Artificial Intelligence
In OneZero. More on Medium.
People don’t make better decisions when given more data, so why do we assume A.I. will?
On a warm day in 2008, Silicon Valley’s titans-in-the-making found themselves packed around a bulky, blond-wood conference room table. Although they are big names today, the success of their businesses was hardly assured at the time. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon operated on extremely tight margins and was not profitable. They had just launched the cloud computing side business that would become Amazon’s cash cow, but they didn’t know it yet. Sean Parker had been forced out of Facebook, retreating to a role as managing partner of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. He was a few years away from a critical investment in…
The potential applications are both amazing and alarming
I have a photographic memory, and I’m a time-space synesthete. That means I can visualize, in photorealistic detail, basically any place I’ve ever been. I can also imagine nonexistent places and fly around them in my brain like I’m in a video game.
It’s a cool thing to be able to do for myself, and the ability to imagine a particular shot in advance is helpful in my career as a photographer. I’d love to share these mental images with others, but there’s a catch: I suck at drawing. …
Human written alt texts increases accessibility — and profits
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), a time to celebrate and explore the many ways users and publishers can make the Internet more accessible to people with disabilities.
Image alt text is a key element of web accessibility. About 7 million people in the United States have a visual disability, which can make it challenging to navigate an Internet that has become increasingly driven by graphics and videos. Many of these users access websites via screen readers, special software programs which transform webpages into audio, allowing visually impaired users to navigate and interact with them.
Screen reader technology has…
What happens when you outsource erotic writing to robots?
When I decided to try my hand at writing a novel this year, I got stuck on writing the sex scenes. I wanted to capture the romance, the passion, the feeling of being swept away by your emotions. Instead, I only managed to write stilted dialogue and awkward positions that somehow defied the laws of physics.
In a fit of despair that I’d never get the scene done, I outsourced the job to an AI bot.
Legions of ads thinly veiled as TikTok videos had recommended a tool called ShortlyAI. …
Why we can’t put your mind in the machine
Immortality awaits. As you draw your dying breath, we will inject a preservative into your brain that will fix in place every one of the trillion or so connections between your 86 billion neurons. We will then trace those wires, building the complete map of your brain’s connections, your “connectome”. Upload that complete wiring diagram to a computer, simulate the brain’s dynamics upon it — and you live again.
Such is the promise of mind uploading. It is predicated on a common idea: that the wiring between neurons is what stores your memories, is what makes you, well, you. Companies…
Open Dialogue
Evan Selinger in conversation with Chris Gilliard
This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.
During the pandemic, educational technology companies experienced a 900% increase in business once schools started shutting down campuses and restricting visitors. These companies swooped in with A.I.-infused software designed to prevent students from cheating. These proctoring algorithms can verify who is taking an exam through facial verification. They can also monitor test-takers, scrutinizing their behavior for signs of irregularities that might indicate cheating, like looking away from the screen.
Critics contend the software promotes unfairness, invasions of privacy, and unduly inflicted anxiety. The situation is so dire…
Open Dialogue
A conversation with the professor who just turned down a $60,000 grant from Google
Emotion A.I., affective computing, and artificial emotional intelligence are all fields creating technology to understand, respond to, measure, and simulate human emotions. Hope runs so high for these endeavors that the projected market value for emotional A.I. is $91.67 billion by 2024. A few examples are revealing: The automotive industry sees value in algorithms determining when drivers are distracted and drowsy. Companies see value in algorithms analyzing how customer support agents talk and computationally coaching them to be better speakers. And researchers see value in children with autism using A.I.-infused …
OPEN DIALOGUE
Unlocking the medical potential of artificial intelligence requires being more realistic about its limitations
This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.
I’m excited to talk with Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad. Muhammad is the principal research scientist at KenSci, inc., a company specializing in A.I. in health care, and an affiliate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Washington Bothell. I’ve known Muhammad for a long time. When I started teaching philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, he was one of my first students. Over the years, we’ve kept in touch as Muhammad went on to get his PhD in computer science and eventually became a…
‘Bias audits’ for discriminatory tools are a promising idea, but current approaches leave much to be desired
This op-ed was written by Mona Sloane, a sociologist and senior research scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible A.I. and a fellow at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge. Her work focuses on design and inequality in the context of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
We have a new A.I. race on our hands: the race to define and steer what it means to audit algorithms. Governing bodies know that they must come up with solutions to the disproportionate harm algorithms can inflict.
This technology has disproportionate impacts on racial minorities, the economically disadvantaged, womxn, and people with disabilities, with…
The pathbreaking MIT professor on her new memoir, and the past, present, and future of our efforts to make technology feel human
In the fall of 1976, Sherry Turkle was recruited to the faculty of MIT to join what would soon become the program on Science, Technology, and Society — one of the nation’s first. After having written a book on French psychoanalysis — a “sociology of the sciences of the mind,” as she describes it — Turkle was fascinated with the cultural forces that shift our thought.
So when she encountered computers for the first time, she had one pressing question on her mind: How would these new machines change us?
Turkle has spent the last four decades investigating that question…
OneZero
The undercurrents of the future. A publication from Medium about technology and people.
