In the EXPONENTIAL MINDS’ Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – AI for President we see an AI candidate for the presidency, AI building AI, visual data, job losses and ubiquity.

Hear Me Out: Let’s Elect an AI as President

Is it possible that someday we will elect an AI president?
Given some of the recent occupants of the White House, many might consider it an upgrade. After all, humans are prone to making decisions based on ego, anger, and the need for self-aggrandizement, not the common good. An artificially intelligent president could be trained to maximize happiness for the most people without infringing on civil liberties. It might even learn that it’s a good idea to tweet less—or not at all.
Sure, on first glance the idea is far-fetched and a little bit ridiculous. It’s not clear, for example, how an algorithm, no matter how lucid, could host a state dinner. Still, AI politicians are the likely culmination of trends already underway. Think about cars. Tesla owners are thrilled to let their Model S’s drive themselves, and auto manufacturers are rushing to produce vehicles that won’t even have steering wheels. Within a decade, tens of thousands of people will entrust their daily commute—and their safety—to an algorithm, and they’ll do it happily.
Read more at WIRED

The war over artificial intelligence will be won with visual data

Major technology companies and new startups are at war over having the most valuable artificial intelligence and at the core of this war is having unique high quality visual data.

This battle will be won by owning the connected camera. The majority of the data our brains analyze is visual, and therefore the majority of the data needed for artificial intelligence to have human (or better than human) skills, will rely on the ability for computers to translate high quality visual data.

One of the business sectors that will be revolutionized by artificial intelligence is e-commerce.  The Amazon’s Echo Look is a smart stake in the ground for Amazon. Adding a camera to their Echo validates a prediction of mine from last year called the Internet of Eyes which enables all inanimate objects to see. Inanimate objects with cameras enable companies to own the first step in gathering the data for computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze.

 
Read more at TechCrunch

Self-driving cars could cost America’s professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says

When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research.
Truck drivers, more so than bus or taxi drivers, will see the bulk of that job loss, according to the report. That makes sense, given today’s employment: In 2014, there were 4 million driver jobs in the U.S., 3.1 million of which were truck drivers, Goldman said. That represents 2 percent of total employment.
Read more at CNBC

Artificial intelligence is getting more powerful, and it’s about to be everywhere

There wasn’t any one big product announcement at Google I/O keynote on Wednesday, the annual event when thousands of programmers meet to learn about Google’s software platforms. Instead, it was a steady trickle of incremental improvements across Google’s product portfolio. And almost all of the improvements were driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — the software’s growing ability to understand complex nuances of the world around it.

Companies have been hyping artificial intelligence for so long — and often delivering such mediocre results — that it’s easy to tune it out. AI is also easy to underestimate because it’s often used to add value to existing products rather than creating new ones.

But even if you’ve dismissed AI technology in the past, there are two big reasons to start taking it seriously. First, the software really is getting better at a remarkable pace. Problems that artificial intelligence researchers struggled with for decades are suddenly getting solved

“Our software is going to get superpowers” thanks to AI, says Frank Chen, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Computer programs will be able to do things that “we thought were human-only activities: recognizing what’s in a picture, telling when someone’s going to get mad, summarizing documents.”

Read more at Vox