Who is listening to your most intimate conversations?

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome
“I do believe that AI is the largest technology force of our time. We will not likely see another one like this. The automation of automation, the automation of intelligence, is such an incredible idea that if we could continue to improve this capability, the applications are really quite boundless. When you think about the size of the intelligence market — how big is the intelligence market? It’s measured in trillions of dollars.” — Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO Learn More from VentureBeat >

#Not Awesome
“…[T]wo new studies show that AI trained to identify hate speech may actually end up amplifying racial bias. In one study, researchers found that leading AI models for processing hate speech were one-and-a-half times more likely to flag tweets as offensive or hateful when they were written by African Americans, and 2.2 times more likely to flag tweets written in African American English (which is commonly spoken by black people in the US)…these studies crack open the fantasy that AI will be able to rescue tech companies from making the complex decisions needed to police hateful speech on their platforms. These algorithms may seem like an easy solution to a complex problem, but they can have unintended consequences.” — Shirin Ghaffary, Reporter Learn More from Vox >

What we’re reading.

1/ Many people don’t realize that companies rely on humans to do “endlessly repetitive work” to teach AI systems that will be eventually used in everything from self-driving cars to healthcare. Learn More from The New York Times >

2/ Facebook paid hundreds of outside human contractors to transcribe audio clips from people using Messenger to make their AI-enabled product experience feel just a little bit more magical. Learn More from Bloomberg >

3/ One startup raised tens of millions of dollars claiming they had built cutting edge AI that could help customers assemble code — but really it was human engineers in India that were helping. Learn More from The Verge >

4/ To protect society from major harm, we should consider building and FDA-style mechanism that oversees algorithms that have the potential to negatively alter the behavior of billions. Learn More from WIRED >

5/ Companies are building AI that can detect the emotion of people and slightly alter your behavior so that you’re likely to spend more money. Learn More from The Guardian >

6/ What convenience could an AI-powered personal assistant offer you in exchange for the knowledge that your most intimate conversations will be heard by an unintended audience? Learn More from Slate >

7/ Investing in the field of human cognitive sciences, an area of study that helps us understand things like how children acquire language, might be the key to unlocking artificial general intelligence. Learn More from WIRED >

Links from the community.

“New State of the Art AI Optimizer: Rectified Adam (RAdam). Improve your AI accuracy instantly versus Adam, and why it works.” submitted by Samiur Rahman (@samiur1204). Learn More from Medium >

“Machine Learning in Asset Management “ submitted by Avi Eisenberger (@aeisenberger). Learn More from GitHub >

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Who is listening to your most intimate conversations? was originally published in Machine Learnings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.