Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

i only use constructive criticism with my roomba

my roomba secretly seething that i'd evacuate from fire without it, though

I thought the fact that automatic sinks don't work half the time was intentional - water-saving innit

And because automatic taps that always came on at the slightest hand movement would be getting set off all the time by small changes in atmospheric pressure, that sort of thing.

Wat if AI boy racers

https://www.avclub.com/anti-homeless-robot-covered-in-barbecue-sauce-given-we-1821337323

nice to see a heartwarming story around xmas time

As San Francisco Business Times reports, the now-mesquite robot in question is a Knightscope K5 security robot, formerly employed by the San Francisco SPCA to keep humans experiencing homelessness out of their parking lots and off the sidewalks surrounding the SPCA building. However, according to SPCA president Jennifer Scarlett, within a week of the robo-narc’s first day on the job, residents of the homeless camp outside the SPCA had “put a tarp over it, knocked it over, and put barbecue sauce on all the sensors.” This week when the city of San Francisco threatened to fine the SPCA $1,000 a day for operating the rent-a-RoboCop on city streets without a permit, the SPCA announced the bot had been fired, “effective immediately.” Since it is a heartless machine, the Knightscope was presumably unable to appreciate the irony of being forced to join the ranks of those whom it had once oppressed.

xpost with the dogs thread

Non-artificial neural networks overfit as well. https://t.co/Zt7TgC108c

— Will Wilson 🗿 (@WAWilsonIV) January 10, 2018

lol

I do the same thing with found money. I snagged a $20 bill in a supermarket parking lot several years ago and to this day whenever I'm there I look around in that area (or consciously force myself not to).

weirdly calming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsp1KaM-avU

You'd think there'd be some kind of weighting or pruning or something they could do for models trained on ImageNet so that there's not a ghostly chihuahua face peering out of every generated picture! I know there's a lot of dogs in the dataset but geez

But more importantly re-creating images from brain scans is amazing! One of those future-is-here moments

Oh look, the goalposts are moving again: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/

that was an intensely frustrating article to read

A first experiment in AI-enhanced AR - it can automatically recognize common objects via a neural-net and attempt to clone them in-situ from an online library of 3D models #madewithblocks #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/nhbwRDUiYZ

— Ben Ferns (@ben_ferns) February 9, 2018

interesting to think of the possible uses for this

right now it appears to be used for using the Star Trek transporter effect to superimpose images from Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" video.

It's the killer app for people who simply can't get enough Second Life.

heh, yeah it's pretty silly looking right now. it's not hard for me to imagine it getting a lot better (more accurately recreating the objects and the room around it) as more iterations of this kind of thing develop (even just improving the online library of 3D models would help a lot, for example)

to me it suggests a therapeutic possibility, recreating traumatic scenes, complete with the surroundings and the objects in the room, and role-playing them out again with different outcomes

the augmented reality apps that let you see what furniture would look like in a room? heck with that, we'll show you what your room would look like with a _different_ couch

we are all going to die pic.twitter.com/fAUyR2S9hX

— brad esposito (@braddybb) February 12, 2018

the hot take on that video always seems to be some variety of THE MACHINES HAVE FINALLY OVERTAKEN US as opposed to hey here's new technology that may greatly benefit differently abled people to cope better

yeah, i almost didn't post it because of the dumbass caption. but you don't get 131K hearts without using a really boring mainstream sense of humor, people eat that shit up

my sense of humor, of course, is truly cutting edge

I recently found out that my lab’s work is used in that creepy as fuck app that’s used to make the “deep fake” videos. I don’t think I’ve ever been more cynical about my work (or field). We literally wrote the thing they used for their rape videos to synthetically create photos of cells (and other small biological objects).

One coworker said on our Slack “maybe they’ll fix some bugs.” 😟

That sucks

I don’t even know how to react to that one other than to offer sympathy

Tony uncovers that the Spymaster was the one who sold Tony's designs to his rival Justin Hammer. Iron Man goes after the Stilt-Man, who is attempting to break into a high-rise office building. Stilt-Man is easily defeated when Iron Man chops off one of his legs, and he renders the armor inoperable with a "negator pack" which destroys Stark circuitry within. A short time later, Iron Man battles the Controller whom he knocks unconscious in front of a crowd and negates his armor. Then, unable to pursue legal means to reclaim his technology, Tony plans to take out every armored warrior who is suspected of having his designs.

Lol - https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai/

deep fake stuff was covered in this article.

thx jus sayin

That NZ Zach story is very sad.

Following up on my earlier tweet, Uber car was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver and it struck a woman (not a bicyclist) who walked into street. She has died. We think this is the first pedestrian killed by an autonomous vehicle. Uber is cooperating. Story coming

— Daisuke Wakabayashi (@daiwaka) March 19, 2018

i've always wondered how this kind of situation would play out, legally speaking.

ugh

I would have expected the first death (assuming you don't count that one where an idiot was mis-using the auto-pilot in his Tesla) to come from one of those no-name fly-by-night outfits, but Uber was a close second.

off topic but the NTSB should investigate every fatality, not just the ones caused by self-driving cars

otm

the "don't blame the self-driving aspect!" people are out in full force but there are a bunch of factors that bear examination, like the fact we almost universally favor car traffic over pedestrians in the design of roadways

also, blame the AI too

i had to write a thing a tweet-length bit about an AI thing i was optimistic about and i said something about "AI eliminating cars" and they changed it to "AI reducing traffic" and i was furious because not the point. get rid of cars.

(i'm not optimistic about ai eliminating cars btw)

only trains will eliminate cars

what was the human safety driver doing???

seems like the whole point of them being there in the first place is to slam on the manual breaks in case something goes wrong. were they not paying attention to the road?

If you're not actually driving then your reaction time will presumably be worse than usual?

I think that's a considerable part of the problem

but then again, human drivers hit pedestrians all the damn time

silby, yeah the subtext of my thought was AI to improve mass transit. i know people who use subtext though, and they're all cowards

wonder if the human safety driver is there mostly for legal cover. there will be an inverse-Sully "the human factor" testimony from that poor, scarred individual.

Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

Arizona has a reputation as being a technology-friendly state. Several major players in the autonomous vehicle industry -- Waymo, Uber and Intel -- are testing their innovations in the state

if your stay-out-of-arizona list wasn't already long enough

i am rooting for autonomous cars, in general. jeering them seems like jeering cancer research, or whatever.

still, it's easy to imagine a scenario where 10x fewer people die in automobile accidents per year, but the families of those who do die are faced with excruciating lawsuits by shitty companies like Uber that make it a policy to mercilessly challenge every wrongful death claim in court (hopefully this doesn't happen - i'm especially curious about what happens in this first case). would that constitute an overall improvement to humanity? it would definitely improve the quality of life of those people who didn't die, although they would never know it and no individual would ever think that the advent of autonomous cars had saved their life. fate would spare them, and they'd never know it.

you know what would spare the most lives is no cars at all.

at any rate families of people that have been killed by corporate products usually face an impossible uphill battle. can't see it going the other way for driverless cars.