time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
Boston Dynamics are behind some of the most interesting robot videos we’ve seen on the Internet, from Big Dog tossing cinder blocks around to, more recently, the reveal of their sharp yellow SpotMini.
If you’ve ever dreamed of having a slender, cat-shaped robot that could spy on your friends from the comfort of your own home, believe it or not South Korean roboticists are happy to oblige.
During last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco, Epic Games revealed one of their latest projects: Siren, a “digital human.” It’s actually some fairly realistic CGI, streamed directly into Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. They worked alongside Tencent, Cubic Motion, and 3Lateral to bring Siren to life, as well as Vicon, who provided her “lifelike …
Continue reading “Meet Siren, The Digital Human Of Your (Uncanny) Dreams”
If there’s one thing I really think the world could use more of right now, it’s robot fish. Thankfully, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has delivered. According to IEEE Spectrum, their roboticists have developed an intriguing new “soft robotic spy fish,” which scientists are now using to explore the ocean without disrupting its …
A Swedish funeral agency called Fenix intends to experiment with creating “digital copies” of the deceased, and they’re looking for volunteers. Don’t get too excited. Yet. The agency’s first order of business is to focus strictly on text, which would mimic the personality of the deceased and answer simple questions, maybe talk about the weather, …
Continue reading “Digital Immortality Phase One – Resurrecting the Dead With Chat Bots?”
“This is not sci-fi imagination or an extreme sport for the fearless.” So reads the opening of the above video, in which we see the Ehang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle in action. It’s essentially a big drone designed to carry human passengers, reportedly the first in the world.
It’s been a couple years since I first learned of Sophia the Robot. She gained media attention in 2016 when she appeared at SXSW and did an interview with her creator, Dr. David Hanson of Hanson Robotics.
Imagine a future in which many of the electrical devices we take for granted today are replaced by plant nanobionics, a natural form of technology that can power itself, as plants do. MIT engineers recently created nanobionic light-emitting plants that may prove such a future awaits us.
Meet the newest version of SpotMini, Boston Dynamics’ yellow four-legged robot that actually looks pretty sleek. It seems a lot more advanced than their older robots, something I could honestly see chasing me down in a post-apocalyptic robot future hellscape. Exciting and terrifying, just the way it should be.
If you asked me how artificial intelligence would learn about humans, Skype would not be the first thing to come to mind. But, apparently, that’s exactly how the robot apocalypse will go down. Fair enough. Facebook’s AI lab has designed a bot animation that can mimic human facial expressions through an artificially intelligent algorithm – …
Continue reading “Facebook Lab Creates AI that Learned Human Facial Expressions from Skype”
Google’s chief of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, claims that artificial intelligence will irrevocably “change the nature of humanity itself” by the year 2029. How will we get there? Metro breaks it down for us, outlining the steps we can expect to take on our way to electronic doom. Right now, they say, we’re surrounded by what’s …
Continue reading “Humanity Will Change Forever By 2029, Says Google’s Resident Futurist”
The robot apocalypse will not happen in a day. First, they’ll invade our kitchens. We’ve already seen these menacing machines chopping noodles in China. Now, it seems they’ve moved on to something even more nefarious – they’re making salads.
Here’s something that slipped by me a few months ago: A group called On-Art Corp in Tokyo unvieled their 8m tall (26 ft) mechanical suit robot dinosaurs back in November. You can check them out in the above video. They’re apparently TRX03 robots with human operators inside (who, as far as I can tell, walk …