If you ask the world of technology to slow down a bit, you're instantly branded as a technophobe. But perhaps a bit of reflection is needed in the artificial intelligence (AI) arena, reports Telecoms.com Google's Deepmind is one of those which is starting to think a bit deeper about the big, burgeoning world of computer intelligence. The team has announced the formation of DeepMind Ethics & Society to "complement" the work of its engineers and scientists, and make sure we don't get a little ahead of ourselves. It is usually a conversation which is relegated to comments boards and conspiracy websites, but the industry does need to have a good look at whether the development of the technology is continuing to work for us. This will be the primary objective of the DeepMind Ethics & Society team; making sure the ethical and social impact of the technology is beneficial to society on the whole.

DeepMind, the Google sibling focusing on artificial intelligence, has announced the launch of an'Ethics and Society' unit to study the impact of new technologies on society. The announcement by the London-based group acquired by Google parent Alphabet is the latest effort in the tech sector to ease concerns that robotics and artificial intelligence will veer out of human control. 'As scientists developing AI technologies, we have a responsibility to conduct and support open research and investigation into the wider implications of our work,' said a blog post announcing the launch Tuesday by DeepMind's Verity Harding and Sean Legassick. DeepMind, the Google sibling focusing on artificial intelligence, has announced the launch of an'Ethics and Society' unit to study the impact of new technologies on society. Google's DeepMind AI relies on artificial neural networks, which try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn.

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) division has established a new research group to learn more about the ethical questions posed by the … Read more: DeepMind wants to answer the big ethical questions posed by AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to have a monumental impact on society.

Google's AI-research arm DeepMind has announced the creation of DeepMind Ethics & Society (DMES), a new unit dedicated to exploring the impact and morality of the way AI shapes the world around us. Along with external advisors from academia and the charitable sector, the team aims to "help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all". The unit has been in the works for the last 18 months with eight staff members and six external fellows, and is expected to grow to around 25 people over the coming year. The team will focus on six areas: privacy, transparency and fairness; economic impacts; governance and accountability; managing AI risk; AI morality and values; and the way AI can address global challenges. This is not the first ethics-orientated unit Google has put together within the AI sphere.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) ring the death knell for humanity, or will it improve our lives immeasurably? It depends who you ask. Tech luminary Elon Musk, for example, believes AI is the biggest threat we face as a civilization, while Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg thinks such viewpoints are irresponsible, at best. The bottom line is, we don't really know how AI will evolve. But we do know that a lot of money is being invested in developing AI technologies, and we are also aware that many people in the know expect that machines will surpass human intellect and abilities at some point in the foreseeable future. It's against this backdrop that Alphabet's U.K.-based AI subsidiary DeepMind has launched a new "ethics and society" research unit tasked with "exploring and understanding" the implications of AI permeating the world.

Deepmind, Google's London-based AI research sibling, has opened a new unit focused on the ethical and societal questions raised by artificial intelligence. The new research unit will aim "to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all", according to the company, which hit headlines in 2016 for building the first machine to beat a world champion at the ancient Asian board game Go. The company is bringing in external advisers from academia and the charitable sector, including Columbia development professor Jeffrey Sachs, Oxford AI professor Nick Bostrom, and climate change campaigner Christiana Figueres to advise the unit. "These Fellows are important not only for the expertise that they bring but for the diversity of thought they represent," said the unit's co-leads, Verity Harding and Sean Legassick, in a blogpost announcing its creation. The unit, called DeepMind Ethics and Society, is not the AI Ethics Board that DeepMind was promised when it agreed to be acquired by Google in 2014.

As we hand over more of our lives to artificial intelligence systems, keeping a firm grip on their ethical and societal impact is crucial. For DeepMind, whose stated mission is to "solve intelligence", that task will be the work of a new initiative tackling one of the most fundamental challenges of the digital age: technology is not neutral. DeepMind Ethics & Society (DMES), a unit comprised of both full-time DeepMind employees and external fellows, is the company's latest attempt to scrutinise the societal impacts of the technologies it creates. In development for the past 18 months, the unit is currently made up of around eight DeepMind staffers and six external, unpaid fellows. The full-time team within DeepMind will swell to around 25 people within the next 12 months.

After DeepMind has released the Video Pixel Networks paper I started working on a tensorflow implementation of it on this github repository . I finished it so feel free to check it out. And I also wrote a medium post about the architecture and my implementation details.

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