Through purposefully designed sound and endless playlists, music made by AI composers will trick your brain into improving your focus and productivity.
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The world’s first digital teacher just debuted in New Zealand
Here’s a new kind of teacher. It’s back to school, and you know what that means — time to fire up the computer that teaches you!
That’s what primary school students in New Zealand have to look forward to, anyways. They’ll soon be the first students in the world to learn from an artificially intelligent (AI) digital avatar.
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It’s the year 2038–here’s how we’ll eat 20 years in the future
A science-fiction look at the next two decades of food developments, from robot farmers to 3D-printed meals to government monitoring of your daily calorie intake.
It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants. We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea.
Was this what we had in mind when we started seeking transparency, traceability, and sustainability of our food system many years ago in the early aughts? About a decade ago, we lived through an agricultural bottleneck caused by warm temperatures that caused plagues and diseases, which severely compromised the food sources we were cultivating and consuming. By the end, three quarters of the world’s food was derived from just 12 plant and five animal species. We learned from this mistake and started to embrace true biodiversity, grew meat in labs, and put robotics into farms. But the technological advances that have made clean, sustainable food possible have also created some horrifying scenarios.
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Filmmaker Tony Kaye casts robot as lead actor in next feature
EXCLUSIVE: As the advancement of technology continues to replace the need for human labor, American History X director Tony Kaye is undertaking a new — and maybe controversial — step in filmmaking by employing an Artificial Intelligent (A.I.) actor as the lead in his next film, 2nd Born.
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Carnegie Mellon researchers create the most convincing deepfakes yet
Ever heard of “deepfakes”? Videos generated with artificial intelligence (AI) that learn to superimpose the face of one person onto the body of another have been used to swap Harrison Ford for Nicolas Cage in countless movie clips, and for far more nefarious purposes, like fake celebrity porn and propaganda. Now, for better or worse, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new AI system that’s more powerful — and versatile — than previous attempts.
It’s called “Recycle-GAN,” and the team described it as an “unsupervised, data-driven approach” for transferring the content of one video or photo to another. “Such a content translation and style preservation task has numerous applications, including human motion and face translation from one person to other, teaching robots from human demonstration,” the researchers wrote, “or converting black-and-white videos to color.”
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AI will create as many new jobs as it loses
PwC, the business consultancy, reckons that as many UK jobs will be created by AI as will be lost by AI.
A PwC report forecasts that about 20% of UK jobs will be automated by 2037—but 20% more jobs will also be created.
That’s 7 million jobs lost and 7.2 million jobs gained.
PwC reckons that manufacturing sector jobs could be reduced by around 25% – a net loss of nearly 700,000 jobs.
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Robot laws: Why we need a code of conduct for AI – and fast
From election-rigging bots to potentially lethal autonomous cars, artificial intelligence is straining legal boundaries. Here’s what we need to keep it in check.
THE car’s computer saw Elaine Herzberg pushing her bicycle across the highway a full six seconds before it struck her. Travelling at just under 70 kilometres per hour, it had more than enough time to stop or swerve. But it did neither, hitting her head on. Herzberg died in hospital, the first pedestrian to be killed by an autonomous vehicle.
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Can emotional AI make Anki’s new robot into a lovable companion?
Known for its hyperactive toys, the company spent years developing technologies to tackle its greatest challenge yet–subtlety.
If there’s a robot uprising anytime soon, it seems unlikely to start in our living rooms. Robotic vacuums like Roomba sell well because they are so handy. But other types of home robots–pets and companions from Sony’s Aibo robo-pooch to the recently shuttered Kuri (backed by Bosch)–have flopped due to both prices and expectations that have been set unreasonably high.
If any company can eventually bring us a domestic robot like Rosie from The Jetsons, Anki is a good bet. Started by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates in 2010, the company has racked up over $200 million in venture funding. More important, it’s attracted customers. Anki has already sold 1.5 million robots by taking what it sees as the easiest route into the home: toys. The star is a manic little bulldozer-looking bot called Cozmo that drives around a tabletop and plays simple games with light-up cubes it carries about. Cozmo was the best-selling toy (by revenue) on Amazon in the U.S., U.K., and France in 2017, according to one analysis.
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Artificial intelligence can now help write Wikipedia pages for overlooked scientists
The tech could be used to increase the representation of women scientists on Wikipedia.
Quicksilver discovers scientists who should have Wikipedia articles about them and writes a first draft.
Plenty of prominent scientists have Wikipedia pages. But while checking to see if someone specific has a Wikipedia page is a quick Google search away, figuring out who should be on Wikipedia but isn’t—and then writing an entry for him or her—is much trickier.
OpenAI creates Dactyl robot hand with “unprecedented” dexterity
Open AI — a non-profit started by Elon Musk — has found a way to programme a robot hand so that it can nimbly manipulate an object using human-like movements it has taught itself.
“We’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity,” said OpenAI of its Dactyl system, which is shown in a video twisting a block into 50 different requested orientations.
Dactyl works by training the robot hand in a simulation and then transferring the knowledge gained there to the real world.
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IBM patenting watermark technology to protect ownership of AI models
Digital properties such as photos and videos get stolen frequently, which is why many creators of such forms of content employ watermarking methodologies so that ownership is easier to claim in case of theft. Another less-known digital property that can get stolen are artificial intelligence (AI) models, that have been developed by researchers after months, and sometimes years of effort.
IBM is now developing a technique to allow AI researchers to “watermark” these models. The technology is currently “patent-pending”.
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The rise of the computer-generated celebrity
A new generation of celebrities is selling out concerts, starring in commercials, and amassing huge Instagram followings. But none of them exist—corporeally, anyway. In recent years, and starting in Japan, technology and social media have spawned a digital demimonde of computer-generated stars, ranging from fake musicians and models to company mascots who appear as holograms (like Betty Crocker, with AI). When they’re not entertaining you, they’re trying to convince you of their humanity, and even the more cartoonish among them have fleshed-out personalities. In a way, it’s the purest expression of celebrity, which has always been an elaborate illusion. CGI starlets, though, “are much easier to control,” says Ryan Detert, CEO of the branding firm Influential. Except when they misbehave.
