Thousands of people lined up outside Citi Field in Queens, New York on Wednesday to watch the Mets face off with the Orioles. But outside the ticketing booth, a handful of protesters handed out flyers. They were there to protest a recent Major League Baseball program, and one that's increasingly common in professional sports: using facial recognition on fans. Facial recognition companies and their customers argue that these systems save time, and therefore money, by shortening lines at stadium entrances. However, skeptics argue that the surveillance tools are never totally secure, make it easier for police to get information about fans, and fuel "mission creep" where surveillance technology becomes more common, or even required.

The holiday travel season is once again upon us! It's the magical time of the year that combines standing in airport security lines with incrementally losing your mind as the hands of your watch perpetually tick closer to a boarding time that magically moved up 45 minutes since you left the house and the goober in front of you is in the year of our lord 2022 still somehow confused about why we have to take our shoes off in security and goddamit dude stop arguing with the TSA and untie your laces already these tickets are nonrefundable. Ai can help fix this. It can perhaps even give regular folks a taste of the effortless airport experience that more well-heeled travelers enjoy -- the private jet set who don't ever have to worry about departure times or security lines like the rest of us schmucks stuck flying Spirit. In their latest book POWER AND PREDICTION: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, University of Toronto economists and professors Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb examine the foundational impact that AI/ML systems have on human decision making as we increasingly rely on automation and big data predictions. In the excerpt below, they posit what the airports of tomorrow might look like if AI eliminates traffic congestion and security delays.

In the food industry, it seems, the robot revolution is well underway, with machines mastering skilled tasks that have always been performed by people. In Boston, robots have replaced chefs and are creating complex bowls of food for customers. In Prague, machines are displacing bartenders and servers using an app. Robots are even making the perfect loaf of bread these days, taking charge of an art that has remained in human hands for thousands of years. Now comes Briggo, a company that has created a fully automated, robotic brewing machine that can push out 100 cups of coffee in a single hour -- equaling the output of three to four baristas, according to the company.

By attacking even black-box systems w/hidden information, MIT CSAIL students show that hackers can break the most advanced AIs that may someday appear in TSA security lines and self-driving cars. Groups like the TSA are even considering using them to detect suspicious objects in security lines. But neural networks can easily be fooled into thinking that, say, a photo of a turtle is actually a gun. This can have major consequences: imagine if, simply by changing a few pixels, a bitter ex-boyfriend could put private photos up on Facebook, or a terrorist could disguise a bomb to evade detection. According to a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), such hacks are even easier to pull off than we thought.

When autonomous vehicles are powered by artificial intelligence engines, individuals traveling to or from the world's busiest airports will no longer experience uncertainty. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently told the WSJDLive Conference that he would like his car to not just drive him to work, but to recognize who he is, set up his conference calls, and handle just about all the functions of a personal assistant. In the near future, personal artificial intelligence engines will read your emails, create travel itineraries, and summon your autonomous vehicle--all without you having to ask. This knowledge, combined with real-time traffic and route data, will allow your personal artificial intelligence engine to pre-summon an autonomous vehicle for your journey to ensure that you arrive on time. In particular, with the introduction of personal artificial intelligence (A.I.) engines and on-demand autonomous vehicles, the uncertainty of traveling to and from major international airports will be eliminated, and travelers will experience effortless commutes.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently told the WSJDLive Conference that he would like his car to not just drive him to work, but to recognize who he is, set up his conference calls, and handle just about all the functions of a personal assistant. In the near future, personal artificial intelligence engines will read your emails, create travel itineraries, and summon your autonomous vehicle--all without you having to ask. This knowledge, combined with real-time traffic and route data, will allow your personal artificial intelligence engine to pre-summon an autonomous vehicle for your journey to ensure that you arrive on time. In particular, with the introduction of personal artificial intelligence (A.I.) engines and on-demand autonomous vehicles, the uncertainty of traveling to and from major international airports will be eliminated, and travelers will experience effortless commutes. Anyone who has ever departed from a major congested airport knows that arriving on time is not always easy.