Lifeboat Foundation

While the metaverse might seem like a far off dream, more fit for the pages of a Neal Stephenson novel than reality, some are already attempting to cash in the concept — and even provide a digital workforce for it.

Enter Soul Machines 0 a New Zealand-based company that says it’s designing AI-driven digital humans for clients to use for things like customer service, promotional videos, and education. However, the company also has its sights set on the future — with co-founder Greg Cross saying it plans to create a “digital workforce” for a potential metaverse, according to The Verge.

Continue reading “A Startup Is Creating Digital Human Servants to Work in the Metaverse” »

The new world of work is also about a new kind of teamwork: humans and AI working together to achieve more than they can accomplish on their own. Regardless of its recent progress, AI is still not accurate enough to meet the enterprise-level requirements of speech-to-text in many industries. “If technology gives me 90% accuracy, humans can deal with the last mile. Human-in-the-loop is core to our product,” explains Livne. In addition to developing the required technology, Ver… See more.

Verbit is a very successful startup. The 4-year-old developer of an AI-powered transcription and captioning platform has reached unicorn status in June, raising $157 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, for a total of $319 million raised to date. It has 2,600 customers, 450 employees, and will reach $100 million in revenues by the end of the year. According to co-founder and CEO Tom Livne, Veribit enjoys Net Revenue Retention (the rate of revenue generation from existing customers) of 163%. “Our customers are growing with us,” says Livne.

This impressive performance is the result of executing on a well thought-out framework for what it will take to succeed in the future, no matter what business you are in and the market you are serving. Verbit’s technology foundation, its global community of freelancers, and its mass customization strategy are the three features of Verbit’s future of work model, the very model of a 21 st century company.

“Technological advances in robotics have already produced robots that are indistinguishable from human beings,” they write. “If humanoid robots with the same appearance are mass-produced and become commonplace, we may encounter circumstances in which people or human-like products have faces with the exact same appearance in the future.”

To test peoples’ reactions, the team asked people to look at photos of individuals with the same face (clones), with different faces, and of… See more.

The uncanny valley is the scientific explanation for why we all find clowns or corpses creepy. And just when we thought nothing could be more alarming than clowns, scientists have found an even uncannier way to freak us out.

Continue reading “New Robots May Be Creepier Than The Uncanny Valley” »

In conversation with my teenage daughter last week, I pointed out a news report which flagged concerns over the use of facial recognition technologies in several school canteens in North Ayrshire, Scotland. Nine schools in the area recently launched this practice as a means to take payment for lunches more quickly and minimize COVID risk, though they’ve since paused rolling out the technology.

Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced a variety of life-forms, each intelligent in its own fashion. Each species has evolved to develop innate skills, learning capacities, and a physical form that ensures survival in its environment.

But despite being inspired by nature and evolution, the field of artificial intelligence has largely focused on creating the elements of intelligence separately and fusing them together after the development process. While this approach has yielded great results, it has also limited the flexibility of AI agents in some of the basic skills found in even the simplest life-forms.

Continue reading “New deep reinforcement learning technique helps AI to evolve” »

Exactly what we needed: more automated systems replacing human workers.

Elon Musk has announced the upcoming release of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta 10.4 update as Tesla slows down the rollout.

Earlier this week, Tesla started rolling out Full Self-Driving Beta 10.3.

The update came after a false start last weekend when Tesla pushed the update with some problems and ended up reverting back to 10.2.

Thankfully, there is a growing effort toward AI For Good.

This latest mantra entails ways to try and make sure that the advances in AI are being applied for the overall betterment of mankind. These are assuredly laudable endeavors and reassuringly crucial that the technology underlying AI is aimed and deployed in an appropriate and assuredly positive fashion (for my coverage on the burgeoning realm of AI Ethics, see the link here).

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, there is the ugly side of the coin too, namely the despicable AI For Bad.

The final humorous argument I have is if one example is really a robot. Aylett and Vargas describe a “robot” as a humanoid machine that doesn’t manipulate anything. It just provides information at a shopping center. How does that fit into their own definition of a robot? It sounds more like an overgrown tablet computer with wheels. However, that’s a fun argument having nothing to do with the business value of whatever you want to call it.

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This is a review of the third book sent to me recently by MIT Press, and the book is the best of the bunch. “Living With Robots,” by Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas is a good, non-technical book that discusses a number of issues with robots in human society. This is excellent for both business managers and those more generally interested in both the promise and reality of robots in society.

Continue reading “‘Living With Robots’ — An Excellent Non-Technical Overview Of Robotics” »