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Typing on air with Google’s Project Soli mini-radar

Google’s Project Soli is an effort to design a touch-free user interface for interacting with electronic devices using tiny radars. The company unveiled Project Soli at Google I/O in May, 2015, and now it looks like Google has begun sending development kits to testers.

Engineer Alex Bravo has posted a short video showing a system for using Project Soli to type characters into a smartphone… by simply moving his fingers through air.

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Ford hopes you’ll watch movies in self-driving cars

If and when self-driving cars become a practical reality, you’ll probably want something to do during your journeys besides chatting with passengers or checking your phone. Thankfully, Ford might have an answer. It recently obtained a patent for an “autonomous vehicle entertainment system” that would let you watch videos when you’re hands-free. Kick your vehicle into self-driving mode and a projector system could swing into action, complete with its own screen — yes, you could watch a movie while you’re on the way to visit family. Think of it as in-flight entertainment, just grounded.

As with most patents, there’s no certainty that Ford will ever use this. While the car maker is serious about autonomous vehicles, it could just as easily resort to flat-panel displays and other less dramatic hardware. There are some safety concerns, too. Do you really want the driver to be completely oblivious to road hazards? For this to work, driverless car tech will have to advance to the point where it’s truly reliable — where you can watch a 2-hour flick without worrying that your car might plow into a bus.

Ask Ray | Ethan Kurzweil debates the role of tech firms in personal privacy

Dear readers,

My son Ethan Kurzweil — who is a partner at Bessemer Ventures Partners — tracks the future of web innovation, social and legal concerns about privacy, and start-ups who have an edge with their business or consumer applications, like team sourcing or software-as-a-service.

He appeared on C • NBC business affairs show Power Lunch. Episode debated the recent news about the US government and law enforcement asking Apple to release private data on an iPhone used by terrorists.

Artificial Intelligence Risk — 12 Researchers Weigh in on the Danger’s of Smarter Machines

A realistic article on AI — especially around AI being manipulated by others for their own gain which I have also identified as the real risks with AI.


Artificial intelligence (AI), once the seeming red-headed stepchild of the scientific community, has come a long way in the past two decades. Most of us have reconciled with the fact that we can’t live without our smartphones and Siri, and AI’s seemingly omnipotent nature has infiltrated the nearest and farthest corners of our lives, from robo-advisors on Wall Street and crime-spotting security cameras, to big data analysis by Google’s BigQuery and Watson’s entry into diagnostics in the medical field.

In many unforeseen ways, AI is helping to improve and make our lives more efficient, though the reverse degeneration of human economic and cultural structures is also a potential reality. The Future of Life Institute’s tagline sums it up in succinct fashion: “Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before…or to self-destruct.” Humans are the creators, but will we always have control of our revolutionary inventions?

To much of the general public, AI is AI is AI, but this is only part truth. Today, there are two primary strands of AI development — ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). ANI is often termed “weak AI” and is “the expert” of the pair, using its intelligence to perform specific functions. Most of the technology with which we surround ourselves (including Siri) falls into the ANI bucket. AGI is the next generation of ANI, and it’s the type of AI behind dreams of building a machine that achieves human levels of consciousness.

AT&T will start selling you cable TV over the Internet

AT&T is going “over the top” with television.

In the fourth quarter of this year, AT&T will start selling cable-like bundles of TV to people across the country through a new app. Subscribers won’t need an AT&T wireless phone or an AT&T broadband connection at home.

It’ll be like Netflix — download the app, sign up, type in a credit card number, and start streaming a TV show.