DailyDirt: Welcoming Our Robot Overlords...
Techdirt. 2016-03-01
Summary:
Despite our supposed intelligence, humans don't actually know how our own brains work. But even in our ignorance, we're still developing algorithms and machines that might catch on to how we learn and think. Google's autonomous vehicle project has a pretty good driving record, except that the world is messy, and predicting how human drivers will react isn't always certain -- especially when they drive buses. Our relationship with robots is going to be more and more complex in the next few years. We'll need to recognize when robots are faulty, and that might get harder and harder to do. 
- We've seen people blindly follow GPS navigation directions that endangered the driver's safety, so would you expect people to follow a robot unquestioningly in an emergency? Yup. A study at Georgia Tech created a "guide robot" that was purposely made to be unreliable (and human participants in the study were told the robot was broken), but during a faked emergency, humans still followed the robot's bad directions to evacuate a building -- even when they conflicted with clearly-marked exit signs. [url]
- A "Data Science Machine" might have better intuition than teams of humans when it comes to big-data analysis. MIT researchers entered their data machine in three data science competitions, and the machine placed ahead of more than half of the human contestants. [url]
- It's difficult to really grasp exponential improvements in technology -- other than to look back and be amazed that things like the iPhone didn't exist just a few short years ago. And it's even more challenging to predict where technology is headed when artificial intelligence projects look so primitive now (and have for some time), but by 2040, we could have significantly more autonomous devices performing complex tasks for us. (Assuming the robots haven't enslaved us instead....) [url]