Lifeboat Foundation

Many of us have already come to know the disembodied voices of personal assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, but now a software engineer has finally put a face to a name.

Jarem Archer, who works as a consultant through his business, unt1tled, created a hologram device to match Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant from Windows 10. She’s just like Cortana the Halo character, which Microsoft based its own on — she’s a slightly translucent, blue-light babe with a hip-waist-bust ratio that exposes her origins in the world of gaming. But Archer’s Cortana is 3D and paces around inside a pyramid prism that rests on a table. In his demo video, he asks Cortana if he’ll need an umbrella, and she then pulls up a graphic with the temperature and assures him that it’s “probably not necessary.”

Continue reading “This guy designed a hologram virtual assistant that actually works — just watch” »

Imagine the perfect personal assistant.

This partner would understand your needs — often before you’ve even expressed them — and know exactly how to deliver what you’re asking for. They would make helpful suggestions without becoming intrusive, and keep you from missing appointments and opportunities. Most importantly, this personal assistant would be someone you can trust implicitly.

Now, how do you embody those traits in an artificial intelligence-powered service? Our experience creating our travel assistant app, Mezi, illustrates key principles of AI regarding the ongoing role of human involvement and how to draw the dividing line between valued assistance and unwelcome intrusion. Here’s what we’ve learned recently.

Continue reading “How to create the ‘perfect’ AI-driven bot” »

Intelligent Machines

A single autonomous car has a huge impact on alleviating traffic.

Even intelligent cruise control systems could be used to clear up congestion.

Continue reading “Watch a single autonomous car stop a traffic jam from happening” »

See also: Elon Musk Says Robots Will Help Tesla Catch Up to Apple in Value

So why won’t other auto manufacturers follow suit and overtake Tesla? First, their products, as well as their factories, are bogged down by legacy. Tesla’s electric cars are significantly easier to manufacture than internal combustion (IC) vehicles. Tesla’s Model S has fewer than 20 moving parts, compared with almost 1,500 moving parts in an IC-engine car. This means that there are fewer steps in the assembly process, fewer suppliers to deal with, and lower inventory of components and parts. Further, Tesla doesn’t have to deal with a unionized workforce, a complex supply chain, or a legacy dealer network. Free from this legacy, Tesla can embrace disruptive innovation without worrying about the backlash from workers, suppliers, and dealers.

To become as big as Apple one day, Tesla will need more than the “Henry Ford” approach to manufacturing. It will also need the “Steve Jobs” approach to marketing by creating a vast global appetite for its products. The Apple iPhone is a global product that can be sold from New York to Mumbai to Beijing with very little incremental investment. However, Tesla’s cars require the creation of infrastructure for charging and a distribution network from scratch—a very expensive and time-consuming process. Tesla will need to build out its charging network and distribution reach, country by country. China is an important overseas market for Tesla, as is Scandinavia; it also has a rollout plan for India with its Model 3.

I’m speaking at Moogfest at 4:30PM a week from today. Can’t Wait! KurzweilAI doing a write-up on the festival below (including a bit on my talk):

The Moogfest four-day festival in Durham, North Carolina next weekend (May 18 — 21) explores the future of technology, art, and music. Here are some of the sessions that may be especially interesting to KurzweilAI readers. Full #Moogfest2017 Program Lineup.

Continue reading “Best of MOOGFEST 2017” »

This month we look at important questions about our future: is it time to have a serious the debate about universal basic income?; the weaponisation of AI; and we review Vivek Wadhwa’s book about our unease over industrial revolution 4.0

This is on tonight.

Robots are now advanced enough to do breast exams.

VICE on HBO, tonight at 7:30 and 11.

Amanda Feilding, a well-known researcher from the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, has long been an advocate for LSD microdosing.

Before it was made illegal in 1968, Ms Feilding would take LSD to boost her creativity, and even found that her performace in the ancient Chinese game of Go, improved.

Speaking to Motherboard, Ms Feilding said: ‘I found that if I was on LSD and my opponent wasn’t, I won more games.

Continue reading “Can the human brain on LSD take on AI?” »

Neurala today announced a major advance in deep learning with software that can learn with or without the cloud and eliminates the risk of forgetting its previous knowledge…

Lifelong-DNN™ (Lifelong-Deep Neural Networks), Neurala’s Patent-Pending Software, Overcomes Catastrophic Forgetting—the #1 Problem Limiting the Growth of Deep Learning Neural Networks for Real-Time Use

SAN JOSE, CA —May 8, 2017— Neurala today announced a major advance in deep learning with software that can learn with or without the cloud and eliminates the risk of forgetting its previous knowledge. The new patent-pending approach means that for the first time a self-driving car can be personalized by each owner or dealer to a specific neighborhood; a parent can teach a toy to recognize a child, without infringing on privacy; and industrial machines can be updated in the field for specific tasks.

Continue reading “2 Comments on ‘Neurala Announces Lifelong-DNN for Self-Driving Cars, Drones, Toys and Other Machines: Deep Learning That Can Learn on the Device Without Using the Cloud’” »