How Japan’s Radically Different Approach to AI Could Lead to Wild New Tech - TIME Business

How Japan’s Radically Different Approach to AI Could Lead to Wild New Tech Posted: 14 Dec 2016 12:33 PM PST Thanks to artificial intelligence, the automobile — that most American of possessions — is being remade. Self-driving cars from Google’s new Waymo subsidiary will hit the streets next year. Tesla’s fully automated cars will arrive in 2018. Uber is testing its own self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh. More than a dozen other companies have AI-powered vehicles in the works. Conspicuously left out out from the self-driving car boom has been Japanese auto makers. While Toyota is belatedly creating a $1 billion research center for AI-powered vehicles, most of Japan’s auto giants will need five or 10 years to catch up, by some estimates. But there is another, wildly different way that Japan has been deploying AI in cars: to make them more lovable. Next month, Honda will take the wraps off a concept vehicle, named the NeuV, which will use AI technologies from Softbank to, in Honda’s words, “enable machines to artificially generate their own emotions.” Honda has released few details, but says the boxy electric commuting car will have an “emotion engine” that promises car lovers an automobile that will love them right back. In a news release last July, Honda said it would work with Softbank to create an AI technology that could converse with a driver and use sensors and cameras “to perceive the emotions of the driver and to engage in dialogue based on the vehicle’s own emotions.” The NeuV seems to be Honda’s first effort to include the technology inside a vehicle. Softbank’s robotics division earlier developed an “emotion engine” for Pepper, a humanoid robot that retailed for $2,000 and learned the habits and preferences of family members. But Pepper didn’t catch on with consumers. According to Bloomberg, “bad decision making and missed opportunities” left the AI software buggy. Pepper is now being rented out for menial tasks like store greeting jobs, lottery-ball selection and handing out tissue packets, a form of advertising in Japan. Meanwhile, Toyota plans to sell its own humanoid robot next year. Kirobo Mini is a four-inch-tall version of an astronaut robot that spent 18 months aboard the International Space Station. It’s designed as a companion who can recognize faces and locations, talk and gesture to humans, and detect and respond to emotions. Kirobo’s solemnly stated mission is to “help solve the problems brought about by a society that has become more individualized and less communicative.” Toyota also believes the technology could make cars more emotionally interactive. The average person spends nearly four and a half years inside cars, giving Toyota ample personal data that can “better the everyday lives of drivers all over the world.” So like the American companies building self-driving cars, Japanese automakers are aspiring to improve lives with their own AI projects. But in some ways, the impulse is radically different from the way AI is thought of in the U.S., where it’s directed toward faceless, if highly practical innovations, like safer driving and smoother traffic. In Japan, the AI is directed toward alleviating loneliness. iRobot’s Roomba can clean your floors, but aren’t really cute unless kittens hop on board. Japan’s robotic baby seals are so adorable they’re used as a form of therapy. In general, Japan’s approach to AI and robots has less anxiety and ambivalence than in the West. And while industrial-robot makers like Fanuc are adopting machine-learning, much of the innovative work in Japanese robotics over the years has centered on humanoid robots that can interact with and help humans. In the U.S., the discussion of AI and robotics often centers around displacing jobs. Tech leaders like Elon Musk talk openly about their misgivings about AI’s destructive potential even as their companies grow dependent on the software. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist employed by Intel to research how humans interact with technology, underscored the different approaches cultures take toward artificial intelligence: What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? And that concern isn’t universal, as other cultures have very different responses to AI, to big data. The most obvious one to me would be the Japanese robotic tradition, where people are willing to imagine the role of robots as far more expansive than you find in the west. Bell pointed to the work of Masahiro Mori, a pioneer of Japan’s robotics industry best known for the uncanny valley hypothesis, in which humans are repulsed by robots that look nearly but not exactly like humans. In his book The Buddha in the Robot, Mori offers a perspective on human-automobile interaction that seems radical by western standards. In Mori’s view, humans and robots have a connection that is more egalitarian than master-slave: Depending on how you look at it, I could be regarded as managing the automobile, or it could be regarded as managing me. To control, in effect, is to be controlled: by driving the car properly I enable it to play a safe and useful role in life; but by controlling me, the automobile enables me to be a reliable and effective driver. The same relationship links human beings with all machines. They don’t do what you want them to do unless you do what they force you to do. Such a view has taken Japanese AI researchers down a different road. It’s also left them, for now, lagging behind their Western counterparts, at least in the auto industry. The software powering Pepper or Kirobo may not bring us a futuristic Herbie the Love Bug any time soon, but in time it could lead to a different kind of self-driving car than Google has in mind. After all, the word for “love” in Japanese, when rendered into English, is spelled “A-I.”

Donald Trump’s Denial About Russia - New York Times

Donald Trump’s Denial About Russia
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
DECEMBER 15, 2016
No matter how divided our politics and our times, Americans can agree that our status as a strong, democratic nation rests on the bedrock of free and fair elections. That confidence is what was targeted when Russia, one of our oldest, most determined foreign adversaries, invaded American computer networks and released thousands of pages of documents to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election.
This news emerged last summer. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agencyshared a further conclusion, based on months of analysis, that the Russian hacking was intended to favor Donald Trump.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said recently. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
Extrapolating motive from evidence is always tricky. But after the C.I.A. provided classified briefings for Congress and the White House, members of both political parties were convinced.
But not President-elect Trump.
Mr. Trump’s instant rejection of the C.I.A. findings as “ridiculous,” based on no review of its work, echoed Moscow’s. “This tale of ‘hacks’ resembles a banal brawl between American security officials over spheres of influence,” Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote on Facebook. Mr. Trump said of American security officials, “They’re fighting among themselves.”
On Nov. 10, two days after the election, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said “there were contacts” between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign. “I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives,” Mr. Ryabkov said.
Paul Manafort, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, resigned after reports described his political ties to Russia. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, sat with Mr. Putin at a gala for Russian state television, where he has appeared as a commentator.
Mr. Trump’s own business ties to Moscow date to the late 1980s. His son Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate gathering in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” adding “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Mr. Trump hasn’t released tax returns or other records that could ease fears that he has financial deals in Russia to protect. And he’s refusing to divest his business interests, so whatever ties there may be are likely to remain.
Kremlin meddling in the 2016 electionwarrants further investigation, with an eye toward preventive or retaliatory measures. President Obama has asked the nation’s intelligence community to deliver a fuller report on its findings before he leaves office on Jan. 20, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for a congressional investigation. The results of that inquiry should be made public, and the intelligence community should tell Americans as much as it can about the cyberattack and its goals.
Mr. Trump’s reaction to the C.I.A.’s findings leaves him isolated, and underscores his dangerous unfamiliarity with the role of intelligence in maintaining national security. There could be no more “useful idiot,” to use Lenin’s term of art, than an American president who doesn’t know he’s being played by a wily foreign power. Or maybe it’s as Mr. Trump says: He’s “a smart person,” and avoids presidential intelligence briefings because they repeat what he already knows. If so, what else does he know about Russia that the intelligence agencies don’t?
New York Times

Donald Trump Meets With Silicon Valley Executives to Smooth Over Post-Election Friction - TIME

Donald Trump Meets With Silicon Valley Executives to Smooth Over Post-Election Friction Posted: 14 Dec 2016 01:37 PM PST (NEW YORK) — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives met at his Manhattan tower on Wednesday, a summit convened to smooth over frictions after both sides made no secret of their disdain for each other during the presidential campaign. The meeting was expected to focus on economic issues and skirt the numerous disagreements the tech industry has with Trump – including on immigration, the trade relationship with China and digital privacy – in favor of a focus on shared priorities, sources said. “There’s nobody like the people in this room, and anything we can do to help this go along we’re going to do that for you,” Trump told the executives gathered in a conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. “You call my people, you call me, it doesn’t make any difference. We have no formal chain of command,” he said. Three of Trump’s adult children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, sat at the head of a large rectangular table as the meeting began. Their attendance may fuel further concern about potential conflicts of interests for Trump, who has said he would hand over control of his business empire to his children while he occupies the White House. Vice President-elect Mike Pence was also in attendance. Guests sat in front of paper name plates and bottles of water sporting the Trump brand logo. The meeting between tech luminaries, including Apple Inc’s Tim Cook, Facebook Inc’s Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla Motors Inc’s Elon Musk, took place as Trump has alarmed some U.S. corporations with his rhetoric challenging long-established policy toward China, a main market for Silicon Valley. A senior Chinese state planning official told the China Daily newspaper Wednesday that Beijing could slap a penalty on a U.S. automaker for monopolistic behavior, a warning delivered days after Trump questioned acknowledging Taiwan as part of “one China.” The official did not identify the automaker. The tech summit is being billed as an introductory session, said sources briefed on the talks. Several company executives thanked Trump for hosting the meeting during introductions attended by reporters. Sandberg said she was most interested in discussing job creation. Other expected participants include Alphabet Inc’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Corp’s Satya Nadella, and Ginni Rometty from IBM, sources said. Cook and Musk will join Trump for a smaller meeting after the other technology executives leave, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team said. The CEOs of Airbnb and Uber were invited but are not attending. Uber’s Travis Kalanick will instead be traveling in India all week, according to a person familiar with his plans. ‘SOME HESITATION’ Trump clashed with Silicon Valley on several issues during the election campaign, including immigration, government surveillance and encryption, and his surprise victory last month alarmed many companies that feared he might follow through on his pledges. He has said that many tech companies are overvalued by investors. “You look at some of these tech stocks that are so, so weak as a concept and a company and they’re selling for so much money,” he told Reuters in an interview in May. Those concerns have not been assuaged in recent weeks as Trump has threatened to upset trade relationships with China and appoint officials who favor expanded surveillance programs. “For some of the companies, there was some hesitation about whether to attend” because of sharp political and personal differences with Trump, one tech industry source said. More than 600 employees of technology companies pledged in an open letter on Tuesday to refuse to help Trump’s administration build a data registry to track people based on their religion or assist in mass deportations. Silicon Valley enjoyed a warm rapport with President Barack Obama and heavily supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. Schmidt was photographed on election night at Clinton headquarters wearing a staff badge, and Musk said in interviews before the election that Trump’s character reflected poorly on the United States. Despite those tensions, Trump named Musk to a business advisory council that will give private-sector input to Trump after he takes office on Jan. 20. Uber’s Kalanick was also appointed to the council. From the employees of the 10 largest Fortune 500 tech companies, Trump raised just $179,400 from 982 campaign donors who contributed more than $200. Clinton raised $4.4 million from the employees of the same companies, with more than 20,400 donations, a Reuters review of contribution data found. Trump publicly bashed the industry during the campaign. He urged his supporters to boycott Apple products over the company’s refusal to help the FBI unlock an iPhone associated with last year’s San Bernardino, California, shootings, threatened antitrust action against Amazon and demanded that tech companies build their products in the United States. Trump has also been an opponent of the Obama administration’s “net neutrality” rules barring internet service providers from obstructing or slowing consumer access to web content. Two advisers to his Federal Communications Commission transition team are opponents of the rules, as are the two Republicans on the FCC. Last week, the two Republicans on the panel urged a quick reversal of many Obama policies and one, Commissioner Ajit Pai, said he believed that net neutrality’s “days are numbered.”