AI : between Science and Fiction - Slaughterbots

Allow me to share this recent short video designed as an argument for a petition against the use of AI in weapons. This is interesting since Science Fiction is used to back up a concern raised by scientists in a video more realistic than usual dystopias. I will come back to that video along with other worst case scenarios in a future update.

Introduction to the Blockchain's project

I will work on the Blockchain and Bitcoin. We all have heard about Bitcoin but I am quite sure that many of us don't know how Blockchain model works and why is it a decentralized currency. 

So first of all, I would like to show the problems that our current monetary system causes. And then I would like to show how Bitcoin can solve these problems. I won't detail how the algorithm works  but I will try to explain it in a way that everybody can understand it. So I will try to clarify the mechanism which allows Bitcoin to be a decentralized currency which is solving many economic problems caused by our current currencies.

AI : between Science and Fiction - Introduction

Myths mentioning human-like creatures built from inanimate material date back to the antiquity with Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved which turned into a woman, or with the clay golems of Jewish mythology. Such a fascination for creation or replication of life, in particular human life, is universal.  Multiple other examples can be found in Chinese, Nordic or Arabic cultures. Today, these myths have evolved in tight correlation with technical and scientific progress and creatures are often restricted to their intelligence, which seems to be the most challenging issue since the brain has not yet yielded up all its secrets. Artificial Intelligence has thus been one of the main themes of Science Fiction in the past century and the latest scenarios, mainly dystopian, raise awareness regarding the recent surge of scientific progress in that field. People like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking shared their concern about AI leading to destruction and no more than the end of humanity. Nevertheless, distinction must be made between Science and Fiction to apprehend this technical revolution and envision how AI can help create a better world.

Artificial Intelligence is the field of computer science created in the 1950’s studying agents able to perceive their environment and perform actions to maximize the chance of success to reach a goal. Paradoxically enough, the first successes of AI were in tasks difficult for humans such as playing checkers or chess while functions as natural as vision or language comprehension long remained hard to mimic. Indeed, the first intelligent programs relied on hard-coded rules which are suited for small, perfectly defined environments such as games where the computing power of a machine is no match for a human brain. Hence the iconic victory of IBM’s Deep Blue over chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. 20 years later, AlphaGo beat Go world champion in a game enabling more possible configurations than particles in the universe and where brute force approach is ineffective. This has only been possible with Machine Learning, a field where rules are not written by a human being anymore but learned through examples and training. More particularly, Deep Learning is at the root of the recent renewed interest in AI and while theorized in the early 1960’s, it only soared in 2012 when the combination of labeled data quantity and computational power enabled to prove its efficiency. The exact same algorithms are used in computer vision, speech recognition and language understanding, powering technologies such as autonomous cars, virtual assistant or automatic translation. This history of AI led to an evolution of the very definition of artificial intelligence since games such as checkers or chess have been proven solvable only with predefined routines and computational power which is not what is commonly accepted as intelligence. The leading current definition of Artificial Intelligence is the ability to perform high-level tasks such as perception or planning and above all to learn.

On the other hand, fictions have mentioned a vision of AI way before these scientific breakthroughs, mainly using humanoïd robots often viewed as mechanical copies of humans, gifted with feelings and consciousness. This description is very distant from the current advances in the technology which is only qualified as weak AI. Indeed, even though programs outperform human beings at recognizing every breed of dog from a picture or at Go, they are specifically designed and trained for a very narrow task and cannot even compare with the abilities of a mouse to perceive its environment, learn and perform the multitude of tasks necessary to survive. Such an ability in a machine is designated as strong AI and is still currently fictional. The research field most related to achieving strong AI is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and is for now limited to training one system for multiple tasks. Projecting human behaviours and feelings to robots is thus currently not relevant and there is no proof it will ever be, but it raises awareness. As soon as 1942, Asimov perceived the potential threat embodied by these fictional creatures and defined the three famous laws of robotics that should be hardwired into their brain :

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Nevertheless, these laws have always been challenged by Science-Fiction authors who have imagined hundreds of worst-case scenario stories and questioned risks of AI for safety and ethics. Among those stories, the ones visually told in movies or series come first to mind and both were inspired by and inspire scientific progress. From 2001 : A space odyssey to the latest Westworld series, my goal is to study how SF visual creations forged a dystopian vision of AI and distinguish fiction from reality on some topics they depict such as threat to humanity, ethics issues or feelings from or for a machine.

My topic's introduction

Hi everyone,

My subject is about a mobility and the future. We are at a turning point of the mobility, because of the digitalisation, and the end of oil. For example, we talk a lot about autonomous but more and more projects emerges like hyper loop or more recently the big fucking rocket of SpaceX. 

The Silicon Valley thinks that technology can resolve all problem and specially the problem of mobility. But when Elon Musk present the big fucking rocket or hyper loop, he forgets that technology is very expensive and only for developed countries.

During this project, I want to talk about this subject and not only about the technology but also about consequence of this technology.

Guillaume

The internet memes, just humour or a new way of expression?

For this project, I chose to talk about « Internet Memes »

I want to show the different uses of memes, which are fads right now. As of  September, every school has its own « meme page » on Facebook, in which they can make some jokes or talk about some events. I want to analyse what they’re posting.

I also want to discover if memes are only about humour? And what is humour? What is the goal of memes? They started with movies and internet culture. Today everyone can do their own meme and send a message as we witnessed a « meme warfare » between all political parties during the US campaign.

As irony is a powerful means of expression, memes could be one too, and not only a waste of time.

Raúl MARTINEZ

I would like to talk about this subject, since I arrived in France I found many people who speak many languages, and then I realized that each person had different habits, thoughts, even methods to study theirs courses, in general, different ways to tackle problems. So, I was thinking about it and I found that the number of languages you speak can influence your creativity, your choices, your personality, prevents you from judging people, but mainly, it helps to develop many different skills. 

But the big question is:  How does the languages we speak shape the way we think?

The topic of my project will be "Why we still need feminism?".  I have chosen this topic because I think feminism is currently misinterpreted, being feminist is not hating men or feeling superior. Feminism is an ideology that argues that women should have the same rights as men, neither more nor less, equal ones.

Why do I say that it is misunderstood? Without going too far we have for example a word widely used: feminazi, pejorative term invented to discredit the feminist struggle (it was popularized by the radio announcer Rush Limbaugh, linked to the Republican Party in the United States, to refer to the women who defended the right to abortion that the author associated with the Holocaust. Amazing, right?)

How do I approach this topic? What I have thought is to read the book The Whole Woman, written by Germaine Greer. It consists in a set of essays, the main theme is the realization of the failure of the sexual revolution. The book is structured in four sections "body," "mind," "love," and "power," each section dealing with these topics.

What would I like to do? I would like to read the book little by little and go posting my impressions or looking for further information on those issues. My goal is to wake up in all of you this concern to fight for a fairer world. Because as with all experience the injustices of the world I think as Galeano once said "Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world."