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Sam Harris Asks If We Can Control AI

#artificialintelligence

You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some abstract theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, and our collective emotional and analytic response to the dangers is not where it should be. TED has finally released the long awaited talk by neuroscientist and author Sam Harris. In his presentation, Harris emphatically urges the audience to consider just how important the development of artificial intelligence is, and how our emotional response so far is "not appropriate tot he dangers that lie ahead." Even Harris admits,"I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk."


Nate Parker addresses sexual assault charges on '60 Minutes': 'I don't feel guilty'

Los Angeles Times

Nate Parker has broken his silence over a 2001 sexual-assault trial, saying he does not feel remorse about the events in question. "I don't feel guilty," the filmmaker and star of "The Birth of a Nation" told Anderson Cooper in a "60 Minutes" interview scheduled to air Sunday. Parker was accused and acquitted of sexually assaulting a woman in 1999 while he was a student at Penn State University. Parker said it was consensual sex. "Birth" co-writer Jean Celestin was convicted; the ruling was overturned on appeal.


Health care IoT: reducing heart disease readmission

#artificialintelligence

An unnamed regionally-managed health care provider partnered with ThingWorx's machine learning platform to detect patterns in data that would lead to better patient care and reduce costly readmissions for patients with ischemic heart disease, according to a case study provided by Thingworx. The solution predicts high-risk patients and provides caregivers insight into why flagged patients should receive extra care across their network using health care IoT. The unspecified health care network includes two major hospitals and a network of outpatient and preventative care providers. It has more than 1,000 patient beds, a home health care service, preventive medicine, rehabilitation services, a network of primary care physicians and a range of outpatient services. According to Thingworx, its client is one of the largest health providers in the country.


6 Strategies for Future Proofing Your Job, and Company, for IoT Greatness

#artificialintelligence

It's unavoidable: the Internet of Things will kill many jobs. Self-driving cars alone could put millions out of work. And the manufacturing sector, already reeling from decades of job losses, could see millions of more jobs replaced by machines. The convergence of IoT and cognitive computing could also threaten many prestigious jobs as computers learn to perform thinking tasks rather than solely mechanical ones. "We will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value," write venture investor William H. Davidow and technology writer Michael S. Malone in Harvard Business Review. "Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century."


Alzheimer's Early Tell - Issue 40: Learning

Nautilus

In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she'd done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English manservant who has a mysterious effect on a circle of friends, once meticulously realized in her head, had become a stranger to her. As Murdoch later told Joanna Coles, a Guardian journalist who visited her in her house in North Oxford in 1996, a year after the publication of the book, Jackson's Dilemma, she was suffering from a bad writer's block. It began with Jackson and now the shadows had suffused her life. "At the moment I'm just falling, falling โ€ฆ just falling as it were," Murdoch told Coles.


The tech world's new key to productivity? A 5,900 chair

Los Angeles Times

Che Voigt believes his company has solved problems that have plagued the working world since the advent of typing. It's a solution to hunched backs, stiff necks and tight shoulders. It's a workstation that, with a push of a button, transitions from a standing desk to a seated table to a fully reclined platform like a dentist's chair. Its seat expands and retracts, supporting the whole body from head to heels. There's a screen and mouse and keyboard that follows the user's eyes and hands.


How a Robot Football Player Will Prevent Concussions

IEEE Spectrum Robotics

During practices, American football coaches typically stay on the sidelines, grim-faced, as they order their players through drills. But during an afternoon this past May, in the cavernous training facility for the Pittsburgh Steelers, head coach Mike Tomlin couldn't resist getting in on the action. As a human-size robot sped over the artificial turf, the grinning coach ran onto the field and tackled it. The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, was designed to take precisely this kind of hit--the sort of jarring blow that, inflicted repeatedly, can injure the brains of human players. American football has been rocked by controversy over the last decade, as it has become clear that the repeated collisions inherent to the sport are giving players concussions and sometimes causing debilitating and permanent brain trauma. In response, the U.S. National Football League (NFL) has altered rules and contributed millions to medical research. Meanwhile, the same head-injury concerns have found even greater resonance in college and youth football.


Lose It launches Snap It to let users count calories in food photos

#artificialintelligence

Boston-based Lose It! (incorporated as FitNow Inc.) has released a new beta feature today called Snap It within its weight loss and calorie tracking app. As is easily guessed by the name, Snap It beta lets users take photos of their daily meals and snacks to automatically log them and derive approximate calorie counts. For now, users will be able to open the Lose It! app, pick a meal-type (breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack), take a photo of their food, submit and wait briefly for Snap It to analyze it. Snap It will present users with a few best guesses of what food was portrayed in the submitted pic. Users can then confirm the food seen in the photo, and add more detail.


Robots in the workplace will improve Americans' quality of life

#artificialintelligence

Likewise, I am convinced that the revolution in artificial intelligence will enable computers and robots to do many of the tasks that white-collar workers now do. It's not surprising, therefore, that many people are worried about the fate of those whose jobs are vulnerable -- or have already been lost -- to the latest disruptive technology. What will happen to the millions of men and women who now drive trucks and taxis when the trucks and taxis can drive themselves? What will happen to the accountants and health workers when computers can do their jobs? Some analysts have estimated that, with many fewer employees needed to produce the current volume of goods and services, a large share of current employment could be made redundant.


Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys

Los Angeles Times

For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows. In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students. When asked which of four videotaped children -- a boy and girl who were black and a pair who were white -- required their closest attention, educators black and white alike chose the study's African American boy most frequently. The study's white boy came in a distant second and two girls -- one white and one black -- drew the least scrutiny from the teachers. But when subjects in the new study were asked to rate the severity of a child's disruptive behavior and recommend consequences for it, race played a more unexpected role: African American pre-K educators, the study found, judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators.