I've tried really hard not to write about the 'metaverse' (inverted commas deliberate), but the more I hear about it the more despondent and dispirited I get. So, if you'll indulge me, I'd just like to get this out of my system, then we need never talk about it again. The 'metaverse' is [...]
AI is meant to do a better job than humans, otherwise what would be the point of having it? Well, a different approach, taken by researchers at Cornell University, is to try and get AI to do just as good, or bad, a job as humans. The first iteration of the AI, known as [...]
Yann LeCun, AI guru and co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, reckons that the current state of AI is "characterised by trial and error, confusion, overconfidence and a lack of overall understanding". So, pretty much slap-bang in the middle of that awkward teenager phase then. It is certainly true that we have no [...]
On the 2nd December I be presented a keynote talk to artists and art market professionals on behalf of DACS. We looked at the role of AI in art, particularly where AI-generated art has been derived from existing works (this is in response to the UK Government's consultation on AI and Intellectual Property). [...]
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and to repair themselves when damaged. The self-repairing ability comes from creating a spongy material that fuses easily into one piece when it is cut. The sense of touch, as this Reuters report explains, comes from "infusing [...]
It is not often that you hear of AI algorithms failing in the market, but that is essentially what happened in the case of real estate company Zillow and its house-buying estimator algorithm, Zestimate. The headline writers and tweeters were quick to feed off the wounded animal, asking whether this was the beginning [...]
In Singapore, the government have been trialling robotsto patrol housing estates and shopping centres in order to detect 'undesirable social behaviour'. It's not quite Robocop, but it's certainly moving in that direction. The robots have 7 cameras and shout out warnings to residents and shoppers whom it detects (using AI) are breaking the myriad [...]
A key mantra of Responsible AI is 'just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to'. So when some schools in Ayrshire, Scotland, start using Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) on school children in order for them to pay for their lunch, you've got to think there must be less intrusive, less dangerous [...]
Most articles about robots show a shiny machine with a smiley face trying very hard to provide some trivial service to a human. Most examples end up just being marketing hype and novelties that have little practical use. But I did come across an example where shiny robots with smiley faces were actually [...]
I've written a few times in the past about how the latest raft of massive algorithms, such as OpenAI's GPT-3, can generate offensive text because they have been trained on pretty much the whole internet, which, as we all know, has more than its fair share of offensive material. But this is the [...]