When writing the screenplay for 1968’s 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were confident that something resembling the sentient, humanlike HAL 9000 computer would be possible by the film’s namesake year. That’s because the leading AI experts of the time were equally confident.
Continue reading… “Robots Are Developing Feelings. Will They Become “People”?”
A jump in the fluency of Google’s language software will help efforts to make chatbots less lame.
Google’s latest advance in machine learning could make the world a little smaller.
Continue reading… “Google’s New Translator Works Almost as Well as Humans”
People want it—but don’t understand it.
If you had to pick a tech industry buzzword for 2016, “machine learning” would be a good choice. Every other company, it seems, is packing the phrase into their pitches, and it’s having an effect.
Continue reading… “Machine Learning: What Companies Get Wrong”
We already know that artificial intelligence systems can work in law firms and beat the world champion at a game of Go. Now it turns out that AI can write some pretty good pop songs, too.
Continue reading… “The first pop song ever written by AI is actually pretty good”
SONY CSL Research Laboratory
SONY CSL Research Laboratory has produced an AI-written song that sounds amazingly like the Beatles.
Continue reading… “Listen To A Song Written By AI and Inspired By The Beatles”
Can robot carts compete with Amazon?
A shopping cart is mostly empty space. At the end of a shopping run, when the cart is brimming with groceries and goods, it becomes fully useful, but it isn’t until that point, and once it’s full, it doesn’t help the person trying to buy two cartfulls of stuff on their own. Walmart, the physical retail giant, doesn’t want people to worry about the inadequacies of carts while shopping. So they filed a patent for a self-driving robot cart.
Continue reading… “Walmart Patents Robot Carts”
Over the last many centuries, human life expectancy has very gradually lengthened with improved health and medical technologies and research. In the next 20 years, we can expect our expected life spans to be extended at a far more rapid pace than in the past.
Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs, according to a Forrester report.
“By 2021, a disruptive tidal wave will begin,” said Brian Hopkins, VP at Forrester, in the report. “Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service, and consumer services.”
Continue reading… “Report: AI will eliminate 6 percent of jobs in five years”
Show a human any photograph and they’ll able to predict what happens next with pretty decent accuracy. The woman riding her bike will keep on moving. The dog will catch the frisbee. The man is going to have a pratfall. And so on. It’s such a basic skill that we don’t consider the vast amount of information that is used to make these predictions — concerning gravity, inertia, the nature of pratfalls, etc. — and teaching computers to do the same is proving to be a key challenge in machine vision.
Continue reading… “The next trick for machine learning is generating videos from photos”
With more than 6,000 applicants from over 100 countries competing, the firstinternational beauty contest judged entirely by artificial intelligence just came to an end. The results are a bit disheartening.
The team of judges, a five robot panel, attempted to pick winners from the submitted photos in hopes that it could determine which faces most closely resembled the idea of “human beauty.” Each of the five robot judges used artificial intelligence to analyze specific traits that contribute to perceived outer beauty.
Continue reading… “The first AI-judged beauty contest: Robots are racist”
“I’m looking for a hammer,” I tell a wheeled rectangle idling at a conference expo area in the San Francisco Union Square Hilton Hotel. The rectangle moves toward me, and I jump.
Fellow Robots CEO Marco Mascorro and chief information officer Thavidu Ranatunga tells me there’s nothing to worry about; it won’t crash into me. This particular display robot made by their Silicon Valley startup is programmed for Ranatunga to control with a remote, though in stores it will be autonomous.
Continue reading… “Ask This Customer Service Robot for a Hammer”
As Detroit car makers and Silicon Valley tech giants vie to bring driverless cars to U.S. roads, one of the world’s largest tractor makers is looking to do the same down on the farm.
Case IH, the agricultural-machinery unit of CNH Industrial NV, this week unveiled a sleek, aggressive-looking red-and-black machine at the annual Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa.
Continue reading… “Modern Farm Tractors Feature Everything But the Farmer”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.