Recommended Reads - Intelligent Machines Week

by Nikita Johnson

The tech world is rapidly evolving and it’s hard to keep up! To help you get up to date we’ve rounded up the best tech and innovation articles from this past week that you should be reading. This week's theme is Intelligent Machines and the rapidly rising world of computers that are capable of intelligent behaviour.Google's Demis Hassabis – Misuse of Artificial Intelligence 'Could Do Harm'Demis Hassabis, the head of Google's £400m machine learning business and one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, responds to concerns about the development of artificial intelligence raised, among others, by Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur and a DeepMind investor, and Professor Stephen Hawking. Read the interview on BBC NewsComputers Can Recognise a Complication of Diabetes That Can Lead to Blindness"Thanks to a newish approach going by the name of "deep learning", computers increasingly possess the pattern-recognition skills—identifying faces, interpreting pictures, listening to speech and the like—that were long thought to be the preserve of humans. Researchers, from startups to giant corporations, are now planning to put AI to work to solve more serious problems." Read more on The EconomistA Video-Game Algorithm to Solve Online AbuseFind out how a team of psychologists and scientists at Riot Games is unlocking the secret to eliminating abuse within an online video game, on MIT Technology Review

An AI Computer Learned How to Beat Almost Anyone at Chess in 72 HoursA masters student at Imperial College London has trained artificial neural networks to play chess at the level of a FIDE International Master, better than 97.8% of rated tournament players. Read more on QuartzWhy Artificial Intelligence Is Succeeding: Then and NowA look at the re-emergence of A.I. and why the technology is poised to succeed given today's environment, over on ComputerWorldAI Is Not New, so Why Suddenly Does It Matter?"But while we may not face imminent extinction at the hands of robot overlords, there does appear to be a consensus that the pace at which the machines are advancing has accelerated. Two forces are driving that - the exponential rise in computer processing power as predicted by Moore's Law and the new era of big data."