The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of.
How it works: Give it a genre, an artist, and lyrics, and Jukebox will produce a passable pastiche in the style of well-known performers, such as Katy Perry, Elvis Presley or Nas. You can also give it the first few seconds of a song and it will autocomplete the rest.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ————— :00–15:11 : Introduction :11–36:12 CHAPTER 1: POSTHUMANISM a. Neurotechnology b. Neurophilosophy c. Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere.
:12–54:39 CHAPTER 2 : TELEPATHY/ MIND-READING a. MRI b. fMRI c. EEG d. Cognitive Liberty e. Dream-recording, Dream-economies f. Social Credit Systems g. Libertism VS Determinism.
:02:07–1:25:48 : CHAPTER 3 : MEMORY/ MIND-AUGMENTING a. Memory Erasure and Neuroplasticity b. Longterm Potentiation (LTP/LTD) c. Propanolol d. Optogenetics e. Neuromodulation f. Memory-hacking g. Postmodern Dystopias h. Total Recall, the Matrix, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind i. Custom reality and identity.
:25:48–1:45:14 CHAPTER 4 : BCI/ MIND-UPGRADING a. Bryan Johnson and Kernel b. Mark Zuckerberg and Neuroprosthetics c. Elon Musk, Neural Lace, and Neuralink d. Neurohacking, Neuroadvertizing, Neurodialectics e. Cyborgs, Surrogates, and Telerobotics f. Terminator, Superintelligence, and Merging with AI g. Digital Analogs, Suffering, and Virtual Drugs h. Neurogaming and “Nervana” (technological-enlightenment)
In a bid to ensure physical distancing at COVID-19 care facility in Amritsar, a robotic trolley ‘carbeot’ has been deployed to provide essentials like medicines, food to coronavirus patients.
Thumbnail image courtesy of OpenWorm, Wormbase, and Caltech.
Scientists Put a Worm Brain in a Lego Robot Body — And It Worked http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-put-worm-brain-in-leg…connectome “The ultimate goal of the project was to completely replicate C. elegans as a virtual organism. But as an amazing starting point, they managed to simulate its brain, and then they uploaded that into a simple Lego robot.”
These Robots Merge Their Nervous Systems Into a Single Megabot https://www.seeker.com/tech/robotics/these-robots-merge-thei…le-megabot “A group of small robots have taken teamwork to the next level, physically connecting and merging their nervous systems to become a single megabot with one “brain.” Researchers describe the robots and their “mergeable nervous system” in a paper published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.”
Will AI Destroy All Humans, or Help Us Build a Better Future?
During a conference call following Tesla’s Q1 2020 results, CEO Elon Musk and CFO Zachary Kirkhorn that Tesla plans to offer the package as a subscription service by the end of the year.
Russia continues it’s pursuit of Killer Robots. Battlefield deployment can be expected soon. Civilian deaths caused by the erroneous decisions of a robot are imminent.
Ban Killer Robots!
While some Russian robots have underperformed expectations in combat, the Ministry of Defence is working on a new generation of combat machines for training and possible future use. At the center of this design is the Marker UGV, or uncrewed ground vehicle. Resembling a miniature tank with treads and turrets, the Marker is as much a test bed as it is a machine expected to see battle.
“The Ministry of Defence is discussing the eventual use of robotic swarms in combat— and Marker is definitely the platform to test that out,” says Bendett, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at CNAS. “As envisioned, it will be able to launch swarms of UAVs or loitering munitions, making it a truly versatile robotic platform.”
The development parallels many robotic programs under way in the United States. It is remarkable, too, that both nations have hit upon swarms of ground robots as a way to supplement existing human formations in combat. Russia plans to test swarms of ground robots later in 2020.
Researchers at Technische Universität München in Germany have recently developed an electronic skin that could help to reproduce the human sense of touch in robots. This e-skin, presented in a paper published in MDPI’s Sensors journal, requires far less computational power than other existing e-skins and can thus be applied to larger portions of a robot’s body.
“Our main motivation for developing the e-skin stems from nature and is centered on the question of how we humans interact with our surrounding environment,” Florian Bergner, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “While humans predominantly depend on vision, our sense of touch is important as soon as contacts are involved in interactions. We believe that giving robots a sense of touch can extend the range of interactions between robots and humans—making robots more collaborative, safe and effective.”
Bergner and other researchers led by Prof. Gordon Cheng have been developing e-skins for approximately ten years now. Initially, they tried to realize e-skin systems with multi-modal sensing capabilities resembling those of human skin. In other words, they tried to create an artificial skin that could sense light touch, pressure, temperature, and vibrations, while effectively distributing its sensing across different places where tactile interactions occurred.
The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.
