Year: 2015

Creating an audio book – by recording artist Joe Hempel

This is a guest post by the voice recording artist Joe Hempel - seen here with a dentist's best client. Joe has done a great job of voicing Pandora's Brain, which will shortly be available as an audio book, and he is currently hard at work on the audio version of  Surviving AI. Joe is a diligent and talented recording artist, and it's been a pleasure working with him. So I invited him to explain a bit about the process of recording an audio book. --- When the audition for Pandora's Brain popped up on ACX (Amazon's audio creation exchange), I...
Book review: The Patient Will See You Now by Eric Topol

Book review: The Patient Will See You Now by Eric Topol

Eric Topol is a techno-optimist and a leading advocate of radical change in the medical profession. Judging by some of the reactions to this best-selling book, parts of that profession see him as a traitor. Smartphone revolution One of the two main themes in Topol's latest book is that the AI embedded in our smartphones is about to spark a revolution in healthcare. Paired with tiny sensing devices and accessing ever-increasing amounts of data, smartphone apps enable patients to monitor every aspect of our bodies.  Diagnoses can be made and prescriptions issued without us having to physically visit the doctor's...

Humanity’s capacity to believe fiction is our super-power

This may seem a bit off-topic, but bear with me. Yuval Harari's book "Sapiens" is brilliant.  I wish I'd written it.  It's stuffed full of great insights, large and small, and the writing style is crisp, clear and often witty.  You can sample his thinking in this TED talk: [embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2015-07-25&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=top_left_image#t-875718[/embed] One of Harari's most important insights is that the reason why humans rule the world, and why the fate of every other species depends on us, is our ability to believe things that aren't true.  Our ability to believe that money is valuable, and that nations and gods exist is what enables us...

Endorsements for "Surviving AI"

"Surviving AI", a non-fiction review of the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, will be published later this summer.  Designer Rachel Lawston has produced a terrific cover (biased? me?), and I'm very grateful to all the illustrious (and busy) people below who gave their time to review it:  A sober and easy-to-read review of the risks and opportunities that humanity will face from AI. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder Skype; co-founder CSER and FLI Understanding AI – its promise and its dangers – is emerging as one of the great challenges of coming decades and this is an invaluable guide to anyone...

Artificial intelligence and ethics

I recently debated some of the ethical considerations raised by the rapid development of artificial intelligence with Ben Medlock of Swiftkey.  Sally Davies of the FT was the ringmaster, and the event was hosted by Playfair Capital.  The video is now available: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvEpATeR5gA&index=1&list=PLDwFvHbYRUw2mcns9GXuGjJhkFD4JEyaQ[/embed]

Professor Margaret Boden’s talk at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks

Professor Boden has been in the AI business long enough to have worked with John McCarthy and some of the other founders of the science of artificial intelligence. During her animated and compelling talk to a highly engaged audience at CSER in Cambridge last month, the sparkle in her eye betrayed the fun she still gets from it. The main thrust of her talk was that those who believe that an artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be created within the next century are going to be disappointed. She was at pains to emphasise that the project is feasible in principle, but she...

Technological unemployment

At an event to mark the launch of the FastFuture book, The Future of Business, I gave a short (8-minute) talk on the possibility that automation will create an economic singularity and lead to widespread technological unemployment. If that happens, will we be able to devise an economic system that can cope with some form of Universal Basic Income, and will we be able to get from here to there without social breakdown? Afterwards, Martin Dinov, Computational and Experimental Neuroscience PhD Researcher at Imperial College, gave a commendably clear talk on artificial neural networks. The video is here.  (The sound quality is not...

Future Trends Forum

Last week I was in Madrid, taking part in the 24th meeting of the Future Trends Forum, a think tank set up by BankInter, a leading Spanish bank. The subject was the Second Machine Age - organising for prosperity, and this short video was shot during the meeting: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=12&v=-U5UIFgzAXM[/embed] The jumping-off point for the meeting was the eponymous book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, so a lot of the discussion revolved around automation and the possibility of widespread technological unemployment. The organisers brought together a fantastic group of smart, experienced people who worked together in a very open and collaborative way during the three...

New book: "Surviving AI". Review copies available

I've just finished writing a non-fiction book on artificial intelligence, called Surviving AI. It starts with a brief history of the science and a description of its current state.  It goes on to look at the benefits and risks that AI presents in the short and medium term, with a short story highlighting the improvements to everyday life that are in the pipeline, and discussions of technological unemployment and killer robots. Then it gets into artificial general intelligence - machines with human-level cognition: whether we can create one, and if so when; whether we will like it if we do, and what we should do about...

The Future of Business

I've contributed a chapter to an interesting new book about the future of business. Edited by Rohit Talwar, The Future of Business looks at the social and economic forces, business trends, disruptive technologies, breakthrough developments in science and new ideas that will shape the commercial environment over the next two decades. It contains chapters by 60 authors -  established and emerging futurists from around the world - and is grouped into ten sections: Visions of the Future - What are the global transformations on the horizon? Tomorrow's Global Order - What are the emerging political and economic transformations that could reshape the environment for society and...

Professor Stuart Russell's talk at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks

Professor Stuart Russell, computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, gave a clear and powerful talk on the promise and peril of artificial intelligence at the CSER in Cambridge on 15th May. Professor Russell has been thinking for over 20 years about what will happen if we create an AGI – an artificial general intelligence, a machine with human-level cognitive abilities. The last chapter of his classic 1994 textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was called “What if we succeed?” Although he cautions against making naive statements based on Moore's Law, he notes that progress on AI is accelerating in...

The Economist’s curious articles on artificial intelligence

The Economist is famous for its excellence at forecasting the past and its weakness at forecasting the future. Its survey on AI (9th May) is a classic. The explanation of deep learning is outstanding, but the conclusion that we should not worry about superintelligence because today's computers have neither volition nor awareness is, well, less impressive. The magazine's leader seems to agree, saying that "even if the prospect of what Mr Hawking calls “full” AI is still distant, it is prudent for societies to plan for how to cope". But it then goes on to make the outlandish claim that...
Movie review: Ultron – not the new Terminator after all

Movie review: Ultron – not the new Terminator after all

Film number two in Marvel's Avengers series is every bit as loud and brash as the first outing, and the crashing about is nicely offset by the customary slices of dry wit, mainly from Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man. Director Joss Whedon demonstrates again his mastery of timing and pace in epic movies, with audiences given time to breathe during brief diversions to the burgeoning love interest between Bruce Banner and the Black Widow, and vignettes of Hawkeye's implausibly forgiving family. The film is great fun (especially on an IMAX screen) and does pretty much everything that fans of superhero...

Ultron, the new Terminator?

Avengers, the Age of Ultron opens in the UK later this week, and in the US the week after. Apparently Hollywood can forecast a film's takings pretty well these days (thanks to clever AI algorithms, no doubt) and it seems the studio is quietly confident it's going to overturn box office records. It may also overturn something else: the unwritten law that every article about the future of artificial intelligence has to be accompanied by a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the killer robot he played. The original Terminator movie was released in 1984, and 31 years is a great innings....

On killer robots

The Guardian's editorial of 14th April 2014 (Weapons systems are becoming autonomous entities. Human beings must take responsibility) argued that killer robots should always remain under human control, because robots can never be morally responsible. They kindly published my reply, which said that this may not be true if and when we create machines whose cognitive abilities match or exceed those of humans in every respect. Surveys indicate that around 50% of AI researchers think that could happen before 2050. But long before then we will face other dilemmas. If wars can be fought by robots, would that not be...

On boiling frogs

If you drop a frog into a pan of boiling water it will jump out. Frogs aren't stupid. But if a frog is sitting in a pan which is gradually heated it will become soporific and fail to notice when it boils to death at 100 degrees. This story has been told many times, not least by the leading management thinker, Charles Handy, in his best-selling book The Age of Unreason. Unfortunately, the story isn't true. It was put about by 19th-century experimenters, but has been refuted several times since. Never mind: it's a good metaphor, and metaphors aren't supposed...

Interview on Singularity Weblog

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISzqmtojD8#t=1036[/embed] This week I interviewed with Nikola Danaylov, the creator of Singularity Weblog.  It was great fun, and quite an honour to follow in the footsteps of his 160-plus previous guests. We talked about hope and optimism as a useful bias, about the promise and peril of AGI, about whether automation will end work and force the introduction of universal basic income ... and of course about Pandora's Brain.
Science fiction gives us metaphors to think about our biggest problems

Science fiction gives us metaphors to think about our biggest problems

Science fiction, it has been said, tells you less about what will happen in the future than it tells you about the predominant concerns of the age when it was written. The 1940s and 50s is known as the golden age of science fiction: short story magazines ruled, and John Campbell, editor of Astounding Stories, demanded better standards of writing than the genre had seen before. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, AE van Vogt, and Robert Heinlein all got started in this period. The Cold War was building up, but the West was emerging from the destruction and austerity of...