Unexploded munitions from past wars continue to kill and maim thousands of people every year. Computer vision is helping researchers figure out where these dormant weapons are likely to be.

A prominent AI researcher has turned his back on computer vision over ethical issues. The co-creator of the popular object-recognition network You Only Look Once (YOLO) said he no longer works on computer vision because the technology has “almost no upside and enormous downside risk.”

YouTube is a great place to learn about new ideas — including some that have been thoroughly discredited. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is helping spread misinformation about climate change, according to research by Avaaz, a self-funded activist group.

I have three hopes for 2020.

Datasets are critical to AI and machine learning, and they are becoming a key driver of the economy. Collection of sensitive data is increasing rapidly, covering almost every aspect of people’s lives.

A U.S. federal judge ruled that the public must be able to see records from a government-chartered AI advisory group. The court decided that the National Security Commission on AI, which guides defense research into AI-powered warfighting technology, must respond to freedom-of-information requests.

Google's AI platform offers a view into the mind of its machines. Explainable AI (xAI) tools show which features exerted the most influence on a model’s decision, so users can evaluate model performance and potentially mitigate biased results.

In March 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars became the first autonomous vehicle reported to have killed a pedestrian. A new report by U.S. authorities suggests that the accident occurred because the car’s software was programmed to ignore jaywalkers.

Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.

Could humanity be destroyed by its own creation? If binary code running on a computer awakens into sentience, it will be able to think better than humans. It may even be able to improve its own software and hardware.

The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.

Amazon is writing what it hopes will become U.S. law governing use of face recognition technology. At a press event, Jeff Bezos told that his company’s lawyers are drafting a statutory framework to guide what he views as an inevitable federal crackdown on face recognition.

OpenAI raised eyebrows in February when it announced — and withheld — the full version of its groundbreaking language model, GPT-2. Six months later, the company has re-examined the decision.

A growing number of companies that sell standardized tests are using natural language processing to assess writing skills. Critics contend that these language models don’t make the grade.