H+ Weekly - Issue #5

Jul 10, 2015

ISSUE #5

Today, in H+ Weekly - AI talks about philosophy, what's happening inside driveless car's mind, cities of the future, exoskeletons, awesome drones and more.

Enjoy!

Google Made a Chatbot That Debates the Meaning of Life

And it learned all that stuff from movies. I wonder what kind of movies it watched. If you are interested in more technical details, there is a paper explaining how it works with some sample conversations with the chatbot.

How a driverless car sees the road

Chris Urmson, head of Google's driveless car project, explains why we should leave driving to machines and gives us a glimpse into the driveless car's mind. Also, he shows how the driveless car sees the surrounding world.

Inceptionism, or how AI sees the art

Take famous pieces of art, give it to Google's deep neural network and see how it sees them. Here's even more. And if you want to generate your own inceptionism art, folks from Google open-sourced the code on GitHub.

Designing Superhumans

NPR tackles the problem of genetic engineering, showing possible benefits (eradicating diseases for example) as well as possible dangers and ethical concerns.

Robot Exoskeletons Are Coming to Japan's Airports

Japan's population is getting older, but still someone has to do hard labor work. To help women and elderly people lift heavy objects, Cyberdyne (yup, that's their name) came up with a small exoskeleton that gives a boost of strength.

The Army is Developing A Mobile Arm Exoskeleton for Firearm Aim Stabilization

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean people are also thinking how to use exoskeletons to give its user some superpowers. Like extraordinaire marksmanship skill.

Experts Respond to Zuckerberg's telepathy

Last week Mark Zuckerberg stated that in future we will be using something that looks like telepathy to communicate with each other (check H+ Weekly Issue #4 for details). In response to Zuckerberg's bold prediction, Discovery News asked neuroscientists how far are we from reading human mind and from sending thoughts over internet.

London is going to have underground farms

A company called Growing Underground will transform WWII abandoned underground tunnels in London into hydroponic farms.

CRISPR, the disruptor

Heidi Ledford explains on Nature what is CRISPR, why it is biggest game changer to hit biology.

Google Glass Is Alive

It looks like Google Glass is coming back. But this time it is not going to be targeted at the general consumer, but at the enterprise market.

Scientists link animal brains to create a real-life mind meld

Resistance is futile. Recent research shows it is possible to link multiple organic brains info a network to combine the brain powers and solve complex tasks.

Disney is funding AI for fictional characters, 3D-printed bionic hands and gadget mind control

So that you could speak with AI chatbot that's pretending to be Winnie the Pooh while wearing VR gear.

IBM has made a chip using 7nm technology

And Time explains in plain English what it means.

Know your parts - memristor

Guys for Hack a Day wrote a little introduction into memristors - new electronic part, that might change a lot of things. Some people believe that a memristor is that part that will make us able to build artificial brains.

Tricorder XPRIZE Competition Heats Up

In case you don't know what is XPRIZE - it's a competition in which teams are facing some insane and bold challenge, like build a reusable space ship, send a probe to the Moon, or build a tricorder. Yes, that thing from Star Trek which makes funny sounds and tells how ill or dead the person is.

Smart cities of the future

We have computers in our pockets that understand what we say to them, the self-driving cars are rolling out on the streets, and yet we still build our cities in the old way. But there some projects that explore how the future cities should look like.

Projects like Masdar - a fully sustainable on green technologies futuristic city with driveless public transport system built in the middle of the desert.

Or CITE - an unpopulated city built also in the middle of the desert in New Mexico, which goals is to test some new technologies before they will be used in real cities.

Future cities would have to also solve the problem of moving stuff around. Solution - robots. A lot of robots.

Robots Build Large Structures With Brick and Concrete

Check out this robot which can build a building in a matter of days. Maybe your next house will be built by one of these machines. Or maybe your moon space-station. Who knows.

Robots can't kill you – claiming they can is dangerous

Soon after the tragic accident in Volkswagen's factory in Germany the internet was full of memes saying "it has begun" or "robots are coming". The media wasn't any better. This article on Phys.org explains how media, looking for a catchy story, are making harm to the industry.

Meet Gimball, a Collision-Tolerant Drone

Norm from Tested went to DARPA Robotics Challenge and met there Gimball - a drone which isn't afraid of hitting walls or other obstacles.

Speaking of drones...

The World's First Drone Dogfight

The idea is simple - get some drones, mount a Nerf guns on them and then try to knock them out from the air in an awesome dogfight. We've might see a birth of a new sport.

Swiss Post is testing drone delivery system

Someone here isn't not afraid of flying robots with packages. Swiss Post started a month-long tests of drone delivery system, which is intended to quickly deliver urgent packages to hard-to-reach places.

First Robot Wedding in Japan

When people were adding a rainbow overlay on their avatars, this important news just went unnoticed under the radar.

Biggest Neural Network Ever Pushes AI Deep Learning

And it's 10 times bigger than previous biggest network built by Google.

Steve Wozniak says that humans will become robots' pets

How a Robot Should Choose to Kill

I think that building an advanced autonomous robot will not only move technology forward, but it will also teach us a lot about ourselves. In his article, Alex Hamilton gives some possible hard ethical problems for military, transportation or medical robots and their designers.

Linus Torvalds is not afraid of AI

Some tech gurus, like Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Steve Wozniak, are warning us against AI like it is something that will be the end for us all. But some tech gurus aren't so afraid. Like Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. In a recent Q&A session, he raised some good points on the topic, saying that we will more likely see "targeted AI" specializing in understanding language that killer Terminator-like robots.

H+ Weekly - Issue #5

Smart cities of the future

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