Artificial Intelligence: The Road Ahead in Low and Middle-Income Countries
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
According to this article, "Research by McKinsey has gone as far as describing AI as contributing to a transformation of society 'happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale' of the Industrial Revolution." So how does that impact low and middle income countries? The report looks at employment and growth, the redistribition of wealth, the delivery of public goods and services, and the impact on democracy. More...

Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses
Stephen Buranyi, The Guardian, 2017/08/09
I think it's a good thing that people are becoming more aware of the (current) limitations of artificial intelligence. When we simply train AI based on the toughts and attitudes of, say, Google employees, we get a skewed perception of reality. More...

How to make a racist AI without really trying
Rob Speer, ConceptNet blog, 2017/08/01
This post works on several layers. First, it makes the obvious point that it is very easy to create a racist artificial intelligence (AI). Second, it makes the less obvious, but much more important, point that making a racist AI is the default if you use standard techniques. Using the most popular website crawl data, the most popular sentiment lexicon, and the most popular AI engines, you inevitably get a racist result (for example: Mexican food is rated worse than other foods, typically Black names are rated lower than other names). More...

Making Room for Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom
Avron Barr, 2017/07/11
This presentation describes some of the work on the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC). There's downloadable audio and video, and also an embed version that's too slow to try to put into the newsletter. The actual presentation starts at 3:50 of the video and the audio is good. More...

Why artificial intelligence is different from previous technology waves
Robbie Allen, Oreilly, 2017/06/30
When Robbie Allen says 'we' here he doesn't mean me. Still, there is truth to what he says: "We went from a general disbelief in software being able to automate things that were strictly in the domain of humans to every startup having a token AI slide in their pitch decks." And of course now the startuips are all AI with a token 'web' or 'user interface' slide in their decks. More...