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Artificial intelligence (AI) is overtaking our human ability to absorb and process information. Robots are becoming increasingly dextrous, flexible, and safe to be around (except the military ones).  It is our most powerful technology, and we all need to understand it. In this new book I argue that within a few decades, most humans will not be able to work for money.  Self-driving cars will probably be the canary in the coal mine, providing a wake-up call for everyone who isn’t yet paying attention. All jobs will be affected, from fast food McJobs to lawyers and journalists. This is the single most important...

The Ludic Group runs a series of events at London's Hospital Club, and on the 4th April David Wood, chair of the London Futurists and I gave talks about some of the technologies shaping our future.  The video, just 3 mins 45 seconds, is here.

ThinkNation is a brilliant initiative. The brainchild of Lizzie Hodgson, it is “where young people, artists and thought leaders tackle how technology is impacting everyday life and shaping our futures.” Given the profound importance of the changes sweeping through our lives in the coming years and decades, there aren't many more important subjects to address. So I was very pleased to deliver this talk (11 minutes) to an impressive group of 14-18 year-olds at a ThinkNation conference in December.  It was followed by this discussion. (20 minutes)

So I am delighted that they commissioned this article about, well ... a Big Issue.  Click on the logo or the image below to go to the site and read the full article. So I am delighted that they commissioned this article about, well ... a Big Issue.  Click on the logo or the image below to go to the site and read the full article.

When Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates talked about the promise and the peril of Artificial Intelligence last year, the media only heard the peril part. And the Terminator got a new lease of life. Since then a more balanced approach has been settling in. As a wise and sapient reader of this blog, you already know that those luminaries were prompted to comment on AI by the publication of Nick Bostrom's book “Superintelligence”. (If you haven't read it yet, you should.) Bostrom is often characterised as a doom-sayer, which he categorically is not. Although the New Year fireworks...

Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year Resolution was to programme an AI to become his butler.  He was aiming at Iron Man’s faithful companion, Jarvis.  But surely he knows that Robert Downey Junior based his portrayal of Iron Man on Elon Musk? Interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.  

An AI system devised by DeepMind will beat the best human at Go. (Rather splendidly, he is called Yoda.) SwiftKey's Neural Alpha – a keyboard for phones which uses Deep Learning to dramatically improve predictive typing - will be launched to the general public and will be big news. Virtual reality will become really quite a big thing. The existential risk organisations (FLI in Boston, FHI at Oxford, CSER at Cambridge, MIRI in California) will continue to grow resources and awareness despite a media backlash against 2015's excitement about all things AI. My book The Economic Singularity, about technological unemployment,...

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...