Nigel Shadbolt – författare

The smart-machines revolution is reshaping our lives and our societies. Here, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, one of the world's leading authorities on artificial intelligence, and Roger Hampson dispel terror, confusion, and misconception. We are not about to be elbowed aside by a rebel army of super-intelligent robots of our own creation. We were using tools before we became Homo sapiens, and will continue to build and master them, no matter how complicated theybecome. How we exercise that control—in our private lives, in employment, in politics—and make the best of the wonderful opportunities, will determine our collective future well-being.Chapter by chapter, The Digital Ape outline how our choices and the use and adaptation of the tools we've created can lead to opportunities for the environment (both built and natural), health, and our security. Shadbolt and Hampson are uniquely well-suited to draw on historical precedent and technical know-how to offer a vision of the future that is exciting, rather than nerve-wracking, to contemplate.

A new approach to the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence that argues for assessing AI actions as if they came from a human being  “Elegant and erudite.”—John Thornhill, Financial Times  Intelligent machines present us every day with urgent ethical challenges. Is the facial recognition software used by an agency fair? When algorithms determine questions of justice, finance, health, and defense, are the decisions proportionate, equitable, transparent, and accountable? How do we harness this extraordinary technology to empower rather than oppress?  Despite increasingly sophisticated programming, artificial intelligences share none of our essential human characteristics—sentience, physical sensation, emotional responsiveness, versatile general intelligence. However, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson argue, if we assess AI decisions, products, and calls for action as if they came from a human being, we can avert a disastrous and amoral future. The authors go beyond the headlines about rampant robots to apply established moral principles in shaping our AI future. Their new framework constitutes a how-to for building a more ethical machine intelligence.

A new approach to the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence that argues for assessing AI actions as if they came from a human being  “Elegant and erudite.”—John Thornhill, Financial Times  Intelligent machines present us every day with urgent ethical challenges. Is the facial recognition software used by an agency fair? When algorithms determine questions of justice, finance, health, and defense, are the decisions proportionate, equitable, transparent, and accountable? How do we harness this extraordinary technology to empower rather than oppress?  Despite increasingly sophisticated programming, artificial intelligences share none of our essential human characteristics—sentience, physical sensation, emotional responsiveness, versatile general intelligence. However, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson argue, if we assess AI decisions, products, and calls for action as if they came from a human being, we can avert a disastrous and amoral future. The authors go beyond the headlines about rampant robots to apply established moral principles in shaping our AI future. Their new framework constitutes a how-to for building a more ethical machine intelligence.

We are entering a new state of global hypersurveillance. As we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they? Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, The Spy in the Coffee Machine explores what—if anything—we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age, and provides readers with a much needed wake-up call to the benefits and dangers of this new technology.

How smart machines are transforming us all — and what we should do about it.The smart-machines revolution is re-shaping our lives and our societies. Here, Nigel Shadbolt, one of Britain’s leading authorities on artificial intelligence, and Roger Hampson dispel terror, confusion, and misconception. They argue that it is human stupidity, not artificial intelligence, that should concern us.Lucid, well-informed, and deeply human, The Digital Ape offers a unique approach to some of the biggest questions about our future.

Social machines are a type of network connected by interactive digital devices made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the read/write World Wide Web, connecting people at scale to document situations, cooperate on tasks, exchange information, or even simply to play. Existing social processes may be scaled up, and new social processes enabled, to solve problems, augment reality, create new sources of value, and disrupt existing practice.This book considers what talents one would need to understand or build a social machine, describes the state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM – The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a wide space, by asking ‘when willit be valuable to use these methods on a sociotechnical system?’ The systems for which the use of these methods adds value are social machines in which there is rich person-to-person communication, and where a large proportion of the machine’s behaviour is constituted by human interaction.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2004, held in Whittleburg Hall, UK in October 2004.The 30 revised full papers and 21 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontologies: mappings and translations; ontologies: problems and applications; ontologies: trust and e-learning; ontology maintenance; applications to medicine; portals; knowledge acquisition; Web services and problem solving; and searching, browsing, and knowledge acquisition.