XLand, Simulation of Sweet Adventures

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including a story from MIT Technology Review (which echoes observations made previously on AI with AI) that "hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch COVID. None of them helped." DeepMind has used its AlphaFold program to identify the structure for 98.5 percent of roughly 20,000 human proteins and will make the information publicly available. The Pentagon makes use of machine learning algorithms to create decision space in the latest of its Global Information Dominance Experiments. An Australian court rules that AI systems can be "inventors" under patent law (but not "owners"), and South Africa issues the world's first patent to an "AI System." The United States Special Operations Command put 300 of its personnel through a unique six-week crash course in AI, including leaders such as Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Defense Secretary Ash Carter. And President Biden nominates Stanford professor Ramin Toloui, who has experience with AI technologies and impacts, as an Assistant Secretary of State for business. In research, DeepMind develop agents capable of "open-ended learning" in XLand, an environment with diverse tasks and challenges. A survey from the Journal of AI Research finds that AI researchers have varying amounts of trust in different organizations, companies, and governments. The Journal of Strategic Studies dedicates an issue to Emerging Technologies, with free access. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel and Johanna Hardin make an Introduction to Modern Statistics open access with an option (or with proceeds going to OpenIntro, a US-based nonprofit). And Iyad Rahwan curates a collection of evil AI cartoons.