Insights June 22nd, 2016
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Each week on a Wednesday Nikolas Badminton, Futurist highlights the top stories from the past week relating to the incredible rise of artificial intelligence and its application in society, the workplace, in cities, and in our lives.
In Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – Hit the Kill Switch! we see posts on implementing kill switches, OpenAI, noisy robots, and changing everything.

Now scientists are building a ‘kill switch’ for Artificial Intelligence

DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, certainly thinks there’s a risk. They’ve teamed up with Oxford University to develop a “red button” that would interrupt an AI machine’s actions. Their paper “explores a way to make sure a learning agent will not learn to prevent (or seek!) being interrupted by the environment or a human operator.”
The “red button” – or “kill switch” as it’s been termed – adds to the debate on the long-term risks of AI.
Read more at The World Economic Forum

OpenAI technical goals

Defining a metric for intelligence is tricky, but we need one to measure our progress and focus our research. We’re thus building a living metric which measures how well an agent can achieve its user’s intended goal in a wide range of environments.
Here are their 4 goals:

  • Goal 1: Measure our progress
  • Goal 2: Build a household robot
  • Goal 3: Build an agent with useful natural language understanding
  • Goal 4: Solve a wide variety of games using a single agent

Read more at OpenAI

US marines reject BigDog robotic packhorse because it’s too noisy

The US military is cooling its eagerness for robots in the battlefield, after trials with quadrupedal robot and nightmare machine Big Dog revealed one crucial flaw: it’s much, much too loud.
The Big Dog robots, first demonstrated almost a decade ago, are developed byBoston Dynamics, a Massachusetts-based robotics firm that was purchased by Google in 2013. They became well known through a series of impressive demonstration videos showing the machine keeping its pace over uneven and slippery surfaces, and even managing to stay upright after a strong unexpected kick from the side.

Read more at The Guardian

Artificial intelligence will change everything |Ginni Rometty, CEO IBM | Code Conference 2016

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about how her company is rethinking its place in the tech world, 105 years after its founding. She explains what IBM has learned from a decade of work in artificial intelligence, which Rometty prefers to call “cognitive solutions,” and why AI will affect every business decision within the next five years. She also argues that no modern company is B2B or B2C; instead, all of them are B2I, or Business-to-Individual.

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.

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Futurist Keynote Speaker and Consultant - Nikolas Badminton

CEO of EXPONENTIAL MINDS and an award-winning Futurist Speaker, researcher and author. His expertise and thought leadership will guide you from complacency to thinking exponentially, planning for longevity, and encouraging a culture of innovation. You will then establish resiliency and abundance in your organization. Please reach out to discuss how he can help you, and read on to see what is happening in the world this week.

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