ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Conscious Exotica Murray Shanahan Aeon "In what follows I attempt to...[describe] the structure of the space of possible minds, in two dimensions: the capacity for consciousness and the human-likeness of behavior. Implicit in this mapping seems to be the possibility of forms of consciousness so alien that we would not recognize them." The answer is simple: We're at a unique intersection where the neural nets we're trying to implement are more suitable to analog designs, while demand for these types of AI circuits is expected to explode." NEUROSCIENCE: How Network Neuroscience Is Creating a New Era of Mind Control MIT Technology Review "Is it possible to exercise the same kind of control over the most complex network we know of: the human brain?...'A critical question…is how to modulate a human brain network to treat cognitive deficits or enhance mental abilities,' they say. 'We posit that network control fundamentally relates to mind control.'" TRANSPORTATION: Will Driverless Cars Really Save Millions of Lives? Lack of Data Makes It Hard to Know. Michael Laris and Ashley Halsey III The Washington Post "Researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a study funded by Google, dug into the data and discovered just how incomplete the federal numbers are.

Apple is the most successful company in the world. But future success for Apple depends to a surprising degree on artificial intelligence. When you think of Silicon Valley's AI leaders, Apple may not immediately come to mind. But the company's initiatives around AI are "amazing." At least that's what the company's newest senior employee said.

Siri continues to receive criticism over at times unreliable performance although Apple's been advancing its personal digital assistant by leaps and bounds since its debut in October 2011. Google, on the other hand, is regularly praised for its powerful knowledge graph and accuracy. You probably know that the search company's exciting new feature, Assistant, recently made its debut on the new Pixel smartphones. With that in mind, YouTuber Marques Brownlee took it upon himself to pit the Pixel's Assistant against the iPhone's Siri in a cool side-by-side video comparison. Let the battle of the smartphone voice assistants begin!

As artificial intelligence improves, machines will soon be equipped with intellectual and practical capabilities that surpass the smartest humans. But not only will machines be more capable than people, they will also be able to make themselves better. That is, these machines will understand their own design and how to improve it – or they could create entirely new machines that are even more capable. The human creators of AIs must be able to trust these machines to remain safe and beneficial even as they self-improve and adapt to the real world. This idea of an autonomous agent making increasingly better modifications to its own code is called recursive self-improvement.

Just over 65 years ago, Alan Turing famously posed the following question: Can machines think? In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing investigates the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the idea that machine-based life may indeed meet or surpass the boundaries of human intellect. Since Turing's essay and over the course of the last several years, leaders in the technology industry, public intellectuals and mathematicians and philosophers alike have begun to sound the alarm on advances in AI computing, warning of the potential unforeseen end results of placing such super-intelligence "online". Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, shocked many in 2014 when he postulated that the world's greatest existential threat was likely not nuclear war or climate change but rather the unboxing of an ill-considered AI, an act he would refer to as "summoning the demon". In subsequent interviews, Musk has carefully elaborated on his view, still cautioning against a foolish act on the part of those at the forefront of AI development. The concern here is not the advent of super-human intelligence per se- as the benefits of this development for humanity could be enormous- but rather a consequential mistake in the game of expectations, allowing a machine-based intelligence, capable of recursive self-improvement, to essentially roam free.

Though Google Translate is one of the most powerful language translation tools, the company still thinks there's room for major improvement. And it is now working towards creating a model which can translate phrases from one language to another automatically. Much like every other product, Google has been working on integrating machine learning translation techniques into this system as well. And today seems to be the day, we can finally see it in action. Google Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT which utilizes state-of-the-art training techniques for improved translations has today been introduced into one of the most difficult language pair: Chinese to English.

Ghetto Distributed Computing For Neural Networks (theapemachine.com)

Chatbots can already order read you the news, order you a takeaway, or hail you a cab. Now they're heading for your kitchen, with the launch of Jamie Oliver Skills, a virtual sous-chef developed by digital agency AKQA and the Jamie Oliver Group for the Amazon Echo. The Echo is a voice-controlled wireless speaker that is Amazon's answer to Apple's Siri, Google's Now and Microsoft's Cortana. Microphones on the device transmit your voice then a virtual assistant called Alexa--now equipped with a British accent for the UK market--responds automatically using artificial intelligence tech to create a simulated conversation. Jamie Oliver Skills is one of the early additions to Alexa's array of capabilities.

When Watson answered the final question to win "Jeopardy!" in 2011, voice recognition and artificial intelligence software were just making their large consumer debut on mobile devices. At the start, these capabilities were engaging, interesting and even exciting, but sometimes more as a parlor game than a deeply functional application. Yet they've continued to improve at an accelerating rate and now demand our serious attention as productivity tools. We are now half a decade on, and cognitive computing is making its presence felt at a deeply functional business level -- not just at the gateway of the journey on our devices, but deep within the industry-process level. For instance, cognitive computing is having a real impact at the clinical-process level for healthcare, which was featured specifically in a segment on artificial intelligence on "60 Minutes."

If Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking's foreboding pronouncements about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence don't have you spooked enough, MIT has deliberately launched a project that is designed to make AI scary. Or, at least, to make scary images using deep learning. Using a unique deep learning algorithm, researchers have attempted to teach their artificial intelligence what haunted houses and "toxic cities" look like. Then they fed it completely innocuous images of famous landmarks and instructed it to make them look eerie. It's doing a pretty good job, as far as nailing that cliched haunted look. Why are they doing this?