Calum Chace's Blog, page 7

Could you – and should you – get paid to do AI safety research?

How close are we to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a machine with all the cognitive ability of an adult human? Surveys of AI researchers indicate that professionals think the most likely timeline is a decade or so either side of the middle of this century. That is not very long, but quite a few well-informed people think it could be even sooner. One such person is Ross Nordby...

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Extending health spans by extending telomeres: profile of Liz Parrish

Patient zero Liz Parrish was nervous. She was on a plane to Colombia, where she would undergo an untested gene therapy. She and her colleagues had spent two years developing the therapy and making the preparations, but they could not know how it would work out. It was September 2015, and Parrish had been inspired to take this step because her son, suffering from type 1 diabetes...

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Superintelligence may be closer than most people think, says neuroscientist

There is a paradox in artificial intelligence (AI). The technology is already very powerful, and most people agree that it will transform every industry and every aspect of our lives. But deployment of AI in industry seems to be proceeding slower than expected. One explanation for this is that CEOs and CTOs are understandably nervous about deploying systems that are unpredictable.

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Why is it so hard to deploy AI?

We all know AI will transform everything There might be a corporate executive somewhere who hasn’t yet concluded that over the next few years, artificial intelligence (AI) will transform their organisation and their industry. If there is, they are very unusual. However, despite this general acknowledgement of its importance, many companies are struggling to deploy AI. How should they do it?

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Has there been a second AI Big Bang?

The Big Bang in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the breakthrough in 2012, when a team of researchers led by Geoff Hinton managed to train an artificial neural network (known as a deep learning system) to win an image classification competition by a surprising margin. Prior to that, AI had performed some remarkable feats, but it had never made much money. Since 2012, AI has helped the big...

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Preventing the brain from aging: profile of Jean Hébert

Machines can be fixed Jean Hébert wanted to be a molecular biologist long before he knew what the term meant. As a boy in elementary school in Montreal, Quebec, he decided that getting old was a bad idea. He reasoned that we are essentially machines, so it must be possible to fix our bodies when they suffer damage, and begin to malfunction. This line of thinking led him all the way to a PhD in...

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Can the UAE become one of the world’s major centres for longevity research?

According to Betteridge’s Law, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a “no”. But let’s not be hasty. A few months ago, the UAE declared a shift in its healthcare policy towards longevity and healthy aging. Throughout its fairly short history, the UAE has been a remarkably ambitious country. Could it become one of the world’s longevity capitals – a global centre for...

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AI and skin biomarkers: profile of Anastasia Georgievskaya

Anastasia Georgievskaya is using AI to develop biomarkers from photos of consumers’ skin. She is doing important work for the longevity revolution, but the consumers are more attracted by offers of improved attractiveness than offers of extended lifespan. Anastasia Georgievskaya runs a company in Estonia that provides consumers with recommendations engines for healthcare and lifestyle changes...

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Biotech firm puts R2D2 to work in lab

Drug development is a time-consuming and expensive business. Notoriously, it takes over 10 years and costs around $2 billion to bring one drug to market — and around 90% of candidate drugs fail during human trials. And the situation is getting worse. Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law in reverse) is the observation that the cost of developing a new drug doubles roughly every nine years.

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The Impact of AI on Delivery Businesses

You know the Travelling Salesman Problem? Find the shortest route that takes you to every city on a list and returns you home. It’s a hard problem. In fact it’s an NP-hard problem, where NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial time. Just in case you were in any doubt about how hard it is. But if you’re a grocery retailer, delivering the weekly shopping to millions of homes, or the country’s...

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