This is something that's been on my mind for a while, and it's been hard to shake - even in beautiful New Zealand. Thought I'd use some of the New Year's energy to write it up. It's a bit long - despite my efforts to get it down to a manageable size, but let's start somewhere. There's a scene in the movie "I, Robot", inspired by Asimov's series of the same name, where the titular robot tells the main character that he cannot create a work of art. He does this while creating a rather striking sketch that most humans would be happy to have been the creator of. This movie stands out in my memory as unique because it briefly touches on what the purpose of existence might be to an artificial mind, unlike most I've seen. Intelligences in popular culture are often portrayed as villains, and even the ones on the side of humanity seem far too concerned with the same things we are - domination, power, control, even glimpses of happiness - that I'm given to wonder if it's been given any serious thought. It's something that's been stuck in my mind for a while, but I have to admit I haven't made any significant progress. That said I'm hoping I can repeat some of the questions I've had and wonder about what the answers might be without making myself any more lost than I already am. To start, let's consider what I think is the popular perception of AI. Before we do so, I'd like to borrow some terminology to define what I'm talking about as an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), also called a strong AI. We'll explore the meaning of this term later, but for now let's consider it to be a general mind that can perform any intellectual task a human being can. This definition if you'll notice does not require consciousness or sentience, each of which is a concept just as complicated if not more. For now, let's forget about what an Artificial SuperIntelligence would be - which in my mind is an advanced AGI - and use the term'intelligence' and'artificial intelligence' to refer to an AGI.

Seth Miller, a journalist who wrote about the issue in 2017, thinks that equipment makers didn't consider the privacy implications. There were already cameras on planes -- although not so intrusive -- and the companies assumed that passengers would trade their images for convenience, as they do with facial-recognition technology at immigration checkpoints, he said.

Artificial intelligence capabilities are scheduled to be built into the Singapore region, said the firm. "These AI capabilities will serve startups and major …

Last week, OpenAI released GPT-2, a conversational AI system that quickly became controversial. Without domain-specific data, GPT-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in seven of eight natural language understanding benchmarks for things like reading comprehension and answering questions. A paper and some code were released when the unsupervised model, trained on 40GB of internet text, went public, but the entirety of the model wasn't released due to concerns by its creators about "malicious applications of the technology," alluding to things such as automated generation of fake news. As a result, the wider community cannot fully verify or replicate the results. Some, including Keras deep learning library founder François Chollet, called the OpenAI GPT-2 release (or lack thereof) an irresponsible, fear mongering PR tactic and publicity stunt.

Say the phrase "big data," and people tend to picture the TV show Black Mirror. They imagine a creepy dystopian future in which robot overlords control everything. But those fears are overblown. What people should think of when they think of big data is Netflix or Amazon: personalized recommendations and a customized experience that make it easier and faster for the consumer to find what they're looking for. In fact, you could say that, when it comes to big data, consumers worry about Black Mirror but hope for more Netflix.

The world's two biggest economies are sparring over U.S. allegations that Beijing uses predatory tactics in a drive to make Chinese companies world leaders in such advanced industries as robotics and driverless cars. Those tactics, the Trump administration argues, include cyber-theft, the unfair subsidizing of state-owned Chinese companies, the use of regulations to hobble China's foreign competitors and pressure on American companies to hand over technology in exchange for access to the Chinese market.

In its latest annual report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, tech giant Alphabet warned investors against the many challenges of artificial intelligence, following the lead of Microsoft, which issued similar warnings last August. Recent advances in deep learning and neural networks have created much hope about the possibilities that AI presents to various domains that were previously thought to be off the limits for computer software. But there's also concern about new threats AI will pose to different fields, especially where bad decisions can have very destructive results. We've already seen some of these threats manifest themselves in various ways, including biased algorithms, AI-based forgery and the spread of fake news during important events such as elections. The past few years have seen the development of a growing discussion around building trust in artificial intelligence and creating safeguards that prevent abuse and malicious behavior of AI models.

Spotify's latest update is drawing anger from users who claim it has hidden one of its most important buttons. The company recently released a redesigned version of its app for iOS and Android that brought a minor tweak to the way the app looks. But that minor tweak has caused major upset among the users who have disagreed with designers' latest choices. The most controversial of the changes is that the "repeat" and "go to queue" buttons have fallen off the now playing screen that users regularly see while listening to music. Instead, people must bury into menus if they want songs to keep playing or to see what's coming up next.

A recent decision by research lab OpenAI to limit the release of a new algorithm has caused controversy in the AI community. The nonprofit said it decided not to share the full version of the program, a text-generation algorithm named GPT-2, due to concerns over "malicious applications." But many AI researchers have criticized the decision, accusing the lab of exaggerating the danger posed by the work and inadvertently stoking "mass hysteria" about AI in the process. The debate has been wide-ranging and sometimes contentious. It even turned into a bit of a meme among AI researchers, who joked that they've had an amazing breakthrough in the lab, but the results were too dangerous to share at the moment.