Lifeboat Foundation

I had thought my job was safe from automation—a computer couldn’t possibly replicate the complex creativity of human language in writing or piece together a coherent story. I may have been wrong. Authors beware, because an AI-written novel just made it past the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan.

The novel this program co-authored is titled, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel. It was entered into a writing contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The contest has been open to non-human applicants in years prior, however, this was the first year the award committee received submissions from an AI. Out of the 1,450 submissions, 11 were at least partially written by a program.

Here’s a except from the novel to give you an idea as to what human contestants were up against:

Continue reading “A Japanese AI Wrote a Novel, Almost Wins Literary Award” »

BOSTON — When evaluating wearables, IT can’t leave out augmented and virtual reality devices, which are poised to have a major effect on the enterprise.

A crucial hurdle in the development of ultra-powerful quantum computers has been overcome through the development of the world’s first programmable system that can be scaled.

Researchers at the University of Maryland College Park built a quantum computer module that can be linked to other modules to perform simultaneous quantum algorithms.

“Quantum computers can solve certain problems more efficiently than any possible conventional computer,” states a paper published this week that details the researchers’ findings. “Small quantum algorithms have been demonstrated in multiple quantum computing platforms, many specifically tailored to hardware to implement a particular algorithm or execute a limited number of computational paths.

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Neurons still remain the most powerful piece of computation machinery on the face of the planet. More to the point, nobody throws up their hands in despair when a screwdriver removes a flathead screw better than their fingernail can, and yet the parallel is an apt one. The circuitry of the human brain has not been honed by evolution to be especially good at playing the game of Go, any more than evolution has fine-tuned our fingernails for removing screws.

Which is not to say there is no room for surprise in today’s world of rapidly advancing technological achievement. What is more impressive, however, is when computers exhibit greater skill than humans at tasks evolution has been perfecting for millions of years like exercising a sense of smell. And yet such advancements are taking place right beneath our noses, metaphorically speaking.

Continue reading “Neurons on a chip let drones smell bombs over a kilometer away” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=a_mYvSVG3QY

For those unfamiliar, SXSW is a week-long, trendy, if not seriously geeky festival of film and culture, panels and discussions. This year, one of the strangest – and either most disturbing or most compelling, depending on where you stand – talks was delivered by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese inventor and roboticist. The Osaka University professor was speaking about human-like androids and what roles they might fill within society in the near future. Ishiguro discussed his greatest and most marvellous creation to date: a “Geminoid” (robot in his own likeness) whose human appearance has been deftly created through with a plastic skull, a metal skeleton and silicon skin – and is controlled by an external computer. It would be hard, at a glance, to tell the two apart. In fact, the Geminoid held an autonomous conversation in Japanese, on stage, in front of an audience of hundreds.

Geminoid is not Ishiguro’s first uncannily human robot. In 2005, he developed a female android named Repliee Q1Expo, telling the BBC, “I have developed many robots before, but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence. Repliee Q1Expo can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying.”

Continue reading “What Do These Robots Mean For The Future Of Sex?” »

Have you ever wanted to mess with a video by making its cast say things they never would on camera? You might get that chance. Researchers have built a face detection system that lets you impose your facial expressions on people in videos. The software uses an off-the-shelf webcam to create a 3D model of your face in real time, and distorts it to fit the facial details in the target footage. The result, as you’ll see below, is eerily authentic-looking: you can have a dead-serious Vladimir Putin make funny faces, or Donald Trump blab when he’d otherwise stay silent.

This isn’t about to reach software you can buy, but the implications for video creation are big if it becomes more than a university project. You could use the tool to mess with your friends by having celebrities say audacious things, or have famous figures recite dialogue in movies without needing to painstakingly animate faces frame by frame. In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren’t safe from a little computer trickery.

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And Steve Jobs was not yet back at Apple when he gave a remarkably prescient interview to Wired’s website the same year. Although the iMac, iPod, and iPhone were still years away, and Jobs was working at NeXT, he clearly saw where the computing industry was headed.

And although his later work at Apple clearly influenced the way things turned out, he still offered a slew of predictions that are shockingly accurate today.

Here’s what Jobs got right:

Continue reading “Steve Jobs gave an interview in 1996 with a bunch of predictions about the future — it turns out he nailed it” »

The $19 billion merger between two data storage giants Western Digital and flash drive maker SanDisk was approved by shareholders.

The EU-funded COLUMNARCODECRACKING project has successfully used ultra-high fMRI scanners to map cortical columns, a process that opens the door to exciting new applications, such as brain-computer interfaces.

Cortical columnar-level fMRI has already contributed and will further contribute to a deeper understanding of how the brain and mind work by zooming into the fine-grained functional organization within specialized brain areas.

By focussing on this, the project has stimulated a new research line of ‘mesoscopic’ brain imaging that is gaining increasing momentum in the field of human cognitive and computational neuroscience. This new field complements conventional macroscopic brain imaging that measures activity in brain areas and large-scale networks.

Continue reading “Mapping Brain’s Cortical Columns To Develop Innovative Brain-Computer Interfaces” »