Hedging and Hawing about AI and Jobs
This is in reply to reading this article from the BBC, “AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says” (January 15, 2024, Annabelle Liang, BBC)
Posts by Year
2024
That Which Dreams are Made Of
In William Shakespeare’s Tempest, the old wizard Prospero at one point famously opines…
Movie Liveblog - The Creator
It’s almost a new year and while I don’t always make New Year’s resolutions (and I definitely don’t always keep them for long) I feel this blog is in need of...
2023
The More Things Change…
Today I held 80 million year old dinosaur bones in my hands and used pics and brushes and glue to piece them back together into a rib. The tools I was using ...
It’s Made of People!
An idea that I have been converging on in discussions recently spawned by Chat-GPT is that, for the purposes of risk assessment and impact, we should to thin...
Path Wars Bonus : The End Credits
Path Wars II : The End Credits
Jedi Master Dijkstra
Using ChatGPT Stories as Anchors for Teaching
2022
Twitter Isn’t Even A Social Network
I’ve tried to write this blog post several times, and each time I get around to it my intro statement is no longer true.
Will Humans be in Control when using Artificial Intelligence Tools?
Some people ask if AI decision tools will always allow human input by 2035, I think that’s two questions in one.
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
This week the world lost two beautiful people who stood for hope, caring and kindness. These people happened to also be actors who most famously played chara...
The Ancient Battle Continues
Reposting now given the latest iteration of this neverending battle, because this never gets old.
Why Build a Meta-Verse?
Some spontaneous thoughts on the multiverse of metaverses and whether it’s all worth the effort.
Is AI Just a Passing Fad
Someone important recently expressed a thought to me along the following lines:
2021
Prediction and Causality - How Can Machine Learning be Used for COVID-19? Causality, ML and COVID-19
Abstract
Do all COVID Vaccines have the same Blood Clot Risk?
TL;DR - Maybe yes, but this study isn’t conclusive, mostly because they are so, incredibly few cases of the blood clot condition.
It’s Better to Know about Atmospheric Engineering than Be Surprised Later
The impact atmospheric engineering could be catastrophic or life saving. But the climate emergency is existential for humanity and all life on Earth. We can’...
A New Year’s Proposal for Ontario for Autonomous Driving
In Southern Ontario, one major low-hanging fruit is allowing some level of Autonomous Driving (AD) on the 400 series highways in the High Occupancy Vehicle (...
Self-Driving ‘Edge’ Cases Aren’t All That Edgy
This is the front of my car after driving for about 20 minutes on the road in average weather conditions on the 401 between Toronto and Waterloo in December ...
2019
ECML 2019 Notes
In September 2019 I had the good fortune to attend ECML 2019 in beautiful Wurzburg, Germany.
2018
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 12 — RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION
“ AI is yielding optimal consumption and production levels with vertical green farms, eliminating waste, and vastly improving yields and resource efficien...
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 10— REDUCED INEQUALITIES
“ Human augmentation using AI-inspired devices both internally and externally provides super senses and knowledge, enhanced physical capabilities, and cor...
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 9— INDUSTRY, INNOVATION, AND INFRASTRUCTURE
“ New hybrid manufacturing incorporating AI, IoT sensors, and 4D printing is reshaping industries, representing the ’A Triple C’, and yielding exponential...
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 7 — AFFORDABLE AND CLEAN ENERGY
“Green energy in all its forms is continuously improving for increased output and more efficiency by AI real-time analysis.” — AI XPRIZE
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 6— Clean Water and Sanitation
Goal: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 5— Gender Equality
Each day up until the AI for Good Summit in Geneva on May 15 I’m writing up a thought on how Artificial Intelligence could impact on each UN Sustainable Deve...
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 4— Quality Education
Goal: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 3— Good Health and Well-Being
Goal: Good Health and Well-being : Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 2 — Zero Hunger
AI XPRIZE Suggestion: “Agriculture productivity is increased through predicative analysis from imaging with automated drones and from satellites. Nearly 50% ...
17 Days of AI for Good
In a couple weeks I will have the good fortune to be attending the second AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The summit is run through collaboration between the X...
Robot Rights Just Ain’t Right.
The European Parliament has apparently been discussing giving rights to machines.
“Sometimes technology is not the answer” said an actual AI Engineering Professor.
**I’m serious. **Sometimes more technology is not the answer. I love technology, I want the intelligent Internet of Things and I love having a supercomputer ...
2017
A Discussion of an Explosion of Intelligence Explosion Discussions
A few opinion pieces about the worries about #IntelligenceExplosion or the Singularity have been floating around in the social media circles of AI/ML researc...
How long ago is long ago? How fast is fast?
So apparently, the first iPhone came out 10 years ago today. That kind of hit me.
2016
How Bad is it Going to Get?
Here’s another great article about impending job losses over the next decade due to advanced automation, and it’s not just factories anymore. As the tasks th...
2015
Computers Cannot Make Ethical Choices For Us
I came across this interesting post on the legal and insurance implications of Tesla’s upcoming autonomous driving feature. The new feature would only work f...
2014
Computational Sustainability at AAAI
This week in Québec City the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference is being held and for the fourth year running there is a special track on Computational Sustainabi...
Making Hard Choices Optimally
This TED talk by Ruth Chang, a Philosopher at Rutgers University, is really thought provoking and useful. I disagree with some of her logic about non-numeric...
The use of automated news writing algorithms is growing
This is interesting. The first story online from a major newspaper about the earthquake this week in LA was generated automatically by an algorithm. In the p...
Reviewing Papers by Reading Group
I love reading groups, and I just had an idea for how they might be able to save scientific peer review. In case you’re outside academia let me just describ...
The Big Deal about Big Data and Deep Learning
Recently, you may have been hearing a lot about “Big Data”, this refers to our growing ability to find patterns and process very large amounts of data with o...
2013
I’ll See Your Canned Message and Raise You and Auto-Reply Bot
Here’s a quick thought about this article on Why Google Wants to ‘Can’ Your Messages. Apparently, Google has filed a patent for a service that would offer su...
Review of RLDM2013 Conference
Last week I attended the first multidisciplinary conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2013) and I think I speak for most people who ...
Are Obama and Boehner stuck in a Nash Equilibrium…again?
It occurred to me that the current train wreck that is carrying out in slow motion in congress this week as the world watches in confusion and horror may hav...
Twitter Truth
Not everything on Twitter is true, not by a long shot. But everything that is true will show up and be reshared on Twitter before it shows up in a newspaper.
Machines want your job : Recruiters
One of the reasons I think it is so important for the everyone person to keep up to date which the advance of science and technology is that is the only way ...
Was The Twitter Plunge Caused By An Algorithm Reading Twitter 92bec296b638
title: Was the Twitter Plunge Caused by an Algorithm Reading Twitter? description: ‘’ date: ‘2013-04-25T03:58:00.000Z’
Miguel Nicolelis Says the Brain is Not Computable, Bashes Kurzweil’sSingularity
I disagree with this opinion on computability of human minds, but it’s fascinating research otherwise. He’s showing that new senses can be integrated into ma...
Robot Lifeguards?
Here’s some interesting research on a Neural Network approach to teaching a machine to detect when someone is drowning. This could lead to better detection o...
NIPS Conference 2012
A month ago I attended the 2012 Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Lake Tahoe Nevada. I’ve already posted some of my thoughts on some of it ...
2012
Could Machines Make Art?
Fascinating study out of the University of Trento on using Machine Vision algorithms to learn how people respond emotionally to abstract art. ** Link :** Com...
Announcing the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance «Computing Education Blog
Announcing the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance « Computing Education Blog The future of education requires Computer Science. This is a...
Should Live Tweeting Be Protected Like Broadcast Rights?
Interesting question here about tweeting sporting events: Should Live Tweeting Be Protected Like Broadcast Rights? I think what is happening is that as techn...
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence — Moshe Y. Vardi — The Atlantic
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence — Moshe Y. Vardi — The Atlantic I just started reading this, but it’s right along the lines of what I’m talking abou...
How much will you pay to be listened to on Facebook?
Facebook is having a Red Barn moment. If you ever played Farmville you’ll know what I mean. Farmville was fun for the first little while, planting, pulling i...
Machines Want Your Job
I’ve been planning for a while to write a series of posts on this blog about how advances in science and technology have the potential to make certain curren...
Don’t Judge a Social Network by it’s Book Price
Far be it for me to defend Facebook…I think Google+ is a far superior tool for discussion and community and even Twitter is unmatched for certain types of in...
Machine Morality
This post started as a response to a provocative question by +David Brin on Google+:
Talking Robots and Psychedelic Drugs
Baby robot learns first words from human teacher — tech — 15 June 2012 — New Scientist I’m always glad to see more methods from research in Artificial Intel...
It’s that time of year again…password changing season.
If you use the popular professional social network LinkedIn you should go there right now and change your password to a new one, apparently some russian hack...
Getting more people into computer science by tying university and industry together.
We feel it is so central to the future of our society that it’s extremely important that we train an increasing number of talented people in computer scie...
Building the Enterprise? Seriously? Why not?
I ignored this the first time I saw it and then I was going to make snarky comment that we should just send a bunch of ships to mars instead of building the ...
Scientists angry about research facility closure
Link : Scientists angry about research facility closure — Manitoba — CBC News. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more of not less of. The only way to...
Interesting Thought : Our Social Network Is Becoming an Agent for Us
Link: Discussion I got into on an article about automatically feeding your google+ content out to twitter and elsewhere I’ve thought along these lines a bit...
Do you believe in the Multiverse?
Great review article of cosmology by Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal : One universe among many? Some people complain that scientists should be war...
Automated Myth Debunking In your Inbox
Hmm…. LazyTruth is “an inbox widget that surfaces vetted information when you receive an email forward full of political myths, urban rumors, or security thr...
Project: Evolution in Action
Project: Evolution in Action | RocketHub ScienceFund is like Kickstarter for Science! Pitch in money to help researchers collect and analysis data like this ...
The Snowy Owl Invades
If you are looking for a good example of the growing intersection of sustainability science and computer science I suggest taking a look at this fascinating ...
2011
In Defence of Algorithms
(I seriously never imagined I’d have to write that title.) Today I came across an odd analysis of several legitimate problems by Barry Devlin. (via Marshall...
AAAI 2011 Wrap-Up
So I didn’t post an update about the AAAI 2011 conference every day, but really, this is more posts than I would have predicted with my prior model of my beh...
CompSust11 — Computational Sustainability at AAAI11
(test) This year the annual AAAI conference held a special track for the field of Computational Sustainability. I attended the AAAI conference and presented ...
AAAI 2011 — Day 2
Day two of tutorials and workshops at AAAI 2011. The crowd is starting to grow and the robots are being set up. Things don’t get fully started until tomorrow...
AAAI 2011 — Day 1
I skipped the afternoon tutorial sessions to work on my presentation and go around town a bit but I did attend a very interesting morning tutorial on time se...