Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Amazon’s Alexa is moving into hospitals. On Monday, the company announced that it will now support scaled launches of its devices inside both healthcare systems and senior living facilities. Continue Reading →

The Financial Times reports that nine schools in the UK's North Ayrshire will start taking lunch payments using facial recognition. Continue Reading →

The interviewer asked, "Is that image real"? There's no way to tell. "What about this video?" It's hard to say. "You can't tell if that's real or fake either." No. Not without analyzing it. "Well, what about the prose? Did a human write this sentence?" It's possible, but it would not surprise me to learn that it was machine generated. "What about the voice in the video?" It's sonically perfect. I'd say 60/40 it's a machine, but I'd need to hear a few more sentences to be sure. "So, what you're saying is that I can't trust my eyes or my ears?" Yes. That's what I'm saying. "Is this the end of truth?" Continue Reading →

Facebook AI has announced Ego4D, a project that is trying to give AI the ability to understand and interact with the world from a first-person perspective (the way that humans do). AI typically learns from photos and videos captured in third-person, but next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action. Continue Reading →

I have often said, "Technology is neither good nor bad; that distinction is for people." Most of the exceptions to this statement are technologies specifically designed to cause harm. Is the robotic sniper dog good or bad? Continue Reading →

If you were Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to get ahead of potential government regulation of your business, what would you fix first? Would you try to curtail social media addiction, protect privacy, reduce mental health risks, reduce weaponized information, eliminate hate speech, flag misinformation, deal with data governance, or address some other seemingly intractable problem? Here's what I'd fix first. Continue Reading →

You find yourself looking at an amazing image of a plaid shirt and wonder if you'll ever find socks to match. Soon, Google will be able to do that search for you. Continue Reading →

Cool or creepy? These are the opposite ends of the Shelly Palmer scale for evaluating AI-powered surveillance systems built into robots, IoT, and other tech. With my cool or creepy scale in mind, behold Amazon's Astro. Continue Reading →

Adam Mosseri, Facebook's Head of Instagram, just sat for a live interview on NBC's Today Show. He shouldn't have. Continue Reading →

OpenAI recently shut down a GPT-3 bot that was programmed to emulate a person's dead fiancée. Getting past the "Wow, that's weird," part of the story… how is this different from training an AI model to emulate a customer service representative? Continue Reading →