Sciber

Norbert Wiener's legacy by Seth Lloyd. I reread "Human Use of Human Beings" last year and agree with most, though Wiener was correct about authoritarianism: Whether bottom-up or top-down, we are controlled and not as free as we could given what cybernetics gave us. Still, true that he would be happy that we are still alive!

Labels: #AI, #Cybernetics, #Wiener

Tom Standage follows a nice random walk from (transcription) bugs to prior biases in AI... Very much a big a conceptual stretch, but, hey, anything that brings back Babbage-Lovelace and programming the first Turing machine (the analytical engine before Turing) is a lot of fun---thank you Thiago for the link.

Labels: #AI, #Babbage, #Bias, #Lovelave, #Turing

Machine learning can analyze photographs of cancer, tumor pathology slides, and genomes. Now, scientists are poised to integrate that information into cancer uber-models. Full article @ The Scientist.

Labels: #AI, #Cancer, #data, #MachineIntelligence, #MachineLearning

"Adapting chatbots to medicine has the potential to help millions, if not billions, of people around the world, right when they most need it. If you have a mobile phone, you have access to a doctor. Imagine the positive effect on people's lives with this equalising force. Especially in developing countries where doctors can be few and far between, or in developed countries where health care can be expensive and not immediate. Even if we can help to reduce people's anxiety about something going wrong with their body (or the body of someone in their care) until they can get to a doctor, that can be an immense relief of global suffering. Medical chatbots can offer relevant high-quality information, reassurance, answers, and ways of thinking about the situation that might be more useful. They would not replace human doctors, but they could help to set a new, increased standard of care. [...] A retrospective review in Geriatric Oncology found that 75% of [Cancer] patients had a potential drug–drug interaction. Pharmaceutial chatbots can be a resource for physicians, preventing these unintentional drug–drug interactions. Chatbots can also be useful as diagnosticians." Full article at The Lancet.

Labels: #AI, #DDI

Lin et al "have created a 3D-printed artificial neural network that uses light photons to rapidly process information." This very cool device reminds me of  Weston and Von Foerster's Numa-Rete device from the 1960s at the BCL in Urbana (which Von Foerster told me was a favorite of John Von Neumann because it could even count doughnut-shape objects without error). News article @TheScientist and paper in Science.

Labels: #AI, #AnlogueComputing, #Cybernetics, #DeepLearning, #NeoCybernetics, #NeuralNetworks

"In September 2017, a screenshot of a simple conversation went viral on the Russian-speaking segment of the internet. It showed the same phrase addressed to two conversational agents: the English-speaking Google Assistant, and the Russian-speaking Alisa, developed by the popular Russian search engine Yandex. The phrase was straightforward: ‘I feel sad.’ The responses to it, however, couldn’t be more different. ‘I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug,’ said Google. ‘No one said life was about having fun,’ replied Alisa." Full article @ Aeon. Thanks Thiago for link.

Labels: #AI, #Culture, #Emotion

The Hippocratic oath for data scientists would be a good start, though I am sure greater regulation is needed. There needs to be government agencies (NIST?) who query commercial and government AI systems with blackbox system identification techniques. They would statistically test against non-biased response distributions; If public systems fail hypothesis testing (e.g. chi-square) against fair distributions, they should be further investigated, their algorithms subpoenaed, and prosecuted if need be---same for data scientists shown to fail any future oath. See book reviews @ The New York Review of Books. (Thank you Thiago for link)

Labels: #AI, #data, #Ethics, #Racsim

DeepMind’s new self-taught Go-playing program is making moves that other players describe as “alien” and “from an alternate dimension.” Full article @ the Atlantic.

Labels: #AI, #GO

Special insight section on Machine Intelligence shows that strengths of field are now strongly based on principles developed in Cybernetics era, but unleashed with the power of modern Informatics. See reviews on Deep learning, Evolutionary Computation, Reinforcement Learning, etc. McCulloch, Shannon, Von Neumann, Wiener and Turing would be proud. Special issue @ Nature

Labels: #AI, #Cybernetics, #Informatics, #MachineIntelligence