After creating a convincing viral series of Tom Cruise deepfakes on TikTok, VFX specialist Chris Ume told The Verge, "You can't do it by just pressing a button. That's important, that's a message I want to tell people." He went on to say that each clip took weeks of work using the open-source DeepFaceLab algorithm as well as established video editing tools. The key takeaway, and the title of the article, was Tom Cruise deepfake creator says public shouldn't be worried about'one-click fakes'. You should be extremely worried about deepfakes, the technology that empowers their creation, and the exponential speed of innovation.

LinkedIn published its "Top 10 Emerging Jobs" list on Tuesday and -- no surprise -- most of them are tech jobs. Coming in at number one is Artificial Intelligence Specialist. While most of the jobs on the list are tech-oriented, they are not necessarily in the tech business. AI, data science, and engineering are required by absolutely every company, so it makes sense that these are the most popular emerging jobs; they are all required for successful digital transformation. The average pay for the top jobs is well into six figures.

AI, specifically "augmented intelligence," is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let's explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce. A brand manager needs an advertisement. So, the brand manager sends a brief to the senior art director (in-house or at an agency) and asks for something amazing to be created. On or before the deadline, the brand manager and the art director meet to review the work.

The sensationalist hype around AI has a lot of people believing that the technology may be too advanced or too technical for their businesses to take advantage of. AI is here now and you can start using it today. In casual conversation, people tend to conflate narrow focused AI, where a training set is crafted to perform specific tasks, with the inevitable (but not yet created) AGI "artificial general intelligence," which (in theory) will be able to learn to do anything and possibly be self-aware. It's an easy mistake to make, but it is a mistake none-the-less. The AI tools outlined below do specific tasks and they all have certain features in common.

Some people believe that Alexa is listening all the time. Some people believe that Alexa records every word for posterity. Some people believe that having an Amazon Echo increases their risk of being hacked. For a solid overview of Alexa Voice Services (AVS), which is the underlying technology for Amazon's Echo products, please read my essay: Just How Dangerous Is Alexa? It explains how voice-enabled smart speakers work and should help you frame your own thesis about Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

On May 25, a new law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going into effect in the European Union. The law was created to protect EU citizens from potential abuses, like the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. Though the timing may seem coincidental, this law has been in the works for more than four years. GDPR will replace the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) of 1995. Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to 4% of their worldwide annual revenue from the previous financial year.

This article is by Featured Blogger Shelly Palmer from his blog. If you want to build a ship to take humans to Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Earth), when should you start the project? If you start today, you might be ready to launch your ship in about 500 years, and accounting for exponential technological advances, you might get there in 10,000 years or so. However, if you wait 5,000 years to start building your ship, you may only need 500 years of travel time. So waiting 5,000 years to start the project might get you there 5,000 years before people who start the project today.

AI is getting smarter every day. Google's AutoML project has learned to replicate itself – early steps on the path to superintelligence. Just down the hall, DeepMind's AlphaGoZero trained itself to beat the human-trained AlphaGo 100 games to zip! As we move closer to a world where machines train themselves – but think for us – complicated questions about fairness and biases arise. In response to the Harvey Weinstein allegations, the hashtag #MeToo began to surface on social media.

If you want to build a ship to take humans to Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Earth), when should you start the project? If you start today, you might be ready to launch your ship in about 500 years, and accounting for exponential technological advances, you might get there in 10,000 years or so. However, if you wait 5,000 years to start building your ship, you may only need 500 years of travel time. So waiting 5,000 years to start the project might get you there 5,000 years before people who start the project today. This completely hypothetical thought starter is one of my favorite ways to explore investment strategies in the age of exponentialism.

To change your world, AI does not need to replace humans – it just needs to displace you. So stop saying that AI can't replace humans, and start asking, "Can AI displace me?" We are not close enough to general-knowledge artificial intelligence to consider a world where such a system could completely replace a cognitive nonrepetitive (white-collar) worker. And while Hollywood and sensationalist reporting would have you believe otherwise, malevolent AI systems and sentient cyborgs should not be the subject of any serious discussion about job loss. The most probable future is far scarier.