AGI, while powerful, could have negative consequences, warned Diveplane CEO Mike Capps and Liberty Blockchain CCO Christopher Alexander. Amazon's top technology officer told the United Nations this week that people will need to eat more fish and less beef if they want to protect the environment, and said artificial intelligence is a tool that is already helping to make that happen. Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon, told the "AI for Good" global summit in Geneva this week that AI is helping rice farmers and other food producers around the world be much more efficient. However, he said AI will also play an important role in making sure food comes at a lower cost to the environment. In his remarks to the conference on July 6, Vogels showed a graphic that said it takes seven times more feed to produce a given amount of protein from a cattle farm compared to a fish farm.

Humanity is at a crossroads that might be summed up as AI for good v AI gone bad, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert. "I see two futures here," the author Prof Gary Marcus told the UN's AI for Good global summit on Friday. In the rosier version, AI revolutionises medicine, helps tackle the climate emergency and delivers compassionate care to elderly people. But we could be on the precipice of a bleaker alternative, with out-of-control cybercrime, devastating conflict and a descent into anarchy. "I'm not saying what's coming; I'm saying we need to figure out what we're doing," Marcus told the summit.

WASHINGTON, July 12, 2022 – Representatives from academia and a nonprofit diverged at a Bipartisan Policy Center event Tuesday about whether the government should step in and minimize problems associated with artificial intelligence, including bias and discrimination in algorithms. "We really do want actors to help us establish national and international guidelines," said Miriam Vogel, president, and CEO of EqualAI, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce bias in AI. "We are driving full speed without lanes, without speed limits to manage the expectations." While acknowledging the benefits of AI in society today, Vogel said its algorithms present risk that often leads to bias and discrimination. She shared the example of how facial recognition misses certain voices or skin tones. AI is used in various sectors and powers algorithms that cater services to individuals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the way we live our everyday lives but tech experts this week warned member of Congress that the systems can have bias, which can lead to unintended consequences for millions of Americans. "AI is increasingly becoming a critical part of our daily lives," said Miriam Vogel, President and CEO of EqualAI. "We think each touch point is also an opportunity to identify and eliminate harmful biases." Bias in AI systems can be especially harmful in financial services. "For example, if you feed in data on who's gotten a mortgage in the past in the United States and ask the computer to make similar decisions in the future, you will get an AI that offers more mortgages to white people than people of color," said Meredith Broussard, an Associate Professor at New York University.

Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. Software failures are expensive -- and on the rise. An estimated 19% to 23% of software development projects fail, and Standish Group found that "challenged" projects -- i.e., those that fail to meet scope, time, or budget expectations -- account for about 52% of software projects. According to a joint project by Undo and Cambridge Judge Business School, these bugs cost enterprises about $61 billion annually, and around 620 million developer hours are wasted on debugging.

Our mission to make business better is fueled by readers like you. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today. Alex Spinelli, chief technologist for business software maker LivePerson, says the recent U.S. Capitol riot shows the potential dangers of a technology not usually associated with pro-Trump mobs: artificial intelligence. The same machine-learning tech that helps companies target people with online ads on Facebook and Twitter also helps bad actors distribute propaganda and misinformation. In 2016, for instance, people shared fake news articles on Facebook, whose A.I. systems then funneled them to users.

"I tried to stay with some of the things that I know will be happening because we have some control of them," said Mr. Vogels. On Wednesday, he shared eight predictions based on customer-behavior patterns and technology investments by the company. The cloud will be everywhere. Next year will see more devices and more organizations powered by the cloud. Mr. Vogel, whose expertise in scalable systems led him to Amazon.com in 2004, predicts that the cloud in 2021 will continue to move beyond the traditional notion of a centralized system, with troves of data moving back and forth between customers and massive data centers in real time.

And the shift hasn't gone unnoticed by the Big Three cloud providers. AWS and others offer subscription-based remote data storage and online tools, and researchers say they can be an affordable alternative to setting up and maintaining their own hardware. The cloud's added computing power can also make it easier for researchers to run machine-learning algorithms designed to identify patterns and extract insights from vast amounts of climate data, for instance, on ocean temperatures and rainfall patterns, as well as decades' worth of satellite imagery. "The data sets are getting larger and larger," said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon.com Inc. "So machine learning starts to play a more important role to look for patterns in the data."

Germany's top soccer (football) league, Bundesliga, announced today it is partnering with AWS to use artificial intelligence to enhance the fan experience during games. Andreas Heyden, executive vice president for digital sports at the Deutsche Fußball Liga, the entity that runs Bundesliga, says that this could take many forms, depending on whether the fan is watching a broadcast of the game or interacting online. "We try to use technology in a way to excite a fan more, to engage a fan more, to really take the fan experience to the next level, to show relevant stats at the relevant time through broadcasting, in apps and on the web to personalize the customer experience," Heyden said. This could involve delivering personalized content. "In times like this when attention spans are shrinking, when a user opens up the app the first message should be the most relevant message in that context in that time for the specific user," he said. It also can help provide advanced statistics to fans in real time, even going so far as to predict the probability of a goal being scored at any particular moment in a game that would have an impact on your team.

More women and minorities must work in tech, or else they risk being left behind in every industry. This grim future was painted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) equality experts who spoke at a conference Thursday hosted by LivePerson, an AI company that connects brands and consumers. In that future, if AI goes unchecked, workplaces will be completely homogenous, hiring only white, nondisabled men. "In this bleak depiction of our future, decades of fights for civil rights and equality have been unwritten in a few lines of code," said EqualAI executive director Miriam Vogel at the conference in Brooklyn, N.Y., called "Boundary Breakers: Women Driving The Future of Tech." Women and minorities are not building AI, and therefore, they are not being represented in popular algorithm-based products, according to Vogel.