AI with AI

Andy and Dave focus on a variety of big news items, including Google bows out of the bidding for the Pentagon’s “JEDI” cloud contract valued at $10 billion; the Government Accountability Office releases a 50-page report on the poor state of the cybersecurity of U.S. weapons systems; “The Big Hack” makes big news, with Bloomberg reporting that China inserted a tiny chip on hardware in order to infiltrate U.S. networks; the U.S. Department of Transportation looks to rewrite safety rules in order to accommodate fully driverless vehicles on public roads; two leaders in collaborative robots (Rethink and Jibo) close their doors; and DeepMind announces efforts to discuss “Technical AI safety” including the areas of specification (true intentions), robustness (safety upon perturbation), and assurance (understanding and control). The latter topic launches further discussion into ethics-related efforts for AI, including the UK Machine Intelligence Garage Ethics Committee; a paper on the motivations and risks of machine ethics; and research from North Caroline State University shows that the (Association for Computing Machinery) code of ethics does not appear to affect the decisions made by software developers. All the excitement somehow causes Dave to invoke Jean Valjean when he means to say Javert. C’est la vie! Finally, Andy describes a couple of motherlodes of papers; Biostorm by Anthony DeCapite makes the story of the week; ZDNet ranks 36 of the best movies on AI; AutoML is prepping an open access book on AutoML, and Dave goes fanboy over the Automata web series from Penny Arcade.