Author: david

The machines will be able to enslave you in your native language.

Source: Google is using neural networks to improve Translate

As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed. We now relate to them as we once related to nature. Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.

Source: The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

At first, the Go champion thought the move was rather odd. Then he saw it was wonderful.

Source: The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go

But building voice technology on a 26-year-old corpus inevitably lays a foundation for misunderstanding. English is professional currency in the linguistic marketplace, but numerous speakers learn it as a second, third, or fourth language. Gavaldà likens the process to drug trials. “It may have been tried in a hundred patients, [but] for a narrow demographic,” he tells me. “You try to extrapolate that to the general population, the dosage may be incorrect.”

Seems like a huge problem of bias if voice systems are trained on such an old and narrow set of data.

Source: Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent

Source: DARPA Perspective on AI

This is the Executive Summary of VoiceLabs’ 36-page 2017 Voice Report, highlighting key analysis and predictions.

Source: 2017 Voice Report | VoiceLabs

But what if bots conversed with us in a new way that is uniquely bot-like? At the moment, we anthropomorphize bots because we’ve never really had any non-human entities occupying conversational space with us. Could we create a new set of expectations and aesthetics that might ameliorate these social challenges and create new conversational possibilities? How might a machine express itself in ways that set up new kinds of expectations for our interactions with it?

Source: Mechanomorphs and the politeness of machines | nytlabs ← Research, thoughts, and process from The New York Times R&D Lab

 

Can machines help us to become more creative? We hope so, by helping us to manipulate style, thanks to the next generation of authoring tools: Flow Machines!

Flow machines is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and coordinated by François Pachet. More info here: www.flow-machines.com

 

As technology rapidly progresses, some proponents of artificial intelligence believe that it will help solve complex social challenges and offer immortality via virtual humans. But AI’s critics are sounding the alarm, going so far as to call its development an “existential threat” to mankind.

Interesting debate format.

Source: Artificial Intelligence: The Risks Could Outweigh the Rewards | IQ2US Debates