As a point of departure for this essay, in their recent Op Ed in The New York Times Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues--Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at the University of Cambridge, and Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company--tell us that "however useful these [AI] programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects…." They continue: "Unlike humans, for example, who are endowed with a universal grammar that limits the languages we can learn to those with a certain kind of almost mathematical elegance, these programs learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages with equal facility." Readers might take these comments to mean current AI so differs from how humans communicate that predictions that AI will displace humans in any but a few minor domains is hype. The new Chatbots, painters, programmers, robots, and what all are impressive engineering projects but nothing to get overly agitated about. Current AI handles language in ways very far from what now allows humans to use language as well as we do. More, current AIs' neural networks and large language models are encoded with "ineradicable defects" that prevent the AIs from using language and thinking remotely as well as people.

Robot revolution to transform human workplaces Feature 18 April 2017 Over the last few months, the idea that a robotic revolution is just around the corner has become commonplace Nick Ismail Robots and artificial intelligence is set to intrude into many of the spheres of our lives – driverless cars are about be tested on Manchester roads, self-driving delivery robots are being trialled in London while a New York firm has developed a robot which can lay six times as many bricks in a day as its human counterpart A recent report from The International Bar Association, a global organisation for lawyers, said Governments could be forced to legislate for quotas of human workers, traditional working practices would be transformed over the coming years and that legal frameworks regulating employment and safety were becoming rapidly outdated. A third of graduate level jobs around the world may eventually be replaced by machines or software, the report said. See also: Robots: better saved for Sci-Fi believe UK consumers An estimate by PWC earlier this year said that 10 million UK workers were at high risk of being replaced by robots over the next 15 years. In some sectors half the jobs could go, it warned. The speed with which change is occurring and the broadness of impact being brought about by AI and robotics is incredible.

This is part IV of our tour through the papers from the Re-coding Black Mirror workshop exploring future technology scenarios and their social and ethical implications. In 2016, the world witnessed the storming of social media by social bots spreading fake news during the US Presidential elections… researchers collected Twitter data over four weeks preceding the final ballot to estimate the magnitude of this phenomenon. Their results showed that social bots were behind 15% of all accounts and produced roughly 19% of all tweets… What would happen if social media were to get so contaminated by fake news that trustworthy information hardly reaches us anymore? Fake news and hoaxes have been around a long time, but the nature of social media pours fuel on the fire. Any user can create and relay content with little third-party filtering or fact-checking; many adults get their news on social media; and research has shown that people exposed to fake news tend to believe it.

Yesterday, the Belgian minister of justice, Koen Greens, announced the result of an investigation that the country's Gaming Commission conducted into video game "loot boxes", a mechanic that lets players pay real money for a chance at winning virtual items. It found that three popular games – Overwatch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Fifa 18 – were in violation of gambling legislation. This is a significant finding, because controversy over loot boxes has been raging for at least six months: are they actually a form of gambling? Worse, are they a form of gambling that is particularly appealing to children? Belgium's Gaming Commission has decided that, yes, they are, and the publishers in question should remove loot boxes from their games or face fines.

Live call-in discussion: As artificial intelligence continues to develop, concerns grow about its invasive nature and reach. How much are we willing to cede to the machines, and what effect will that have on our lives? The Vermont House recently passed a bill that would create an AI commission to address these subjects. John Quinn, the state's digital services secretary, and Burlington Rep. Brian Cina discuss these issues and what the proposed commission would address. We also hear from Milo Cress, a Champlain Valley Union High School student, who played an important role in the House passage of the bill which would create the commission.

Hedge funds are increasingly turning their attention towards artificial intelligence technology to get an edge on the competition when it comes to trading strategies. Quantitative trading - a subset of what hedge funds do which focuses on algorithms and computers to trade clients' assets - is a natural testbed for machine learning technology, which is good at spotting trends in big data sets and executing at high speed. For example, at Man Group - a London-based hedge fund - "by 2015 artificial intelligence was contributing roughly half the profits in one of Man's biggest funds, the AHL Dimension Programme that now manages $5.1 billion, even though AI had control over only a small proportion of overall assets," as reported by Bloomberg. For what it's worth, European Union lawmakers have attempted to legislate against algorithm-centric funds disrupting the market with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) regulation. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) meanwhile is charged with maintaining order in UK markets, but these efforts can be difficult when the algorithms are by their nature difficult to investigate - also known as black box algorithms.