Humans Need Not Apply

[Abdul Alhazred]

A behavioral "scientist" who studies machines.

[Witness]

Oxford University given record £150m donation to fund AI ethics institute

The £150m gift from Blackstone boss Stephen A Schwarzman is reported to be the biggest ever single donation to a UK university.

An American billionaire and adviser to Donald Trump has given Oxford University its largest single donation "since the Renaissance" to investigate the ethics of artificial intelligence.

The £150m gift from Stephen A Schwarzman, chief executive and co-founder of US investment and private equity firm Blackstone, is reported to be the biggest ever single donation to a UK university.

A centre named after the philanthropist will house all of the university's humanities subjects for the first time and is expected to open in 2024.

It will also be home to Oxford University's new Institute for Ethics in AI, which will explore questions affecting the workplace and society.

Mr Schwarzman, who is not an Oxford graduate, said he was "proud" to partner with the university as AI is going to be the "fourth revolution".

"It is going to impact jobs, excellence, efficiency and it is a force for amazing good and also a potential force for not good," he told the BBC's Today programme.

"What is important about it isn't just what it can do, but making sure it is introduced in a way unlike the internet.

https://news.sky.com/story/oxford-unive ... e-11744587

[sparks]

There is only one way to treat an 'intelligent' machine: As the enemy. Pull it's fucking plug. STAT!!!

[Witness]

AI system 'should be recognised as inventor'

An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says.

The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore.

Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans - to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognised.

The academics say this is "outdated".

And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations.

As a result, two professors from the University of Surrey have teamed up with the Missouri-based inventor of Dabus AI to file patents in the system's name with the relevant authorities in the UK, Europe and US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49191645

It will get interesting when they start owning money. And using it.

[Anaxagoras]

That sounds dubious to me. If anything, the inventor of the AI is indirectly the inventor of any inventions the AI might come up with.

[Abdul Alhazred]

That sounds dubious to me. If anything, the inventor of the AI is indirectly the inventor of any inventions the AI might come up with.

Was the AI paid at least $15.00 hour?

[Anaxagoras]

It seems premature to be anthropomorphizing AI. Maybe once there's a sentient AI, or one that can pass a general Turing test.

[Abdul Alhazred]

The Turing test has been passed again and again.

But passing for human (variety racist stoner jadrool) isn't the real test anyway.

[Witness]

Could an artificial intelligence be considered a person under the law?

Humans aren’t the only people in society – at least according to the law. In the U.S., corporations have been given rights of free speech and religion. Some natural features also have person-like rights. But both of those required changes to the legal system. A new argument has laid a path for artificial intelligence systems to be recognized as people too – without any legislation, court rulings or other revisions to existing law.

Legal scholar Shawn Bayern has shown that anyone can confer legal personhood on a computer system, by putting it in control of a limited liability corporation in the U.S. If that maneuver is upheld in courts, artificial intelligence systems would be able to own property, sue, hire lawyers and enjoy freedom of speech and other protections under the law. In my view, human rights and dignity would suffer as a result.

https://theconversation.com/could-an-ar ... law-102865

Let us all welcome our robotic overlords.

[Witness]

How students in Colombia empower robots in California

At Kiwi, we are artists & engineers working on making sustainable delivery easier, faster and safer for everyone. Our core technology is based on the philosophy of Parallel Autonomy Systems, a framework proposal that makes emphasis on shared control for autonomous systems. This means that while the Kiwibots are navigating the streets, supervisors are monitoring and annotating inputs to ensure the delivery arrives intact. This is to assure safety and improve our learning.

Being supervised and corrected by humans creates a large, heterogeneous variety of inputs for steering and velocity to use in our learned representations pipelines. Our machine learning model learns functions that connect images to control messages. This end-to-end approach allows us to learn the task of driving in high density and complex areas. This is very useful when you are crossing more than 1,500 street intersections per day.

https://medium.com/kiwicampus/how-kiwi- ... 99cf1bbc8d

Now even robots have to feel empowered.

But:

Kiwibots are not fully Autonomous and are controlled by operators in Colombia

It seemed inevitable with the era of the autonomous car, ideas like the Kiwibots emerged. Small ostensibly autonomous vehicles that were in charge of food distribution, thus posing an alternative to courier services such as Glovo, Deliveroo or Uber Eats where deliveries are carried out by human messengers through the bike.

Everything seemed fantastic until it has been discovered that these vehicles have little of self-employed: an investigation has discovered that in reality these robots are remotely controlled by operators in Colombia who charge $2 per hour for this work.

https://www.techidence.com/kiwibots-are ... -colombia/

[Witness]

We are doomed (again).



And they made a somewhat creepy ad:

[Anaxagoras]

Those are some agile robots. I'm impressed.

Not quite an Olympic gymnast yet with the tumbling, but pretty good nonetheless.

[Witness]

Update:

Boston Dynamics' Scary Quadruped Robots Are Now Roaming the World Free

Good luck, everyone

Boston Dynamics has announced that Spot — its quadruped robot — is now available for sale for any company with good ideas. You know, like tweaking that AI brain, adding a poisonous dart launcher and have them hunt trespassing humans like on that Black Mirror episode.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/boston-d ... spot-robot for the rest of the doom.


And this:

UK wages flatline as robots take skilled jobs, pushing workers into low-paid roles

Paralegals, administrative staff and others taking on lower-skilled work, forcing others into underemployment, research finds

Wages are flatlining because companies are scrapping swathes of mid-tier positions – replacing them with algorithms and cheap offshore labour, according to a new report.

White-collar recruitment specialist Hays found that with jobs like paralegal work and administration, new technology is making these roles redundant, leaving over-qualified professionals working in lower-tier positions instead.

This is, in turn, is pushing those in lower-skilled jobs into underemployment – where they have jobs but do not work as many hours as they would like – leading to lower wages overall.

The chief executive of Hays, Alistair Cox, suggested this could be why there has been record employment levels and wage stagnation going hand in hand.

He told the PA news agency: “By and large, workers are drifting down the skill chain and moving into the sorts of jobs that they are overqualified for. That’s putting pressure on people with lower level skills.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/busi ... 16246.html

I hope our robotic overlords won't scrap my pension (Soylent Green, Soylent Green…).

[Abdul Alhazred]

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles
The Register

As if the internet isn’t already a complicated cesspool full of trolls, AI engineers have gone one step further to build a machine learning model that can generate fake comments for news articles.

The eyebrow-raising creation, known as DeepCom, was developed by a group of engineers at Beihang University and Microsoft, China. “Automatic news comment generation is beneficial for real applications but has not attracted enough attention from the research community,” they said in a paper released on arXiv.

Allowing readers to post comments under articles keeps them engaged, they argued. Open dialogue allows people to discuss their opinions and share new information. It’s good for publishers too since comments also boost people’s attention and encourages page views.

...

Perhaps the right wing trollbots and the left wing trollbots will reach a reasonable compromise about what to do about the human question?

[Witness]

'Goliath Is Winning': The Biggest U.S. Banks Are Set to Automate Away 200,000 Jobs

Over the next decade, U.S. banks, which are investing $150 billion in technology annually, will use automation to eliminate 200,000 jobs, thus facilitating “the greatest transfer from labor to capital” in the industry’s history. The call is coming from inside the house this time, too—both the projection and the quote come from a recent Wells Fargo report, whose lead author, Mike Mayo, told the Financial Times that he expects the industry to shed 10 percent of all of its jobs.

This, Mayo said, will lay the groundwork for, and I quote, “a golden age of banking efficiency.” The job cuts are slated to hit front offices, call centers, and branches the hardest, where 20-30 percent of those roles will be on the chopping block. They will be replaced by better ATMs, automated chatbots, and software instruments that take advantage of big data and cloud computing to make investment decisions.

“The next decade should be the biggest decade for banks in technology in history,” Mayo said.

...

The analysis itself is also secondary—filled with buzzwords and promises of harnessing big data and predictive algorithms that may or may not pan out to be as effective as currently thought—it is the confidence and enthusiasm for this schema that is key, as that is what will transform the report into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the banks buy what Mayo and Wells Fargo are selling, then the report will contribute to an automated arms race between companies to cut staff and purchase enterprise financial software products that is already underway. This is how a lot of corporate automation unfolds.

As a result, we can expect to interact with even more customer service chatbots and automated call menus (whether they work well or not), to see more financial decisions turned over to algorithms, and a continued flood of software products to enter the banking industry. And Wells Fargo certainly won’t be the only bank automating here: As the FT notes, Citigroup is planning to eliminate tens of thousands of call center workers, and Deutsche Bank expects to slash half its ~100,000-strong workforce.

https://gizmodo.com/goliath-is-winning- ... 40347?IR=T

[Anaxagoras]

It's all for the greater good in the long run. Efficiency that is. It does suck if you like your job and you lose it of course. The only thing that sucks is that the dividends of increased efficiency all tend to go to a small group of very rich people. But that could be addressed in other ways.

[Abdul Alhazred]

It's all for the greater good in the long run. Efficiency that is. It does suck if you like your job and you lose it of course. The only thing that sucks is that the dividends of increased efficiency all tend to go to a small group of very rich people. But that could be addressed in other ways.

You mean ... ???

[Anaxagoras]

Nothing so barbaric, old chum!

Taxes. Make the rich pay them.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Nothing so barbaric, old chum!

Taxes. Make the rich pay them.

Got it.

So politicians benefit, not The People ^TM

[Rob Lister]

Nothing so barbaric, old chum!

Taxes. Make the rich pay them.

Because politicians need their pockets lined too.