This Is the Most Aerodynamic Bike, According to AI
Competitors at this year’s World Human Powered Speed Challenge are going to have to contend with this—a bullet-shaped bike designed by an artificially intelligent software program.
Google Is Reportedly Looking to Take Over Call Centers With Its Duplex AI Assistant
When Google introduced Google Duplex, its AI assistant designed to speak like a human, the company showed off how the average person could use the tech to save time making reservations and whatnot. What wasn’t touched on was the possibility that Duplex may have a use on the other side of the line, taking over for call…
MIT's New AI-Powered Software Can Extract Individual Instruments From Videos With a Single Click
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…
My 15 Favorite Science and Tech Books for Smart Beach Reading
Summer is finally upon us, which means it’s time to put together a reading list, whether it’s for the beach, your cottage, or the hammock in your backyard. Here are 15 science and technology books that will keep your nerdy brains engaged and titillated.
AI and Carbon Nanotubes Are Now Being Used to Improve the World's... Keyboards?
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…
Microsoft Employees Up in Arms Over Cloud Contract With ICE
Tensions are high within Microsoft, as new scrutiny is given to a partnership between the company’s Azure Government cloud computing arm and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to several Microsoft employees who spoke to Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity. Two were considering leaving the…
Self-Taught AI Masters Rubik’s Cube in Just 44 Hours
Meet DeepCube, an artificially intelligent system that’s as good at playing the Rubik’s Cube as the best human master solvers. Incredibly, the system learned to dominate the classic 3D puzzle in just 44 hours and without any human intervention.
Don't Be Fooled by the 'Forced a Bot' Meme
By now, you’ve probably seen the satirical posts where someone claims to have “forced a bot” to watch thousands of hours of video and then write their own script. The posts are funny, but if you haven’t realized, they’re jokes that don’t quite encapsulate how artificial intelligence works.
The Invisible Radio Waves All Around Us Let MIT's New AI See People Right Through Walls
The information age has generated far more data than humanity can ever hope to manually process, but with the help of artificial intelligence, that avalanche of data is now revealing itself to be far more useful than we ever thought possible. The omnipresent wireless signals that keep us connected can now be used like…
Deepfake Videos Are Getting Impossibly Good
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible.
The World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Is an Absolute Beast
Behold Summit, a new supercomputer capable of making 200 million billion calculations per second. It marks the first time in five years that a machine from the United States has been ranked as the world’s most powerful.
Researchers Are Training a Robot Butler to Do the Chores You Hate in a Sims-Inspired Virtual House
Researchers are teaching machines to get stuff done using video simulations, a database of chores, and a virtual home reminiscent of your favorite time-wasting video game. The end goal? Teaching robots the same way you teach yourself how to install a toilet: instructional videos.
Police Are More Likely to Arrest You at a Protest Where People Actually Give a Shit, Study Finds
A new study from the University of Southern California (USC) suggests that there is a correlation between an increase in violence at protests and tweets with “moral content” concerning what the protest is about—like, say, police violence. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find that the study’s implications are more…
Why Thousands of Researchers Are Boycotting Nature’s Upcoming AI Journal
Early next year, the Springer Nature publishing group will launch a new subscription journal devoted to artificial intelligence. Like its other journals, Nature will impose a pay wall and restrict access to paying customers—a move that isn’t going over well with AI researchers, who say a for-profit subscription…
This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk
Our individual walking styles, much like snowflakes, are unique. With this in mind, computer scientists have developed a powerful new footstep-recognition system using AI, and it could theoretically replace retinal scanners and fingerprinting at security checkpoints, including airports.
Your Worst Alexa Nightmares Are Coming True
What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And…
And Now the White House Has Climbed Aboard the AI Bandwagon
Yesterday, the White House announced the creation of a new committee that will coordinate federal efforts related to artificial intelligence. The move makes sense given the rapid rise of AI, but the new group better be prepared to tackle all that AI has to offer—both the good and the bad.
Gmail Now Writes Emails for You
Emails take too long. Well, at least according to Google, which is why on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company announced a new Gmail feature called Smart Compose. The feature allows for artificial intelligence to auto-fill information in the emails you compose in an effort to cut down on the time spent typing up…
Top Tech Companies Head to White House to Talk AI, Fending off the Apocalypse
It’s almost been a year since the White House held its last big tech summit. On Thursday, it will reportedly host representatives from 38 of the biggest companies in the US to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and how the government can help us avoid disaster.
AI Could Dramatically Increase Risk of Nuclear War by 2040, Says New Report
The common conception of a technologically enabled apocalypse foresees a powerful artificial intelligence that, either deliberately or by accident, destroys human civilization. But as a new report from the RAND Corporation points out, the reality may be far subtler: As AI slowly erodes the foundations that made the…
