InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) announced that InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts has collaborated with Baidu to introduce the next generation of intelligent hospitality – smart rooms, which are powered by artificial intelligence.
From now on, guests staying at InterContinental® Beijing Sanlitun and InterContinental® Guangzhou Exhibition Centre will be among the first to enjoy the AI smart rooms. A total of 100 AI powered Club InterContinental suites will be available at InterContinental hotels in gateway cities and key destinations across China within the year.
If you believe the hype, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the world in dramatic ways soon. Nay-sayers claim it will lead to, at best, rising unemployment and civil unrest, and at worst, the eradication of humanity. Advocates, on the other hand, are telling us to look forward to a future of leisure and creativity as robots take care of the drudgery and routine.
A third camp – probably the largest – are happy to admit that the forces of change which are at work are too complicated to predict and, for the moment, everything is up in the air. Previous large-scale changes to the way we work (past industrial revolutions) may have been disruptive in the short-term. However, in the long term what happened was a transfer of labor from countryside to cities, and no lasting downfall of society.
However, as author Calum Chace points out in his latest book ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities’ this time there’s one big difference. Previous industrial revolutions involved replacing human mechanical skills with tools and machinery. This time it’s our mental functions which are being replaced – particularly our ability to make predictions and decisions. This is something which has never happened before in human history, and no one exactly knows what to expect.
There’s no x86 in the AI chip market yet—”People see a gold rush; there’s no doubt.”
A lot has changed since 1918. But whether it’s a literal (like the City of London School athletics’ U12 event) or figurative (AI chip development) race, participants still very much want to win.
For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Unlike HAL, it won’t be able to open the pod bay doors.
Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles.
CIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work — namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Whether it is facial recognition tech that is (allegedly) able to pick a wanted criminal out of a crowd of thousands or aerial drones which use image recognition smarts to predict fights before they take place, there is no doubt that we are living through a major paradigm shift for automated surveillance technology. But this kind of tech can have more grounded, everyday applications, too — like helping prevent shoplifters stealing goods from their local mom-and-pop corner store.
That is something seemingly demonstrated by a new artificial intelligence security camera called the “A.I. Guardman,” built by Japanese telecommunication company NTT East and startup Earth Eyes Corp. The camera uses a special pose detection system to identify behavior it deems to be suspicious. In the event that this kind of behavior is spotted, it sends an alert to the store owner’s smartphone, allowing them to take action.
Researchers are developing a real-time drone survelliance system to identify violence in crowds before it occurs.
Imagine your every move being watched and analysed by drones designed to predict – and stop – violent behaviour.
It sounds like a scene from Black Mirror, but researchers are trialling a drone surveillance system that does just that – and it could come to a festival near you.
The sensationalist hype around AI has a lot of people believing that the technology may be too advanced or too technical for their businesses to take advantage of. This is false. AI is here now and you can start using it today.
Wireless radio signals can be used to monitor a person’s precise movements through a solid wall, thanks to artificial intelligence. The technology could help us monitor people for health and safety less intrusively—but it also raises a range of security and privacy issues.
Sotheby’s acquired startup Thread Genius, whose machine learning tech can discern clients’ artistic and style leanings–and suggest customized purchases.
Just a few doors down from its CEO and the wood-paneled cubicles where sharply dressed professionals sit, the eighth floor of Sotheby’s New York takes on a very different vibe.
Suddenly, it’s more Silicon Valley than Upper East Side as staid formality gives way to a group of millennials, some in T-shirts with their sneakered feet on desks. Computer code is scrawled on whiteboards and the room’s glass wall. It is here where the storied auction house–founded in 1744–meets its future.
When science-fiction worlds introduce robots that look and behave like people, sooner or later those worlds’ inhabitants confront the question of robot self-awareness. If a machine is built to truly mimic a human, its “brain” must be complex enough not only to process information as ours does, but also to achieve certain types of abstract thinking that make us human. This includes recognition of our “selves” and our place in the world, a state known as consciousness.
One example of a sci-fi struggle to define AI consciousness is AMC’s “Humans” (Tues. 10/9c starting June 5). At this point in the series, human-like machines called Synths have become self-aware; as they band together in communities to live independent lives and define who they are, they must also battle for acceptance and survival against the hostile humans who created and used them.
Major companies are bringing together new machine learning algorithms, better and cheaper sensors, and increased computing power in hopes of addressing growing global demand for food and agriculture’s diminishing labor force.
The big picture: Alphabet’s X and John Deere, startups and universities are looking to AI-based agriculture to address these problems. But farming presents hard problems for AI that, if solved, could ultimately help it be deployed in more structured places (think: homes).
