White lies are common in daily life. However, lying could be interfering with your physical and mental health. A recent study suggests that honesty really is the best policy.
A "Science of Honesty" project at the University of Notre Dame asked people to give up telling major and minor lies for 10 weeks. At the conclusion of the experiment, the test subjects reported that they felt less tension and sadness when they refrained from lying. They also reported that they had fewer physical symptoms, such as headaches and sore throats.
Try these strategies to make it easier to avoid those white lies.
Incorporating complete honesty into your life can be difficult. But, the rewards are amazing.
Guidelines for Being More Honest in Everyday Life:
1. Be realistic. It's estimated that the average person tells 10 or more lies per week. Becoming more candid will require a good deal of effort. Give yourself credit for every time you dare to be forthcoming instead of hiding behind a fib.
2. Stop making excuses. Becoming more accountable is a great place to start. When you show up late for an appointment, just apologize for running late instead of pretending there was a traffic jam.
3. Fulfill your promises. There will be less temptation to make up stories if you keep your word in the first place. Accept your limitations and take on only what you can handle.
4. Ask directly. Direct approaches work better than manipulation. Invite a friend on a weekend getaway instead of trying to convince her that she looks tired and needs a break.
5. Deal with conflicts. We sometimes keep quiet because it seems easier than dealing with the conflict. Examine whether you're accommodating others to be kind or if it would be better to work out your differences.
6. Present yourself accurately. Take risks and open up to others. Express your true feelings. State your opinions even when they're different than the majority.
7. Think like a nurse. A Gallup poll found that nurses were especially straightforward. That makes sense considering that a person's health is often at stake. Consider your impact on the world when you're feeling inclined to sidestep the truth.
8. Speak tactfully. Uncomfortable subjects and situations are easier to face when you choose your words carefully. It's also helpful to select an appropriate time and place. Think about how you'd want someone to talk to you about a difficult topic and give them the same courtesy.
Guidelines for Being More Honest in Specific Situations:
1. Evaluate your parenting. Your kids provide a lot of motivation for becoming a worthy role model. If you embrace honesty in your life, your children will follow suit. Help them develop solid communication skills and emotional intelligence. They'll grow up to be more resilient and resourceful.
2. Deepen your intimate relationships. The courage to be honest will strengthen your connection with your partner. You'll feel accepted for who you are and give them the chance to experience the same joy.
3. Be more honest at work. Find a line of work that allows you to operate according to your values. Figure out how to be honest with your boss and coworkers in a respectful way.
4. Engage in self-reflection. Set aside time on a regular basis to review how you're doing with incorporating honesty into your life. Think in terms of progress rather than perfection.
Honesty is good for your mind and body. Telling lies and keeping track of them can be stressful. Truthfulness, combined with sensitivity, will strengthen your relationships and help you feel better about yourself.
It is said that decision making becomes easy if you know your Values. Or indirectly saying, your Values make it easy for you to make decisions. Not only this, your Values strengthen your character, portrays the persistency in your personality, systemize your life and remind you to focus on the things which matter the most in a way which is defined by the Values you chose to live by. So, after all, what are Values?
The Values are the characteristics and the principles which you adopt in your routine life to live by. For example if a person lives with the Values of "Being Adaptable" and "Being Optimistic" then he/she would be more elastic to different situations (Adaptable) and would be less stressful in tragic situations (Optimistic). Hence, it would be appropriate to say that your Values are shaping your present and your future.
Some of the most common values are: Confident, Friendly, Honest, Surprising, Devoted, Adaptable, Honest, Harmonious, Energetic, Optimistic, Caring, Courageous, Forgiving, Generous, Gratitude, Friendly and Empathic. While, all these Values give you benefit in different situations of life; there are some most common yet most powerful Values to adopt by all means. Below are my favorite ones:
1-Being Empathic:
There is a big difference between Human Being and Being Human. Latter requires you helping others by all possible means which demands high level of empathy from you. Empathy is the skill to understand the emotions as well as needs of people and to treat them according to their emotional reaction. This skill is closely linked with the emotional intelligence which is basically analyzing, assessing and managing the emotion of oneself and others. So by developing and practicing this Value not only you resolve someone's conflicts and problems but also win their hearts !
2-Being Committed:
Once you decide something, you have to make sure you complete it by all positive and logical and fair means. Once you start living with this Value, you will make things happen by strictly sticking to your goals. An indicative to strong commitment is that you start focusing on the solutions to the problems instead of finding the excuses. You would know that a weak approach to any task means you are already half lost it. So living this Value empower your "Can-do-Attitude"
3-Being Optimistic: Positive people are part of solutions instead of complaining, criticizing, cursing, contradicting, confronting, conspiring and corrupting. Being positive gives you great flexibility and a sense of independence because you chose to ignore the negative thoughts and free up your mind to focus on things which can add value to your life. Eventually you enhance your productivity by adopting this Value.
4-Being Gratuitous:
The stanza says, "When Your Head is on the Pillow, and the day is almost done; Count God's blessings, Count Them One by One. If you are reading this article, you are better than billions of people who do not have even basic necessities such as food to eat, bed to sleep, clothes to wear and even clean water to drink. Generally speaking, it is believed that people who have high level of gratitude posses deep peace of mind and are high achievers in life. You can practice this Value by dedicating 5 minutes at the end of each day and being thankful to God by refreshing the blessings you have including each organ of your body and several other materialistic/financial blessings. To strengthen this Value, compare yourself with the people who don't have these blessings.
5-Being Adaptable:
Stubborn people suffer from many problems such as stress, wrong decisions, professional stagnancy, family imbalance and emotional disturbance. You have to understand that you cannot boil the ocean nor you can spin the world. So be flexible to the changing situations and adopt yourself accordingly. Be fair, logical and analytical in judging the situations and change your strategy to control or mitigate the side effects. However this does not mean to allow yourself to 'go-with-the-wind"; instead, be concrete on your goal achievement however be elastic in your approach to reach to the destination.
6-Being Analytical:
Being Analytical means analyzing any situation from logical, personal, religious, emotional, financial, needs Vs wants, familial and professional perspectives. Being analytical gives you the wisdom to see things from wider angle and consider things from all stake holders' perspective so that your decisions are healthy and fruitful in the long run and are in the best interest of yourself, your family and your business.
7-Being Trust-worthy:
Trust is the permanent certainty and confident expectation from someone for something. Lack of trust might lead to shattered relations so Trust is the most critical ingredient for strong relationship; the relation which can either be between Husband-Wife, Boss-Employee, Father-Son, Brother-Sister, supplier-customer and so on. You can adopt and demonstrate this Value by being truthful to others, by meeting our promises, keeping the secrets and providing fair advises, honest with our loved ones.
Reports suggest that Apple may build future iPhones with Li-Fi capabilities. A Twitter user found that within its iOS 9.1 code there were references to Li-Fi written as 'LiFiCapability' hinting that Apple may integrate Li-fi with iPhones in the future. Read on to find out what Li-Fi is, how it works and why Wi-Fi may be a thing of the past.
Light Fidelity or Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system running wireless communications travelling at very high speeds.
Li-Fi uses common household LED (light emitting diodes) lightbulbs to enable data transfer, boasting speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second.
The term Li-Fi was coined by University of Edinburgh Professor Harald Haas during a TED Talk in 2011. Haas envisioned light bulbs that could act as wireless routers.
Subsequently, in 2012 after four years of research, Haas set up company pureLiFi with the aim 'to be the world leader in Visible Light Communications technology'.
How it works
Li-Fi and Wi-Fi are quite similar as both transmit data electromagnetically. However, Wi-Fi uses radio waves while Li-Fi runs on visible light.
As we now know, Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system. This means that it accommodates a photo-detector to receive light signals and a signal processing element to convert the data into 'stream-able' content.
An LED lightbulb is a semi-conductor light source meaning that the constant current of electricity supplied to an LED lightbulb can be dipped and dimmed, up and down at extremely high speeds, without being visible to the human eye.
For example, data is fed into an LED light bulb (with signal processing technology), it then sends data (embedded in its beam) at rapid speeds to the photo-detector (photodiode).
The tiny changes in the rapid dimming of LED bulbs is then converted by the 'receiver' into electrical signal.
The signal is then converted back into a binary data stream that we would recognise as web, video and audio applications that run on internet enables devices.
Li-Fi vs Wi-Fi
While some may think that Li-Fi with its 224 gigabits per second leaves Wi-Fi in the dust, Li-Fi's exclusive use of visible light could halt a mass uptake.
Li-Fi signals cannot pass through walls, so in order to enjoy full connectivity, capable LED bulbs will need to be placed throughout the home. Not to mention, Li-Fi requires the lightbulb is on at all times to provide connectivity, meaning that the lights will need to be on during the day.
What's more, where there is a lack of lightbulbs, there is a lack of Li-Fi internet so Li-Fi does take a hit when it comes to public Wi-Fi networks.
In an announcement yesterday, an extension of standard Wi-Fi is coming and it's called Wi-Fi HaLow.
This new project claims to double the range of connectivity while using less power. Due to this, Wi-Fi HaLow is reportedly perfect for battery powered devices such as smartwatches, smartphones and lends itself to Internet of Things devices such as sensors and smart applications.
But it's not all doom and gloom! Due to its impressive speeds, Li-Fi could make a huge impact on the internet of things too, with data transferred at much higher levels with even more devices able to connect to one another. (See also: What is the Internet of Things?)
What's more, due to its shorter range, Li-Fi is more secure than Wi-Fi and it's reported that embedded light beams reflected off a surface could still achieve 70 megabits per second.
The future of Li-Fi
In November last year, Li-Fi pioneers pureLiFi joined forces with French lighting company Lucibel aiming to bring out Li-Fi enables products, later this year.
pureLiFi already have two products on the market: Li-Flame Ceiling Unit to connect to an LED light fixture and Li-Flame Desktop Unit which connects to a device via USB, both aiming to provide light and connectivity in one device.
Plus, with faster connectivity and data transmission it's an interesting space for businesses. The integration of internet of things devices and Li-Fi will provide a wealth of opportunities for retailers and other businesses alike. For example, shop owners could transmit data to multiple customers' phones quickly, securely and remotely.
Whether or not Li-Fi will live up to its hype is yet to be decided. Watch this space...
Half of the world's problems might happen because people need to show off to other people. Here's how you can be part of the solution.
"The need to impress others causes half the world's woes. Don't add to them. Be real, not impressive," said the late American spiritual teacher, author, and philosopher Vernon Howard.
The need to impress other people motivates our lives. The need to impress other people will impact the clothing we wear, vehicles we drive, careers we select and technology we use.
It often is elusive, unfortunately. Vehicles rust. Technology advances. Fashion changes. The purchases which impressed your neighbors yesterday will not make that same impression nowadays. As a consequence, we'll live our lives with clothing that is outdated, careers we hate, increasing debt, and jealousy toward neighbors who tend to have it all... until this unquenchable need to impress will beg us to start the pattern again.
The fact is we oftentimes look to impress other people in all of the incorrect places.
Take one minute to identify those within your life who really impress you. What will it be about their lives that will inspire you? Create a list. Rarely will it be the size of their house or vehicle they drive. More often than not, those who really inspire us have the intangible, invisible qualities all of us want. Give consideration to this list of methods to impress other people:
1. Become generous.
Provide your energy, time, and money regularly to other people; expecting nothing in return. Giving of one life to another includes amongst the most impressive tasks to do.
2. Laugh a lot.
Become that individual who regularly laughs at other people's stories and jokes. It will concretely communicate that you love life, as well as their company. They will become impressed and you will be a more pleasant individual.
3. Become optimistic.
You should always be focusing on the positive aspects of situations and people. Occasionally you must appear harder than other people, yet you always will be happy that you did.
4. Adore your children.
And by adore your children, I mean really like them, as well. Enjoy spending time with them, being with them, as well as investing within their lives. This adoration toward kids is going to be evident within your life even as they are not around.
5. Become faithful to your husband/wife.
Fidelity in a marriage is too quickly going out of style today. Remain faithful to your significant other. Your colleagues and friends are going to be impressed.
6. Develop strengths.
I'm impressed by great authors, singers, architects, writers, CEO's, speakers, mothers, computer programmers and athletes. There's just one thing all of them have in common: All of them found out their strengths, as well as developed their strengths with discipline. Do the exact same with your temperament and talents. And irrespective of the job you select, you'll impress.
7. Visit the world.
You'll change and become better because of it.
8. Have an appreciation for various opinions.
As there isn't anything incorrect with being dogmatic within your beliefs, an appreciation of how other people came to their beliefs definitely is a positive quality.
9. Adore life.
Do not fall into that trap of living your life like everybody else. Avoid consumerism and television. Discover enjoyment within your life and embrace your passions. Those around you are going to be jealous... and impressed.
10. Encourage others more.
Living life competitively with the ones around you never will impress. Everyone else, after all, already is doing so. Change your world by being totally different. Lift others up and encourage others. The individual who will benefit the most just might be you.
11. Adore nature.
Individuals exhibiting care for their world around them show care for all of humanity.
12. Intently listen.
Focus your eyes. Keep your ears tuned. Keep your phone off. Within a world which cannot move quickly enough, somebody who may discover some time to listen will be as rare as a valuable gem... and more precious.
13. Become modest.
You're unique, special, and gifted. The less you make the effort to inform everybody of that, the more they'll notice.
14. Become content.
Contented lives are admirable, desirable, and enjoyable. The ones who do not have it, want it. And will be impressed with the ones who do.
15. Do not live just to impress.
Instead, strive to live to inspire. Give up the need to impress everybody you come across. However, you should never give up the need to inspire everybody you meet.
An old man sat outside the walls of a great city. When travelers approached, they would ask the old man, "What kind of people live in this city?" The old man would answer, "What kind of people live in the place where you came from?" If the travelers answered, "Only bad people live in the place where we came from," the old man would reply, "Continue on; you will find only bad people here."
But if the travelers answered, "Good people live in the place where we came from," then the old man would say, "Enter, for here too, you will find only good people."
Reflection: Color of this world is based on the color of your eyes, color of your glasses. The way you perceive the things; your understand, your thoughts and your experiences. Good and Bad people you will find everywhere in the world, in every country, in every society it is up to us, what we are looking for.Picture Credit: thinkyness
What makes you happy at work? Maybe you have a great boss who gives you the freedom to be creative, rewards you for going the extra mile, and helps you to reach your career goals.
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Maybe you have none of the above and are updating your résumé as we speak.
It's pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door.
But managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don't leave jobs; they leave managers.
Bad management does not discriminate based on salary or job title. A Fortune 500 executive team can experience more dissatisfaction and turnover than the baristas at a local coffee shop. The more demanding your job is and the less control you have over what you do, the more likely you are to suffer. A study by the American Psychological Association found that people whose work meets both these criteria are more likely to experience exhaustion, poor sleep, anxiety, and depression.
The sad thing is that this suffering can easily be avoided. All that's required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager's part to give employees autonomy and make their work feel less demanding. To get there, managers must understand what they're doing to kill morale. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must be abolished if you're going to hang on to good employees.
Overworking people. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. It's so tempting to work the best people hard that managers frequently fall into this trap. Overworking good employees is perplexing for them as it makes them feel as if they're being punished for their great performance. Overworking employees is also counterproductive. New research from Stanford showed that productivity per hour declines sharply when the workweek exceeds 50 hours, and productivity drops off so much after 55 hours that you don't get anything out of working more. Talented employees will take on a bigger workload, but they won't stay if their job suffocates them in the process. Raises, promotions, and title-changes are all acceptable ways to increase workload. If managers simply increase workload because people are talented, without changing a thing, these employees will seek another job that gives them what they deserve.
Holding people back. As an employee, you want to bring value to your job, and you do so with a unique set of skills and experience. So how is it that you can do your job so well that you become irreplaceable? This happens when managers sacrifice your upward mobility for their best interests. If you're looking for your next career opportunity, and your boss is unwilling to let you move up the ladder, your enthusiasm is bound to wane. Taking away opportunities for advancement is a serious morale killer.
Management may have a beginning, but it certainly has no end. When blessed with a talented employee, it's the manager's job to keep finding areas in which they can improve to expand their skill set and further their career. The most talented employees want feedback—more so than the less talented ones—and it's a manager's job to keep it coming. Otherwise, people grow bored and complacent.
Playing the blame game. A boss who is too proud to admit a mistake or who singles out individuals in front of the group creates a culture that is riddled with fear and anxiety. It's impossible to bring your best to your work when you're walking on eggshells. Instead of pointing fingers when something goes wrong, good managers work collaboratively with their team and focus on solutions. They pull people aside to discuss slip-ups instead of publicly shaming them, and they're willing to accept responsibility for mistakes made under their leadership.
Frequent threats of firing. Some managers use threats of termination to keep you in line and to scare you into performing better. This is a lazy and shortsighted way of motivating people. People who feel disposable are quick to find another job where they'll be valued and will receive the respect that they deserve.
Not letting people pursue their passions. Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.
Withholding praise. It's easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it's a raise; for others, it's public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you're doing it right. This doesn't mean that managers need to praise people for showing up on time or working an eight-hour day—these things are the price of entry—but a boss who does not give praise to dedicated employees erodes their commitment to the job.
Bringing It All Together
If managers want their best people to stay, they need to think carefully about how they treat them. While good employees are as tough as nails, their talent gives them an abundance of options. Managers need to make people want to work for them.
What other mistakes kill morale? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0,
The division, which employs around 140 researchers at its lab in a new building at Kings Cross, London, is on a mission to solve general intelligence and make machines capable of learning things for themselves. It plans to do this by creating a set of powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that can be combined to make an AI system or "agent".
Suleyman explains
These are systems that learn automatically. They're not pre-programmed, they're not handcrafted features. We try to provide a large set of raw information to our algorithms as possible so that the systems themselves can learn the very best representations in order to use those for action or classification or predictions.
The systems we design are inherently general. This means that the very same system should be able to operate across a wide range of tasks.
That's why we've started as we have with the Atari games. We could have done lots of really interesting problems in narrow domains had we spent time specifically hacking our tools to fit the real world problems - that could have been very, very valuable.
Instead we've taken the principle approach of starting on tools that are inherently general.
AI has largely been about pre-programming tools for specific tasks: in these kinds of systems, the intelligence of the system lies mostly in the smart human who programmed all of the intelligence into the smart system and subsequently these are of course rigid and brittle and don't really handle novelty very well or adapt to new settings and our fundamentally very limited as a result.
We characterise AGI as systems and tools which are flexible and adaptive and that learn.
We use the reinforcement learning architecture which is largely a design approach to characterise the way we develop our systems. This begins with an agent which has a goal or policy that governs the way it interacts with some evironment. This environment could be a small physics domain, it could be a trading environment, it could be a real world robotics environment or it could be a Aatari environment.The agent says it wants to take actions in this environment and it gets feedback from the environment in the form of observations and it uses these observations to update its policy of behaviour or its model of the world.
How does it work?
The technology behind DeepMind is complex to say the least but that didn't stop Suleyman from trying to convey some of the fundamental deep learning principles that underpin it. The audience - a mixture of software engineers, AI specialists, startups, investors and media - seemed to follow.
Suleyman explains
You've probably heard quite a bit about deep learning. I'm going to give you a very quick high-level overview because this is really important to get intuition for how these systems work and what they basically do.
These are hierarchical based networks initially conceived back in the 80s but recently resuscitated by a bunch of really smart guys from Toronto and New York.
The basic intuition is that at one end we take the raw pixel data or the raw sensory stream data of things we would like to classify or recognise.
This seems to be a very effective way of learning to find structure in very large data sets. Right at the very output we're able to impose on the network some requirement to produce some set of labels or classifications that we recognise and find useful as humans.
How is DeepMind being tested?
DeepMind found a suitably quirky way to test what its team of roughly 140 people have been busy building.
The intelligence of the DeepMind's systems was put through its paces by an arcade gaming platform that dates back to the 1970s.
Suleyman demoed DeepMind playing one of them during his talk - Space Invaders. In his demo he illustrated how a DeepMind agent learns how to play the game with each go it takes.
Suleyman explains
We use the Atari test bed to develop and test and train all of our systems…or at least we have done so far.
There is somewhere on the magnitude of 100 different Atari games from the 70s and 80s.
The agents only get the raw pixel inputs and the score so this is something like 30,000 inputs per frame. They're wired up to the action buttons but they're not really told what the action buttons do so the agent has to discover what these new tools of the real world actually mean and how they can utilise value for the agent.
The goal that we give them is very simply to maximise score; it gets a 1 or a 0 when the score comes in, just as a human would.
Everything is learned completely from scratch - there's absolutely zero pre-programmed knowledge so we don't tell the agent these are Space Invaders or this is how you shoot. It's really learnt from the raw pixel inputs.
For every set of inputs the agent is trying to assess which action is optimal given that set of inputs and it's doing that repeatedly over time in order to optimise some longer term goal, which in Atari's sense, is to optimise score. This is one agent with one set of parameters that plays all of the different games.
Live space invaders demo
An agent playing space invaders before training struggles to hide behind the orange obstacles, it's firing fairly randomly. It seems to get killed all of the time and it doesn't really know what to do in the environment.
After training, the agent learns to control the robot and barely loses any bullets. It aims for the space invaders that are right at the top because it finds those the most rewarding. It barely gets hit; it hides behind the obstacles; it can make really good predictive shots like the one on the mothership that came in at the top there.
As those of you know who have played this game, it sort of speeds up towards the end and so the agent has to do a little bit more planning and predicting than it had done previously so as you can see there's a really good predictive shot right at the end there.
100 games vs 500 games
The agent doesn't really know what the paddle does after 100 games, it sort of randomly moves it from one side to the other. Occasionally it accidentally hits the ball back and finds that to be a rewarding action. It learns that it should repeat that action in order to get reward.
After about 300 games it's pretty good and it basically doesn't really miss.
But then after about 500 games, really quite unexpectedly to our coders, the agent learns that the optimal strategy is to tunnel up the sides and then send them all around the back to get maximum score with minimum effort - this was obviously very impressive to us.
We've now achieved human performance in 49/57 games that we've tested on and this work was recently rewarded with a front cover of Nature for our paper that we submitted so we were very proud of that.
How is it being used across Google?
Google didn't buy DeepMind for nothing. Indeed, it's using certain DeepMind algorithms to make many of its best-known products and services smarter than they were previously.
Suleyman explains
Our deep learning tool has now been deployed in many environments, particularly across Google in many of our production systems.
In image recognition, it was famously used in 2012 to achieve very accurate recognition on around a million images with about 16 percent error rate. Very shortly after that it was reduced dramatically to about 6 percent and today we're at about 5.5 percent. This is very much parable with the human level of ability and it's now deployed in Google+ Image Search and elsewhere in Image Search across the company.
As you can see on Google Image Search on G+, you're now able to type a word into the search box and it will recall images from your photographs that you've never actually hand labelled yourself.
We've also used it for text and scription. We use it to identify text on shopfronts and maybe alert people to a discount that's available in a particular shop or what the menu says in a given restaurant. We do that with an extremely high level of accuracy today. It's being used in Local Search and elsewhere across the company.
We also use the same core system across Google for speech recognition. It trains roughly in less than 5 days. In 2012 it delivered a 30 percent reduction in error rate against the existing old school system. This was the biggest single improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, again using the same very general deep learning system across all of these.
Across Google we use what we call Tool AI or Deep Learning Networks for fraud detection, spam detection, hand writing recognition, image search, speech recognition, Street View detection, translation.
Sixty handcrafted rule-based systems have now been replaced with deep learning based networks. This gives you a sense of the kind of generality, flexibility and adaptiveness of the kind of advances that have been made across the field and why Google was interested in DeepMind.
Should we be scared?
The number of scientists and world-famous entrepreneurs speaking out on the potential dangers of AI is increasing week-by-week, with renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and PayPal billionaire Elon Musk being two of the most outspoken anti-AI advocates.
The pair, along with several others including Bill Gates and Sky cofounder Jaan Tallinn, believe that machines will soon become more intelligent than humans, just as they do in recent Hollywood blockbuster Ex Machina.
Despite this, Google is keen to develop its AI algorithms as much as possible in order to improve its offerings and boost its profits.
Suleyman tried to put people's minds at ease and explain the logic behind all the hype.
Suleyman explains
Over the last 18 months or so, AI breakthroughs have, I think, created a sense of anxiety or in some cases hype around the potential long term direction of the field.
This of course is not least induced by Elon [Musk] who recently Tweeted that we need to be super careful with AI because it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes" and that's obviously backed up by various publications including Nick Bostrom's - all culminating in this kind of sense that AI has the potential to end all human kind.
If you didn't really pay attention to the field and all you did was read, as I think the vast majority of people do, descriptions of the kind of work that we do on the web then you could be forgiven for believing that AI is actually about this. Whether it's Terminator coming to blow us up or societies of AIs or mad scientists looking to create quite perverted women robots.
This narrative has somehow managed to dominate the entire landscape, which I think we find really quite remarkable.
It's true that AI has in some sense really arrived. This isn't just a summer. These are very concrete production breakthroughs that really do make a big different but it's also sad how quickly we adapt to this new reality. We rarely take time to acknowledge the magic and the potential of these advances and the kind of good that they can bring. In some sense, the narrative has shifted from isn't it terrible that AI has been such a failure to isn't it terrible that AI has been such a success.
Just to address directly this question of existential risk. Our perspective on this is that it's become a real distraction from the core ethics and safety issues and that it's completely overshadowed the debate.
The way we think about AI is that it'll be a hugely powerful tool that we control and direct whose capabilities we limit, just as we do with any other tool that we have in the world around us, whether they're washing machines or tractors.
These are tools that we designed that we can control. We should explicitly be designing these systems such that we are able to control them and where we fear there's a risk that we're not able to control them, then that's I think when we should be slowing down, just as we have in many other sectors, from nuclear development to chemical weapons or the like.
We're building them to empower humanity, absolutely not to destroy us.I think our technology has the potential to really positively transform the world if we can steward it in the right direction and imagine new mechanisms of governance and accountability and transparency that involve a broader group in the process of directing the application of our technology.
There are many, many much more urgent concerns we need to direct our attention to. This conversation around whether we'll have human-like intelligences wondering around absorbing all the information that's ever been created and giving them rights and being conscious - these are just so…there are a few engineers in the room who will know how difficult it is to get these things to do anything.The idea that we should be spending these moments now talking about consciousness and robot right is really quite preposterous.
I don't mean to be dismissive, these are serious concerns and we put a great deal of effort and a great deal of our negotiating capital into establishing what we think is a reasonably effective process. We're introducing additional oversight and accountability into the way that we steward our technology with the establishment of our ethics and safety board.
These are important issues, we do need to discuss them but we also need to focus on what else is at stake in the world today. How can these tools be useful elsewhere? 800 million people don't have access to clean water, rising to 1.8 billion in the next decade alone. One of the most fundamental rights beyond so many people on our planet. 800 million people are malnourished but a third of the food we produce is wasted every year.
Looking ahead
Google has pledged to set up an ethics board to monitor its internal AI developments. Interestingly, this was one of DeepMind's prerequisites to signing the acquisition papers, suggesting that Suleyman knows AI has potential to do harm.
A number of people have already been appointed to the board but Google has refused to reveal who they are. Suleyman said he wants the names to be revealed.
"We will [publicise the names], but that isn't the be-all and end-all. It's one component of the whole apparatus," he said, adding that he was impressed a 100-strong company like DeepMind was able to convince Google to set up the board in the first place.
Some believe that the board should be appointed with the help of other organisations and public oversight but Google has so far decided to act independently.
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