Examples of how machine learning can come up with unexpected behaviors – really showing how critical the precise instructions need to be (and how negative behavior needs to be defined).

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According to a 2018 survey by MIT Technology Review and Genesys, 90% of global executives said their firms now use AI solutions to improve the customer experience. On average, between 25% and 50% of all customer inquiries are now completely resolved through automated channels.

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A simple flowchart to test if an algorithm is using machine learning.

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An example of how dinner out with friends can be initiated, planned, implemented and paid for – all using WeChat.

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Robots predicting the future; Robot soldiers; Schizophrenic robot; Economic meltdown; Robots that deceive; Robot lovers; Survival robots; Police using AI algorithms to predict crimes; AI-based medical treatment; Autonomous drones and weapons; Supercomputer with imagination; AI is granted citizenship; Self-driving cars gone wrong; AI communicating with AI; AI taking jobs; AI hackers; Robots in our brains; AI machines learning right from wrong; AI in court; Not-so-smart home AI. Almost all are currently in use!

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AI systems are already augmenting and replacing human workers in the fashion industry, law, and medicine.

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A comprehensive guide to machine learning, including a definition, its relation to AI, the main types (supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning), neural networks, deep learning, its success and uses, AlphaGo, inherent bias, best courses, and online services.

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The proposed five myths are: 1. You can differentiate between a machine and a human. 2. The U.S. is falling behind in the race for AI breakthroughs. 3. AI will automate the economy, and put people out of work. 4. AI can remove human bias from decision-making. 5. Artificial intelligence is a threat to mankind. The fundamental flaw in the article is that AI and its developers will improve exponentially to the point that myths 2-5 become reality.

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The UK House of Lords’ Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence has issued a report ‘AI in the UK: Ready, willing and able?’ that predicts widespread changes to employment, with AI enhancing and creating many new jobs, but also destroying roles and reducing the manpower needed for a large number of existing tasks. The report warns that workers will need to retrain throughout their lives to secure the skills needed when AI reshapes the job market. Childhood education will also need to be reformed, with schools teaching both the skills needed to work alongside AI and to take full advantage of the technology available. The other central concern revolves around the ethics of how AI might be used.

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The UK House of Lords’ Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence has issued a report ‘AI in the UK: Ready, willing and able?’ that predicts widespread changes to employment, with AI enhancing and creating many new jobs, but also destroying roles and reducing the manpower needed for a large number of existing tasks. The report warns that workers will need to retrain throughout their lives to secure the skills needed when AI reshapes the job market. Childhood education will also need to be reformed, with schools teaching both the skills needed to work alongside AI and to take full advantage of the technology available. The other central concern revolves around the ethics of how AI might be used.

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In a Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh lab, a robot arm lifts a bottle filled with chemical reagents and carries it over a bank of test tubes, dispensing a precise number of drops into each one, and carrying out multiple tests. Soon, machines won’t just run the experiments—they’ll devise them, too. AI software designed to identify and sort patterns has been deployed across a wide swath of science, from marine biology to astronomy.

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New services, like DoNotPay, are encouraging people to challenge inaccurate parking tickets and property taxes online. Users are asked a series of questions, which creates a letter with a formal legal defense to be mailed in or submitted online. The free service has helped drivers across the U.S. and U.K. squash more than 450,000 parking tickets representing $13 million in fines; with users winning dismissals more than 50 percent of the time.

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Financial services firms are investing in AI to reduce costs and improve efficiency. AUDITING: Machine learning analyzeS thousands of documents, quickly developing summaries, and producing useful information and criteria. AI speedS up tedious tasks, such as checking debit and credit entries. ACCOUNTING: AI can analyze broad trends, revealing financial insights that help develop better long-term strategies. AI can maintain a constant focus on regulatory compliance and reporting and can assist in risk management.

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lon Musk called for more symbiosis between humans and AI, with a public body to oversee AI implementations. His primary concern is that AI experts don’t believe a machine could ever be smarter than they are.

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Major topics include: AI, Automation, Bitcoin, Cybersecurity, Regulating Tech Giants, and Biotech.

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The singularity is the point in time when advances in AI lead to the creation of a machine smarter than humans. Experts vary in forecasting when – Ray Kurzweil (2045), Louis Rosenberg (2030s), Patrick Winston (2040), Jürgen Schmidhuber, the “father of artificial intelligence” (2048).

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AI systems will typically demonstrate at least some behaviors associated with human intelligence. This is a general defnition and introduction to AI, including discussion of narrow AI and general AI, machine learning, neural networks, evolutionary computation, and expert systems.

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A series of reference and current news articles about AI.

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The thoughts of 7 experts (including videos from Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk) separating sci-fi from actual developments in AI, and indicating how close they think we are to reaching the singularity.

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Ray Kurzweil is estimated to be 86% accurate in predicting the future, which he envisions marked by decentralization of both the physical and mental: – Singularity still at 2045. – Robots as smart as humans by 2029. – VR will advance so that physical workplaces will become obsolete. – By the early 2030s, we will be able to copy human consciousness onto an electronic medium; hence eternal existence. – WiFi available worldwide. – Most major diseases eradicated during the 2020s.

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Gartner opened its flagship conference with the statement that, by 2020, AI will automate 1.8 million people out of work, but it will create 2.3 million jobs. No supporting details were supplied. Gartner’s underlying assumption is that AI is going to play a complementary role to a lot of workers, making them faster, more efficient, and more productive.

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More than 100 leaders of AI companies, including Elon Musk, have signed an open letter to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, voicing their concern that companies building AI systems may convert the technology into autonomous weapons. Like most technology, there is a fine line between good and evil in its use. Academics are warning that complex AI systems are so unpredictable, it is possible for well-intentioned robotic environments, under certain conditions, to turn adversarial—even dangerous.

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A good but superficial overview of the benefits and dangers of our inevitable future with AI, referencing the current proponents and opponents.

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Kurzweil sees the future as nuanced. He points out that we have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history, and that, for every job we eliminate, we’ve created more jobs at the top of the skill ladder. The issue is that you can’t describe the new jobs, because they’re in industries and concepts that don’t exist yet.

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MIT experts say we’ve entered “the second wave of the second machine age,” in which AI has exceeded expectations. The areas that AI will not easily handle include setting priorities and people management.

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An Oxford University research team surveyed 352 AI experts in 2015 to determine when they expected intelligent machines to be better than humans in all tasks (with a 50% probability). The median response was 45 years, with North American experts predicting 74 years and Asian experts 30 years. Note that the median response for machines to beat GO experts was 12 years, when in fact it took 2 years!

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A new research report from IDC and Salesforce found that artificial intelligence could create more than 800,000 jobs by 2021, and have a $1.1 trillion impact on the global economy. The idea that AI will create more jobs than it replaces stands in stark contrast to other research from MIT and others that point to an opposing trend, with automation replacing workers. Public cloud vendors will be critical in delivering the AI solutions of the future, the report found.

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More than 50% of US workers feel more stress than in 2016, with the fear of losing their job to AI the top stressor in the workplace. Outside of work, employees were most stressed by the current political climate, while inside the workplace they also felt unskilled for changing job demands. Training and development, meditation, and exercise were the top ways employees were combatting stress.

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The CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argues that globalization is being blamed wrongly for job loss, where the culprit is actually technology-enabled disruption. This error will cause trade negotiations to focus on the wrong set of issues.

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Erik Brynjolfsson is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of The Second Machine Age, a book that asks what jobs will be left once the software has perfected the art of driving cars, translating speech and other tasks once considered the domain of humans. He believes that, as in the past, new jobs will replace those lost.

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In September 2016, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google announced the creation of a “Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society” (Partnership on AI), a nonprofit formed to “study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.” Apple joined the partnership as a founding member in January 2017. 22 new organizations are joining including eBay, Intel, McKinsey, Salesforce, SAP, Sony, and 14 non-profits.

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The magnitude of the impact of AI in the next decade is way beyond anything we ever imagined. It is the real issue facing our government leaders today, as failure to transition to a sustainable AI society will lead to massive job loss and economic downturn. AI can recognize what is in an image; Beat the world champion at Go; Reproduce the style of any master artist; Understand natural language queries; Automate your house; Drive your car; Diagnose cancer better than a doctor; Recognize your kids in a picture better than you can yourself. Humans and Machines must be thought of as complementary. Many jobs will be transformed rather than disappear. Many high-paid jobs will also disappear. Solving the AI and Job crisis involves providing mass continuous education. We will change jobs as easily as we move houses.

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Bob Reselman researches the impact of automation on jobs. His concern is not that lots of people will be out of work, but how will people spend their time.

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Sunil Johal, policy director at the Mowat Centre think-tank at the University of Toronto, says millions of Canadians — between 1.5 million and 7.5 million, many of them highly skilled workers — could lose their jobs during the next decade because of rapid technological advances, including in artificial intelligence and robotics, and the potential for automating increasingly sophisticated tasks. Nobody should consider their job “safe.”

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In 2013, two Oxford economists forecasted that 45% of all US jobs could be automated within the next 20 years, and were ignored but now seem realistic. Transportation and warehousing employ 5 million Americans, including 2.5 million truck, car and bus drivers, whose jobs will shortly be lost. 8 million Americans work as retail salespeople and cashiers, and US restaurants employ 14 million people. Many of these jobs will soon be automated too.

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ManpowerGroup, one of the world’s largest jobs companies, released a report detailing how the technological revolution is going to change the employment market forever. It surveyed more than 18,000 employers across 43 countries and six industry sectors. Survey results were 64% no headcount change, 19% increase, 12% decrease. Need to be identified for new skill training.

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A report from the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship at Ryerson University (Toronto) estimated that 42% of Canadian jobs would be affected over the next 20 years as automation is applied to cognitive, non-routine tasks and occupations. Workers in the most susceptible jobs typically earn less and have lower education levels than the rest of the Canadian labour force.

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A brief history of AI with many reference links: Starting with Ancient History (Greek mythology; Moving to 4th Century BCE, and 13th to 19th Century; Then more detail for the first half of the 20th Century) and Modern History (1956-2000s) with a link to AITopics Home Page for history in the making!

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