Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist
December 26th, 2018Via: PetaPixel: Check out these rather ordinary looking portraits. They’re all fake. Not in the sense that they were Photoshopped, but rather they were completely generated by artificial intelligence. That’s right: none of these people actually exist. NVIDIA researchers have published a new paper on easily customizing the style of realistic faces created by a […]
Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy On Us
December 20th, 2018Via: Guardian: The purchase of Keyhole was a milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing internet company and began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military […]
Something Very Weird with Google’s Autocomplete, Searching on Google vs. Duckduckgo
December 16th, 2018Yep. I tried it. Via: Reddit:
Parrot Uses Alexa to Order Watermelon, Lightbulbs While Owner Is Out
December 15th, 2018Via: Newsweek: A peckish parrot has been caught ordering strawberries, a watermelon and even a water boiler through his foster owner’s electronic personal assistant. Rocco, an African Grey, requested the items through an Alexa device while his minder was out of the home. Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went […]
Affect Recognition: Face Scanning Combined with Insane Pseudoscience
December 14th, 2018You’ll love this one. Via: The Intercept: Facial recognition has quickly shifted from techno-novelty to fact of life for many, with millions around the world at least willing to put up with their faces scanned by software at the airport, their iPhones, or Facebook’s server farms. But researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute […]
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Doorbell Cameras
December 14th, 2018Via: ACLU: Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year. While the details are sketchy, the application describes a […]
Walmart Testing Robotic Fry Cook
December 11th, 2018Via: Yahoo Finance: Walmart (WMT) is in the early stages of testing a kitchen robot assistant named “Flippy” at its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters to see whether or not it’s the right fit for its in-store delis. Flippy is the world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant powered by artificial intelligence from Miso Robotics, a two-year-old startup. […]
DeepMind’s AlphaZero Obliterates Previous AI Chess Champion
December 6th, 2018Via: Telegraph: DeepMind’s artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero is now showing signs of human-like intuition and creativity, in what developers have hailed as ‘turning point’ in history. The computer system amazed the world last year when it mastered the game of chess from scratch within just four hours, despite not being programmed how to win. But […]
5G + AI
December 6th, 2018Via: EE Times: SAN FRANCISCO — Qualcomm launched a $100 million venture fund at an event here where the level of enthusiasm for machine learning ran high. China’s SenseTime alone talked about taking in $3 billion for its platform, and others gave examples of AI quadrupling productivity and saving lives. The combination of 5G and […]
Waymo One Robotaxi Service Available to “A Few Hundred Customers” in Arizona
December 5th, 2018Meatsack still onboard. Via: Los Angeles Times: Robot cars are now officially a real business. Waymo on Wednesday launched a commercial robot ride-hailing service in Arizona called Waymo One. Like Uber or Lyft, customers will summon a ride with a smartphone app. But in this case, the car will be driving itself. “This is a […]
