Lifeboat Foundation

There are a lot of people in the world that need glasses on a daily basis. Despite their often expensive price tag, they do little more than correct poor eyesight. Let Glass updates glasses for the 21st century by integrating them with smart home connectivity.

While maintaining a slim form factor, Let Glass features audio entertainment, telephone communication, and voice interaction. Using Alexa and a built-in microphone, these frames allow users to control their smartphones without fumbling through their pockets. Simply tapping the legs of the smart glasses activate remote control functions, while voice commands handle everything else. In addition to Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Now are also supported.

Continue reading “Look into the future using the first smart glasses with Alexa control” »

In the mid-1900s, art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig developed a system to identify artists by their brush or pen strokes, which he called Pictology. Dantzig found shape, length, direction, and pressure all contributed to a kind of stroke signature, unique to each artist.

New research with contributions from The Hague suggests that Pictology might be the key to helping machines understand art, allowing systems to quickly verify whether brushstrokes were from an original painter or a forger.

After analyzing 80,000 brushstrokes from 297 digitized sketches and drawings, an AI system was able to spot forged drawings in the style of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Egon Schiele with 100% accuracy. The “fakes” were commissioned recreations of specific drawings, which the algorithms had not been shown previously.

Continue reading “This AI algorithm probably means the end of high-end art forgeries” »

Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 tries to rectify the situation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare and political systems.

Yuval Noah Harari responds to an account of the artificial intelligence era and argues we are profoundly ill-prepared to deal with future technology.

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Of course, it’s not actually all that doom and gloom, the child AI is really only capable of a specific task – image recognition. Using its AutoML AI, Google’s AI-building AI created its child AI using a technique called reinforcement learning. This works just like machine learning, except it’s entirely automated where AutoML acts as the neural network for its task-driven AI child.

Known as NASNet, the child AI was tasked with recognising objects in a video, in real time. AutoML would then evaluate how good NASNet was at its task and then improve its algorithms using the data to create a superior version of NASNet.

READ NEXT: Watching an AI create fake celebrity faces is nightmare fuel.

Continue reading “Google’s AI builds its own AI child and it’s better than anything humans have made” »

The show Robosapiens (about #robots) aired last night and had about a 5 minute section on my #transhumanism work. The footage is from a while back but just aired yesterday. My part is in English:

“Liever een computer die de nucleaire codes heeft dan Trump? Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan is ervan overtuigd dat kunstmatige intelligentie politici ooit zal kunnen vervangen. Meer in Robo sapiens, vanavond om 20.15u @NPO2

Liever een computer die de nucleaire codes heeft dan Trump? Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan is ervan overtuigd dat kunstmatige intelligentie politici ooit zal kunnen vervangen. Meer in Robo sapiens, vanavond om 20.15u @NPO2 pic.twitter.com/fhuaStpUP3— vpro (@vpro) December 3, 2017

Continue reading “I’m excited to share a short highlight video below of my work featured on NPO, Dutch Puublic TV” »

In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that’s capable of generating its own AIs.

More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a ‘child’ that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.

The Google researchers automated the design of machine learning models using an approach called reinforcement learning. AutoML acts as a controller neural network that develops a child AI network for a specific task.

Continue reading “Google’s AI Built Its Own AI That Outperforms Any Made” »

Three new reports combine to suggest these answers: It can probably do less right now than you think. But it will eventually do more than you probably think, in more places than you probably think, and will probably evolve faster than powerful technologies have in the past.

Three new reports suggest that artificial intelligence can probably do less right now than you think. But by one estimation, up to a third of American workers will have to switch jobs by 2030 largely because of it.

Last week, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Autumn Budget a £500m package of investment into tech initiatives, including the development of artificial intelligence.

Which must have had the Channel 4 executives ordering trebles all round, because with perfect timing they’ve designated this week the “Rise of the Robots season”, with a schedule that includes documentaries on the take-off of artificial intelligences (AIs) as consulting doctors, a David Tennant -narrated piece on the challenge of making robots as human as possible, and the one that’s had the tabloids hot under the collar, today’s The Sex Robots Are Coming – which needs little further explanation.

Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Sex-Bots aside, though, is it actually possible that the dream of science fiction writers going back a century or more is on the verge of reality? Are we really about to live in the long-promised future of robots and AIs?

Continue reading “The robots are coming – but will they really take all our jobs?” »