The Best Things we read in AI this Week

"Artificial Intelligence" is Vintra's weekly round-up of AI-related articles, blogs, videos, and papers we liked. 

• Welcome to the Panopticon, otherwise known as China. China continues to build towards an all-seeing state. Troubling, challenging, and in some ways, an impressive feat of technological advance (minus the whole big brother, public-shaming techniques...). Read the article here.  
  

  ... China’s ambitions outstrip its abilities. Technology in place at one train station or crosswalk may be lacking in another city, or even the next block over. Bureaucratic inefficiencies prevent the creation of a nationwide network. // For the Communist Party, that may not matter. Far from hiding their efforts, Chinese authorities regularly state, and overstate, their capabilities. In China, even the perception of surveillance can keep the public in line.

   

Check our latest Case Study, The Running Man. 

• Henry Kissinger has some questions about AI and humanity's readiness for its rise. Although, waiting until we have all the answers to what may happen before pushing forward with technological advancements may, in this case, impede many positive advancements across various industries. Read the article here. 

  As I listened to the speaker celebrate this technical progress, my experience as a historian and occasional practicing statesman gave me pause. What would be the impact on history of self-learning machines—machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and applied that knowledge to ends for which there may be no category of human understanding? Would these machines learn to communicate with one another? How would choices be made among emerging options? Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?

• AI used to predict the progression of Alzheimer's using data that hasn't been classified or labeled. Read the article here.  

  Researchers at Unlearn.AI, a startup that designs software tools for clinical research, think that artificial intelligence has a valuable role to play in personalizing diagnosis and treatment. In a paper (“Using deep learning for comprehensive, personalized forecasting of Alzheimer’s Disease progression”) published on the preprint server Arvix.org, they lay out a system that predicts disease progression, in essence projecting the symptoms that individual patients will experience at any point in the future. (A demo was published on Unlearn.AI’s website.)

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