Countries around the world are vastly increasing their budgets for AI, and with good reason. Just look at Gartner’s Hype Cycle released yesterday to see how important the technology is expected to be over the next decade.

Russian president Vladimir Putin famously said back in 2017 that the nation which leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world”. Putin said that AI offers unprecedented power, including military power, to any government that leads in the field.

China, the third global superpower, has also embarked on a major national AI strategy. In July 2017, The State Council of China released the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” to build a domestic AI industry worth around $150 billion over the next few years and to become the leading AI power by 2030.

Naturally, the US isn’t going to give that top podium spot to China without a fight.

The White House has proposed (PDF) a 30 percent hike in spending on AI and quantum computing. Around $1.5 billion would be allocated to AI funding and $699 million to quantum technology.

According to a report published by US national security think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Chinese officials see an AI ‘arms race’ as a threat to global peace.

The fear of the CNAS is that integrating AI into military resources and communications may breach current international norms and lead to conflict-by-accident.

China and the US have been vying to become the top destination for AI investments. Figures published by ABI Research at the end of last year suggested that the US reclaimed the top spot for AI investments back from China, which overtook the Americans the year prior. ABI expects the US to reach a 70 percent share of global AI investments.

Lian Jye Su, Principal Analyst at ABI Research, said: 

“The United States is reaping the rewards from its diversified AI investment strategy. 

Top AI startups in the United States come from various sectors, including self-driving cars, industrial manufacturing, robotics process automation, data analytics, and cybersecurity.”

The UK, unable to match the levels of funding allocated to AI research as the likes of the US and China, is taking a different approach.

An index compiled by Oxford Insights last year ranked the UK number one for AI readiness in Europe and only second on the world stage behind Singapore. The US is in fourth place, while China only just makes the top 20.

The UK has focused on AI policy and harnessing the talent from its world-leading universities to ensure the country is ready to embrace the technology’s opportunities.

A dedicated AI council in the UK features:

• Ocado’s Chief Technology Officer, Paul Clarke
• Dame Patricia Hodgson, Board Member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation 
• The Alan Turing Institute Chief Executive, Professor Adrian Smith
• AI for good founder Kriti Sharma
• UKRI chief executive Mark Walport
• Founding Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Professor David Lane

British Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright stated: “Britain is already a leading authority in AI. We are home to some of the world’s finest academic institutions, landing record levels of investment to the sector, and attracting the best global tech talent. But we must not be complacent.”

Growing cooperation between the UK and US in a number of technological endeavours could help to harness the strengths of both nations if similarly applied to AI, helping to maintain the countries’ leaderships in the field.

(Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash)

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“We are still excited to see how the AI algorithms perform against each other as well as a Weapons School-trained human and hope that fighter pilots from across the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as military leaders and members of the AI tech community will register and watch online,” said Col. Dan Javorsek, program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office.

“It’s been amazing to see how far the teams have advanced AI for autonomous dogfighting in less than a year.”

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is using the AlphaDogfight Trial event to recruit more AI developers for its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program.

The upcoming event is the final in a series of three and will finish with a bang as the AI-powered F-16 fighter planes virtually take on a human pilot.

“Regardless of whether the human or machine wins the final dogfight, the AlphaDogfight Trials is all about increasing trust in AI,” Javorsek added.

“If the champion AI earns the respect of an F-16 pilot, we’ll have come one step closer to achieving effective human-machine teaming in air combat, which is the goal of the ACE program.”

The first event was held in November last year with early algorithms:

A second event was held in January this year demonstrating the vast improvements made with the algorithms over a relatively short period of time. The algorithms took on adversaries created by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab:

The third and final event will be streamed live from the Applied Physics Lab (APL) from August 18th-20th.

Eight teams will fly against five APL-developed adversary AI algorithms on day one. On day two, teams will fly against each other in a round-robin tournament.

Day three is when things get most exciting, with the top four teams competing in a single-elimination tournament for the AlphaDogfight Trials Championship. The winning team’s AI will then fly against a real F-16 pilot to test the AI’s abilities against a human.

ACE envisions future air combat eventually being conducted without putting human pilots at risk. In the meantime, DARPA hopes the initiative will help improve human pilots’ trust in fighting alongside AI.

Prior registration is required to view the event. Non-US citizens must register prior to August 11th while Americans have until August 17th.

You can register for the event here.

(Image Credit: DARPA)

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“If we would use the software only [for subject identification], we would not solve the case 95-97 percent of the time,” Craig said. “If we were just to use the technology by itself to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify.”

Craig’s comments arrive just days after the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) lodged a complaint against the Detroit police following the harrowing wrongful arrest of black male Robert Williams due to a facial recognition error.

Detroit Police arrested Williams for allegedly stealing five watches valued at $3800 from a store in October 2018. A blurry CCTV image was matched by a facial recognition algorithm to Williams’ driver’s license photo.

Current AI algorithms are known to have a racism issue. Extensive studies have repeatedly shown that facial recognition algorithms are almost 100 percent accurate when used on white males, but have serious problems when it comes to darker skin colours and the fairer sex.

This racism issue was shown again this week after an AI designed to upscale blurry photos, such as those often taken from security cameras, was applied to a variety of people from the BAME communities.

Here’s a particularly famous one:

🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/LG2cimkCFm

— Chicken3gg (@Chicken3gg) June 20, 2020

And some other examples:

Last week, Boston followed in the footsteps of an increasing number of cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and California in banning facial recognition technology over human rights concerns.

“Facial recognition is inherently dangerous and inherently oppressive. It cannot be reformed or regulated. It must be abolished,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future.

Over the other side of the pond, facial recognition tests in the UK so far have also been nothing short of a complete failure. An initial trial at the 2016 Notting Hill Carnival led to not a single person being identified. A follow-up trial the following year led to no legitimate matches but 35 false positives.

An independent report into the Met Police’s facial recognition trials, conducted last year by Professor Peter Fussey and Dr Daragh Murray, concluded that it was only verifiably accurate in just 19 percent of cases.

The next chilling step for AI in surveillance is using it to predict crime. Following news of an imminent publication called ‘A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing,’ over 1000 experts signed an open letter last week opposing the use of AI for such purposes.

“Machine learning programs are not neutral; research agendas and the data sets they work with often inherit dominant cultural beliefs about the world,” warned the letter’s authors.

The acknowledgement from Detroit’s police chief that current facial recognition technologies do not work in around 96 percent of cases should be reason enough to halt its use, especially for law enforcement, at least until serious improvements are made.

(Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash)

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PAI is a US-led alliance which aims to foster the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies. Baidu was the only Chinese member.

The loss of Baidu’s expertise and any representation from China is devastating for PAI. Ethical AI development requires global cooperation to set acceptable standards which help to ensure safety while not limiting innovation.

Baidu has officially cited financial pressures for its decision to exit the alliance.

In a statement, Baidu wrote:

“Baidu shares the vision of the Partnership on AI and is committed to promoting the ethical development of AI technologies. 

We are in discussions about renewing our membership, and remain open to other opportunities to collaborate with industry peers on advancing AI.”

Directors from PAI hope to see Baidu renew its membership to the alliance next year.

Cooperation between American and Chinese firms

Cooperation between American and Chinese firms is getting more difficult as the world’s largest economies continue to implement sanctions on each other.

The US has criticised China for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, trade practices, its mass imprisonment and alleged torture of Uyghur Muslims in “re-education” camps, and breaking the semi-autonomy of Hong Kong.

In the tech world, much of the focus has been on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei – which the US accuses of being a national security threat. Canada arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou last year on allegations of using the company’s subsidiaries to flout US sanctions against Iran. Two Canadian businessmen that were arrested in China shortly after Meng’s detention, in a suspected retaliation, were charged with spying by Beijing this week.

An increasing number of Chinese companies, including Huawei, have found themselves being added to an ‘Entity List’ in the US which bans American companies from working with them without explicit permission from the government.

The US added six Chinese AI companies to its Entity List last October, citing their role in alleged human rights violations.

Earlier this week, the US Commerce Department made an exception to Huawei’s inclusion on the Entity List which allows US companies to work with the Chinese giant for the purposes of developing 5G standards. Hopefully, we can see the same being done for AI companies.

However, on the whole, cooperation between American and Chinese firms is getting more difficult as a result of the political climate. It wouldn’t be surprising to see more cases of companies like Baidu dropping out of well-intentioned alliances such as PAI if sensible resolutions to differences are not sought.

(Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash)

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AI will assist us mere humans in coming up with new innovations in the years to come. However, the USPTO will not let them take the credit.

The USPTO has rejected two early filings of inventions credited to an AI system called DABUS which was created by Stephen Thaler.

DABUS invented two devices; a shape-shifting food container, and a new type of emergency flashlight.

The filings were submitted by the Artificial Inventor Project (AIP) last year. AIP’s lawyers argued that Thaler is an expert in building AI systems like DABUS but has no experience in consumer goods and would not have created them himself.

The USPTO concluded that “only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application,” under the current law.

Similar applications by the AIP in the UK and EU were rejected along the same lines by their respective patent authorities.

“If I teach my Ph.D. student and they go on to make a final complex idea, that doesn’t make me an inventor on their patent, so it shouldn’t with a machine,” editor Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey who led a group of legal experts in the AI patent project, told the Wall Street Journal last year.

The case over whether only humans should hold such rights has similarities to the infamous monkey selfie saga where PETA argued that a monkey could own the copyright to a selfie.

The US Copyright Office also ruled in that instance that only photographs taken by humans can be copyrighted and PETA’s case was subsequently dismissed.

(Photo by Jesse Chan on Unsplash)

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Writing in a FT editorial, Pichai said: “…there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. It is too important not to.”

Few people debate the need for AI regulation but there are differing opinions when it comes to how much. Overregulation limits innovation while lack of regulation can pose serious dangers – even existential depending on who you listen to.

Pichai says AI is “one of the most promising new technologies” that has “the potential to improve billions of lives,” but warns of the possible risks if development is left unchecked.

“History is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed,” Pichai wrote. “The internet made it possible to connect with anyone and get information from anywhere, but also easier for misinformation to spread.”

Google is one of the companies which people have voiced concerns about given its reach and questionable record when it comes to user privacy. Pichai’s words today will offer some comfort that Google’s leadership wants sensible regulation to guide its efforts.

So far, Google has shown how AI can be used for good. A study by Google, published in science journal Nature, showed how its AI model was able to spot breast cancer in mammograms with “greater accuracy, fewer false positives, and fewer false negatives than experts.”

Governments around the world are beginning to shape AI regulations. The UK, Europe’s leader in AI developments and investments, aims to focus on promoting ethical AI rather than attempt to match superpowers like China and the US in other areas.

In a report last year, the Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence recommended the UK capitalises on its “particular blend of national assets” to “forge a distinctive role for itself as a pioneer in ethical AI”.

The EU, which the UK leaves at the end of this month, recently published its own comprehensive proposals on AI regulation which many believe are too stringent. The US warned its European allies against overregulation of AI earlier this month.

In a statement released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House wrote:

“Europe and our allies should avoid heavy handed innovation-killing models, and instead consider a similar regulatory approach.

The best way to counter authoritarian uses of AI is to make sure America and our international partners remain the global hubs of innovation, shaping the evolution of technology in a manner consistent with our common values.”

Pichai refrains from denouncing either the White House’s calls for light AI regulation, or the EU’s plans for stringent rules. Instead, Pichai only calls for the need to balance “potential harms… with social opportunities.”

Google has certainly not been devoid of criticism over its forays into AI. The company was forced to back out from a Pentagon contract in 2018 called Project Maven over backlash about Google building AI technology for deploying and monitoring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Following the decision to back out from Project Maven, Pichai outlined Google’s ethical principles when it comes to AI:

1. Be socially beneficial.
2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.
3. Be built and tested for safety.
4. Be accountable to people.
5. Incorporate privacy design principles.
6. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence.
7. Be made available for uses that accord with these principles.

Pichai promised the company “will work to limit potentially harmful or abusive applications” and will block the use of their technology if they “become aware of uses that are inconsistent” with the principles.

Time will tell whether Google will abide by its principles when it comes to AI, but it’s heartening to see Pichai call for sensible regulation to help enforce it across the industry.

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Voter manipulation is a concern for any functioning democracy and deepfakes provide a whole new challenge for social media platforms.

A fake video of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, went viral last year after purportedly showing her slurring her words as if she was intoxicated. The clip shows how even a relatively unsophisticated video (it wasn’t an actual deepfake) could be used to cause reputational damage and swing votes.

Facebook refused to remove the video of Nancy Pelosi and instead said it would display an article from a third-party fact-checking website highlighting that it’s been edited and take measures to limit its reach. The approach, of course, was heavily criticised.

The new rules from Facebook claim that deepfake videos that are designed to be misleading will be banned. The problem with the rules is they don’t cover videos altered for parody or those edited “solely to omit or change the order of words,” which will not sound encouraging to those wanting a firm stance against manipulation.

In the age of “fake news,” many people have become aware not to necessarily believe what they read. Likewise, an increasing number of people also know how easily images are manipulated. Deepfake videos pose such a concern because the wider public are not yet aware enough of their existence or how to spot them.

A report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights last September, covered by our sister publication MarketingTech, highlighted the various ways disinformation could be used ahead of this year’s presidential elections.

One of the eight predictions is that deepfake videos will be used “to portray candidates saying and doing things they never said or did”. Another prediction is that Iran and China may join Russia as sources of disinformation, the former perhaps now being even more likely given recent escalations between the US and Iran and the desire for non-military retaliation.

Legislation is being introduced to criminalise the production of deepfakes without disclosing that they’ve been modified, but the best approach is to limit them from being widely shared in the first place.

“A better approach, and one that avoids the danger of overreaching government censorship, would be for the social media platforms to improve their AI-screening technology, enhance human review, and remove deepfakes before they can do much damage,” the report suggests.

The month after Facebook refused to remove the edited video of Pelosi, a deepfake created by Israeli startup Canny AI aimed to raise awareness of the issue by making it appear like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures.”

Canny AI’s deepfake was designed to be clearly fake but it shows how easy it’s becoming to manipulate people’s views. In a tense world, it’s not hard to imagine what devastation could be caused simply by releasing a deepfake of a political leader declaring war or planning to launch a missile.

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Project Maven is a Pentagon initiative aiming to use AI technologies for deploying and monitoring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Naturally, Google’s involvement with the initiative received plenty of backlash both internally and externally. At least a dozen employees quit Google while many others threatened to walk out if the firm continued building military products.

The pressure forced Google to abandon the lucrative Pentagon contract. However, it just meant that it was happily picked up by another company.

According to Business Insider who broke the news, the company which stepped in to develop Project Maven was Palantir – a company founded by Peter Thiel, a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and cofounder of PayPal.

Business Insider reporter Becky Peterson wrote that:

“Palantir is working with the Defense Department to build artificial intelligence that can analyze video feeds from aerial drones … Internally at Palantir, where names of clients are kept close to the vest, the project is referred to as ‘Tron,’ after the 1982 Steven Lisberger film.”

In June 2018, Thiel famously said that Google’s decision to pull out from Project Maven but push ahead with Project Dragonfly (a search project for China) amounts to “treason” and should be investigated as such.

Project Maven/Tron is described as being capable of extensive tracking and monitoring of UAVs without human input, but the unclassified information available indicates that it will not be able to fire upon targets. This is somewhat in-line with the accepted norms being established about the use of AI in the military.

Many experts accept that AI will increasingly be used in the military but are seeking to establish acceptable practices. One of the key principles is that, while an AI can track and offer advice to human operators, it should never be able to make decisions by itself which could lead to loss of life.

The rapid pace in which the Project Maven contract was picked up by another company gives credence to comments made by some tech giants that, rather than pull out from such contracts altogether – and potentially hand them to less ethical companies – it’s better to help shape them from the inside.

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According to figures published by ABI Research, the United States received 52.3 percent of global AI investments in 2018.

In 2018, investments in US-based AI technologies reached a total of $9.7 billion. This represents a staggering 120 percent year-on-year growth.

Huge AI investments from companies such as Zoox, Cruise Automation, Zymergen, and Dataminr helped to propel the US back into the number one spot.

The gap between the US and China is only expected to increase based on investment figures this year. ABI Research expects the US to reach a 70 percent share of global AI investments.

Lian Jye Su, Principal Analyst at ABI Research, said: 

“The United States is reaping the rewards from its diversified AI investment strategy. 

Top AI startups in the United States come from various sectors, including self-driving cars, industrial manufacturing, robotics process automation, data analytics, and cybersecurity.

All these startups research on and invest in cutting edge deep learning technologies in their solutions, democratising AI for enterprises and end consumers.”

China also continues to see healthy growth in its AI sector. Year-on-year it’s grown 54 percent to reach a total of $7.4 billion.

Beijing itself has doubled-down on its ambitions to be a world leader in AI. The country’s rollout of the largest commercially-available 5G network in the world today will help to support this endeavour.

China has many established AI leaders, such as SenseTime and CloudWalk. The former is the world’s most funded AI startup and has a valuation of more than $4.5 billion, in part due to its provision of surveillance services to Beijing.

SenseTime’s Viper system aims to process and analyse over 100,000 simultaneous real-time streams from traffic cameras, ATMs, and more to automatically tag and keep track of individuals.

ABI Research predicts China will continue to witness growth but will suffer from “strong headwinds” due to the ongoing trade war with the US. The researchers believe attempts by the Americans to reduce Chinese firms’ access to US tech has slowed AI advancements in China.

“There is no doubt that Chinese AI investment is feeling the pinch of reality, but China is still undeniably the largest single market for AI implementation,” comments Su.

“Favourable policies and flexible regulations in China, backed by a government willing to invest and deploy innovative technologies at scale, will certainly amplify AI adoption in the region.”

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Speaking on Tuesday, Rear Adm. Brian Losey said AI is able to provide tactical guidance as well as anticipate enemy actions and mitigate threats. Adversaries with such technology will have a significant advantage.

Losey is retired from the military but is now a partner at San Diego-based Shield AI.

Shield AI specialises in building artificial intelligence systems for the national security sector. The company’s flagship Hivemind AI enables autonomous robots to “see”, “reason”, and “search” the world. Nova is Shield AI’s first Hivemind-powered robot which autonomously searches buildings while streaming video and generating maps.

During a panel discussion at The Promise and The Risk of the AI Revolution conference, Losey said:

“We’re losing a lot of folks because of encounters with the unknown. Not knowing when we enter a house whether hostiles will be there and not really being able to adequately discern whether there are threats before we encounter them. And that’s how we incurred most of our casualties.

The idea is: can we use autonomy, can we use edge AI, can we use AI for manoeuvre to mitigate risk to operators to reduce casualties?”

AI has clear benefits today for soldiers on the battlefield, national policing, and even areas such as firefighting. In the future, it may be vital for national defense against ever more sophisticated weapons.

Some of the US’ historic adversaries, such as Russia, have already shown off developments such as killer robots and hypersonic missiles. AI will be vital to equalising the capabilities and hopefully act as a deterrent to the use of such weaponry.

“If you’re concerned about national security in the future, then it is imperative that the United States lead AI so we that we can unfold the best practices so that we’re not driven by secure AI to assume additional levels of risk when it comes to lethal actions,” Losey said.

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams has warned against robots making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. Williams said it is ‘unethical and immoral’ and can never be undone.

Williams was speaking at the UN in New York following the Project Quarterback announcement from the US military which uses AI to make decisions on what human soldiers should target and destroy.

“We need to step back and think about how artificial intelligence robotic weapons systems would affect this planet and the people living on it,” said Williams during a panel discussion.

It’s almost inevitable AI will be used for military purposes. Arguably, the best we can hope for is to quickly establish international norms for their development and usage to minimise the unthinkable potential damage.

One such norm that many researchers have backed is that AI should only make recommendations on actions to take, but a human should take accountability for any decision made.

A 2017 report by the Human Rights Watch chillingly concluded that no-one is currently accountable for a robot unlawfully killing someone in the heat of a battle.

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