A Kiwi company developing artificial intelligence has delivered its latest digital human, called Rachel.
Rachel can see, hear and respond to you.
She is an avatar created by two-time Oscar winner Mark Sagar, who worked on the blockbuster movie of the same name.
Mr Sagar, of Auckland-based company Soul Machines, says his aim is to make man socialise with machine, by putting a human face on artificial intelligence.
Self-driving semi trucks are finally on the road.
Great story in Politico Magazine on #transhumanism and a future AI President. My direct digital democracy ideas and others are mentioned: “Istvan, for one, envisions regular national elections, in which voters would decide on the robot’s priorities and how it should come out on moral issues like abortion; the voters would then have a chance in the next election to change those choices. The initial programming of the system would no doubt be controversial, and the programmers would probably need to be elected, too. All of this would require amending the Constitution, Istvan acknowledges.”
Yes, it sounds nuts. But some techno-optimists really believe a computer could make better decisions for the country—without the drama and shortsightedness we accept from our human leaders.
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.
Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.
A fun list to check out on people influencing the global discussion on robots: http://www.onalytica.com/blog/posts/robotics-top-100-influencers-brands/ #transhumanism
A list of the top 100 robotics influencers & brands driving the most engagement in 2016, including quotes from the experts!
Amazon’s Alexa is gaining knowledge at a rapid clip.
The voice assistant now has more than 15,000 “skills” (Amazon’s term for voice-based apps), nearly all of them created in the little more than two years since Amazon opened Alexa to outside developers. That is boatloads more than the number of apps available for Alexa’s chief rivals, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, according to recent Voicebot data. And all those skills make Alexa able to do more tasks than its peers.
But Amazon’s “arms-wide-open” strategy means that, for every useful skill its assistant gains, it gets three skills dedicated to telling you egg facts. What’s more, Alexa is the dumbest of the major assistants when it comes to answering general knowledge questions, according to a recent study.