Author: The Conversation

While self-driving vehicles are being deployed in numerous cities globally, persistent controversies continue to challenge their deployment. Recently, Tesla recalled more than two million cars after the US regulator found problems with its driver assistance system. Tesla did not agree with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) analysis but agreed to add new features. Tesla’s autopilot system is not fully autonomous, since a human driver has to be present at all times. But autonomous, self-driving cars have already been deployed as driverless taxis, or “robotaxis”, in several US cities, including San Francisco and Phoenix. Cruise, the robotaxi company owned…

The legal profession has already been using artificial intelligence (AI) for several years, to automate reviews and predict outcomes, among other functions. However, these tools have mostly been used by large, well established firms. In effect, certain law firms have already deployed AI tools to assist their employed solicitors with day-to-day work. By 2022, three quarters of the largest solicitor’s law firms were utilising AI. However, this trend has now started to encompass small and medium firms too, signalling a shift of such technological tools towards mainstream utilisation. This technology could be enormously beneficial both to people in the legal profession and clients.…

2023 was an inflection point in the evolution of artificial intelligence and its role in society. The year saw the emergence of generative AI, which moved the technology from the shadows to centre stage in the public imagination. It also saw boardroom drama in an AI startup dominate the news cycle for several days. And it saw the Biden administration issue an executive order and the European Union pass a law aimed at regulating AI, moves perhaps best described as attempting to bridle a horse that’s already galloping along. We’ve assembled a panel of AI scholars to look ahead to 2024 and describe the issues AI…

Future historians may well regard 2023 as a landmark in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). But whether that future will prove utopian, apocalyptic or somewhere in between is anyone’s guess. In February, ChatGPT set the record as the fastest app to reach 100 million users. It was followed by similar “large language” AI models from Google, Amazon, Meta and other big tech firms, which collectively look poised to transform education, healthcare and many other knowledge-intensive fields. However, AI’s potential for harm was underscored in May by an ominous statement signed by leading researchers: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other…

In pursuit of the ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions, nations worldwide must expand their use of clean energy sources. In the case of solar energy, this change may already be upon us. The cost of electricity from solar plants has experienced a remarkable reduction over the past decade, falling by 89% from 2010 to 2022. Batteries, which are essential for balancing solar energy supply throughout the day and night, have also undergone a similar price revolution, decreasing by the same amount between 2008 and 2022. These developments pose an important question: have we already crossed a tipping point where solar energy is poised…

The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration. Several new missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon. The latter half of the year will feature several exciting launches, with the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration mission in September, Europa Clipper and Hera in October and Artemis II and VIPER to the Moon in November – if everything goes as planned. I’m a…

There are few things more peaceful and relaxing than a night under the stars. Through the holidays, many people head away from the bright city lights to go camping. They revel in the dark skies, spangled with myriad stars. As a child, I loved such trips, and they helped cement my passion for the night sky, and for all things space. One of my great joys as an astronomer is sharing the night sky with people. There is something wondrous about helping people stare at the cosmos through a telescope, getting their first glimpses of the universe’s many wonders. But we can…

Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making. Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions. AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar, call this AI overcoming “lossy bottlenecks.” Lossy is a term from information theory that refers to imperfect communications channels – that is, channels that lose information. Multiple-choice practicality Imagine…

Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location of the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, who proceeded to name the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader “Tatooine”. The mysterious 1931 meteorite, a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) known as a diogenite, is obviously not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet. But it was similarly…

Google Deepmind has recently announced Gemini, its new AI model to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While both models are examples of “generative AI”, which learn to find patterns of input training information to generate new data (pictures, words or other media), ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) which focuses on producing text. In the same way that ChatGPT is a web app for conversations that is based on the neural network know as GPT (trained on huge amounts of text), Google has a conversational web app called Bard which was based on a model called LaMDA (trained on dialogue). But Google is now upgrading…