alotta these have already ended but, eg, Lyft is still going

This page describes human error rates in a variety of contexts.

Most of the error rates are for mechanical errors. A good general figure for mechanical error rates appears to be about 0.5%.

Of course the denominator differs across studies. However only fairly simple actions are used in the denominator.

The Klemmer and Snyder study shows that much lower error rates are possible--in this case for people whose job consisted almost entirely of data entry.

The error rate for more complex logic errors is about 5%, based primarily on data on other pages, especially the program development page.

FT podcasts on US-China competition and AI: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/ft-podcasts-on-us-china-competition-and.html

A new recommended career path for effective altruists: China specialist: https://80000hours.org/articles/china-careers/
Our rough guess is that it would be useful for there to be at least ten people in the community with good knowledge in this area within the next few years.

By “good knowledge” we mean they’ve spent at least 3 years studying these topics and/or living in China.

We chose ten because that would be enough for several people to cover each of the major areas listed (e.g. 4 within AI, 2 within biorisk, 2 within foreign relations, 1 in another area).

AI Policy and Governance Internship: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ai-policy-governance-internship/

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf
Deciphering China’s AI Dream
The context, components, capabilities, and consequences of
China’s strategy to lead the world in AI

Europe’s AI delusion: https://www.politico.eu/article/opinion-europes-ai-delusion/
Brussels is failing to grasp threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence.
By BRUNO MAÇÃES

When the computer program AlphaGo beat the Chinese professional Go player Ke Jie in a three-part match, it didn’t take long for Beijing to realize the implications.

If algorithms can already surpass the abilities of a master Go player, it can’t be long before they will be similarly supreme in the activity to which the classic board game has always been compared: war.

As I’ve written before, the great conflict of our time is about who can control the next wave of technological development: the widespread application of artificial intelligence in the economic and military spheres.

...

If China’s ambitions sound plausible, that’s because the country’s achievements in deep learning are so impressive already. After Microsoft announced that its speech recognition software surpassed human-level language recognition in October 2016, Andrew Ng, then head of research at Baidu, tweeted: “We had surpassed human-level Chinese recognition in 2015; happy to see Microsoft also get there for English less than a year later.”

...

One obvious advantage China enjoys is access to almost unlimited pools of data. The machine-learning technologies boosting the current wave of AI expansion are as good as the amount of data they can use. That could be the number of people driving cars, photos labeled on the internet or voice samples for translation apps. With 700 or 800 million Chinese internet users and fewer data protection rules, China is as rich in data as the Gulf States are in oil.

How can Europe and the United States compete? They will have to be commensurately better in developing algorithms and computer power. Sadly, Europe is falling behind in these areas as well.

...

Chinese commentators have embraced the idea of a coming singularity: the moment when AI surpasses human ability. At that point a number of interesting things happen. First, future AI development will be conducted by AI itself, creating exponential feedback loops. Second, humans will become useless for waging war. At that point, the human mind will be unable to keep pace with robotized warfare. With advanced image recognition, data analytics, prediction systems, military brain science and unmanned systems, devastating wars might be waged and won in a matter of minutes.

...

The argument in the new strategy is fully defensive. It first considers how AI raises new threats and then goes on to discuss the opportunities. The EU and Chinese strategies follow opposite logics. Already on its second page, the text frets about the legal and ethical problems raised by AI and discusses the “legitimate concerns” the technology generates.

The EU’s strategy is organized around three concerns: the need to boost Europe’s AI capacity, ethical issues and social challenges. Unfortunately, even the first dimension quickly turns out to be about “European values” and the need to place “the human” at the center of AI — forgetting that the first word in AI is not “human” but “artificial.”

https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/983057591298351104
https://archive.is/m3Njh
US military: "LOL, China thinks it's going to be a major player in AI, but we've got all the top AI researchers. You guys will help us develop weapons, right?"

US AI researchers: "No."

US military: "But... maybe just a computer vision app."

US AI researchers: "NO."

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17196818/ai-boycot-killer-robots-kaist-university-hanwha
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html
https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/981685030417326080
https://archive.is/3wbHm
AI-risk was a mistake.

collaborative filtering where you only have R_ij = 1 or R_ij = ?
would be useful for pinboard tag-recommendation
http://win.ua.ac.be/~adrem/bibrem/pubs/verstrepen15PhDthesis.pdf
many cites: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.192.6482&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Bayesian: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.165.7857&rep=rep1&type=pdf
implemented in Quora library (c++): https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:5265de8b1c0d

The PLA’s organizational tendencies could render it more inclined to take full advantage of the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence, without constraints due to concerns about keeping humans ‘in the loop.’ In its command culture, the PLA has tended to consolidate and centralize authorities at higher levels, remaining reluctant to delegate decision-making downward. The introduction of information technology has exacerbated the tendency of PLA commanders to micromanage subordinates through a practice known as “skip-echelon command” (越级指挥) that enables the circumvention of command bureaucracy to influence units and weapons systems at even a tactical level.[xxviii] This practice can be symptomatic of a culture of distrust and bureaucratic immaturity. The PLA has confronted and started to progress in mitigating its underlying human resource challenges, recruiting increasingly educated officers and enlisted personnel, while seeking to modernize and enhance political and ideological work aimed to ensure loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. However, the employment of artificial intelligence could appeal to the PLA as a way to circumvent and work around those persistent issues. In the long term, the intersection of the PLA’s focus on ‘scientific’ approaches to warfare with the preference to consolidate and centralize decision-making could cause the PLA’s leadership to rely more upon artificial intelligence, rather than human judgment.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/08/ssc-journal-club-ai-timelines/
http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2017/06/01/do-ai-experts-exist/
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/rise-of-machines-survey-of-ai.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/07/robots-taking-our-jobs.html