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A pocket-sized AI that sees everything you see, learns who you are, and anticipates your needs? Meet Asteria, the future of artificial intelligence.

To date, the promises of AI have largely remained unfulfilled. 2016’s cast of artificial characters—Siri, Cortana, Alexa—are still glorified chatbots, summoned only when we remember to check the weather, or when we need a gimmick at a house party.

Real artificial intelligence—the kind that thinks; the kind that feels; the kind that observes; the kind you might fall in love with if you’re not careful—is still a developer’s daydream. Meanwhile, the AI we do have seem trapped in the same cycle of incremental evolution as the devices they inhabit.

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The film about pushing the limits of technology recruited Watson to make a trailer.


For a film about the risks of pushing the limits of technology too far, it only makes sense to advertise for it using artificial intelligence.

Morgan, staring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti, is a sci-fi thriller about scientists who’ve created a synthetic humanoid whose potential has grown dangerously beyond their control. Fitting, then, that they’d employ the help of America’s AI sweetheart IBM Watson to build the film’s trailer.

IBM used machine learning and experimental Watson APIs, parsing out the trailers of 100 horror movies. It did visual, audio, and composition analysis of individual scenes, finding what makes each moment eerie, how the score and actors’ tone of voice changed the mood—framing and lighting came together to make a complete trailer. Watson was then fed the full film, and it chose scenes for the trailer. A human—in this case, the “resident IBM filmmaker”—still needed to step in to edit for creativity. Even so, a process that would normally take weeks was reduced to hours.

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Luv this article because it hits a very important topic of how will things change with BMI/ mind control technology in general. For example with BMI will we need wearable devices? if so, what type and why? Also, how will banking, healthcare, businesses, hospitality, transportation, media and entertainment, communications, government, etc. in general will change with BMI and AI together? And, don’t forget cell circuitry, and DNA storage and processing capabilities that have been proven to date and advancing.

When you take into account what we are doing with synthetic biology, BMI, AI, and QC; we are definitely going to see some very amazing things just within the next 10 years alone.


Neuroscientists have just demonstrated that we can control drones with our minds. Find out how this shapes the future of digital marketing.

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Audi’s upcoming four-door luxury electric car will have a 311-mile range, along with Level 4 self-driving features (essentially full autonomy, for those keeping track) and three separate electric motors, according to a new report from Autocar. The car is set to go head-to-head with the Model S, based on these new stats, and will likely be called the “A9 e-tron” when it goes on sale sometime in 2020, the publication says.

The range is in line with what Tesla says its new P100D option package will offer for Model S owners, though Autocar says that the Audi A9 e-tron will have a 95kWh battery to achieve that range, rather than the 100kWh version Tesla employs to get 315 miles as measured by EPA standards.

The powertrain for the upcoming vehicle is said to feature three electric motors that combined produce 429 brake horsepower (bhp), with a drive mode that can boost it to 496 bhp for short stints. Audi is looking at electric drivetrain tuning as one way where it will be able to offer a differentiating advantage to potential consumers.

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Researchers from the University of Warsaw have employed liquid crystalline elastomers and soft robotics techniques to make a small robot caterpillar that moves according to light conditions.

Soft robotics is a field that not too many are familiar with, but it has led to the creation of some stunning robots. Far from the large and rigid clunkers that are the public face of robots (think: Atlas), soft robotics focuses on bots with a lighter touch, mimicking the graceful movements of natural organisms.

And mimic them they do.

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Harvard researchers were able to create the world’s first fully autonomous soft robot. Ultimately, it is controlled by a pneumatic system.

A group of Harvard engineers were able to create a completely autonomous robot using soft robotics. Notably, this is the first robot created that does not use any hard components. And if that’s not enough, it’s also the world’s first completely autonomous soft robot.

The team’s work was published in Nature, and you can see the robot in action in the video below.

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Experts may reassure us that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world anytime soon – but they just might invade the multiplex.

At least that’s the plot developing at IBM, where the Watson artificial-intelligence team programmed a computer to come up with a scary trailer for “Morgan,” a thriller about a genetically modified, AI-enhanced super-human.

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