Mini Episode: Self Driving Ignorance, AI Surveillance, Nvidia‘s AI Pacman
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Hello and welcome, this is Daniel Beshear here with SkyNet Today's Week in AI. This week we've had news running the gamut from self-driving cars to surveillance. If you followed the news about self-driving cars, you may have heard about issues with Tesla's autopilot feature and a tragic accident involving a self-driving Uber vehicle in Tempe, Arizona.

With those incidents in mind, it might seem unsurprising that people are less than enthused about self-driving technology. But even if you knew about just those two incidents, you're actually more aware than most people who responded to a survey conducted in February and March on behalf of Partners for Automated Vehicle Education.

48% of those respondents said they never get into a self-driving taxi, while 20% believed the technology would never be safe. But few of those respondents were aware of these incidents. Instead, most of the mistrust came from people's lack of first-hand experience with the technology. While most people don't have first-hand experience with self-driving cars, many do have experience with airplanes. And if you've been to an airport in the past year, you may have noticed a little kiosk with a logo for a company called Clear.

In exchange for an annual fee, the biometric company allows you to walk up to one of these kiosks and after a face or iris scan, skip the dreaded lines. While the product has previously been confined to airports and stadiums, Clear wants to help you get back to work. Their Health Pass app uses the same biometric technology paired with a real-time health quiz to share data about users' health information as a country begins to open up.

While the idea reminiscent of an immunity passport seems nice, its very existence demonstrates a major issue. The US government, with no reopening plan in place, is turning to imperfect solutions and as a result potentially giving private companies control over public health policy.

You've probably heard enough about facial recognition, so here's a story about speech recognition. Shenzhen-based iFlytech has made headlines over the past few years for a number of reasons, including breakthroughs in speech recognition technology, a partnership with MIT, and their eventual blacklisting by the US government.

Its virtual assistants and translation devices are beloved by users. They're able to understand accented speech and even accurately translate idioms. But the impressive technology has a darker side. iFlytex technology is used not only by consumers but also by the Chinese government for surveillance efforts. The impressive level of its technology is the result of a feedback loop, where data collected from consumers and surveillance systems allow one another to continually improve.

But let's end things on a less pessimistic note. You've probably heard of Nvidia because of their graphics cards, popularized for their use in gaming and now in deep learning. But the company conducts some serious AI research itself. In a new project, Nvidia researchers taught an AI system to recreate the game Pac-Man by simply watching it being played. The AI version isn't perfect, but it hits all the basic dynamics of the game: eat pellets, avoid ghosts, and try not to die.

NVIDIA says this technology, which tries to create convincing replications of its input data, could be used for game design and robot programming in the future. That's all we have for this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to rate and share. If you'd like to hear more news like this, please check out skynetoday.com, where you can find weekly news digests with similar articles.