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Artificial Intelligence

U=(N/T)M*G: Decade

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Cool cats, we’ve entered a new decade and I’m on the edge of my seat about it. The 2010’s were a circus for me, personally and publicly and politically, a roller coaster of wildness I’m hoping won’t be repeated. It wasn’t all bad. I started my writing career and had a son, got married and got divorced, made friends and lost friends and rekindled my zest for life. The last decade was something to behold, a time to look back and shake my head in wonder that I manage to knuckle under, survive it mostly on nothing by spite. The … Read more

Are Conscious Computers Impossible?

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Artificial Intelligence AI - pixabay

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that. So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like … Read more

How Will Deepfake AIs Change Our World?

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Deepfake Mona Lisa

Of all the scary powers of the internet, it’s ability to trick the unsuspecting might be the most frightening. Clickbait, photoshopped pictures and false news are some of the worst offenders, but recent years have also seen the rise of a new potentially dangerous tool known as deepfake artificial intelligence (AI). The term deepfake refers to counterfeit, computer-generated video and audio that is hard to distinguish from genuine, unaltered content. It is to film what Photoshop is for images. The tool relies on what’s known as generative adversarial networks (GANs), a technique invented in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, a Ph.D. … Read more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An AI Created a Model of Our Universe. We Have No Idea How it Works (But it Does)

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universe - pixabay

The first-ever artificial intelligence simulation of the universe seems to work like the real thing — and is almost as mysterious. Researchers reported the new simulation June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The goal was to create a virtual version of the cosmos in order to simulate different conditions for the universe’s beginning, but the scientists also hope to study their own simulation to understand why it works so well. “It’s like teaching image-recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” study co-author Shirley Ho, … Read more

Quantum Computers Are Improving Spooky Fast

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quantum computers - pixabay

The era of quantum supremacy is nigh. Quantum computers, which make calculations with entangled particles, or qubits, are poised to overtake their conventional counterparts very, very fast. And it’s all captured by a new law of computing, known as Neven’s Law, according to a fascinating new article in Quanta Magazine. So, what exactly is Neven’s Law? Named after Hartmut Neven, the director of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at Google who first noticed the phenomenon, the law dictates how quickly quantum processors are improving, or getting faster at processing calculations, relative to regular computers. And it turns out, they’re gaining … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Listens to Voices, Then Generates Speakers’ Faces

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AI Creates Faces From Voices - Oh et al

Have you ever constructed a mental image of a person you’ve never seen, based solely on their voice? Artificial intelligence (AI) can now do that, generating a digital image of a person’s face using only a brief audio clip for reference. Named Speech2Face, the neural network — a computer that “thinks” in a manner similar to the human brain — was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the internet that showed over 100,000 different people talking. From this dataset, Speech2Face learned associations between vocal cues and certain physical features in a human face, researchers wrote in a … Read more