Sorry, you shouldn't bundle all AI together like this. AI is just a subset of software, it's made all different ways. In the Science article we look at standard natural language AI components. We actually look at them from two different sources, Stanford (main article) and Google (supplement.) But they just scrape language from the world wide web. It's just stuff people say. It's not a special biased subset. So this tells us more about language than it does about AI. http://science.sciencemag.org/...

I hope you mean the Guardian article not the Science article? I think that although we presented this pretty liberally we were also pretty open minded and clear about the fact that language communicates all associations, learning the associations is called "bias" in ML and bias is what you need, it's the signal you've found in all the noise of the universe. Read the Science paper? http://science.sciencemag.org/... Or otherwise, read the blog posts? https://joanna-bryson.blogspot...

There's all kinds of AI some of which is just programmed entirely by hand so can contain whatever its author wants, but anyway this was about science, about human language, not really about AI, and in this you are right -- sometimes science reflects things you don't want to see. https://joanna-bryson.blogspot...

You guys should read the Science report, I think it's open access? All the stimuli come directly from previously run psychological experiments, and are listed in the supplementary materials here: http://science.sciencemag.org/...

Wow, thanks, that's the most useful thing I've read about Lifeboat since they invited me to join. I've been in them for a year & there isn't any evidence yet that they're about anything other than raising money. I don't know how they got so many big names – when I couldn't find out about them I decided to join due to the people I'd be associated with & the vague hope it might be something useful. Now I guess I'm just part of the problem. I agree with others that Wolfram is brilliant but either a shyster or kidding himself. Smart brains can still go in circles.

Not that anyone cares, but I'm already in print about this: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/is/2010/00000011/00000002/art00003 or get it here http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/web/ai.html I actually argued that this process will be an important part of keeping robotics companies from overselling their products, and in fact the issue will be underselling to escape liability, so there will need to be consumer information dissemination about it.

I think you are dead right, actually. I realised this when I read that Tron was designed after the writer first saw Pong, was blown away by the transfer of a real game into a new medium & was fascinated by the idea of putting himself into the perspective of the game. That story reminded me of how I felt about the movie -- it was clearly silly and fantastic to have people running around in a computer, but no more so than quite a lot of other ideas people are happy to entertain to watch movies or participate in religion. Once you are happy to suspend disbelief it is a fantastic idea that all programs have some level of AI and are running around bereft of sensor information about their makers & having to rely on faith and imputation given the structure of their environment about what could have formed it.

This girl is an absolute hero. Most children that age (and much older) are too terrified to report an assault, so the crime goes on. The people criticizing her here are sick.

I think the members of the EU who kept dissing Turkey's entry have a lot to answer for this. How often do France, Spain & Italy have to stand up and say "you can't join us, you are barbaric / insufficiently Christian" before it became almost a patriotic duty to vote for an Islamic party? Of course Italy is doing the same thing -- attacking information & becoming autocratic. Actually, having visited both countries recently, urban Turkey at least feels more like northern Europe than urban Italy does -- Italy feels more like India. (No offense, I like India too.) But the point is, rejecting people as being too different from you is not a good way to get them to behave more like you. And if you think "good, I want to be special", you don't get the information age.

I haven't read the documents, but I heard about them a long time ago. My husband and I were the other ones at the dinner, so Dylan contacted me when the first allegations were going to the external examiner, but no one from the university ever contacted me.

My husband and I don't wear wedding rings & I'm older than he is & fairly butch, but we have been married since 1999 and so I was a bit offended by the complainant's description of us. Dylan's then-new girlfriend did cancel at short notice & saying she had a cold was something of an excuse, but she is still Dylan's partner to this day, and in fact after the complainant & her husband went home that night, my husband, Dylan & I ran into Dylan's girlfriend's brother & some of his friends in the streets of Cork & they invited us out drinking & Dylan wanted to go. But we got him to take us home because I wasn't up for a late night.

Dylan does indeed flirt all the time with everyone, but that night he was not flirting with any intent other than trying to charm a politically powerful couple because he was new in the university. My husband and I just happened to have chosen the weekend the power dinner was already arranged for to come out & see Dylan's new house & meet his new partner, because my husband was working with a collaborator in Dublin earlier that week. We live in Bath, England, and Dylan used to work at the same university I do when we first moved here. Dylan thought we would all get on well, since we were all well-established academics (I think that's why his girlfriend felt out of place -- I think she was still a PhD student or postdoc at the time), so just added two people to his reservation.

After we had dinner at a restaurant that night, all five of us went out to a coffee shop & talked a bit longer after dinner. Everyone (all five people) seemed to be having a great time. The other couple actually seemed more relaxed & conversational at coffee than they had at dinner -- we figured the guy had been worried he was going to be lobbied for something specifically, but Dylan just wanted to get on good terms with him. My husband and I met Dylan's girlfriend the next morning & in fact we went rowing with her & Dylan in some kind of weird Irish longboat.

Personally, I first saw the fruit bat article when a Viennese PhD student facebook friend posted it & thought about sending it to Dylan because I knew he'd love it, but decided it wasn't the kind of thing you should send anyone but your partner & just sent it to my husband. Dylan's a lot more forward than I am, but then he's the one with book contracts & writing for the Guardian, not me. So I think it normally serves him in good stead.