The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else Nations, alliances of nations, and national institutions are in decline, while a state perhaps best described as Oligarchia is on the ascent. George Dyson explains in this, the first Edge New Year’s Essay. GEORGE DYSON is the author of Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines. All revolutions come to an end, whether they […]
A moral map for AI cars – reveal that moral choices are not universal
The Moral Machine Experiment – Survey maps global variations in ethics for programming autonomous vehicles. How do different cultures value human life? To find out, researchers created a viral online experiment to gather data from millions of participants across the world. Some values generalised across cultures, but others came as a surprise. When a driver […]
Basic Income, Job Guarantees, and Invisible Labor
This is a 22 min read about how we will value our values in the emerging Digital Environment This is a very preliminary sort of ramble, because my ideas are still in a pretty early stage, and I’m quite likely to be wrong about several things. But it’s good to explore these ideas publicly, hear […]
The New Intelligence
Modern AI and the fundamental undoing of the scientific method The days of traditional, human-driven problem solving — developing a hypothesis, uncovering principles, and testing that hypothesis through deduction, logic, and experimentation — may be coming to an end. A confluence of factors (large data sets, step-change infrastructure, algorithms, and computational resources) are moving us toward an entirely new […]
Why Ethical Robots Might Not Be Such a Good Idea After All
The risks that a robot’s ethics might be compromised by unscrupulous actors raise doubts over the wisdom of embedding ethical decision making in real-world safety critical robots This week my colleague Dieter Vanderelst presented our paper: “The Dark Side of Ethical Robots” at AIES 2018 in New Orleans. I blogged about Dieter’s very elegant experiment here, but let me […]