A chat client, in my experience, needs to do one thing besides facilitate a text exchange between two or more parties: It needs to inform you whether someone is or is not available to send and receive such messages. Gchat used to do that fairly well—in a small box of frequent contacts, it displayed which of your past…
Shimon—a four-armed marimba playing robot—has been around for years, but its developers at Georgia Tech have recently taken this futuristic musical machine to the next level. Using deep learning, the robot can now study large datasets from well-known musicians, and then produce and perform its own original…
Emulating spiders and bugs, and using drinking straws as basic building blocks, a research team from Harvard University has developed a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing, walking, and even striding across a liquid surface. Say hello to the “arthrobots.”
Using search data collected by Google, researchers at the Pew Research Center have reconstructed the journeys taken by refugees flowing into Europe from the Middle East. It represents a new way of tracking migration patterns—but the technique could eventually lead to misuse.
With each passing breakthrough in artificial intelligence, we’re asking our machines to make increasingly complex and weighty decisions. Trouble is, AIs are starting to act beyond our levels of comprehension. In high frequency stock trading, for example, this had led to so-called flash crashes, in which algorithms…
Films and TV shows like Blade Runner, Humans, and Westworld, where highly advanced robots have no rights, trouble our conscience. They show us that our behaviors are not just harmful to robots—they also demean and diminish us as a species. We like to think we’re better than the characters on the screen, and that when…
In the not-so-distant future, next time you want to back up your work to Microsoft’s cloud, you might be storing it on a few snippets of DNA.
“I used to be into guns, but that’s not a realistic plan,” says Michael Robertson, 69, of Utah. “How many men do you need to guard a place 24 hours a day? Twenty?”
Microsoft overhauled its fading corporate image nearly three years ago with that announcement of a powerful new operating system, Windows 10. The most surprising facet of this rebranding effort was a promising augmented reality headset, HoloLens, shown off at a press conference in January 2015. When it debuted,…
When former DARPA chief Regina Dugan announced on stage last month that Facebook planned to build a brain computer interface to allow users to send their thoughts directly to the social network without a keyboard intermediary, it had all the Silicon Valley swagger of Facebook circa “move fast and break things.” With…
If you sacrifice style to strap a clunky Apple Watch or Fitbit to your wrist, one of the tradeoffs is supposedly the ability to better monitor your health. But so far, the health benefits of tracking your step count or heart rate are mostly unproven. In fact, some research has suggested the benefits are actually nil.
The president’s confusing, concerning, and ultimately crazy week continued on Thursday with a prickly Time cover package. It contained an unnerving interview between the magazine’s White House correspondent and Donald Trump. Based on his answers, the president really, really doesn’t understand modern technology, and…
In an important advance that takes us one step closer to the inevitable robopocalypse, MIT researchers have developed a system that teaches robots how to acquire new skills—and then teach those skills to different types of robots.
The traditional speaker design involves the use of a vibrating membrane that pushes air to create sound waves that travel to your ears. The technology has been in use for well over a century, but scientists at the University of Exeter might have found a way to improve how speakers work—eliminating movement…
Since we’re all friends here on the internet, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I hate driving. I drive too slowly, lurch violently when I change lanes, and the thought of having to merge onto a speeding California highway makes my heart speed up a little even as I write this. I’m no good at driving and never have…
A series of potentially calamitous leaks in India leave as many as 130 million people at risk of fraud or worse after caches of biometric and other personal data became accessible online. That’s according to a new report from the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which details breaches at four…
The human voice, with all its subtlety and nuance, is proving to be an exceptionally difficult thing for computers to emulate. Using a powerful new algorithm, a Montreal-based AI startup has developed a voice generator that can mimic virtually any person’s voice, and even add an emotional punch when necessary. The…
The future of Windows computers could soon be worn on your face. Today, at a special media event in New York City, we got our hands on the first Windows 10 “mixed reality headset” from Acer. The device is only a developer kit for now, but it’s expected to be commercially available by the holiday season this year.
I have this vision of waking up in the morning, and pressing a button that plays music everywhere in my house. Sonos was the original pioneer that built a speaker system to get this multiroom job done, and it remains the best option for a number of reasons: The $200 starting price point is reasonable, the system…
The Samsung Galaxy S8 is one of the prettiest phones you can buy right now, but it launched as a somewhat incomplete product. Bixby, the phone’s new digital assistant, doesn’t yet have one if its key features—voice recognition. This shortcoming wouldn’t be so obvious if only Samsung hadn’t included a new button on the…
