Humans Vs Computers


Book Description

Humans vs Computers is a book about people caught between wrong assumptions and computer bugs. You'll read about humans who are invisible to computers, how a default password once caused a zombie apocalypse and why airlines sometimes give away free tickets. This is also a book on how to prevent, avoid and reduce the impact of such problems. Our lives are increasingly tracked, monitored and categorised by software, driving a flood of information into the vast sea of big data. In this brave new world, humans can't cope with information overload. Governments and companies alike rely on computers to automatically detect fraud, predict behaviour and enforce laws. Inflexible automatons, barely smarter than a fridge, now make life-changing decisions. Clever marketing tricks us into believing that phones, TV sets and even cars are somehow smart. Yet all those computer systems were created by people - people who are well-meaning but fallible and biased, clever but forgetful, and who have grand plans but are pressed for time. Digitising a piece of work doesn't mean there will be no mistakes, but instead guarantees that when mistakes happen, they'll run at a massive scale. The next time you bang your head against a digital wall, the stories in this book will help you understand better what's going on and show you where to look for problems. If nothing else, when it seems as if you're under a black-magic spell, these stories will at least allow you to see the lighter side of the binary chaos. For people involved in software delivery, this book will help you find more empathy for people suffering from our mistakes, and discover heuristics to use during analysis, development or testing to make your software less error prone. About the author Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP, winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko's book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010. Gojko is a frequent keynote speaker at leading software development conferences and one of the authors of MindMup and Claudia.js. As a consultant, Gojko has helped companies around the world improve their software delivery, from some of the largest financial institutions to small innovative startups.




When Computers Were Human


Book Description

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.




The Myth of Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

“Artificial intelligence has always inspired outlandish visions—that AI is going to destroy us, save us, or at the very least radically transform us. Erik Larson exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it. This is a timely, important, and even essential book.” —John Horgan, author of The End of Science Many futurists insist that AI will soon achieve human levels of intelligence. From there, it will quickly eclipse the most gifted human mind. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence argues that such claims are just that: myths. We are not on the path to developing truly intelligent machines. We don’t even know where that path might be. Erik Larson charts a journey through the landscape of AI, from Alan Turing’s early work to today’s dominant models of machine learning. Since the beginning, AI researchers and enthusiasts have equated the reasoning approaches of AI with those of human intelligence. But this is a profound mistake. Even cutting-edge AI looks nothing like human intelligence. Modern AI is based on inductive reasoning: computers make statistical correlations to determine which answer is likely to be right, allowing software to, say, detect a particular face in an image. But human reasoning is entirely different. Humans do not correlate data sets; we make conjectures sensitive to context—the best guess, given our observations and what we already know about the world. We haven’t a clue how to program this kind of reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. Larson argues that all this AI hype is bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we are to make real progress, we must abandon futuristic talk and learn to better appreciate the only true intelligence we know—our own.




Computers in the Human Interaction Loop


Book Description

This book integrates a wide range of research topics related to and necessary for the development of proactive, smart, computers in the human interaction loop, including the development of audio-visual perceptual components for such environments; the design, implementation and analysis of novel proactive perceptive services supporting humans; the development of software architectures, ontologies and tools necessary for building such environments and services, as well as approaches for the evaluation of such technologies and services. The book is based on a major European Integrated Project, CHLI (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop), and throws light on the paradigm shift in the area of HCI that rather than humans interactive directly with machines, computers should observe and understand human interaction, and support humans during their work and interaction in an implicit and proactive manner.




The Most Human Human


Book Description

A playful, profound book that is not only a testament to one man's efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place. “Terrific. ... Art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire.” —The New Yorker Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can “think.” The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the “Most Human Human.” Brian Christian—a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy—was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This




Human-Centered AI


Book Description

The remarkable progress in algorithms for machine and deep learning have opened the doors to new opportunities, and some dark possibilities. However, a bright future awaits those who build on their working methods by including HCAI strategies of design and testing. As many technology companies and thought leaders have argued, the goal is not to replace people, but to empower them by making design choices that give humans control over technology. In Human-Centered AI, Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives. This project bridges the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to offer a road map for successful, reliable systems. Digital cameras, communications services, and navigation apps are just the beginning. Shneiderman shows how future applications will support health and wellness, improve education, accelerate business, and connect people in reliable, safe, and trustworthy ways that respect human values, rights, justice, and dignity.




Cyborg


Book Description

"Steve Mann is a cyborg. He sees the entire world, including himself, through a video lens--the WearComp system. He can control what he sees, liberating his imaginative space from the visual stimuli-billboards and flashing neon signs--that threaten to overwhelm us. While recognizing the danger that human beings could be controlled by technology and the corporations that produce it for profit, Mann is also fascinated by the vast possibilities presented by the wearable computer"--Back cover




The Singularity Is Near


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.




Cognitive Computing for Human-Robot Interaction


Book Description

Cognitive Computing for Human-Robot Interaction: Principles and Practices explores the efforts that should ultimately enable society to take advantage of the often-heralded potential of robots to provide economical and sustainable computing applications. This book discusses each of these applications, presents working implementations, and combines coherent and original deliberative architecture for human–robot interactions (HRI). Supported by experimental results, it shows how explicit knowledge management promises to be instrumental in building richer and more natural HRI, by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system for sustainable computing applications. This book will be of special interest to academics, postgraduate students, and researchers working in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Key features: - Introduces several new contributions to the representation and management of humans in autonomous robotic systems; - Explores the potential of cognitive computing, robots, and HRI to generate a deeper understanding and to provide a better contribution from robots to society; - Engages with the potential repercussions of cognitive computing and HRI in the real world. - Introduces several new contributions to the representation and management of humans in an autonomous robotic system - Explores cognitive computing, robots and HRI, presenting a more in-depth understanding to make robots better for society - Gives a challenging approach to those several repercussions of cognitive computing and HRI in the actual global scenario




Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology


Book Description

Human values--including accountability, privacy, autonomy, and respect for person--emerge from the computer systems that we build and how we choose to use them. Yet, important questions on human values and system design have remained largely unexplored. If human values are controversial, then on what basis do some values override others in the design of, for example, hardware, algorithms, and databases? Do users interact with computer systems as social actors? If so, should designers of computer persona and agents seek to build on such human tendencies, or check them? How have design decisions in hospitals, research labs, and computer corporations protected or degraded such values? This volume brings together leading researchers and system designers who take up these questions, and more.