Lifeboat Foundation

There is an enduring fear in the music industry that artificial intelligence will replace the artists we love, and end creativity as we know it.

As ridiculous as this claim may be, it’s grounded in concrete evidence. Last December, an AI-composed song populated several New Music Friday playlists on Spotify, with full support from Spotify execs. An entire startup ecosystem is emerging around services that give artists automated songwriting recommendations, or enable the average internet user to generate customized instrumental tracks at the click of a button.

But AI’s long-term impact on music creation isn’t so cut and dried. In fact, if we as an industry are already thinking so reductively and pessimistically about AI from the beginning, we’re sealing our own fates as slaves to the algorithm. Instead, if we take the long view on how technological innovation has made it progressively easier for artists to realize their creative visions, we can see AI’s genuine potential as a powerful tool and partner, rather than as a threat.

Continue reading “How Music Generated” »

You can read more about Tranhumanism here — and you can make sure that you have the best Internet you can get by clicking here.

Fabian Lapham

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Continue reading “‘We Will Overcome Death’” »

You might only know JPEG as the default image compression standard, but the group behind it has now branched out into something new: JPEG XS. JPEG XS is described as a new low-energy format designed to stream live video and VR, even over WiFi and 5G networks. It’s not a replacement for JPEG and the file sizes themselves won’t be smaller; it’s just that this new format is optimized specifically for lower latency and energy efficiency. In other words, JPEG is for downloading, but JPEG XS is more for streaming.

The new standard was introduced this week by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which says that the aim of JPEG XS is to “stream the files instead of storing them in smartphones or other devices with limited memory.” So in addition to getting faster HD content on your large displays, the group also sees JPEG XS as a valuable format for faster stereoscopic VR streaming plus videos streamed by drones and self-driving cars.

“We are compressing less in order to better preserve quality, and we are making the process faster while using less energy,” says JPEG leader Touradj Ebrahimi in a statement. According to Ebrahimi, the JPEG XS video compression will be less severe than with JPEG photos — while JPEG photos are compressed by a factor of 10, JPEG XS is compressed by a factor of 6. The group promises a “visual lossless” quality to the images of JPEG XS.

Continue reading “Low-latency JPEG XS format is optimized for live streaming and VR” »

Artificial intelligence is permeating everybody’s lives through the face recognition, voice recognition, image analysis and natural language processing capabilities built into their smartphones and consumer appliances. Over the next several years, most new consumer devices will run AI natively, locally and, to an increasing extent, autonomously.

But there’s a problem: Traditional processors in most mobile devices aren’t optimized for AI, which tends to consume a lot of processing, memory, data and battery on these resource-constrained devices. As a result, AI has tended to execute slowly on mobile and “internet of things” endpoints, while draining their batteries rapidly, consuming inordinate wireless bandwidth and exposing sensitive local information as data makes roundtrips in the cloud.

That’s why mass-market mobile and IoT edge devices are increasingly coming equipped with systems-on-a-chip that are optimized for local AI processing. What distinguishes AI systems on a chip from traditional mobile processors is that they come with specialized neural-network processors, such as graphics processing units or GPUs, tensor processing units or TPUs, and field programming gate arrays or FPGAs. These AI-optimized chips offload neural-network processing from the device’s central processing unit chip, enabling more local autonomous AI processing and reducing the need to communicate with the cloud for AI processing.

Continue reading “New AI systems on a chip will spark an explosion of even smarter devices” »

Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.

Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.

Continue reading “Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living” »

Jump to media player The connection will have speeds of between 10 and 100 times faster than 4G.

Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

Continue reading “The U.S. government’s ‘high tech Holy Grail’” »

‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…

More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.

Continue reading “Google employees pen letter denouncing controversial AI drone project” »

The US Army today released documents detailing plans to build a large-scale battlefield platform dubbed the “Internet of Battle Things.”