Perhaps adhering to the exponential growth of Moore’s Law predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence development has had several big years recently, and none bigger than the past one. The three major nation-state superpowers — the United States, China, and Russia — have a powerful monopoly on what many consider to be the next generation of warfare, known as the “Third Offset Strategy” in military circles. At the same time, big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others are vying for dominance in the fields of machine learning and neural networks. Even small startups are getting in on the action.
The last year brought a head-spinning influx of new AI projects and headlines, some of them funny, some fascinating, and others downright troubling. Anti-Media has covered it every step of the way. Here are the most stunning recent AI news stories.
‘90% Accuracy Rate’: New Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Your Death
New deep learning algorithms approved by the Food and Drug Administration have the ability to monitor patients’ vital signs and make potentially life-saving prognoses with a 90% accuracy rate. The innovation could be groundbreaking for palliative care. A separate team at Stanford University created another AI algorithm that can predict patient mortality using “an 18-layer Deep Neural Network that inputs the EHR data of a patient, and outputs the probability of death in the next 3-12 months.”
Skynet Now: Pentagon Deploys Terrorist-Hunting Artificial Intelligence
It was inevitable that the world’s governments would employ AI as a military weapon, and sure enough, in 2017 the Pentagon announced a cutting edge algorithm generals are deploying on the battlefield to hunt terrorists. As the flagship weaponized system of the mysterious Project Maven, the new AI could one day have sole control over legions of autonomous drones.
Google’s Artificial Intelligence Built Its Own AI That Outperforms Any Made by Humans
Google has become a ferocious force in AI development. In 2017, researchers at Google Brain unveiled their newest creation, AutoML, a recursively self-improving AI that is better than humans at creating...itself. Deep learning engineers say the development will dramatically improve neural network architecture and computer vision algorithms.
New Artificial Intelligence Designed to Be Mentally Unstable: What Could Go Wrong?
Computer scientist Stephen Thaler used a technique called “generative adversarial networks” to purposely create an AI that mimics the symptoms of mental illness. This tortured artist AI, known as DABUS, short for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified Sentience,” hallucinates and experiences mania. Thaler believes integrating such characteristics into machine intelligence will improve their problem solving abilities — and artwork.
An Artificial Intelligence Is Producing Short Horror Stories — and They’re Creepy as Hell
Just in time for Halloween, researchers at MIT revealed a new deep learning algorithm named Shelley AI (named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley) that is capable of writing original horror fiction.
Elon Musk: Why Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than North Korea
In the midst of the war of words between President Trump and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, tech mogul Elon Musk made headlines by proclaiming that artificial intelligence represents a greater threat to humanity than North Korea. Musk, who wants to create a “neural lace” technology to bridge human and AI intelligence, says unregulated AI presents an existential threat to the human race.
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