Skip to main content

Artificial Intelligence: a danger to mankind, or the key to a better world?

In the background, AI is being used in a huge range of settings, from helping to land a plane, to getting a parcel to you more quickly, and deciding whether you get a job interview.
But there are growing concerns that these powerful technologies pose equally powerful dangers, even posing an existential threat to humanity itself.
Some legislators and technologists are worried that so-called “general AI” – or machine-based intelligence that resembles basic human intelligence - could develop superintelligence capabilities at an exponential rate, escaping human control, with untold consequences for mankind.
On 11 September, UNESCO, the UN’s  Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, hosted a roundtable discussion entitled “Artificial Intelligence: Reflection on its Complexity and Impact on Society”, featuring experts from academia and industry.
The talk was hosted by Peter-Paul Verbeek, [PRON FAIR-BAKE] a Philosophy Professor at Twente University in the Netherlands, and a member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Everything you should know about the coronavirus: COVID-19

  What are coronaviruses? SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a family of single-stranded RNA viruses known as coronaviridae, a common type of virus which affects mammals, birds and reptiles. In humans, it commonly causes mild infections, similar to the common cold, and accounts for 10–30% of upper respiratory tract infections in adults. More serious infections are rare, although coronaviruses can cause enteric and neurological disease. The incubation period of a coronavirus varies but is generally up to two weeks. Previous coronavirus outbreaks include  Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS ), first reported in Saudi Arabia in September 2012, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), identified in southern China in 2003. MERS infected around 2,500 people and led to more than 850 deaths while SARS infected more than 8,000 people and resulted in nearly 800 deaths. The case fatality rates for these conditions were 35% and 10%, respectively. SARS-CoV-2 is a new strain of co...

The First Step Towards Responsible AI Needs To Be About People Not Strategy!

Article By Charles Radclyffe:  I was recently consulting for an organisation that was looking to implement a framework to govern the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)  technologies. Like many organisations in their sector, they had been running various ‘lab’ experiments for some time, and had seen positive results; but there was still something holding them back from wholesale investment. A major consulting firm had encouraged them to ‘accelerate’ their innovation by using a framework to govern the roll-out. I asked them where they felt it needed more focus, and they responded saying that it felt somewhat vanilla, a re-hashing of any-old IT project management best practice. “Surely there is something different about AI”, they asked? I couldn’t agree more. There is no magic to AI. Today’s AI is a collection of methodologies that apply extreme reductionism to Big Data in order to elicit patterns, calculate probabilities or make predictions. Wha...

C3 IoT Partners With Google Cloud On AI and IoT

C3 IoT announced on Tuesday a new strategic partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), aimed at accelerating digital transformation with AI and IoT. C3 IoT announced on Tuesday a new strategic partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), aimed at accelerating digital transformation through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). As part of the announcement, C3 IoT confirmed its IoT platform has been integrated into GCP, leveraging the cloud platform’s infrastructure and AI capabilities. The businesses will work together on marketing, selling, and training initiatives. “The Google Cloud and C3 IoT partnership creates a solution that dramatically speeds up our customers’ digital transformations to allow them to attain new levels of operational efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage,” said Ed Abbo, C3 IoT President and CTO. “Together, w...