Mark Minevich has just finished a 2-part series for Forbes on “The Women Defining the 21st Century AI Movement.”  It was a worthy undertaking, but he missed a few, including Sadia Ayaz, Director Waste Management; Stacy Chapman, CEO SwoopTalent; Angela Hood, CEO ThisWayGlobal; Athena Karp, CEO HiredScore; Andreea Wade, CEO Opening.io; and Danielle Weinblatt, President…

In my book Circa 2118, I predicted that AI would power a revolution in real world retail clothing stores.  AI assisted humanoids working in those stores would be able to instantaneously reshape themselves to look exactly like the customer so that they could see what a new suit or dress would actually look like on…

Business Insider has just published a story in which the author used AI to analyze tweets by Trump, Biden & Sanders for anger, negativity and passive aggression.  Substituting AI assessments for human judgments is a trend fraught with danger.  Why?  Because it surrenders human agency.  Humans taught the machines to make such judgments (for better…

For those who sneer at regulating AI research or, worse, those who champion it in public but then ignore it altogether behind closed doors – hello, tech company CEOs – consider this statement from Susanne Gerber, a specialist in bioinformatics at Mainz University: “Many machine learning methods, such as the very popular deep learning, are…

CB Insights has just announced the global AI rankings and the US is solidly in first place, with 65 of the top 100 startups located there. The UK and Canada tied for second, China “slipped into third,” and Israel took the fourth spot. While that’s good news for the US tech industry, it comes with…

They must think we’re idiots. The manufacturers of robots and other intelligent machines are now adorning them with cutesy faces in the belief that such human touches will assuage people’s fear about losing their jobs to the machines. While it’s true that intelligent machines can seem empathetic and that some people do actually develop a…

In the vein of Pogo’s famous quip, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” AI researchers at MIT, working with colleagues in Israel and Ukraine, recently displayed a deep fake video in which former President Nixon announces the failure of the 1969 moon landing. Worse, the prevalence and potential harm of such misapplications…

The French historian Hilaire Belloc once said, “The future always comes as a surprise.” And surprise is the greatest threat AI poses to working men and women over the next 5-10 years. You go home one evening feeling good about the contribution you made at work and go back into the office the next day…

The Roman Catholic Church, IBM and Microsoft have just signed a pact – The Rome Call for Ethics – to find ways to develop “human-centred” AI.  The three admit to being “strange bedfellows,” and certainly skepticism about the venture isn’t inappropriate, given that none of the organizations is a role model of transparency.  Nevertheless, they…

There are some who say, don’t worry, the transition from an industrial to an AI/automated economy will be just like the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy.  Old jobs will disappear and new ones will be created.  That’s true, but the skills required for those early industrial jobs weren’t all that different from…