Lifeboat Foundation

Aipoly helps the blind and visually impaired see the world through their smartphone.

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” »

Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ — and that she certainly is.

@icbydt bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 24, 2016

To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s ‘teen girl’ AI turns into a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours” »

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Self-driving trucks could be a legitimate possibility, thanks to #Daimler. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo

Rolls-Royce has released their vision of the future of shipping, which will see the continued evolution of that ongoing trend toward automation and “unmanned autonomy.”

On Tuesday, Rolls-Royce —more famous for its luxury cars than its maritime contributions—rolled out a slick new video detailing a number of projected innovations in containerized shipping. The company hopes to someday make these innovations a reality, and if they do, it will mean a revolution in the way we ship goods across the seas.

Continue reading “Welcome to the Age of Autonomous Drone Ships” »

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I like it already…

Autonomous vehicles will bring about an age of safe and effortless travel. But anything that comes with a trunk also comes with baggage.

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?” »