A new startup is offering car insurance on the basis of your continuously monitored driving behaviour. The better your skills, or the more you use the car’s autonomous features (!) the less you pay for insurance. Interesting to think about how this would generalise to other forms of insurance. Insurance against financial risks? Life insurance? Health insurance? A…

Not long ago Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to use AI to fight fake news on Facebook. His idea to use algorithms for assessing the truthfulness of webpages or other data is not new. In 2015 Google sketched an algorithm for calculating truth ranks (or ‘Knowledge-Based Trust’ ranks, as they call them) in the spirit of their hugely successful search…

Researchers from Google report on how deepmind performs in games resembling repeated prisoners dilemmas. They seem to be surprised that in one game (Gathering) a higher complexity of allowed strategies led to more cooperation while in the other game (Wolfpack) it led to less. I am surprised that they are surprised. Of course it all…

It does come as a surprise to me that it seems that only one year after Go, poker is going to be the next game to be conquered by AI. Poker is way more complicated than Go, because of the unlimited nested levels of bluff (bluff, bluffing that you bluff, etc.), it not being a perfect…

So the EU votes on introducing a new category in the law: “electronic persons”. Do not be fooled by this term; it is just another technical category in the law that paves the way for new legislation. However, it seems to me that it is crucial to distinguish electronic persons from other machines. But, I cannot…

Nissan’s Maarten Sierhuis promotes the idea that remotely operating human intelligence can fill in the gaps left open by artificial intelligence falling short in dealing with ‘corner events’ for self driving cars. The idea is that as soon as a self driving vehicle meets a situation that is too difficult to handle for its AI-mechanisms,…

In Michigan (the state where car makers like Ford and General motors are located, but where Tesla is forbidden to sell its cars) self driving cars are now allowed to operate without a driver. The legislators of Michigan explicitly state the following about possible crashes and fatalities: “It’s a risk worth taking because the future of…

This is impressive, but not surprising. Do not be lured into thinking that DeepMind also understands what is being said.    

A fine example of people’s tendency to ascribe way too much capabilities to robots (and of how Russian officials are terrified by anything new political opponents undertake). The Russian manufacturer of the robot declared “Police asked to remove the robot away from the crowded area, and even tried to handcuff him. According to eyewitnesses, the robot did…

This is of course a bold claim, as one can never be sure any given hardware is actually sufficient for a certain level of autonomy. Another problem is that the data gathered until now is more or less useless as it is specific for the ‘old’ set of sensors for the Teslas since 2014. But, no…