AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[raklian]

[wjfox]

It is 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause a financial crash within a decade, SEC head says

Tom Carter
Oct 16, 2023, 12:31 PM BST

The chair of the SEC has warned that AI could trigger a financial crisis, as Wall Street rushes to adopt the new technology.

Gary Gensler told the Financial Times that it was "nearly unavoidable" that AI would cause a financial crash as soon as the late 2020s or early 2030s, and said that reliance on models developed by tech companies could lead to economic chaos.

"I do think we will in the future have a financial crisis . . .[and] in the after action reports people will say 'Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we've relied on.' Maybe it's in the mortgage market. Maybe it's in some sector of the equity market," he said.

Gensler called for AI regulation that addresses both the underlying AI models built by tech companies and how they are used by Wall Street banks, describing it as a "cross-regulatory challenge."

"It's a hard financial stability issue to address because most of our regulation is about individual institutions, individual banks, individual money market funds, individual brokers; it's just in the nature of what we do," he told the Financial Times. "And this is about a horizontal [matter whereby] many institutions might be relying on the same underlying base model or underlying data aggregator."

https://markets.businessinsider.com/new ... ys-2023-10

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[funkervogt]

It is 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause a financial crash within a decade, SEC head says

Tom Carter
Oct 16, 2023, 12:31 PM BST

The chair of the SEC has warned that AI could trigger a financial crisis, as Wall Street rushes to adopt the new technology.

Gary Gensler told the Financial Times that it was "nearly unavoidable" that AI would cause a financial crash as soon as the late 2020s or early 2030s, and said that reliance on models developed by tech companies could lead to economic chaos.

"I do think we will in the future have a financial crisis . . .[and] in the after action reports people will say 'Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we've relied on.' Maybe it's in the mortgage market. Maybe it's in some sector of the equity market," he said.

Gensler called for AI regulation that addresses both the underlying AI models built by tech companies and how they are used by Wall Street banks, describing it as a "cross-regulatory challenge."

"It's a hard financial stability issue to address because most of our regulation is about individual institutions, individual banks, individual money market funds, individual brokers; it's just in the nature of what we do," he told the Financial Times. "And this is about a horizontal [matter whereby] many institutions might be relying on the same underlying base model or underlying data aggregator."

https://markets.businessinsider.com/new ... ys-2023-10

I have a friend who has a Ph.D in mathematical finance, and he has predicted the exact same thing. He can solve a Rubik's Cube in under two minutes while drunk.

[weatheriscool]

Amazon Begins Testing Bipedal Robot, Swears It's Not Taking Anyone's Job
Digit stands 5 feet 9 inches tall and can carry 35 pounds.
By Ryan Whitwam October 20, 2023

Amazon has invested heavily in automation at its network of warehouses, using robots to move shelves and boxes around the sprawling facilities. The company's constant push for more robotic workers has sparked fears among its 1.5 million warehouse workers that they could be phased out in favor of machines. The company's latest initiative will have employees fretting again. Amazon has started testing Digit, a bipedal robot that can pick up objects and carry them around the warehouse. However, it claims Digit won't take anyone's job.

The push to automate within Amazon is more than a decade old and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of robots rolling around warehouses. Most of these robotic helpers move shelving units and small collections of items from one place to another. Digit, a robot designed by Agility Robotics, is the most ambitious play so far.

Digit is designed to operate in environments created with humans in mind, so it's shaped like a human. It stands 5 feet 9 inches (175cm) tall and weighs 143 pounds (65kg). It's not particularly fast, with a maximum walking speed of 4.9 ft/s (1.5 m/s), but it can carry an impressive 35 pounds (16kg) while doing so. Agility Robotics says Digit can operate in light-duty mode for about three hours before recharging. If carrying heavy objects, that drops to about 1.5 hours.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/ama ... nyones-job

[Powers]

Amazon Begins Testing Bipedal Robot, Swears It's Not Taking Anyone's Job

[firestar464]

Chatbots reveal troubling ability to infer private data

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-cha ... ivate.html

I feel as if though privacy is dead

[wjfox]

AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief

Tue 24 Oct 2023 13.00 BST

The world must treat the risks from artificial intelligence as seriously as the climate crisis and cannot afford to delay its response, one of the technology’s leading figures has warned.

Speaking as the UK government prepares to host a summit on AI safety, Demis Hassabis said oversight of the industry could start with a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hassabis, the British chief executive of Google’s AI unit, said the world must act immediately in tackling the technology’s dangers, which included aiding the creation of bioweapons and the existential threat posed by super-intelligent systems.

“We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change,” he said. “It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we’re living with the consequences of that now. We can’t afford the same delay with AI.”

Hassabis, whose unit created the revolutionary AlphaFold program that depicts protein structures, said AI could be “one of the most important and beneficial technologies ever invented”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... regulation

[firestar464]

Research shows humans can inherit AI biases

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-hum ... iases.html

I spoke with someone on Discord yesterday, and their response was basically "no shit. That's how humans learn bruh"

Thoughts?

[wjfox]

The White House will reportedly reveal a ‘sweeping’ AI executive order on October 30

Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 9:05 PM GMT+1·2 min read

The Biden Administration is reportedly set to unveil a broad executive order on artificial intelligence next week. According to The Washington Post, the White House’s “sweeping order” would use the federal government’s purchasing power to enforce requirements on AI models before government agencies can use them. The order is reportedly scheduled for Monday, October 30, two days before an international AI Safety Summit in the UK.

The order will allegedly require advanced AI models to undergo a series of assessments before federal agencies can adopt them. In addition, it would ease immigration for highly skilled workers, which was heavily restricted during the Trump administration. Federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Energy Department and intelligence branches, would also have to assess how they might incorporate AI into their work. The report notes that the analyses would emphasize strengthening the nation’s cyber defenses.

On Tuesday evening, the White House reportedly sent invitations for a “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” event for Monday, October 30, hosted by President Biden. The Washington Post indicates that the executive order isn’t finalized, and details could still change.

Meanwhile, European officials are working on AI regulations across the Atlantic, aiming for a finalized package by the end of the year. The US Congress is also in the earlier stages of drafting AI regulations. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) hosted AI leaders on Tuesday at the second AI Insights Forum.

AI regulation is currently one of the most buzzed-about topics in the tech world. Generative AI has rapidly advanced in the last two years as image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E 3 emerged, producing convincing photos that could be disseminated for disinformation and propaganda (as some political campaigns have already done). Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard and other advanced large language model (LLM) chatbots have arguably sparked even more concern, allowing anyone to compose fairly convincing text passages while answering questions that may or may not be truthful. There are even AI models for cloning celebrities’ voices.

https://www.engadget.com/the-white-hous ... 5cKweJ6T9g

[firestar464]

Sabotage tool takes on AI image scrapers

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-sab ... apers.html

I wonder if this will lead to the death of gen-AI, as people who post on non-"do not crawl" sites may still poison their images

[firestar464]

Researchers develop ‘Woodpecker’: A groundbreaking solution to AI’s hallucination problem

https://venturebeat.com/ai/researchers- ... n-problem/

[weatheriscool]

Microsoft CEO: AI Copilot Is the New Windows Start Button
His comments hint at the central role AI is likely to play when Windows 12 arrives, possibly in 2024.
By Josh Norem October 26, 2023

It's no secret that AI is the buzzword du jour in the tech world, with every new product launch centered around its potential to revolutionize our lives. Microsoft is leaning into this phenomenon more than other companies its size. It recently added its Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11 and will soon bring it to its ubiquitous Office 365 suite. In light of this, the company's CEO recently stated Copilot is not just a gimmicky tool used for light-hearted queries but central to the Windows experience. It's so central that he thinks it will become the new Start button for Windows users.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/m ... art-button

[Powers]

They force voice command and I learn Linux (or any of the trillions options available).

[Time_Traveller]

[Cyber_Rebel]

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I'm sorry, but are humans not the smartest species currently within the animal kingdom? Is our intelligence not why we've dominated the planet and created a technologically advanced society? The fallacy within his argument is ascribing AI to human beings themselves, and assuming they will always be subservient "just because that's the way we've always operated."

His point that the smartest person doesn't often lead is also not something I'd think would be seen as a positive. In fact, that's certainly apart of the problem within a great many things. This just seems to be cope more than anything else.

[Cyber_Rebel]

Government is preparing to curb powerful new AI due within months, Science Secretary promises
Michelle Donelan said government scientists would be given advance access to determine whether they present a national security threat

(The Telegraph)

The Government will curb powerful new AI systems expected within months if officials become “concerned” about their capabilities, the Science Secretary has said. With AI firms planning to launch new models next summer which are 100 times more powerful than today’s most advanced systems, Michelle Donelan said government scientists would be given advance access to determine whether they present a national security threat.

Warning that AI was being “utilised as modern warfare”, she also revealed that Britain was working with allies to counter the threat of deepfakes being used to upend key Western elections in 2024.
This week, Rishi Sunak will host a global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to discuss how risks posed by the technology can be addressed.

The Prime Minister has voiced fears that the technology could be used to build weapons of mass destruction, launch cyber-attacks and spread disinformation, and that it could eventually even pose an existential threat if humanity loses control of it.

While the world has been astonished by the arrival of AI systems such as Chat GPT, the companies involved are already planning to launch new models with about 100 times the computational power of the current state of the art.

Speaking to The Telegraph ahead of the summit, Ms Donelan said: “The companies are just about to start training the new models, and then releasing them next year, so time is of the essence.”

[caltrek]

Will Machines Soon be Conscious?
October 27, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) The rise of the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has led to the view that these systems might soon be conscious. However, we might underestimate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying human consciousness.

Modern AI systems are capable of many amazing behaviors. For instance, when one uses systems like ChatGPT, the responses are (sometimes) quite human-like and intelligent. When we, humans, are interacting with ChatGPT, we consciously perceive the text the language model generates. You are currently consciously perceiving this text here! The question is whether the language model also perceives our text when we prompt it. Or is it just a zombie, working based on clever pattern-matching algorithms? Based on the text it generates, it is easy to be swayed that the system might be conscious. However, in this new research, Jaan Aru, Matthew Larkum and Mac Shine take a neuroscientific angle to answer this question.

All three being neuroscientists, these authors argue that although the responses of systems like ChatGPT seem conscious, they are most likely not. First, the inputs to language models lack the embodied, embedded information content characteristic of our sensory contact with the world around us. Secondly, the architectures of present-day AI algorithms are missing key features of the thalamocortical system that have been linked to conscious awareness in mammals. Finally, the evolutionary and developmental trajectories that led to the emergence of living conscious organisms arguably have no parallels in artificial systems as envisioned today. The existence of living organisms depends on their actions and their survival is intricately linked to multi-level cellular, inter-cellular, and organismal processes culminating in agency and consciousness.

Thus, while it is tempting to assume that ChatGPT and similar systems might be conscious, this would severely underestimate the complexity of the neural mechanisms that generate consciousness in our brains. Researchers do not have a consensus on how consciousness rises in our brains. What we know, and what this new paper points out, is that the mechanisms are likely way more complex than the mechanisms underlying current language models.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1006138

[weatheriscool]