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Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.

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(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).

I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas connect to AT&T’s network and it seems clear that data needs will only increase for data hungry vehicles that drive themselves. Already Tesla cars consume quite a few gigabytes of data per month.

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Breaking : Elon Musk’s ideas on SpaceX DeepMind Tesla and The Dangers of #AI #Robots #Armageddon caused by AI & ideas for NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (starts at 42mins in video).


Closing Plenary Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”

Speaker: Elon Musk
Governor Terry McAuliffe, Virginia, Chair.
Governor Brian Sandoval, Nevada, Vice Chair.

Keynote speaker: • elon musk, CEO of tesla and spacex

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Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction. Military innovations from wooden catapults to nuclear bombs have been transforming the way war is waged since prehistoric humans carved arrows from stones some 10,000 years ago.

The visions of futurists don’t always match the experiences of military personnel, but the battlefields of the future will bear little resemblance to the war zones of today.


The future of technology in warfare: From AI robots to VR torture.

Geopolitical developments have raised fears of another world war. Technological advances mean it should at least be over quickly.

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