by Nikki Olson
Computers, by their very nature, don’t need to have a point of view. However, for our purposes, it is often preferred that they do. In the days before natural language processing, this manifested as a bias towards other computers. For example, Macintosh hardware didn’t run Windows software until 2006, and printers weren’t recognized by PC hardware without deliberate driver installation until Windows 7 came out in 2010. But as of late, computers are capable of holding a new kind of ‘bias’, that being a ‘biased’ opinion about human beings, and about the world at large. This past year computers began working as journalists, writing articles about data-intensive topics such as weather and sports. For articles generated by the software program Statsheet, over 80% of the time, sports readers cannot tell whether a computer or human has written the article. Say [...]
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by Socrates
The technological singularity is the event or sequence thereof likely to occur at or after the birth of AI, especially when Artificial Intelligence surpasses biological i.e. human intelligence. Since it is human intelligence which, in one way or another, is still the primary cause and ultimate mover behind AI, there are a number of people who either had or continue to have enormous impact on the singularity. Some of those are scientists who work diligently in fields as varied as Genetics, Robotics, Nanotechnology or Artificial Intelligence. Others are theorists and science fiction writers who have been the inspiration behind both the concept and the science, and have shaped the popular perception about what the singularity will, could or should be. Still others have been vehement critics who have either argued powerfully against or have taken direct action to prevent the [...]
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