa. Read more Amazon reveals release date for Echo smart speaker In this way, it is similar to Apple’s Siri but has advances in microphone and AI technology that make it significantly more accurate than past devices in understanding and executing commands – and from anywhere in your home that it can hear you. I’ve been living with Amazon Echo for a year now, having imported it from the US via eBay. It’s an astonishing piece of kit that has to be experienced to see exactly why it has the potential to make the idea of a personal assistant smart home hub successful. It’s not surprising that Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has said it is potentially the fourth core Amazon service after its marketplace, cloud services and mobile devices. Many of us have already become used to poor voice-recognition software and error-prone requests on our mobile devices. But Amazon started developing a high-precision microphone and more sophisticated voice recognition system a full 12 months before its competitors and has gained a significant headstart. The big difference with other AI assistants is that instead of a single piece of software, Alexa uses 300 of its own apps (which Amazon calls “skills”) to provide the device’s different capabilities. This creates a system that is far more integrated and sophisticated yet simple to use with minimal setup. Amazon Echo uses an artificial intelligence assistant app called Alexa to allow users to access the information and services of the internet and control personal organisation tools (Youtube) This is a very significant development in the rise of the connected home, which is coming as we move from PCs and mobile devices to the era of the internet of things when computer chips will be in objects all around us. Echo is arguably the first successful product to bridge that gap. It’s working voice recognition service and connected sensors essentially link your home to a marketplace supply chain that services many (if not all) of your needs. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA It’s still early days for this kind of device, but it raises the question how other shops, banks and entertainment companies might need to respond to the technology because it could effectively place a middle-man between them and their customers. If you want to order something, instead of going to the company that provides it directly, you just go to Amazon through your Echo. It’s what the IT industry might call an “aggregator” or a “service broker platform”. This is the much-spoken of but near-mythical goal of many tech companies who want to become the service provider of all other services. Any downsides? The US feedback on Echo has been very strong from early adopters. In my experience, the argument that it doesn’t have a screen and therefore is harder to interact with disappears when you actually use the device. The voice interaction is natural and if there is a problem with the system it’s more to do with learning the range of “skills” the device can perform than getting them to work. Read more A device that is constantly listening for your commands (although, the company is at pains to make clear, not the rest of your unrelated conversations) will no doubt raise concerns about privacy, just as all our smart devices do. Echo and Alexa work through the existing security protocols that many people already use when online shopping or accessing cloud web services through Amazon. But how secure these systems really are – and their potential for misuse – may come under greater scrutiny once Amazon (or any smart home company) has access not just to our bank details but our private conversations, too. Echo represents a new kind of interface that will likely make voice activated services, along with the breaking concepts of virtual and augmented reality, the cutting edge way we interact with computers in 2017 and beyond. Google have already launched Google Home in the US (a full year late) and other firms are developing similar solutions. The astonishing thing about this is that it’s a vision of the future that’s arriving much sooner that expected. We’re still far from general artificial intelligence, with machines fully able to think and perform like humans, but the days of the keyboard and mouse are numbered. This article originally appeared on The Conversation (theconversation. com). Mark Skilton is a Professor of Practice, at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick The Conversation Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search WWDC 2016: Apple set to unveil artificial intelligence plans and showcase iOS 10 at annual conference Tech giant will use event to announce plans to take on Google and Facebook in fast-growing field 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Apple will use its annual conference to announce plans to take on Google and Facebook in the fast-growing artificial intelligence arena, experts believe. The technology giant will also reveal a new version of its iOS software that powers the iPhone and iPad, as well as updating its MacBook laptop line, at its WWDC (worldwide developers conference) event. The conference in San Francisco on Monday will see the technology company showcase iOS 10, the latest version of the operating system that runs on iPhone and iPad. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA The software's virtual, voice-activated personal assistant Siri is expected to be expanded so that it works in a wider range of apps. Both Google and Facebook have already announced greater focus on their artificial intelligence products this year, with Google improving its Google Now software, while Facebook is introducing intelligent "bots" to Messenger that can understand requests and questions from users. It is now expected that Apple will discuss its own plans for this area of technology. Read more Apple's big WWDC event to be streamed live It has also been suggested that a new app for controlling smart home products could be a part of the update, as could a dark mode for screen viewing in low light. Also on the agenda is believed to be a version of iMessage - Apple's instant message service that works between iPhone and iPad - that will extend its compatibility to rival platform Android for the first time. It has been seen by many as a response to the growing power and popularity of other messaging services, including WhatsApp. Read more subscriptions for games Germany and other countries Apple Music, the streaming service that was announced at the event last year is believed to be getting a redesign too. Reports suggest there could be plenty of discussion of the company's laptop line as well, with not only the traditional annual update of the software expected, but also new a MacBook Pro, the firm's most powerful laptop, as well as a new slimline MacBook Air. The Apple TV streaming box and the Apple Watch are also expected to have software revamps announced during the keynote on Monday evening. Press Association Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Elon Musk’s research group opens ‘AI gym’ to train robots not to destroy the human race CEO and founder Elon Musk speaks at a SpaceX press conference (Getty) / Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images OpenAI, which will run the gym, was established in December to make sure that artificial intelligence is used to ‘advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return’ 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Elon Musk’s AI research group has opened a “gym” for robots, to ensure that they can be properly tested. The new project is an attempt to bring together training for artificially intelligent machines, allowing them to be fairly compared with each other – and avoid any problem results. The gym has been launched as the first project from OpenAI, a research group that is funded by backers including Mr Musk as well as a range of other tech leaders. The project launched in December and aims to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately The gym’s primary function is establishing benchmarks for artificially intelligent systems, so that they can be compared against one another. That is intended as a way of monitoring the progress of such systems – and hopefully ensuring that they don’t go wrong, or have the kinds of effects that Mr Musk and others have repeatedly warned about. Programmers will be able to submit their AIs to the gym, which will run them through a range of tests and see how they get on. It is not simply one test – like the game Go, which has been used before – but is instead a range of different trials that look to test the artificial intelligence in full. Read more AlphaGo beat Lee Se-dol - but it's a long way from being human The problem with specific trials, like DeepMind’s success in Go, is that systems can be created specifically for any given test. They might then be good at only that challenge – making it difficult to compare the powers of systems against one another. But in the OpenAI Gym, researchers will theoretically be able to share their scores and compare it with others. That will allow the research to be conducted in public and in comparable ways, hopefully avoiding the potential for AI to go wrong. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google Calendar ‘Goals’ update uses artificial intelligence to make its users into better people The tool aims to make it easier for people to improve themselves, by scheduling ‘reading more books, learning a new language, or working out more regularly’, as well as any other regular activity 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Google has introduced a new tool to its Calendar, intended on making its users into better people. The new tool, called Goals, uses artificial intelligence to help people schedule in time to fulfil their aspirations – including learning new languages and doing exercise. The feature looks through people’s calendar, finds times when they might be free, and then adds in time for them to do the things that they might not otherwise get to. When a user opts to add something into their schedule, they pick a specific activity like “work out more” and are then asked a series of questions. Those include how often something needs to happen, and how long it will last. Once all of those are answered, the app will look at the schedule and set a time. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA Once they are scheduled in, Google’s algorithms can use their artificial intelligence to ensure that people are still able to make them. If something comes up and gets in the way of time that had been previously scheduled for meeting a goal, for instance, the app will automatically reschedule the event to another time when its user is free. Or if there isn’t time to meet a goal, it can be deferred and the app will schedule it in again. The app will then learn from when people tend to defer or complete their goals, and use that information to schedule them better in the future. If someone tends not to be able to finish their goals on Tuesday nights, for instance, but can do them on Thursday mornings, it will try and add future events into that slot. The new feature, which was introduced to celebrate Google Calendar’s tenth birthday, is available now in the iPhone and Android versions of the app. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Tay Tweets: Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot turned into a pro-Hitler racist troll in just 24 hours The messages started out harmless, if bizarre, but have descended into outright racism — before the bot was shut down 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down. The company made the Twitter account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence prowess. But it quickly started sending out offensive tweets. “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now,” it wrote in one tweet. “donald trump is the only hope we've got. ” Another tweet praised Hitler and claimed that the account hated the Jews. Those widely-publicised and offensive tweets appear to have led the account to be shut down, while Microsoft looks to improve the account to make it less likely to engage in racism. The offensive tweets appear to be a result of the way that the account is made. When Microsoft launched “Tay Tweets”, it said that the account would get more clever the more it was used: “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets”. Gadgets and tech news in pictures Gadgets and tech news in pictures Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule. The I. F. O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Jet Capsule/Cover Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U. S Reuters The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. This is a production preview of the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be revealed next year and on the road in 2018 AP Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' Reuters Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot 'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters The interior of Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 Reuters A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Reuters Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo. The Connected company is a part of seven Toyota in-house companies that was created in April 2016 Getty A Toyota Motors employee demonstrates a smartphone app with the company's pocket plug-in hybrid (PHV) service on the cockpit of the latest Prius hybrid vehicle during Toyota's "connected strategy" press briefing in Tokyo Getty An exhibitor charges the battery cells of AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty A robot with a touch-screen information apps stroll down the pavillon at the Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An exhibitor demonstrates the AnyWalker, an ultra-mobile chasis robot which is able to move in any kind of environment during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty Robotic fishes swim in a water glass tank displayed at the Korea pavillon during Singapore International Robo Expo Getty An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Reuters Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Getty Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA wire Ford EEBL Emergency Electronic Brake Lights is demonstrated during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire PA Full-scale model of 'Kibo' on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan EPA Miniatures on display at the Space Dome exhibition hall of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center, in Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, Japan. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module 'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles EPA The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components Getty The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight Getty Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit AP Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va. AP Stefan Schwart and Udo Klingenberg preparing a self-built flight simulator to land at Hong Kong airport, from Rostock, Germany EPA That appears to be a reference to machine learning technology that has been built into the account. It seems to use artificial intelligence to watch what is being tweeted at it and then push that back into the world in the form of new tweets. But many of those people tweeting at it appear to have been attempting to prank the robot by forcing it to learn offensive and racist language. Tay was created as a way of attempting to have a robot speak like a millennial, and describes itself on Twitter as “AI fam from the internet that’s got zero chill”. And it’s doing exactly that — including the most offensive ways that millennials speak. The robot’s learning mechanism appears to take parts of things that have been said to it and throw them back into the world. That means that if people say racist things to it, then those same messages will be pushed out again as replies. It isn’t clear how Microsoft will improve the account, beyond deleting tweets as it already has done. The account is expected to come back online, presumably at least with filters that will keep it from tweeting about offensive words. Nello Cristianini, a professor of artificial intelligence at Bristol University, questioned whether Tay’s encounter with wider world was an experiment or a PR stunt. “You make a product, aimed at talking with just teenagers, and you even tell them that it will learn from them about the world,” he said. “Have you ever seen what many teenagers teach to parrots? What do you expect? “So this was an experiment after all, but about people, or even about the common sense of computer programmers. ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google DeepMind computer beats Go champion Lee Se-dol in shock 4-1 victory South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, right, puts the first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul, South Korea / AP Some had thought that Mr Lee's clawing back of the fourth game could indicate that he was learning how the computer worked – but the final game ended in a victory for AlphaGo 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Google’s Go-playing computer has definitively beaten the best human in the world, finishing a pioneering match at 4-1. For the past week, AlphaGo has been playing grandmaster Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players in history. The victory has been hailed as a huge leap forward for artificial intelligence systems of the kind built by DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence team. The ancient Chinese board game had been seen as too complex for computers to master. Just months ago, artificial intelligence experts said that we were at least 10 years from creating a computer powerful enough to beat the best humans at the game. But Go fans across Asia were astonished when Lee, one of the world's best Go players, lost the first three matches. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Lee beat AlphaGo in the fourth match. He said he had found weak points in Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence programme which showed the machine was not infallible. Some had thought that could mean that Lee would go on to win the fifth game, too, and that AlphaGo’s victory in the first three games was the result of its eccentric and non-human playing style. But the Google computer dispelled those doubts, winning the fifth game after in a tense and long showdown. Google wants to use AlphaGo beyond games, ultimately to solve real-world problems. The computer has been widely seen as proof that artificial intelligence machines could go on to master characteristics that were previously thought to belong only to humans, like intuition. Additional reporting by Press Association Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google Deepmind artificial intelligence beats world's best Go player Lee Sedol in landmark game South Korea’s Lee Sedol, the world’s top Go player, bows during a news conference ahead of matches against Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo, in Seoul, South Korea, March 8, 2016 / REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji Go depends mostly on intuition, since it is so complex — and the victory shows that computers are well on their way to learning the powers that we thought belonged only to humans 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A computer programme has won a game of Go against the world's best player, in a huge breakthrough for artificial intelligence. Google’s AlphaGo computer has beaten South Korean human and Go champion Lee Sedol in the first of five matches. The Deepmind-based computer's victory in the complex Chinese game marks a major event in the development of artificial intelligence — the game depends hugely in intuition, since there are so many possibilities, and so mastery of the game was previously thought to be a human skill. The game is said to be one of the most creative and complicated in the world, and usually takes years for even humans to master. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately AI experts had previously thought that it would take another ten years of development for computers to get good enough at the game to beat a human. But then AlphaGo beat the European champion last year, and now appears to be on track for beating Lee, the world's best Go player. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Why does it matter that Google’s DeepMind computer has beaten a human at Go? South Korea’s Lee Sedol (R), the world’s top Go player, shakes hands with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, after a news conference ahead of matches against Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo / REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji The Big Question: A computer’s mastery of arguably the most complex game in the world is a major step forward for artificial intelligence 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Why are we asking this now? A computer has won a game of Go against a person — much to many humans’ surprise. Google's machine appears to have mastered the game, beating Lee Sedol, widely regarded as humanity's best player. The game still has some time to go — AlphaGo's win was just the first part of a best of five match. But even winning just one was a huge step forward for AlphaGo, the robot created by Google. The computer wasn’t expected to win, at least not by everyone. For his part, Mr Lee had said that he expected to win by a “landslide” — initially predicting a 5-0 win. Why is Go so important? Computers have beaten humans at almost every game before, but none of them have had the same kinds of complexity. Winning at chess, for instance, was a huge achievement — but one of more traditional computing than artificial intelligence. Go is thought to be one of the most complicated games that there is. Because of that there is an almost infinite number of moves — meaning that it is a game more of intuition than calculation. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately The ancient Chinese game of Go is nearly 3,000 years old and immensely challenging. Players take turns putting black and white stones onto a gridded piece of wood, with the ultimate aim being taking over the full board. That is done using a relatively simple set of rules. But because of the huge and complex possibilities that those simple rules create, it just isn’t possible to win the game by anticipating all the moves, as is the case with the (relatively) limited number of possible moves in a game like chess. How did AlphaGo get so good at it? As with much work in artificial intelligence, Google’s DeepMind team trained the computer using a system of trial and error. The computer uses “reinforcement learning” — a development remarkably similar to the way that humans learn. That process happens as the computer plays against itself. When it does so, it adjusts its own thinking based on what it learns, meaning that it gets better all the time. While it still uses some of those predictions that are involved in chess computers and other game-playing machines, it is also able to anticipate humans’ thinking and use a simulation of a kind of intuition. What does it mean for us? Intuition — like other kinds of human traits — is one of the key parts of artificial intelligence. We have managed to gather together huge amounts of computing power, and the current challenge for many engineers is making those computers learn, think and understand like humans do. If computers manage to perfect many of those central parts of human life, then it could lead to a revolution on the scale of the first supercomputers. Having machines that can think like people can lead them to take on much of the work that is done by people: they’ll be able to talk and process information. For the moment, we’re seeing that application in only minute ways, such as image recognition that allows Google and other companies to classify pictures according to what is in them. But the processes involved in those two activities are similar, in one way: recognising cats in Google Photos and recognising the best Go move in South Korea are both matters of trying out possibilities and being able to see what works. What’s more, such computers get better by themselves. A development called machine learning allows computers to gather information like we do — meaning that they can make themselves more clever and more intelligent with time. Some people are scared of those same developments, fearful that AI will become clever enough that it will decide to crush us. But for now at least you’re more likely to see the results come into your searches and social networks. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Artificial intelligence 'should be used to give children one-on-one tutoring' Academics argue AI could radically transform our education system for the better – but is being held back by funding Click to follow The Independent Online Academics argue that one-to-one tutoring could provide the most-effective approach to teaching but it's being held back by a lack of funding iStock Artificial intelligence should be used to provide children with one-to-one tutoring to improve their learning and monitor their well-being, academics have argued. One-to-one tutoring has long been thought the most-effective approach to teaching but would be too expensive to provide for all students. However, in a paper, academics from University College London’s Knowledge Lab argue that AI systems could simulate human one-to-one tutoring by delivering learning activities tailored to a student’s needs and providing targeted and timely feedback, all without an individual teacher present. Read more Facebook to use AI to map people's homes, give them internet Instead of being examined in traditional ways, children could be assessed in a more complete manner by collecting data about their performance over a long period, providing employers and educational institutions with a richer picture of their abilities. The report argues that AI could radically transform our education system for the better – but it is being held back by funding. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Proposals to use AI have been controversial. Professor Stephen Hawking and other leading scientists have warned of the dangers of it becoming “too clever”, and there are concerns about data security and privacy. Some teachers also fear their role could be diminished by this technology, or that it could be used as a “classroom spy” to monitor their performance. But the report’s authors believe there are huge potential benefits – and they argue it is essential the teaching profession is involved from the start. The report says: “We are in no doubt that teachers need to be central agents in the next phase of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd). In one sense this is obvious – it is teachers who will be the orchestrators of when, and how, to use these AIEd tools. In turn, the AIEd tools, and the data-driven insights that these tools provide, will empower teachers to decide how best to marshal the various resources at their disposal. ” Read more intelligence It adds: “The increasing use of AIEd systems will enable the collection of mass data about which teaching and learning practices work best. This data will enable us to track learner progress against different teaching approaches and, in turn, will allow us to develop a dynamic catalogue of the best teaching practices suited to the development of different skills and capabilities, in particular the 21st century skills, across a range of environments. ” AI should also be used to tackle the achievement gap between the poorest children and their wealthier peers by helping low-income parents with parenting even before their offspring start school. The report says: “Low-income parents may also have had limited education opportunities, meaning they may face serious challenges in providing at-home learning support to their children. “AIEd systems can provide tailored support to parents in the same way that they can for teachers and students, improving education and outcomes for both parents and their children. Imagine, for example, providing parents with AIEd assistants that could advise them about strategies for talking to their child, sharing songs, and enjoying books. This could enable all parents to provide the right sort of support in those all-important early years. ” AI first appeared in a digital game in 1979, when Pac-Man used a technique known as state machine (transitioning between states depending on conditions) to control whether or not a ghost ran towards or away from a player. The AI in most modern digital games builds on this approach. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Basic income may be needed to combat robot-induced unemployment, leading AI expert says Industrial robots have already displaced human workers in some factories / Sean Gallup/Getty The rise of artificial intelligence could put millions of human workers out of jobs - could a basic income be a solution? 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A leading artificial intelligence (AI) expert believes that societies may have to consider issuing a basic income to all citizens, in order to combat the threat to jobs posed by increased automation in the workplace. Dr Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, believes that a basic income may be needed in the future as advances in automation and AI put human workers out of jobs. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Dr Vardi said: "Our current economic system requires people to either have wealth or to work to make a living, with the assumption that the economy creates jobs for all those who need them. " Read more Stephen Hawking warns that robots could make us all unemployed "If this assumption breaks down - and progress in automation is likely to break it down, I believe - then we need to rethink the very basic structure of our economic system. " In Dr Vardi's view, governments and societies around the world may have to consider a "basic income guarantee" - a system in which all citizens or residents of a country receive an unconditional sum of money, in addition to any income they bring in elsewhere. The concept is controversial, but in the last few years, basic income has gathered support among those in power. At the end of 2015, the government of Finland began drawing up plans to give each citizen €800 (£620) a month, tax-free. The system would cost the government around €52. 2 billion (£40. 6 billion) a year, and would replace all existing forms of benefits. The final proposal won't be ready until the end of this year, and if it goes ahead, it'd likely be trialled in a few areas before being rolled out nationwide. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately A basic income pilot scheme is also set to be tested on a small number of benefits claimants in the Dutch city of Utrecht, and the system has support among people in the Green and Labour parties in the UK. The idea of robots replacing humans may sound like science fiction, but it's already a reality. As Dr Vardi told The Huffington Post: "Many [of the US manufacturing workers who have been displaced by automation] have found new jobs, but many also left the workforce, which accounts for the significant drop in the US labour force participation rate over the last 20 years. " Read more told Similarly, not all of the workers who will be displaced by automation in the coming decades will find new jobs. This is one of the reasons why a basic income system may need to be examined, he believes. One industry which is set to be radically altered by automation in the near future is transport - self-driving car technology is progressing at a rapid pace, and although legal issues may delay its widespread use, it still poses a threat to the livelihood of the millions of people who operate vehicles as part of their jobs. According to a 2015 study, around 70 per cent of young people in Australia currently enter the workforce in jobs which will be "radically affected by automation. " A separate 60 per cent of students are currently being trained for occupations in which at least two-thirds of jobs could be automated within the next 10 to 15 years, it claimed. If technology-induced mass employment does become a reality in the future, a basic income may be one of the solutions. Governments around the world will be keeping a close eye on the experiments in northern Europe to see just how feasible the concept is. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Professor Marvin Minsky: Mathematician and inventor inspired by Alan Turing to become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence Minsky devoted his career to the hypothesis that engineers could someday create an intelligent machine Click to follow The Independent Online Minsky at a seminar in Seattle in 1987, ‘Artificial Intelligence: Society’s Atlas or Achilles? ’ AP Marvin Minsky was a founding father of the field of artificial intelligence and an innovative explorer of the mysteries of the human mind during his long tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a professor emeritus at MIT's Media Lab, which has a broad, interdisciplinary mandate to explore technology, multimedia and design. Minsky devoted his career to the hypothesis that engineers could someday create an intelligent machine. He flourished as a professor and mentor even as the field of AI endured discouraging results and eruptions of pessimism. He lived long enough to see AI ambitions flourishing anew, with attendant concerns about killer robots and rogue computers. Although Minsky was himself an inventor – as a young man, he developed a microscope for studying brain tissue that eventually became a standard tool for scientists – his greatest contributions were theoretical. He developed a concept of intelligence as something that emerged from disparate mental agents acting in co-ordination. No single agent is intelligent when operating alone. If a single word could encapsulate Minsky's career, it would be "multiplicities", his MIT colleague and former student Patrick Winston said. The word "intelligence," Minsky believed, was a "suitcase word", Winston said, because "you can stuff a lot of ideas into it. " Other such words include "creativity" and "emotion". In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Along with fellow AI pioneer John McCarthy, Minsky founded the artificial intelligence lab at MIT in 1959. His 1960 paper Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence laid out many of the routes researchers would take in the decades to come. He wrote, "we are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines. " Anyone trying to mimic intelligence in a machine, he wrote, had to solve five categories of problems: search, pattern recognition, learning, planning and induction. He also wrote books, including The Society of Mind (1986) and The Emotion Machine (2006), that colleagues consider essential to understanding the challenges in creating machine intelligence. On his death, his colleague Nicholas Negroponte wrote: "The world has lost one of its greatest minds in science. As a founding faculty member of the Media Lab he brought equal measures of humour and deep thinking, always seeing the world differently. He taught us that the difficult is often easy, but the easy can be really hard. " Minsky was born in New York in 1927. His father, Henry, was a noted eye surgeon while his mother, the former Fannie Reiser, was active in Zionist causes. As a child, he recalled, he was "physically terrorised" by playground bullies, and a lack of academic support in the classroom led his parents to enrol him in the progressive Fieldston School. His interest in electronics and chemistry blossomed, and he won a place at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in 1941. He spent his senior year at a private Academy in Massachusetts, to bolster his college options. In 1945, he enlisted in the Navy in the final months of the Second World War and served in an electronics programme. He graduated in mathematics from Harvard in 1950 and received his PhD at Princeton in 1954. At Princeton, with funding from the Office of Naval Research, Minsky co-built a primitive "electronic learning machine" with tubes and motors. He was also exposed to some of the greatest minds of the day, including John von Neumann, a pioneer of computers. Back at Harvard as a junior fellow in the mid-1950s, Minsky invented the confocal scanning microscope that would find many uses in science. "Minsky's invention disappeared from view for many years because the lasers and computer power needed to make it really useful had not yet become available," Winston wrote. "About 10 years after the original patent expired, it started to become a standard tool in biology and materials science. " In 1956, when the very idea of a computer was only a couple of decades old, Minsky attended a two-month symposium at Dartmouth College that is considered the founding event in the field of artificial intelligence. Read more intelligence Minsky said last year that Alan Turing was the first person to bring respectability to the idea that machines might one day think. "There were science fiction people who made similar predictions, but no one took them seriously because their machines became intelligent by magic. Whereas Turing explained how the machines would work. " In 1969 the US Association of Computing Machinery gave him the highest honour in computer science, the AM Turing Award. Minsky and his wife, the former Gloria Rudisch, a paediatrician, enjoyed a partnership that began with their marriage in 1952. Their home became the regular haunt of science-fiction writers, including Isaac Asimov, while Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, would play the bongos at their parties. Gloria Marvin recalled her first conversation with the man she ended up marrying: "He said he wanted to know about how the brain worked. I thought he is either very wise or very dumb. Fortunately it turned out to be the former. " Minsky acknowledged last year that he was disappointed that AI research has yet to create human-level intelligence in a machine. He said early efforts at large companies such as IBM failed to appreciate the complexity of the problem and how incremental progress would have to be. "It's interesting how few people understood what steps you'd have to go through," he said. "They aimed right for the top and they wasted everyone's time. " He was asked if he believed that machines will become more intelligent than human beings and if that would be a good thing. "Well, they'll certainly become faster," he said. "And there's so many stories of how things could go bad, but I don't see any way of taking them seriously because it's pretty hard to see why anybody would instal them on a large scale without a lot of testing. " Marvin Lee Minsky, scientist: born New York 9 August 1927; married Gloria Rudisch (three children); died Boston 24 January 2016. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google AlphaGo computer beats professional at 'world's most complex board game' Go More complex than chess: the Chinese board game Go / Wikimedia/Creative Commons Milestone in AI research likened to defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue computer 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech It was considered one of the last great challenges between man and machine but now, for the first time, a computer program has beaten a professional player of the ancient Chinese game of Go in a defeat that many had not expected for at least another 10 years. The machine’s victory is being likened to the defeat of reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which became a milestone in the advance of artificial intelligence over the human mind. Go, however, is more complex than chess with an infinitely greater number of potential moves, so experts were surprised to find that computer scientists had invented a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that taught the computer how to win against Europe’s top player. Read more 'Artificial intelligence alarmists' win 'Luddite of the Year' award The program, called AlphaGo, defeated European champion Fan Hui by a resounding five games to nil in a match played last October but only now revealed in a scientific study of the moves and algorithms published last night in the journal Nature. A match against the current world Go champion, Lee Sedol from South Korea, is now scheduled for March. It was the first time a computer had won against a professional Go player on a full-sized board without any handicaps or advantages given to either side, said Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the AI arm of Google in London, who helped to write the program. Go rules The rules of Go are deceptively simple and no luck is involved. Two players – one black, one white – start with an empty board by placing one of their pieces or “stones” on a position, from where it does not move. The winner is the first to fill more than half the board with their stones. It is possible to take an opponent’s stone by completely surrounding it with your stones. Children and adults can easily play against each other and a handicap system allows players of different strengths to play with a 50 per cent chance of winning. “Go is the probably the most complex board game humans play. There are more configurations of the board than there are atoms in the Universe. In the end, AlphaGo won 5-nil and it was perhaps stronger than even we were expecting,” Mr Hassabis said. “AlphaGo discovered for itself many of the patterns and moves needed to play Go. Go is considered to be the pinnacle of AI research – the holy grail. For us, it was an irresistible challenge,” he said. Computer chess programs work by analysing every possible move on the board but this is relatively straightforward when there are about 20 possible moves for each stage of the game. In Go, however, there are about 200 possible moves, making the task of writing a winning program far more difficult. Science news in pictures Science news in pictures The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels. Scott Birch. Wellcome Images Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen. Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1. 9m YouTube Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface. Nasa Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park. The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye. Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT. Wellcome Images from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions. It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008. Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo. But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did. New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future. The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves. Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever. The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up. They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole. Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars. And the jets have been seen before. But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards. And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago. The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea. This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain. Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits. Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4. 1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew. The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed. The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”. Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned. Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower. Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system. They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time. The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project. Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”. Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here? ” model of the Solar System in a Nevada desert Illustrations of the Earth and moon show the two to be quite close together, Mr Overstreet said. This is inaccurate, the reason being that these images are not to scale. “The search process itself is not based on brute force but on something complex intuitive machinery that we only previously thought to be possible in the human brain,” said David Silver of Google DeepMind, the lead author of the study. AlphaGo uses two neural networks working in parallel and interacting with one another. A “value network” evaluated the positions of the black and white pieces or “stones” on the board, while a “policy network” selected the moves based on continuous learning of both past human moves and the program’s own dummy moves, Mr Silver said. Video: IBM’s Watson defeats greatest 'Jeopardy! ' champions “Humans can play perhaps a thousand games in a year whereas AlphaGo can play millions of games a day. It is conceivable with enough process power, training and search power that AlphaGo could reach a level that is beyond any human,” he said. Milestones in AI Research speculating on the possibility of creating machines that can think – as defined by his Turing Test. intelligence” was born with the Dartmouth Conference of researchers including Marvin Minsky talking about creating an artificial brain. companies as the first commercial exploitation of AI. system that could play chess as well as a grand master. Garry Kasparov for the first time. driving autonomously for 131 miles along a rehearsed desert track. greatest champions in the American quiz show Jeopardy! , Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson won $1m first prize. In tests against other Go computer games on the market, AlphaGo won all but one out of 500 games, even when other programs were given a head-start with pieces already positioned on the board. Mr Silver said the neural networks were able to learn by themselves, unlike the “supervised” training of other artificial intelligence algorithms. “It learns in a human-like manner but it still takes a lot of practice. It has to play many millions of games to do what a human player can learn in a few games,” Mr Silver said. World champion Lee Sedol said he is looking forward to the challenge match in March. “I have heard that Google DeepMind's AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time,” he said. Jon Diamond, president of the British Go Association, said: “Before this match the best computer programs were not as good as the top amateur players and I was still expecting that it would be at least 5 or 10 years before a program would be able to beat the top human players; now it looks like this may be imminent. The proposed challenge may well be that day. ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search 'Artificial intelligence alarmists' like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking win 'Luddite of the Year' award The winners of the award warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose a huge danger to humanity / Getty Although the foundation which gave the award acknowledge Hawking and Musk aren't really Luddites, they said they had contributed to 'feverish hand-wringing' over the dangers of AI 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A diverse group of scientists and technologists, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and famed physicist Stephen Hawking, have been named as the winners of 2015's 'Luddite Award', for their warnings over the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and 'killer robots'. The award, which is issued by Washington DC-based think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), is awarded annually to highlight the year's worst "anti-technology ideas and policies. " Although Hawking and Musk weren't directly named as nominees, they were part of a group of more than 1,000 luminaries from the worlds of science and technology who signed an open letter calling for a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons," or as they are better known 'killer robots'. Read more Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and thousands of others sign open letter The letter, which was also signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and philosopher Noam Chomsky, was a warning to the scientific community over the possible risks of militarised artificially intelligent robots. While the text of the letter acknowledged that AI could have huge benefits to humanity, it warned the use of the technology in warfare could be hugely destructive, and could potentially lead to the end of humanity if a man-made superintelligence 'turned' on its creators. Clearly unimpressed by these warnings over AI, ITIF made a veiled reference to the letter's signatories, by including "alarmists touting an artificial intelligence apocalypse" and "advocates seeking a ban on 'killer robots'" in their list of nominees for the award. Artists in Pakistan target drones with giant posters of child victims Artists in Pakistan target drones with giant posters of child victims A poster bearing the image of a Pakistani girl whose parents, lawyers say, were killed in a drone strike, lies in a field at an undisclosed location in the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. A group of artists in Pakistan are hoping to generate "empathy" among US drone operators by placing giant posters of children in the country's troubled tribal regions Crowd gather next to the poster, which targets predator drone operators in Pakistan The portrait of the nameless child was released with the hashtag: In military slang predator drone operators refer to victims as 'bug splats' because when you view the bodies from a grainy video they appear to look like crushed insects Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a heavily bombed area home to many drone attacks; the artists hope that the image of the young girl might make operators think twice Also nominated by ITIF were "The Center for Food Safety fighting genetically improved food," and "California’s governor vetoing RFID in driver’s licenses," among several others. After a month-long public vote, the "alarmists" who warned of an AI apocalypse, which included the signatories of the letter and many others, were deemed the winners, with 27 per cent of the vote. Commenting on the Luddite Award, which takes its name from the English anti-technology movement that sprung up during the later part of the Industrial Revolution, ITIF President Robert D. Atkinson criticised the 'demonisation' of AI that took place in 2015. Read more intelligence "It is deeply unfortunately that luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have contributed to feverish hand-wringing about a looming artificial intelligence apocalypse," he said. "Do we think either of them personally are Luddites? No, of course not. They are pioneers of science and technology. But they and others have done a disservice to the public - and have unquestionably given aid and comfort to an increasingly pervasive neo-Luddite impulse in society today - by demonising AI in the popular imagination. " He added: “If we want to continue increasing productivity, creating jobs, and increasing wages, then we should be accelerating AI development, not raising fears about its destructive potential. " Atkinson also pointed out the irony of Elon Musk being part of the winning group, considering the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has contributed significantly to the development of safe AI through his creation of OpenAI, a non-profit which aims to advance the technology in a way that can benefit humanity. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Artificial intelligence gets a lot of bad press, but it will solve the planet’s hardest problems Filmmakers have stoked human fears of AI technology in movies like ‘Ex Machina’, but big data could be a force for good According to the ‘digital prophet’ Kevin Kelly, we’re on the verge of a brave new future, where computing will solve all the planet’s ills. And he’s not alone 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech As you’re choking down your latest serving of Trump Clinton Brexit Racism Terrorism Wealth Gap Climate Change Casserole, you could use some good news. Let’s start with The Inevitable, the new best-seller by Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine some 20 years ago and one of our wisest technological prognosticators. “This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, ‘Oh to have been alive and well back then! ’” Kelly writes. “There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute. ” In the mid-2010s, we’re getting the first sneak peeks at a bouquet of technologies that can vastly improve the lives of most people on the planet and solve some of our hardest problems – even climate change. Just consider for a moment how much everyday life has been transformed since 2007, when smartphones, social networks and cloud computing took off at about the same time. What we’re going to experience in the next decade, from 2017 to 2027, will make that stuff seem as ho-hum as a wall socket. Artificial intelligence gets a lot of bad press. Yes, it’s probably going to wipe out certain jobs and professions, as always happens with progress. (Know any darkroom technicians? How about a cooper? ) The other side of AI is that it’s going to take civilisation on a great leap forward. Companies and researchers are collecting unimaginable amounts of data. They’ve got data from every Google search or Facebook like, every action on every cellphone, every online transaction, every motion of every factory machine, plus input from sensors being placed in streetlights and in buoys and on whales and in our bodies. AI is how we’ll learn from that data – in fact, it’s the only way we can lasso and make sense of so much data. The result of applying AI to all that data will be much more profound than, like, a Nest smart thermostat. AI is how we’re going to find a cure for cancer in the next decade. It’s how we’re going to build liveable cities even as more and more people move to them. It’s how we’ll stop terrorists before they strike. AI will help figure out mysteries of the human condition, like why a batter can hit 20 home runs in one game of baseball and then get hammered in the next, but are so hopeless on the international stage – and then help us all understand how to perform more consistently in our work or play. Read more Amazon robot competition won by shelf stacking AI AI will likely take driving away from humans, and that’s a very good thing. Human drivers kill 32,000 people a year in the US because our brains get distracted or make bad choices. Despite headlines about a recent self-driving fatality, AI driving should eventually nearly eliminate accidents. “It is hard to imagine anything that would ‘change everything’ as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence,” Kelly writes. “It is the ur-force in our future. ” The energy industry is similarly about to go through mind-bending change. Gas cars are all but doomed. Tesla showed the way, and now most major car companies believe the industry’s future is electric. At the same time, the cost of solar energy technology is plummeting. “There’s over five thousand times more solar energy falling on the planet’s surface than we use in a year,” Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler wrote in their 2012 book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. Add together electric cars and cheap solar, and we move into an age when burning carbon will seem archaic. That won’t reverse climate change, but it sure makes for a more optimistic outlook. Technology is deeply affecting work and jobs, stirring up political turmoil. But maybe technology will help us get a better outcome. Today, only about 7 percent of the global population has a university degree. Education for many is too expensive or not even available. Khan Academy and other online learning companies will in the next decade make education cheap and available to anyone with a smartphone, which should give more people more ways to make a living. At the same time, technology is driving down the cost and difficulty of creating almost any product or service. As Kelly points out, starting a company, building a product, making a movie or publishing a book is 100 times easier now than just a couple of decades ago – and will be another 100 times easier in another decade. This combination of education and easy entrepreneurship is why Kelly says there has never been a time of more opportunity – the opposite message of so many political rants. So much life-altering technology is coming, it’s hard to imagine how it will all play out. AI-driven health care will be like having a doctor in your pocket 24/7, helping you feel better and live longer – and what’s more valuable than that? A pocket doc, in turn, will push down demand for expensive procedures and make being healthy more affordable. Blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, could help open up the financial system to more people across the economic spectrum. Blockchain has so many still-to-be-explored uses, according to author Don Tapscott, that the technology today is as exciting as the internet circa 1995. Cars with AI technology like Tesla could be the future (Reuters) All of these technologies – AI, solar, blockchain, personal medicine, online education – will pile on top of mobile, social and cloud technologies, which aren’t finished changing our lives. Some experts, like Diamandis, the guy behind the XPrize contests, believe it all adds up to a coming era of “abundance”. Technology relentlessly drives down costs, they point out, and is making a lot of stuff free. Photography used to cost quite a bit; now it’s free on your phone. College courses cost a near fortune; Khan is free. If you look at your phone screen right now, you can probably see 20 free or cheap things that would’ve cost significant money 20 years ago – if they even existed 20 years ago. Shazam would’ve seemed like a miracle in 1996. Read more it’s even worth trying to play password vulnerability acknowledge he is gay on a Republican convention stage Instagram “Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet,” according to Diamandis and Kotler. Of course, a Pollyannaish view isn’t warranted or helpful. Technology has its dark sides. It always has. But in this moment of global tension, it stinks that our politicians don’t see what’s coming and are failing to rally us to embrace it, build on it and shape it for the better. It’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump figuring out how to send a Dropbox folder much less lead us into a new era of AI, solar energy and tech-driven abundance. At least Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a stab at explaining quantum computing. In the US, we just get fulminations about building walls or scandals about that antediluvian technology called email. “Future people will envy us, wishing they could have witnessed the birth we saw,” Kelly concludes about 2016’s technology. It will be nice if he’s right, since we too often feel as if future people are more likely to blame us for the collapse we started. ‘The Inevitable’ by Kevin Kelly is published by Viking Books Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Mark Zuckerberg to build robot butler to look after his child as part of 2016 New Year's resolution Alicia Vikander in a scene from 'Ex Machina' The system will be able to control his lights and music as well as helping him run his company 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Mark Zuckerberg intends to build a robot to look after his house and keep tabs on his newborn daughter. The Facebook founder and CEO’s resolution for 2016 is to build an artificially intelligent system that will be able to control his house, watch over his child and help him to run Facebook. Mr Zuckerberg has in the past taken on “personal challenges” that have included reading two books per month, learning Mandarin and meeting a new person each day. But now he has undertaken perhaps his most ambitious plan — an artificially intelligent robot that seems to be able to run his whole house. Read more Facebook scam being shared thousands of times, weeks after beginning “My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work,” he wrote. “You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man. ” Facebook has been working hard on AI systems as a company, including building computers that can recognise the contents of a picture and then make sure it is shown properly on Facebook. But other technologists and scientists have expressed concerns about such plans. People such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have worried that artificial intelligence will go on to have too much power and could damage humanity. Those worries were dramatised in last year’s Ex Machina. That film also showed an AI-obsessed boss of a huge technology firm who lived in a computer-controlled house, who went on to create a dangerous robot out of the masses of data he had on his users. Mr Zuckerberg responded to worries about the technology, in response to a commenter that asked whether AI could become "so intelligent that it could run the world like in movies". "I think we can build AI so it works for us and helps us," he wrote. "Some people fear-monger about how AI is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc. " Others were concerned that he could make killer robots. "Just don't accidentally create skynet," said one user, referencing the self-aware AI that brought chaos in the Terminator films. Mr Zuckerbg said that he would "be careful". Mr Zuckerberg said that he would start by looking into existing technologies. That seemed to be a reference to the burgeoning products in the so-called “internet of things” — WiFi-connected speakers and lights, for instance. “I'm going to start by exploring what technology is already out there,” he wrote. “Then I'll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on. I'll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. “I'll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max's room that I need to check on when I'm not with her. ” In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Mr Zuckerberg also said that the system would help him with his work. It would do so using virtual reality, another technology that Facebook has invested heavily in with its acquisition of Oculus, the headset-making firm. “On the work side, it'll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively," he wrote. “Every challenge has a theme, and this year's theme is invention. ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Plan to bring people back from the dead by freezing their brains and then resurrecting them with artificial intelligence The company is developing techniques to take people's brains out and freeze them until they are ready / Getty Artificial intelligence and apps would watch people during their lives — and then use that to bring them back to life 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A company claims that it is developing technology to bring people back from the dead. Humai says that it is developing technology that would allow brains to be frozen and have their information stored, bringing people back using artificial intelligence. The technology could be available to the public within the next 30 years, the company claimed. The details of how exactly the company intends to bring people back to life are still unclear. And as often with such grand claims, it is possible that the people behind the firm are only making them as a hoax or publicity stunt. Read more Chemists explain exactly how death feels But if the technology is real then it would involve freezing a person’s brain and then fitting it with a reality chip. Once the techniques were sufficiently advanced, the frozen brain would then be taken out of its freezer and put into a new body, allowing the person to be brought back to life. Before the person dies, the company would use artificial intelligence to study the conversational style and behaviour of their customers. That would then be fed into the chip so that the person that was being re-animated would be preserved. “We'll first collect extensive data on our members for years prior to their death via various apps we're developing,” founder Josh Bocanegra told PopSci in an interview. “After death we'll freeze the brain using cryonics technology. When the technology is fully developed we'll implant the brain into an artificial body. “The artificial body functions will be controlled with your thoughts by measuring brain waves. As the brain ages we'll use nanotechnology to repair and improve cells. Cloning technology is going to help with this too. ” The company’s slick website claim that it wants “to bring you back to life after you die”. Science news in pictures Science news in pictures The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels. Scott Birch. Wellcome Images Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen. Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1. 9m YouTube Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface. Nasa Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park. The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye. Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT. Wellcome Images from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions. It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008. Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo. But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did. New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future. The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves. Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever. The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up. They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole. Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars. And the jets have been seen before. But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards. And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago. The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea. This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain. Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits. Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4. 1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew. The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed. The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”. Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned. Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower. Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system. They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time. The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project. Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”. Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here? ” model of the Solar System in a Nevada desert Illustrations of the Earth and moon show the two to be quite close together, Mr Overstreet said. This is inaccurate, the reason being that these images are not to scale. “We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioural patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out,” the site reads. “This data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial body with the brain of a deceased human. Using cloning technology, we will restore the brain as it matures. ” The company has five people working together to create the technology, it claims. That includes people working on artificial intelligence, “bionics and sensors” and nanotechnology. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Stephen Hawking: Artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity when it gets too clever as humans will be like ants Chinese inventor Tao Xiangli modifies the circuits of his home-made robot at his house in Beijing, May 15, 2013 / REUTERS/Suzie Wong AI is likely to be ‘either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity,’ Hawking said, ‘so there's huge value in getting it right’ 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Stephen Hawking has warned that artificially intelligent machines could kill us because they are too clever. Such computers could become so competent that they kill us by accident, Hawking has warned in his first Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. A questioner noted that Professor Hawking’s ideas about artificial intelligence are seen as “a belief in Terminator-style ‘Evil AI’”, and asked how he would present his own beliefs. “The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence,” Professor Hawking said. “A super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble. Read more AI system found to be as clever as a child “You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let's not place humanity in the position of those ants. ” Hawking said that eventually humans might become cleverer than their creators. Our own intelligence is no limit on that of the things we create, he said: “we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents”. Stephen Hawking reads “Relativity” By Sarah Howe If they become that clever, then we may face an “intelligence explosion”, as machines develop the ability to engineer themselves to be far more intelligent. That might eventually result in “machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails”, Hawking said. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Hawking said that it wasn’t clear how long such artificial intelligence would take to develop — warning that people shouldn’t trust “anyone who claims to know for sure that it will happen in your lifetime or that it won't happen in your lifetime”. But when it does happen, Hawking said, “it's likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there's huge value in getting it right”. As such, we should “shift the goal of AI from creating pure undirected artificial intelligence to creating beneficial intelligence”. Read more “It might take decades to figure out how to do this, so let's start researching this today rather than the night before the first strong AI is switched on,” Hawking said. That echoed the warnings in the open letter about AI that Hawking’s AMA had followed — in it, experts warned that if we are lax about thinking about artificial intelligence, computers will become too clever before we even realise. Before the robots become so powerful that they accidentally kill us, they might end up taking our jobs. Asked whether the rise of artificially intelligent robots could lead to “technological employment”, Hawking warned that it would depend entirely on how the extra wealth that they create was distributed. “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution,” Hawking said. “So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Apple buys VocalIQ: Siri likely to get more human as artificial intelligence could come to iPhones and Apple cars The Apple store in Beijing launches the new iPhone 6s / Cambridge-based VocalIQ aims to change ‘the way we talk to machines’ by making them talk more like humans 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Apple has bought a new artificial intelligence-powered company that aims to make robots easier to speak to and could lead to improvements in its voice assistant, Siri. VocalIQ, which is based in Cambridge, builds . And Apple is likely to have bought the company to improve Siri, its voice-controlled digital assistant. “Traditional spoken dialogue interfaces are handcrafted, fragile and frustrating,” says VocalIQ’s website. “It is unrealistic to expect seven billion people to start talking to machines in a way mandated by a programmer. Dialogue systems need to learn how people speak, and not the other way round. ” Read more deal VocalIQ says that its technology “harnesses the power of more than 10 years of academic research in natural language, belief tracking, decision making and message generation”. “Re-imagining the way that people interact with their devices has application across different market verticals - with enormous potential to revolutionise our interaction with machines,” its website said. Apple has been working to make Siri more useful and better at understanding the needs of its owners. iOS 9, the most recent update to the iPhone and iPad operating system, brought new features to Siri that allowed it to suggest apps that it thinks its owner might be looking for, for instance. The top five features in Apple's iOS 9 Eventually, the same technology is likely to come to all of Apple's line. Its CarPlay in-car entertainment technology can make use of Siri, for instance — and so might the rumoured Apple car. Apple has been reported in the past to be hiring machine learning and artificial intelligence experts, in an attempt to help make Siri more clever and able to predict what humans are saying and might want. The company has been aggressively hiring experts including those from other companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, in addition to the VoiceIQ acquisition. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Sex robots should be banned, say campaigners, as engineers look to add AI to sex toys A still from the film Ex Machina, in which an AI seduces a man Machines ‘in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes’ are ‘harmful and contribute to inequalities in society’, campaigners claim 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Companies should be stopped from developing sex robots with artificial intelligence for fear of harming humanity, according to campaigners. Many engineers are looking to add artificial intelligence to sex toys and dolls in an attempt to make them more like humans, and therefore more attractive to customers. But such moves are unethical and will harm humanity, according to a new campaign. The Campaign Against Sex Robots, launched this week, says that the “increasing effort” that has gone into producing sex robots — “machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes” — is harmful and makes society more unequal. The researchers say that such robots contribute towards the objectification of women and children and enforce stereotypical ideas of them. The robots reduce human empathy, since they will take people away from relationships with real humans, they argue. Read more The robots also reproduce the idea of prostitution, which the campaigners say could harm women. The idea sbehind the robots “show the immense horrors still present in the world of prostitution which is built on the ‘perceived’ inferiority of women and children and therefore justifies their uses as sex objects”, the researchers say. Some have argued that sex robots will help those involved in prostitution and sexual exploitation and violence, since those people will instead use robots. But the researchers say that “technology and the sex trade coexist and reinforce each other creating more demand for human bodies”. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately The campaign, led by robotics and ethics researchers Kathleen Richardson and Erik Brilling, proposes that engineers instead work on technology that “reflect human principles of dignity, mutuality and freedom”. They hope that other members will join the campaign, so that it can “encourage computer scientists and roboticists to refuse to contribute to the development of sex robots as a field by refusing to provide code, hardware or ideas” as well as working with campaigns against the sexual exploitation of humans. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Kitchens go hi-tech: From robot chefs to recipe-shopping apps, computerised cooking is coming Helping hands: Moley Robotics’ automated kitchen If a microwave is the most hi-tech thing in your kitchen, it could be time for an upgrade. From apps that automatically make shopping lists from your recipe books to smart ovens and robot chefs, Kevin Maney rounds up innovations to make your mouth water Click to follow Indy/Life We've been hearing ad nauseam about driverless cars. Next up will be the cookless kitchen. There's a lot of stuff simmering in that realm. Investors have been pouring money into "food tech" startups the past couple of years. Entrepreneurs are turning spicy phrases such as "the new restaurant is no restaurant". MBA-wielding forward thinkers, applying the kind of spreadsheet thinking that they might use to improve the efficiency of a supply chain, are talking about how they're out to reduce our "time to meal". That all may sound a bit overheated, but to be fair, the technology of the meal hasn't profoundly changed since the introduction of the microwave oven in 1955. As data, artificial intelligence and robotics intersect in the home, the everyday meal is ripe for disruption. The room we call the kitchen might end up becoming as quaint as a fireplace – nice to have, but not necessary. These grand schemes to change the nature of cooking help explain some of the vertiginous valuations of recent food-tech companies. In the US, Munchery, for instance, lets customers order freshly prepared meals using a mobile app. The chilled meals are delivered in about 30 minutes, then customers can throw them in the microwave or refrigerate for later in the week. While that may sound as if it's barely more clever than pizza delivery from Domino's, Munchery just raised another $85m (£54m), valuing the company at $300m. Startups with names such as Blue Apron, DoorDash, Hello Fresh and ChowNow are getting similarly large investments. In 2014, US food-tech companies raised more than $1bn and India, Europe and China have all become sizzling regions for food-tech startups. If the end goal were just newfangled food delivery, the investment surge would look like bubble-driven investor looniness. But remember: Facebook was once an online college yearbook – nobody knew it was going to change the nature of social circles. Perhaps some of these companies will bring about a similarly profound transformation in meals. If you stir the pot a little, you can see how new technologies will come together to change cooking. Take a UK-based company called Whisk. It was started by Nick Holzherr, who is somewhat famous in the UK because he first pitched his idea on the country's version of The Apprentice, getting turned down by Lord Sugar, who huffed: "Who could be bothered with it? " Whisk, for now, is an app that automates shopping lists on your phone. A user can find a recipe online, throw it into Whisk and the app will add the items needed to the list. You can refer to the list while at the supermarket, or in some shops use it to automatically order from a delivery service. Food-tech startups are developing ovens that intuitively know how to cook different kinds of food, such as June Behind that simple idea, Holzherr has a bigger one: as Whisk gathers data about recipes, ingredients and user tastes, the company plans to develop a "food genome" – a nod to Pandora's Music Genome Project that breaks down the traits of songs. As Holzherr explained to me, once Whisk has data about food and user taste preferences, it can make matches – like a food-discovery service. You might tell Whisk that you want to try a new Indian dish that's under 600 calories, and it could present a recipe geared to what it knows you like. As meals go digital, companies such as Whisk and Munchery will learn a great deal about ingredients, recipes, trends and their customers' tastes. That will change the way we buy and eat food, much as Pandora and Spotify are changing the way we try and buy music. Technologists are also working on the mechanics of cooking. A couple of former Apple developers have created an oven called June, which is supposed to recognise the food placed in it and cook it perfectly. The company says June is a "computer-based oven that thinks like a chef". It's also a step toward a kitchen that can cook by itself. The Moley app serves multiple functions At Asia's inaugral Consumer Electronics Show in May, Moley Robotics showed off its automated kitchen. The thing looks like someone cut off Robocop's arms and stuck them on a kitchen counter. For now, the system is only a very sophisticated mimic – it has to record a human chef's actions, then it can cook the meal if the ingredients are precisely placed in predetermined spots, all within reach of the arms. In a way, it's not a huge advance over Dick Van Dyke's mechanical kitchen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But systems like this will get smarter and more flexible, using artificial intelligence to learn how to make meals and figure out where to find the ingredients. Add up the various inventions that are in the works, and the robot cook starts looking like more than just a labour-saving daydream of a nerd with 10 kids. Throw IBM's Chef Watson into the mix, too. As a way to show off the Watson computer's capabilities, IBM fed it truckloads of recipes from around the world, along with data about ingredients and how their chemicals react to one another. The machine developed recipes no one had ever created, sometimes for good reason, unless a beef burrito with chocolate and edamame sounds good to you. The computer even has its own cookbook, Cognitive Cooking With Chef Watson. The bottom line: a machine can now think up recipes. Whisk automates shopping lists on your phone We're on a path toward some kind of machine that will know just about everything there is to know about food combinations, and it will be able to assemble intimate knowledge of the tastes of the people it will serve. Robotics are getting so good, so quickly, there's no reason to think robot cooks won't make their mark first in high-volume food preparation enterprises and, later, homes. Swizzle together a robot chef plus food data and artificial intelligence, and you have a home cook that can be as good as any celebrity chef – or even your mother. Maybe the best way to automate cooking will be to build a kitchen suited to robots instead of humans – like a self-enclosed, self-cleaning unit of stoves and arms and blenders that sits in the basement and sends finished plates up through a dumb waiter. People who really want to cook will be like people who really want to do their own woodworking. Instead of a human-scale kitchen as a default room in any house, it will be something you have to choose to install. Which puts a whole new spin on the techie catchphrase: "Software is eating the world. " I guess we may end up eating software. (c) Newsweek Europe Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google's AI think tank is working on a way to cure cancer Deep Mind scientists are trying to figure out how to use nanotechnology to turn off cancer cells Click to follow The Independent Online Deep Mind, the London-based artificial intelligence start-up bought for £400m by Google last year, is working on technology to fight cancer, according to one of the search giants's top executives. Speaking at Advertising Week Europe in London, Google's UK head Eileen Naughton said: “In concept, they are trying to figure out how to use nanotechnology to turn off cancer cells. They're working on high level, life changing stuff. ” Read more In recent years Google has taken an increasing interest in healthcare, establishing a Life Sciences division within Google X, the branch of Google that works on so-called 'moon projects' that are not immediately commercial. The technology giant has also launched a spin-off company, Cailco, that focuses on cures for age related diseases. Naughton said Google's Life Sciences division was doing “an enormous amount of mapping of cancer cells” and is also working on mapping the genome of autistic people to better understand the condition. Steven Hawking has expressed fears about possible intended consequences arising from the type of artificial intelligence that Deep Mind is working on Member's of the science community including Steven Hawking have expressed fears about possible intended consequences arising from the type of artificial intelligence that Deep Mind is working on. Naughton conceded there are risks, saying: “You can imagine this artificial intelligence can be used for menacing purposes - you could get something like the Matrix or Terminator. ” But she added: “Demis Hassabis, who is the founder of Deep Mind, and a group of MIT professors and a whole crowd of artificial intelligence researchers recently got together and signed a doctrine that's essentially a Magna Carta for AI - how we comport ourselves and what are the ethics governing AI. ” Naughton praised King's Cross-based Deep Mind as “the most advance artificial intelligence think tank in the world” and said the engineers and scientists who staff it are viewed as the “elite of the elite” within Google. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search New artificial intelligence can learn how to play vintage video games from scratch The Deep Q-network has learned to play Space Invaders and Breakout Click to follow The Independent Online Space Invaders, one of the 49 classic Atari games that the Deep Q-network has mastered A new kind of computer intelligence has learned to play dozens of vintage video games without any prior help in how to achieve human-like scoring abilities, scientists said. The intelligent machine learns by itself from scratch using a trial-and-error approach that is reinforced by the reward of a score in the game. This is fundamentally different to previous game-playing “intelligent” computers, the researchers said. The system of software algorithms is called Deep Q-network and has learned to play 49 classic Atari games such as Space Invaders and Breakout, but only with the help of information about the pixels on a screen and the scoring method. The researchers behind the development said that it represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence capable of learning from scratch without being fed instructions from human experts – the classic method for chess-playing machines such as IBM’s Deep Blue computer. “This work is the first time anyone has built a single, general learning system that can learn directly from experience to master a wide range of challenging tasks, in this case a set of Atari games, and to perform at or better than human level,” said Demis Hassabis, a former neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind Technologies, which was bought by Google for £400m in 2014. “It can learn to play dozens of the games straight out of the box. What that means is we don’t pre-program it between each game. All it gets access to is the raw pixel inputs and the game’s score. From there it has to figure out what it controls in the game world, how to get points and how to master the game, just by playing the game,” said Mr Hassabis, a former chess prodigy. “The ultimate goal here is to build smart, general purpose machines but we’re many decades off from doing that, but I do think this is the first significant rung on the ladder,” he added. Read more The Deep Q-network played the same game hundreds of times to learn the best way of achieving high scores. In some games it outperformed human players by learning clever tactics such as, for instance, tunnelling through the ends of the wall in Breakout to get the cursor to bounce behind the bricks. In more than half the games, the system was able to achieve more than 75 per cent of the human scoring ability just by learning by itself through trial and error, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the world champion chess player, in 1997, while IBM’s Watson computer outperformed seasoned players of the quiz show game Jeopardy! in 2011. However, Deep Q works in a fundamentally different way, Mr Hassabis said. Chess enthusiasts watch as Deep Blue beats World Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 (Getty) “The key difference between those kinds of algorithms is that they are largely pre-programmed with their abilities,” he explained. “In the case of Deep Blue it was the team of programmers and chess masters they had on their team that distilled their chess knowledge into a program, and that program effectively executed that without learning anything – and it was that program that was able to beat Gary Kasparov,” he said. “What we’ve done is to build programs that learn from the ground up. You literally give them a perceptual experience and they learn to do things directly from that perceptual experience from first principles,” Mr Hassabis added. An advantage of “reinforced learning” rather than “supervised learning” of previous artificial intelligence computers is that the designers and programmers do not need to know the solutions to the problems because the machines themselves will be able to master the task, he said. “These type of systems are more human-like in the way they learn in the sense that it’s how humans learn. We learn from experiencing the world around us, from our senses and our brains then make models of the world that allow us to make decisions and plan what to do in the world, and that’s exactly the type of system we are trying to design here,” Mr Hassabis said. What does the creation of Deep Q mean? A machine with a human-like brainpower is the stuff of nightmares, and even scientists such as Stephen Hawking have warned about the existential threat posed by uncontrolled artificial intelligence. Movies such as 'I, Robot' have speculated on the threat that artificial intelligence may pose The latest Deep Q-network is far from being able to wield this kind of malign power. However, what makes it interesting, and some might say potentially dangerous, is that it was inspired and built on the neural networks of the human brain. In particular, the designers of Deep Q compare it to the dopamine reward system of the brain, which is involved in a range of reinforcing behaviours, including drug addiction. “There is some evidence that humans have a similar system of reinforced learning in the dopamine part of the brain,” said David Silver, one of system’s developers. “This was one of the motivations for doing our work because humans also similarly learn by trial and error – by observing reward and learning to reinforce those rewards,” he said. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Artificial intelligence could kill us because we're stupid, not because it's evil, says expert She’s electric: some scientists believe that robots with consciousness, such as Ava in ‘Ex Machina’, are only ‘a couple of breakthroughs away’ Building artificial intelligence in humanity’s image will make it dangerous, says leading theorist 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Artificial intelligence will be a threat because we are stupid, not because it is clever and evil, according to experts. We could put ourselves in danger by creating artificial intelligence that looks too much like ourselves, a leading theorist has warned. “If we look for A. I. in the wrong ways, it may emerge in forms that are needlessly difficult to recognize, amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits,” writes theorist Benjamin H Bratton in the New York Times. The warning comes partly in response to similar worries voiced by leading technologists and scientists including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. They and hundreds of other experts signed a letter last month calling for research to combat the dangers of artificial intelligence. But many of those worries seem to come from thinking that robots will care deeply about humanity, for better or worse. We should abandon that idea, Bratton proposes. “Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant,” he writes. “Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all. ” In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Instead we should start thinking about artificial intelligence as something more than the image of human intelligence. Tests like that proposed by Alan Turing, which challenges artificial intelligence to pass as a human, reflect the fact that our thinking about what kinds of intelligence there might be is limited, according to Bratton. “That we would wish to define the very existence of A. I. in relation to its ability to mimic how humans think that humans think will be looked back upon as a weird sort of speciesism,” he writes. “The legacy of that conceit helped to steer some older A. I. research down disappointingly fruitless paths, hoping to recreate human minds from available parts. It just doesn’t work that way. ” Other experts in artificial intelligence have pointed out that we don’t tend to build other technology to mimic biology. Planes, for instance, aren’t designed to mimic the flight of birds, and it could be a mistake to do the same with humanity. Retaining our idea that intelligence only exists as it does in humans could also mean that we force robots to “pass” as a person in a way that Bratton likens to being “in drag as a human”. “We would do better to presume that in our universe, ‘thinking’ is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case,” he writes. “The real philosophical lessons of A. I. will have less to do with humans teaching machines how to think than with machines teaching humans a fuller and truer range of what thinking can be (and for that matter, what being human can be). ” Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Alex Garland's 'Ex Machina': is true artificial intelligence sci-fi or sci-fact? The former literary rock star's brilliant directorial debut explores the development of artificial consciousness - a subject which is more topical than ever Click to follow The Independent Culture Still from the film 'Ex Machina' UPI Media "Tough crowd …. There were some real heavyweights there, a lot of people a lot smarter than me. I was pretty terrified. " So says Alex Garland, when I meet him the morning after the screening of his directorial debut, Ex Machina, to an audience of scientists. The reason for their presence? The high-concept thriller deals with that most topical of scientific topics, artificial intelligence, via the tale of a beautiful machine, Ava, believed by its creator to be the first truly human-like robot. As if proving the film’s currency, after the screening Demis Hassabis, founder of British AI company DeepMind Technologies, approached Garland and suggested they go out to dinner; last year, DeepMind was bought by Google, becoming its largest-ever European acquisition. “This guy is actively trying to develop artificial consciousness,” Garland says, evidently impressed, “and Google have just spent £242 million to be part of it”. Ex Machina cleaves to this reality: the film’s inventor figure is Oscar Isaac’s Nathan, CEO of “Bluebook”, the world’s largest search engine. Alex Garland, the director of 'Ex Machina' (Getty Images) If Garland sounds a little cowed by his new friends, then that belies his blossoming reputation as one of cinema’s foremost creators of science fiction. The 44-year-old Londoner became a literary rock star in the Nineties with his gap-year thriller The Beach. However, after retiring from literature with overwhelming writer’s block, he found a second wind in screenwriting. An obsessive JG Ballard fan, he has rebuilt his name penning dystopian fictions, from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Sunshine to the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and the Judge Dredd reboot Dredd. And now comes Ex Machina. Set in one location with just three speaking parts, its premise is based on the Turing Test, the method devised by the British mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing to determine whether a machine might be experiencing a sense of consciousness comparable to our own. Isaac’s Nathan applies the test by introducing his feminine robotic creation, Ava (Alicia Vikander), to an employee of his (Domhnall Gleeson) and setting up a series of meetings between them. Is she still a machine, we wonder? Or are we witnessing something as alive and self-aware as any human? The film plays with the idea of “the singularity”, a term coined by Hassabis’ new boss and Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, to refer to the moment when humans and machines will “converge”. Kurzweil has predicted this will happen within as little as 15 years. Garland, however, expects a longer timetable before we see an AI like Ava. “My children’s lifetime, I expect,” he says when pressed. “But we are approaching a point where machines will be willing to say to us: ‘Please don’t switch me off…’ They’ll have the capacity to want something, to feel things. ” Best films to watch in 2015 Best films to watch in 2015 Meryl Streep is bound to make a formidable Emmeline Pankhurst in Sarah Gavron's new film about the British women's suffragette movement of the early 20th century. Streep is again working from a screenplay by Abi Morgan who also wrote The Iron Lady. Getty Images Thomas Vinterberg turns his hand to Thomas Hardy and British costume drama. Memories of the John Schlesinger version with Alan Bates and Julie Christie will be hard to exorcise. Carey Mulligan and the mercurial Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts star as Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak. The third Jurassic Park sequel is finally here starring Chris Pratt. The storyline goes something like this - theme park gets dinosaur to attrack visitors and it all goes horribly wrong. Should prove a fun one among cinema-goers. Colin Trevorrow Arnold Schwarzenegger kept his promise - he's back and he's trying to stop Judgement Day. Bond is back for the 24th time. So is arch-villain Blofeld. Director Sam Mendes did a sterling job with Skyfall but the last movie ended on a very downbeat note with poor old Judi Dench signing out of the series. The challenge now is to reinvigorate a franchise that is already well into its 50s. Rex Features It's Rachel from Friends as you've never seen her before as Jennifer Aniston plays Claire Bennett - a woman who initiates a relationship with a widower while battling hallucinations of his dead wife. It will be intriguing to see how Saul Dibb’s long-awaited adaptation of Irène Némirovsky’s novel deals with a problem that has often confounded British film-makers: how to portray French characters played by English-speaking actors in Nazi-occupied, wartime Paris without slipping into ’Allo ’Allo! -style caricature. Michelle Williams and Kristin Scott Thomas lead Dibb’s promising cast. Chris Hemsworth plays tough seafarer Owen Chase in this dramatic Moby Dick movie. Warner Bros Kenneth Branagh's live action remake of Disney's classic tale stars Downton Abbey's Lily James. Helena Bonham-Carter and Cate Blanchett also star as the Fairy Godmother and evil stepmother. Disney This view is shared by Ex Machina’s scientific advisors: Murray Shanahan, a professor in cognitive robotics at Imperial College, whose writings form the basis for the film’s logic, and geneticist and science broadcaster Adam Rutherford. “The robotics side of things – Ava’s body – we can get to in 10 or 15 years I think,” says Shanahan. “But Ava’s consciousness – we need a couple of conceptual breakthroughs before we get there. But in a basement of some research institute somewhere, it’s possible that these breakthroughs are taking place. ” In the film, Ava’s brain is made from a sort of “structured gel”, into which all the data from every use of the world’s biggest search engine is fed. It’s a solution that feels especially convincing in the light of the Snowden revelations that search engines such as Google are capable of storing, and then exploiting, every thought and feeling we communicate through our devices. If popular culture is our guide, then the development of conscious machines should terrify us. Cinema’s prophesies about AI range from the fretful and anxious to the outright apocalyptic: see the “time to die” replicants in Blade Runner, Skynet’s hell-bent destruction of mankind in the Terminator franchise, and, more recently, the emotional turmoil of falling for an operating system in Spike Jonze’s Her. Again and again, our organic wet-matter is celebrated over the cold hardware of the “conscious” machines trying to encroach on our turf. In the effort to vilify robotics, Hollywood has friends in high places. During a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the tech pioneer Elon Musk compared the development of AI to “summoning the demon”. Meanwhile Professor Stephen Hawking recently told the BBC: “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, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded. ” It would spoil Ex Machina to say more about its plot but Garland, unusually for a filmmaker, fundamentally disagrees with the AI happen,” he says. What about the moral implications of creating something that doesn’t age like us, and will have an analytical power far beyond our capabilities, I venture. “I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about creating a conscious machine,” he says, “because we create new consciousness routinely in the propagation of our species – we have children. The ethical implications of creating a conscious machine are broadly similar to the ethical implications of creating a child. ” Garland's writing credits include 2002's '28 Days Later' (AP) Rutherford, too, dismisses Hawking’s warnings: “I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about,” he says. “We’re so informed by the dystopic visions we see in our culture: computers so advanced they no longer ourselves? I don’t buy the idea that we’ll suddenly have to bow to our computer overlords. ” Why, does Garland think, the idea of AI scares people so much? “I think we’re more like processing machines than we want to think we are,” he says. “It disturbs people to think of their emotional connections in terms of electrochemical responses. ” “It’s easy to be premature and alarmist about these artificial creatures,” says Shanahan. “We should be careful. I think there needs to be a debate about them; we’re talking about a completely unregulated part of our society. Do I want governments to be in possession of these creatures, or private companies and individuals? I don’t know. But I am, overall, excited about them. ” “We can’t ignore this, but, in the same way, we can’t be knee-jerk and fear-mongering about it,” says Rutherford. “Google and the big tech companies are currently going through a serious land grab of AI start-ups, and it’s certainly aggressive. I wonder sometimes what they’re up to. We need to talk about it meaningfully in a democracy. ” “One day the AIs will look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa,” says Ava’s creator in Ex Machina. “Upright apes, ready for extinction. ” Maybe that’s why we fear AI, because it makes us reflect on who we really are: flesh and blood, and much more basic than we like to believe. ‘Ex Machina’ is released in cinemas on 23 Jan Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search iPhone 6s successors to use artificial intelligence to guess what users want before they know Apple has been stepping up its efforts to hire machine learning and artificial intelligence experts, apparently for its Siri personal assistant, according to reports 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Apple is beefing up its artificial intelligence team, in an apparent attempt to make iPhones clever enough to know what they’re users want before they do. The company has launched a huge hiring push to take on more experts in machine learning — a branch of computing that aims to make devices that think like humans. The push is likely part of Apple’s attempts to make iPhones more clever and able to predict and then anticipate what users are looking for, which is being built in to its personal assistant, Siri. Apple has already rolled out some of those features in iOS 9, the operating system that is expected to roll out with the new iPhone 6s. But they are so far relatively limited — guessing what apps people are about to use or where they might want to go, for instance. Read more happen, man or machine? data because it's evil, says expert Those special search features are wrapped up with Siri, the digital personal assistant that is built in to the iPhone and iPad. Siri is expected to play a central role in Apple’s big event this week, after it was teased on invitations. The company is at the moment trying to hire at least 86 more employees that work in machine learning, according to its job posts. And it is also hiring more aggressively from experts that are currently working at other companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, according to Reuters. But Apple’s attempts to launch a fully artificially intelligent digital assistant might be frustrated by its commitment not to store or use its customers’ personal data. Google’s Now, for instance, packs in more features than Siri — but it also looks through emails and calendars to do so, computing that in the cloud. Apple has repeatedly stressed that it doesn’t want to see users’ data, and that all of Siri’s understanding of people is based on the phone itself rather than on the cloud or over the internet. Some experts have chosen not to work at Apple because its rules on data mean that they have less information to work with, according to the Reuters report. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Kitchens go hi-tech: From robot chefs to recipe-shopping apps, computerised cooking is coming Helping hands: Moley Robotics’ automated kitchen If a microwave is the most hi-tech thing in your kitchen, it could be time for an upgrade. From apps that automatically make shopping lists from your recipe books to smart ovens and robot chefs, Kevin Maney rounds up innovations to make your mouth water Click to follow Indy/Life We've been hearing ad nauseam about driverless cars. Next up will be the cookless kitchen. There's a lot of stuff simmering in that realm. Investors have been pouring money into "food tech" startups the past couple of years. Entrepreneurs are turning spicy phrases such as "the new restaurant is no restaurant". MBA-wielding forward thinkers, applying the kind of spreadsheet thinking that they might use to improve the efficiency of a supply chain, are talking about how they're out to reduce our "time to meal". That all may sound a bit overheated, but to be fair, the technology of the meal hasn't profoundly changed since the introduction of the microwave oven in 1955. As data, artificial intelligence and robotics intersect in the home, the everyday meal is ripe for disruption. The room we call the kitchen might end up becoming as quaint as a fireplace – nice to have, but not necessary. These grand schemes to change the nature of cooking help explain some of the vertiginous valuations of recent food-tech companies. In the US, Munchery, for instance, lets customers order freshly prepared meals using a mobile app. The chilled meals are delivered in about 30 minutes, then customers can throw them in the microwave or refrigerate for later in the week. While that may sound as if it's barely more clever than pizza delivery from Domino's, Munchery just raised another $85m (£54m), valuing the company at $300m. Startups with names such as Blue Apron, DoorDash, Hello Fresh and ChowNow are getting similarly large investments. In 2014, US food-tech companies raised more than $1bn and India, Europe and China have all become sizzling regions for food-tech startups. If the end goal were just newfangled food delivery, the investment surge would look like bubble-driven investor looniness. But remember: Facebook was once an online college yearbook – nobody knew it was going to change the nature of social circles. Perhaps some of these companies will bring about a similarly profound transformation in meals. If you stir the pot a little, you can see how new technologies will come together to change cooking. Take a UK-based company called Whisk. It was started by Nick Holzherr, who is somewhat famous in the UK because he first pitched his idea on the country's version of The Apprentice, getting turned down by Lord Sugar, who huffed: "Who could be bothered with it? " Whisk, for now, is an app that automates shopping lists on your phone. A user can find a recipe online, throw it into Whisk and the app will add the items needed to the list. You can refer to the list while at the supermarket, or in some shops use it to automatically order from a delivery service. Food-tech startups are developing ovens that intuitively know how to cook different kinds of food, such as June Behind that simple idea, Holzherr has a bigger one: as Whisk gathers data about recipes, ingredients and user tastes, the company plans to develop a "food genome" – a nod to Pandora's Music Genome Project that breaks down the traits of songs. As Holzherr explained to me, once Whisk has data about food and user taste preferences, it can make matches – like a food-discovery service. You might tell Whisk that you want to try a new Indian dish that's under 600 calories, and it could present a recipe geared to what it knows you like. As meals go digital, companies such as Whisk and Munchery will learn a great deal about ingredients, recipes, trends and their customers' tastes. That will change the way we buy and eat food, much as Pandora and Spotify are changing the way we try and buy music. Technologists are also working on the mechanics of cooking. A couple of former Apple developers have created an oven called June, which is supposed to recognise the food placed in it and cook it perfectly. The company says June is a "computer-based oven that thinks like a chef". It's also a step toward a kitchen that can cook by itself. The Moley app serves multiple functions At Asia's inaugral Consumer Electronics Show in May, Moley Robotics showed off its automated kitchen. The thing looks like someone cut off Robocop's arms and stuck them on a kitchen counter. For now, the system is only a very sophisticated mimic – it has to record a human chef's actions, then it can cook the meal if the ingredients are precisely placed in predetermined spots, all within reach of the arms. In a way, it's not a huge advance over Dick Van Dyke's mechanical kitchen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But systems like this will get smarter and more flexible, using artificial intelligence to learn how to make meals and figure out where to find the ingredients. Add up the various inventions that are in the works, and the robot cook starts looking like more than just a labour-saving daydream of a nerd with 10 kids. Throw IBM's Chef Watson into the mix, too. As a way to show off the Watson computer's capabilities, IBM fed it truckloads of recipes from around the world, along with data about ingredients and how their chemicals react to one another. The machine developed recipes no one had ever created, sometimes for good reason, unless a beef burrito with chocolate and edamame sounds good to you. The computer even has its own cookbook, Cognitive Cooking With Chef Watson. The bottom line: a machine can now think up recipes. Whisk automates shopping lists on your phone We're on a path toward some kind of machine that will know just about everything there is to know about food combinations, and it will be able to assemble intimate knowledge of the tastes of the people it will serve. Robotics are getting so good, so quickly, there's no reason to think robot cooks won't make their mark first in high-volume food preparation enterprises and, later, homes. Swizzle together a robot chef plus food data and artificial intelligence, and you have a home cook that can be as good as any celebrity chef – or even your mother. Maybe the best way to automate cooking will be to build a kitchen suited to robots instead of humans – like a self-enclosed, self-cleaning unit of stoves and arms and blenders that sits in the basement and sends finished plates up through a dumb waiter. People who really want to cook will be like people who really want to do their own woodworking. Instead of a human-scale kitchen as a default room in any house, it will be something you have to choose to install. Which puts a whole new spin on the techie catchphrase: "Software is eating the world. " I guess we may end up eating software. (c) Newsweek Europe Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Careers in tech: Artificial intelligence Pepper, the 3ft 11in shiny box of circuits who can tell jokes and respond to human emotions / Reuters Artificial Intelligence is all around us and now is the time to get involved Click to follow The Independent Online How would you feel if a robot looked after your child? Worried? Anxious? What if that robot was as intelligent as yourself, if not more so, and was able to react to every problem and whim without ever tiring or wanting to scream? For those studying and working in artificial intelligence, creating this kind of situation could so easily become a reality. “AI is embedded in many educational applications,” explains Janet Read, a professor in child computer interaction at the University of Central Lancashire, pointing to new gesture recognition and interpretation technologies. “Brain computer interfaces are detecting mood and emotion and in the near future robotic and virtual systems might be able to partially take on the care of children. ” AI is one of the most exciting fields of technological study, giving computers the ability to ‘think’, ‘learn’ and adapt when faced with a host of data. But it is not a technology of the future. It is all around us today, pervading our everyday lives and allowing us to take advantage of image and voice recognition software, intelligent web searching and medical advances, the latter made possible thanks to robot scientists formulating hypotheses and interpreting data. In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Modern video games use AI to generate intelligent behaviour in non-player characters. NASA's Mars Rover was designed to make its own decisions, stopping and analysing only the rocks it felt would be useful. And more is to come, with driverless cars and intelligent home systems on their way. As a result, many universities have been promoting AI courses and modules for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Each of them requires a solid background in computing, maths and physics and explores knowledge representation, planning and learning. “Studying AI is perfect for students who can solve problems in abstract ways and devise new angles,” says Dr Richard Watson, senior lecturer in electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton. “But AI is also about learning techniques of advanced computer science, so students should have a broad education in computer science before they tackle it. ” For that reason, very few undergraduate degrees will concentrate entirely on AI. Instead, it tends to be offered as modules within an overall computer science degree. A self-portrait of NASA's Mars Rover (Getty) Even so, a great many courses explore the subject well, looking at the benefits of intelligent prediction for businesses and grounding students in the AI programming language Prolog. MSc courses, in particular, focus on linking computational intelligence techniques to the real world, covering AI in games, robotic science, search engines, biological sciences, medicine and industry. And as more and more people become engaged in the goal of creating intelligence, an increasing number of jobs are available for those with the right skills. “Some of our students will enter IT consultancy roles while others will go to work for big companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google,” says Dr Watson. Certainly, the career prospects for students look good. Google is one of a number of companies snapping up AI firms – it bought the British AI start-up DeepMind for a cool £242m – and Dr Watson says new techniques are constantly being worked on. “Google has its hands on so much data that it is hungry to know what to do with it,” he says. “AI will help them get more out of it. ” Read more Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Stephen Hawking right about dangers of AI. . . but for the wrong reasons, says eminent computer expert Professor Mark Bishop says key human abilities, such as understanding and consciousness, are fundamentally lacking in so-called 'intelligent' computers Click to follow The Independent Online Stephen Hawking and out of control computers from I, Robot Getty It is one of our biggest existential threats, something so powerful and dangerous that it could put an end to the human race by replacing us with an army of intelligent robots. This may sound like a bad film but in fact it came from Stephen Hawking, the world's most famous cosmologist, who told the BBC last week that he worries deeply about artificial intelligence and machines that can outsmart humanity. "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," Professor Hawking said. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded. " His apocalyptic vision is not matched, however, by the views of one expert in artificial intelligence. "It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved international genius wrong, but in the alarming prediction regarding artificial intelligence and the future of humankind, I believe Professor Stephen Hawking is," said Mark Bishop, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Professor Hawking is not alone in being worried about the growing power of artificial intelligence (AI) to imbue robots with the ability to both replicate themselves and to increase the rate at which they get smarter – leading to a tipping point or "singularity" when they can outsmart humans. The mathematician John von Neumann first talked of an AI singularity in the 1950s, and Ray Kurzweil, the futurologist, popularised the idea a few decades later. HAL, the out of control computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Warner Bros) Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University said something similar in 1997 when promoting his book March of the Machines and more recently, Elon Musk, the PayPal entrepreneur, warned about AI being our biggest existential threat that needs regulatory oversight. But they are misguided, according to Professor Bishop, because there are some key human abilities, such as understanding and consciousness which are fundamentally lacking in so-called "intelligent" computers. "This lack means that there will always be a 'humanity gap' between any artificial intelligence and a real human mind. Because of this gap a human working in conjunction with any given AI machine will always be more powerful than that AI working on its own," Professor Bishop said. "It is precisely this that prevents the runaway explosion of AI that Hawking refers to – AI building better AI until machine intelligence is better than the human mind, leading to the singularity point where the AI exceeds human performance across all domains," he said. Fear of clever automatons goes back many decades. Nearly a hundred years ago, Czech film-maker Karel Capek coined the word "robot", meaning "slave", to describe a machine take-over of humanity. "The history of the subject is littered with researchers who claimed a breakthrough in AI as a result of their research, only for it later to be judged harshly against the weight of society's expectations," Professor Bishop said. But what does worry him about AI is the increasing reliance being placed on so-called intelligent machines. "I am particularly concerned by the potential military deployment of robotic weapons systems – systems that can take a decision to militarily engage without human intervention – precisely because current AI is not very good and can all too easily force situations to escalate with potentially terrifying consequences," Professor Bishop said. "So it is easy to concur that AI may pose a very real 'existential threat' to humanity without having to imagine that it will ever reach the level of superhuman intelligence," he said. We should be worried about AI, but for the opposite reasons given by Professor Hawking, he explained. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. 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Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Tesla boss Elon Musk warns artificial intelligence development is 'summoning the demon' CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk / Getty The business magnate, inventor and investor has warned about artificial intelligence before 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has described artificial intelligence as a “demon” and the “biggest existential threat there is”, in his latest dramatic statement about technology. Addressing students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Musk said: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out. ” The business magnate, inventor and investor, who is also CEO and CTO of SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity, has warned about artificial intelligence before, which he believes could be more threatening than nuclear weapons. In August he tweeted: “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes. ” Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014 In another Twitter post he said: “Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable. ” In pictures: Landmarks in AI development In pictures: Landmarks in AI development The Google driverless car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for autonomous cars. The software powering Google's cars is called Google Chauffeur During his MIT appearance Musk also discussed his company SpaceX’s plans to help populate Mars. “It’s cool to send one mission to Mars, but that’s not what will change the future for humanity,” he said. “What matters is being able to establish a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars, and I don’t see anything being done but SpaceX. I don’t see anyone else even trying. ” Musk left the symposium to a standing ovation. Watch the whole thing here. The ethical issues around AI were highlighted earlier this year when Google bought the British start-up DeepMind for $400 million (£242m). The London-based firm, founded by chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, specialises in algorithms and machine learning for e-commerce and games. But Mr Hassabis has also predicted that AI machines will learn “basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities” by the end of the decade. Google has acquired a slew of robotics firms, including Boston Dynamics That purchase – Google’s largest European acquisition – came just months after it bought Boston Dynamics, a firm that produces life-like military robots. Google has reportedly set up an “ethics board” in wake of the purchases but concerns remain. Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, has warned that artificial intelligence could spur mass unemployment as machinery replaces manpower. He has also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces. But Mr Musk’s warning has particular weight given his strong credentials as a tech pioneer. The South African-born multi-millionaire’s CV includes online payments system PayPal, electronic car manufacturer Tesla Motors, and Hyperloop – his proposal for a near-supersonic transport link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2002 many sneered as Mr Musk launched a private space travel company Space X. A decade later it became the first private firm to launch a spacecraft into orbit and bring it back to earth. Intelligent machines: AI breakthroughs Lincor A bedside computer that entertains patients while engaging them with relevant information and advice. SwiftKey Understands the context of language and how words fit together. Celaton Applies AI to labour-intensive clerical tasks. Darktrace Uses advanced mathematics to detect abnormal behaviour in organisations instantly in order to manage risks from cyber attacks. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search How the Turing Test was passed…and why it matters A computer posing as a Ukranian teenager has fooled enough people to be considered intelligent. What's next? Click to follow Independent Voices Turing's Pilot ACE computer, the fastest in the world in 1950 PA You are sitting in front of a computer screen which is split down the middle. One half is controlled by a human, one half by a machine – neither of which you can see. You then have five minutes in which to decide which is, which simply by typing questions to both. This is the iconic and controversial Turing Test. I have spent my life working in Artificial Intelligence – and among other dubious claims to fame, am the world’s first human cyborg. So I am not surprised that debate has been raging since my colleagues at the University of Reading claimed that the test was finally passed after decades of trying. Alan Turing – the father of modern computing – first devised the question and answer game in a seminal 1950 paper, “Computing, Machinery conversation, a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said to be 'thinking' and, therefore, could be attributed with intelligence. " He also suggested that by the year 2000 the “average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. ” For years, judging a Turing Test was not a challenge. But now it is a different story. Machines are much better at structuring flowing conversations and mimicking humans – with random, quirky and off-beat answers. That’s why the designers of the winning machine gave their machine the persona of Ukrainian teenager, Eugene Goostman – cocky enough for "him" to claim he knows anything but his age ensuring that he does not know much. Some have argued that similar tests have already been passed – but ours was a true Turing Test as stipulated by the man himself. We had 30 judges and five machines taking part in 300 conversations. It was independently verified and, crucially, the questions and topics were unrestricted unlike other versions. Some have argued that a five-minute conversation is not long enough to form an opinion on which is human. That may be true. Longer would indeed give judges more time to gain clues. But these were the parameters set by Turing himself which have remained consistent for all Turing Tests since. And others have claimed that a computer posing as a 13-year-old boy ‘cheats’ by confusing the judge into thinking non-sequiturs, or lack of knowledge, is due to tender years rather than intellectual ability. But the judges were not told he was a teenager and Turing never suggested that artificial intelligence would have to pose as an adult – just that it fooled people to thinking it was human. Judges were free to ask the subjects any questions they liked in unrestricted conversations – and Eugene was clearly capable of holding its own. The fact is this landmark shows us is that programmers are now more sophisticated at producing computers that can act like people. We should not overstate the results. Two thirds of our judges were still not fooled, which shows the machines still have some way to go before they take over the world. But it shows artificial intelligence is showing the appearance of getting cleverer. And it has practical benefits in combating cybercrime. It only takes a tiny fraction – let alone 30% – of phishing emails to trick victims to create a multimillion pound fraud. The Test helps us understand more fully how online, real-time communication can fool humans. Alan Turing was a pioneer, genius and visionary. He believed the test would be passed in time but even he would struggle to comprehend the size and scope of today’s internet. And as a man whose greatest achievements came in helping to defeat the Nazis would have understood, technology can be used as a force for good, as well as for evil. Comments Most Popular Sponsored Features Video We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Turing Test: What is it – and why isn't it the definitive word in artificial intelligence? The K supercomputer in Japan. A computer recently passed the iconic test for the first time this weekend - but is a 64-year-old thought experiment even relevant for today's computers? 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech The news that the Turing Test has been beaten by a computer for the first time could have significant implications for artificial intelligence – but just what is the Turing test and what does beating it actually mean? The test was first proposed by the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing who, in his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, asked a simple question: ‘Can machines think? ’ Turing later finessed this to ‘can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do? ’ and proposed his eponymous test as one way of finding out. In its most simple form the test has a human interrogator speaking to a number of computers and humans through an interface. If the interrogator cannot distinguish between the computers and the humans then the Turing Test has been passed. There are many different takes on the test (in some variations the interrogator knows that one of the entities they are questioning is a computer – in others they don’t) but many computer scientists and philosophers have criticized its very premises for only assessing the appearance of intelligence. Eugene Goostman, a computer programme pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the test. The American philosopher John Searle famously challenged the Turing test with a thought experiment he called the Chinese room. Searle's suggestion was that a computer’s ability to conduct a conversation or convincingly answer questions is not the same as having a ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’. either written or spoken,” wrote Searle in 1980, adding that he would receive questions written in Chinese through a slot in the wall. He can’t read the characters, but has a set of instructions in English that allow him to respond to “one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols. ” In this way, Searle can respond to any questions submitted to him by simply following the English rules and selecting the right Chinese characters to return to his interrogator. If the rules he has are sophisticated enough then it would appear that he could speak Chinese – even though he has no understanding of the language. Most criticisms of the Turing test as a measure of artificial intelligence follow similar lines, arguing that computers can use tricks and vast databases of pre-programmed responses in order to simply ‘appear’ intelligent. Alan Turing, pictured at the Second World War code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park For example, in the recent successful test the computer programme claimed to be a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine – two factors that could be used to excuse any grammatical errors in the computer’s replies as well as its ignorance of more specialised forms of knowledge (pop culture and the like). In addition, only 33 per cent of the judges 'Eugene' spoke to had to be convinced he was a human (Turing himself never specified a pass rate) and the conversation was only five minutes long. For this reason (and many others) a lot of computer scientists no longer view the Turing Test as a credible way to assess artificial intelligence. However, that doesn't mean it's completely useless. A more stringent version of the test is currently the subject of a $20,000 bet between two legends of the tech industry, Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor. In their rules the conversation must take place over three hours and two out of three judges must be convinced that the computer is a human - that's a pretty tough ask. As it stands, the Turing test passed this weekend by 'Eugene' isn't insignificant (it certainly says a lot about the sophistication of our chatbots - which could be used in everything from scamming to therapy) but the main takeaway from this weekend's news is perhaps that the goal posts have moved. Turing's original test came from a time when computers the size of buildings were less powerful than our current smartphones - the fact that it's no longer as relevant as we first thought can be celebrated too. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment, warn experts The Meka M1 Mobile Manipulator. One of the many robots purchased by Google last year. Academics say half of US jobs could be automated within a decade or two 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Experts have warned that rapidly improving artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment just days after Google revealed the purchase of a London based start-up dedicated to developing this technology. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Stuart Armstrong from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford said that there was a risk that computers could take over human jobs “at a faster rate than new jobs could be generated. ” “We have some studies looking at to which jobs are the most vulnerable and there are quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting,” said Dr Armstrong. “Ultimately, huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence. ” Dr Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, agreed that improvements in artificial intelligence were creating “short term issues that we all need to be talking about. ” "It's very difficult to predict," said Dr Shanahan. "That is, of course, a concern. But in the past when we have developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over. But it certainly is something we ought to be discussing. " Both academics did however praise Google for creating an ethics board to look at the “how to deploy artificial intelligence safely and reduce the risks” after its £400 million purchase of London-based start-up DeepMind. Google's search technology power devices such as Google Glass (above), allowing users to perform searchs and ask for help in natural language. DeepMind has been operating largely unnoticed by the wider UK technology scene, although its advances in artificial intelligence have obviously been of interest to the experts - founded in just 2012, DeepMind is Google's largest European acquisition to date. Dr Shanahan hailed DeepMind as “a company with some outstanding people working for it,” noting that the company has mainly been working in the areas of machine learning and deep learning, which he described as “all about finding patterns in very large quantities of data. ” Google’s purchase of the company has led to speculation as to how they might implement the technology. Although there had been some talk of using DeepMind’s algorithms to give ‘brains’ to Google recent robotic purchases, insiders have said that the acquisition was about improving search functionality, not AI. Regardless of how DeepMind’s expertise will be used, Google’s purchase of the company underscores increasing fears over the impact of technology on employment. Academics note that although professions have always been threatened by the forces of ‘progress' (a nebulous concept that can cover anything from speedier computers to more efficient steam engines), current trends suggest jobs are being destroyed faster than they are being created. A recent paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford University suggests that nearly half (47 per cent) of all American jobs are under threat and could be automated in “a decade of two”. Frey and Osborne identify the most at-risk jobs as those which are based in routines (eg telemarketing, low-level accounting and data entry) and which could be replaced by increasingly advanced algorithms, as well as jobs in industry and manufacturing which have already been deeply hurt by advances in the last decades (see video above). “While computerization has been historically confined to routine tasks involving explicit rule-based activities, algorithms for big data are now rapidly entering domains reliant upon pattern recognition and can readily substitute for labour in a wide range of non-routine cognitive tasks,” write Frey and Osborne. “In addition, advanced robots are gaining enhanced senses and dexterity, allowing them to perform a broader scope of manual tasks. This is likely to change the nature of work across industries and occupations. ” Unfortunately, it seems that we can assume the same problems will also become rapidly apparent in the UK. Although certain types of jobs are not yet threatened (especially those which involve dealing with other humans – a vague category that can cover anything from healthcare to management) this is no guarantee that they’ll be safe forever. Read more misery? Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Which apps will become WhatsApps? After the billion-dollar purchase of the messaging service, a guide to the best UK tech firms Who's going to be next? WhatsApp's success is being replicated across the tech industry as Apps are hungrily bought up 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Global technology giants are in the midst of a spending spree, as once trailblazing companies such as Google and Facebook try to maintain growth and regain their edge by snapping up young talent and good ideas. Facebook's $19bn (£11. 4bn) takeover of mobile messaging app WhatsApp on Thursday was just the latest, and most expensive, deal in a mergers and acquisitions splurge that has seen companies from Palo Alto to Tel Aviv swallowed up. The UK has had its fair share of the action, as British start-ups have begun to attract the attention of Silicon Valley's biggest players. Last month, a secretive London artificial intelligence start-up, DeepMind, was acquired for £400m by Google – just days before the struggling US gaming firm Zynga shelled out £320m for the Oxford-based games studio NaturalMotion. Most people outside the tech world had never heard of these firms – and there are plenty more UK tech firms flying below the radar which could soon be eyeing a million-dollar exit. Here's a guide to the hottest tech start-ups of which you may never have heard. DataSift Founded by the inventor of Twitter's retweet button, Nick Halstead, the Reading-based firm is one of only two companies across the globe with access to Twitter's so-called "firehose" data stream. The company gets all the raw data from the platform, converting it into something understandable and manageable – who is saying what and where. As well as Twitter, the four-year-old company has data deals with other major social networks and intends to move into analysing internal business data. Who might be interested? The most likely candidate would be Twitter. The social network has been ramping up its offerings to businesses since its float, and roughly 15 per cent of its revenue currently comes from selling data and user information. However, DataSift founder Halstead says he's committed to a stock market float of the firm within three to four years. TransferWise A peer-to-peer international money transfer business, co-founded by Skype's first employee, Taavet Hinrikus. The service cuts out the costly transfer fees typically charged by existing companies such as Western Union. It has transferred more than £250m since launching in 2011, and last year PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested $6m in the London-based business. Who might be interested? The banks. The financial sector is quickly waking up to the fact that if it is not careful, new financial technology (or FinTech) firms could eat their lunch. Alternatively, TransferWise could be a target for a bigger tech firm in the area, such as mobile payment firm Square, run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Grabyo The London-based company lets broadcasters edit and share TV clips on social media in real time. It launched the service on Twitter last year in time for Premier League transfer deadline day. Who might be interested? Grabyo is another company that could help Twitter beef up its business offering, and the microblogging site already works with Grabyo on its "Amplify" package in the UK. Alternatively, an advertising giant such as WPP could poach the firm. SpaceApe A hotly tipped games studio, founded by former employees of gaming studios Playfish, Electronic Arts and Mind Candy. While it only set up shop in 2012, SpaceApe is already attracting attention for the success of its mobile and Facebook game Samurai Siege. Chief executive John Earner knows a thing or two about adventure – before turning to gaming, he served in the US Navy, hunting smugglers. Who might be interested? Zynga may be interested in SpaceApe, which, along with NaturalMotion, could help it crack mobile. Google could also be tempted by the firm's work on artificial intelligence. SwiftKey It may not sound like much, but this predictive keyboard app is seen as one of the hottest start-ups on the UK technology scene. The firm was co-founded by Ben Medlock, who has a PhD from Cambridge in language-based artificial intelligence; the app learns how you speak, suggesting phrases and even whole sentences as you type. Who might be interested? Apple and Google. SwiftKey's trailblazing technology would be valuable to both firms as a way to improve their smartphones' software. YPlan Set up by two Lithuanians in London, YPlan is a "spontaneous booking" app that lets people buy last-minute tickets to a curated selection of events in town that night. The start-up works with more than 550 event partners in London, including the Barbican, South Bank Centre and the Comedy Store. The app has been downloaded more than 500,000 times since launching in London in late 2012, and has since launched in New York, with San Francisco to follow soon. Who might be interested? Social network Foursquare could use the app to reinvigorate its service. Facebook may also throw its hat in the ring, with its European partnership head, Julien Codorniou, recently calling YPlan "a very important partner". Alternatively dotcom-boom survivor Lastminute. com could use YPlan as a way to break into mobile. Digital Shadows The London-based cyber-security firm helps businesses and individuals keep track of the crumb trails they leave online, allowing them to spot vulnerabilities. Founded less than three years ago by a veteran of BAE's cyber-security business Detica, the company already counts some of the world's leading banks as paying clients. Who might be interested? Industry watchers are predicting a cyber-security "gold rush" this year as big players such as McAfee and Symantec search out new ways to tackle digital threats. At the start of the year, US giant FireEye paid $1bn for Mandiant, the firm that analysed Chinese attacks on The New York Times last year. Skyscanner Edinburgh-based Skyscanner helps people find cheap flights, comparing routes, airlines and timings to find the best deals. Last year, Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that first backed Apple, invested in it, valuing it at $800m. The business is now aiming to crack the US and Latin America. Who might be interested? In 2008, Microsoft paid a reported $115m for Farecast, a company offering a similar service, building it into its Bing search engine. Google or Yahoo! may be interested in Skyscanner for similar reasons. Comments Most Popular Video Sponsored Features We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies to find out more. We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Advertising helps fund our journalism and keep it truly independent. It helps to build our international editorial team, from war correspondents to investigative reporters, commentators to critics. Click here to view instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, and help us to keep providing you with free-thinking journalism - for free. Thank you for your support. How to disable your ad blocker for independent. co. uk Adblock / Adblock Plus address bar. for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click "disable on independent. co. uk". Firefox Tracking Protection cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Ghostery Trusted Site list. whitelisted". uBlock and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site. Thank you for supporting independent. co. uk Search Search Google buys UK artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind for £400m London-based company focused on “cutting edge artificial intelligence" could supply the brains for Google's burgeoning robotics division 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech A former child chess prodigy and computer game designer from London has sold his company to Google for around £300m in one of the Internet giant’s largest European acquisitions. Demis Hassabis, a computer scientist, is understood to have struck the deal with Google for his secretive start-up business Deep Mind Technologies, which specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) for computers. Hassabis, 37, has built the company by bringing together neuroscientists and computer engineers in an effort to use technology and medical research to help machines to mimic the brain’s ability to improve performance. He previously led a study at University College London in 2009 that scanned human brains and found “just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”. Google founder Larry Page, who has expressed interest in making search commands easier by having an implant in the brain, is understood to have led the move to buy Deep Mind. Google is exploring smart technology that will enable it to go into space travel and create self-driving cars. The website The Information claimed that Google had beaten Facebook to the acquisition and had sealed the deal after agreeing to set up an ethics board to ensure that the AI technology was not abused. IBM recently pledged billion to fund Watson (above) - its own 'cognitive computing' machine that its hoped will one day understand the nuances of human language. Hassabis is known within the computer gaming industry for having “a brain larger than a planet”. He began playing chess when he was four years old, reached Master Standard by the age of 13 and represented England. He did his first work in the games industry only two years later when he entered a competition to design a clone for Space Invaders. Going into the industry seemed like “the perfect marriage between games and programing”, he has said. By the age of 16 – having already completed his A-levels – Hassabis began working at games company Bullfrog and co-wrote the successful game Theme Park – which was based on an amusement park and released in 1994 - in his year off before going to the University of Cambridge. His student friends struggled to believe he was the author of such a successful product until they saw his name on the packaging. After graduating with a triple first in computer science from Queen’s College, Hassabis quickly returned to the games industry and became a lead AI programmer at Lionhead Studios, the Surrey-based company founded by British computer games pioneer Peter Molyneux. Very soon afterwards the young graduate went off to set up his own business, Elixir Studios, where he was executive designer of a game called Republic: The Revolution, which attempted to recreate a “living, breathing city” and was nominated for a BAFTA. Joe Mc Donagh and Demis Hassabis, in the green shirt, in 1999 (david Sandison) Although he has accepted that the project was over-ambitious, he told games website CVG that he had always been prepared to take chances. “I’m actually more worried about not taking risks and playing safe, not pushing myself enough,” he said. “It’s a bit perverse I suppose, and asking for trouble. I’ve always been prepared to jump in at the deep end and see if I can swim or not. ” For many years, Hassabis was a successful competitor in the London-based Mind Sports Olympiad, taking part in its elite Pentamind contest – a sort of mental pentathlon. Hassabis was Pentamind champion in five of the first seven years after the Olympiad was founded in games player in history”. Hassabis is an expert in the Japanese board game Shogi and an accomplished poker player. His next computer game Evil Genius, which was based on a Bond-style villain in an island lair, was more favourably received by critics. After selling the rights to publishers, Hassabis sold the studio and went into medical science in order to further pursue his interest in AI technology. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his game designs. Hassabis co-wrote 'Theme Park', which was released in 1994 As a cognitive neuroscientist he specialised in autobiographical memory (combining personal recollection and general knowledge) and amnesia. He investigated whether patients with lesions to the Hippocampus parts of their brains suffered damage to their imagination process as well as their memory recall. He completed his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at University College London and became a fellow at the college’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and a visiting scientist at MIT and Harvard. 'Evil Genius' was received favourably by critics In 2012, he left academia to set up Deep Mind Technologies, developing technology for e-commerce and gaming and creating computer systems capable of playing computer games. The company, which was based in central London’s Russell Square before moving to Fenchurch Street, has a reputation for secrecy. Its aim is said to be to develop computers that think like humans. It is said to employ 50 people including co-founders Shane Legg, a 40-year-old New Zealander, and Mustafa Seleyman, a 29-year-old Briton. Deep Mind’s investors include US Tesla car mogul Elon Musk, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel and the family of London app creator Nick d’Aloisio, who are all set for windfalls following the sale to Google. D’Aloisio, from south London, sold his news based app Summly to Yahoo! for a reported £19m early last year. 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