How to Grow a Mind

This week, we're shifting focus slightly to look at ethics within the field of artifical intelligence. Ethics are an important consideration for anyone interested in the field of AI. This particular paper focuses on one of the largest debates in the current AI ethics field, accident algorithms in self-driving cars. In the event a self-driving car realizes an accident is about to occur, what should it do? What outcomes should be prioritized? The paper reviews the current viewpoints on these questions.

This week will be a short break from our NLP/CogSci papers. Ants are one of the few creatures on the planet that engage in two-way traffic just like us. By looking at how ants navigate their self-organized traffic systems, we can learn how to better organize our own homologous systems (such as intersections, roadways, etc.). This paper experimentally investigates the efficiency of ants navigating paths involving bidirectional movement, and found that ants are capable of a level of efficiency that is twice as high as humans' in equivalent scenarios. What makes ants so much better than humans at traffic organization? What can we learn from ants' organizational paradigms? Should ants be driving our cars instead of humans? These are some of the questions investigated in this week's paper.