In his recent keynote Google CEO Sundar Pichai said In fact, when I look at where computing is headed, it’s clear to me that we are evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world. Devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home are “always-on” intelligent assistants designed to sit quietly and await our bidding. As the […]
First death in a self-driving car
The first death in a self-driving car occurred in May 2016. It was in a Tesla Model S travelling along a Florida highway. Apparently the car’s Autopilot system got confused by a white truck against a bright sky and failed to brake. When AI systems fail, they sometimes fail big. Tesla noted in a press […]
Campaign to Stop Killer Robots
There’s an international coalition that is […] working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons. To be clear, this isn’t the type of robot used to kill a sniper recently. We are talking about systems designed to make a kill decision without human intervention. What really drew my attention to the (serious) campaign, however, was the […]
Robot kills person?
I noticed some headlines in the last few days about the “unprecedented” use of a robot to kill a person. At first, I was worried that, as we prepare to have robots move among us, one of our faithful servants had already broken Asimov’s first law of robotics A robot may not injure a human […]
Self-driving car dilemmas
ScienceDaily has an interesting article on the moral dilemmas that could face autonomous cars. Iyad Rahwan of MIT’s Media Lab surveyed people on how safety rules should be programmed in these cars. People generally held a utilitarian view. For example, in a situation where a car could either career into a group of schoolchildren or […]