Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. intelligence community (IC) on Thursday rolled out an “ethics guide” and framework for how intelligence agencies can responsibly develop and use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Among the key ethical requirements were shoring up security, respecting human dignity through complying with existing civil rights and privacy laws, rooting out bias to ensure AI use is “objective and equitable,” and ensuring human judgement is incorporated into AI development and use.

The IC wrote in the framework, which digs into the details of the ethics guide, that it was intended to ensure that use of AI technologies matches “the Intelligence Community’s unique mission purposes, authorities, and responsibilities for collecting and using data and AI outputs.”

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In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China. To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.

Amid ever-increasing demands for privacy and security for highly sensitive data stored in the cloud, Google Cloud announced this week the creation of Confidential Computing.

Terming it a “breakthrough technology,” Google said the technology, which will offer a number of products in the coming months, allows users to encrypt sensitive data not only as it is stored or sent to the cloud, but while it is being worked on as well.

Confidential Computing keeps data encrypted as it’s being “used, indexed, queried, or trained on” in memory and “elsewhere outside the central processing unit,” Google said in a statement about the new technology.

Do you agree with these predictions?

The first few months of 2020 have radically reshaped the way we work and how the world gets things done. While the wide use of robotaxis or self-driving freight trucks isn’t yet in place, the Covid-19 pandemic has hurried the introduction of artificial intelligence across all industries. Whether through outbreak tracing or contactless customer pay interactions, the impact has been immediate, but it also provides a window into what’s to come. The second annual Forbes’ AI 50, which highlights the most promising U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies, features a group of founders who are already pondering what their space will look like in the future, though all agree that Covid-19 has permanently accelerated or altered the spread of AI.

“We have seen two years of digital transformation in the course of the last two months,” Abnormal Security CEO Evan Reiser told Forbes in May. As more parts of a company are forced to move online, Reiser expects to see AI being put to use to help businesses analyze the newly available data or to increase efficiency.

Continue reading “AI 50 Founders Predict What Artificial Intelligence Will Look Like After Covid-19” »

Dr. Ben Goertzel CEO & Founder of the SingularityNET Foundation is particularly visible and vocal on his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, AGI, and where research and industry are in regards to AGI. Speaking at the (Virtual) OpenCogCon event this week, Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence. He has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and data mining to robotics, video gaming, national security, and bioinformatics.

Are we at a turning point in AGI?

Dr. Goertzel believes that we are now at a turning point in the history of AI. Over the next few years he believes the balance of activity in the AI research area is about to shift from highly specialized narrow AIs toward AGIs. Deep neural nets have achieved amazing things but that paradigm is going to run out of steam fairly soon, and rather than this causing another “AI winter” or a shift in focus to some other kind of narrow AI, he thinks it’s going to trigger the AGI revolution.

Do you agree Eric Klien?

The US needs an education system that informs students about the world around them, retired Navy Adm. William McRaven said.

Image Credits: Getty Images.

Scott Salandy-Defour used to make frequent stops at a battery manufacturer in southern China for his energy startup based in Hong Kong. The appeal of Hong Kong, he said, is its adjacency to the plentiful electronics suppliers in the Pearl River Delta, as well as the city’s amenities for foreign entrepreneurs, be it its well-established financial and legal system or a culture blending the East and West.

“It’s got the best of both worlds,” Salandy-Defour told TechCrunch. “But it’s not going to be the same.”

Backers of the EARN IT Act focus on protecting children from being exploited, but security experts say the bill actually chips away at your encrypted messages.

Survey finds majority of companies with AI projects reporting positive results. IT leaders see potential for security analytics and predictive intelligence to improve their delivery of tech services.