Killer robots should be banned to prevent them wiping out humanity, the world's largest gathering of scientists was told yesterday. While full-blown android soldiers remain the stuff of science fiction, advances in artificial intelligence mean machines with the power to select and attack targets without human input could soon be developed. Such robots represent the'third revolution' in warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons, scientists and campaigners told the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington DC. Scientists have said that'killer robots' should be banned to prevent them wiping out humanity Mary Wareham, from the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said: 'Bold leadership is needed for a treaty. Backers include UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has called autonomous weapons'politically unacceptable and morally repugnant'.

Say this much for the "reproducibility crisis" in science: It's poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don't stand up to scrutiny. They don't replicate--which is to say, if someone else does the same experiment, they get different (often contradictory) results. The scientific term for that is bad. What's good, though, is that the scientific method is built for self-correction.

Under the section entitled'Data and Computing Resources for AI Research and Development' there are strong statements regarding resource allocation.

The provincial government is putting $100 million toward a five-year plan to entice high-tech companies specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) to invest in Alberta. The province believes the funding will net 5,600 high-skill jobs, more than 100 new companies and dozens of new multi-national offices and labs in the province, Premier Rachel Notley said Wednesday at an announcement in Calgary. "High tech is the future and we making it happen right here in Alberta," she said. An initial investment of $27 million in the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) will see the non-profit set up a new program to support companies looking to build up their in-house AI capacity. The provincial funding, combined with $25 million from Ottawa, will also allow the Edmonton-based Amii to establish a new Calgary office, a release said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezHillicon Valley: New York says goodbye to Amazon's HQ2 AOC reacts: 'Anything is possible' FTC pushes for record Facebook fine Cyber threats to utilities on the rise Poll finds Democrats oppose certain aspects of border deal Ocasio-Cortez celebrates Amazon canceling New York offices: 'Anything is possible' MORE (D-N.Y.) recently began sounding the alarm about the potential pitfalls of using algorithms to automate human decision-making. She recently pointed out a fundamental problem with artificial intelligence (AI): "Algorithms are still made by human beings... if you don't fix the bias, then you are just automating the bias." She has continued to raise the issue on social media. Ocasio-Cortez isn't the only person questioning whether machines offer a foolproof way to improve decision-making by removing human error and bias. Algorithms are increasingly deployed to inform important decisions on everything from loans and insurance premiums to job and immigration applications.

Taylor Swift raised eyebrows late last year when Rolling Stone magazine revealed her security team had deployed facial recognition recognition technology during her Repudiation tour to root out stalkers. But the company contracted for the efforts uses its technology to provide much more than just security. ISM Connect also uses its smart screens to capture metrics for promotion and marketing. Facial recognition, used for decades by law enforcement and militaries, is quickly becoming a commercial tool to help brands engage consumers. Swift's tour is just the latest example of the growing privacy concerns around the largely unregulated, billion-dollar industry.

NVIDIA wasn't joking when it warned that its performance for the quarter ending in January 27th, 2019 will fall short of expectations. The chipmaker's earnings report for the period shows that it posted a $2.2 billion revenue, which sounds impressive until you realize that it's down 24 percent from the year before. That figure is also down 31 percent from the previous quarter, which saw NVIDIA posting $3.18 billion in revenue. In addition, the company made $294 million in operating income, down a whopping 73 percent year-on-year and down 72 percent from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, its operating expenses went up by 25 percent from the same period a year before.

A team of researchers who have built an artificially-intelligent writer say they are withholding the technology as it might be used for "malicious" purposes. OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is a research institute backed by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It shared some new research on using machine learning to create a system capable of producing natural language, but in doing so the team expressed concern the tool could be used to mass-produce convincing fake news. Which, to put it another way, is of course also an admission that what its system puts out there is unreliable, made-up rubbish. Still, when it works well, the results are impressively realistic in tone - which is why I've shared a sample of it below.

In the United States and around the world, public concern is rising at the prospect of weapons systems that would select and attack targets without human intervention. As the United States Department of Defense releases a strategy on artificial intelligence (AI), questions loom about whether the US government intends to accelerate its investments in weapons systems that would select and engage targets without meaningful human control. The strategy considers a range of potential, mostly benign uses of AI and makes the bold claim that AI can help "reduce the risk of civilian casualties" by enabling greater accuracy and precision. The strategy commits to consider how to handle hacking, bias, and "unexpected behavior" among other concerns. Scientists have long warned about the potentially disastrous consequences that could arise when complex algorithms incorporated into fully autonomous weapons systems created and deployed by opposing forces meet in warfare. How would the use of such learning systems conform with current US policy, which commits to "to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force"?

The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed "deepfakes for text" – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough. At its core, GPT2 is a text generator. The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next. The system is pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, both in terms of the quality of the output, and the wide variety of potential uses.