It was organised by PauseAI, a confederation of campaign groups in 17 countries. It was organised by PauseAI, a confederation of campaign groups in 17 countries. 'Pull the plug': protesters resort to direct action against AI firms In a bar below Waterloo Bridge, a cell of a fast-growing anti-AI protest movement met last week to plot their latest move: disrupting a tech industry dinner being addressed by a senior executive from the chip maker Nvidia. Emma, a 28-year-old bartender, had never before taken direct action and was the most nervous of the four plotters from Pull The Plug, one of a growing number of AI-focused campaign groups around the world. Around the table were a former climate protester and a campaigner versed in the anti-nuclear movement.

Machine-learning models are increasingly driving decisions in high-stakes settings, such as finance, law, and hiring, thus, highlighting the need for transparency. However, the key challenge is to balance transparency -- clarifying `why' a decision was made -- with recourse: providing actionable steps on `how' to achieve a favourable outcome from an unfavourable outcome. Counterfactual explanations reveal `why' an undesired outcome occurred and `how' to reverse it through targeted feature changes (interventions). Current counterfactual approaches have limitations: 1) they often ignore causal dependencies between features, and 2) they typically assume all interventions can happen simultaneously, an unrealistic assumption in practical scenarios where actions are typically taken in a sequence. As a result, these counterfactuals are often not achievable in the real world. We present P2C (Path-to-Counterfactuals), a model-agnostic framework that produces a plan (ordered sequence of actions) converting an unfavourable outcome to a causally consistent favourable outcome. P2C addresses both limitations by 1) Explicitly modelling causal relationships between features and 2) Ensuring that each intermediate state in the plan is feasible and causally valid. P2C uses the goal-directed Answer Set Programming system s(CASP) to generate the plan accounting for feature changes that happen automatically due to causal dependencies. Furthermore, P2C refines cost (effort) computation by only counting changes actively made by the user, resulting in realistic cost estimates. Finally, P2C highlights how its causal planner outperforms standard planners, which lack causal knowledge and thus can generate illegal actions.

Gen. Jack Keane joins'Fox Report' to discuss the escalating tensions in the Middle East amid fears of a wider war. While much of the world has eyes on Israel's battles with Hezbollah and Hamas, the U.S. Navy has its sights set on another of Iran's proxies, the Yemeni Houthi rebels. With a mission to keep international waterways at peace, the Navy now finds itself fending off attacks from the shadowy gang of pirates who have gone from arming themselves with assault rifles, pickup trucks and motorboats – to a seemingly unending supply of drones, missiles and other weaponry. The Houthis often attack unarmed Western ships carrying goods through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – while the U.S. has responded in kind with drone attacks on Yemen. ISRAELI AIR FORCE STRIKES HOUTHI TARGETS IN YEMEN WITH'EXTENSIVE' OPERATION That's led to perilous waters along a trade route that typically sees some 1 trillion in goods pass through it, as well as shipments of aid to war-torn Sudan and the Yemeni people.

If you've ever uploaded photos or art, written a review, "liked" content, answered a question on Reddit, contributed to open source code, or done any number of other activities online, you've done free work for tech companies, because downloading all this content from the web is how their AI systems learn about the world. Tech companies know this, but they mask your contributions to their products with technical terms like "training data," "unsupervised learning," and "data exhaust" (and, of course, impenetrable "Terms of Use" documents). In fact, much of the innovation in AI over the past few years has been in ways to use more and more of your content for free. This is true for search engines like Google, social media sites like Instagram, AI research startups like OpenAI, and many other providers of intelligent technologies. This exploitative dynamic is particularly damaging when it comes to the new wave of generative AI programs like Dall-E and ChatGPT.

I went to my first in person meeting since February 2020 last week! How to be? Wonderful and scary!) It was an enjoyable Responsible Tech Meet Up hosted by Cennydd Bowles and inspired by the All Tech Is Human meet ups held elsewhere. It was great and depressing to hear the inside stories from folks at the heart of trying to make tech responsible and accountable, the problems they face and their indefatigable efforts to create change. We got talking about'What Worked' to persuade companies and governments to change to more'responsible' behaviour.

Star Trek got it right: In the future, we'll use computers by talking to them. Google held an event this week and new hardware got most of the attention. Google unveiled a couple of Google-built Pixel phones, Google Wi-Fi home mesh routers, the Google Home virtual assistant appliance, a new 4k Chromecast Ultra streaming media box and the Daydream View VR headset. Critics say Google is copying and competing directly with Apple with the Pixel phones and with Amazon with Home. But this misses the point.

Google Assistant, the search giant's new personal digital assistant, is barely available to users, but Google isn't wasting any time opening it up to developers. During the company's hardware event on Tuesday, Google announced two new developer programs to build Google Assistant into pretty much anything you can think of. "Going back to Google's earliest days we've always worked hard to create healthy open platforms," said Scott Huffman, who leads the Google Assistant engineering team. "The Google Assistant will be our next thriving open ecosystem." The first new program is called Actions on Google, which will launch in early December and allow app makers to build Google Assistant into their services.