Better check out this short simple non-technical overview of IBM’s Watson. What do you think this means to the future of humanity?
This video demonstrates Watson addressing both sides of a debate on violent video games.
Sobering overview of the real impact robots are having on society and jobs right now. As the narrator says, “You may think we have been here before, but we haven’t, this time is different.“ Not just automation of manual jobs, but lawyers, doctors and white collar workers also. What does it mean? Check it out. This video was posted August 13 and seven days later has 1,805,673 views.
“A new USC study suggests that patients are more willing to disclose personal information to virtual humans than actual ones, in large part because computers lack the proclivity to look down on people the way another human might. “We know that developing a rapport and feeling free of judgment are two important factors that affect a person’s willingness to disclose personal information,” said co-author Jonathan Gratch, director of virtual humans research at ICT and a professor in USC’s Department of Computer Science. “The virtual character delivered on both these fronts and that is what makes this a particularly valuable tool for obtaining information people might feel sensitive about sharing.” “The research, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army, is promising for people suffering from post-traumatic stress and other mental anguish, said Gale Lucas, a social psychologist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, who led the study. In intake interviews, people were more honest about their symptoms, no matter how potentially embarrassing, when they believed that a human observer wasn’t in on the conversation. “In any given topic, there’s a difference between what a person is willing to admit in person versus anonymously,” Lucas said. “The study, which will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, provides the first empirical evidence that virtual humans can increase a patient’s willingness to disclose personal information in a clinical setting, researchers said. It also presents compelling reasons for doctors to start using virtual humans as medical screeners. The honest answers acquired by a virtual human could help doctors diagnose and treat their patients more appropriately …”
Source Tanya Abrams – USC
Contact: USC press release
Original Research Abstract for for “It’s only a computer: Virtual humans increase willingness to disclose” by Gale M. Lucas, Jonathan Gratch, Aisha King, and Louis-Philippe Morency in Computers in Human Behavior. Published online July 9 2014 doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.04.043
PL – Now, read my post HERE as I “connect the dots” between this topic (above) to the shortage of real professionals in behavioral health services. Kudos to those creating AI applications to advance our machines. But the time has come to use AI to advance our humanity.
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), 89.3 million Americans live in federally-designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, compared to 55.3 million Americans living in primary-care shortage areas and 44.6 million in dental health shortage areas. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that the current mental health workforce is only able to meet about half of the nation’s demand for behavioral health services.
PL – Now let’s “connect the dots” between this topic (above) to a USC study that suggests that patients are more willing to disclose personal information to virtual humans than actual humans. HERE’s my post about it. Kudos to those creating AI applications to advance our machines. But the time has come to use AI to advance our humanity.
Source: Kaiser Health News, Michael Ollove
August 20, 2014
“Pastoral Counselors’ Help Fill Mental Health Gap In Rural States
AI Quotes
“Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is power, we’re about to see an even greater concentration of power …
“To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices …
“The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be human …
“I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian …” 
Read the complete OP-ED piece here:
Source: Our Machine Masters
October 30, 2014
Excerpt from the article, The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World:
Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder, who became the company’s CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
I’ve thought a lot about that conversation over the past few years as Google has bought 14 AI and robotics companies. At first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to improve its search capabilities, since search contributes 80 percent of its revenue. But I think that’s backward. Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better. – Kevin Kelly
Source: Wired
AI Quote
Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu
“I believe something like Watson will soon be the world’s best diagnostician—whether machine or human. At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
Source: Wired
In 1997, Watson’s precursor, IBM’s Deep Blue, beat the reigning chess grand master Garry Kasparov in a famous man-versus-machine match. After machines repeated their victories in a few more matches, humans largely lost interest in such contests. You might think that was the end of the story (if not the end of human history), but Kasparov realized that he could have performed better against Deep Blue if he’d had the same instant access to a massive database of all previous chess moves that Deep Blue had. If this database tool was fair for an AI, why not for a human? To pursue this idea, Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them.
Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or you can act as the hand for your supersmart chess computer, merely moving its board pieces, or you can play as a “centaur,” which is the human/AI cyborg that Kasparov advocated. A centaur player will listen to the moves whispered by the AI but will occasionally override them—much the way we use GPS navigation in our cars. In the championship Freestyle Battle in 2014, open to all modes of players, pure chess AI engines won 42 games, but centaurs won 53 games. Today the best chess player alive is a centaur: Intagrand, a team of humans and several different chess programs.
But here’s the even more surprising part: The advent of AI didn’t diminish the performance of purely human chess players. Quite the opposite. Cheap, supersmart chess programs inspired more people than ever to play chess, at more tournaments than ever, and the players got better than ever. There are more than twice as many grand masters now as there were when Deep Blue first beat Kasparov. The top-ranked human chess player today, Magnus Carlsen, trained with AIs and has been deemed the most computer-like of all human chess players. He also has the highest human grand master rating of all time.
If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers. Most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by special-purpose, narrowly focused software brains that can, for example, translate any language into any other language, but do little else. Drive a car, but not converse. Or recall every pixel of every video on YouTube but not anticipate your work routines. In the next 10 years, 99 percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly or indirectly, will be nerdily autistic, supersmart specialists.
Source: Wired
We haven’t just been redefining what we mean by AI—we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique
to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. We’ll spend the next decade—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are for. In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.
Source: Wired
at we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
AI Quotes
“Facebook is 10 years old this year. So if I ask 10 years from now, what should we develop? I decided we should develop three things. First, we need to connect the entire world. We need everybody to use the internet. Second, we want to develop (in English) artificial intelligence. I think 10 years from now computers will be better than humans at reading, listening, talking, and other things. So we are developing this. Third, when everyone is using mobile phones, I believe the next platform will be (in English) virtual reality. Oculus is the first product, but we hope there will be many products. Those three things.”
Source: Quartz, October 23, 2014
The Most Important Things Marck Zuckerberg just said in broken Chinese
Written by Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad
AI Quotes
A technology shift is happening that will dramatically alter the entrepreneurial landscape in the next few years. Several technologies — involving medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials — are advancing at exponential rates and are converging.
” … computers keep getting better and are doing more things that humans can do. Perhaps, the only move left for human beings is to become better at being human.”
Source: Marjorie Prime; about his new science fiction play opening Sept 21, 2014, in Los Angeles
The Knowledge Graph is well known throughout the SEO community as a knowledge base that collects data from a variety of sources across the Web to enhance its search results. But will its technology be “old news” soon? Enter the Knowledge Vault, the brainchild of Google and a sort-of “Knowledge Graph on steroids” that could soon be a reality for search.
This paper published by Google goes into more detail about the concepts behind the Knowledge Vault, citing three major components:
The potential of a machine system that has the whole of human knowledge at its fingertips is huge. One of the first applications will be virtual personal assistants that go way beyond what Siri and Google Now are capable of, says Austin.
Source: Search Engine Watch
Watch how IBM Watson is making connections for humans in healthcare, law enforcement, finance, retail, government, manufacturing, energy and education. They are forging new partnerships between humans and computers to enhance, scale and accelerate human expertise.
Quote from the video: “The next great innovations will come from people who are able to make the connections that others cannot put together.”
PL – These advances are great! But we are particularly interested in ways that Watson can help humans with tough human issues: The inter and intra – personal space, as we the bloggers of this site, like to call it.
AI Quotes
“I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome … we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”
Source: CNBC Interview June 17, 2014
Phil Lawson: If I may, for a sec, compare the culture being developed right now in AI to the culture of a nation. Note what this means to a nation via the following excerpts from the book, Cultural Imperative: Global Trends in the 21st Century, by Richard D. Lewis:
“It [a nation’s culture] is an all-embracing pattern of a group’s entire way of life, including a shared system of values, social meanings, and agendas … Some of these attributes are subject to change, but the cultural framework generally endures … “
So far, 29-year-old white males (@ Google) represent the “majority” defining the culture in search and AI. It is from this perspective that search criterion and ranking is being established — that the cultural framework for AI is taking shape, that the patterns and ‘systems of value, the social meanings and agendas’ are forming. Therefore, we’d like to suggest (insist, really) that:
March 2014 Bloomberg report on the Average Age of Tech Employees
We know this: There is no magic algorithm that produces perfect search returns to a user. Human coders working for corporations are using editorial judgements to offer this service. Note the following:
“Humans are the ones who decide,” says a white paper commissioned by Google in August of 2012, page 11, “how the algorithm should predict the likely usefulness of a Web page to the user. These human editorial judgments are responsible for producing the speech displayed by a search engine … criterion for ranking search results … and … measure of a site’s value. Search engine results are thus the speech of the corporation.”
Certainly, there’s benefit in general universal search returns on our smartphones. But, when it comes to our own individual needs, our unique and evolving circumstances, when it comes to what makes us human in human situations, the information we require must reflect — it must speak to who we are, in each of our moments, all of which is subject to ongoing change as we shift and grow.
To meet this challenge, AI coders must transform omniscient-style programming approaches to include AI to human collaborations
that learn the human, interact with the human, and directly respond to his/her individual needs in real-time.
Did you know that patients with type 2 diabetes should spend 143 minutes per day taking care of themselves if they are to follow every doctors’ orders?
It’s called burden of treatment. It’s a tough reality in healthcare today. It involves illnesses of all kinds. It’s the burden of treatment on the patient, on his or her family and friends, and the doctors who care for them. It involves increased pressures and anxiety, financial strains, and additional demands on time for doctor visits, tests and trips to the pharmacy. And many patients fail to handle this.
The current method of discovery is “conversation.” But, says Dr. Victor Montori, of the Mayo Clinic, “We need a different way of practicing medicine for patients.”
“I do not think that change will come quietly,” Dr. Montori says, “I am focused on a patient revolution led by patients, in partnership with health professionals, to make healthcare primarily about the welfare of patients.”
Phil Lawson: The current method of discovery is “conversation?” Who has the time to do that well, these days? When tweets and “likes” are common forms of communication.
We’ve created planes, trains and automobiles to transport our bodies farther, faster. We’ve created tech to connect us faster to the “things” we want to buy. But we have yet to create faster, better ways for our brains to process complex human scenarios — to help us overcome the 7 things barrier of working memory; to help us connect the dots in life, work, the world.
It’s time for tech to go where no tech has gone before.
Currently, IBM’s Watson is making great strides in diagnosis and treatment for patients, but AI must go deeper. It must get personal. This requires a different kind of approach to coding. A moving beyond omniscient programming. It must involve AI to human collaboration.
Below is an example of a well-being application of our behavior growth tech that could be customized to meet the burden of treatment challenge and how AI can add value.
For more info on this approach see Spherit.com
AI Quotes
“We want to have a robot that will maximize people’s joy and minimize their sadness … Pepper is a baby step in making robots with emotion. Our vision is to create affectionate robots that understand people’s feelings and then autonomously take action. So the joy of a family will become the joy of the robot.”Source: Computer World, June 5, 2014
AI Quotes
“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks,” says Stephen Hawking, and a group of leading scientists.
AI Quotes
“Long before we have a robot uprising, we’re going to deal with much more interesting problems. This idea that we’re going to build a robot that has human cognition and appreciation for morals and values, that’s super-hard stuff …“
“The more important question is “What is human?” ”
Source: Business Insider, Dylan Love, June 1, 2014
A Q&A With iRobot’s Colin Angle, The CEO Of The Only Consumer Robotics Company That Matters
The field of AI is trying to understand human-level intelligence, something that took evolution a billion years and more to develop, and it’s unreasonable to expect humans to recapitulate that process even in a few decades. That said, I think we’re making a huge amount of progress.
Jeff Siskind, professor at Purdue University
Source: ComputerWorld
“The overwhelming success of modern physics does not give physicists the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences … ” — Physicist, Mathew R. Francis
Source: slate.com
Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense
Matthew R. Francis, May 29, 2014
Phil Lawson: Ultimate success in AI will not alone rest on the shoulders of physicists, mathematicians and coders who write deep learning algorithms. It will require interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, therapists, culturalists and more. It may even require “Spherists” to inspire these interactions 🙂
[Spherist, as defined on this blog: A person who has experienced the limits of compartmentalized thinking; who values connecting the dots and seeing a bigger picture. Who is also informed in the sciences of systems: chaos, turbulence, self-organization, wholeness, etc.]
AI Quotes
“We would have more if the talent was there to be had. Last year, the cost of a top, world-class deep learning expert was about the same as a top NFL quarterback prospect. The cost of that talent is pretty remarkable.”
Business Week, January 27, 2014
AI Quotes
“In today’s hyperkinetic world of instant internet links and television sound bites we’ve become conditioned — I would say brainwashed — into believing that the innovative people who make important contributions to our culture and our economy are all whiz kids — prodigies — fresh from the most prestigious art schools and institutes of technology who leap to sudden dramatic discoveries and quickly become rich and famous.
“A really wonderful book.” — Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink
Source: Old Masters and Young Geniuses
(Photo Wired)
Excerpt from Wired from interview with Kai Yu, CEO of Bidhu, China’s largest search engine:
Today, web searches for products or services give you little more than long list of links, and “then it’s your job to read through all of those webpages to figure out what’s the meaning,” Yu says. But he wants something that works very differently. We need to fundamentally change the architecture of the whole system,”That means building algorithms that can identify images and understand natural language and then parse the relationships between all the stuff on the web and find exactly what you’re looking for. It other words, it wants algorithms that work like people. Only faster.
– Yu explains.
Source: Wired, ‘Chinese Google’ opens artificial intelligence lab in Silicon Valley
AI developers at IBM Watson hope some day soon to answer a simple human question, like, ‘Is this a good time to buy a house?’ by having Watson quickly analyze news articles, forum posts, call logs, policy documents and web pages to report ‘window of opportunity’ data.
Phil Lawson: Frankly, Watson, this will be cool when you can do this! But even more important to a human is this question: “Is this a good time FOR ME to buy a house?” When Watson can return this kind of information, based on individual circumstances, this will be awesome.
“Artificial Intelligence must be about more than our things. It must be about more than our machines. It must be a way to advance human behavior in complex human situations. But this will require wisdom-powered code. It will require imprinting AI’s genome with social intelligence for human interaction. It must begin right now.”
— Phil Lawson
(read more)
AI Quotes
Portrait by Richard Rappaport
In 1957, computer scientist and future Nobel-winner Herbert Simon predicted that, by 1967, psychology would be a largely computerized field.
Source: Popular Science, The End is A.I.: The Singularity is Sci-Fi’s Faith-Based Initiative, Erik Sofge, May 28, 2014
