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Gizmorama - May 7, 2014
Good Morning, Stephen Hawking wrote an article, inspired by the new film 'Transcendence', about the possible threat from artificial intelligence. All I can think about is CYBERDYNE and Arnold saying something about "it's becoming self-aware!" I'm scared!
Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
ErinP.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click
GopherArchives****-- Stephen Hawking says threat of artificial intelligence a real concern --*LONDON (UPI) - Stephen Hawking, in an article inspired by the new Johnny Depp flick Transcendence, said it would be the "worst mistake in history" to dismiss the threat of artificial intelligence. In a paper he co-wrote with University at California, Berkeley computer-science professor Stuart Russell, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professors Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, Hawking said cited several achievements in the field of artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars, Siri and the computer that won Jeopardy! "Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring," the article in Britain's Independent said. "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," the article continued. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." The professors wrote that in the future there may be nothing to prevent machines with superhuman intelligence from self-improving, triggering a so-called "singularity." "One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all," the article said. "Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks."
*-- New study reveals the secret to rock-paper-scissors --*HANGZHOU, China (UPI) - If the game rock-paper-scissors were played by random number generators, or robots, there would never be any way to game the system. Each robotic player would randomly throw out one of the three signs, and over a long enough sample sizes, the games would be equally split between wins for player A, wins for player B and ties. But rock-paper-scissors is rarely played by robots. More often, it's played by humans -- humans that operate emotionally, even irrationally. And humans playing rock-paper-scissors, as researchers from Zhejiang University in China recently showed, often follow a predictable pattern -- the "win-stay lose-shift" strategy. Researchers recruited several hundred students to play in a tournament of rock-paper-scissors featuring cash prizes (so as to incentivize genuine competition). In studying the games, strategies and patterns, researchers noticed that after a contestant won a round, they were much more likely to stick with the same symbol, whereas losers were more likely to switch to one of the other two. In theory, a good player should employ game theory: randomizing their choices to remain unpredictable. Two players employing game theory tactics would essentially cancel each other out, each with equal probability to win -- a reality known as the Nash equilibrium. But, as the researchers found out, humans often fail to employ such tactics. "The game of rock-paper-scissors exhibits collective cyclic motions which cannot be understood by the Nash equilibrium concept," explained researchers. "Whether conditional response is a basic decision-making mechanism of the human brain or just a consequence of more fundamental neural mechanisms is a challenging question for future studies," the study's authors added.
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