Apple joins AI partnership

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Apple joins AI partnership --

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 14:13

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The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society has gained another high-profile participant: Apple. It s another bellwether in the progression of AI for use in entertainment.

The company has become a founding member alongside Amazon, Facebook, Google/DeepMind, IBM and Microsoft.

Diversity of thought across the organisation is crucial to ensure that we effectively explore and address the influences of AI on people and society, provide guidance on AI best practices and seek to advance the public s understanding of AI, the group said in making the announcement. We are committed to having balanced representation at the leadership, executive and operations levels.

AI is applicable to many aspects of the members businesses, including user interfaces, advertising analytics, recommendation and surfacing algorithms, and security. But on the video and entertainment front, the development of AI holds some special promise, as laid out in the recent One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence study from Stanford University.

Today, an amateur with a video camera and readily-available software tools can make a relatively good movie, the report noted. In the future, more sophisticated tools and apps will become available to make it even easier to produce high-quality content, for example, to compose music or to choreograph dance using an avatar. The creation and dissemination of entertainment will benefit from the progress of technologies such as ASR, dubbing and machine translation, which will enable content to be customised to different audiences inexpensively.

In the future, things will get even more interesting, with the rise of virtual reality and haptics in the living room. The report mentions dialogue-based entertainment systems that become progressively more human-like, predicted to develop new characteristics such as emotion, empathy and adaptation to environmental rhythms such as time of day.

Unsurprisingly, the report takes a cautionary tone as well.

With content increasingly delivered digitally, and large amounts of data being logged about consumers preferences and usage characteristics, media powerhouses will be able to micro-analyse and micro-serve content to increasingly specialised segments of the population, down to the individual, the report explained. Conceivably the stage is set for the emergence of media conglomerates acting as Big Brothers who are able to control the ideas and online experiences to which specific individuals are exposed. It remains to be seen whether broader society will develop measures to prevent their emergence.

The warning acts as a reminder that despite market enthusiasm, not everyone loves AI; many have raised the spectre of unintended consequences. The idea is that we as humans will not be able to compete AI will evolve and grow its brain capacity at a much faster rate than any other species has ever done, relegating us to an inferior, second-class status, ripe for enslavement or genocide.

Researchers at Oxford University said in a report last year that AIs with malicious intent are actually a threat to human civilisation, or even possibly to all human life . Elon Musk, the Tesla Motors and SpaceX entrepreneur, called AI our biggest existential threat, comparing it to a demon that, once summoned, cannot be controlled.

Bill Gates weighed in too: First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super-intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well, he said during a Reddit Ask Me Anything Q&A in January 2015. A few decades after that though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.

And Stephen Hawking has been even more to the point. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race, he told the BBC.

All of that said, AI remains fraught with promise.

AI will increasingly enable entertainment that is more interactive, personalised and engaging, the Stanford report concluded. Research should be directed toward understanding how to leverage these attributes for individuals and society s benefit.

Source: Rapid TV News

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