Google’s New AI Goes for the Kill – Beware of the Sensors Under Your Desk
Did Google’s new AI backfire on a stressful situation? This could not be far from Stephen Hawking’s, the famed physicist, warning “the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”.
You might not know, that with AI now getting ready for the future, you could also be monitored in your office the moment you leave your desk.
—
Related articles:
Google’s new AI has learned to become ‘highly aggressive’ in stressful situations
New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk
http://craigpeterson.com/news/new-office-sensors-know-when-you-leave-your-desk/11784
—
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don’t miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
—
Transcript
TTWCP-DAILY-38_2017-02-22_Googles-New-AI-Goes-for-the-Kill
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 02/22/2017
Google’s New AI Goes for the Kill – Beware the Sensors Under Your Desk
Craig Peterson: Hi Craig Peterson here. We got a couple things to talk about in today’s daily. We are going to talk about some new office sensors. Now, you know, we all worked in some kind of an office, whether it’s at home or otherwise. Are these sensors really being used to monitor you as you work or are they maybe helping out somehow? We’ll talk little bit about that. Some these new ones and I know ID badges that are being used to track us. Google has a new artificial intelligence and of course they’ve been busy playing around with them. We’ll play a little audio from their AI and how well it can talk nowadays. It’s absolutely amazing. But it looks like it might be turning into something a lot uglier. In fact, I kind of go along with what Stephen Hawking was saying. These new AIs that are coming out of Google, at least right now, are becoming hyper aggressive and are doing some just incredible things. We’ll talk a little bit about that as well, right here, right now.
(TTWCP EARWORM)
Alright. Let’s get right down to it. We’ve got artificial intelligence just kind of popping up absolutely everywhere. And there is some very cool stuff it’s going to be able to do. Now you don’t need artificial intelligence in order to be able to do the more simple things. For instance, drive your car around. These autonomous vehicles, they’re not really using AI. So what is artificial intelligence? Bottom line, these are machines that can learn and do learn themselves. So in tests last year, Google came up with this new DeepMind AI System test and it demonstrated an ability to be able to learn independently from its own memory. So instead of, for instance, teaching the AI how to go about and play a game and then what are the different strategies like what they’ve done in chess games. They pre-loaded them with all of these standard chess opening moves, etc. They taught them just the basics. They taught the AI, here’s how you move pieces. And in this case it was Go, which is a game out of China, I don’t if I have ever played it before, with black and white tiles that you can flip over. It’s an interesting game and someday maybe we should talk a little bit about the concepts behind it and how it shows how the Chinese thinking is different than American or Western thinking for instance. But it’s kind of interesting because this game is very, very hard to automate. Well for the first time ever, this new AI from Google was able to beat the world’s best Go player. Now that’s pretty darn cool.
Well it’s also been figuring out how to seamlessly mimic a human voice. Now historically what have we done? Historically we have generated speech by pulling together different parts of someone speaking and then using that to reassemble and come up with phrases and things that kind of sound little funny. So, for instance, here’s what my Mac sounds like when it’s trying to say something.
(MAC AUDIO CLIP)
MAC: If you have a lengthy amount of text to read or review that you don’t have time to actually read, another alternative is to convert a text into an audio track.
Craig: Now that should be a pretty familiar sound to you by now. A lot of people use it. They’ve been using it for intros to the podcasts and you might even use it on your computer if you have a little bit of a hard time seeing things. And on your Mac, if you have a recent Mac you’ve got a couple of dozen different voices you can choose from. That’s just called Alex it’s kind of a default one so it sounds very computer-ish. Doesn’t it? Let’s give a listen now to what Google’s new AI is able to do.
(GOOGLE AI AUDIO CLIP)
GOOGLE AI: The avocado is a pear shaped fruit with leathery skin, smooth edible flesh and a large stone. The avocado is a pear shaped fruit with leathery skin smooth edible flesh and a large stone.
Craig: What do you think about that inflection particularly in this last one? It’s amazing what this AI is able to do and it’s going to be able to do more and more and more stuff as time goes on. It’s very, very intelligent. Now I remember it learned how to speak. That’s what you just heard. It was the AI had figured out how to speak and even in the inflections. It was taught some very, very basic rules but it figured this out for itself. So one of the things that they decided to do is teach it a few games. They taught it a simple game called Gathering and it has the two AIs, in this case, both trying to gather a limited set of apples. And they’ve given the AIs the ability to disable the other player for a short period of time. Now in this case they’re firing a laser but the AI doesn’t know that means. And it doesn’t, you know, destroy the other player. All it does is make it so they can’t play for a second or so.
So off they go. They start playing. They’re going back and forth and what ends up happening? They end up shooting lasers at each other like crazy as soon as the supply of apple starts to dwindle. Now that’s got a lot of people kind of concerned. Although this early on we don’t have any period review documents talking about this. But it is concerning because when we’re talking about these AIs and what they’re eventually going to be able to do, are they going to ultimately take over the world? Kind of the Skynet, the Terminator thing.
There’s another game they had it play called wolf pack where two of the AIs we’re playing against a third AI. And two of the AIs were wolves and the other was the prey. And there were few different games to this rule but they would benefit. The AIs that were the wolves would benefit if they cooperated. And they found out that the AIs in fact did kind of cooperate to do it. So it’s interesting I’ve got a lot more information on it. You’ll find it on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com. And it goes into a lot of depth of you’re interested with that sort of thing.
Now the office sensors, this is a real kind of an interesting thing because it’s happening more and more. Some journalist in a British newspaper called the Telegraph, a newspaper that I quote a lot here on the show, found little black boxes installed under the desks when they came in Monday morning. Well they had a logo or name on them called Occupy and the employees were wondering what these things were for. And they were designed to tell whether or not an employee was at their workstation. So the writers, the editors were very suspicious. They’re worried that the bosses were monitoring the moves, they’re monitoring their bathroom breaks, etc. And the National Union of Journalists complained to management about this Big Brother style surveillance. And the company was saying Hey listen. These are just there to reduce energy costs. So if someone isn’t sitting at the workstation we can go ahead and turn off lights, we can turn off heating or air-conditioning in areas if they’re not occupied. But the damage frankly was done here. People just plain didn’t trust it and the devices were removed.
Now I had a similar thing happen with one of my clients. We installed iMacs replacing PCS that they had used for decades, right? Different PCs. So we put these iMacs in place. We worked with the business team over at Apple to get them the right models. We got them installed. We got them running. And all of a sudden after a month or two we started seeing people having put electrician’s tape over the camera on the iMacs. And we’re trying to figure out why? What’s going on here? And the customer got back to us and said yeah people are afraid that they’re being monitored.
That they’re being spied on. And that’s a legitimate concern. You know, frankly, I get it, right? But on the iMac it’s very, very difficult, near impossible to be able to turn on that camera without that little green light coming on. So they were all worried about it. We had to write up the document that explain Hey listen, that’s not with these are for. You can use them. You can talk to each other. You can talk to people in different departments using FaceTime and it’s all encrypted and it’s all local. Don’t worry about it. But you know what? They still worried about it. So the damage was done. Keep that in mind, you know. If you have a larger business and you put in sensors and it’s designed, really, to help save some money here on your electrical cost, or heating, cooling costs. Keep in mind that employees nowadays are very, very worried. They’re sensitive to this topic that our government scanning us. The government’s watching us. The government’s recording everything we’re doing and employers can, frankly, monitor any kind of activity they want in the workplace that doesn’t involve the bathroom. So what should you be doing? What shouldn’t you be doing? Really good article on Bloomberg about this. And again we got more information up on my website, http://CraigPeterson.com.
Hey have a great day. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. Just http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. For now you’re going to have to go to TuneIn. If you are on an Android phone just go to TuneIn the app, search for Craig Peterson and you will see my podcast. We’ve been really busy putting about 6 or 7, well actually it’s 5, 8, 9 a week on the average week, covering all of the latest in technology. Have a great day and we will chat with you on the morrow. Bye bye.
—-
Don’t miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes Subscribe and give us a rating!
Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We’re really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!
