Tag Archives: old

#439023 In ‘Klara and the Sun,’ We Glimpse ...

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Android

In a store in the center of an unnamed city, humanoid robots are displayed alongside housewares and magazines. They watch the fast-moving world outside the window, anxiously awaiting the arrival of customers who might buy them and take them home. Among them is Klara, a particularly astute robot who loves the sun and wants to learn as much as possible about humans and the world they live in.

So begins Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, published earlier this month. The book, told from Klara’s perspective, portrays an eerie future society in which intelligent machines and other advanced technologies have been integrated into daily life, but not everyone is happy about it.

Technological unemployment, the progress of artificial intelligence, inequality, the safety and ethics of gene editing, increasing loneliness and isolation—all of which we’re grappling with today—show up in Ishiguro’s world. It’s like he hit a fast-forward button, mirroring back to us how things might play out if we don’t approach these technologies with caution and foresight.

The wealthy genetically edit or “lift” their children to set them up for success, while the poor have to make do with the regular old brains and bodies bequeathed them by evolution. Lifted and unlifted kids generally don’t mix, and this is just one of many sinister delineations between a new breed of haves and have-nots.

There’s anger about robots’ steady infiltration into everyday life, and questions about how similar their rights should be to those of humans. “First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theater?” one woman fumes.

References to “changes” and “substitutions” allude to an economy where automation has eliminated millions of jobs. While “post-employed” people squat in abandoned buildings and fringe communities arm themselves in preparation for conflict, those whose livelihoods haven’t been destroyed can afford to have live-in housekeepers and buy Artificial Friends (or AFs) for their lonely children.

“The old traditional model that we still live with now—where most of us can get some kind of paid work in exchange for our services or the goods we make—has broken down,” Ishiguro said in a podcast discussion of the novel. “We’re not talking just about the difference between rich and poor getting bigger. We’re talking about a gap appearing between people who participate in society in an obvious way and people who do not.”

He has a point; as much as techno-optimists claim that the economic changes brought by automation and AI will give us all more free time, let us work less, and devote time to our passion projects, how would that actually play out? What would millions of “post-employed” people receiving basic income actually do with their time and energy?

In the novel, we don’t get much of a glimpse of this side of the equation, but we do see how the wealthy live. After a long wait, just as the store manager seems ready to give up on selling her, Klara is chosen by a 14-year-old girl named Josie, the daughter of a woman who wears “high-rank clothes” and lives in a large, sunny home outside the city. Cheerful and kind, Josie suffers from an unspecified illness that periodically flares up and leaves her confined to her bed for days at a time.

Her life seems somewhat bleak, the need for an AF clear. In this future world, the children of the wealthy no longer go to school together, instead studying alone at home on their digital devices. “Interaction meetings” are set up for them to learn to socialize, their parents carefully eavesdropping from the next room and trying not to intervene when there’s conflict or hurt feelings.

Klara does her best to be a friend, aide, and confidante to Josie while continuing to learn about the world around her and decode the mysteries of human behavior. We surmise that she was programmed with a basic ability to understand emotions, which evolves along with her other types of intelligence. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me,” she explains to one character.

Ishiguro does an excellent job of representing Klara’s mind: a blend of pre-determined programming, observation, and continuous learning. Her narration has qualities both robotic and human; we can tell when something has been programmed in—she “Gives Privacy” to the humans around her when that’s appropriate, for example—and when she’s figured something out for herself.

But the author maintains some mystery around Klara’s inner emotional life. “Does she actually understand human emotions, or is she just observing human emotions and simulating them within herself?” he said. “I suppose the question comes back to, what are our emotions as human beings? What do they amount to?”

Klara is particularly attuned to human loneliness, since she essentially was made to help prevent it. It is, in her view, peoples’ biggest fear, and something they’ll go to great lengths to avoid, yet can never fully escape. “Perhaps all humans are lonely,” she says.

Warding off loneliness through technology isn’t a futuristic idea, it’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, with the technologies at hand growing more and more sophisticated. Products like AFs already exist. There’s XiaoIce, a chatbot that uses “sentiment analysis” to keep its 660 million users engaged, and Azuma Hikari, a character-based AI designed to “bring comfort” to users whose lives lack emotional connection with other humans.

The mere existence of these tools would be sinister if it wasn’t for their widespread adoption; when millions of people use AIs to fill a void in their lives, it raises deeper questions about our ability to connect with each other and whether technology is building it up or tearing it down.

This isn’t the only big question the novel tackles. An overarching theme is one we’ve been increasingly contemplating as computers start to acquire more complex capabilities, like the beginnings of creativity or emotional awareness: What is it that truly makes us human?

“Do you believe in the human heart?” one character asks. “I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

The alternative, at least in the story, is that people don’t have a unique essence, but rather we’re all a blend of traits and personalities that can be reduced to strings of code. Our understanding of the brain is still elementary, but at some level, doesn’t all human experience boil down to the firing of billions of neurons between our ears? Will we one day—in a future beyond that painted by Ishiguro, but certainly foreshadowed by it—be able to “decode” our humanity to the point that there’s nothing mysterious left about it? “A human heart is bound to be complex,” Klara says. “But it must be limited.”

Whether or not you agree, Klara and the Sun is worth the read. It’s both a marvelous, engaging story about what it means to love and be human, and a prescient warning to approach technological change with caution and nuance. We’re already living in a world where AI keeps us company, influences our behavior, and is wreaking various forms of havoc. Ishiguro’s novel is a snapshot of one of our possible futures, told through the eyes of a robot who keeps you rooting for her to the end.

Image Credit: Marion Wellmann from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439000 Can AI Stop People From Believing Fake ...

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Android

Machine learning algorithms provide a way to detect misinformation based on writing style and how articles are shared.

On topics as varied as climate change and the safety of vaccines, you will find a wave of misinformation all over social media. Trust in conventional news sources may seem lower than ever, but researchers are working on ways to give people more insight on whether they can believe what they read. Researchers have been testing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that could help filter legitimate news. But how trustworthy is AI when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation?

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Tennessee collaborated to study the role of AI in helping people identify whether the news they’re reading is legitimate or not.

The research paper, “Tailoring Heuristics and Timing AI Interventions for Supporting News Veracity Assessments,” was published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports. It discussed how crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) can be used to identify misinformation for fresh news and specific heuristics, which are rules of thumb used to process information and consider its veracity. In other words, heuristics are essentially “shortcuts for decisions,” explained Dorit Nevo, an associate professor at RPI’s Lally School of Management and a lead author for the paper.

The study found that AI would be successful in flagging false stories only if the reader did not already have an opinion on the topic, Nevo said. When study subjects were set in their beliefs, confirmation bias kept them from reassessing their views.

Nevo said the first part of the project focused on whether subjects could detect misinformation around climate change and vaccines like the one designed to prevent chicken pox. Then, beginning in April 2020, her team studied how people responded to news related to COVID-19.

“With COVID-19, there was a significant difference,” Nevo said. They found that about 72 percent of respondents could identify misinformation about the coronavirus without heuristic clues, and roughly 93 percent were able to be convinced by the researcher’s heuristics that the content was fake.

Examples of heuristic clues include text with too many capital letters or the use of strong language, Nevo said.

There were two types of heuristics mentioned in the team’s paper: objective heuristics and source heuristics. They put a statement at the top of each article the subjects read; it instructed them to read the article and indicate whether they believed its central thesis.

“We either put a statement that says the AI finds this article reliable and accurate based on the objective heuristics, or we said the AI finds the source reliable,” Nevo said. “So that's the source heuristic.”

In her research on heuristics, Nevo found that people’s thinking takes one of two paths: The first path is to read the article, think about it and decide if they believe it; the second is to consider the source and what others think about the news, and decide whether to believe it before reading it.

Image: Dorit Nevo/RPI/IEEE Spectrum

Researchers at RPI researched the role of heuristics and AI in detecting whether people thought news was credible

Another research paper, “Timing Matters When Correcting Fake News,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by researchers at Harvard University, differed from the RPI researchers in its findings. While Nevo and her collaborators found that it’s easier to convince people that a story is fake news before reading it, the Harvard researchers, led by Nadia M. Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist, discovered that a fact-check can convince people of misinformation even after reading headlines. When study subjects read true or false labels after reading a headline, that resulted in a 25.3 percent reduction in “subsequent misclassification,” when compared to headlines with no tag, Brashier and her team found.

In the end, fighting misinformation will require both computing and human efforts such as policy changes, says Benjamin D. Horne, an assistant professor of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee and one of Nevo’s co-authors. He says the RPI-Tennessee work was inspired by AI tools he designed previously. Horne was previously a research assistant at RPI, where he developed machine learning (ML) algorithms that can detect partial truths as well as decontextualized truths and out-of-date information.

“Our algorithms are trained on source-level behavior, both when using the textual content of an article and the network of other news sources that it draws news from,” Horne said. “We have found that these two types of features together are quite good at distinguishing between sources labeled as reliable or unreliable by external news source ratings.”

The machine learning algorithms analyze the writing style and the content-sharing behavior of news outlets, Horne said. Researchers trained a supervised ML algorithm called Random Forest, a classification algorithm that uses decision trees.

AI for Detecting Fake News

So, what’s the potential for AI to be successful in detecting misinformation?

“The tools we have developed, and other tools developed in this area, have fairly high accuracy in lab settings,” says Horne. “For example, our most recent technical work showed around 83% accuracy in predicting when the source of a news article is reliable or unreliable.”

Despite the effectiveness of algorithms, old-fashioned fact-checking by journalists will still be required to combat fake news. AI could filter the information for fact-checkers to verify, according to Horne.

“AI tools are great at dealing with high quantities of information at fast speeds but lack the nuanced analysis that a journalist or fact-checker can provide,” Horne said. “I see a future where the two work together.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438809 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Facebook’s New AI Teaches Itself to See With Less Human Help
Will Knight | Wired
“Peer inside an AI algorithm and you’ll find something constructed using data that was curated and labeled by an army of human workers. Now, Facebook has shown how some AI algorithms can learn to do useful work with far less human help. The company built an algorithm that learned to recognize objects in images with little help from labels.”

CULTURE
New AI ‘Deep Nostalgia’ Brings Old Photos, Including Very Old Ones, to Life
Kim Lyons | The Verge
“The Deep Nostalgia service, offered by online genealogy company MyHeritage, uses AI licensed from D-ID to create the effect that a still photo is moving. It’s kinda like the iOS Live Photos feature, which adds a few seconds of video to help smartphone photographers find the best shot. But Deep Nostalgia can take photos from any camera and bring them to ‘life.’i”

COMPUTING
Could ‘Topological Materials’ Be a New Medium For Ultra-Fast Electronics?
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
“Potential future transistors that can exceed Moore’s law may rely on exotic materials called ‘topological matter’ in which electricity flows across surfaces only, with virtually no dissipation of energy. And now new findings suggest these special topological materials might one day find use in high-speed, low-power electronics and in quantum computers.”

ENERGY
A Chinese Province Could Ban Bitcoin Mining to Cut Down Energy Use
Dharna Noor | Gizmodo
“Since energy prices in Inner Mongolia are particularly low, many bitcoin miners have set up shop there specifically. The region is the third-largest mining site in China. Because the grid is heavily coal-powered, however, that’s led to skyrocketing emissions, putting it in conflict with President Xi Jinping’s promise last September to have China reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 at the latest and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”

VIRTUAL REALITY
Mesh Is Microsoft’s Vision for Sending Your Hologram Back to the Office
Sam Rutherford | Gizmodo
“With Mesh, Microsoft is hoping to create a virtual environment capable of sharing data, 3D models, avatars, and more—basically, the company wants to upgrade the traditional remote-working experience with the power of AR and VR. In the future, Microsoft is planning for something it’s calling ‘holoportation,’ which will allow Mesh devices to create photorealistic digital avatars of your body that can appear in virtual spaces anywhere in the world—assuming you’ve been invited, of course.”

SPACE
Rocket Lab Could Be SpaceX’s Biggest Rival
Neel V. Patel | MIT Technology Review
“At 40 meters tall and able to carry 20 times the weight that Electron can, [the new] Neutron [rocket] is being touted by Rocket Lab as its entry into markets for large satellite and mega-constellation launches, as well as future robotics missions to the moon and Mars. Even more tantalizing, Rocket Lab says Neutron will be designed for human spaceflight as well.”

SCIENCE
Can Alien Smog Lead Us to Extraterrestrial Civilizations?
Meghan Herbst | Wired
“Kopparapu is at the forefront of an emerging field in astronomy that is aiming to identify technosignatures, or technological markers we can search for in the cosmos. No longer conceptually limited to radio signals, astronomers are looking for ways we could identify planets or other spacefaring objects by looking for things like atmospheric gases, lasers, and even hypothetical sun-encircling structures called Dyson spheres.”

DIGITAL CURRENCIES
China Charges Ahead With a National Digital Currency
Nathaniel Popper and Cao Li | The New York Times
“China has charged ahead with a bold effort to remake the way that government-backed money works, rolling out its own digital currency with different qualities than cash or digital deposits. The country’s central bank, which began testing eCNY last year in four cities, recently expanded those trials to bigger cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, according to government presentations.”

Image Credit: Leon Seibert / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438749 Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible ...

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Android

Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are inaccessible from the surface.

Now, researchers in the UK, led by Headlight AI, have developed a drone that could cast a light in the darkness. Named Prometheus, this drone can enter a mine through a borehole not much larger than a football, before unfurling its arms and flying around the void. Once down there, it can use its payload of scanning equipment to map mines where neither humans nor robots can presently go. This, the researchers hope, could make mine inspection quicker and easier. The team behind Prometheus published its design in November in the journal Robotics.

Mine inspection might seem like a peculiarly specific task to fret about, but old mines can collapse, causing the ground to sink and damaging nearby buildings. It’s a far-reaching threat: the geotechnical engineering firm Geoinvestigate, based in Northeast England, estimates that around 8 percent of all buildings in the UK are at risk from any of the thousands of abandoned coal mines near the country’s surface. It’s also a threat to transport, such as road and rail. Indeed, Prometheus is backed by Network Rail, which operates Britain’s railway infrastructure.

Such grave dangers mean that old mines need periodic check-ups. To enter depths that are forbidden to traditional wheeled robots—such as those featured in the DARPA SubT Challenge—inspectors today drill boreholes down into the mine and lower scanners into the darkness.

But that can be an arduous and often fruitless process. Inspecting the entirety of a mine can take multiple boreholes, and that still might not be enough to chart a complete picture. Mines are jagged, labyrinthine places, and much of the void might lie out of sight. Furthermore, many old mines aren’t well-mapped, so it’s hard to tell where best to enter them.

Prometheus can fly around some of those challenges. Inspectors can lower Prometheus, tethered to a docking apparatus, down a single borehole. Once inside the mine, the drone can undock and fly around, using LIDAR scanners—common in mine inspection today—to generate a 3D map of the unknown void. Prometheus can fly through the mine autonomously, using infrared data to plot out its own course.

Other drones exist that can fly underground, but they’re either too small to carry a relatively heavy payload of scanning equipment, or too large to easily fit down a borehole. What makes Prometheus unique is its ability to fold its arms, allowing it to squeeze down spaces its counterparts cannot.

It’s that ability to fold and enter a borehole that makes Prometheus remarkable, says Jason Gross, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University. Gross calls Prometheus “an exciting idea,” but he does note that it has a relatively short flight window and few abilities beyond scanning.

The researchers have conducted a number of successful test flights, both in a basement and in an old mine near Shrewsbury, England. Not only was Prometheus able to map out its space, the drone was able to plot its own course in an unknown area.

The researchers’ next steps, according to Puneet Chhabra, co-founder of Headlight AI, will be to test Prometheus’s ability to unfold in an actual mine. Following that, researchers plan to conduct full-scale test flights by the end of 2021. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438738 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A New Artificial Intelligence Makes Mistakes—on Purpose
Will Knight | Wired
“It took about 50 years for computers to eviscerate humans in the venerable game of chess. A standard smartphone can now play the kind of moves that make a grandmaster’s head spin. But one artificial intelligence program is taking a few steps backward, to appreciate how average humans play—blunders and all.”

CRYPTOCURRENCY
Bitcoin’s Price Rises to $50,000 as Mainstream Institutions Hop On
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“Bitcoin’s price is now far above the previous peak of $19,500 reached in December 2017. Bitcoin’s value has risen by almost 70 percent since the start of 2021. No single factor seems to be driving the cryptocurrency’s rise. Instead, the price is rising as more and more mainstream organizations are deciding to treat it as an ordinary investment asset.”

SCIENCE
Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth Contain Oldest DNA Ever Found
Jeanne Timmons | Gizmodo
“An international team of scientists has sequenced DNA from mammoth teeth that is at least a million years old, if not older. This research, published today in Nature, not only provides exciting new insight into mammoth evolutionary history, it reveals an entirely unknown lineage of ancient mammoth.”

SCIENCE
Scientists Accidentally Discover Strange Creatures Under a Half Mile of Ice
Matt Simon | Wired
“i‘It’s like, bloody hell!’ Smith says. ‘It’s just one big boulder in the middle of a relatively flat seafloor. It’s not as if the seafloor is littered with these things.’ Just his luck to drill in the only wrong place. Wrong place for collecting seafloor muck, but the absolute right place for a one-in-a-million shot at finding life in an environment that scientists didn’t reckon could support much of it.”

BIOTECH
Highest-Resolution Images of DNA Reveal It’s Surprisingly Jiggly
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
“Scientists have captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of DNA, revealing previously unseen twisting and squirming behaviors. …These hidden movements were revealed by computer simulations fed with the highest-resolution images ever taken of a single molecule of DNA. The new study is exposing previously unseen behaviors in the self-replicating molecule, and this research could eventually lead to the development of powerful new genetic therapies.”

TRANSPORTATION
The First Battery-Powered Tanker Is Coming to Tokyo
Maria Gallucci | IEEE Spectrum
“The Japanese tanker is Corvus’s first fully-electric coastal freighter project; the company hopes the e5 will be the first of hundreds more just like it. ‘We see it [as] a beachhead for the coastal shipping market globally,’ Puchalski said. ‘There are many other coastal freighter types that are similar in size and energy demand.’ The number of battery-powered ships has ballooned from virtually zero a decade ago to hundreds worldwide.”

SPACE
Report: NASA’s Only Realistic Path for Humans on Mars Is Nuclear Propulsion
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Conducted at the request of NASA, a broad-based committee of experts assessed the viability of two means of propulsion—nuclear thermal and nuclear electric—for a human mission launching to Mars in 2039. ‘One of the primary takeaways of the report is that if we want to send humans to Mars, and we want to do so repeatedly and in a sustainable way, nuclear space propulsion is on the path,’ said [JPL’s] Bobby Braun.”

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars
Joey Roulette | The Verge
“Perseverance hit Mars’ atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the “seven minutes of terror.” With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions.”

ENVIRONMENT
A First-of-Its-Kind Geoengineering Experiment Is About to Take Its First Step
James Temple | MIT Technology Review
“When I visited Frank Keutsch in the fall of 2019, he walked me down to the lab, where the tube, wrapped in gray insulation, ran the length of a bench in the back corner. By filling it with the right combination of gases, at particular temperatures and pressures, Keutsch and his colleagues had simulated the conditions some 20 kilometers above Earth’s surface. In testing how various chemicals react in this rarefied air, the team hoped to conduct a crude test of a controversial scheme known as solar geoengineering.”

Image Credit: Garcia / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots