Casey’s story is from The Spark, MIT Know-how Assessment’s new weekly local weather publication. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Wednesday.
A bias bounty for AI will assist to catch unfair algorithms sooner
What’s occurring: Whereas AI techniques are deployed on a regular basis, it may possibly take months and even years till it turns into clear whether or not, and the way, they’re biased. At the moment, a bunch of AI and machine-learning specialists are launching a brand new bias bounty competitors, which they hope will velocity the method of uncovering embedded prejudices.
What’s up first? Taking inspiration from bug bounties in cybersecurity, the primary bias bounty competitors goes to deal with biased picture detection. The winner will take dwelling a $6,000 prize dedicated by Microsoft and startup Strong Intelligence, which has been hailed as a powerful incentive for the machine studying neighborhood to winkle out bias. Learn the complete story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
Ought to we imagine in—and even need—immortality?
Twenty years have handed since author Jonathan Weiner first met Aubrey de Gray, the person with the Methuselah beard. Again then, Aubrey was already a True Believer within the quest for immortality. However he wasn’t well-known, or infamous, but; he wasn’t Aubrey!, as he would quickly turn out to be to his followers within the anti-aging crowd. And he wasn’t but a person in shame.
Weiner first met Aubrey in 2002, when Aubrey was nonetheless working as a pc programmer within the Division of Genetics on the College of Cambridge, in England. He quickly turned a secular guru, a prophet of immortality—to the extraordinary annoyance of a lot of the scientists within the getting old area. However Aubrey’s eagerness to persuade believers they might reside for hundreds of years, millennia, and even longer, in the event that they had been fortunate, raises pertinent questions on what it’s to need one thing we might not even imagine in. Learn the complete story.
This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed difficulty, obtainable from 26 October. If you wish to learn it when it comes out, you’ll be able to subscribe to MIT Know-how Assessment for as little as $80 a 12 months.
