Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Apr 6, 2018

Elon Musk Worries That AI Research Will Create an 'Immortal Dictator'

Imagine your least-favorite world leader. (Take as much time as you need.) Now, imagine if that person wasn't a human, but a network of millions of computers around the world. This digi-dictator has instant access to every scrap of recorded information about every person who's ever lived. It can make...

May 7, 2018

Google AI Expert: Machine Learning Is No Better Than Alchemy

A prominent researcher of machine learning and artificial intelligence is arguing that his field has strayed out of the bounds of science and engineering and into alchemy. And he's offering a route back. Ali Rahimi, who works on AI for Google, said he thinks his field has made amazing progress,...

May 9, 2018

This Horrifying AI Thought Experiment Got Elon Musk a Date

It's Elon Musk at his Elon Musk-iest: According to news reports, the space-and-electric-car entrepreneur met his current girlfriend by making a joke about treacherous artificial intelligence. Musk and the musician Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, went to the Met Gala as a couple Monday (May 7). According to...

May 24, 2018

Will AI Ever Become Conscious?

One example of a sci-fi struggle to define AI consciousness is AMC's Humans (Tues. 10/9c starting June 5). At this point in the series, human-like machines called Synths have become self-aware; as they band together in communities to live independent lives and define who they are, they must also battle...

Jun 1, 2018

Can Machines Be Creative? Meet 9 AI 'Artists'

One of the behaviors considered to be uniquely human is our creativity. While many animal species create visually stunning displays or constructions — think of a spider's delicate web or the colorful, intricate structures built by bowerbirds — they are typically created with a practical purpose in mind, such as...

Jun 4, 2018

Google Will End Its 'Evil' Partnership with the US Military, But Not Until 2019

Following months of employee outrage and media scrutiny, Google has decided not to renew its contract to develop AI image recognition software for U.S. military drones, Gizmodo reported. On Friday (June 1), Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees that the company would allow its controversial contract with the Department...

Jun 8, 2018

Why Does Artificial Intelligence Scare Us So Much?

When people see machines that respond like humans, or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity, they sometimes joke about a future in which humanity will need to accept robot overlords. But buried in the joke is a seed of unease. Science-fiction writing and popular movies,...

Jul 11, 2018

What If AI Psychopath 'Norman' and Amazon's Alexa Got Together?

If, like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last decade and have just woken up, your flip phone has become super-popular among retro technologists and survivalists alike, and, oh yeah, artificial intelligence (AI) is either going to kill you or save you. AI is the latest in a...

Sep 7, 2018

We're Probably Living in a Simulation, Elon Musk Says

Elon Musk thinks we're all probably trapped in a Matrix-like pseudo existence. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so any civilizations that may have arisen throughout the cosmos have had loads and loads of time to hone their technological know-how, the SpaceX founder and CEO explained early this morning...

Oct 18, 2018

How Close Are We to Kubrick's AI-Controlled Vision of the Future?

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Movie audiences first heard these calmly intoned and ominous words in 1968, spoken by a spaceship's intelligent computer in the science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. With that one phrase, the computer named HAL 9000 confirmed that it could think for...

Oct 23, 2018

Portrait 'Painted' by AI Up for Auction at Christie's in NYC

An unsettling portrait created by artificial intelligence (AI) is making a historic appearance on the auction block at Christie's in New York City this week. It will be the first artwork created by an algorithm to be offered for auction in the world of fine art. The portrait — designed...

Oct 25, 2018

Creepy AI-Created Portrait Fetches $432,500 at Auction

A creepy-looking painting of a fictitious man in a dark frockcoat left the auction block at Christie's for a whopping $432,500 today (Oct. 25) in New York City. While that price tag is high — nearly 45 times its upper estimate — that's not what makes the sale so compelling:...

Jan 4, 2019

AI Can Now Decode Words Directly from Brain Waves

Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people's brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study,...

Jan 11, 2019

Mathematicians Discovered a Computer Problem that No One Can Ever Solve

Mathematicians have discovered a problem they cannot solve. It's not that they're not smart enough; there simply is no answer. The problem has to do with machine learning — the type of artificial-intelligence models some computers use to learn how to do a specific task. When Facebook or Google recognizes...

Jan 29, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Algorithms Can Be Racist. Here's Why She's Right.

Last week, newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines when she said, as part of the fourth annual MLK Now event, that facial-recognition technologies and algorithms always have these racial inequities that get translated, because algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to...