Self-driving tech pioneer charged with 33 counts of theft

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome
“[If machine behavior suddenly became a mature field,] I think we would be able to better diagnose emergent [technological] problems, and maybe anticipate them. For example, for somebody designing Facebook and its news feed algorithm, maybe we would have known early enough that this was going to lead to a far more polarized political sphere and a lot of spreading of misinformation. And maybe we’d have been able to build immunity into the system, so that it could self-correct.” — Iyad Rahwan, Computational Scientist Learn More from Quanta Magazine >

#Not Awesome
“An AI trawled 3.5M books and found fundamental differences in the written language we use to describe men and women…If the language we use to describe men and women differs, in employee recommendations for example, it will influence who is offered a job when companies use IT systems to sort through job applications,” Augenstein said. “We can try to take this into account when developing machine-learning models by either using less biased text or by forcing models to ignore or counteract bias. All three things are possible.”” — Jesse Damiani, Entrepreneur Learn More from Forbes >

What we’re reading.

1/ Prosecutors charge one of Silicon Valley’s pioneers of self-driving technology ith 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. Learn More from The New York Times >

2/ Biased algorithms are grading writing portions of standardized tests, and they will lead to lower scores for certain groups of people. Learn More from Vice >

3/ Alibaba’s Jack Ma argues that humans cannot create an AI that is smarter than them. Elon Musk disagrees strongly. Learn More from Bloomberg >

4/ Companies developing AI need to be held responsible for the negative externalities their products create, or situations like the fatal accident caused by Uber’s self-driving AI will become increasingly common. Learn More from TechCrunch >

5/ OpenAI did not find evidence of bad actors abusing their natural language models in the wild, so they plan to share more of their AI technology with the world. Learn More from MIT Technology Review >

6/ Transgender and gender nonconforming people have reported being forced to expose their genitals to TSA employees, and many think the agency’s body scanning technology is to blame. Learn More from ProPublica >

7/ AI tech is being used by criminals to mimic the voice of victims and commit “voice fraud” — and one company reports that cases of voice fraud have risen by 350% from 2013 to 2017. Learn More from Quartz >

Links from the community.

“Finding novel materials for practical devices” submitted by Samiur Rahman (@samiur1204). Learn More from MIT News >

“Partnership on AI’s Terah Lyons talks ethics washing, moonshots, and power” submitted by Avi Eisenberger (@aeisenberger). Learn More from VentureBeat >

“OpenGPT-2: We Replicated GPT-2 Because You Can Too” by Vanya Cohen. Learn More from Noteworthy >

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Self-driving tech pioneer charged with 33 counts of theft was originally published in Machine Learnings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.