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 – Investment, Feelings, and Bias we see how investment is growing, how AI might become ‘people’, and how AI is becoming biased.

Artificial Intelligence: Growth, Opportunities and Threats

As applications based on artificial intelligence are becoming popular in hospitals, homes, certain industries and schools, its adoption raises some social concerns such as unemployment and privacy issues. While AI technologies and robots will potentially enhance the quality of human life and open new horizons, it also has the potential to shrink the jobs market by over five million by 2020.
Bank of America Corporation (BAC) expects the current robots and artificial intelligence solutions market at $153 billion by the year 2020 including $83 billion for robots, and $70 billion for AI-based analytics. It further suggests that these disruptive technologies will yield $14-33 trillion in the annual economic impact by the year 2025 through cost reductions and efficiency gains. Adoption of these technologies has the potential to boost productivity by 30% across many industries while trimming manufacturing labor costs by 18-33%.
Overall, although the future of AI-based technologies will be determined by weighing its benefits against risks and costs which these AI-based technologies present, technology giants are already positioned‘to bring and be a part’ of these transformational changes.
Read more at NASDAQ

Robots Are Developing Feelings. Will They Ever Become “People”?

“At some point you have to recognize that you have a system that has its own being in the sense of—well, not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of the ability to take on responsibilities and have rights,” says Rosenbloom. “At that point it’s no longer a tool, and if you treat it as a tool, it’s a slave.”
We’re still a long way from that. Rosenbloom’s AI platform, called Sigma, is just beginning to replicate parts of a human mind. At the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), he shows me a demonstration in which a thief tries to figure out how to rob a convenience store and a security guard tries to figure out how to catch the thief. But the two characters were just primitive shapes darting around a sparse 3D environment—looking like the world’s dullest video game.
Read more at Fast Company

Artificial Intelligence: It’s Not Man vs. Machine. It’s Man And Machine

As more of our lives are aided by intelligent systems in our homes, at work, and in our cars, other questions arise. Will AI get so smart that it replaces us? Sutton, High and Saxena all agree “no,” but they say that some tasks will certainly become automated. They believe the more important change will be the creation of a new class of jobs. According to Forrester, 25% of all job tasks will be offloaded to software robots, physical robots, or customer self-service automation — in other words, all of us will be impacted in some way. But while that may sound disparaging, the same study states that 13.6 million jobs will be created using AI tools over the next decade.
The nature of work will change dramatically with AI. We’ll have technology that augments our skills and abilities — perhaps something like a “JARVIS suit” that allows us to be superhuman. We’ll work alongside robotic colleagues that help us with our most challenging tasks. In terms of cognitive computing, we’re talking about amplifying human cognition, not replacing the human mind. There is so much to be gained when we uncover ideas and solutions we wouldn’t have been able to do on our own.
Read more at GigaOM

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming as biased as we are

What’s concerning though, is just how much of our lives we’re on the verge of handing over to artificial intelligence. With today’s deep learning algorithms, the ‘training’ of this AI is often as much a product of our collective hive mind as it is programming. Artificial intelligence, in fact, is using our collective thoughts to train the next generation of automation technologies. All the while, it’s picking up our biases and making them more visible than ever.
As Donald Trump spouts off at the mouth in racist, sexist, xenophobic rants about how to make the country great again, the language is being used to train Twitter bots that share his views.
Microsoft’s Tay went from an innocent, albeit scatterbrained, teen to a Hitler-quoting nazi fembot in a matter of hours.
An AI-judged beauty contest decided that people of color aren’t quite as pretty as those with light skin.
This is just the beginning, and while offensive, the AI mentioned above is mostly harmless. If you want the scary stuff, we’re expanding algorithmic policing that relies on many of the same principles used to train the previous examples. In the future, our neighborhoods will see an increase or decrease in police presence based on data that we already know is biased.
Read more at TheNextWeb