Casting anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo just feels like sacrilege, but since Ford is now 76 years old, playing a younger version of himself would be all but impossible. Or at least impossible if you rely on the standard Hollywood de-aging tricks like makeup and CG. Artificial intelligence, it…
Last week, Google dropped its bid for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a massive military cloud computing contract potentially worth up to $10 billion, amid employee backlash and concern the project could violate their “AI principles.” Now an open letter claiming to be from an unspecified number of…
Optical illusions take advantage of shortcomings in the visual system. Certain special designs can trick our brain as it’s trying to process the information that’s coming in. Learning more about what can trick our minds would help us learn more about the human mind itself.
Using a technique called reinforcement learning, a researcher at Google Brain has shown that virtual robots can redesign their body parts to help them navigate challenging obstacle courses—even if the solutions they come up with are completely bizarre.
Making smartphones is hard, and despite having one of the best pedigrees in the business, Andy Rubin’s company stumbled out of the gate when it launched the Essential PH-1 last year. At first, the Essential Phone’s camera wasn’t great and it’s software wasn’t quite as smooth as we’d like, but thanks to continued…
As hundreds of millions of people flood social networks, tech companies are struggling to weed out harassment on their platforms—and so they’re turning to machines for help. On Tuesday, Instagram announced it was doing just that.
The sex robot community—the people who make the sex robots, and the people who want to have sex with the sex robots—suffered a blow this past week, when the Houston City Council voted to preemptively ban what would’ve been the first sex robot “brothel” in the U.S. But even those council members must know that their…
The advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence will make 75 million jobs obsolete by the year 2022, according to a new report. Sounds dreadful, but the same report goes on to predict the creation of 133 million new jobs over the same period.
Robots in factories are really good at picking up objects they’ve been pre-programmed to handle, but it’s a different story when new objects are thrown into the mix. To overcome this frustrating inflexibility, a team of researchers from MIT devised a system that essentially teaches robots how to assess unfamiliar…
Murderbot is back! The AI with a bad attitude (who isn’t necessarily a bad robot, despite that scary name) returns October 2 in Exit Strategy. It’s the final installment of Martha Wells’ Hugo and Nebula-winning novella series—ahead of the author’s next project, a full-length Murderbot novel.
By now we’ve got lots of worrying examples of how AI-powered image processing software can flawlessly alter faces, or make someone appear to say something they didn’t. But there are other, perhaps under-explored uses for this technology: like trying to fake a video of you dancing so it looks like you’ve got Bruno…
Tired of that smug look of satisfaction on your kid’s face when they’re able to find Waldo on a page faster than you can? A creative agency called redpepper built a robot that levels the Where’s Waldo playing field using a camera and machine learning AI to spot the striped traveler in as little as four-and-a-half…
Internal company documents from IBM show that medical experts working with the company’s Watson supercomputer found “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” when using the software, according to a report from Stat News.
When Aliens: Colonial Marines dropped in 2013, it has built up a ton of hype that made it seem as though the game would transport players into the terror-filled and action-packed Alien universe. Instead, they got an absolute mess of a game that, as it turns out, may have been just one letter away from being good—or at…
It’s been rumored for months that Facebook might be interested in building its own, in-house processing chips. Now it appears the social network company is really going for it. Bloomberg reported Friday that Facebook managed to snag one of Google’s top silicon engineering directors to head up its own efforts in the…
Photographers already face an uphill battle in trying to preventing people from using their digital photos without permission. But Nvidia could make protecting photos online much harder with a new advancement in artificial intelligence that can automatically remove artifacts from a photograph, including text and…
An instructor of mine once compared mixing a song to baking a cake. The various tracks are the ingredients, and once everything is mixed and baked, as with a cake, those ingredients can’t be deconstructed. Or can they? AI researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created an app…
In a self-congratulatory move, Microsoft announced some major improvements today to its fundamentally biased facial recognition software. The Azure-based Face API was criticized in a research paper earlier this year for its error rate—as high as 20.8 percent—when attempting to identify the gender of people of color,…
When it comes to groundbreaking research, there are two fields that seem to occupy the newscycle: carbon nanotubes and artificial intelligence. The potential combination of those two fields of study seems like it could radically change the word as we know it, or, as South Korean scientists have discovered, at least…
Lovers of quality audio content you’re probably not paying for, rejoice. Google has finally released its own Google Podcasts app, providing users a dedicated place to enjoy their shows, find personalized recommendations, and soon take advantage of upcoming accessibility features. It’s also one of the few Android-only…
