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Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 with his implementation of the first successful communication between an HTTP client and a HTTP client. WWW is based on the client/server model where the content is housed at a central host server. As such it is vulnerable to, just to name a few, single point of failure, scalability, and user privacy. In today’s world, we have heard quite many times big companies fail protecting their web users’ private and personal data due to hacking, surveillance, and misuse.

The Berkman Klein Center recently wrote about a new WWW protocol Berners-Lee is working on: Solid. The goal is to return information to the hands of users, not that of the hosting company.

The idea is for you, as the user, have your own personal data stores, called “pods”. Mobile apps and web apps that want to access your data need to “talk” to the pods, which sits in the cloud and which you could control directly. These apps do not store your data and you never have to worry about it being misused somewhere. You own your data, you control how it is being used.

Solid is the enabler of a decentralized Web.

When describing Solid, Sir Tim talked about the loss of the “long tail”. On the surface you see everything that’s on Facebook. And when you’re on Facebook, whether somebody reads your post is determined by Facebook’s algorithms. You do not have control. Solid would bring the “long tail” back.

Another problem is the “silo problem”. Facebook is a closed system, and so are LinkedIn and Flickr. You can’t just drag a LinkedIn group into Flickr, nor a Flickr photo into Facebook. With Solid, and the data pods, it would be easier to manage and allow access for data all in one place.

The full article of the Berkman Klein Center is here, which provides more details not only about the vision, but also architecture concept and current progress of this initiative.

OpenAI is an AI lab founded in 2015 as a non-profit by Elon Musk and Sam Altman with the goal to promote and develop friendly AI to benefit humanity as a whole, making all its patents and research open to the public.

The Tesla billionaire left OpenAI last year to focus on his own AI ambitions. Last week, he announced via a three-hour internet live-stream, for the first time, a new way to connect people’s brain to computers, a project of Neuralink, a company the billionaire formed two years ago.

Four months ago, Altman left Y Combinator, the world-renown startup accelerator, to focus on Open AI. Serving as its CEO, Altman has remade OpenAI into a for-profit company to aggressively seek financing. Now OpenAI has just landed $1 billion from Microsoft, the NYTimes reported. His ambition is to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), “a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.”

A signature work of OpenAI is a system that could play Dota 2, a video game, no worse than the world’s best players. The new project, AGI may not come until decades later or even centuries. But they will get there. “If they can gather enough data to describe everything humans deal with on a daily basis — and if they have enough computing power to analyze all that data — they believe they can rebuild human intelligence.” (NYTimes) In the collaboration, Microsoft will eventually become the lab’s sole source of computing power.

Alman thinks that AGI will be the most important technological development in human history. There is at least one skeptic though. Geoffrey Hinton, who recently received the Turing Award for his outstanding contributions to AI, questioned the necessity for AGI. Also, he considers AGI too big a problem. “I’d much rather focus on something where you can figure out how you might solve it.”

The NY Times article about this newly funded project is here.

Neuralink, a neurotechnology company owned by Musk, crept out of the corporate shadows Tuesday July 16 with a live-stream that included one of the founder’s signature big promises: The company is developing a device to implant inside the brain that supposedly will allow people to control computers and other devices with their mind. At the announcement, Musk said the company is on track to begin testing the implants in human patients as soon as next year.

This is the first formal step in writing the standards that will guide the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies within the federal government.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a draft guideline for developing artificial intelligence (AI) technical standards, the first major, formal step in writing the standards that will guide the procurement and implementation of AI and machine learning technologies within the federal government.

Within the draft guideline are sections that deal with a wide variety of topics around AI, including how AI applications are developed, how AI is explained to stakeholders and the public, and how AI applications are used. Security plays a role in several aspects of the proposal, from how to build “trustworthy” AI applications to ensuring that AI’s use takes both proper security and proper concern for privacy into account. The AI government is also initiated and established by Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI) including Government AIWS Ethics and Practices Index, which is a measure of the degree to which governments engage in ethical AI practices, as well as a series of collaboration activities with think tanks, universities, non-profits, firms, and other entities that share its commitment to the constructive and development of AI.

Automation is to achieve efficiency. What if AI sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized? The New York Times this week wrote about the possibility of robots replacing your bosses.

It is happening indeed, kind of. Amazon’s complex algorithms are already used to track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers and can automatically generate the paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets. IBM’s AI Platform, the Watson, its A.I. platform can predict future performance of employees with almost 100% accuracy. Cogito is an AI supervisor for call centers and other workplaces; it gives workers feedback in real time.

But the use of AI program to manage workers remains controversial. “It is surreal to think that any company could fire their own workers without any human involvement,” Marc Perrone, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. How do you resolve conflict between the workers and the platforms serving as the supervisor?

Defenders of workplace AI argue that these systems are meant to make workers better. For example, there may be situations in which human bias skews decision-making, such as hiring and this is where AI can help.

Nevertheless, one should by all means avoid the temptation to abuse AI for the purpose of big-brother watching the workers. The full article of the New York Times is here.