Paperclips, a new game from designer Frank Lantz, starts simply. The top left of the screen gets a bit of text, probably in Times New Roman, and a couple of clickable buttons: Make a paperclip. You click, and a counter turns over. One. // The game ends—big, significant spoiler here—with the destruction of the universe.

capitalism, paperclip maximizer, AI

Google and others, fighting for a small pool of researchers, are looking for automated ways to deal with a shortage of artificial intelligence experts.

AI

Researchers funded by the US military are developing appliances to record neural activity and automatically stimulate the brain to treat mental illness.

mental health, information age anxiety, AI

There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of trying maximize its goals. There is a great wiki on the subject here, but the basic idea of the paperclip maximizer posits the emergence of an artificial general intelligence which is capable of performing not only complex functions, but also is able to innovate means to improve its own function.

capitalism, AI, paperclip maximizer

Fully Autonomous Weapons Would Increase Danger to Civilians

AI

Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves. After all, computers can run tons of simulations and figure out the instructions we would have given them if we knew enough. Thus, we don’t try to define a sheep for image-recognition software (that would be hard!), we give the computer a bunch of sheep pictures and let it figure out the most efficient way to define the commonality. It sounds easy enough, except sometimes machines learn the wrong lessons.

AI, capitalism