Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 15, 2019

An argument that AI will have more impact on medicine than the X-Ray did; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Ancient Greek art work suggests contact with south-Asian culture; Google gives 1,494 phone locations to federal agents; and a Steem post with an embedded video discussion of philosophical concepts, including the "vulnerable world hypothesis" and the idea that we're living in a simulation.

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1. AI is to Medicine Today What the X-ray was to Medicine a Century Ago, and Much More… - In this short essay, Jiajie Zhang argues that AI is set to be more impactful on medicine than the X-Ray was in the 20th century, and also that society is currently in the "throes of a fundamental economic and societal transformation". Zhang gives a slew of examples including identifying melanoma, glaucoma, endovascular thrombectomy from photographs or medical imagery, identifying Parkinson's disease from typing as tasks, identifying depression from cell-phone sleep tracking applciations, and others, where artificial intelligence (AI) is now accomplishing things that humans can't. He draws the analogy that as the X-Ray let us see inside of bodies, AI lets us find patterns that would have gone unrecognized without its assistance. He goes on to compare the current world to the agricultural revolution - which freed people from food insecurity, the industrial revolution - which freed people from physical labor, and now says that the on-going AI revolution is set to free people from cognitive labor.


2. Video Friday: This Robot Is Learning About Personal Space to Avoid Pesky Humans - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes: an autonomous biped that is able to avoid obstacles, including humans that stray into its path; A new lidar camera that claims to be the world's smallest and most efficient; A robot arm that brushes hair; An ultrasound device that can change the direction of a ping-pong ball; A biped "running robot" with a natural gait; and more...
   
   Here is a U-Drone, designed for underground operation (without GPS reception). The "U" stands for Underground, Unlimited, Unjammable, User-Friendly and Unearthing:
   

Ancient monkey painting suggests Bronze Age Greeks travelled widely - U. of Penn researcher, Marie Nicole Pareja Cummings worked with primatologists to examine paintings on the wall of a building in Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini). The paintings were buried by volcanic ash around 3700 years ago. Many of the paintings depict monkeys, although there were no monkeys in Greece at the time. Most of the monkeys are from Egypt, where the Greeks are known to have traveled, but one painting depicts a grey langur, which inhabits southern Asia, in modern-day India, Nepal, Bhutan - and notably, in the Indus Valley, which held one of the most important and advanced civilizations of the time. As-of now, there is no evidence for direct contact between the civilizations, but this painting seems to suggest that it may have happened. h/t archaeology.org

Google Hands Feds 1,500 Phone Locations In Unprecedented ‘Geofence’ Search - A series of arsons in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area is said to have resulted in the deaths of two dogs and more than $50,000 in property damage. In the course of investigating the crimes, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) demanded to know which Google customers were in areas covering 29,387 square meters during a period of nine hours when the crimes were taking place. In response to the warrants, Google identified 1,494 devices and supplied the device identifiers to the ATF officers. These so-called "geofences" or "reverse location searches" are useful to law enforcement because it helps them to narrow down the candidate pool for criminal activity, but they are concerning to privacy advocates. A privacy advocate says the incident points out that this reveals the massive scope of Google's own surveillance, and also demonstrates the unconstitutional nature of reverse location searches, where large numbers of people have their privacy impinged without suspicion. Reminds me of the recent op-ed, You’re in a Police Lineup, Right Now, which was about facial recognition, but highlighted the same sort of sweeping suspicionless searches. h/t ARS Technica

STEEM We're living in a computer simulation - philosopher - This post contains an embedded video from @rt-international where Sophie Shevardnadze interviews philosopher, Nick Bostrom about a number of ideas from philosophy. The discussion begins with the "vulnerable world hypothesis", which argues that at some level of technological development, it becomes so easy to destroy society that such destruction is inevitable. According to Bostrom, if this hypothesis is correct, pervasive surveillance may be the best hope at survival. Bostrom goes on to argue that if the surveillance is limited to beneficent uses, then it doesn't represent a form of totalitarianism. The interview takes on that argument, suggesting that the human propensity for control makes it very unlikely that total surveillance will not be abused. Bostrom concedes that we don't know yet, whether we'll be able to restrict AI to beneficial purposes, but argues that if the potential to destroy society becomes too easy, surveillance - in alignment with human values - may be the only possible defense. The second portion of the video, starting at about 14:40 takes on the subject in the title. Bostrom suggests that we might all be living in a simulation. He says, based on his own publication in 2003, that one of three propositions must be true: (i) All civilizations go extinct before they reach technological maturity; (ii) Most or all civilizations that do reach technology maturity are uninterested in creating simulations; or (iii) Statistically, we are almost certainly living in a technological simulation that was created by a technologically mature civilization. Extending the thought, Bostrom says that for most every day purposes, we should probably assume that we're not in a simulation, but there are new possibilities that emerge if we actually are. In many ways, he suggests that these possibilities mirror the metaphysical ideas that theologians have been thinking about.

Here is the video: but click through and give @rt-international an upvote.

(A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @rt-international.)

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