Year: 2015

1. The Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment In January, Citibank helped establish this programme, to be led by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, authors of a famous paper on AI-driven automation. The programme is monitoring changes in the labour market, and watching for signs of irreversible technological unemployment. 2. Google open-sources Tensor Flow In September, Google announced an important change in strategy. Having built a very lucrative online advertising business based on algorithms and hardware which produced better AI than anyone else, it was open sourcing its current best AI software – a deep learning engine called...

Sorry, but I couldn't resist sharing this.  "Surviving AI" is the Christmas Number One.* A very Merry Christmas to you, and a Happy New Year! * On Amazon's top 100 new releases in AI and Machine Learning.  (On Christmas Eve, anyway.)  

It's great news that the Leverhulme Trust is granting £10m to Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risks (CSER).  The money will fund an important new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, to explore the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence, both short and long term. Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. CSER's Executive Director, says that the Centre will look “at themes such as different kinds of intelligence, responsible development of technology, and issues surrounding autonomous weapons and drones." Prominent figures associated with CSER include professor Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the...

Fondaction BankInter is a leading global think tank based in Madrid.  In 2015 it investigated the idea that machine intelligence may lead to technological unemployment.  A workshop in June lead to a report which was published in November, and the Fondacion asked me and Juan Francisco Blanes, a roboticist, to give talks at the launch. With splendid irony, my computer crashed during the presentation, so fans of schadenfreude will particularly enjoy the section at 14 minutes 04 seconds.  Fortunately, the Fondacion staff came to the rescue with great efficiency and aplomb, and the talk re-starts at 18 minutes 57 seconds.

Seven vignettes from the history of artificial intelligence, for the BBC's history magazine.

The excellent FiveBooks site interviewed me recently, and asked me to recommend five books to read about artificial intelligence. I think this is the century of two singularities, so I chose two books about the Technological Singularity (one each by Kurzweil and Bostrom) and two about what I call the Economic Singularity, the consequences of technological unemployment (one by Martin Ford and the other by McAfee and Brynjolfsson). The interview (here), by Sophie Roell, is quite long, but a jolly good read (in my wholly un-biased opinion). My fifth book choice is Permutation City by my favourite science fiction writer,...

Charles Arthur, a journalist who writes for The Guardian and other outlets, wrote this intriguing article about the possibility of technological unemployment, and its potential impact on society: If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US,...

Nice Mr Bezos has given me gift vouchers for 25 review copies of Pandora's Brain audio books and 25 review copies of Surviving AI audio books. You get a free book, and when you've listened to it, Amazon gets a review of the book - that's the deal. Gamification is everywhere these days, so these exciting freebies will be awarded for interesting / insightful / funny or even just plain honest completions of one of the two following statements: “The best thing about AI is...” or "The scariest thing about AI is..." Email your full name and your answer to calum@3cs.co.uk. Don't...

Surviving AI is now available at Amazon as an audio book - either as a stand-alone purchase, or (free!) as part of a trial of Amazon's Audible service. Like Pandora's Brain, the audio version of Surviving AI is narrated by Joe Hempel, a talented voice artist who is making quite a name for himself in the world of audio books. It is already a best-seller in two categories. Whether you go to work on the tube or the freeway, turn off the Eagles, and in just four and a half hours, learn all about the promise and peril of our most powerful...

SwiftKey pioneered keyboards with a three-word suggestion bar above the keys that could accurately predict your next word. This was powered by a technology called “n-gram”, an approach now used on more than a billion devices globally. N-gram technology has some limitations, as it can’t capture the underlying meaning of words and can only accurately predict words that have been seen before in the same word sequence. Now, SwiftKey Neural’s intelligent understanding of sentence context introduces a more ‘human’ touch for mobile typing. Using machine learning and enormous amounts of language data, SwiftKey’s neural model is able to capture the...

We are used to thinking about globalisation as a phenomenon involving products. Economic liberals see it as a good thing, enabling the law of comparative advantage to improve the lives of people all over the world, and uniting nations in peaceful trade instead of sundering them in war. Their opponents on both the political left and right see it as a bad thing, impoverishing their own citizens as cheap goods flood in from “over there”. Globalisation is not new. When in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he kicked off a massive wave of globalisation, but it was neither the...

“Art goes beyond creativity, and you have to be conscious to produce it.” That could be a handy slogan for the forthcoming race against the machines – and it might also be true. Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something. Imagination is the faculty of having original ideas, and there seems to be no reason why that requires a conscious mind to be at work. Creativity can simply be the act of combining two existing ideas (perhaps from different domains of expertise) in a novel way. The eminent 19th-century chemist August Kekule solved the riddle...

I just finished reading "The Girl in the Spider's Web", the fourth book in the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, which was made into a great trilogy of films in its native Sweden, and (IMHO) a less good film by Hollywood.  Famously, this fourth book was not written by Larsson, who made the ill-advised career move of dying before his books became huge best-sellers. But (IMHO again) it's damn good. For me at least, the cast of characters live on. (There is an AGI sub-plot which I think is a bit daft, but it barely distracts.) The shift in author...

Google kindly offered the use of the conference room at their London Campus for the official launch of "Surviving AI" on 15th September. David Wood, chair of the London Futurist Group did most of the organisation with his usual efficiency and aplomb, and Kenn Cukier of The Economist did a terrific job of compering. There was a great turnout and a lively discussion after the talk.  You can watch the video here, and you can join the discussion here.

Here's a link to a 14-minute interview with Bill Padley of Talk Radio Europe, a station for English-speakers in Spain.  A tiny bit of research enabled me to illustrate the power of the AI we already have, much to Bill's delight. [embed]https://youtu.be/Faao4DQI4Eo[/embed]

A couple of days ago I Skyped with Jon Perry, co-founder and co-host of the excellent Review the Future podcast. (I came across this podcast recently when they interviewed Nikola Danaylov of Singularity 1 on 1, and I've listened to some of their back catalogue, which I highly recommend.) Jon and I cantered over much of the subject area covered by “Surviving AI”, and then he edited it so that I didn't sound like a complete fool. (Thanks Jon!) And now it's online and available for your consideration.

"Surviving AI", a non-fiction review of the promise and peril of artificial intelligence is now on sale at Amazon.  It's available in both ebook and paperback formats, and my favourite voice artist, Joe Hempel, is making great strides with the audio version.  (Here are Amazon's UK and US sites.) Artificial intelligence is our most powerful technology, and in the coming decades it will change everything in our lives. If we get it right it will make humans almost godlike. If we get it wrong... well, extinction is not the worst possible outcome. “Surviving AI” is a concise, easy-to-read guide to what's coming, taking you...

The audible version of Pandora's Brain is now available at your local Amazon store.  You can even get it free if you subscribe to Audible's subscription service. The narrator is Joe Hempel, a very talented voice artist based in the US (see previous post). In some episodes of Top Gear, the anonymous test driver The Stig listened to audio books while working.  I wonder if he now works for the BBC or for Amazon?  Anyone got his number?