On unaccountable algorithms that watch and profile all
“Digital star chamber” featured on aeon magazine – by Frank Pasquale:
“The infancy of the internet is over. As online spaces mature, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other powerful corporations are setting the rules that govern competition among journalists, writers, coders, and e-commerce firms. (…)
Algorithms are increasingly important because businesses rarely thought of as high tech (…) are collecting data from both workers and customers, using algorithmic tools to make decisions, to sort the desirable from the disposable.(…)
For wines or films, the stakes are not terribly high. But when algorithms start affecting critical opportunities for employment, career advancement, health, credit and education, they deserve more scrutiny. (…)Continue reading
Mark my words
In “What Searchable Speech Will Do To You” , published in Nautilus, James Somers discuss some interesting aspects on the coming possibility of having all we say recorded. And then labeled, tagged, searched…
“We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. (…) It will happen by our standard combination of willing and allowing. It will happen because it can. It will happen sooner than we think.
(…) But would all of this help or hurt us? (…) The more we come to rely on a tool, the less we rely on our own brains.
(…) By offloading more of memory’s demands onto the Record (…) it might not be that we’re making space for other, more important thinking. We might just be depriving our brains of useful material. (…)
The worry, then, is twofold: If you stopped working out the part of your brain that recalls speech (…) your mind would become a less interesting place.Continue reading
“A Gentle Guide to Machine Learning” by Raúl Garreta
Posted at MonkeyLearn
“Machine Learning is a subfield within Artificial Intelligence that builds algorithms that allow computers to learn to perform tasks from data instead of being explicitly programmed.
(…) some of the most common categories of practical Machine Learning applications:
Image Processing (…) : Image tagging (…) , Optical Character Recognition (…) , Self-driving cars (…)
Text Analysis(…) : Spam filtering, (…) Sentiment Analysis,(…) Information Extraction, (…)
Data Mining(…): Anomaly detection, (…) Grouping , (…), Predictions(…)
Video Games & RoboticsContinue reading
can we keep walking? please…
When self-driving cars hit the streets, among other features it is expected that they take pedestrian safety seriously. This hope is illustrated by this couple of anecdotal stories show Google self driving car reactions to a lady chasing ducks on her wheelchair or a cyclist making a track stand.
But what next? After self-driving is supposedly stablished and approved technology, people will probably get back to the trend on posing pedestrian the blame. Ravi Mangla “The secret history of jaywalking: The disturbing reason it was outlawed — and why we should lift the ban” shows it happened in the past. Adoption of self-driving driving cars may be the opportunity window to have people free to walk again.
A similar claim comes from “The end of walking” by Antonia Malchik. When it comes to getting around, sitting apes have the high ground on the standing ones. It should also be noticed that such anti-pedestrian behaviour is growing among cyclists as well. Even if cyclists are in general much more civilized than car drivers. But so were drivers in automobile early days as well…
Computers outrunning our brain. What about choice?
About when people would seem enough to think of computing capacity in terms of FLOPS, supercomputers development makes the point that a better measure is TEPS. TEPS stand for Traversed edges per second, which is sort of FLOPS weighted by communication cost.
Anyway, fact is AI Impacts produced estimates for our Brain performance in TEPS. Next thing was the ubiquitous, of course. It would seem we can hire this computational power in the next decade by $ 100/hour. But for the time being this cost is estimated to be around $4,700 – $170,000/hour. So go to your boss and tell him he’s renting your brain for a bargain.
IF you do so, your odds are better if you skip the info below and make it simple. New studies show that our brains do consider cognitive effort when making choices. This ‘TLDR’ feature of brain wiring may be the culprit in preventing you to go through the paper “Separate and overlapping brain areas encode subjective value during delay and effort discounting” that says so.
“Mind reading viable as scientists reconstruct speech from brain activity” By Matthew Humphries
“…speech is produced using the cerebral cortex of the brain, meaning with the right electrodes and system in place we should be able to reconstruct speech just from brain waves.
This is what a team from Cognitive Systems Lab at KIT and the Wadsworth Center in New York has managed to do. Using 7 epileptic patients who volunteered for the study, they each had an electrode array attached to the surface of their cerebral cortex in order to monitor brain waves related to speech. A combination of this information combined with machine learning and linguistic knowledge allowed a system to be created that can reconstruct what is being spoken.
The video below shows the speech decoding system in action.” read full article