AI Weekly: Dystopian visions of AI are distractions from present problems

Writing about AI for an appreciable amount of time is, in my experience, enough to make any reasonable person concerned about the future of humanity. But I worry the focus of that concern is too often directed at the relatively distant future, which could lead to unforeseen consequences in the present. Headlines from the past few months illuminate how bad things can get. Consider the cases of the self-driving Uber that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona and that of the Apple engineer who was killed when his Tesla, driving on Autopilot, plowed into a traffic barrier on the highway. You're probably aware of the content suggestion algorithms from Facebook and YouTube, which have been implicated in the spread of fake news and extremist views.