September 3, 2024
“The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.” – Joy Buolamwini, Canadian-American computer scientist, AI researcher, author, and activist (b. 1989)
Fortune magazine has called Buolamwini “the conscience of the AI revolution” for her work in revealing the widespread racial and gender bias found in many AI algorithms. In 2016, she founded the Algorithmic Justice League, whose mission is “to raise awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with empirical research, build the voice and choice of the most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policy makers, and industry practitioners to mitigate AI harms and biases.”
Buolamwini is the author of Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (2023), which is both a personal memoir of her journey and a detailed description of her research and findings. She calls herself a poet of code and her work was featured in Coded Bias, a 2020 documentary available on Netflix.
In her book, Buolamwini writes, “AI will not solve poverty, because the conditions that lead to societies that pursue profit over people are not technical. AI will not solve discrimination, because the cultural patterns that say one group of people is better than another because of their gender, their skin color, the way they speak, their height, or their wealth are not technical. AI will not solve climate change, because the political and economic choices that exploit the earth’s resources are not technical matters.”
She continues, “As tempting as it may be, we cannot use AI to sidestep the hard work of organizing society so that where you are born, the resources of your community, and the labels placed upon you are not the primary determinants of your destiny. We cannot use AI to sidestep conversations about patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, or who holds power and who doesn’t.”
Buolamwini was born in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) and grew up in Mississippi and Tennessee. She received a B.S. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, she has an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, and she is both a Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow.
August 28, 2024
"Before we can get to 'God-like AI' we'll need to get through 'Dog-like AI.'" – Yann LeCun, French-American computer scientist (b. 1960)
In 2018, LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio together received the Turing Award for their work on deep learning, and specifically for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing." LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" or the "Godfathers of Deep Learning."
LeCun is a long-time believer in the open-source development of AI. In 2013, his demands before being willing to join Meta (at the time, Facebook) included two things: that the company would commit to building an open-source AI model, and that he would not have to relocate from New York City to Silicon Valley.
LeCun is currently the Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
August 21, 2024
“By far, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky American AI researcher (b. 1979)
Yudkowsky is the lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and is well known for his strong concerns about AI and where we are taking it. On its website, MIRI defines its mission as the following: "We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact."
On March 29, 2023, more than 1,100 data scientists, AI experts, and others signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on research into AI systems more powerful than the just-released GPT-4. Titled "Pause Giant Experiments: An Open Letter," it now has 33,707 signatures.
Yudkowsky was given the opportunity to be one of the original signatories, but he chose not to sign the letter because he felt that it didn't go far enough. Instead, he wrote an article for Time explaining his reasoning. In "Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down," he states, "I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it." More of Yudkowsky's writings can be found on his personal website.
August 14, 2024
“Elon Musk is worried about Al apocalypse, but I am worried about people losing their jobs. The society will have to adapt to a situation where people learn throughout their lives depending on the skills needed in the marketplace.” – Andrew Ng, British-American serial entrepreneur and innovative educator.
Andrew Ng is the cofounder of Google Brain, Coursera, and DeepLearning.AI, and the former chief scientist at Baidu, which is the dominant search engine in China. As Wikipedia describes it, Ng has led efforts to "democratize deep learning" by teaching over eight million students through his online courses. He was named to Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2012 and to the Time100 AI Most Influential People in 2023.
Ng is currently an adjunct professor at Stanford and was formerly the director of the Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL). In 2017, he founded Landing.AI and in 2018, he founded the AI Fund, which has the mission of supporting startups focused on artificial intelligence. Ng continues to lead both of these organizations.
August 5, 2024
"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
– Alan Turing (1912-1954).
London-born Alan Turing rates two Quotes of the Week, as he was one of the giants in the fields of crypotography and early computing. Considered the father of theoretical computer science, Turing continues to cast a long shadow on computing and artificial intelligence. After receiving his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1938, his "Turing machine" broke the Nazis' "unbreakable" Enigma code and helped to turn the tide for the Allies in World War II. (It was Turing's doctoral advisor who later named this very early computer the Turing machine.)
Turing is perhaps best known today for the "Turing test," which he called "the imitation game." This is the test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. If a human can't tell whether a machine's response is actually human-generated, the machine passes the test.
Based on the bestselling biography, "Alan Turing: The Enigma, "The Imitation Game" is an Oscar-winning 2014 film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. The movie is rated 8.0 on IMDB and is both inspiring and heartbreaking, examining Turin's professional triumphs, while not shying away from his personal anguish and the tragic consequences of being a gay man in 1950s Britain.
July 29, 2024
"There's a great phrase, written in the '70s: 'The definition of today's AI is a machine that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire.' It really speaks to the limitations of AI. In the next wave of AI research, if we want to make more helpful and useful machines, we've got to bring back the contextual understanding." – Fei-Fei Li, named in 2023 as one of the the Time 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Li is the founder of ImageNet, a project that revolutionized image classification and object detection in the field of artificial intelligence. She is also co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford, and the author of The Worlds I Know: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI.
July 22, 2024
“Artificial intelligence and generative AI may be the most important technology of any lifetime.” – Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce
July 15, 2024
Banning AI “is like trying to nail down the tide as it goes out to sea. It feels inevitable that AI is going to have a role in society. And it’s better to figure out how to make it work rather than trying to pretend it’s not going to exist.” – Art Papas, CEO of Bullhorn, Inc.
July 8, 2024
"As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore." – John McCarthy (1927-2011) was an American computer scientist who has long been considered one of the founding fathers of AI. He is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955 for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which took place the following year.
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