Invoice Gates’ new local weather plans, and an AI bug bounty

Casey’s story is from The Spark, MIT Expertise Evaluation’s new weekly local weather publication. Join to obtain it in your inbox each Wednesday.

A bias bounty for AI will assist to catch unfair algorithms sooner

What’s occurring: Whereas AI techniques are deployed on a regular basis, it could possibly take months and even years till it turns into clear whether or not, and the way, they’re biased. As we speak, a gaggle of AI and machine-learning consultants are launching a brand new bias bounty competitors, which they hope will pace the method of uncovering embedded prejudices.

What’s up first? Taking inspiration from bug bounties in cybersecurity, the primary bias bounty competitors goes to give attention to biased picture detection. The winner will take house a $6,000 prize dedicated by Microsoft and startup Sturdy Intelligence, which has been hailed as a powerful incentive for the machine studying neighborhood to winkle out bias. Learn the total story.
—Melissa Heikkilä

Ought to we imagine in—and even need—immortality?

Twenty years have handed since author Jonathan Weiner first met Aubrey de Gray, the person with the Methuselah beard. Again then, Aubrey was already a True Believer within the quest for immortality. However he wasn’t well-known, or infamous, but; he wasn’t Aubrey!, as he would quickly turn into to his followers within the anti-aging crowd. And he wasn’t but a person in shame.

Weiner first met Aubrey in 2002, when Aubrey was nonetheless working as a pc programmer within the Division of Genetics on the College of Cambridge, in England. He quickly turned a secular guru, a prophet of immortality—to the extraordinary annoyance of a lot of the scientists within the getting old discipline. However Aubrey’s eagerness to persuade believers they might dwell for hundreds of years, millennia, and even longer, in the event that they had been fortunate, raises pertinent questions on what it’s to need one thing we could not even imagine in. Learn the total story.

This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed concern, obtainable from 26 October. If you wish to learn it when it comes out, you’ll be able to subscribe to MIT Expertise Evaluation for as little as $80 a yr.