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More remarkably, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based computers in the next century may alter how we relate to ourselves.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence: Transforming Healthcare, Cybersecurity, and Communications” »

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been helping humans in IT security operations since the 2010s, analyzing massive amounts of data quickly to detect the signals of malicious behavior. With enterprise cloud environments producing terabytes of data to be analyzed, threat detection at the cloud scale depends on AI. But can that AI be trusted? Or will hidden bias lead to missed threats and data breaches?

Bias can create risks in AI systems used for cloud security. There are steps humans can take to mitigate this hidden threat, but first, it’s helpful to understand what types of bias exist and where they come from.

Today marks nine months since ChatGPT was released, and six weeks since we announced our AI Start seed fund. Based on our conversations with scores of inception and early-stage AI founders, and hundreds of leading CXOs (chief experience officers), I can attest that we are definitely in exuberant times.

In the span of less than a year, AI investments have become de rigueur in any portfolio, new private company unicorns are being created every week, and the idea that AI will drive a stock market rebound is taking root. People outside of tech are becoming familiar with new vocabulary.

Continue reading “A ‘people-first’ view of the AI economy” »

But most deep learning models are loosely based on the brain’s inner workings. AI agents are increasingly endowed with human-like decision-making algorithms. The idea that machine intelligence could become sentient one day no longer seems like science fiction.

How could we tell if machine brains one day gained sentience? The answer may be based on our own brains.

A preprint paper authored by 19 neuroscientists, philosophers, and computer scientists, including Dr. Robert Long from the Center for AI Safety and Dr. Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal, argues that the neurobiology of consciousness may be our best bet. Rather than simply studying an AI agent’s behavior or responses—for example, during a chat—matching its responses to theories of human consciousness could provide a more objective ruler.

An artificial intelligence algorithm defeated a human F-16 fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight sponsored by DARPA Thursday.

In what can only bode poorly for our species’ survival during the inevitable robot uprisings, an AI system has once again outperformed the people who trained it. This time, researchers at the University of Zurich in partnership with Intel, pitted their “Swift” AI piloting system against a trio of world champion drone racers — none of whom could best its top time.

Swift is the culmination of years of AI and machine learning research by the University of Zurich. In 2021, the team set an earlier iteration of the flight control algorithm that used a series of external cameras to validate its position in space in real-time, against amateur human pilots, all of whom were easily overmatched in every lap of every race during the test. That result was a milestone in its own right as, previously, self-guided drones relied on simplified physics models to continually calculate their optimum trajectory, which severely lowered their top speed.

This week’s result is another milestone, not just because the AI bested people whose job is to fly drones fast, but because it did so without the cumbersome external camera arrays= of its predecessor. The Swift system “reacts in real time to the data collected by an onboard camera, like the one used by human racers,” an UZH Zurich release reads. It uses an integrated inertial measurement unit to track acceleration and speed while an onboard neural network localizes its position in space using data from the front-facing cameras. All of that data is fed into a central control unit — itself a deep neural network — which crunches through the numbers and devises a shortest/fastest path around the track.

Artificial Intelligence has transformed how we live, work, and interact with technology. From voice assistants and chatbots to recommendation algorithms and self-driving cars, AI has suddenly become an integral part of our daily lives, just a few months after the release of ChatGPT, which kickstarted this revolution.

However, with the increasing prevalence of AI, a new phenomenon called “AI fatigue” has emerged. This fatigue stems from the overwhelming presence of AI in various aspects of our lives, raising concerns about privacy, autonomy, and even the displacement of human workers.

AI fatigue refers to the weariness, frustration, or anxiety experienced by individuals due to the overreliance on AI technologies. While AI offers numerous benefits, such as increased efficiency, improved decision-making, and enhanced user experiences, it also presents certain drawbacks. Excessive dependence on AI can lead to a loss of human agency, diminishing trust in technology, and a feeling of disconnection from the decision-making process.

Michael Levin is a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts University. He holds the Vannevar Bush endowed Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, where he began to uncover a new bioelectric language by which cells coordinate their activity during embryogenesis. The Levin Lab works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.

✅EPISODE LINKS:
👉Round 1: https://youtu.be/v6gp-ORTBlU
👉Mike’s Website: https://drmichaellevin.org/
👉New Website: https://thoughtforms.life.
👉Mike’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.
👉Mike’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@drmichaellevin.
👉Mike’s Publications: https://tinyurl.com/yc388vvk.
👉The Well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a3xg4M9Oa8 & https://youtu.be/XHMyKOpiYjk.
👉Aeon Essays: https://aeon.co/users/michael-levin.

Continue reading “What is The Field of Diverse Intelligence? Hacking the Spectrum of Mind & Matter | Michael Levin” »

Catastrophic forgetting, an innate issue with backpropagation learning algorithms, is a challenging problem in artificial and spiking neural network (ANN and SNN) research.

The brain has somewhat solved this problem using multiscale plasticity. Under global regulation through specific pathways, neuromodulators are dispersed to target brain regions, where both synaptic and neuronal plasticity are modulated by neuromodulators locally. Specifically, neuromodulators modify the capacity and property of neuronal and synaptic plasticity. This modification is known as metaplasticity.

Researchers led by Prof. Xu Bo from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have proposed a novel brain-inspired learning method (NACA) based on neural modulation dependent plasticity, which can help mitigate catastrophic forgetting in ANN and SNN. The study was published in Science Advances on Aug. 25.