The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people

DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how AI will shape the future | The Verge
▻http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/11192774/demis-hassabis-interview-alphago-google-deepmind-ai

Just talking about the significance for AI (...) the other big thing you’ve heard me talk about is the difference between this and Deep Blue. So Deep Blue is a hand-crafted program where the programmers distilled the information from chess grandmasters into specific rules and heuristics, whereas we’ve imbued AlphaGo with the ability to learn and then it’s learnt it through practice and study, which is much more human-like.

sur la capacité de l’approche :

We think this algorithm can work without any supervision. The Atari games that we did last year, playing from the pixels — that didn’t bootstrap from any human knowledge, that started literally from doing random things on screen.

#apprentissage #machine_learning #jeux_video #IA #go

Q: The main future uses of AI that you’ve brought up this week have been healthcare, smartphone assistants, and robotics. (...)
A: the sort of things you’ll see this kind of AI do is medical diagnosis of images and then maybe longitudinal tracking of vital signs or quantified self over time, and helping people have healthier lifestyles. (…) we’re just doing it all for free

sur la capacité de calcul :

AlphaGo doesn’t actually use that much hardware in play, but we needed a lot of hardware to train it and do all the different versions and have them play each other in tournaments on the cloud. That takes quite a lot of hardware to do efficiently, so we couldn’t have done it in this time frame without those [Google] resources.

applications pour la #recherche :

What I’m really excited to use this kind of AI for is science, and advancing that faster. I’d like to see AI-assisted science where you have effectively AI research assistants that do a lot of the drudgery work and surface interesting articles, find structure in vast amounts of data, and then surface that to the human experts and scientists who can make quicker breakthroughs.

du #data_mining sur les publications

The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people | Ars Technica UK
►http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the documents, #SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA’s methods as “ridiculously optimistic” and “completely bullshit.” A flaw in how the #NSA trains SKYNET’s machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by #drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as “extremists,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of “20070108” on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.