Recommended Robot and AI Reads This Week

The Doomsday Invention
Essential reading for anyone interested in the debate over the dangerous consequences of “super-intelligent AI.”

Google Open-Sourcing Tensorflow Shows AI’s Future Is Data
Good perspective on why Google decided to release the underlying code for its machine-learning technology. Basically, it’s all about the data, not the algorithms.

Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans
As robots become commonplace, you can expect their human masters to issue some pretty stupid commands. Thankfully some people are researching the best ways for robots to politely, but effectively, decline.

German Researchers Build a Robotic Ear Worm
Medical robots are advancing quickly, and this story describes a neat, if slightly unnerving, effort to improve ear surgery.

The Computer That Knows What You’re Thinking
Computers are still pretty poor at understanding what we’re feeling. But experiments shows that machines are getting better at reading people’s emotions, even when they try to hide them.