Stephen Hawking: 'Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?' - Science - News. Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! And the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring. The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list.
Loading gallery In pictures: Landmarks in AI development 1 of 4 Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Johnny Depp plays a scientist who is shot by Luddites in 'Transcendence' (Alcon) Blind Sight: The Next Generation of Sensory Substitution Technology - The Crux. It’s long been known that blind people are able to compensate for their loss of sight by using other senses, relying on sound and touch to help them “see” the world. Neuroimaging studies have backed this up, showing that in blind people brain regions devoted to sight become rewired to process touch and sound as visual information. Now, in the age of Google Glass, smartphones and self-driving cars, new technology offers ever more advanced ways of substituting one sensory experience for another. These exciting new devices can restore sight to the blind in ways never before thought possible.
A female blind user wearing the vOICe. Seeing with the Ears One approach is to use sound as a stand-in for vision. Over a series of training sessions they learn, for example, that a short, loud synthesizer sound signifies a vertical line, while a longer burst equates to a horizontal one. The concept has tried and true analogs in the animal world, says Dr. According to Dr. Navigating with the Fingertips. The Quantified Other: Nest And Fitbit Chase A Lucrative Side Business. Le futur : six logiciels pour changer le monde (suite) | Par 4 chemins. The Battle For The Connected Home Is Heating Up. Editor’s note: Matt Turck is a managing director of FirstMark Capital. Follow him on Twitter at @mattturck. Almost 15 years ago, a friend of mine at McKinsey spent a few nights writing a document called “The Battle for the Home”. The thesis at the time was that with broadband, the home PC was gradually going to challenge the TV as the core home digital system.
Over the following few years, that battle gradually grew more complex, as the home saw the adoption of a new generation of HDTV sets, game consoles, set-top boxes and DVR options. But fundamentally, the discussion was about who was going to control the home entertainment system. Now, the battle has expanded to the rest of the home. The irony of this market, not always acknowledged, is that a number of large companies with big brands and existing “pipes” in our homes, have been unusually innovative. The first battle for the home was not always kind to startups. The new household brands This is a big opportunity. Not so fast. Full Steam Ahead: Inside Valve's Grand Plan to Replace Game Consoles With PCs | Game|Life. Clockwise from left: Anna Sweet, Eric Hope and Greg Coomer, three of the Valve employees at work on the company’s Steam Machines initiative, in the Valve offices in Bellevue, Washington.
Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams/WIRED BELLEVUE, WA — Installed base. It’s what every gaming machine needs if it’s to get even a tenuous foothold in this ultra-competitive market. Software developers won’t bring their killer games to your platform if there isn’t a critical mass of addressable customers — but those customers won’t buy your hardware in the first place without exclusive software. The difficulty of squaring this circle is the reason why the history of the gaming business is strewn with the bodies of failed platforms. If you release a new piece of gaming hardware without at least attempting to resolve that fundamental chicken-and-egg problem, you’re dead before you even launch. Our customers love all those Steam titles, but they also like their families. The Gigaom guide to deep learning: Who’s doing it, and why it matters. The field of deep learning is picking up steam to the point that it’s now inspiring a growing list of startups in areas such as natural language processing and image recognition.
It’s also commanding a growing percentage of research and acquisition budgets at companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. This post highlights some of the companies involved in this space and the type of products or projects they’re working on. What deep learning is First, though, a little primer: Despite its cognitive moniker, deep learning isn’t really about teaching machines to mimic the human brain a la the BRAIN Initiative President Obama announced in 2012. Rather, it’s about teaching machines to think more hierarchically or more contextually — to see a picture of a mole, for example, and work down from recognizing the features that comprise an animal to recognizing the specific features that make it a mole.
One layer of a Google deep learning network for image recognition. The startups. The Threat of Artificial Intelligence. If the New York Times’s latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost “magical.” Self-driving cars have arrived; Siri can listen to your voice and find the nearest movie theatre; and I.B.M. just set the “Jeopardy”-conquering Watson to work on medicine, initially training medical students, perhaps eventually helping in diagnosis. Scarcely a month goes by without the announcement of a new A.I. product or technique. Yet, some of the enthusiasm may be premature: as I’ve noted previously, we still haven’t produced machines with common sense, vision, natural language processing, or the ability to create other machines. Our efforts at directly simulating human brains remain primitive.
Still, at some level, the only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame. The futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks true, human-level A.I. will be here in less than two decades. For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. Moore's Law Is Dead, What Comes Next? The world’s most powerful computing machine is perhaps also the most ubiquitous: the human brain. It’s able to perform computations on a scale that even the most advanced supercomputers cannot hope to match. However, the circuitry underpinning our brains is surprisingly sloppy and slow. Neurons act on millisecond timescales – slow when compared to the fastest processors – and can fail to activate; one reason why the brain has so many neurons is this redundancy.
“The problem we’re now facing is more fundamental than anything before” What allows the brain to run on this clunky machinery is parallel computing, the ability to solve problems simultaneously using many different parts of the brain. It’s the law that says the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years; it’s the law that accurately described the explosion in computing power that enables the modern world to function; it’s Moore’s Law and it is coming to a grinding halt.
Comments. World's Fastest Computer Will Operate Like a Human Brain. Google in Jeopardy: What If IBM's Watson Dethroned the King of Search? | Wired Opinion. Photo: Sam Gustin / WIRED Remember Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy champion? A couple years ago, Watson beat the top two human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at a game where even interpreting the cue is complex with language nuances. (Not to mention finding answers at lightning speed on any subject matter.)
Yet after the initial excitement, most people – except for a notable few – forgot about Watson. But we need to pay attention, and now. Because Watson heralds the emergence of “thinking machines” capable of knowledge creation that will trump today’s knowledge retrieval machines. This could be the beginning of a serious challenge to Google, whose most ambitious initiatives — from wearables to cars to aging — are funded through its thriving advertising business.
Watson was arguably the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test, designed by British mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer could think. In other words: Google can retrieve, but Watson can create. Nanotechnology advance in making 'programmable matter' using nanocrystals. Cost-saving computer chips get smaller than ever with nanotechnology. The Man Who Would Build a Computer the Size of the Entire Internet | Wired Enterprise. Solomon Hykes, the driving force behind Docker, an open source project that seeks to recast the internet as one giant computer. Photo: Alex Washburn/WIRED Google runs its web empire on computers the size of warehouses. Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to a new breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it.
A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. It runs on the data center, grabbing computing power from any machine than can spare it. Google calls this “warehouse-scale computing,” and for some, it’s an idea so large, they have trouble wrapping their heads around it. Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. That may seem a little odd. . — Ted Dziuba. The real plan for Google Glass may be to sell it to businesses, not consumers - Quartz. Yesterday evening in New York City, Google’s Glass team threw a party. It brought together “Explorers” and “Influencers”—the lucky few people who got to try out the computerized glasses Google is developing.
Over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the diverse crowd gushed about the joys and dissected the drawbacks of the device, which they’ve been wearing for the last few months. The takeaway? Google Glass is not for who you think it is. Though Google has been promoting the device with heart-warming videos on rollercoaster rides and in children’s playgrounds, for the next few years at least, its main customers will be large businesses. Members of the Glass operations team have been on the road showing it off to companies and organizations, and they told Quartz that some of the most enthusiastic responses have come from manufacturers, teachers, medical companies, and hospitals.
Those potential uses are manifold. Other uses of Glass would be in medicine. The Rise of Minimalist Sex Apps. In January of last year, Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko had an idea to break their sexual dry spells the way they solved many of their other problems: with an app. "We wanted an easy way to find sex, basically," says Sidorenko. But the two friends (who describe themselves as "pomosexuals") were too impatient to use the available dating apps on the market, all of which required them to spend hours flirting with potential flings via chat or text message before getting a date and, possibly, sealing the deal.
They knew there were horny people around them looking for sex — and nothing more — but had no way of figuring out where, and who, they were. "We thought it would be cool to use an approach like Uber," Sidorenko says. "Where you basically create the request, and you get a car pretty soon. We thought it would be cool to have something like that to find a sex buddy. " From that brainstorm came Pure, a new app that brings the on-demand convenience of Uber or Seamless to the bedroom. Technological singularity. The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity.[1] Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.[2] The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann.
Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an "intelligence explosion",[5][6] where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human. Basic concepts Superintelligence Non-AI singularity Intelligence explosion Exponential growth Plausibility. Bio-Hackers, Get Ready. When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard. But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave. A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA.
Like the old Microsoft-Intel relationship of the PC era, they believe they have the symbiotic relationship necessary to usher in a new era where anybody can inexpensively create their own life forms. Genome Compiler is backed with $3 million in funding, including $2 million from Autodesk. Cambrian is funded by Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures and Draper Associates. Making Sense Of The Internet Of Things. Editor’s note: Matt Turck is a managing director of FirstMark Capital. Follow him on Twitter @mattturck. The emerging Internet of Things — essentially, the world of physical devices connected to the network/Internet, from your Fitbit or Nest to industrial machines — is experiencing a burst of activity and creativity that is getting entrepreneurs, VCs and the press equally excited. The space looks like a boisterous hodgepodge of smart hobbyists, new startups and large corporations that are eager to be a part of what could be a huge market, and all sorts of enabling products and technologies, some of which, including crowdfunding and 3D printing, are themselves far from established.
(Click to enlarge) The chart to the right is an attempt at making sense of this frenetic activity. Building Blocks The concept of the Internet of Things is not new (the term itself was coined in 1999), but it is now in the process of becoming a reality thanks to the confluence of several key factors. Verticals. Augmented Reality: Fujitsu touch and gesture video interface | Beyond The Beyond. *Basically an entry in the Kinect and LeapMotion sweepstakes. The video mechanism has nothing to do with the paper, but when you project on something and people touch it, they never look up to see the camera lens and projector. It always comes across to the user as “magic paper.” *People wonder where the Personal Computer is going… If you had this installed in homes and offices, users would look back in pity at yesterday’s desktop-jockeys.
They’d be like cramped victims of industrial malfeasance, blowing out their backs and wrists while peering through plastic portholes. “This technology measures the shape of real-world objects, and automatically adjusts the coordinate systems for the camera, projector, and real world. In this way, it can coordinate the display with touching, not only for flat surfaces like tables and paper, but also for the curved surfaces of objects such as books. MIT Media Lab Futuristic Projects.
SXSW Keynote Speaker Olivier Bau Talks About Creating Invisible Objects Using Electricity. Oculus Rift at SXSW: is virtual reality the 'Holy Grail' of gaming? Cognitive enhancement: How the Internet is expanding our minds. How Mind-Controlled Games Work - And Why It's Way, Way Bigger Than That. Soon You Will Interact With Computers Through Thought Alone. Holograms, ‘Minority Report’ Gestures And Other Ways Your Meetings Will Change By 2018.
You Can Reach Into This Monitor And Touch The Interface.