This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 16th)

Alison E. Berman

Jul 16, 2016

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
Ellen Huet | Bloomberg
"The company [X.ai] advertises Amy as an AI personal assistant who can 'magically schedule meetings'...But the system isn’t yet ready to take the next step on its own. Multiple former AI trainers said that as recently as a few months ago, trainers looked over parts of almost all incoming e-mails—to evaluate what Amy guessed the user was saying—before Amy generated an auto response...Some people might find it unnerving to message a bot only to realize it’s a human."

ROBOTICS: Robots Could Hack Turing Test by Keeping Silent
Tia Ghose | Scientific American
"Warwick was organizing Turing tests for the 60th anniversary of Turing's death when he and his colleague Huma Shah, also a computer scientist at Coventry University, noticed something curious: Occasionally, some of the AI chatbots broke and remained silent, confusing the interrogators. 'When they did so, the judge, on every occasion, was not able to say it was a machine,' Warwick told Live Science."

HEALTH: A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline
Gina Kolata | The New York Times
"Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases, like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment cannot fully explain it...But Dr. Cummings, intrigued by the waning of disease, has a provocative idea for further investigation...Perhaps, he said, all these degenerative diseases share something in common, something inside aging cells themselves."

BIOLOGY: The Unseen: Millions of Microbes Are yet to Be Discovered. Will One Hold the Ultimate Cure?

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Raffi Khatchadourian | The New Yorker
"For millennia, humans were blind to microbial life. Bacteria were discovered in the seventeenth century, but the golden age of microbiology did not begin for another two hundred years...By exploring just a fraction of the microbial dark matter, a small team had discovered a potentially revolutionary drug—quickly accomplishing what large pharmaceutical companies had been unable to do for years."

INTERNET & SOCIETY: Pokémon Go, Explained
German Lopez | VOX
"Beyond realizing childhood dreams, Pokémon Go is many people’s introduction into a new type of game that blends the real world with a virtual one — what’s known as 'augmented reality'...Pokémon Go is perhaps the biggest augmented reality game to date. But it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last."

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Alison E. Berman

Alison tells the stories of purpose-driven leaders and is fascinated by various intersections of technology and society. When not keeping a finger on the pulse of all things Singularity University, you'll likely find Alison in the woods sipping coffee and reading philosophy (new book recommendations are welcome).

Lumina simulation of a cosmic web, 650 million light-years across. The image shows dark matter and gas from the early universe.

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