Imagine yourself graduating from high school, with the world before you.
But now you must decide what career you want to pursue. You hope for a job that will pay the bills, but also one you will enjoy. After all, you will spend a large portion of your waking hours at work.
In fact, the 42 authors of DeepMind’s paper, published today in Nature, greatly outnumber the rest of the world building bots for StarCraft. Without wishing to take anything away from an impressive feat of collaborative engineering, if you throw enough resources at a problem, success is all but assured.
The tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook have all begun to use machine learning to give you tips on what to wear. Is fashion styling the next field to be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI), or will the human eye remain supreme?
So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.
Digital platforms, the websites and apps which compete for our precious screen time, have successfully invaded the traditional territory of many sectors of the “old economy”. They have become the preferred – expected, even – domains for many kinds of human behaviour, from banking and property buying, to dating and entertainment.
Data drives our global digital ecosystem, and AI technologies reveal patterns in data. Smartphones, smart homes, and smart cities influence how we live and interact, and AI systems are increasingly involved in recruitment decisions, medical diagnoses, and judicial verdicts. Whether this scenario is utopian or dystopian depends on your perspective.
Surely an AI won’t ever be able to compete? Well, it turns out they might. A paper recently published in Nature reports that an AI has now managed to predict future scientific discoveries by simply extracting meaningful data from research publications.
Science fiction is brimming with visions of the future and the many wondrous things the human race can achieve. But it is full of warnings too – and we should be careful to take heed of some of the big messages that are more relevant now than they ever were before.
Gmail will now go ahead and correct spelling errors and point out grammatical errors made while you’re typing.
In this week’s Light Start, the Channel is crossed, AI takes on knitting, we indulge in some Console Wars (later), and check out some Little Monsters.