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What's Changing? - Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is typically defined as the ability of a machine to perform cognitive functions we associate with human minds, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with the environment, problem solving, and even exercising creativity. Examples of technologies that enable AI to solve business problems are robotics and autonomous vehicles, computer vision, language, virtual agents, and machine learning.

Please see below recent artificial intelligence (AI)-related change.

See also:

December 2024

Company leaders are struggling to police workers use of artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reported. Employees are adopting large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude faster than firms can write corporate policies on how LLMs should or shouldn't be used.
The climate crisis ran head-on into the ambitions of AI companies Google and Microsoft admitted that the electricity demands of AI required them to reconsider or revise their goals to lower carbon emissions. Companies began talking much more about — and striking deals to acquire — nuclear power, considered a cleaner energy source due to its lack of carbon emissions.

November 2024

Stanford University researchers analysed the AI capabilities of 36 countries and determined that the US significantly led in most of the 42 areas studied — including research, private investment, and notable machine learning models. China, which led in patents and journal citations, came in second, followed by the UK, India, and the UAE.

October 2024

Archaeologists discovered 303 giant symbols carved into Peru’s Nazca Desert, thanks to AI. The mysterious Nazca geoglyphs are giant drawings in the ground, easily visible from high up, some nearly 2000 years old. The research team, led by Japan’s Yamagata University and IBM’s Watson Research Centre, trained an AI model on existing geoglyphs to identify potentially undiscovered symbols.
Researchers used AI to identify 70,500 new viruses using metagenomics, in which scientists sequence entire environments based on individual samples. The research, led by University of Toronto scientists, uses a machine learning tool developed by Meta to find new viruses and predict their protein structures.

September 2024

A United Nations advisory body studying AI released its final report. Called “Governing AI for Humanity,” it is a set of findings and policy recommendations for the international organisation and an update since the group’s interim report in December 2023.
The Council of Europe officially opened its new artificial intelligence treaty for signatories. The Council is billing its treaty - called the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law - as the “first-ever international legally binding treaty” aimed at making sure AI systems are consistent with international legal standards.

August 2024

Hooked on AI? It's a real risk, OpenAI admitted in a safety report. The company said users might become too emotionally reliant on its "remarkably lifelike" voice mode, which can respond in real time, laugh, take a breath and even gauge emotional states. OpenAI warned that forming a social relationship with the tool could help "lonely individuals," but also "possibly affect...healthy relationships." The report highlighted one major risk of artificial intelligence, per CNN: many tech companies are rushing to release these much-hyped tools without fully understanding the potential consequences.
Global spending on AI will more than double in the next five years to $632 billion in spending by 2028, according to a report from the market intelligence firm, International Data Corporation.

June 2024

In their 2024 book Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World, Alvin Wang Graylin and Louis Rosenberg outlined three phases of AI evolution over the 21st century. The third stage could bring the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Although such a system would far exceed human intelligence, it would still be influenced by the totality of humanity’s creations.
The IMF said the generative AI revolution could spark massive labour disruptions and spiralling inequality across the Global North. It had already said generative AI will impact 40% of jobs worldwide. Some of those jobs will be automated away, they said, while for others the use of AI will become a key aspect of the role. Another report urged governments to take measures that will ameliorate the social impact, including improved unemployment benefits for those who lose their jobs.

May 2024

The reality of AI isn't living up to the hype, with very few people regularly using some of the best-known AI systems, according to a study from the Reuters Institute and Oxford University. Of the 12,000 people surveyed, only 2% of British and 2% of French respondents said they'd used OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot or Google Gemini on a daily basis, compared with 7% in the US.

April 2024

The World Health Organization released Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health - or SARAH - an AI chatbot that’s able to answer basic health questions. SARAH communicates in eight different languages, and the WHO says its a tool to fight misinformation about e.g. mental health, cancer, and COVID. The WHO bills SARAH, which appears as a female avatar with a voice and facial expressions, as a digital health “promoter” - not a provider - and, though SARAH hasn’t taken the Hippocratic Oath, it’s meant to fill in the gaps for people searching for health questions without access to proper health care providers.
The market is dominating AI: of the foundation models released between 2019 and 2023, 72.5% originated from private industry, according to a Stanford report. 108 models were released by companies, 28 from academia, nine from an industry-academia collaboration, and four from government. None at all were released through a collaboration between government and industry

March 2024

The UN General Assembly adopted its first-ever draft resolution on AI, pledging “to refrain from or cease the use of AI systems that are impossible to operate in compliance with international human rights law or that pose undue risks to the enjoyment of human rights.”The resolution was brought by the US delegation with the support of 123 member nations - including China and Russia.The resolution came one week after the EU became the first major power to pass comprehensive regulation to rein in the most severe risks of AI.

January 2024

Some AI prognosticators are obsessed with humanity's demise at the hands of all-powerful AI. In a survey of 2,700 scientists, more than half put the “extinction rate” - the chance that the advent of artificial intelligence will end the human race - at about 5%.

December 2023

November 2023

A late 2023 study highlighted a 2000% rise in job posts requiring generative AI skills, underscoring their demand and shortage, and some startups are now encouraged to hire AI officers due to the increasing importance and scarcity of AI skills.
Shira Perlmutter, the US register of copyrights, the country’s top copyright official, said her office had received 10,000 comments about AI in late 2023. Artists urged federal officials like Perlmutter to take a stance against AI for fear it’s innately violative. Meanwhile, a litany of lawsuits alleging copyright violations made their way through US federal courts.

October 2023

The CEO of DeepMind claimed the risks posed by AI should be taken as seriously as those posed by climate change and called for international regulatory oversight of AI, saying technologists should take inspiration from the International Panel on Climate Change.
Meanwhile, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US and the EU published an 11-point code of conduct for tech companies to “promote safe, secure and trustworthy AI worldwide”. It urged AI companies to voluntarily commit to testing their most advanced models for a range of potential risks, boosting cybersecurity defences and using watermarks for AI-generated content.

September 2023

Debate about AI tends often focuses on its potential dangers. However, others are focusing on the potential rewards. AI could, they claim, help humanity solve some of its biggest and thorniest problems, and in a very specific way: by radically accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, especially in areas such as medicine, climate science and green technology.

August 2023

People are becoming more and more aware of the biased outputs that AI generates. When prompted with imagine ‘a professional’, 80% of the images generated by MidJourney, an AI image platform, featured men. More seriously, algorithms perpetuate existing discrimination - from racial bias in financial services, policing and healthcare to gender bias in recruitment

July 2023

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) argued that the roles most threatened by AI-driven automation are highly skilled jobs: law, medicine and finance, which often require many years of education, are among the industries set to be impacted the most. The OECED added that the latest crop of "generative AI" platforms can create content that is indistinguishable from that of humans, and major economies could be at a tipping point, although, for now, AI is largely changing jobs rather than replacing them entirely.

June 2023

GZERO noted that headlines that warn of catastrophe are hiding the revolutionary advances and opportunities that could benefit billions of people. By sifting quickly and efficiently through oceans of data, AI can help scientists and researchers develop new treatments, and even cures, for diseases, including cancer. It could help educators individualise the instruction of vast numbers of children. AI could also sharply increase economic productivity, an essential step in raising living standards.
However, there are clearly risks to e.g. white collar workers like coders, paralegals, financial analysts and traders, journalists and creative, plus e.g. call centre workers in emerging markets like the Philippines, where the industry accounts for as much as 7% of GDP.
Generative AI could add $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually by reducing redundancies in work processes, according to McKinsey, who also warned that 50% of work will be automated between 2030 and 2060 - 15 years earlier than the firm initially predicted. McKinsey further estimated that current generative AI and other technologies have the potential to save 60-70% of employees’ time through automation.

May 2023

Stuart J. Russell argued in his book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, that we need to be appropriately concerned about the future threat of human-level, artificial general intelligence (AGI) which could pose an existential threat to humanity unless we can ensure that these systems remain aligned with human values and goals. He contended that the standard approach to designing AI systems - in which machines are programmed to maximise some objective function - is fundamentally flawed because these machines don’t actually understand the world around them in any comprehensive way, a flaw that could lead to unintended and catastrophic failures if it can’t anticipate the consequences of its own actions.

April 2023

Goldman Sachs (GS) warned that AI could put up to 300 million people out of work in a decade. Most at-risk jobs are desk gigs, not blue-collar manufacturing jobs people once thought would be wiped out by automation. However, GS also suggested that generative AI could improve productivity in the US by 1.5 to 2.9% over a 10-year period. Globally, this could translate to a 7% growth in GDP.

March 2023

IDC forecast global spending on AI systems to reach US$154 billion in 2023, up 26.9% from 2022.
The latest breakthroughs in AI could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs. The investment bank said that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7% over a 10-year period.
However, tech leaders called for a pause in the training of next-gen AI. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were among hundreds of signatories to an open letter advocating for shared safety protocols.

February 2023

Generative AI will change the world, many believe: the first weeks of 2023 saw Google release its text-to-music AI, a politician deliver the first AI-written speech, an elite private school cancel homework, Springer Nature ban ChatGPT as a scientific co-author, while the program also passed law and business school exams and CNET admitted its AI-written explainers were full of mistakes.
The meteoric rise of ChatGPT was a watershed moment for AI as it enabled millions of users, regular people, to experiment with AI and witness its astonishing capabilities first-hand. While there are still limitations, ChatGPT made people aware of how far AI has already come. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even spoke of an upcoming platform shift, likely referring to AI-enabled services as the next big change in tech after the shift to mobile.
Research based on BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index showed that companies that invest more in digital put more resources into AI; moreover, for those that are able to scale up AI, even small seed investments pay off big. Modest investments in specific AI use cases can generate up to 6% more revenue, and with rising investments, the revenue impact from AI triples to 20% or more.
Over 20 drugs created with the assistance of AI were already in clinical trials by 2023, opening up the possibility of faster, cheaper, more personalised pharmaceuticals.

January 2023

Despite the risks, AI can also potentially do a lot of good for humanity: one example is how machine learning can help make us live healthier and longer by detecting diseases earlier and improving certain surgeries.

December 2022

Multi-modal AI applications will allow AI systems to process audio, visual and language data in combination with and in relation to each other. Multi-modal AI can allow AI systems to analyse data and the environment in highly sophisticated, nuanced ways. In medicine, multi-modal AI could examine a combination of patient imaging and histories, and data from biosensors to craft diagnoses and treatment recommendations. The transition to multi-modal systems will also give AI even more creative power than it has today. "It's like Netflix creating a whole new film based on your preferences, versus just surfacing recommendations," according to Madrona Venture Group's Matt McIlwain.
Further reading:

November 2022

Most CVs are never read by humans. Instead, they're scanned by applicant tracking systems that filter out anyone who doesn't match a narrow profile. While some HR solutions use skill assessments to filter out fewer people, resumes are still the beginning point. TaTiO aimed to rewire the recruiting funnel by looking for skills instead of resumes. The Israeli startup created competency assessments through simulations that focus on key tasks for a specific job. AI is used to analyse a candidate's behaviour and tone of voice, and their data is made anonymous to lower the risk of unconscious biases influencing recruiters.

October 2022

The White House announced a new AI Bill of Rights. The guidelines said US citizens should be aware when AIs or automated systems are making decisions that impact them, and should be able to opt out of such systems, but critics said the proposals, which will not become law, will not change the behaviour of Big Tech.

July 2022

Researchers at DeepMind trained an AI to play a game intended to model the complex choices we face when it comes to tax and redistribution. The four-player game sees each player receive a different amount of money, and then vote on different mechanisms to pool those resources, invest them, and share the gains. After observing thousands of human games, the AI devised a tax and redistribution system that proved more popular with human players than any of the other systems they’d been using.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the world needs an AI deterrence agreement. Schmidt likened the destructive potential of AI to that of nuclear weapons, and argued that the US and China should sign a pact that outlaws aggressive uses of the technology.

June 2022

A new type of artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging as a candidate to become the next major general-purpose technology. “Foundational AI” will inject itself into many human endeavours -from writing to coding to drug discovery. The Economist explored why foundation models could end up having an economic impact similar to that of electricity, and why the emerging technology is also proving so controversial.
Further reading:

May 2022

Further reading:

April 2022

AI has often been the topic of dark dystopian thrillers and has sparked concern in real-life about replacing human workforces, but there is a growing case for AI tackling some of the world's most challenging societal issues. Throughout the pandemic, AI was invaluable in helping share real-time data with practitioners such as doctors, scientists, and research labs worldwide. However, AI's usage goes far beyond healthcare. The McKinsey Global Institute collected 160 AI social-impact use cases and the findings suggested that existing AI applications could help tackle all 17 SDGs, potentially helping hundreds of millions of people affected by climate change. For example, AI was used to increase access to safe information about aid requirements and available resources in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Dealroom mapped 130+ European companies using AI for social good.
For BCG, there are two faces to the machine-learning component of artificial intelligence algorithms. There are the competitions in which data grand masters, given fixed rules, design algorithms that set in motion a race to solve aspects of complex problems like HIV or traffic forecasting: because speed is crucial, automated data manipulation and pattern identification are frequently employed. The other face of machine learning involves the more real-world challenge of how to fix an obsolescent business process or address a business challenge using algorithms and programs.
AI can be used to educate and empower children and youth and have a positive impact on society, but children and youth can be especially vulnerable to the potential risks posed by AI, including bias, cybersecurity and lack of accessibility. The World Economic Forum believes that AI must therefore be designed inclusively to respect the rights of the child user. Child-centric design can protect children and youth from the potential risks posed by the technology. Parents, guardians and adults all have the responsibility to carefully select ethically designed AI products and help children use them safely.
Businesses are using AI to monitor the emotion of clients and prospects during online sales calls. A range of startups are building software systems to support this, and Zoom reportedly said they planned to offer emotion recognition services in future.
Further reading:

March 2022

The world’s largest online library reportedly fired 700 book reviewers and replaced them with AI. NBD Biblion selects and distributes books to most of the public libraries in the Netherlands. Its reviewers categorised and wrote short descriptions of new books as they arrived. The organisation said human reviewers are no longer needed.
A record 65 artificial intelligence companies reached US$1bn+ valuations in 2021, up over 5x from the previous year. There were 125 AI unicorns globally at the end of 2021. In the fourth quarter alone, 10 new AI vendors joined the unicorn club.
Further reading:

January 2022

An Ethiopian entrepreneur is harnessing artificial intelligence to fight food insecurity. Sara Menker told The New York Times that Gro Intelligence is informed by her childhood in Addis Ababa, being raised in "massive families," constantly aware of rations. She says the idea for Gro, which forecasts agricultural trends after analysing thousands of data sources, blossomed during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, after she became "obsessed" with inefficiencies in global food systems.
Further reading:

February 2022

Further reading:
- Does artificial intelligence entrench inequality? - Prospect

January 2022

Further reading:

December 2021

At the end of 2021, Exponential View noted that, a decade into the artificial intelligence boom, scientists in research and industry were making incredible breakthroughs. Increases in computing power, theoretical advances and a rolling wave of capital had revolutionised domains from biology and design to transport and language analysis.
New World Same Humans noted that The Megatron Transformer, an AI developed by the Applied Deep Research team at at Nvidia, had been invited to a debate on AI ethics at the Oxford Union. The team behind it say it was trained on all of Wikipedia, 64 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes worth of Reddit threads. Asked to offer its opinion on ethical AI, the Megatron said: AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans.

November 2021

The State of AI Report 2021 found, inter alia, that:
- AI stepped up in more concrete ways, including being applied to mission critical infrastructure like national electric grids and automated supermarket warehousing optimisation during pandemics.
- AI-first approaches have taken biology by storm with faster simulations of humans’ cellular machinery (proteins and RNA). This has the potential to transform drug discovery and healthcare.
- Transformers emerged as a general purpose architecture for machine learning, beating the state of the art in many domains including NLP, computer vision, and even protein structure prediction.
- Investors took notice, with record funding in 2021 into AI startups, and two first ever IPOs for AI-first drug discovery companies, as well as IPOs for data infrastructure and cybersecurity companies that help enterprises retool for the AI era.

September 2021

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet asked member states to hold off on further development of AI technology until all the "negative, even catastrophic" risks that come with it can be ironed out: AI can cause harm in a number of ways, from algorithms that codify harmful biases all the way up to AI-driven killing machines, warned GZERO.

August 2021

Despite the vast potential of AI, it hasn’t caught hold in most industries. Despite projections that AI will create $13 trillion of value a year to come true, industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare still need to find ways to make this technology work for them.
In modern society, AI systems increasingly govern and surveil people’s lives - algorithms now routinely make decisions about health care, housing, insurance, education, employment, banking, and policing—yet racial and gender biases are deeply embedded in many of these AI systems (see Artificial Intelligence and Ethics), warned Harvard Magazine.

May 2021

The Global AI Index claimed to be the first index to benchmark nations on their level of investment, innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence

April 2021

The EU proposed strict rules for facial recognition and other “high-risk” use of artificial intelligence, in the world’s first attempt to regulate the technology. The plans included a ban on social scoring and digital surveillance, excepting kidnappings and terrorist threats. Other uses, such as AI used in recruitment or self-driving vehicles, would have to be thoroughly vetted before they may be applied. Both digital rights groups and some in the tech community said the draft legislation was too ambiguous, which could create loopholes and discourage innovation.

January 2021

The World Economic Forum launched the Global AI Action Alliance in a move to bring more voices from across sectors into the conversation on ethical artificial intelligence.

December 2020

Software company Citrix predicted that AI will bring in more revenue than human workers by the end of the 2020s after surveying 1,200 business leaders in Europe. Firms will appoint Chief Artificial Intelligence Officers and leaders will increasingly rely on AI to make business decisions, Citrix says. That’s not necessarily bad news for people: AI could help upskill workers and make them more productive, for example by processing lots of data, freeing up humans to focus on more creative and strategic work.

November 2020

The adoption of AI is driving revenue for organisations, with some attributing 20% or more of their earnings to the technology. That’s according to 2020's McKinsey Global Survey, which found that marketing and sales, strategy and corporate finance and supply chain management teams saw the most significant gains from AI, with enterprises most commonly using AI to improve inventory and parts optimisation, pricing and promotion, customer-service analytics and sales and demand forecasting.

October 2020

The transformative promise of artificial intelligence in medicine is taking giant strides towards reshaping healthcare and future-proofing the health service against the onslaught of needs from an ageing demographic. The UK government claimed that AI could reduce cancer rates by 10 per cent, saving 20,000 lives a year by 2033, while its widespread adoption could free up an estimated £12.5 billion a year in NHS staff time.
With rising numbers of people looking for work during the pandemic, companies turned to AI-based solutions to sort CVs - but experts warned that these could disadvantage some candidates due to biases in the software. Keyword AIs trained on previous hires could cull certain demographic groups based on soft skills or even hobbies, Raluca Crisan, co-founder of a firm that analyses AI bias, told Wired. Timeline-based AI could also penalise people for CV gaps or shorter periods of service. Research by Capgemini showed that while the majority of firms were aware of discriminatory issues around AI, only half hadsomeone overseeing their AI ethics standards.

August 2020

Tortoise Media launched The Global AI Index, asking: is the world ready for AI and who’s winning the global AI race? As governments and industries try to keep pace, it claims that its flagship index is the first to benchmark countries on AI innovation and implementation.
Scientists have warned there could be thousands of excess deaths in the coming years due to delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment during by the coronavirus crisis.The pandemic meant routine screenings, and urgent referrals and treatments, have been delayed or cancelled, leading to a backlog of patients. But artificial intelligence (AI) could be a solution. Over the past decade, AI has emerged as a leading technology with the potential to aid the medical community, from speeding up diagnostics and improving accuracy to improving patient outcomes and hospital efficiencies.

July 2020

Despite the varying effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across different industries, the global market for artificial intelligence (AI) software will expand to $98.8 billion by 2025, according to a report from Omdia. That number is an increase by a factor of six from $16.4 billion in 2019.
AI got a "B-" in helping handling Covid. The plus side: robots delivering food and medication, and contact tracing. The minus side: AI works by accumulating a lot of data, but a pandemic is a once-in-a-century activity, and there isn't a lot of experience building models to deal with this situation.
Startup Urbint uses AI to anticipate and prevent catastrophic power failures. Using algorithmic risk scoring, the startup's system can determine where high damage is likely to occur on any day of the week, given a range of circumstances, reported GZEROMedia.

June 2020

Microsoft announced that it would lay off dozens of journalists, editors, and other workers at MSN and its other news divisions and replace many of them with artificial intelligence. Soon, AI algorithms will search the internet for news stories and decide which ones are most important—a job that has long been reliant on skilled editors. This comes amid 36,000 layoffs at news organisations, triggered by the economic decline of the pandemic, noted Future Today Institute.

April 2020

Traders deciding on the next big market bet. A navigation app quickly mapping out a less-explored area. Fashion brands choosing the hottest colour of the season. An airport managing flight delays. MIT Sloan asked: what do these scenarios have in common? In each one, swarm intelligence blends global and local insight to improve how businesses make decisions. Swarm intelligence is a form of AI inspired by the insect kingdom. In nature, it describes how honeybees migrate, how ants form perfect trails, and how birds flock. In the world of AI, swarm systems draw input from individual people or machine sensors and then use algorithms to optimise the overall performance of the group or system in real time.

December 2019

Adoption of AI continues to increase, and the technology is generating returns. The findings of the 2019 McKinsey Global Survey on the subject showed a nearly 25% year-over-year increase in the use of AI in standard business processes, with a sizeable jump from the past year in companies using AI across multiple areas of their business. A majority of executives whose companies have adopted AI report that it has provided an uptick in revenue in the business areas where it is used, and 44 percent say AI has reduced costs.

October 2019

Forbes cautioned about AI's growing ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're “good” or “bad” in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilisation hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be “good” employees, “good” customers, “good” dates and “good” citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China.

June 2019

AI technologies are forecast to add US$15 trillion to the global economy by 2030. According to the findings of an Oxford Insights index, the governments of countries in the Global North are better placed to take advantage of these gains than those in the Global South. There is a risk, therefore, that countries in the Global South could be left behind by the so-called fourth industrial revolution. Not only will they not reap the potential benefits of AI, but there is also the danger that unequal implementation widens global inequalities.

May 2019

Quartz noted that AI is learning teamwork. Researchers have managed to train AI bots to work as a team in a deadly game of capture the flag.

March 2019

AI contributed US$2 trillion to global GDP in 2018, according to a PwC report. The report also estimated that the AI industry could contribute $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. The greatest economic gains by 2030 will be the 26 percent boost to GDP in China and the 14.5 percent boost in North America.

February 2019

A Nuffield Foundation briefing summarised a roadmap for research on the ethical and societal implications of algorithms, data and AI (ADA). It was aimed at those involved in planning, funding, and pursuing research and policy work related to these technologies. The term ‘ADA-based technologies’ is used to capture a broad range of ethically and societally relevant technologies based on algorithms, data, and AI, recognising that these three concepts are not totally separable from one another and will often overlap. The roadmap was commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation to inform the development of the Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent research and deliberative body with a mission to ensure data and AI work for people and society.
In AI Safety Needs Social Scientists, Distill argued that properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values will require resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. These can only be resolved empirically through experimentation - if we want to train AI to do what humans want, we need to study humans.
Further reading:

January 2019

A new programme at the DARPA research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas. “Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. It’s the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events.
Further reading:

December 2018

The 2018 edition of the AI Index highlighted further acceleration in the performance of AI systems, research in AI, a boom in demand for relevant skills and continued investment.
The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report, compiled by experts from a number of institutions including the University of Cambridge and research firm OpenAI, argued that in the wrong hands, AI could be exploited by rogue states, terrorists and criminals. The World Economic Forum noted that such threats include remote-controlled vehicle crashes and the manipulation of public opinion.
Deepfake is an AI-based technology used to produce or alter video content so that it presents something that didn't, in fact, occur. It can make it look as if anyone has said or done anything. Is it the next wave of (mis)information warfare, asked The Guardian?
For Raconteur, the fact that AI is dramatically transforming the human resources industry is somewhat ironic, given the growing global clamour for robots, usurping millions of jobs. HR, though, is not traditionally associated with pioneering nascent technology, and failure to deploy and develop AI could prove a fatal mistake.
Raconteur noted that AI offers the potential to automate very low-value repetitive tasks and provide data-driven insights on liquidity and execution, all of which can be very valuable to an investment management trading desk in seeking the best possible deal for investors.
Further reading:

November 2018

AI has the potential to help tackle some of the world’s most challenging social problems. To analyse potential applications for social good, McKinsey compiled a library of about 160 AI social-impact use cases. They suggested that existing capabilities could contribute to tackling cases across all 17 of the UN’s sustainable-development goals, potentially helping hundreds of millions of people in both advanced and emerging countries. Real-life examples of AI were already being applied in about one-third of these use cases, albeit in relatively small tests. They range from diagnosing cancer to helping blind people navigate their surroundings, identifying victims of online sexual exploitation, and aiding disaster-relief efforts.
AI will test truthfulness in European airports, reported Quartz. Virtual border guards will look more sceptical and use different tones of voice if they think passengers are lying.
How to create more diverse workplaces and how to use AI ethically are among the more challenging dilemmas facing business and government, according to The New York Times. While the issues may appear to have little in common besides their complexity, they do overlap. Recently, for example, according to news reports Amazon abandoned a hiring tool that used artificial intelligence because it favoured men.
One source of income inequality is prejudice. Unconscious (and conscious) attitudes direct opportunities more to favoured groups and steer them away from those on the outs. Forbes noted that Silicon Valley types assumed they could solve the problem like any other - with software, by having AI look at the patterns and make the decisions. Then came the warning signs in research that AI-driven systems were maybe not as free of bias as their creators thought - for example, Amazon dropped recruiting software that used AI because it preferred to hire men over women.
AI and automation technologies have the potential to transform government processes and public services, freeing up employee time spent on manual, repetitive tasks. But what does the ordinary citizen make of AI, asked Raconteur.
US-based workforce information firm Kronos partnered with IBM to create an AI-powered Watson Career Coach for hourly workers.The mobile-based, chatbot service provides workers with personalised advice on recommended trainings, earning promotions and raises, and switching positions within their organisations. The service, noted TrendWatching, is aimed at companies in, for example, the food service or retail sectors who employ large numbers of lower paid hourly workers where it is difficult to provide meaningful 1:1 human career management.
Google’s AI assistant appreciates good manners. It won’t scold you for not saying “please” and “thank you,” but it will be nicer if you do.
Further reading:
- The A-Z of how artificial intelligence is changing the world - BBC

October 2018

AI could contribute an estimated additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and a Raconteur infographic examined which countries and sectors might benefit the most.
The FT argued that the latest incarnations of AI are not much better at solving real world complex problems than their ancestors were three decades ago. Heavily-tuned systems can win at narrow challenges such as Go, chess, or Jeopardy. But diagnosing a disease from the myriad and conflicting symptoms a human being can exhibit is currently beyond them. So what is AI good for, asked the FT? What it has always been good for: the identification of patterns in complex data. Medical image anomaly detection, hydrocarbon detection, consumer behavioural prediction and fraud detection have all benefited from advances in computational capacity. These all share two things: large volumes of well-structured input data and well-defined endpoints.
Google announced it would not bid for the US Defense Department cloud computing contract JEDI, potentially worth $10bn. Google explained that the company would not bid because “we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles”. Google is one of many companies considering the ethical questions surrounding artificial intelligence. Read more from CB Insights about how tech companies are confronting ethics in AI here.
Stephen Hawking’s final warnings to humanity emerged. In his last writings, reported Quartz, the late physicist predicted that a breed of genetically engineered “superhumans” would take over. AI, meanwhile, could develop “a will that is in conflict with ours”.
We have AI as a new tool to help us better manage the impacts of climate change and protect the planet, according to a World Economic Forum report, Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for the Earth. In India, AI has helped farmers get 30% higher groundnut yields per hectare by providing information on preparing the land, applying fertiliser and choosing sowing dates. In Norway, AI helped create a flexible and autonomous electric grid, integrating more renewable energy.
AI in China is already a powerful enabler of authoritarian rule, with the government facing few legal constraints while accessing the enormous amounts of personal data generated by consumer tech services. But a Wired article also warned that China aims to become much more: an AI superpower exporting its techno-authoritarian revolution to the world.
Artificial intelligence has got pretty good at detecting lies, noted Quartz. Police departments in Spain have used machine learning to find dozens of false written confessions.
Further reading:

September 2018

Research from the McKinsey Global Institute attempted to simulate the impact of AI on the world economy:
- First, it builds on an understanding of the behaviour of companies and the dynamics of various sectors to develop a bottom-up view of how to adopt and absorb AI technologies.
- Second, it takes into account the likely disruptions that countries, companies, and workers are likely to experience as they transition to AI.
- Third, it examines the dynamics of AI for a wide range of countries - clustered into groups with similar characteristics - with the aim of giving a more global view.
Gains from AI could add $13 trillion to global economic output by 2030, around 16 percent higher cumulative GDP compared to today, according to McKinsey, but those benefits may be spread unevenly, and the economic impact of AI could exacerbate divides between workers, companies, and governments.
Microsoft announced AI for Humanitarian Action, a new $40 million, five-year programme. The initiative will harness the power of AI to focus on helping the world recover from disasters, addressing the needs of children, protecting refugees and displaced people, and promoting respect for human rights. The AI for Humanitarian Action program is part of Microsoft’s AI for Good suite – a growing $115 million, five-year commitment to work to unlock solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges with AI - read more at Microsoft on the Issues.
Meanwhile, The Economist highlighted a new report which suggested that AI may not be as bad for workers as many fear. The researchers found that AI would not take away as many jobs as expected. It could increase collaboration and job satisfaction, break down groupthink and promote diversity in job searches. Though AI programs are only as good as the data they are fed, the report is an optimistic corrective to the usual alarming predictions.
EY's Digital Trust campaign looked at how AI is quickly outpacing the governance and controls that guide its use - increasing demand from clients about how they should adapt.- see How do you teach AI the value of trust?
EY warned that as AI and machine learning proliferate, AI technologies are rapidly outpacing the organisational governance and controls that guide their use. External regulators simply can’t keep up, and enterprises are grappling with increasing demands to demonstrate sound and transparent controls that can evolve as quickly as the technology does.
The AI revolution will bring short-term pain before long-term gains, warned Project Syndicate. If that pain occurs against a backdrop of frustration with the unequal distribution of AI's benefits, it may trigger a backlash against technologies that could otherwise produce a virtuous cycle of higher productivity, income growth, and employment-boosting demand.
There are about 10,000 known human diseases, yet human doctors are only able to recall a fraction of them at any given moment. As many as 40,500 patients die annually in intensive care in the U.S. as a result of misdiagnosis, according to a 2012 Johns Hopkins study. A British entrepreneur believes that AI can help doctors avoid these mistakes.
Recruiting cybersecurity experts is becoming a challenge for companies, as skilled staff are in short supply, reported the FT, but AI is coming to the rescue. While AI is already taking the pressure off overstretched cybersecurity teams, the skills required from professionals are changing rapidly as the technology evolves. This is forcing companies to choose between retraining existing staff or hiring fresh talent. Machine learning is ideally suited to monitoring growing volumes of data for potential security breaches and cutting cybersecurity teams’ workloads.
AI can predict a city’s obesity levels by analysing its buildings, according to Quartz. Using satellite images, Google Street View, and health data, researchers trained an algorithm to estimate obesity rates without examining its inhabitants.
Further reading:

August 2018

Recommended read of the month: AI in startups.
In an effort to stop trolls, Wikimedia Foundation partnered with Jigsaw (the tech incubator formerly known as Google Ideas) on a research project called Detox using machine learning to flag comments that might be personal attacks. This project is part of Jigsaw’s initiative to build open-source AI tools to help combat harassment on social media platforms and web forums.
Now we have personal assistants in our pockets and on our desks, automated factories and self-driving cars currently being tested, we are, "living in the imagined futures of our past", claimed Big Think, recommending 10 AI books to help us get to the next step.
In spite of recent progress, AI has a long way to go to approach human-level learning, thinking, and problem solving ability — a goal known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Today’s AIs are quite narrow and rigid. The vast majority of researchers agree that current technology is nowhere near human (or even animal) intelligence in terms of general cognitive ability. However, the coming "third wave of AI" may change this.
Meanwhile, Forbes showcased 10 examples of how deep learning is used in practice to help its readers visualise its potential.
Lawfare warned that means nations will try to identify, steal, and corrupt or otherwise counteract the AI and related assets of others, and will use AI against each other in pursuit of their own national interests. And that presents nations with a classic counterintelligence problem in a novel and high-stakes context: how do they protect a valuable national asset against a range of threats from hostile foreign actors, and how do they protect themselves against the threat from AI in the hands of adversaries?
A lot of AI development is being spent in the cybersecurity space, noted CIO, with the advent of ransomware, sophisticated malware and the like. All the top technology companies are spending millions each year on AI and cyber security -- from Microsoft to Google, from Cisco to Symantec, including the big name anti-virus companies. However, in the last few years, there has been an increase in startups around security tools that tout machine learning and AI (Darktrace, Cylance, AlienVault, etc.) - there is more about this trend in Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017, 2016, and 2015.
Analyst firm CCS Insight sees AI radically transforming the health care industry over the next five years. AI will bring important improvements in operational effectiveness, care delivery and above all, patient outcomes. It will also be a vital tool in helping solve some of our most challenging health-related problems, not least how to balance restricted budgets and reduced workforces against the growth of chronic conditions.
The vision of AI that China is creating is a thoroughly illiberal one, warned the National Review. Constant surveillance of citizens is powering initiatives such as the Social Credit System, which will rate citizens on their social and economic performance, increasing the power of the state to enforce its cultural vision. If liberal governments fail to develop AI strategies that can sufficiently compete with those of China, "dire consequences will follow for global democracy".
McKinsey research suggested that a technology race has started for AI, a set of new technologies now in the early stages of deployment. It appears that AI adopters can’t flourish without a solid base of core and advanced digital technologies. Companies that can assemble this bundle of capabilities are starting to pull away from the pack and will probably be AI’s ultimate winners.
As AI technologies have become more powerful in recent years there has been growing interest in how the technology will impact our work. The latest of these comes from an MIT Sloan academic who recently penned a paper that attempts to provide a more nuanced exploration of the topic than the utopian and doomsday predictions that occupy either end of the spectrum. The paper argues that whole jobs are very unlikely to be disrupted or replaced by machines, with a much more likely scenario being that specific tasks will be replaced instead, although some jobs are likely to have more of their tasks automated than others.
Powerful AI needs to be reliably aligned with human values. Does this mean that AI will eventually have to police those values? Cambridge philosophers considered the trade-off between safety and autonomy in the era of superintelligence.
Of all corporate functions, sales by its very nature is surely the most people-focused, argued Raconteur. While it may no longer involve quite as much face-to-face interaction as it once did, selling has remained emphatically a job for people rather than machines. However, AI and machine-learning are already starting to make major inroads into the sales process, adding an extra dimension to everything from marketing automation to customer relationship management. And they work. According to Salesforce Research, high-performing teams are at least twice as likely to be using intelligent sales technologies such as AI, sentiment analysis, next-step analysis and deep-learning.
Academics at Stanford University demonstrated that a “deep learning” algorithm was capable of diagnosing potentially cancerous skin lesions as accurately as a board-certified dermatologist. The cancer finding, reported in Nature, was part of a stream of reports offering an early glimpse into what could be a new era of “diagnosis by software,” in which AI aids doctors - or even competes with them. Experts say medical images, like photographs, x-rays, and MRIs, are a nearly perfect match for the strengths of deep-learning software, which has in the past few years led to breakthroughs in recognising faces and objects in pictures.
AI is taking hold of the gaming industry, and promises to revolutionise everything from eSports to in-game advertising. However, the gaming industry is no stranger to AI, noted CB Insights, adding that games as early as Space Invaders (1978) used computer-controlled, non-player characters to enhance the game experience for human players.
The Omidyar Network published its framework on ethical AI with the Institute of the Future.
Are you neurotic, agreeable, an extravert, or conscientious? New AI technology purports to know you better than you know yourself. Machine learning is bringing a new meaning to the phrase “in the blink of an eye”, reported the World Economic Forum, with researchers at the University of South Australia and the University of Stuttgart using eye movements to predict key traits.

July 2018

According to EY's AI leader, the main reason AI is less understood than previous technologies is that it isn’t just one technology, but rather a number of different technologies like machine learning, speech recognition, computing vision, natural language processing, and planning.
Countries and companies are beginning to attend to the ethics of AI technology use. However, such efforts need to be collectively determined to result in solid frameworks, cautioned Computer Weekly.
Quartz noted that scientists test new chemical compounds on animals because we they claim we still don’t completely understand the world around us. New compounds might interact with living cells in unexpected ways, causing unforeseen harm. But an AI system published in the research journal Toxicological Sciences showed that it might be possible to automate some tests using the knowledge about chemical interactions we already have. The AI was trained to predict how toxic tens of thousands of unknown chemicals could be, based on previous animal tests, and the algorithm’s results were shown to be as accurate as live animal tests.
Brains and Chains was a recent AI and Blockchain conference which explored the intersection of these two cutting-edge technological trends, and discussed how they can be utilised to create opportunities for innovative solutions.
Prediction Machines, a new book by the University of Toronto’s Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb, argued that the core benefit AI technology will provide to us is the ability to significantly lower the cost of making accurate predictions.
New research from Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute revealed that AI is no longer alien to consumers, with close to three-quarters indicating they have interacted via AI, and 69% of those who have used AI being satisfied with those interactions. The report, The Secret to Winning Customers’ Hearts with Artificial Intelligence: Add Human Intelligence, revealed that 55% of consumers prefer interactions enabled by a mix of AI and humans, and 64% want AI to be more human-like.
AI is no longer just about the ability to calculate the quickest driving route from London to Bucharest, or to outplay Garry Kasparov at chess. Think next-level, said Aeon: think artificial emotional intelligence. ‘Siri, I’m lonely’: an increasing number of people are directing such affective statements, good and bad, to their digital helpmeets. According to Amazon, half of the conversations with the company’s smart-home device Alexa are of non-utilitarian nature – groans about life, jokes, existential questions.
The Global Artificial Intelligence Platform Market 2018 - by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 claimed to focus on the leading factors responsible for the development of the global AI market and highlight the dominant players in the AI market.
Most employers do not (yet) feel threatened by AI. According to recent data from work benefits giant MetLife, 56% of employers demonstrated a positive view of automation technologies like AI, analytics and even robots.
New research from Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute revealed that AI is no longer alien to consumers, with close to three-quarters (73%) indicating they have interacted via AI, and 69% of those who have used AI being satisfied with those interactions. The report, “The Secret to Winning Customers’ Hearts with Artificial Intelligence: Add Human Intelligence” reveals that 55% of consumers prefer interactions enabled by a mix of AI and humans, and 64% want AI to be more human-like

June 2018

62 years ago this summer, Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has come to think it’s unhelpful. “Instead of thinking about AI as separate or adversarial to humans, it’s more helpful and accurate to think about machines augmenting our collective intelligence and society,” Ito told WIRED, who in turn advise us to say goodbye to AI, and hello to EI, or XI, for extended intelligence.
Chatham House warned that AI technology may have profound impacts on economic and geopolitical power balances, but it will require clarity of purpose to ensure that it does not simply serve to reinforce existing inequities.
Google announced its AI Principles which include being socially beneficial, avoiding unfair bias, safe, accountable, transparent, scientifically rigorous and not used harmfully (including for weapons or surveillance beyond ‘international norms’).
New research highlights how differing attitudes towards trust of AI could lead to a new digital divide. Refusing to accept the advantages offered by AI could place a large group of people at a serious disadvantage: for example, differential access to job opportunities.
The Economist noted that, while we are still a fair way from the researchers’ goal of what is technically called Artificial General Intelligence - a machine that can successfully perform any task an average human could and even, perhaps, become self-aware - IBM’s AI researchers are already thinking through the kinds of problem-solving activities that, rolled together, would make something like a human brain.
Artificial Intelligence is driving huge value for businesses, but will AI kill creativity? Accenture Interactive views AI as a creative enabler that should be fully integrated into marketing strategies to free up creatives to do what they are best at and discussed ow businesses can drive real value from AI and harness new opportunities.
Although it can replicate behaviour, AI does not have imagination, because it is just a sorting algorithm with advanced functional optimisation and regression techniques. The human mind, on the other hand, is rapidly creative and imaginative. Humans are able to think of stories and imagine things which we then bring to life. AI cannot do that, rather what it can do is repetitive tasks at an extremely efficient rate. So in the age of AI human creativity will have more premium than ever before. The world will need more creativity in all endeavours, even in regards to implementing and leveraging AI technology creatively.
For all of human history, politics has been fundamentally driven by conscious human action and the collective actions and interactions of humans within networks and organisations. Now, noted Chatham House in a major new report, Artificial Intelligence and International Affairs, which argued that advances in AI hold out the prospect of a fundamental change in this arrangement: the idea of a non-human entity having specific agency could create radical change in our understanding of politics at the widest levels.
AI has passed a new landmark in its development: its first psychopath. Researchers at MIT Media Lab have developed Norman, a machine-learning algorithm fed on a data diet of dark subject matter.
Some futurists and tech experts predict a not-so-distant future in which AI, having achieved a certain indistinguishability from humans, will be truly intelligent. At that point, they claim, AI will experience the world in ways not too unlike the ways that we experience it – emotionally, intelligently, and spiritually.
As AI is woven deeper into different types of software and business processes, the success of it, particularly from customer experience and personalisation standpoints, depends on its ability to recognise emotion and act accordingly. Will machines be able to achieve artificial empathy? Or have they already, asked Information Week,
While automation and AI are already transforming businesses and will contribute to economic growth via contributions to productivity, they will also help address “moonshot” societal challenges in areas from health to climate change, believes McKinsey.
You wouldn’t leave a child without supervision. And we shouldn’t leave AI systems without supervision, either, warned Quartz. Despite the learning potential of AI, it is in its infancy and cannot be left unattended. From over-optimised GPS sending unwitting tourists into barely existent dirt paths inside Death Valley to Microsoft’s AI Twitter bot going rogue after Twitter pranksters filled its brain with hate speech; whether unintentional or by malicious design, algorithms behaving unexpectedly are now a fact of life.
In the race to master artificial intelligence, Europe is a clear laggard, warned the FT. The US and China dominate AI in everything from research to investment. Whereas Europe spent about $3bn-$4bn on AI in 2016, investment in North America was up to $23bn, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
Google’s Director of Engineering and, co-founder of Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil, has predicted that by 2029 AI will achieve human level of intelligence and by 2045 'Singularity' will happen, which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.

May 2018

No longer confined to the realms of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has become central to the corporate agenda, with PwC predicting it could add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. The AI for Business special report, published in The Times, examines the many business areas which could be boosted by smart use of AI, from education to energy.
From booking systems to customer and feedback services, chatbots are ubiquitous in business. But in areas, such as health or the home, people seem less willing to engage with what is effectively a computer running smart software or a machine that “learns” thorough artificial intelligence (AI). However, according to Raconteur, businesses are increasingly taking advantage of advances in emotionally intelligent AI to open up new opportunities to gain people’s trust when it comes to more sensitive subjects.
The rise of the personal computer and the internet have given us an early taste of how access to augmented intelligence might change ther world. But a new Quantumrun six-part series talked about a future of truly limitless intelligence, the kind that learns on its own, takes action on its own, a magnitude of intelligence that “can liberate or enslave the whole of humanity”.
Retail companies are turning to AI, with companies like Walmart using the tech for shelf-scanning robots to manage inventory. CB Insights took a look at how AI is impacting all parts of the retail chain, from heavy lifting in the warehouse to chatbots online.
Accenture research has shown that, globally, AI could boost profitability by an average of 38%, leading to an economic boost of $14 trillion by 2035.
EY pointed to a number of recent cases where AI has been able to accelerate human innovation:
1) Google used DeepMind to reduce the amount of energy required to cool its massive data centers by 40%. Google engineers were stunned the software could achieve these savings. The rule of thumb was that the most energy efficient way to cool a building was to run as few systems as possible, maxing out each one before bringing additional units online. But the AI didn’t do this. Instead, it turned on almost all the cooling systems simultaneously, but ran them at lower power levels, balancing the heat load across almost all of them.
2) In 2016, AlphaGo (a software developed by DeepMind) defeated world’s top player (Lee Sedol) at the board game Go. The game Go originated in China two to three millennia ago and has possible moves to the tune of 10^170 (more than the number of atoms in the universe). There are plenty of rules of thumb about the best ways to play the game. However, during the contest with Lee Sedol, AlphaGo came up with entirely new ways of approaching the game, for instance, it choose to cede territory around the perimeter of the board in situations when humans, based on strategies developed over generations, do the opposite.
3) Google's AI research team Magenta created the Neural Synthesiser, or 'NSynth', a software capable of generating entirely new sounds. It invents audio using deep AI neural networks, which blend the sounds of two instruments to create a novel, hybrid sound.
Philosophers and others in the field of the humanities who helped shape previous concepts of world order tend to be disadvantaged, lacking knowledge of AI’s mechanisms or being overawed by its capacities. In contrast, the scientific world is impelled to explore the technical possibilities of its achievements, and the technological world is preoccupied with commercial vistas of fabulous scale. The incentive of both these worlds is to push the limits of discoveries rather than to comprehend them, warned The Atlantic. And governance, insofar as it deals with the subject, is more likely to investigate AI’s applications for security and intelligence than to explore the transformation of the human condition that it has begun to produce.
One of the main concerns with AI technologies today is the fear that they will propagate the various biases we already have in society. A recent Stanford study turned things around however, and highlighted how AI can also turn the mirror onto society and shed light on the biases that exist within it. The study utilised word embeddings to map relationships and associations between words, and through that measure the changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes over the last century in the United States. The algorithms were fed text from a huge canon of books, newspapers and other texts, whilst comparing these with official census demographic data and societal changes.
While there is a lot of news about how artificial intelligence is changing business, Inc. argued that the most common misconception about AI is that it's complicated and only for large companies and that you don't need to be a data scientist to know how to leverage data just like you don't need to be a developer to create the concept behind an app. There are plenty of simple consumer-facing tools powered by AI that can help people run a small business or startup.
Scarcely a day goes by without artificial intelligence making news in some form or other, noted Burson Cohn & Wolfe. Much of it is about the new applications for AI, which have been used to create new beers, diagnose depression, detect cardiac arrests, and even write poetry. But there are also ominous warnings about the dangers of AI, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin last month joining Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the late Stephen Hawking worrying about the technology’s threat to humanity.
The FT noted that the potential scale of deep learning’s impact on business had been laid out in an April 2018 report from McKinsey Global Institute, Notes from the AI Frontier: Insight from Hundreds of Use Cases. Depending on the industry it is in, the value a company could hope to gain from applying this technology ranges from 1 to 9 per cent of its revenues. This points to trillions of dollars of potential impact on business - and the workers who are the first to learn how to apply it will be the big winners.
Roland Berger’s Think:Act magazine asked what exactly do people mean when they talk about AI in 2018 and tried to answer the question as to where to start if you want to embrace AI in your business.
We already have lots of choices when it comes to the products in our life, noted Inc. Coffee or tea? Nike or Adidas? Apple or Samsung etc? Futurist (and Inc. magazine columnist) Amy Webb claimed the stakes of those decisions will soon be a lot higher, as she talked about the larger role AI will play in our everyday lives in the not-too-distant future. "You won't be deciding between systems like iOS or Android for your phone," she said. "You'll be deciding: Do you want your life operating system to be Amazon or Google? If you think it's hard choosing a smartphone, just wait."
Over the next 15 years, AI will take ever (financial) services types of jobs, according to research firm Autonomous’s new report. Two converging trends have enabled forms of AI that can effectively mimic or replace human labour, argued Fast Company. On the one hand, specialised hardware has increased processing power, making it possible for AI systems to generate outputs in real time. At the same time, the amount of data available to feed those systems has skyrocketed, thanks to search histories, online photos, and more.
McKinsey believes that AI can be a huge help to the leader who’s trying to become more inwardly agile and foster creative approaches to transformation. When a CEO puts AI to work on the toughest and most complex strategic challenges, he or she must rely on the same set of practices that build personal inner agility. Sending AI out into the mass of complexity, without knowing in advance what it will come back with, the CEO is embracing the discovery of original, unexpected, and breakthrough ideas.
AI is a wide-ranging tool that enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyse data, and use the resulting insights to improve decision making - and already it is transforming every walk of life, believes the Brookings Institution, which offers recommendations for getting the most out of AI while still protecting important human values.
The most momentous challenge facing socio-economic systems today is the arrival of AI, argued The Washington Post. If AI remains under the control of market forces, it will inexorably result in a super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires who reap the wealth created by robots that displace human labor, leaving massive unemployment in their wake. But China’s socialist market economy could provide a solution to this. If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.
Artificial Intelligence will enable breakthrough advances in areas like healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation, argued GZEROMedia. But how do we deal with the complex questions and societal concerns that AI raises? How do we ensure that AI is designed and used responsibly? How do we establish ethical principles to protect people? And how will AI impact employment and jobs? Microsoft explored these issues, and offered suggestions on the way forward in a new book, The Future Computed - read more here.
Rand asked whether AI could upend concepts of nuclear deterrence that have helped spare the world from nuclear war since 1945? Stunning advances in AI- coupled with a proliferation of drones, satellites, and other sensors - raise the possibility that countries could find and threaten each other's nuclear forces, escalating tensions.

April 2018

Explaining the origins of AI, a new article explained how it is generally agreed that John McCarthy coined the phrase “artificial intelligence” in the written proposal for a 1956 Dartmouth workshop, dated August 31st, 1955.
The AI revolution hasn’t happened, yet argued that we need a 'human-centric engineering discipline' to ensure that what we develop helps humans flourish.
Advanced AI techniques (such as deep learning and reinforcement learning) could unlock around $5 trillion of value annually across multiple industries according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Microsoft disclosed it has refused to sell AI tools to customers it believed had bad intentions.
Top AI researchers are reportedly being paid more than $1m a year.
AI brings huge opportunities for civil society organisations to improve the lives of people and communities around the world, argued the World Economic Forum: e.g. the charity Parkinson’s UK is exploring whether machine learning could be applied to develop better early warning indicators for Parkinson ’s disease.
Artificial intelligence is front and centre with business and government leaders pondering the right moves. But what’s happening in the lab, where discoveries by academic and corporate researchers will set AI’s course for the coming year and beyond? PwC's team of researchers homed in on the leading developments both technologists and business leaders should watch closely.
According to McKinsey, AI stands out as a transformational technology of our digital age, and its practical application throughout the economy is growing apace. For its briefing, Notes from the AI frontier: Insights from hundreds of use cases, McKinsey mapped both traditional analytics and newer “deep learning” techniques and the problems they can solve to more than 400 specific use cases in companies and organisations.

A new SAS eBook summarised answers and results of recent interviews with business leaders that explored enterprise readiness for AI, Based on the results of that survey, this eBook delves into the biggest opportunities and challenges organisations recognise on their way to AI adoption.
A case for broadening the study of machine behaviour. These AI systems “are a new class of agents that inhabit our world. We must use every tool at our disposal to understand and regulate their impact on the human race.”
Francois Chollet, a deep learning expert, outlined his fears that AI could be used as a tool to exploit and manipulate people.

“W e are here to create” is an interview with Kai-Fu Lee, pioneering AI researcher and head of one of China’s Top VC firms. He’s been frank about the risks: “We’re all going to face a very challenging next fifteen or twenty years, when half of the jobs are going to be replaced by machines.

Emmanuel Macron announced his intention to make France an AI leader and avoid “dystopia”, supported by €1.5bn in investment. Macron demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the opportunity - both technological and social - of artificial intelligence.

How AI engineers are tackling bias in face-recognition systems.

GE Medical Systems is figuring out how to deliver machine intelligence across its platforms. (Sources: Exponential View, Azeem Azhar's Wondermissive: Future, Tech & Society

Pre-2018

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a long-term investigation of the field of AI and its influences on people, their communities, and society. It considers the science, engineering, and deployment of AI-enabled computing systems.
So how will AI systems change the way we live? Well, AI tools are already producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and disease detection.
Beyond that, in our daily lives, how might AI affect e.g. urban life in future years?
On a moral level, what do we need to do to fully consider the ethical dimensions of AI?
The grandly-named Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society certainly is not shy about its ambitions. Led by Google and Microsoft, and including Facebook, Amazon and IBM, its goals are: “to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education”. The name and the lofty language convey, for the FT, the difficulty of setting the right expectations around AI. Reeking of condescension, they reinforce the impression of a technocratic elite deigning to reach down to the rest of mankind.
The Accenture Institute for High Performance recently surveyed nearly 1,800 managers across 14 countries to gauge their feelings about the emergence of AI. Unlike their counterparts in the Americas and Asia Pacific, European managers are significantly more cautious about adopting AI in their work and reluctant to regard intelligent machines as active partners in the workplace. Yet while AI may initially present challenges for managers, the technology could enable them to reinvent their roles and introduce significant opportunities to create value.
Further, how will AI impact individual business functions? In marketing, for example, Gartner estimates that 20% of business content will be authored by machines by 2018. However, when you talk to an AI chatbot, while there’s certainly an algorithm behind the scenes, humans put together the phrases - indeed some tech companies are even creating teams of writers, including playwrights, poets, and novelists, to help write lines that don’t sound like they came from a machine. The work can range from creating a consistent character for a chatbot, to inspiring an immersive virtual reality – again, in short, “knowledge work”.
In the Black asked what the evolution from automation and data-analytics software to AI is likely to mean for accountants. It identified five accounting tasks that are likely to be affected: 1. Auditing 2. Risk management 3. Vendor reconciliation 4. Regulatory compliance and reporting and 5. Trend analytics.
An October 2016 webinar for APQC, 'Big Knowledge from Big Data', discussed the power and allure of Big Data and how it enables organisations to leverage unconventional data points and turn large quantities of information, both structured and unstructured, into better business decisions and impact.

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