The neural networks behind social media's sophisticated ad targeting could swallow the whole energy grid.

A leading U.S. computer scientist and medical statistician warned that artificial intelligence is being applied with undue haste to analyze data in some areas of biomedical research, leading to inaccurate findings. Artificial intelligence is being applied with undue haste to analyze data in some areas of biomedical research, leading to inaccurate findings, a leading US computer scientist and medical statistician warned on Friday. "I would not trust a very large fraction of the discoveries that are currently being made using machine learning techniques applied to large data sets," Genevera Allen of Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University warned at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Machine learning is a form of AI being applied widely to find patterns and associations within scientific and medical data, for example between genes and diseases. In precision medicine, researchers look for groups of patients with similar DNA profiles so that treatments can be targeted at their particular genetic form of disease.

For me, that raising the possibility of a massive failure mode in the future, the possibility that we create human or super human level AGI and we've got a whole world populated by super human level AGIs, none of whom is conscious. And that would be a world, could potentially be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness no subjective experience at all. Now, I think many many people, with a wide variety of views, take the view that basically subjective experience or consciousness is required in order to have any meaning or value in your life at all. So therefore, a world without consciousness could not possibly have a positive outcome. Maybe it wouldn't be a terribly negative outcome, it would just be an outcome, and among the worst possible outcomes.

Robots and artificial intelligence have long posed a threat to humans' jobs, but a group of scientists on Sunday issued an especially dire warning about the impact of such machines. Several academics told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that further advances in automation could result in mass unemployment across a whole spectrum of industries, from transportation to sex work. Moshe Vardi, professor of computer science and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology Rice University, said that there are 250,000 industrial robots in the United States right now, and the growth rate is in the double digits. "We need to start thinking very seriously--what will humans do when machines can do almost everything?" "We have to redefine the meaning of good life without work."