Artificial intelligence is already inextricably woven into everyday life, and its impact will only grow in the coming years. But while this development inspires much discussion among members of the scientific community, public opinion on artificial intelligence has remained relatively unknown. Artificial Intelligence: American Attitudes and Trends, a report published earlier in January by the Center for the Governance of AI, explores this question. Its authors relied on an in-depth survey to analyze American attitudes towards artificial intelligence, from privacy concerns to beliefs about U.S. technological superiority. Some of their findings--most Americans, for example, don't trust Facebook--were unsurprising. But much of their data reflects trends within the American public that have previously gone unnoticed. This month Ariel was joined by Baobao Zhang, lead author of the report, to talk about these findings. Zhang is a PhD candidate in Yale University's political science department and research affiliate with the Center for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on American politics, international relations, and experimental methods. In this episode, Zhang spoke about her take on some of the report's most interesting findings, the new questions it raised, and future research directions for her team.

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. The first words uttered on a controversial subject can rarely be taken as the last, but this comment by British mathematician Lady Lovelace, who died in 1852, is just that--the basis of our understanding of what computers are and can be, including the notion that they might come to acquire artificial intelligence, which here means "strong AI," or the ability to think in the fullest sense of the word. Her words demand and repay close reading: the computer "can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." This means both that it can do only what we know how to instruct it to do, and that it can do all that we know how to instruct it to do.

After scraping the web for billions of our photos, making dubious claims of accuracy, and marketing its software to countries with authoritarian regimes, Clearview AI has somehow reached yet another new frontier in dystopian facial recognition. According to the New York Times' Kashmir Hill, America's elites have been using the software as a plaything. They include billionaire businessmen finding out who their daughters were dating, the kids of Texan investors checking out who else they look like -- and potentially actor-turned venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher. "I have an app in my phone in my pocket right now. It's like a beta app," the star of Dude, Where's My Car? and former host of Punk'd told YouTube series Hot Ones last year.

There is a gender gap in artificial intelligence (AI). A study by the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn found that only 22% of AI professionals are women. Research by the AI Now Institute found that women make up only 15% of the AI research staff at Facebook and only 10% at Google. Although the gender gap in AI echoes those in cybersecurity and information technology in general, the repercussions of a lack of diversity in AI broaden because the details of the how the systems work are not fully known. As a result, identifying and correcting bias introduced by the decisions of the development teams or the data they select to train their algorithms is difficult.

Researchers are now able to take preventive actions against energetic electrons through a two-day notice delivered by a sophisticated computer model. A new machine learning computer system precisely foresees harmful radiation storms triggered by the Van Allen belts two days before the storm takes place. It is the most developed notice that currently exists, as per a new study published in the journal Space Weather. "Radiation storms from the Van Allen belts can damage or even knock out satellites orbiting in medium and high altitudes above the Earth, but predicting these storms has always been a challenge," said Yue Chen, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and principal investigator on the project funded by both NASA and NOAA. "Given that the Van Allen Probes, which provided important data about space weather, recently de-orbited, we no longer have direct measurements about what's happening in the outer electron radiation belt. Our new model uses existing data sets to'learn' patterns and predict future storms so satellite operators can take protective measures, including temporarily shutting down part of or even the whole satellite to avoid damage," Chen added.

Vatican officials are calling for stricter ethical standards on the development of artificial intelligence, with tech giants IBM and Microsoft being the first companies to sign its new initiative. The "Rome Call for AI Ethics" lays out six broad principles: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy. These principles say that technology should "protect people," particularly the "weak and underprivileged." They also urge policymakers across the world to create new forms of regulation on "advanced technologies that have a higher risk of impacting human rights," which includes facial recognition. "AI is incredibly promising technology that can help us make the world smarter, healthier, and more prosperous," IBM vice president John Kelly III said after the initiative's signing.

Mount Sinai Hospital last year switched on an artificial intelligence program to search the hospital's records for evidence of malnourished patients in its wards. NEW YORK -- Last year, Mount Sinai Hospital switched on an artificial intelligence program to search the hospital's records for evidence of malnourished patients in its wards. The numbers it turned up were eye-popping: 20 percent more cases were diagnosed than in the previous year. Around the same time, Barbara Murphy, chief of the renowned health system's department of medicine, was helping to develop another AI program, to predict whether diabetic patients are at near-term risk of kidney disease and to help prioritize specialist visits for those who are. One of the early findings, according to Murphy: "We probably need some more nephrologists."

The novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19 made its first appearance in December 2019 in China. It is believed to have originated from bats or pangolins in the meat markets that occupy the streets of Wuhan. Since then, the number of those infected has increased worldwide as the coronavirus spreads rapidly across the globe. Along with the growing fear rate in the United States with new travel advisories, and more deaths reported in the U.S. Pharmaceutical companies are gearing up to have a new vaccine on the market to combat the virus as the number of COVID-19 cases increase in the United States. The U.S. government is working diligently with pharmaceutical companies round the clock to produce a vaccine to treat the vastly growing coronavirus.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly useful for central banks. While it may be used only in low-level roles today, technological advances and cost savings will likely embed AI deeper and deeper into core central bank functions. Maybe each central bank will have their own AI engine, maybe a future'BoB' (the Bank of England Bot). What will be the impact of BoB and its counterparts? BoB could today, or soon, help with many central bank tasks, such as information gathering, data analysis, forecasting, risk management, financial supervision, and monetary policy analysis. The technology is mostly here; what prevents adoption are cultural, political, and legal factors.

The state of Utah has given an artificial intelligence company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and "public safety" cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other sensitive data. The company, called Banjo, says that it's combining this data with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps, and claims its algorithms "detect anomalies" in the real world. The lofty goal of Banjo's system is to alert law enforcement of crimes as they happen. It claims it does this while somehow stripping all personal data from the system, allowing it to help cops without putting anyone's privacy at risk. As with other algorithmic crime systems, there is little public oversight or information about how, exactly, the system determines what is worth alerting cops to. In its pitches to prospective clients, Banjo promises its technology, called "Live Time Intelligence," can identify, and potentially help police solve, an incredible variety of crimes in real-time. Banjo says its AI can help police solve child kidnapping cases "in seconds," identify active shooter situations as they happen, or potentially send an alert when there's a traffic accident, airbag deployment, fire, or a car is driving the wrong way down the road. Banjo says it has "a solution for homelessness" and can help with the opioid epidemic by detecting "opioid events." It offers "artificial intelligence processing" of state-owned audio sensors that "include but may not be limited to speech recognition and natural language processing" as well as automatic scene detection, object recognition, and vehicle detection on real-time video footage pulled in from Utah's cameras.