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The demo is clever, questionably real, and prompts a lot of questions about how this device will actually work.

Buzz has been building around the secretive tech startup Humane for over a year, and now the company is finally offering a look at what it’s been building. At TED last month, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri gave a demonstration of the AI-powered wearable the company is building as a replacement for smartphones. Bits of the video leaked online after the event, but the full video is now available to watch.

The device appears to be a small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top. Throughout the 13-minute presentation, Chaudhri walks through a handful of use cases for Humane’s gadget: * The device rings when Chaudhri receives a phone call. He holds his hand up, and the device projects the caller’s name along with icons to answer or ignore the call. He then has a brief conversation. (Around 1:48 in the video) * He presses and holds one finger on the device, then asks a question about where he can buy a gift. The device responds with the name of a shopping district. (Around 6:20) * He taps two fingers on the device, says a sentence, and the device translates the sentence into another language, stating it back using an AI-generated clone of his voice. (Around 6:55) * He presses and holds one finger on the device, says, “Catch me up,” and it reads out a summary of recent emails, calendar events, and messages. (At 9:45) * He holds a chocolate bar in front of the device, then presses and holds one finger on the device while asking, “Can I eat this?” The device recommends he does not because of a food allergy he has. He presses down one finger again and tells the device he’s ignoring its advice. (Around 10:55)

Chaudhri, who previously worked on design at Apple for more than two decades, pitched the device as a salve for a world covered in screens. “Some believe AR / VR glasses like these are the answer,” he said, an image of VR headsets behind him. He argued those devices — like smartphones — put “a further barrier between you and the world.”

Humane’s device, whatever it’s called, is designed to be more natural by eschewing the screen. The gadget operates on its own. “You don’t need a smartphone or any other device to pair with it,” he said.

From 2021

A new method called tensor holography could enable the creation of holograms for virtual reality, 3D printing, medical imaging, and more — and it can run on a smartphone.

YouTube.


PhD student from MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Liang Shi said people once believed that with the existing consumer-grade computer hardware, it’s impossible to do real-time 3D holograms. It’s going to take decades before it would be viable, but he figured out a way to cut that time.

Holographic image is not just made up in the movies, it’s being created as we speak. Shi’s team took a different approach from what was first developed in holograms, where laser beam would split, half the beam is used to illuminate the subject and the other half used as a reference for the light waves phase.

Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is—in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

In a new study in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers Bojian Yin and Sander Bohté from the HBP partner Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) demonstrate a significant step towards artificial intelligence that can be used in local devices like smartphones and in VR-like applications, while protecting privacy.

They show how brain-like neurons combined with novel learning methods enable training fast and energy-efficient spiking on a large scale. Potential applications range from wearable AI to and Augmented Reality.

While modern artificial neural networks are the backbone of the current AI revolution, they are only loosely inspired by networks of real, biological neurons such as our brain. The brain however is a much larger network, much more energy-efficient, and can respond ultra-fast when triggered by external events. Spiking neural networks are special types of neural networks that more closely mimic the working of biological neurons: the neurons of our nervous system communicate by exchanging electrical pulses, and they do so only sparingly.

Discover the fascinating world of digital immortality and the pivotal role artificial intelligence plays in bringing this concept to life. In this captivating video, we delve into the intriguing idea of preserving our consciousness, memories, and personalities in a digital realm, potentially allowing us to live forever in a virtual environment. Unravel the cutting-edge AI technologies like mind uploading, AI-powered avatars, and advanced brain-computer interfaces that are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be alive.

Join us as we explore the ethical considerations, current progress, and future prospects of digital immortality. Learn about the ongoing advancements in brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink, AI-powered virtual assistants like ChatGPT, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Will digital immortality redefine humanity’s relationship with life, death, and existence itself? Watch now to uncover the possibilities.

Keywords: digital immortality, artificial intelligence, mind uploading, AI-powered avatars, brain-computer interfaces, Neuralink, ChatGPT, virtual afterlife, eternal life, neuroscience, ethics, virtual reality, consciousness, future of humanity.

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In January, new reports on Apple’s long-awaited augmented reality/virtual reality headset were released. And if what’s in these reports is even partially true, Apple is poised to give the world one of the most jaw-dropping, powerful pieces of technology in history (again) — which is why it was a bit surprising that this news didn’t make more of a splash.

This is the same company that has fans enter lotteries for tickets to corporate keynote addresses! Yet, outside of the usual tech blogs and a few newspaper columns, the future of Apple’s AR/VR device went largely unnoticed.

In Silicon Valley, some of the brightest minds believe a universal basic income (UBI) that guarantees people unrestricted cash payments will help them to survive and thrive as advanced technologies eliminate more careers as we know them, from white collar and creative jobs — lawyers, journalists, artists, software engineers — to labor roles. The idea has gained enough traction that dozens of guaranteed income programs have been started in U.S. cities since 2020.

Yet even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the highest-profile proponents of UBI, doesn’t believe that it’s a complete solution. As he said during a sit-down earlier this year, “I think it is a little part of the solution. I think it’s great. I think as [advanced artificial intelligence] participates more and more in the economy, we should distribute wealth and resources much more than we have and that will be important over time. But I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem. I don’t think that’s going to give people meaning, I don’t think it means people are going to entirely stop trying to create and do new things and whatever else. So I would consider it an enabling technology, but not a plan for society.”

The question begged is what a plan for society should then look like, and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, a founder in the field of virtual reality, writes in this week’s New Yorker that “data dignity” could be an even bigger part of the solution.