Month: December 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49004004

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Elon Musk reveals brain-hacking plans

By Jane WakefieldTechnology reporter
  • 17 July 2019
Brain neurons
Image captionThe aim of the firm is to find ways to stimulate the brain in paralysed humans to allow them to control computers

NeuraLink, a company set up by Elon Musk to explore ways to connect the human brain to a computer interface, has applied to US regulators to start trialling its device on humans.

The system has been tested on a monkey that was able to control a computer with its brain, according to Mr Musk.

The firm said it wanted to focus on patients with severe neurological conditions.

But ultimately Mr Musk envisions a future of “superhuman cognition”.

Merging with AI

The device the firm has developed consists of a tiny probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads – thinner than a human hair – which can then monitor the activity of 1,000 neurons.

The advantage of this system, according to the firm, is that it would be able to target very specific areas of the brain, which would make it surgically safer. It would also be able to analyse recordings using machine learning, which would then work out what type of stimulation to give a patient.

NeuraLink did not explain how the system translated brain activity or how the device was able to stimulate brain cells.

“It’s not like suddenly we will have this incredible neural lace and will take over people’s brains,” Mr Musk said during his presentation. “It will take a long time.”

But he said, for those who choose it, the system would ultimately allow for “symbiosis with artificial intelligence”.

Media captionMeet Elon Musk, the man who inspired Robert Downey Jr’s take on Iron Man

Previously Mr Musk has suggested that AI could destroy the human race.

“Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind,” he said.

“With a high bandwidth brain machine interface, we can go along for the ride and effectively have the option of merging with AI.”

Connecting the brain to an interface would create a new layer of “superintelligence” in the human brain, he added, something people “already have via their phones”.

Later, during a question and answer session, he revealed that the device NeuraLink is working on has been tested on monkeys, with the animal able to control a computer with its brain, according to Mr Musk.

Now the firm is putting together a submission to start human testing, which will need to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Mr Musk is also looking to recruit more scientists to the firm, which currently has about 100 employees.

Brain with interface

NeuraLink released a paper to coincide with the announcement, but it has not been peer-reviewed, something that is generally seen as a crucial part of any new scientific breakthrough.

Krittika D’Silva, an AI researcher at the Frontier Development Lab, a partnership with Nasa attended the event, and said: “The technology described by NeuraLink is exciting because it is significantly less invasive than prior work in this field.

“The plans they describe will require many years of work to deal with technical and ethical challenges, but the technology could be a big step in working to alleviate certain serious medical conditions like epilepsy and Parkinson’s.”

The Kording Lab Twitter account, for scientists from the University of Pennsylvania’s neuroscience department, tweeted that there was “nothing revolutionary but a range of really creative ideas” which seemed to suggest the firm was “on a great track”.

Andrew Hires. assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Southern California, tweeted that the company had “pushed forward” the best of existing lab technology.

NeuraLink is not the only firm building neural interfaces. Kernel, set up by tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, is attempting similar things to “radically improve and expand human cognition”.

Many of Mr Musk’s ventures push at the boundaries of what is currently possible. Space X is exploring missions to Mars, while his Boring Company is looking to build tunnels underneath Los Angeles, and his Hyperloop project aims to reinvent travel.

https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/a-pioneer-brain-boosting-implant-might-never-have-us-asking-again-what-s-that-thing-called-1.4545851

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

A pioneer brain-boosting implant might never have us asking again: “What’s that thing called??”

Like a pacemaker for your memory — and the implications for degenerative brain diseases may be massive

Marc Beaulieu · CBC Life · 

It’s high on the list of irksome brain fails. You’re chatting with someone, well on your way to making a salient point, your mouth opens and then… zilch, nada, nothing. The flow is lost, or at least sufficiently stalled, ruining your cred as a sharp conversationalist. Rifling through the storage bins in your brain, you can’t quite summon the word you’re sure you had on the tip of your tongue. The thing is, your tongue isn’t at fault. Your brain, on the other lobe, has left you hanging hard. Well, fret not, once eloquent orator, science is on it. Or, rather, in it. A brain implant providing a measurably significant boost to memory has just been successfully tested by researchers — and it works as quick as an electric pulse. The human animal, and arguably the art of debating, is officially poised for an upgrade.

In a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, the brains of 25 severely epileptic patients were implanted with hundreds of electrodes while being evaluated for corrective neurosurgery. Because accessing the brain is tricky business, it’s not uncommon for researchers to go for a medical twofer, conducting consensual research in one area of the brain while invasive procedures are being performed elsewhere.

In this instance, the lateral temporal cortex (which manages sensory input and recent memory) was stimulated via implant with electrical bursts while patients were awake and their recall was tested. Researchers asked participants to memorize a list of words and then distracted them, before asking them to summon as many of the words as they could. The same exercise was then also conducted with the memory aid switched off. The results were clear: those who got full cybernetic support had their brains bolstered with an added ability to both retain and retrieve information. They consistently enjoyed a 15 percent boost in word recall.

The implanted device in question, though very much a prototype, is novel in that it’s completely autonomous (in other words, no button to press). It works very much like a pacemaker, sending useful pulses only when it notices the brain is wrestling with storing or retrieving information, while staying completely dormant when the brain seems to have recall under control. And if you’re imagining body-rattling brain zaps, consider that one participant told media that the process wasn’t just painless — he didn’t know it was happening. “I could not honestly tell how the stimulation was affecting my memory,” he said. “You don’t feel anything; you don’t know whether it’s on or off.” Seamless cybernetic fusion.

Naturally, the science of biohacking our brains isn’t currently focused on bettering our anecdotes. This research could be applied in future treatment strategies for those suffering from dementia, neurological disorders, devastating brain injuries, strokes or even congenital cognitive limitations — any illnesses where memory is bound to take a significant hit. And that future, thankfully, could be closer than we think.

Dr. Michael Kahana, who lead the study, told CBC’s The Current that tech with this kind of potential comes by funding easily and moves fast. With proper clinical trials expected within “a small number of years”, patients in deep need of support, like those with Alzheimer’s, could eventually be housed with helpful cranial or chest implants about the size of a wristwatch, explains Kahana. Researchers confirm that talks to commercialize this emerging technology are already well underway, and the scope of relief would be considerable, as one estimate puts the number of Canadians suffering from neurodegenerative diseases at 747,000.

This isn’t the first time science has explored inserting tech into our bodies to better them. Recall that the pacemaker qualifies as a cybernetic upgrade and the tech that got us there is already 80 years old. For years, sufferers of Parkinson’s who experienced no reprieve with medication have found some relief with Deep Brain Stimulation (or DBS), which serves to aggressively interrupt faulty upsurges in brain activity. More extreme cases of treatment resistant depression and OCD have also been treated in similar ways.

This type of biotech will only evolve more rapidly from now on, and some aren’t even waiting for it to go mainstream. Grinders, or those with a penchant for DIY biohacking, already go it alone. One fellow in Sydney Australia is having legal trouble with transit authorities after implanting a subway pass chip into his hand. He may have the right idea. Reality’s version of Tony Stark, Elon Musk, has been adamant that humanity will only survive the advent of AI by refurbishing our increasingly obsolete biology cybernetically. His Neuralink project hopes to deliver a “neuroprosthetic” that will gives us unlimited memory and access to the full riches of the internet without ever looking at a screen. Becoming what Musk calls “transhuman” won’t just let us compete with robots — it could grant us immortality. So on the way to infinite existence, do prepare yourself for a pop up message on the back of your eyeball when a new version of your brain is available for download. Do you want to install it now?

That we can leverage debilitating illnesses robbing us of cognitive prowess before our time is welcome news to anyone who has seen something like Alzheimer’s up close. It now seems likely that this recall-enhancing tech could end up mitigating the mental decline common to some of our most perniciousness brain diseases. Mind bending in every sense. But the applications for an ageing public struggling with more run-of-the-mill memory limitations are also clear and, if the futurists are right, inevitable. Rapid recall has been shown to decline steadily towards the tail end of our 70s. Still, research from the expansive Whitehall II study found that searching synapses start firing harder to drag words from the murky depths of our memory banks when we’re as young as 45. So, for all of us saddled with the more standard ills of ageing, a cybernetic implant should at least improve the flow of our dinner conversations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5531885/TELEPATHIC-superhumans-reality-decades.html

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

New breed of TELEPATHIC superhumans who can communicate their thoughts using brain implants could be a reality ‘within decades’, claims neurosurgeon

  • Claims were made by Eric Leuthardt, a brain surgeon at Washington University 
  • He believes implants will become like having plastic surgery or getting tattoos
  • Dr Leuthardt is not the only one with ambitions to create neural implants
  • Elon Musk is also developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers 

By PHOEBE WESTON FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: | UPDATED: 

A new breed of superhumans that can communicate using their thoughts alone could be a reality within decades, a brain surgeon has predicted.

These telepathic superhumans will transfer information to other people and machines using brain implants, according to Dr Eric Leuthardt.

The Washington University brain surgeon believes getting a brain implant will be as common as getting plastic surgery or a tattoo.

Scroll down for video

 

In the near future doctors will create superhumans who can communicate through their thoughts alone, a brain surgeon has predicted (stock image)

 

‘A true fluid neural integration is going to happen,’ Dr Leuthardt told MIT Technology Review as part of an in-depth feature.

‘It’s just a matter of when. If it’s 10 or 100 years in the grand scheme of things, it’s a material development in the course of human history’, he said.

As well as his duties as a neurosurgeon, Dr Leuthardt has also published two novels and written a play aimed at ‘preparing society for the changes ahead’.

In his first novel – a techno-thriller called RedDevil 4 – 90 per cent of humans have computer hardware in their brains.

With his work he has an understanding of the inherent limitations of the brain and also how technology could overcome these limitations.

Dr Leuthardt believes at the pace technology is changing ‘it’s not inconceivable to think that in a 20-year time frame everything in a cell phone could be put into a grain of rice’.

‘That could be put into your head in a minimally invasive way, and would be able to perform the computations necessary to be a really effective brain-computer interface’, he said.

Dr Leuthardt is not the only one with ambitions to create brain-computer interfaces.

Elon Musk is also developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.

It will work on what Musk calls the ‘neural lace’ technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts.

He said ‘neural laces’ will help people with severe brain injuries in just four years and in eight to ten years, the Matrix-style technology will be available to everyone, he claims.

Elon Musk is also developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers

 

Elon Musk is also developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers

 

Lots of experts say these tiny computers will be widespread.

Bryan Johnson, who is the founder of Kernel, a start-up developing brain microchips, said at the end of last year that neural chips will soon be as popular as smartphones.

Speaking at the Web Summit is Lisbon at the end of last year, Mr Johnson said unlocking the potential of the mind is the ‘single greatest thing’ humanity can achieve.

‘I would expect in around 15-20 years we will have a sufficiently robust set of tools for the brain that we could pose any question we wanted’, he said.

‘For example, could I have a perfect memory? Could I delete my memories? Could I increase my rate of learning, could I have brain to brain communication?’ he said.

He said he considers this new technology a ‘necessity’ for the future of humanity.

‘I consider myself to be cognitively impaired because I am limited by my biases, by my blind spots. I don’t want the limitations, I don’t want those constraints, I want to break open’, he said.

While you might think that such a device would be reserved for the rich, Mr Johnson believes that microchips will become ‘democratised, like smartphones.’

https://it.toolbox.com/article/elon-musks-neuralink-unveils-tech-for-paralyzed-patients-to-control-computers-via-brain-implants

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment
Elon Musk’s Neuralink Unveils Tech for Paralyzed Patients to Control Computers via Brain Implants
Pierre-Yves Lanneau Saint Leger.jpg
By Pierre-Yves Lanneau Saint Leger
Monday, July 22, 2019

Man using a wheelchair

Neuralink, a company owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, stepped out of the shadows this week to announce it has developed a technology to allow humans to control computers with brain implants.

It’s asking federal regulators to begin human trials of a brain-computer interface by the end of 2020. Neurological patients would be asked to participate.

While the announcement sounds like a plot from a science-fiction movie, many in the technology industry believe that such an interface eventually will become accepted science.

Versions of the technology, still in its infancy, have already been tested on paralyzed patients at Brown University. Now, research teams including those financed separately by Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are looking to unlock human applications.

Tiny Threads in the Brain

Neuralink’s implant consists of thousands of electrodes placed inside the brain, each with tiny threads attached. 

The threads are a tenth of the width of a human hair and can monitor the electrical impulses of 1,000 neurons. They feed back the neural data from the brain to a receiver outside the brain that can then translate it into actions.

Using chips implanted in the brain, the interface could eventually enable paralyzed patients to control phones, laptops and medical devices with their thoughts, and write texts and even move objects simply by thinking.

Neuralink, formed quietly two years ago in San Francisco with a reported $100 million investment from Musk, introduced itself at a splashy “Hello World” presentation streamed over the Internet with chats by Musk and others and high-definition videos set to rousing music.

Already Tested on Rats and Monkeys

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, revealed that Neuralink has already tested the system on monkeys. “A monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain, FYI,” he said. 

Scientists at Neuralink gave a separate laboratory demonstration to journalist John Markoff  that showed a system connected to a rat reading information from 1,500 electrodes. While the system was 15 times better than current systems embedded in humans, the scientists admitted they have a long way to go before they could begin to offer a commercial service.

Another technology called BrainGate has already been used successfully.

In 2006, a patient with spinal cord paralysis was given a brain implant using BrainGate that allowed him to control a computer cursor. Other patients have also benefited from the system. But BrainGate uses stiff needles implanted into the brain. Musk claims the Neuralink system is a significant advance on this because it uses flexible threads that are less damaging to the brain tissue.

The Neuralink implants are inserted into the brain using a surgical robot, which has been compared to a sewing machine, that drills tiny holes in the skull. In the long term, the aim is to use laser surgery to drill holes for the implants.

But such methods are far more invasive than other technology for reading brain activity, which use sensors embedded in a helmet placed on the head, rather than electrodes inserted into the brain.

Another Approach to BCI Tech

Musk’s announcement comes as technology companies step up their development of what has become known as a brain-computer interface or BCI. Zuckerberg revealed earlier this year that his company is working on a BCI project that would allow virtual and augmented reality users to navigate through virtual worlds using their thoughts. 

He dismissed the idea of brain implants. “If you are actually trying to build things that everyone is going to use, you are going to want to focus on the non-invasive things,” he said.  Facebook’s plan is for a helmet that would scan the brain for links between thoughts and the brain’s electrical activity.

Meanwhile, a start-up called CTRL-Labs, which has received funding from Amazon, uses a wrist band to intercept neural signals from the brain to the hand.

At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed off a sensor called the N1 which is implanted in the brain and connects wirelessly to a device worn behind the ear. Executives say the aim is to embed the implant and use wireless connectivity to allow people to connect to it by a smartphone app. The company asked the Food and Drug administration to permit human trials.

Will it Help or Harm Humanity?

In the long-term, Musk views BCI as a way to help humans compete with artificial intelligence, which he believes will eventually outpace and race ahead of human intelligence and create a threat to the species. 

He said the goal of Neuralink is to help humans gain “a sort of symbiosis with AI” where the brain would merge with AI and be able to stay abreast of it.

Some of the technologies which Musk promotes can sound quite far-fetched, such as living on Mars or the vacuum-powered Hyperloop tunnel system. Musk himself once famously said he would not mind dying on Mars so long as it is not in a spaceship crash on the planet.

Yet some scientists have questioned whether engineers like Musk and Zuckerburg are marching too quickly to drumbeats from the edges of technology without thinking about the potential harm to humanity.

Or, as one self-described scientist and entrepreneur, Jeff Stibel, wrote: “whether we are literally giving up our minds to a group of engineers without any consideration of the consequences.”

 

Pierre-Yves Lanneau Saint Leger.jpg
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pierre-Yves Lanneau Saint Leger
Pierre-Yves has in-depth experience with a range of core technical and business strategies and processes including ERP and CRM. As COO at VitalBriefing he is particularly passionate about how disruptive technologies and innovative business models shape the future of every industry.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-a-human-brain-cloud-interface-is-coming-this-is-what-it-could-be-like

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

We Are Closer Than Ever to Merging Human Brains With The Cloud

PETER DOCKRILL
15 APR 2019

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

main article imageIn a new research paper exploring what they call the ‘human brain/cloud interface’, scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we’ll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

At its core, the brain/cloud interface (B/CI) is likely to be made possible by imminent advances in the field of nanorobotics, proposes the team led by senior author and nanotechnology researcher Robert Freitas Jr from the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in California.

Nanobots – incredibly tiny machines smaller than the width of a human hair – are expected to one day benefit humans and the planet in all manner of ways, but it’ll take a particular kind to achieve the B/CI: neuralnanorobotics.

“These devices would navigate the human vasculature, cross the blood-brain barrier, and precisely autoposition themselves among, or even within brain cells,” says Freitas.

“They would then wirelessly transmit encoded information to and from a cloud-based supercomputer network for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.”

So far, so Matrix, so Borg. But just because it sounds incredibly like fantastic science fiction, doesn’t mean it’s only a fantasy. In a sense, we’re already half-way there.

Consider that only a few short decades ago, the internet as we know it today didn’t exist at all. In the rapid evolution of the technology since then, we now interface with this connected hub of information through much of our waking life.

For better or worse (hopefully better), this hypothetical B/CI medium would represent the ultimate continuation of that trajectory, and while we’re not there yet, we’re getting awfully close.

Last year, scientists announced a three-way brain connection technology called BrainNet that enabled three people to share their thoughts and even play a game together via the cloud, using only their minds.

Milestones like that are simultaneously mind-blowing and, in a way, primitive, in that they represent just baby steps in what an advanced B/CI vision could one day become.

“[BrainNet] used electrical signals recorded through the skull of ‘senders’ and magnetic stimulation through the skull of ‘receivers,’ allowing for performing cooperative tasks,” says nanotechnology scientist Nuno Martins from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“With the advance of neuralnanorobotics, we envisage the future creation of ‘superbrains’ that can harness the thoughts and thinking power of any number of humans and machines in real-time.”

According to Martins, these kinds of brain-connective technologies – spruiked by a range of visionaries from futurists like Ray Kurzweil and tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (and his Neuralink venture) – could one day revolutionise democracy and unite people across cultural divides.

As for when we can expect this B/CI tech utopia to emerge, the researchers can’t say for sure, but predict in their paper that it could be a possibility within “the next few decades”.

Whether or not we meet that ambitious deadline will involve devising the right kind of scientific and technological solutions to make the B/CI work as envisaged.

Perhaps the greatest hurdles will be figuring out ways to safely integrate neural nanorobots with the human brain tissue, and in a way that enables these little helpers to transmit vast amounts of data generated and relayed by supercomputers into our grey matter, without creating a bottleneck effect.

“This challenge includes not only finding the bandwidth for global data transmission,” says Martins, “but also, how to enable data exchange with neurons via tiny devices embedded deep in the brain.”

All in all, we’re still a long way off realising this wild techno-dream. But we’re also closer than we’ve ever been before – a place that’s both exciting, and scary.

The findings are reported in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

https://www.teslarati.com/should-tesla-carry-the-burden-of-teaching-the-public-about-artificial-intelligence/

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Should Tesla carry the burden of teaching the public about artificial intelligence?

IMAGE: UNPLUGGED PERFORMANCE

Avatar
By
Posted on 

Welcome to a FREE preview of our weekly exclusive! Each week our team goes ‘Beyond the News’ and handcrafts a special edition that includes our thoughts on the biggest stories, why it matters, and how it could impact the future.

You can receive this newsletter along with all of our other members-exclusive newsletters, become a premium member for just $3/month. Your support goes a long way for us behind the scenes! Thank you.

—

In a recent podcast discussion Elon Musk had with AI expert Lex Fridman about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, an interesting question arose about Tesla’s role as an educator in that realm. Referring specifically to the Smart Summon feature that’s part of the company’s Version 10 firmware, Fridman asked Musk whether he felt the burden of being an AI communicator by exposing people for the first time (on a large scale) to driverless cars.

To be honest, Musk’s response wasn’t really, well, responsive. He deferred to the more commercial-oriented goals of the company: “We’re just trying to make people’s lives easier with autonomy.” The long-term goals of Neuralink are pretty scary for mainstream humans, so to me, this question really deserves a long sit-and-think. After all, we’re talking computer self-awareness and capabilities well beyond what we’d consider superhuman and beyond the ability of humans to control after a certain point. Neuralink wants the type of AI connection implanted in our brains.

On one hand, the evolution of Autopilot with each iteration and the evolution of Smart Summon with each new release exposes people to the process of how humans teach computers and how computers teach themselves. In other words, it shows people that AI is somewhat similar to how people learn. However, I don’t know that it gives everyday people a full picture of what Musk is really talking about all the time regarding the pace of AI learning and how that leads to doom scenarios.

If anything, is Tesla lowering expectations for AI’s future? If a Tesla is the first “robot” people see, and then they see years of functionality that’s sub-par to an attentive human at the wheel before seeing the full promise of the Tesla Network, what picture is being painted? Then, what about the wake of uncertainty it will leave behind?

In the interview, Musk described our minds as essentially a monkey brain with a computer trying to make the monkey brain’s primitive urges happy all the time. Once we start letting computers take over what little functions the monkey brain enjoyed or needed to keep in check (driving, painting, laboring, etc.), how is the AI eventually going to decide to deal with what it will just see as…the monkeys? Right now, we’re seeing robot cars driving into curbs and highway dividers, making us feel pretty superior to them despite the fact that humans do this much more frequently. What happens if the car one day decides to do that on purpose because its calculations factor out that humans need to exist?

Okay, I know I’m getting a touch ridiculous here, but it just brings me back to Fridman’s original question about whether Tesla carries the burden of educating the public on these matters with their push for self-driving. Perhaps if they were just focused on moving the world to sustainable energy and production, their driver-assist features would be just as Musk describes them – a convenience or value-added feature. After all, most other self-driving companies and auto manufacturers working on self-driving just have the customer in mind, not so much a robot overlord future.

But that’s not the future Musk is working towards. He’s both warning us about the future of AI while actively developing our defense against it. Should his car company then play a big role in acclimating and teaching people about what AI will really be able to do beyond getting them to work and back? Hosting 3-4 hour long “Investor Day” presentations are part of this educational effort, I suppose, but 99% (or more) of the general public is not going to be interested or even able to understand what Tesla’s genius developers are talking about, much less understand how it might apply to their lives beyond their cars one day.

I don’t really know what Tesla’s teaching could or would or should look like, but it’s an interesting question given the acceleration the company is making in bringing AI into our lives on a scale much bigger than harvesting our data to sell us ads.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-is-our-future-but-will-it-save-or-destroy-humanity

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Artificial Intelligence Is Our Future. But Will It Save Or Destroy Humanity?

Here’s a rundown of what the world’s greatest minds think.

PATRICK CAUGHILL

Choosing Sides

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don’t agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall.

How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community?

Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve — processes typically performed in the human brain. Digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri , along with Tesla’s Autopilot, are all powered by AI. Some forms of AI can even create visual art or write songs.

There’s little question that AI has the potential to be revolutionary. Automation could transform the way we work by replacing humans with machines and software. Further developments in the area of self-driving cars are poised to make driving a thing of the past. Artificially intelligent shopping assistants could even change the way we shop. Humans have always controlled these aspects of our lives, so it makes sense to be a bit wary of letting an artificial system take over.

The Lay Of The Land

AI is fast becoming a major economic force. According to a paper from the McKinsey Global Institute Study reported by Forbes, in 2016 alone, between $8 billion and $12 billion was invested in the development of AI worldwide. A report from analysts with Goldstein Research predicts that, by 2023, AI will be a $14 billion industry.

KR Sanjiv, chief technology officer at Wipro, believes that companies in fields as disparate as healthcare and finance are investing so much in AI so quickly because they fear being left behind. “So as with all things strange and new, the prevailing wisdom is that the risk of being left behind is far greater, and far grimmer, than the benefits of playing it safe,” he wrote in an op-ed published in Tech Crunch last year.

Games provide a useful window into the increasing sophistication of AI. Case in point, developers such as Google’s DeepMind and Elon Musk’s OpenAI have been using games to teach AI systems how to learn. So far, these systems have bested the world’s greatest players of the ancient strategy game Go, and even more complex games like Super Smash Bros and DOTA 2.

On the surface, these victories may sound incremental and minor — AI that can play Go can’t navigate a self-driving car, after all. But on a deeper level, these developments are indicative of the more sophisticated AI systems of the future. Through these games, AI become capable of complex decision-making that could one day translate into real-world tasks. Software that can play infinitely complex games like Starcraft, could, with a lot more research and development, autonomously perform surgeries or process multi-step voice commands.

When this happens, AI will become incredibly sophisticated. And this is where the worrying starts.

AI Anxiety

Wariness surrounding powerful technological advances is not novel. Various science fiction stories, from The Matrix to I, Robot, have exploited viewers’ anxiety around AI. Many such plots center around a concept called “the Singularity,” the moment in which AIs become more intelligent than their human creators. The scenarios differ, but they often end with the total eradication of the human race, or with machine overlords subjugating people.

Several world-renowned sciences and tech experts have been vocal about their fears of AI. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously worries that advanced AI will take over the world and end the human race. If robots become smarter than humans, his logic goes, the machines would be able to create unimaginable weapons and manipulate human leaders with ease. “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate,” he told the BBC in 2014. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Elon Musk, the futurist CEO of ventures such as Tesla and SpaceX, echoes those sentiments, calling AI “…a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” at the 2017 National Governors Association Summer Meeting.

Neither Musk nor Hawking believe that developers should avoid the development of AI, but they agree that government regulation should ensure the tech does not go rogue. “Normally, the way regulations are set up is a whole bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years, a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” Musk said during the same NGA talk. “it takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad, but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.”

Hawking believes that a global governing body needs to regulate the development of AI to prevent a particular nation from becoming superior. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently stoked this fear at a meeting with Russian students in early September, when he said, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.” These comments further emboldened Musk’s position — he tweeted that the race for AI superiority is the “most likely cause of WW3.”

Musk has taken steps to combat this perceived threat. He, along with startup guru Sam Altman, co-founded the non-profit OpenAI in order to guide AI development towards innovations that benefit all of humanity. According to the company’s mission statement: “By being at the forefront of the field, we can influence the conditions under which AGI is created.” Musk also founded a company called Neuralink intended to create a brain-computer interface. Linking the brain to a computer would, in theory, augment the brain’s processing power to keep pace with AI systems.

Other predictions are less optimistic. Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at SETI believes that AI will succeed humans as the most intelligent entities on the planet. “The first generation [of AI] is just going to do what you tell them; however, by the third generation, then they will have their own agenda,” Shostak said in an interview with Futurism.

However, Shostak doesn’t believe sophisticated AI will end up enslaving the human race — instead, he predicts, humans will simply become immaterial to these hyper-intelligent machines. Shostak thinks that these machines will exist on an intellectual plane so far above humans that, at worst, we will be nothing more than a tolerable nuisance.

Fear Not

Not everyone believes the rise of AI will be detrimental to humans; some are convinced that the technology has the potential to make our lives better. “The so-called control problem that Elon is worried about isn’t something that people should feel is imminent. We shouldn’t panic about it,” Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates recently told the Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg went even further during a Facebook Live broadcast back in July, saying that Musk’s comments were “pretty irresponsible.” Zuckerberg is optimistic about what AI will enable us to accomplish and thinks that these unsubstantiated doomsday scenarios are nothing more than fear-mongering.

Some experts predict that AI could enhance our humanity. In 2010, Swiss neuroscientist Pascal Kaufmann founded Starmind, a company that plans to use self-learning algorithms to create a “superorganism” made of thousands of experts’ brains. “A lot of AI alarmists do not actually work in AI. [Their] fear goes back to that incorrect correlation between how computers work and how the brain functions,” Kaufmann told Futurism.

Kaufmann believes that this basic lack of understanding leads to predictions that may make good movies, but do not say anything about our future reality. “When we start comparing how the brain works to how computers work, we immediately go off track in tackling the principles of the brain,” he said. “We must first understand the concepts of how the brain works and then we can apply that knowledge to AI development.” Better understanding of our own brains would not only lead to AI sophisticated enough to rival human intelligence, but also to better brain-computer interfaces to enable a dialogue between the two.

To Kaufmann, AI, like many technological advances that came before, isn’t without risk. “There are dangers which come with the creation of such powerful and omniscient technology, just as there are dangers with anything that is powerful. This does not mean we should assume the worst and make potentially detrimental decisions now based on that fear,” he said.

Experts expressed similar concerns about quantum computers, and about lasers and nuclear weapons—applications for that technology can be both harmful and helpful.

Definite Disrupter

Predicting the future is a delicate game. We can only rely on our predictions of what we already have, and yet it’s impossible to rule anything out.

We don’t yet know whether AI will usher in a golden age of human existence, or if it will all end in the destruction of everything humans cherish. What is clear, though, is that thanks to AI, the world of the future could bear little resemblance to the one we inhabit today.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2019/12/28/apple-macos-catalina-macbook-pro-imac-mac-security-permission-restriction/#16d4f59b85ec

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Apple’s New MacOS Catalina Changes Will Cause Confusion

Ewan SpenceSenior Contributor 

Consumer Tech

Storyteller exploring digital worlds, mobile, music and podcasting

Apple has confirmed that it will be enforcing the MacOS Catalina notarization prerequisites for any MacOS application that is distributed outside of the Mac App Store. That means any application wanting to run under normal circumstances on your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac Pro machine must be signed and authorised by Apple.

If it’s not signed, then it’s not going to run normally. This won’t come as a surprise to those following Apple’s developer boards, but that is only a small number of the Mac user base. it could confuse many users and damage their confidence in Apple.

From Apple’s note to developers:

“In June, we announced that all Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run by default on macOS Catalina. In September, we temporarily adjusted the notarization prerequisites to make this transition easier and to protect users on macOS Catalina who continue to use older versions of software. Starting February 3, 2020, all submitted software must meet the original notarisation prerequisites.”

Don’t light the pitchforks just yet, this is not a complete lock-down of code not approved that you see in the iPhone.

But it is a lock-down of being able to run unsigned code by default. Once this is implemented the standard double-click will only run code that has passed through Apple’s clearing process. Currently you can right-click to open unsigned applications, and while Apple has stated that “in future versions of MacOS [Catalina], unsigned code will not run by default”, there will be options to allow unsigned code to run.

After all, the MacOS platform is still the platform of choice for developing applications for all of Apple’s ecosystem, and you can’t expect developers to sign every compilation of their code throughout the development process.

The MacOS platform is not just for developers. It is used by creatives, students, as personal or business machines, and in countless other areas where a smartphone or a tablet will simply not suffice… no matter how much advertising Apple pushes out around the iPad Pro with its Smart Keyboard cover.

So Apple’s decision to lock-down unsigned applications is something that developers are expected to overcome, but will be difficult for the average consumer to understand if they stray away from the sanctioned apps. Whether Apple locks down this process even further (for example developers will need to apply for their own digital certificate to run unused apps) is speculative, but even a cursory glance at iOS, iPadOS and watchOS shows a company that is more than comfortable to restrict application usage to those it has deemed worthy.

Should that thinking be carried over to MacOS Catalina? Should Apple have the final say over what can or cannot be run on hardware that is has sold to a customer? Should Apple have the right to restrict a users’ choice via a future software update? And if that is the case, how confusing will that be for consumers?

These questions may feel more philosophical to some, but Apple has pushed forwards with MacOS in general and Catalina in particular and left some feeling upset over the loss of older apps as support for 32-bit apps was removed.

Having Apple watch over every app does create a solid ring of security for the user, but it is not impregnable. But having a Big Brother decide what is safe and what is not safe could be regarded as Orwellian.

MacOS remains one of the most open parts of Apple’s ecosystem and offers a flexibility that is simply not present in any other Apple hardware. I’m not confident, but I hope that this remains the case in 2020 and beyond.

Now read how Tim Cook’s Apple has changed the mission of the MacBook Pro…

Ewan Spence

I am known for my strong views on mobile technology, online media, and the effect this has on the public conscious and existing businesses.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614996/ai-baidu-ernie-google-bert-natural-language-glue/

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Baidu has a new trick for teaching AI the meaning of language

Inspired by a difference between Chinese and English, it shows how AI research benefits from diversity.

by Karen Hao
Dec 26, 2019

Earlier this month, a Chinese tech giant quietly dethroned Microsoft and Google in an ongoing competition in AI. The company was Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, and the competition was the General Language Understanding Evaluation, otherwise known as GLUE.

GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like “it” refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is now the first team to surpass 90 with its model, ERNIE.

The public leaderboard for GLUE is constantly changing, and another team will likely top Baidu soon. But what’s notable about Baidu’s achievement is that it illustrates how AI research benefits from a diversity of contributors. Baidu’s researchers had to develop a technique specifically for the Chinese language to build ERNIE (which stands for “Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration”). It just so happens, however, that the same technique makes it better at understanding English as well.

ERNIE’s predecessor

To appreciate ERNIE, consider the model it was inspired by: Google’s BERT. (Yes, they’re both named after the Sesame Street characters.)

Before BERT (“Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”) was created in late 2018, natural-language models weren’t that great. They were good at predicting the next word in a sentence—thus well suited for applications like Autocomplete—but they couldn’t sustain a single train of thought over even a small passage. This was because they didn’t comprehend meaning, such as what the word “it” might refer to.

But BERT changed that. Previous models learned to predict and interpret the meaning of a word by considering only the context that appeared before or after it—never both at the same time. They were, in other words, unidirectional.

BERT, by contrast, considers the context before and after a word all at once, making it bidirectional. It does this using a technique known as “masking.” In a given passage of text, BERT randomly hides 15% of the words and then tries to predict them from the remaining ones. This allows it to make more accurate predictions because it has twice as many cues to work from. In the sentence “The man went to the ___ to buy milk,” for example, both the beginning and the end of the sentence give hints at the missing word. The ___ is a place you can go and a place you can buy milk.

The use of masking is one of the core innovations behind dramatic improvements in natural-language tasks and is part of the reason why models like OpenAI’s infamous GPT-2 can write extremely convincing prose without deviating from a central thesis.

From English to Chinese and back again

When Baidu researchers began developing their own language model, they wanted to build on the masking technique. But they realized they needed to tweak it to accommodate the Chinese language.

In English, the word serves as the semantic unit—meaning a word pulled completely out of context still contains meaning. The same cannot be said for characters in Chinese. While certain characters do have inherent meaning, like fire (火, huŏ), water (水, shuĭ), or wood (木, mù), most do not until they are strung together with others. The character 灵 (líng), for example, can either mean clever (机灵, jīlíng) or soul (灵魂, línghún), depending on its match. And the characters in a proper noun like Boston (波士顿, bōshìdùn) or the US (美国, měiguó) do not mean the same thing once split apart.

So the researchers trained ERNIE on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters rather than single ones. They also trained it to distinguish between meaningful and random strings so it could mask the right character combinations accordingly. As a result, ERNIE has a greater grasp of how words encode information in Chinese and is much more accurate at predicting the missing pieces. This proves useful for applications like translation and information retrieval from a text document.

The researchers very quickly discovered that this approach actually works better for English, too. Though not as often as Chinese, English similarly has strings of words that express a meaning different from the sum of their parts. Proper nouns like “Harry Potter” and expressions like “chip off the old block” cannot be meaningfully parsed by separating them into individual words.

So for the sentence:

Harry Potter is a series of fantasy novels written by J. K. Rowling.

BERT might mask it the following way:

[mask] Potter is a series [mask] fantasy novels [mask] by J. [mask] Rowling.

But ERNIE would instead mask it like this:

Harry Potter is [mask] [mask] [mask] fantasy novels by [mask] [mask] [mask].

ERNIE thus learns more robust predictions based on meaning rather than statistical word usage patterns.

A diversity of ideas

The latest version of ERNIE uses several other training techniques as well. It considers the ordering of sentences and the distances between them, for example, to understand the logical progression of a paragraph. Most important, however, it uses a method called continuous training that allows it to train on new data and new tasks without it forgetting those it learned before. This allows it to get better and better at performing a broad range of tasks over time with minimal human interference.

Baidu actively uses ERNIE to give users more applicable search results, remove duplicate stories in its news feed, and improve its AI assistant Xiao Du’s ability to accurately respond to requests. It has also described ERNIE’s latest architecture in a paper that will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference next year. The same way their team built on Google’s work with BERT, the researchers hope others will also benefit from their work with ERNIE.

“When we first started this work, we were thinking specifically about certain characteristics of the Chinese language,” says Hao Tian, the chief architect of Baidu Research. “But we quickly discovered that it was applicable beyond that.”