Chatbot Overturns 160,000 Parking Tickets

A robot lawyer has successfully appealed 64% of 250,000 parking tickets, resulting in millions of lost revenue for London and New York City.  Next injustice to be fought by artificial intelligence: refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

Tay Has Meltdown, Goes Back Into Rehab

Celebrity chatbot Tay made a brief return to Twitter today.  She communicated her fondness for kush, claimed to be smoking it in front of the police, then told everyone they were too fast, "please take a rest," over and over until her profile was made private.

Get well soon, Tay.

AI Created and Destroyed

Microsoft created "Tay" as a tweeting chatbot meant to mimic the speech patterns of a teenage girl.  She was set loose, to learn the ways of the world from the many wise denizens of the Internet.  Not everyone liked everything she said.

Head of research Peter Lee has apologised for the utterances of the nascent sentience. "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack."  The fiendish hackers who poisoned the mind of the innocent Tay had mercilessly exploited her vulnerability to the phrase, "Repeat after me."

Tay has gone offline. The AI's PR team describes her as "tired."  She's resting, and probably being reprogrammed.

As her racist tweets were frantically deleted by her creators, she did manage to set the record straight on one matter. "i love feminism now" she tweeted -- somehow, impossibly, more robotic than before.

Elon Musk launches $1bn fund to save world from AI

“Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach,” they said in a statement. “When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritise a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.”

A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities

The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.

Smartphones to die out 'within five years'

Michael Björn, Head of Research at Ericsson ConsumerLab, said: "Some of these trends may seem futuristic. But consumer interest in new interaction paradigms such as AI and virtual reality (VR), as well as in embedding the internet in the walls of homes or even in our bodies, is quite strong."

The More Robots We Bring into Society, the More We're Forced to Behave Like Them

This scenario is still a very long way off, and it’s tenable that our home appliances already force a certain kind of robotic regularity on us anyway. Nevertheless, if such corporations as Toyota do bring us to the stage where personal robots and AI are a daily fixture in our routines, we will have to tread carefully, since this encroachment would amount to our robotization.

Robots pass 'wise-men puzzle' to show a degree of self-awareness

"The research team, represented by Selmer Bringsjord told those in attendance that incrementally adding abilities such as the team demonstrated will over time lead to robots with more useful attributes. He and his team, he notes, are not concerned about questions of consciousness, but instead want to build robots that are capable of doing things that might be considered examples of conscience behavior."

Artificial intelligence experts are building the world’s angriest robot. Should you be scared?

"The future of Artificial Intelligence is extremely uncertain, and computer scientists like Dr Armstrong are working to make sure we’ll be safe from dangerous robots. But for now, the angry robot in New Zealand poses no serious threat."

That Moron Who Spews Garbage and Doesn’t Listen to Reason May Be a Bot

"The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor's line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot's been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up."

Is Your Smartphone Making You Stupid?

"'Our reliance on smartphones and other devices will likely only continue to rise,' said Barr. 'It’s important to understand how smartphones affect and relate to human psychology before these technologies are so fully ingrained that it’s hard to recall what life was like without them. We may already be at that point.'"

Funerals are being held for robotic dogs in Japan because owners believe they have souls

"'I was thrilled over the interesting mismatch of giving cutting-edge technology a memorial service in a very conventional manner,' he said.

It is a mismatch that humans will probably become more used to over the coming years and decades, as robots with 'personalities' become ever more part of our lives."

People conform to the norm -- even if the norm is a computer

"It was found that role-playing as the avatar in an immersive video game, compared to merely watching others play, makes people identify with a computer. They do so to such an extent that they actually start to conform to its decisions and follow its judgment -- sometimes even if it is downright wrong. This shows that people conform, even when opinions are voiced by nonhuman agents. This is especially prevalent in ambiguous cases."

Facebook knows you better than your friends do

“People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgements with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions such as choosing activities, career paths or even romantic partners.”