Insights June 1st, 2016

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 – Sexism, Human Rights, and Monetization we see posts on gender bias, human rights, Kurzweil’s chat bot, monetization, robot bookings, The White House, and convolutional neural networks.

Female computer science professor blasts the sexist geeks she says show ‘staggering’ bias against women

Sexist geeks who built a prototype of an ‘enhanced human’ which was entirely male have been lambasted by one of Britain’s leading computer scientists.

Ursula Martin, a professor of computer science at Oxford University, said it was a symptom of the ‘staggering sexism’ in the industry.

She said there was still an anti-female bias and conjured up a picture of male academics like the characters of Sheldon Cooper and Rajesh Koothrappali in The Big Bang Theory, who struggled to engage with women or understand the female viewpoint.

This vision of a new kind of humanity was an entirely male vision

Ursula Martin

Computers may be given ‘human’ rights, says professor

“We’re in a golden age,” said du Sautoy. “It’s a bit like Galileo with a telescope. We now have a telescope into the brain and it’s given us an opportunity to see things that we’ve never been able to see before.”
Please conceive, therefore, that once artificial intelligence is deemed to be smarter than you — what will we give it, five years? — then there will be consequences. At some point, your gadgets will even knowthat they’re smarter than you.
This might make them a touch uppity. It might also give them privileges.
“If we understand these things are having a level of consciousness,” he said, “we might well have to introduce rights. It’s an exciting time.”
Yes, rights. As in human rights.
It will be exciting, indeed, to wake up one day and discover your Moto now has the Moto-vation to refuse to follow your orders.
Read more at CNET

Ray Kurzweil’s Google team to release a chat bot later this year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK9jcT-EhPc
Read more at The Verge

The race to monetize artificial intelligence is on

The battle in the artificial intelligence (AI) market has been heating up. IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all continuously releasing impressive technologies in the space that are capturing the minds of developers and customers. From a market perspective, AI is positioned to become a pillar of the next generation of software technologies. Without a doubt, we can expect all those software giants to capture segments of the AI space. However, the most interesting question is who can monetize AI at scale first.
Monetizing a technology at scale goes beyond its technical capabilities. Typically, the path to monetization at scale is a combination of different factors such as the following:

Leveraging well-established assets like user or customer community as the main distribution mechanism.
Expanding the offer across different distribution channels.
Providing a compelling value proposition for prospects to become buyers.
Building network-effects into the product so that paying customers can attract other paying customers.
Nature of the transaction: Large (enterprise), small (consumer).
Duration of the sales cycle.

There are other factors that can influence the monetization at scale of a specific technology, but the aforementioned ones must definitely be considered when evaluating a monetization model. In the AI space, the picture is pretty complicated as the top vendors already enjoyed a certain level of success and impressive access that can be devoted towards the monetization of AI.
Read more at CIO

When a Robot Books Your Airline Ticket

Virtual travel assistant services — some from established companies like Facebook, IBM and Expedia, and others from new entrants like Pana andHelloGbye — are now popping up worldwide, just as major hotel chains like Starwood and Hilton are incorporating robots into their everyday operations.

Many of the virtual assistant services use artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science that simulates intelligent human behavior. Some respond to questions posed by travelers, either in live speech or digitally, while some, like Pana, rely on additional input by humans to provide answers.

Although many services are now in their infancy, they are expected to change the way travel is planned in the not-too-distant future.

Read more at NY Times

The White House Is Finally Prepping for an AI-Powered Future

RESEARCHERS DISAGREE ON WHEN artificial intelligence that displays something like human understanding might arrive. But the Obama administration isn’t waiting to find out. The White House says the government needs to start thinking about how to regulate and use the powerful technology while it is still dependent on humans.
“The public should have an accurate mental model of what we mean when we say artificial intelligence,” says Ryan Calo, who teaches law at University of Washington. Calo spoke last week at the first of four workshops the White House hosts this summer to examine how to address an increasingly AI-powered world.
Read more at WIRED

Neural Network that Changes Everything

Years of work down the drain, the convolutional neural network is a step change in image classification accuracy. Image Analyst Dr Mike Pound explains what it does. Read this first
Kernel Convolutions: https://youtu.be/C_zFhWdM4ic
Deep Learning: https://youtu.be/l42lr8AlrHk
Botnets: https://youtu.be/UVFmC178_Vs
AI’s Game Playing Challenge: https://youtu.be/5oXyibEgJr0
Space Carving: https://youtu.be/cGs90KF4oTc