Unraveling the Ethics of AI - Weekly Mash-Up 157

Killer Machines and Sex Robots: Unraveling the Ethics of A.I.
Seeker

Artificial intelligence is blowing up, so much so that the Obama administration released a 60-page report titled Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. At NYU’s Ethics of Artificial Intelligence conference, one of the speakers, Kate Devlin, an AI researcher, raised a dozen different compelling issues concerning sex, ethics and robots. For instance, Pepper, the humanoid robot from Japan that can ostensibly read human emotions through facial cues and vocal tones. Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook on virtual reality: 'There’s no substitute for human contact'
CNBC

When asked about virtual reality, Apple CEO Tim Cook, believes that VR has intriguing applications, but is not as broad-based as augmented reality. "There's no substitute for human contact, and so you want the technology to encourage that." This is not the first time Cook has indicated AR’s superiority. Read more

See if You Can Spot the Phony Uses for VR
Wired

With so many different industries implementing augmented and virtual reality, it can be difficult to determine which ones use the technologies to their best capabilities. Companies are experimenting with all sorts of applications, some more outlandish than others. Can you distinguish the virtually real from the entirely fake? Read more

Elon Musk: If You Question Autonomous Cars, "You're Killing People"
Inverse

Elon Musk is so confident in Tesla’s autonomous driving hardware and software that he believes anyone who publicly questions their safety is basically “killing people.” According to him, self-driving cars are already at least two times safer than human drivers on average. That superiority factor will only go up as time goes on, as the neural network takes in and processes more and more information. Read more