The cars can emit different types of honks depending on the situation.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2369
This is one of those “therotical” topics that many of us have had at some point in our lives with our engineering team pals, or with our research department/ lab buddies. Fun to see Elon Musk share his views on this topic. Who knows; maybe? Last week, we learned that black holes may be nothing more that a multi-layer hologram in space.
“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode’s Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely we’re just characters living inside a simulation.
The Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky got half-way through asking Musk if he thought our existence was simulated before the Tesla CEO jumped in to finish his question for him. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk explained. “You’ve thought about this?” Topolsky asked. “A lot,” Musk replied. “It got to the point where every conversation was the AI / simulation conversation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.”
His argument — one presumably honed in the soothing waters of many a jaccuzi — goes that the incredibly fast advancement of video game technology indicates we’ll be capable of creating a fully lifelike simulation of existence in a short span of time. In 40 years, Musk explained, we’ve gone from Pong to massively multiplayer online games with millions of simultaneous players, games with photorealistic graphics, and stand now on the cusp of a new wave of virtual and augmented reality experiences.
Personally, I cannot wait to see all of the improvements in AI via Quantum technology.
Recent tests show that quantum computers made by D-Wave systems should solve some problems faster than ordinary computers. Researchers have begun to map out exactly which queries might benefit from these quantum machines.
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Ivan made it in the major news this week again.
As if the world didn’t have enough problems, Russia is apparently creating a scary humanoid robotic soldier, affectionately being called “Ivan the Terminator.” Thank God they didn’t call it the T-800. The idea of the robot is to eventually replace humans on the battlefield. For now, these robotic avatars are remote-controlled using special suits worn by a human, but you know that won’t last long. One day they will be doing stuff on their own.
This robot (shown below) will accurately repeat the exact movement of the user by reading the fine motor skills of the neck, shoulder, hands and fingers. So if you raise your rifle to fire and pull the trigger, the robot will do just that. But it isn’t limited to just that kind of work, it can even drive a vehicle by automatically scanning the road for blockages or barriers. So it could give chase to enemies.
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A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence.
Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent’s house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one.
Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don’t exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.
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“The property that has given humans a dominant advantage over other species is not strength or speed, but intelligence.”
Intel is in the midst of its biggest business transition ever. Just a few months ago, the chip giant announced that it would be laying off 11,000 workers and taking a step away from the PC market. Instead, it’ll be focusing on wearables and IoT devices. Coinciding with those announcements was an executive shuffle that put Navin Shenoy, its Mobile Client VP, in charge of its wider Client Computing Group (which covers all consumer devices). At Computex this week, we had a chance to pick Shenoy’s brain about Intel’s path forward.
What do you envision being the next major breakthrough for PC form factor?
We’re working on lots of things that are mind-blowing. To me, we have to figure out how to get to J.A.R.V.I.S. [Iron Man’s trusty AI, not Intel’s vaporware earpiece]. The ability to manipulate things wherever you are, look at things wherever you are, talk to things in a more natural way. That’s the next big breakthrough in computing. And it will be in so many domains, it won’t just be PCs. It’ll be phones, tablets and also new types of things we haven’t conceived of yet.
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