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Click on the links for extra reading and listening practice. As you read and listen, try to identify the following:
a. topic
b. main idea or issue
c. any examples provided
d. any evaluations made
e. any suggested implications
f. any recommendations
g. author or speaker attitude

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Meet Spot, the robot dog that can run, hop and open doors | Marc Raibert

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Innovation and internationalisation can work together to promote SME growth. Shutterstock

To grow and prosper, national economies need innovative and internationalised small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Such firms can make up to more than 97% of the total number of companies in some countries. In France, SMEs account for 95% of enterprises, 50% of workers, and 57% of added value.

Over the last decade, businesses' ability to spread across borders has become a determining factor in their competitiveness. Their ability to develop and launch new products, services or innovative processes confers a competitive advantage, can help ensure a return on investment and a long-term strategic advantage.

Research shows that when small business innovate, they experience increased productivity, potential growth and general sustainability. In some economic sectors, the proportion of innovative SMEs exceeds that of large companies; more than 20% of French firms filing patents are small businesses.

When confronted with serious structural or technological changes, the evolution of markets is constrained by innovation. Global strategic direction, the enlargement of the external environment, and the acquisition of international customers are positive factors in the development of a self-sustainable innovation dynamic.

Internationalisation and innovation

While previous research has explored the connection between innovation and international development, our current work, based on a sample of 335 French SMEs, has established that technological resources are key drivers.

The innovation process is based on a company's ability to activate its existing and available internal knowledge. It also depends on the firm's capacity to gain knowledge from external sources through imitation strategies, licensing acquisition, partnerships or the purchase of patents. Export strategies increase the innovative capacity of small- and medium-sized companies by increasing their access to resources such as skilled labour.

Global activities allow direct access to business partners and international experts in venture-capital markets. Only 30% of European SMEs engage in exportation, while in France the figure is about 16%. Product innovation is presented as a major factor of the propensity of German companies to export.

Moreover, SMEs operating within an industry or with technologically advanced suppliers have higher innovation potential. Research has shown that if business are constrained by geographic limitations, that also constrains their innovation capabilities.

Internationalisation provides the opportunity to increase their resources by reaching new markets. This leverage frees internal financial resources. Access to external financing is also improved through export activities, providing convenient access to new networks of potential investors more willing to participate in innovation efforts. Proximity allows access to critical information in terms of current and potential customers 'expectations. Much research considers customers as the main lever of product innovation.

Toward more innovation and internationalisation of SMEs

Nevertheless, implementing mixed strategies can result in major difficulties. The size of SMEs limit innovation or internationalisation strategies, as they can they consume significant financial, technological, commercial and human resources. Considered fragile in terms of resources, small businesses maintain performance through high flexibility. The synergy expected as a consequence of the joint development of both innovation and internationalisation is limited by the low transferability of resources. Indeed, cultural and institutional distances can drastically reduce the transmission of skills and knowledge.

The results of our research allowed for a better adaptation of public innovation and export policies, which are separated and individually managed. The French Employment Orientation Council has identified more than 2,500 different promotion programs, mainly based on financial support, but coordination is lacking and effectiveness limited. Indeed, a study conducted by ANVAR (French organisation for the improvement of innovation in SMEs) reported that 39% of the firms that received financial support still failed. By focusing on support in codifying the existing innovations, public policy would sustain the internationalisation strategy, increase the value added and the industry production, and induce a job-creation effect.

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Innovation and internationalisation: A competitive advantage for small- and medium-sized enterprises

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To grow and prosper, national economies need innovative and internationalised small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Such firms can make up to more than 97% of the total number of companies in some countries. In France, SMEs account for 95% of enterprises, 50% of workers, and 57% of added value.

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Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes.

The film - in cinemas from today - revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563).

Hundreds of years after a catastrophic war, called "The Fall", the population of Earth now resides in a wealthy sky city called Zalem and a sprawling junkyard called Iron City where the detritus from Zalem is dumped.

Read more: The science of parkour, the sport that seems reckless but takes poise and skill

We follow Alita's story as she makes friends and enemies, and discovers more about her past. Her character is great - she has many of the mannerisms of a teenage girl combined with a determination and overarching sense of what is right - "I do not stand by in the presence of evil."

So let's dig into the many scientific concepts touched on in the film and see how far from reality they are, or might be in the future.

Touch skin

Alita goes through two cybernetic bodies in the film, with the second being especially advanced. A big part of the film is the interaction between the human and cyborg components, and a major component of that is touch, especially with respect to the main love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson).

20th Century Fox.

As shown in the film, Alita's cyborg body has a pretty advanced and location-sensitive sense of touch. In today's world, robot touch, or tactile sensing, is relatively advanced (although not yet widely deployed) and uses a range of technologies including deformable skin that changes both its capacitance (to measure and "sense" the touch) and illuminance (to display the results of the touch).

Touch can also be detected in terms of changes in temperature, conductivity, resistance or even optical changes that result from a touch.

Verdict: Not a stretch.

Antimatter heart

20th Century Fox

Like Ironman from The Avengers with his arc reactor, and The T-850 from the Terminator series with its hydrogen fuel cells, Alita is powered by an antimatter heart.

We are nowhere close to an antimatter-type energy source at this stage - current robots of similar size like the ones Boston Dynamics builds are increasingly being powered by relatively conventional batteries.

There are multiple major obstacles to overcome in using antimatter as any type of energy source, including finding an efficient way to obtain the antimatter in the first place and capturing the energy released from a matter-antimatter event.

Verdict: Beating physics is difficult.

Learning to use a body

Alita's first steps upon waking up in her new body cause her to stumble, but only momentarily.

Robot walking and other related motion capabilities have long been an active field of research, with companies such as Boston Dynamics making very publicly visible strides (see what we did there) in biped ( two legs) and quadruped ( four legs) movement.

Alita has likely never used the exact body that she is given at first - but manages to walk, jump and fight fluently almost instantaneously.

This is in stark contrast to current robots learning from scratch to walk - which can take thousands of hours of training in simulation and then on the robot to get right.

Instead it's likely that Alita has a range of pre-trained motion models for a variety of body configurations, and is able to rapidly tweak them to work on the body she is given.

20th Century Fox

Verdict: Runs well.

Will cyborgs need to eat?

The doctor tells Alita she has to eat to provide nutrients to her (still organic) brain. This sounds reasonable, but she would need a complete digestive system to break the food down into nutrients and absorb them into her bloodstream.

Since her torso is completely inorganic, it's more likely that fluid, vitamins, minerals and macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates and fats) would be injected directly into her blood.

Today, some people who have had their intestines removed due to illness continue to live relatively normal lives.

Verdict: Hard to swallow.

Will cyborgs need sleep?

We first see the repaired Alita as she wakes up from a deep sleep.

Scientists are not certain about all the reasons that sleep is needed, but it seems particularly important for the brain. While awake, your brain cells use lots of energy and produce lots of metabolic waste that accumulates around the cells.

At night while you sleep, your brain clears away the waste. Sleep also seems vital for remembering what you've learned.

Since Alita's brain is human, it's quite plausible she would need to sleep.

Verdict: Not just a dream.

Could a brain survive for 300 years?

Even while you sleep, your brain still needs a constant supply of oxygen. Brain damage from a lack of oxygen starts becoming irreparable after about 20 minutes without it, although with noted exceptions.

Brains can be temporarily put into a state of suspended animation by cooling them down dramatically, and operations like heart transplants are sometimes done this way today.

But keeping the brain cold also requires power, and a brain can only currently be kept alive like this for a few hours, not the 300 years portrayed in the movie.

Verdict: A little brain-dead.

The future of humans - cyborgs

Alita: Battle Angel presents a world full of cyborgs with varying remnants of their humanity (both physical and mental). Whether this is a realistic potential future is still up for debate - we don't know whether this ongoing hybridisation of humans and technology will be sustained or will rapidly switch completely over to robotics technology.

Read more: Why visual illusions appear in everyday objects - from nature to architecture

But if we are to have a future of cyborgs, the movie presents (sometimes realistically) a range of concepts that are fascinating to consider: will these cyborgs still need to eat, to sleep, and how will a mixed society of humans and cyborgs function.

Alita: Battle Angel is a vision of one such possible future, and is a worthy addition to the canon of films that provoke us to think about just what our world of tomorrow will look like.

20th Century Fox

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A robot that can touch, eat and sleep? The reality of cyborgs like Alita: Battle Angel

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Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes. The film - in cinemas from today - revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563).

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Latest stories

1. Would you trust a chat bot powered by artificial intelligence to help draft your last will and testament? In the Darwin suburb of Coolalinga, it's already happening. But the service is not without critics.

2. Baristas will soon find themselves competing with a clone army of 'baristabots' who can brew perfectly personalised flat whites without ever taking a sick day. And they're not alone.

Decades spent holding the line against the complete robotic re-engineering of automobile production left Australia with an industrial 'overhang' that has finally collapsed under the weight of its own costs.

As robots displace the human element within the Australian economy, how will we survive?

3. Experts in artificial intelligence have built a computer program that can understand simple jokes, marking an important step in making robots seem friendlier to humans, the weekly New Scientist reports.

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Latest stories Would you trust a chat bot powered by artificial intelligence to help draft your last will and testament? In the Darwin suburb of Coolalinga, it's already happening. But the service is not without critics. Baristas will soon find themselves competing with a clone army of 'baristabots' who can brew perfectly personalised flat whites without ever taking a sick day.

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NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars has been officially pronounced dead. Its amazingly successful mission lasted nearly 15 years, well beyond its initial three-month goal. Opportunity provided the first proof that water once existed on Mars and shaped its surface, a crucial piece of knowledge informing both current and future missions.

Opportunity landed on the red planet on January 25, 2004, and was last heard from on June 10, 2018, when a huge dust storm reduced light levels there significantly. This prevented the rover from using its solar panels to charge its batteries. The solar panels had already started to degrade due to the longer than expected mission, and the low light levels and the build up of dust may have caused its ultimate demise.

The rover has driven over 45km on the Martian surface despite being designed to travel for just 1km - an interplanetary record. Lasting almost 60 times its expected lifetime, it is an incredible achievement for space exploration. The mission is therefore helping scientists design new rover missions including NASA's Mars 2020 rover and the ExoMars 2020 rover that I work on, recently named "Rosalind Franklin" after the DNA pioneer.

Stunning science

The science from the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity has been simply groundbreaking. For Opportunity, it started with landing by chance in a 22-metre wide crater called "Eagle" on an otherwise mainly flat plain - a space exploration "hole in one". Immediately after landing, it spotted a layered rocky outcrop, similar to sedimentary rocks on Earth but never before seen on Mars. And because it was mobile, it could actually examine the rock composition directly after leaving the landing platform.

By illuminating the rocks with radioactive sources, the rover discovered the expected iron (effectively rust) that makes Mars' surface reddish brown, along with other metals such as nickel and zinc. But it also found more volatile elements like bromine, chlorine and sulphur, which indicated that these rocks may have reacted with ancient water. Most excitingly, it detected the mineral " jarosite ", which is often seen in the outflow of acidic water from mining sites on Earth. This provided direct evidence that acidic water had been involved in the formation of Mars' rocks 3.8-4 billion years ago.

The rover then moved out of the Eagle crater onto the flat, surrounding plain. In the first weeks, it discovered "blueberries" - millimetre-sized spheres of the mineral hematite. Although this could have formed due to volcanism or meteor impacts, analysis revealed that it most likely formed in water.

Opportunity later visited the spectacular Victoria crater, which is 750 metres in diameter and some 70 metres deep, with dunes on the crater floor. Remarkably, the rover and its tracks were imaged from orbit by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter near the crater rim. There was more hematite here, too, showing that this may have formed underground in water, before being brought to the surface when the crater formed via an impact.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Its next destination was the Endeavour crater, which is 22km in diameter and 300 metres deep. Here it also made a major discovery -- there were clays near the crater rim, which would have required fresh, abundant and non-acidic water for their formation. This was the first indication that Mars was actually habitable 3.8-4 billion years ago, containing drinkable as well as acidic water.

These main science results are key to our scientific exploration of Mars today. The question of habitability is being pursued further by the NASA Curiosity mission, which has already found evidence of a large, ancient lake on early Mars that contained organic matter by drilling into the mudstones that remain.

Digging deeper

Thanks to Opportunity, upcoming missions will look closer at the spots were ancient water flowed. NASA's Mars 2020 rover will gather samples from Jezero crater, a location where orbiters have detected signs of an ancient river delta. These samples may be returned to Earth by a future international mission. Analysis in labs on Earth may ultimately answer the question of whether there is or ever was life on Mars, if we haven't already.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ. › Full image and caption

Meanwhile, our Rosalind Franklin rover, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and Russia, is due for launch in 2020. It will land in March, 2021, at Oxia Planum, an elevated plain. Here, there are also signs of prolonged exposure to ancient water, clays and a river outflow channel.

Rosalind the rover will pick up where Opportunity and Curiosity left off by examining a key, unexplored dimension on Mars - depth. We will drill down to two metres below the surface of Mars for the first time, much further than Curiosity's five centimetres. This is enough to take us far enough below the harsh surface environment of Mars - with cold temperatures, a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and high levels of harmful radiation - to see if anything lives there.

We will decide where to drill using a number of instruments, including the PanCam instrument which I lead. Samples will be vaporised and put into a drawer for analysis by three instruments which will look for markers of life - such as complex carbonates.

One of the key aspects of Opportunity's success was the teamwork between its science and engineering teams. This is definitely something that will be implemented on upcoming rovers. Many members of the Mars 2020 team, and some on the ExoMars team, have direct experience from Opportunity which will be invaluable as we learn how to operate our rovers on the planet.

Another interesting legacy of Opportunity is that we we don't have to worry too much about Martian dust, except during exceptional global storms. Opportunity showed that that during the rest of the time, accumulating dust blows away naturally in the wind - helped by the movement of the rover over the ground causing vibration. It was a surprise that Opportunity lasted so long, and it certainly blazed a trail for us.

Rosalind Franklin has the best chance of any currently planned mission for detecting biomarkers and even perhaps evidence for past or present life on Mars. But we are building on the shoulders of giants, like the Opportunity Rover. #ThanksOppy indeed!

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Farewell, Opportunity: rover dies, but its hugely successful Mars mission is helping us design the next one

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NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars has been officially pronounced dead. Its amazingly successful mission lasted nearly 15 years, well beyond its initial three-month goal. Opportunity provided the first proof that water once existed on Mars and shaped its surface, a crucial piece of knowledge informing both current and future missions.

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In this special feature we focus on the top innovations that will fuel some of the key trends in 2018 and offer plenty of opportunities for businesses across retail, travel, publishing, property management and the healthcare sector. From tackling 'fake news' to reviving bricks-and-mortar as well as embracing the circular economy and the power of data, these innovations aim to inspire you and support you in your mission to drive product and business transformation.

12 Jan 2018

We've selected 10 new business ideas that will provide entrepreneurs with plenty of inspiration in 2018. Spotted from countries all around the world, these businesses offer a taste of what's to come in the year ahead.

Once featuring only in Hollywood films, artificial intelligence is now expanding the way companies approach data that can hugely impact their business action.
Manual collation or even use of basic systems can be laborious, hard to analyse and mistakes can be easily made. By using an AI system, companies can access the widest range of information possible with minimal effort.

One example is AskPorter, an AI property management platform that aims to reduce inefficiencies in workflows and change the role of property manager into that of a supervisor or concierge. By acting as the first point of contact for queries, simple questions and requests from tenants can be managed quickly and easily.

In a different industry, DemandJump has created an AI-enabled marketing platform named TrafficCloud that guides marketers on what action to take next with campaigns. Unlike traditional data collation tools that would look into page hits, for example, this new tool is able to link customer activity across devices and present a much more detailed analysis of traffic between sources. Such innovation could revolutionise the way businesses look at their data.
Read more about AskPorter "

The use of augmented reality (AR) within apps has gained popularity in recent years, with the Pokémon GO app kick starting the trend in 2016. AR's application to a range of different industries means the possibilities are endless.

An app named Firstage has utilised AR's capabilities, applying it to the music industry. The app is aimed at up-and-coming musicians, allowing performers to be seen on an augmented reality 'stages' anywhere in the world. Users can download the app and search for artists. The app then scans the room and the artist 'performs' in the space. This approach to integrating industries with the technology could work across the board, and we expect a growing number of AR applications within the health, travel and entertainment sectors in 2018.
Read more about Firstage "

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Top 10 innovation ideas for 2018 | Springwise

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In this special feature we focus on the top innovations that will fuel some of the key trends in 2018 and offer plenty of opportunities for businesses across retail, travel, publishing, property management and the healthcare sector.

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It's not easy to build an innovative culture when everyone's focused on just keeping the organisation afloat. Image sourced from Shutterstock.com

Despite the explosive rate of innovation transforming our world, how established organisations innovate themselves is another matter altogether.

The string of defunct or struggling organisations such as Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster, Blackberry or Borders Books attests to the fact that incumbent, established and erstwhile successful organisations either resisted, or were unsuccessful at attempting intrinsic innovation. At the same time, industry research indicates that there is no statistical relationship between R&D spend and business, revenue and net margin growth.

Given that the real economy comprises mostly of established enterprises, be they government agencies, public or private firms, how can we realise the real potential of enterprise-wide innovation? The benefits are there for the taking, and include substantially improved enterprise agility, resilience, productivity and enhanced wealth creation.

While product based R&D spending and innovation may deliver hero products or service offerings, investing in an enterprise wide innovation capability is evergreen, as the organisation itself becomes a sustainable innovation incubator. Product and service based innovation is then a consequence - woven into the DNA of the entire organisation.

The key is to get it right.

Innovation or improvement?

Innovation means different things to different people, and is often context specific.

For example, an innovation in the air traffic control industry will differ from an innovation that relates to the use of smartphone technology. In the former, people may die if the innovation's downstream impacts are poorly understood, while in the latter, failure may be an inconvenience, or even encouraged as a way of helping in the rapid evolution of the product.

Additionally, the fact that a new product or service offering may be marketed as "innovative" further blurs the distinction between an incremental improvement and a transformational or even disruptive innovation.

For any established organisation to really make sense of innovation, its C-suite executives must see past the innovation headlines to identify its potential value and risk to their own organisation.

So, in the new innovation economy, how does the C-suite of established organisations transition their enterprise to becoming "innovative" without either compromising effective governance, or diverting valuable resources from keeping the business running?

The key to building a sustainable enterprise wide innovation capability is to consider innovation through the three lenses of your (1) business strategies, (2) intrapreneurship and (3) organisational culture.

1. Rethink your high level business strategy

Conventional approaches to developing enterprise-level business strategies are being tested in the new world of technology-led change, marketplace disruption, globalisation and rapidly shifting customer needs. Ensuring that your high level business strategies remain relevant when confronted with innovation and change is key. This is not the world of fixed strategic plans.

Long term business strategies, while useful as a guide, have the potential to rapidly become irrelevant when organisations have to either respond to, or initiate rapid transformational change.

The important skill then becomes being able to rapidly review and alter key elements of the business strategy, while retaining its overall integrity.

2. Recognise and protect INtrapreneurs

An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who operates within a large firm to drive value through internal innovation. Problems is, in the absence of an appropriate process, explicit executive support and protection, their life expectancy in established organisations is limited.

In their recent paper on realising the value of intrapreneurs UTS's Prof. Ken Dovey and entrepreneur Dr Bruce McCabe offers valuable insights of three real world cases from very different industries. In each case, organisations failed to realise the value of the talent that was recruited at significant cost to lead an attempt at innovation.

Innovation should not rely on a job role or title, but should be an intrinsic organisational capability.

3. Build an innovation culture: incubate, don't mandate

Top-down initiatives calling for "innovation" or one-off ideas are unlikely to result in an a sustainable innovation capability.

Within your organisation, in what way are the insights of your junior staff valued and assessed? Those involved in the development of innovative ideas soon become disheartened when their ideas are dismissed by senior executives who do not understand their origins or context. This has a corrosive influence on any executive level attempts at fostering innovation.

Remember when it comes to innovation in established, hierarchical organisations - insights trump seniority and ego.

The critical success factors that result in a sustainable, enterprise-wide innovation culture lies in the C-suite:

1. Architecting and implementing a holistic enterprise strategy which embodies agility. Innovation will not thrive if the organisation is change resistant.

2. Developing innovation processes that are transparent, inclusive and secure. Individual innovation can be unpredictable, however collective innovation requires a process. Understand that enterprise-wide innovation is not an ideas-fest, ideology, marketing strategy or competition where "winner takes all".

3. Reviewing staffing strategies, incentive schemes and structures to maximise executive and employee (or contractor) engagement. Innovation will most likely fail if the staffing strategy is based on a revolving door of casual, contract and interim staff.

4. Defining and measuring strategic leadership competencies for innovation throughout the organisation.

When the organisation is already being adversely impacted by change, the proof that existing business strategies and innovation capabilities have fallen short of the mark should be plain to see.

But before you call in the consultants, stress test your business strategies, intrapreneurship and culture.

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Three ways to build innovation into your organisation

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Despite the explosive rate of innovation transforming our world, how established organisations innovate themselves is another matter altogether. The string of defunct or struggling organisations such as Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster, Blackberry or Borders Books attests to the fact that incumbent, established and erstwhile successful organisations either resisted, or were unsuccessful at attempting intrinsic innovation.

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" Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before - as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial."

Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute

What is AI?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google's search algorithms to IBM's Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

Why research AI safety?

In the near term, the goal of keeping AI's impact on society beneficial motivates research in many areas, from economics and law to technical topics such as verification, validity, security and control. Whereas it may be little more than a minor nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid. Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. As pointed out by I.J. Good in 1965, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind. By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a superintelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes superintelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of superintelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

How can AI be dangerous?

Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. Instead, when considering how AI might become a risk, experts think two scenarios most likely:

1. The AI is programmed to do something devastating: Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the hands of the wrong person, these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. Moreover, an AI arms race could inadvertently lead to an AI war that also results in mass casualties. To avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply "turn off," so humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. This risk is one that's present even with narrow AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase.

2. The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI's goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult. If you ask an obedient intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for. If a superintelligent system is tasked with a ambitious geoengineering project, it might wreak havoc with our ecosystem as a side effect, and view human attempts to stop it as a threat to be met.

As these examples illustrate, the concern about advanced AI isn't malevolence but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we have a problem. You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. A key goal of AI safety research is to never place humanity in the position of those ants.

Why the recent interest in AI safety

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many other big names in science and technology have recently expressed concern in the media and via open letters about the risks posed by AI, joined by many leading AI researchers. Why is the subject suddenly in the headlines?

The idea that the quest for strong AI would ultimately succeed was long thought of as science fiction, centuries or more away. However, thanks to recent breakthroughs, many AI milestones, which experts viewed as decades away merely five years ago, have now been reached, making many experts take seriously the possibility of superintelligence in our lifetime. While some experts still guess that human-level AI is centuries away, most AI researches at the 2015 Puerto Rico Conference guessed that it would happen before 2060. Since it may take decades to complete the required safety research, it is prudent to start it now.

Because AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can't use past technological developments as much of a basis because we've never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us. The best example of what we could face may be our own evolution. People now control the planet, not because we're the strongest, fastest or biggest, but because we're the smartest. If we're no longer the smartest, are we assured to remain in control?

FLI's position is that our civilization will flourish as long as we win the race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. In the case of AI technology, FLI's position is that the best way to win that race is not to impede the former, but to accelerate the latter, by supporting AI safety research.

The Top Myths About Advanced AI

A captivating conversation is taking place about the future of artificial intelligence and what it will/should mean for humanity. There are fascinating controversies where the world's leading experts disagree, such as: AI's future impact on the job market; if/when human-level AI will be developed; whether this will lead to an intelligence explosion; and whether this is something we should welcome or fear. But there are also many examples of of boring pseudo-controversies caused by people misunderstanding and talking past each other. To help ourselves focus on the interesting controversies and open questions -- and not on the misunderstandings -- let's clear up some of the most common myths.

Timeline Myths

The first myth regards the timeline: how long will it take until machines greatly supersede human-level intelligence? A common misconception is that we know the answer with great certainty.

One popular myth is that we know we'll get superhuman AI this century. In fact, history is full of technological over-hyping. Where are those fusion power plants and flying cars we were promised we'd have by now? AI has also been repeatedly over-hyped in the past, even by some of the founders of the field. For example, John McCarthy (who coined the term "artificial intelligence"), Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon wrote this overly optimistic forecast about what could be accomplished during two months with stone-age computers: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College [...] An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

On the other hand, a popular counter-myth is that we know we won't get superhuman AI this century. Researchers have made a wide range of estimates for how far we are from superhuman AI, but we certainly can't say with great confidence that the probability is zero this century, given the dismal track record of such techno-skeptic predictions. For example, Ernest Rutherford, arguably the greatest nuclear physicist of his time, said in 1933 --- less than 24 hours before Szilard's invention of the nuclear chain reaction --- that nuclear energy was "moonshine.'' And Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley called interplanetary travel "utter bilge'' in 1956. The most extreme form of this myth is that superhuman AI will never arrive because it's physically impossible. However, physicists know that a brain consists of quarks and electrons arranged to act as a powerful computer, and that there's no law of physics preventing us from building even more intelligent quark blobs.

There have been a number of surveys asking AI researchers how many years from now they think we'll have human-level AI with at least 50% probability. All these surveys have the same conclusion: the world's leading experts disagree, so we simply don't know. For example, in such a poll of the AI researchers at the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference, the average (median) answer was by year 2045, but some researchers guessed hundreds of years or more.

There's also a related myth that people who worry about AI think it's only a few years away. In fact, most people on record worrying about superhuman AI guess it's still at least decades away. But they argue that as long as we're not 100% sure that it won't happen this century, it's smart to start safety research now to prepare for the eventuality. Many of the safety problems associated with human-level AI are so hard that they may take decades to solve. So it's prudent to start researching them now rather than the night before some programmers drinking Red Bull decide to switch one on.

Controversy Myths

Another common misconception is that the only people harboring concerns about AI and advocating AI safety research are luddites who don't know much about AI. When Stuart Russell, author of the standard AI textbook, mentioned this during his Puerto Rico talk, the audience laughed loudly. A related misconception is that supporting AI safety research is hugely controversial. In fact, to support a modest investment in AI safety research, people don't need to be convinced that risks are high, merely non-negligible -- just as a modest investment in home insurance is justified by a non-negligible probability of the home burning down.

It may be that media have made the AI safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones. As a result, two people who only know about each other's positions from media quotes are likely to think they disagree more than they really do. For example, a techno-skeptic who only read about Bill Gates's position in a British tabloid may mistakenly think Gates believes superintelligence to be imminent. Similarly, someone in the beneficial-AI movement who knows nothing about Andrew Ng's position except his quote about overpopulation on Mars may mistakenly think he doesn't care about AI safety, whereas in fact, he does. The crux is simply that because Ng's timeline estimates are longer, he naturally tends to prioritize short-term AI challenges over long-term ones.

Myths About the Risks of Superhuman AI

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline: " Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind." And as many have lost count of how many similar articles they've seen. Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because they've become conscious and/or evil. On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers don't worry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, and robots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car? Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, it's irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isn't malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans don't generally hate ants, but we're more intelligent than they are - so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and there's an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines can't have goals. Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target. If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose. If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldn't exclaim: "I'm not worried, because machines can't have goals!"

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids, because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isn't with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection - this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can't control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it's possible that we might also cede control.

The Interesting Controversies

Not wasting time on the above-mentioned misconceptions lets us focus on true and interesting controversies where even the experts disagree. What sort of future do you want? Should we develop lethal autonomous weapons? What would you like to happen with job automation? What career advice would you give today's kids? Do you prefer new jobs replacing the old ones, or a jobless society where everyone enjoys a life of leisure and machine-produced wealth? Further down the road, would you like us to create superintelligent life and spread it through our cosmos? Will we control intelligent machines or will they control us? Will intelligent machines replace us, coexist with us, or merge with us? What will it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? What would you like it to mean, and how can we make the future be that way? Please join the conversation!

Recommended References

Many of the organizations listed on this page and their descriptions are from a list compiled by the Global Catastrophic Risk institute; we are most grateful for the efforts that they have put into compiling it. These organizations above all work on computer technology issues, though many cover other topics as well. This list is undoubtedly incomplete; please contact us to suggest additions or corrections.

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Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - Future of Life Institute

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What are the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI)? Why do we need research to ensure that AI remains safe and beneficial?