This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 30)
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free
Cade Metz | WIRED
"In the rarefied world of AI research, the brightest minds aren’t driven by—or at least not only by—the next product cycle or profit margin. They want to make AI better, and making AI better doesn’t happen when you keep your latest findings to yourself."
ROBOTICS: When a Robot Kills, Is It Murder or Product Liability?
Ryan Calo | Slate
"There is a fundamental similarity between the question of whether a robot can be responsible and the question of whether a robot should enjoy rights...We wouldn’t say of a driverless car that it possesses a responsibility to keep its passengers safe, only that it is designed to do so. But somehow, we feel comfortable saying that a driverless car is responsible for an accident."
COMPUTING: Computers Might Just 'See' Like Humans After All
Jordan Pearson | Motherboard
"Machines and humans experience greater difficulty recognizing the same kinds of images—when objects were rotated in three dimensions, for example—suggesting that deep learning networks actually follow similar 'internal mechanisms' to human vision. Knowing this, the team hopes that we can take lessons from the brain’s visual processes and use them to make computer vision better."
DRONES: Zero Zero's Camera Drone Could Be a Robot Command Center in the Future
Tekla S. Perry | IEEE Spectrum
"'When I want it to follow me around, it is using facial and body recognition to follow me and make sure I’m in the frame. It can follow anybody I choose. In the final version, though not just yet, it will do a 360 scan around itself and pull out all the faces, they pop up on my phone, then I can choose which person to follow automatically.'"
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HEALTH: Do human bodies carry more toxins now than 50 years ago?
Matt Limmer | AEON
"By some measures, more than 99 per cent of human exposure to toxins result from natural toxins, and the toxic body-burden presented by these natural toxins is unlikely to have significantly changed in modern times. The presence of such natural toxins, moreover, should not be frightening. As living organisms, we’ve evolved strategies, such as the liver, to mitigate many of these natural invaders, strategies that can be used in the defence against human-made toxins, too."
SOCIAL MEDIA: How Social Media Is Quietly (Yet Radically) Changing The Way We Buy Stuff
Ryan Holmes | Fast Company
"While we've been busy watching cat videos, social platforms have quietly turned nearly every aspect of customer experience on its head. The way people learn about products, evaluate them, buy them, and interact with companies are being mediated today by social media."
Image Credit: Shutterstock
David started writing for Singularity Hub in 2011 and served as editor-in-chief of the site from 2014 to 2017 and SU vice president of faculty, content, and curriculum from 2017 to 2019. His interests cover digital education, publishing, and media, but he'll always be a chemist at heart.
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