Government

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday urged business leaders and technocrats to build a'bridge' between the artificial intelligence (AI) and human intentions, while stating that his government is using technology to effectively deliver the benefits of welfare schemes to targeted groups. Addressing a gathering of several top business leaders including Ratan Tata, Prime Minister Modi said technology should be used to uplift the life of the poor and the marginalised sections of the society in the country. "There should not be a debate on the dangers of artificial intelligence, but there should debate as to when the robot will be smarter than the human. There should be a debate as to how a bridge can be made between artificial intelligence and human intentions," he said. Prime Minister Modi said that a section of people are working to project technology as anti-people and asserted that technology only benefits humanity if it is used with good intentions.

Today's commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations -- wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else -- and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly. But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots? That's the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It's now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies. The new work appears in the October issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, in a paper by Jenett, Gershenfeld, fellow graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman, and CBA alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM '07, PhD '12, who is now at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he leads the ARMADAS project to design a lunar base that could be built with robotic assembly.

Artificial intelligence (AI) expert and Flamingo Ai Founder and Executive Director Dr Catriona Wallace is set to share her insights on what we can look forward to in a world with more advanced AI, at this year's CEBIT expo. The keynote, titled'AI: Human Machine: Who gets the upper hand?' will explore developments in AI, how it's being used and how it will transform the business world and life as we know it. "AI, described as the most powerful force equal in impact to the discovery of fire and the invention of electricity, will increasingly become the primary power driving the massive changes that [climate change and disruptive technologies] will bring," Wallace said. "With AI set to replace 40% of jobs and 30% of business interactions in the next five years, and the time of'singularity', where machines may become'smarter' than humans possibly just 20 years away, the onus will be on people to successfully navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution." NSW Minister for Jobs and Investment Stuart Ayres said CEBIT Australia will provide an international forum for technology companies to do business and discuss the future, including the impact of AI and how it can be harnessed to secure new jobs.

On Monday 8th April 2019, the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) revealed ethics guidelines aimed at forming best practices for creating "trustworthy AI." In fact, many argue this issue of trust in the AI system is one of the main hurdles the technology must overcome for more widespread implementation. A Forbes survey found that nearly 42% of respondents "could not cite a single example of AI that they trust"; in another survey, when respondents were asked what emotion best described their feeling towards AI, "Interested" was the most common response (45%), but it was closely followed by "concerned" (40.5%), "skeptical" (40.1%), "unsure" (39.1%), and "suspicious" (29.8%). The Commission's guidelines are a new roadmap for businesses to align their AI systems. While these guidelines are not policy, it is easy to imagine that they will serve as the building blocks for such regulations.

Have you ever been running late for work, your hand extended into your shower, cursing its name as the water slowly warms to a temperature that would allow you to enter? Well, you may be being unsympathetic to your hot water heater, because it's likely running all day and all night to keep between 40-80 gallons of water heated, so it can be ready at your command. As you ponder the inefficiency of such a system, imagine the hot water needs of a hotel or a high-rise apartment building, with hundreds of rooms and thousands of inhabitants. The founder in this week's Silicon Valley Insider, Sridhar Deivasigamani, estimates that at any point in time in the US, there could be as much as 6 billion gallons of water being kept hot for our consumption, one-sixth the size of Lake Tahoe. Intellihot, the Galesburg, IL company founded in 2009, designs and manufactures tankless water heaters, as well as monitoring devices and apps, for residential, commercial and industrial applications.

Tank warfare isn't traditionally easy to predict. In July 1943, for instance, German military planners believed that their advance on the Russian city of Kursk would be over in ten days. In fact, that attempt lasted nearly two months and ultimately failed. Even the 2003 Battle of Baghdad, in which U.S. forces had air superiority, took a week. The U.S. Army has launched a new effort, dubbed Project Quarterback, to accelerate tank warfare by synchronizing battlefield data with the aid of artificial Intelligence.

Armed violence is on the rise and we don't know how to stop it1. Since 2011, conflicts worldwide have killed up to 100,000 people a year, three-quarters of whom were in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The rate of major wars has decreased over the past few decades. But the number of civil conflicts has doubled since the 1960s, and terrorist attacks have become more frequent in the past ten years. The nature of conflict is changing.

As artificial intelligence is being used to solve problems in healthcare, agriculture, weather prediction and more, scientists and engineers are investigating how AI could be used to fight climate change. AI algorithms could indeed be used to build better climate models and determine more efficient methods of reducing CO2 emissions, but AI itself often requires substantial computing power and therefore consumes a lot of energy. Is it possible to reduce the amount of energy consumed by AI and improve its effectiveness when it comes to fighting climate change? Virginia Dignum, an ethical artificial intelligence professor at the Umeå University in Sweden, was recently interviewed by Horizon Magazine. Dignum explained that AI can have a large environmental footprint that can go unexamined.

About a year ago, top deepfake artist Hao Li came to a disturbing realization: Deepfakes, i.e. the technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake content, is rapidly evolving. In fact, Li believes that in as soon as six months, deepfake videos will be completely undetectable. And that's spurring security and privacy concerns as the AI behind the technology becomes commercialized – and gets in the hands of malicious actors. Li, for his part, has seen the positives of the technology as a pioneering computer graphics and vision researcher, particularly for entertainment. He has worked his magic on various high-profile deepfake applications – from leading the charge in putting Paul Walker into Furious 7 after the actor died before the film finished production, to creating the facial-animation technology that Apple now uses in its Animoji feature in the iPhone X.

Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI highlighted the rapidly increasing expectations regarding the business benefits of AI and the low incidence of business gains so far; the increasing adoption of AI by businesses worldwide and the challenges in its implementation and integration with exiting processes; and how companies respond to AI by both reducing and training their workforce. The report estimated the combined AI spending from large-capitalization financial institutions at more than $150 billion annually. In the past two years, BB&T Corp. has embraced a digital-first approach to plugging in artificial intelligence and robotics into its back-office, customer-service and compliance operations. That should eclipse the 1,281 companies that raised $16.8 billion in all of 2018, according to the 3Q 2019 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor [VentureBeat] "The values of AI designers or the purchasing administrators are not necessarily the values of the bedside clinician or patient. Those value collisions and tensions are going to be sites of significant ethical conflict"--Danton Char, assistant professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University Medical Center "I don't yet fully subscribe to the view that the machine is completely autonomous and operates without human intervention. At least as of today, and probably the foreseeable future, the AI machine is just another tool"--Andrei Iancu, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, speaking about recognizing AI systems that develop new products as inventors "If leaders think about AI like a balance sheet, then they're missing the point. You need to get emotional attachment to the disruptive nature that it can bring"--Werner Boeing, CIO, Roche Diagnostics "The major upside for us is driving more engagement....Right behind that is the ability to monetize this and generate incremental revenue for us and for our clubs....This data's going to be hugely valuable"--Dave Lehanski, NHL senior vice president of business development and global partnerships