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#435199 The Rise of AI Art—and What It Means ...
Artificially intelligent systems are slowly taking over tasks previously done by humans, and many processes involving repetitive, simple movements have already been fully automated. In the meantime, humans continue to be superior when it comes to abstract and creative tasks.
However, it seems like even when it comes to creativity, we’re now being challenged by our own creations.
In the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of hundreds of “AI artists.” These complex algorithms are creating unique (and sometimes eerie) works of art. They’re generating stunning visuals, profound poetry, transcendent music, and even realistic movie scripts. The works of these AI artists are raising questions about the nature of art and the role of human creativity in future societies.
Here are a few works of art created by non-human entities.
Unsecured Futures
by Ai.Da
Ai-Da Robot with Painting. Image Credit: Ai-Da portraits by Nicky Johnston. Published with permission from Midas Public Relations.
Earlier this month we saw the announcement of Ai.Da, considered the first ultra-realistic drawing robot artist. Her mechanical abilities, combined with AI-based algorithms, allow her to draw, paint, and even sculpt. She is able to draw people using her artificial eye and a pencil in her hand. Ai.Da’s artwork and first solo exhibition, Unsecured Futures, will be showcased at Oxford University in July.
Ai-Da Cartesian Painting. Image Credit: Ai-Da Artworks. Published with permission from Midas Public Relations.
Obviously Ai.Da has no true consciousness, thoughts, or feelings. Despite that, the (human) organizers of the exhibition believe that Ai.Da serves as a basis for crucial conversations about the ethics of emerging technologies. The exhibition will serve as a stimulant for engaging with critical questions about what kind of future we ought to create via such technologies.
The exhibition’s creators wrote, “Humans are confident in their position as the most powerful species on the planet, but how far do we actually want to take this power? To a Brave New World (Nightmare)? And if we use new technologies to enhance the power of the few, we had better start safeguarding the future of the many.”
Google’s PoemPortraits
Our transcendence adorns,
That society of the stars seem to be the secret.
The two lines of poetry above aren’t like any poetry you’ve come across before. They are generated by an algorithm that was trained via deep learning neural networks trained on 20 million words of 19th-century poetry.
Google’s latest art project, named PoemPortraits, takes a word of your suggestion and generates a unique poem (once again, a collaboration of man and machine). You can even add a selfie in the final “PoemPortrait.” Artist Es Devlin, the project’s creator, explains that the AI “doesn’t copy or rework existing phrases, but uses its training material to build a complex statistical model. As a result, the algorithm generates original phrases emulating the style of what it’s been trained on.”
The generated poetry can sometimes be profound, and sometimes completely meaningless.But what makes the PoemPortraits project even more interesting is that it’s a collaborative project. All of the generated lines of poetry are combined to form a consistently growing collective poem, which you can view after your lines are generated. In many ways, the final collective poem is a collaboration of people from around the world working with algorithms.
Faceless Portraits Transcending Time
AICAN + Ahmed Elgammal
Image Credit: AICAN + Ahmed Elgammal | Faceless Portrait #2 (2019) | Artsy.
In March of this year, an AI artist called AICAN and its creator Ahmed Elgammal took over a New York gallery. The exhibition at HG Commentary showed two series of canvas works portraying harrowing, dream-like faceless portraits.
The exhibition was not simply credited to a machine, but rather attributed to the collaboration between a human and machine. Ahmed Elgammal is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University. He considers AICAN to not only be an autonomous AI artist, but also a collaborator for artistic endeavors.
How did AICAN create these eerie faceless portraits? The system was presented with 100,000 photos of Western art from over five centuries, allowing it to learn the aesthetics of art via machine learning. It then drew from this historical knowledge and the mandate to create something new to create an artwork without human intervention.
Genesis
by AIVA Technologies
Listen to the score above. While you do, reflect on the fact that it was generated by an AI.
AIVA is an AI that composes soundtrack music for movies, commercials, games, and trailers. Its creative works span a wide range of emotions and moods. The scores it generates are indistinguishable from those created by the most talented human composers.
The AIVA music engine allows users to generate original scores in multiple ways. One is to upload an existing human-generated score and select the temp track to base the composition process on. Another method involves using preset algorithms to compose music in pre-defined styles, including everything from classical to Middle Eastern.
Currently, the platform is promoted as an opportunity for filmmakers and producers. But in the future, perhaps every individual will have personalized music generated for them based on their interests, tastes, and evolving moods. We already have algorithms on streaming websites recommending novel music to us based on our interests and history. Soon, algorithms may be used to generate music and other works of art that are tailored to impact our unique psyches.
The Future of Art: Pushing Our Creative Limitations
These works of art are just a glimpse into the breadth of the creative works being generated by algorithms and machines. Many of us will rightly fear these developments. We have to ask ourselves what our role will be in an era where machines are able to perform what we consider complex, abstract, creative tasks. The implications on the future of work, education, and human societies are profound.
At the same time, some of these works demonstrate that AI artists may not necessarily represent a threat to human artists, but rather an opportunity for us to push our creative boundaries. The most exciting artistic creations involve collaborations between humans and machines.
We have always used our technological scaffolding to push ourselves beyond our biological limitations. We use the telescope to extend our line of sight, planes to fly, and smartphones to connect with others. Our machines are not always working against us, but rather working as an extension of our minds. Similarly, we could use our machines to expand on our creativity and push the boundaries of art.
Image Credit: Ai-Da portraits by Nicky Johnston. Published with permission from Midas Public Relations. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435172 DARPA’s New Project Is Investing ...
When Elon Musk and DARPA both hop aboard the cyborg hypetrain, you know brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are about to achieve the impossible.
BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with external computers, turning human users into literal cyborgs. Yet mind-controlled robotic arms, microelectrode “nerve patches”, or “memory Band-Aids” are still purely experimental medical treatments for those with nervous system impairments.
With the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program, DARPA is looking to expand BMIs to the military. This month, the project tapped six academic teams to engineer radically different BMIs to hook up machines to the brains of able-bodied soldiers. The goal is to ditch surgery altogether—while minimizing any biological interventions—to link up brain and machine.
Rather than microelectrodes, which are currently surgically inserted into the brain to hijack neural communication, the project is looking to acoustic signals, electromagnetic waves, nanotechnology, genetically-enhanced neurons, and infrared beams for their next-gen BMIs.
It’s a radical departure from current protocol, with potentially thrilling—or devastating—impact. Wireless BMIs could dramatically boost bodily functions of veterans with neural damage or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or allow a single soldier to control swarms of AI-enabled drones with his or her mind. Or, similar to the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire, it could cloud the perception of soldiers, distancing them from the emotional guilt of warfare.
When trickled down to civilian use, these new technologies are poised to revolutionize medical treatment. Or they could galvanize the transhumanist movement with an inconceivably powerful tool that fundamentally alters society—for better or worse.
Here’s what you need to know.
Radical Upgrades
The four-year N3 program focuses on two main aspects: noninvasive and “minutely” invasive neural interfaces to both read and write into the brain.
Because noninvasive technologies sit on the scalp, their sensors and stimulators will likely measure entire networks of neurons, such as those controlling movement. These systems could then allow soldiers to remotely pilot robots in the field—drones, rescue bots, or carriers like Boston Dynamics’ BigDog. The system could even boost multitasking prowess—mind-controlling multiple weapons at once—similar to how able-bodied humans can operate a third robotic arm in addition to their own two.
In contrast, minutely invasive technologies allow scientists to deliver nanotransducers without surgery: for example, an injection of a virus carrying light-sensitive sensors, or other chemical, biotech, or self-assembled nanobots that can reach individual neurons and control their activity independently without damaging sensitive tissue. The proposed use for these technologies isn’t yet well-specified, but as animal experiments have shown, controlling the activity of single neurons at multiple points is sufficient to program artificial memories of fear, desire, and experiences directly into the brain.
“A neural interface that enables fast, effective, and intuitive hands-free interaction with military systems by able-bodied warfighters is the ultimate program goal,” DARPA wrote in its funding brief, released early last year.
The only technologies that will be considered must have a viable path toward eventual use in healthy human subjects.
“Final N3 deliverables will include a complete integrated bidirectional brain-machine interface system,” the project description states. This doesn’t just include hardware, but also new algorithms tailored to these system, demonstrated in a “Department of Defense-relevant application.”
The Tools
Right off the bat, the usual tools of the BMI trade, including microelectrodes, MRI, or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are off the table. These popular technologies rely on surgery, heavy machinery, or personnel to sit very still—conditions unlikely in the real world.
The six teams will tap into three different kinds of natural phenomena for communication: magnetism, light beams, and acoustic waves.
Dr. Jacob Robinson at Rice University, for example, is combining genetic engineering, infrared laser beams, and nanomagnets for a bidirectional system. The $18 million project, MOANA (Magnetic, Optical and Acoustic Neural Access device) uses viruses to deliver two extra genes into the brain. One encodes a protein that sits on top of neurons and emits infrared light when the cell activates. Red and infrared light can penetrate through the skull. This lets a skull cap, embedded with light emitters and detectors, pick up these signals for subsequent decoding. Ultra-fast and utra-sensitvie photodetectors will further allow the cap to ignore scattered light and tease out relevant signals emanating from targeted portions of the brain, the team explained.
The other new gene helps write commands into the brain. This protein tethers iron nanoparticles to the neurons’ activation mechanism. Using magnetic coils on the headset, the team can then remotely stimulate magnetic super-neurons to fire while leaving others alone. Although the team plans to start in cell cultures and animals, their goal is to eventually transmit a visual image from one person to another. “In four years we hope to demonstrate direct, brain-to-brain communication at the speed of thought and without brain surgery,” said Robinson.
Other projects in N3 are just are ambitious.
The Carnegie Mellon team, for example, plans to use ultrasound waves to pinpoint light interaction in targeted brain regions, which can then be measured through a wearable “hat.” To write into the brain, they propose a flexible, wearable electrical mini-generator that counterbalances the noisy effect of the skull and scalp to target specific neural groups.
Similarly, a group at Johns Hopkins is also measuring light path changes in the brain to correlate them with regional brain activity to “read” wetware commands.
The Teledyne Scientific & Imaging group, in contrast, is turning to tiny light-powered “magnetometers” to detect small, localized magnetic fields that neurons generate when they fire, and match these signals to brain output.
The nonprofit Battelle team gets even fancier with their ”BrainSTORMS” nanotransducers: magnetic nanoparticles wrapped in a piezoelectric shell. The shell can convert electrical signals from neurons into magnetic ones and vice-versa. This allows external transceivers to wirelessly pick up the transformed signals and stimulate the brain through a bidirectional highway.
The magnetometers can be delivered into the brain through a nasal spray or other non-invasive methods, and magnetically guided towards targeted brain regions. When no longer needed, they can once again be steered out of the brain and into the bloodstream, where the body can excrete them without harm.
Four-Year Miracle
Mind-blown? Yeah, same. However, the challenges facing the teams are enormous.
DARPA’s stated goal is to hook up at least 16 sites in the brain with the BMI, with a lag of less than 50 milliseconds—on the scale of average human visual perception. That’s crazy high resolution for devices sitting outside the brain, both in space and time. Brain tissue, blood vessels, and the scalp and skull are all barriers that scatter and dissipate neural signals. All six teams will need to figure out the least computationally-intensive ways to fish out relevant brain signals from background noise, and triangulate them to the appropriate brain region to decipher intent.
In the long run, four years and an average $20 million per project isn’t much to potentially transform our relationship with machines—for better or worse. DARPA, to its credit, is keenly aware of potential misuse of remote brain control. The program is under the guidance of a panel of external advisors with expertise in bioethical issues. And although DARPA’s focus is on enabling able-bodied soldiers to better tackle combat challenges, it’s hard to argue that wireless, non-invasive BMIs will also benefit those most in need: veterans and other people with debilitating nerve damage. To this end, the program is heavily engaging the FDA to ensure it meets safety and efficacy regulations for human use.
Will we be there in just four years? I’m skeptical. But these electrical, optical, acoustic, magnetic, and genetic BMIs, as crazy as they sound, seem inevitable.
“DARPA is preparing for a future in which a combination of unmanned systems, AI, and cyber operations may cause conflicts to play out on timelines that are too short for humans to effectively manage with current technology alone,” said Al Emondi, the N3 program manager.
The question is, now that we know what’s in store, how should the rest of us prepare?
Image Credit: With permission from DARPA N3 project. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435152 The Futuristic Tech Disrupting Real ...
In the wake of the housing market collapse of 2008, one entrepreneur decided to dive right into the failing real estate industry. But this time, he didn’t buy any real estate to begin with. Instead, Glenn Sanford decided to launch the first-ever cloud-based real estate brokerage, eXp Realty.
Contracting virtual platform VirBELA to build out the company’s mega-campus in VR, eXp Realty demonstrates the power of a dematerialized workspace, throwing out hefty overhead costs and fundamentally redefining what ‘real estate’ really means. Ten years later, eXp Realty has an army of 14,000 agents across all 50 US states, 3 Canadian provinces, and 400 MLS market areas… all without a single physical office.
But VR is just one of many exponential technologies converging to revolutionize real estate and construction. As floating cities and driverless cars spread out your living options, AI and VR are together cutting out the middleman.
Already, the global construction industry is projected to surpass $12.9 trillion in 2022, and the total value of the US housing market alone grew to $33.3 trillion last year. Both vital for our daily lives, these industries will continue to explode in value, posing countless possibilities for disruption.
In this blog, I’ll be discussing the following trends:
New prime real estate locations;
Disintermediation of the real estate broker and search;
Materials science and 3D printing in construction.
Let’s dive in!
Location Location Location
Until today, location has been the name of the game when it comes to hunting down the best real estate. But constraints on land often drive up costs while limiting options, and urbanization is only exacerbating the problem.
Beyond the world of virtual real estate, two primary mechanisms are driving the creation of new locations.
(1) Floating Cities
Offshore habitation hubs, floating cities have long been conceived as a solution to rising sea levels, skyrocketing urban populations, and threatened ecosystems. In success, they will soon unlock an abundance of prime real estate, whether for scenic living, commerce, education, or recreation.
One pioneering model is that of Oceanix City, designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and a host of other domain experts. Intended to adapt organically over time, Oceanix would consist of a galaxy of mass-produced, hexagonal floating modules, built as satellite “cities” off coastal urban centers and sustained by renewable energies.
While individual 4.5-acre platforms would each sustain 300 people, these hexagonal modules are designed to link into 75-acre tessellations sustaining up to 10,000 residents. Each anchored to the ocean floor using biorock, Oceanix cities are slated to be closed-loop systems, as external resources are continuously supplied by automated drone networks.
Electric boats or flying cars might zoom you to work, city-embedded water capture technologies would provide your water, and while vertical and outdoor farming supply your family meal, share economies would dominate goods provision.
AERIAL: Located in calm, sheltered waters, near coastal megacities, OCEANIX City will be an adaptable, sustainable, scalable, and affordable solution for human life on the ocean. Image Credit: OCEANIX/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.
Joined by countless government officials whose islands risk submersion at the hands of sea level rise, the UN is now getting on board. And just this year, seasteading is exiting the realm of science fiction and testing practical waters.
As French Polynesia seeks out robust solutions to sea level rise, their government has now joined forces with the San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute. With a newly designated special economic zone and 100 acres of beachfront, this joint Floating Island Project could even see up to a dozen inhabitable structures by 2020. And what better to fund the $60 million project than the team’s upcoming ICO?
But aside from creating new locations, autonomous vehicles (AVs) and flying cars are turning previously low-demand land into the prime real estate of tomorrow.
(2) Autonomous Electric Vehicles and Flying Cars
Today, the value of a location is a function of its proximity to your workplace, your city’s central business district, the best schools, or your closest friends.
But what happens when driverless cars desensitize you to distance, or Hyperloop and flying cars decimate your commute time? Historically, every time new transit methods have hit the mainstream, tolerance for distance has opened up right alongside them, further catalyzing city spread.
And just as Hyperloop and the Boring Company aim to make your commute immaterial, autonomous vehicle (AV) ridesharing services will spread out cities in two ways: (1) by drastically reducing parking spaces needed (vertical parking decks = more prime real estate); and (2) by untethering you from the steering wheel. Want an extra two hours of sleep on the way to work? Schedule a sleeper AV and nap on your route to the office. Need a car-turned-mobile-office? No problem.
Meanwhile, aerial taxis (i.e. flying cars) will allow you to escape ground congestion entirely, delivering you from bedroom to boardroom at decimated time scales.
Already working with regulators, Uber Elevate has staked ambitious plans for its UberAIR airborne taxi project. By 2023, Uber anticipates rolling out flying drones in its two first pilot cities, Los Angeles and Dallas. Flying between rooftop skyports, drones would carry passengers at a height of 1,000 to 2,000 feet at speeds between 100 to 200 mph. And while costs per ride are anticipated to resemble those of an Uber Black based on mileage, prices are projected to soon drop to those of an UberX.
But the true economic feat boils down to this: if I were to commute 50 to 100 kilometers, I could get two or three times the house for the same price. (Not to mention the extra living space offered up by my now-unneeded garage.)
All of a sudden, virtual reality, broadband, AVs, or high-speed vehicles are going to change where we live and where we work. So rather than living in a crowded, dense urban core for access to jobs and entertainment, our future of personalized, autonomous, low-cost transport opens the luxury of rural areas to all without compromising the benefits of a short commute.
Once these drivers multiply your real estate options, how will you select your next home?
Disintermediation: Say Bye to Your Broker
In a future of continuous and personalized preference-tracking, why hire a human agent who knows less about your needs and desires than a personal AI?
Just as disintermediation is cutting out bankers and insurance agents, so too is it closing in on real estate brokers. Over the next decade, as AI becomes your agent, VR will serve as your medium.
To paint a more vivid picture of how this will look, over 98 percent of your home search will be conducted from the comfort of your couch through next-generation VR headgear.
Once you’ve verbalized your primary desires for home location, finishings, size, etc. to your personal AI, it will offer you top picks, tour-able 24/7, with optional assistance by a virtual guide and constantly updated data. As a seller, this means potential buyers from two miles, or two continents, away.
Throughout each immersive VR tour, advanced eye-tracking software and a permissioned machine learning algorithm follow your gaze, further learn your likes and dislikes, and intelligently recommend other homes or commercial residences to visit.
Curious as to what the living room might look like with a fresh coat of blue paint and a white carpet? No problem! VR programs will be able to modify rendered environments instantly, changing countless variables, from furniture materials to even the sun’s orientation. Keen to input your own furniture into a VR-rendered home? Advanced AIs could one day compile all your existing furniture, electronics, clothing, decorations, and even books, virtually organizing them across any accommodating new space.
As 3D scanning technologies make extraordinary headway, VR renditions will only grow cheaper and higher resolution. One company called Immersive Media (disclosure: I’m an investor and advisor) has a platform for 360-degree video capture and distribution, and is already exploring real estate 360-degree video.
Smaller firms like Studio 216, Vieweet, Arch Virtual, ArX Solutions, and Rubicon Media can similarly capture and render models of various properties for clients and investors to view and explore. In essence, VR real estate platforms will allow you to explore any home for sale, do the remodel, and determine if it truly is the house of your dreams.
Once you’re ready to make a bid, your AI will even help estimate a bid, process and submit your offer. Real estate companies like Zillow, Trulia, Move, Redfin, ZipRealty (acquired by Realogy in 2014) and many others have already invested millions in machine learning applications to make search, valuation, consulting, and property management easier, faster, and much more accurate.
But what happens if the home you desire most means starting from scratch with new construction?
New Methods and Materials for Construction
For thousands of years, we’ve been constrained by the construction materials of nature. We built bricks from naturally abundant clay and shale, used tree limbs as our rooftops and beams, and mastered incredible structures in ancient Rome with the use of cement.
But construction is now on the cusp of a materials science revolution. Today, I’d like to focus on three key materials:
Upcycled Materials
Imagine if you could turn the world’s greatest waste products into their most essential building blocks. Thanks to UCLA researchers at CO2NCRETE, we can already do this with carbon emissions.
Today, concrete produces about five percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But what if concrete could instead conserve greenhouse emissions? CO2NCRETE engineers capture carbon from smokestacks and combine it with lime to create a new type of cement. The lab’s 3D printers then shape the upcycled concrete to build entirely new structures. Once conquered at scale, upcycled concrete will turn a former polluter into a future conserver.
Or what if we wanted to print new residences from local soil at hand? Marking an extraordinary convergence between robotics and 3D printing, the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) is already working on a solution.
In a major feat for low-cost construction in remote zones, IAAC has found a way to convert almost any soil into a building material with three times the tensile strength of industrial clay. Offering myriad benefits, including natural insulation, low GHG emissions, fire protection, air circulation, and thermal mediation, IAAC’s new 3D printed native soil can build houses on-site for as little as $1,000.
Nanomaterials
Nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong, and self-charging buildings. While carbon nanotubes dramatically increase the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers, revolutionizing their structural flexibility, nanomaterials don’t stop here.
Several research teams are pioneering silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. Researchers at the US National Renewable Energy Lab have developed similar smart windows. Turning into solar panels when bathed in sunlight, these thermochromic windows will power our buildings, changing color as they do.
Self-Healing Infrastructure
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the US needs to spend roughly $4.5 trillion to fix nationwide roads, bridges, dams, and common infrastructure by 2025. But what if infrastructure could fix itself?
Enter self-healing concrete. Engineers at Delft University have developed bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. As head researcher Henk Jonkers explains, “What makes this limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. […] If cracks appear as a result of pressure on the concrete, the concrete will heal these cracks itself.”
But bio-concrete is only the beginning of self-healing technologies. As futurist architecture firms start printing plastic and carbon-fiber houses like the stunner seen below (using Branch Technologies’ 3D printing technology), engineers have begun tackling self-healing plastic.
And in a bid to go smart, burgeoning construction projects have started embedding sensors for preemptive detection. Beyond materials and sensors, however, construction methods are fast colliding into robotics and 3D printing.
While some startups and research institutes have leveraged robot swarm construction (namely, Harvard’s robotic termite-like swarm of programmed constructors), others have taken to large-scale autonomous robots.
One such example involves Fastbrick Robotics. After multiple iterations, the company’s Hadrian X end-to-end bricklaying robot can now autonomously build a fully livable, 180-square meter home in under 3 days. Using a laser-guided robotic attachment, the all-in-one brick-loaded truck simply drives to a construction site and directs blocks through its robotic arm in accordance with a 3D model.
Layhead. Image Credit: Fastbrick Robotics.
Meeting verified building standards, Hadrian and similar solutions hold massive promise in the long term, deployable across post-conflict refugee sites and regions recovering from natural catastrophes.
Imagine the implications. Eliminating human safety concerns and unlocking any environment, autonomous builder robots could collaboratively build massive structures in space or deep underwater habitats.
Final Thoughts
Where, how, and what we live in form a vital pillar of our everyday lives. The concept of “home” is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. At the same time, real estate and construction are two of the biggest playgrounds for technological convergence, each on the verge of revolutionary disruption.
As underlying shifts in transportation, land reclamation, and the definition of “space” (real vs. virtual) take hold, the real estate market is about to explode in value, spreading out urban centers on unprecedented scales and unlocking vast new prime “property.”
Meanwhile, converging advancements in AI and VR are fundamentally disrupting the way we design, build, and explore new residences. Just as mirror worlds create immersive, virtual real estate economies, VR tours and AI agents are absorbing both sides of the coin to entirely obliterate the middleman.
And as materials science breakthroughs meet new modes of construction, the only limits to tomorrow’s structures are those of our own imagination.
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Image Credit: OCEANIX/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435150 Fieldwork Robotics completes initial ...
University of Plymouth spinout company Fieldwork Robotics has completed initial field trials of its robot raspberry harvesting system. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435140 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
GENETICS
Gene Therapy Might Have Its First Blockbuster
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“…drug giant Novartis expects to win approval to launch what it says will be the first ‘blockbuster’ gene-replacement treatment. A blockbuster is any drug with more than $1 billion in sales each year. The treatment, called Zolgensma, is able to save infants born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1, a degenerative disease that usually kills within two years.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Took a Test to Detect Lung Cancer. It Got an A.
Denise Grady | The New York Times
“Computers were as good or better than doctors at detecting tiny lung cancers on CT scans, in a study by researchers from Google and several medical centers. The technology is a work in progress, not ready for widespread use, but the new report, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a glimpse of the future of artificial intelligence in medicine.”
ROBOTICS
The Rise and Reign of Starship, the World’s First Robotic Delivery Provider
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“[Starship’s] delivery robots have travelled a combined 200,000 miles, carried out 50,000 deliveries, and been tested in over 100 cities in 20 countries. It is a regular fixture not just in multiple neighborhoods but also university campuses.”
SPACE
Elon Musk Just Ignited the Race to Build the Space Internet
Jonathan O’Callaghan | Wired
“It’s estimated that about 3.3 billion people lack access to the internet, but Elon Musk is trying to change that. On Thursday, May 23—after two cancelled launches the week before—SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, in Florida, as part of the firm’s mission to bring low-cost, high-speed internet to the world.”
VIRTUAL REALITY
The iPod of VR Is Here, and You Should Try It
Mark Wilson | Fast Company
“In nearly 15 years of writing about cutting-edge technology, I’ve never seen a single product line get so much better so fast. With [the Oculus] Quest, there are no PCs required. There are no wires to run. All you do is grab the cloth headset and pull it around your head.”
FUTURE OF FOOD
Impossible Foods’ Rising Empire of Almost Meat
Chris Ip | Engadget
“Impossible says it wants to ultimately create a parallel universe of ersatz animal products from steak to eggs. …Yet as Impossible ventures deeper into the culinary uncanny valley, it also needs society to discard a fundamental cultural idea that dates back millennia and accept a new truth: Meat doesn’t have to come from animals.”
LONGEVITY
Can We Live Longer but Stay Younger?
Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker
“With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever.”
PRIVACY
Facial Recognition Has Already Reached Its Breaking Point
Lily Hay Newman | Wired
“As facial recognition technologies have evolved from fledgling projects into powerful software platforms, researchers and civil liberties advocates have been issuing warnings about the potential for privacy erosions. Those mounting fears came to a head Wednesday in Congress.”
Image Credit: Andrush / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots