The White House is expected to take action within the next few weeks aimed at boosting U.S. artificial intelligence and 5G deployment, an administration official confirmed to The Hill. The plan will offer the "first deliverables" of the National Quantum Initiative Act, a law passed by the previous Congress that laid out an initiative to improve U.S. efforts on quantum technology, according to the official.
If there’s one thing we learned from the commercials that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, it’s that we humans are definitely not worried about robots or artificial intelligence at this juncture in history. Not at all. In fact, we find them funny. Ha-ha! See? We’re laughing confidently, as humans do when confronted with a new trend or phenomenon that doesn’t at all threaten or otherwise discomfit us.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed his government to create a national strategy for research into and development of artificial intelligence, according to state media. The order follows a year of various efforts to better coordinate Russian government, academic, and private-sector work on AI. Delivered Thursday in a list of instructions approved by Putin following a Jan. 15 meeting of the supervisory board of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, the order sets a delivery deadline of Feb. 25, TASS reported.
For the past century, the U.S. or its allies have held the upper hand in technology, whether it was the code cracking that helped win World War II, the atomic and space races, or the processing power that ushered in the digital age. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union competed on rockets and weapons systems, but didn't challenge American supremacy in consumer tech. The state of play: Now, that has changed. And America is paying too little attention.
Along America’s west coast, the world’s most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. But late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government.
I was having a conversation with an old school teacher who thinks that AI is ruining education. They challenged me to name 26 ways that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education for the better, and instead, I came up with. Here they are.
While the phrase “artificial intelligence” is unquestionably, undoubtedly misused, the technology is doing more than ever -- for both good and bad. It’s being deployed in health care and warfare; it’s helping people make music and books; it’s scrutinizing your resume, judging your creditworthiness, and tweaking the photos you take on your phone. In short, it’s making decisions that affect your life whether you like it or not.
China has been developing Artificial Intelligence weaponry at a much higher rate than the U.S. and experts say it’s something that neither Silicon Valley nor The Pentagon should be turning their backs on. Reports suggest that the tech and governmental sectors of China have been working together in a “military-civil fusion” and according to a recent Financial Times report, the partnership has become a nightmare for western governments like the United States, which has mostly taken the opposite approach.
Most troubling for the American business leaders in Davos, who had grown accustomed to being atop the global technological heap, was that they heard time and again how quickly they were falling behind their Chinese peers. Though it is a tech race most Western executives feel is only on its first laps, they heard how President Xi had declared a sort of space race or Manhattan Project around AI that is already delivering measurable results.
Steve Jobs was fond of saying that the key to Apple’s success has been a marriage of technology and the liberal arts. What he meant by this is that innovation emerges at the intersection of art and technology -- rather than either alone. In fact, it was Douglas Engelbart who first understood the importance of computer technologies in bootstrapping human capabilities and augmenting human creativity.