Internet of Bings

[retina]

A little light humour, but manages to hit the points accurately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oANUXY3xXKM

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Sorry if this is stretching things a bit WRT the thread's subject, but... Perhaps a potent of things to come with all those remote-control home security systems?

Similarly tangential... A couple of interesting articles I came across recently:

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

Berners-Lee fears AI monster

While many people reference the "Terminator" movies when they talk about the risks of AI, personally I always think back to Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series I read long ago.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by Nick

There's a little more to it with modern cars: read section 3.3 of Ross's book:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c03.pdf

In a single word: pebkac (or pebkcacd)

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Similarly tangential... A couple of interesting articles I came across recently:

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

After she finished cancer treatment last year, Barzilay and her students began working with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop a system capable of mining pathology reports to identify patients with specific clinical characteristics that researchers might want to study. However, Barzilay understood that the system would need to explain its reasoning. So, together with Jaakkola and a student, she added a step: the system extracts and highlights snippets of text that are representative of a pattern it has discovered. Barzilay and her students are also developing a deep-learning algorithm capable of finding early signs of breast cancer in mammogram images, and they aim to give this system some ability to explain its reasoning, too. “You really need to have a loop where the machine and the human collaborate,” -Barzilay says.

My sense is that while 'explainability' is being made a big deal of at present, as AIs increase in power humans, being inherently lazy, will inevitably cede more and more ground here because 'who cares *how* it does what it does? It just works!' And in the context of a for-profit health-insurance/care paradigm, insurers abusing patient privacy and using deep learning in order to exclude likely-to-be-costly patients - i.e. the ones who justify the concept of mutualized risk which is the raison d'être for insurance to begin with - is gonna be rampant.

The U.S. military is pouring billions into projects that will use machine learning to pilot vehicles and aircraft, identify targets, and help analysts sift through huge piles of intelligence data. Here more than anywhere else, even more than in medicine, there is little room for algorithmic mystery, and the Department of Defense has identified explainability as a key stumbling block.

David Gunning, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is overseeing the aptly named Explainable Artificial Intelligence program. A silver-haired veteran of the agency who previously oversaw the DARPA project that eventually led to the creation of Siri, Gunning says automation is creeping into countless areas of the military. Intelligence analysts are testing machine learning as a way of identifying patterns in vast amounts of surveillance data. Many autonomous ground vehicles and aircraft are being developed and tested. But soldiers probably won’t feel comfortable in a robotic tank that doesn’t explain itself to them, and analysts will be reluctant to act on information without some reasoning. “It’s often the nature of these machine-learning systems that they produce a lot of false alarms, so an intel analyst really needs extra help to understand why a recommendation was made,” Gunning says.

See my note above about habituation. 50 years ago the idea of governments and private companies pervasively spying on everyone and homes filling up with wired devices which surveil in the guise of 'helping their owners' would have been rightfully appalling to just about everyone. No more. Incubating SkyNet...

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

And in the context of a for-profit health-insurance/care paradigm, insurers abusing patient privacy and using deep learning in order to exclude likely-to-be-costly patients - i.e. the ones who justify the concept of mutualized risk which is the raison d'être for insurance to begin with - is gonna be rampant.

I completely agree.

As an example, I smoke cigarettes -- tobacco -- which I really want to stop using. But my doctor can't prescribe me anything covered by my insurance which will help me stop smoking.

Why? Because statistically those who get lung cancer die really quickly. My death will be a profit to the insurance company; they will pay out a little bit for the hospice care, but nothing compared to how much I paid in.

And anything I buy on my own dime to quit smoking (and I do) is actually more expensive than smoking. For example, a pack of nicotine gum which would help me not smoke a pack of 20 cigarettes which costs me BDS $13.20 costs me BDS $53.00 from the pharmacy.

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Incubating SkyNet...

Again, agreed.

But in some ways I think that perhaps the AIs might be kinder than the current human overlords.

Heck, if the AIs were as kind to me as I am to my cats, my chickens, the neighbours' dogs and the beggers in the street, I'd be a very happy human....

[ewmayer]

Burger King embraces the Internet of Shit™:

Burger King is launching a TV ad that triggers Google Home devices, and it has a potentially disastrous flaw | Business Insider

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Burger King embraces the Internet of Shit™:

Burger King is launching a TV ad that triggers Google Home devices, and it has a potentially disastrous flaw | Business Insider

Karma can be a harsh mistress. That sort of trickery is another reason to keep a mobile device carefully controlled, if you must have one. This may not be quite as bad as the talking children's' toys which were sending data back to the company, but it is pretty low. At least, cases of someone on TV or radio saying, "Siri, order me a ...., with bad results, has been accidental or just boneheaded. Using such commands in advertising would be heinous. It also suggests all sorts of nasty mass attacks which could be built around personal assistant commands.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by kladner

Karma can be a harsh mistress.

Indeed. The neighbour introduced screaming children, including a baby in nappies, into the communal pool.

I suggested introducing carbon monoxide, and lots of smoke, into the mix. That didn't go down so well....

[retina]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Burger King embraces the Internet of Shit™:

Burger King is launching a TV ad that triggers Google Home devices, and it has a potentially disastrous flaw | Business Insider

Anyone the deliberately introduces a listening device into their home deserves what they get. Did they really expect any other outcome?

https://xkcd.com/1807/

[only_human]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Indeed. The neighbour introduced screaming children, including a baby in nappies, into the communal pool.

I suggested introducing carbon monoxide, and lots of smoke, into the mix. That didn't go down so well....

You could put on an adult diaper and go into the pool while saying "what? what? Isn't that what we do now?"

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by only_human

You could put on an adult diaper and go into the pool while saying "what? what? Isn't that what we do now?"

I swim naked in my pool. And I go out of my way to pee every chance I get.