“Apple started looking seriously into building an electric car about two years ago. It expanded the project quickly, poaching experts in battery technology and so-called machine vision, as well as veterans from the automobile industry.”
Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.
U.K.-based DeepMind, which Google acquired for about 400 million pounds ($533 million) in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence called WaveNet that can mimic human speech by learning how to form the individual sound waves a human voice creates, it said in a blog post Friday. In blind tests for U.S. English and Mandarin Chinese, human listeners found WaveNet-generated speech sounded more natural than that created with any of Google’s existing text-to-speech programs, which are based on different technologies. WaveNet still underperformed recordings of actual human speech.
Worried that AI’s one day could make us their pets Elon Musk is teasing a new brain-hacking tech
There’s no doubting that Elon Musk is one busy guy. Whether he’s trying to land on Mars with SpaceX, running Tesla, buying SolarCity, investing in the future of AI, building Giga factories or throwing out Hyperloop concepts for fun but it’s increasingly apparent that he’s giving a huge amount of thought to the day when advanced AI’s become the most intelligent form of “life” on the planet.
Continue reading “An AI upgrade for your brain, Elon Musk teases the Neural Lace” »
Now this, this will accelerate AI autonomous capabilities. However, still should be done with a QC secured infrastructure.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s research agency has a new challenge for scientists: make wireless radios with artificial intelligence that can figure out the most effective, efficient way to use the radio frequency spectrum, and win a pile of cash.
Winners of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) could take home up to $3.5 million, but to do that, teams will have to demonstrate new technologies that represent a “paradigm shift” with both military and commercial applications, said Paul Tilghman, a DARPA program manager who is leading the challenge.
Continue reading “DARPA Challenges Industry To Make Adaptive Radios With Artificial Intelligence” »
Advanced warfare platforms are increasingly using unused spectrum, now the Pentagon needs a system to cripple it
The US military is cultivating new electronic warfare technologies that, in real time, use artificial intelligence to learn how to jam enemy systems that are using never-before-seen frequencies and waveforms.
Although this “cognitive electronic warfare” is still in its nascent stages of development, scientists developing these systems told Defense News the technology could appear on the battlefield within the next decade.
Continue reading “Pentagon tests Artificial Intelligence electronic warfare systems” »
Imagine a five-year-old watching Mum talking to Siri, and Dad talking to Alexa, on a daily basis — what must she think of such interactions? Children nowadays witness computers that seem like they have a mind of their own — and even a personality with which to engage. It can be taken for granted that their perception of machines, and thus of the world itself, differs a lot from our own.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most promising areas of tech today, if not even the one that is likely to entail the most striking changes in our way of living, the way our economy works and how society functions. Thanks to enormous amounts of data, coupled with compute power to analyze it, technology companies are making strides in AI that resembles something of a gold rush.
New approaches, including use of deep neural networks, have led to groundbreaking achievements in AI, some of which weren’t predicted to happen for another decade. Google defeating the world champion at the ancient game of Go is just one prominent example. Many more are to be expected, including advances in deep learning combined with reasoning and planning — or even emulating creativity and artwork.
Elon Musk has recently hinted that he may be working on a “neural lace,” a mesh of electronics that will allow AI and the brain to work together. This could help human brains keep up with future enhancements in AI.
There’s no doubt that Elon Musk is one busy individual. When not playing on the Tesla factory floor, he may be bringing electric roofs to electric vehicles, or dreaming up the Hyperloop, or toying with the future of AI.
The conjunction of Venus and Jupiter just before dawn over the southeastern Caspian sea. Credit: Babak A. Tafreshi (TWAN) http://twanight.org/
Aside from the attention it receives around one of its rare solar transits, Venus hardly makes headlines.
But before our warming sun turned Venus into a poster child for the dangers of a runaway greenhouse, our closest planetary neighbor may have once had oceans capable of harboring complex life.
Continue reading “Venus Before Mars? The Case For Real Time TeleRobotics From Venus Orbit” »
A computer’s victory over a human go master this past March reminds us of the pending “singularity” — the rapidly approaching moment in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Machines will learn, and we won’t be their teachers. Are we prepared for it? Can we prepare for it?
We’d better. Many futurists declare it inevitable, probably within a generation, maybe less. Shukan Shincho magazine discusses some hypothetical implications in its Aug. 25 edition. Even the least of them are shocking. For example, in 2045 a computer with the combined intellectual power of the entire human race would cost $100. In short, it’ll be no big deal. What will be a big deal? Should we shudder at the thought, or rejoice?
Francis Bacon (1561−1626) is generally acknowledged as the grandfather of modern science. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” he wrote. His fictional “New Atlantis” was a utopia ruled by scientists who, having admitted their ignorance and purged themselves of illusory knowledge, experimented, observed and slowly built up from scratch an ever-expanding store of “true” knowledge — armed with which they “commanded” nature to outgrow her destructive caprices and ease mankind’s lot.
Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, a director of engineering at Google and a co-founder of the Singularity University think tank at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He is a nonfiction author and creator of several inventions.
Kurzweil met with the Silicon Valley Business Journal to discuss how technology’s exponential progress is rapidly reshaping our future through seismic shifts in information technology and computing power, energy, nanotechnology, robotics, health and longevity.
