Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Amazon Selling Face-Recognition Tech to Police
May 22nd, 2018Amazon, a large CIA contractor, is selling face-recognition tech to police. Via: AP: The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are asking Amazon to stop marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to police, saying law enforcement agencies could use the technology to “easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of […]
Robots Fight Weeds in Challenge to Agrochemical Giants
May 22nd, 2018Via: Reuters: In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles. Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot […]
Saildrones
May 20th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.
Google: Behavioral Sequencing
May 18th, 2018Via: The Verge: Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in late 2016 by […]
The Future of Border Security: Lie-Detecting Computer Kiosks Equipped with Artificial Intelligence
May 15th, 2018Magic 8-Ball says, “Orange jumpsuit for you.” Via: CNBC: International travelers could find themselves in the near future talking to a lie-detecting kiosk when they’re going through customs at an airport or border crossing. The same technology could be used to provide initial screening of refugees and asylum seekers at busy border crossings. The U.S. […]
Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot Running Outside
May 11th, 2018Via: Boston Dynamics:
Google Demonstrates New AI Having Phone Conversations with Humans
May 9th, 2018Via: Guardian: Google’s virtual assistant can now make phone calls on your behalf to schedule appointments, make reservations in restaurants and get holiday hours. The robotic assistant uses a very natural speech pattern that includes hesitations and affirmations such as “er” and “mmm-hmm” so that it is extremely difficult to distinguish from an actual human […]
South Wales Police Facial Recognition System Generated 92% False Positives at Soccer Match
May 7th, 2018Via: Engadget: Ask critics of police face recognition why they’re so skeptical and they’ll likely cite unreliability as one factor. What if the technology flags an innocent person? Unfortunately, that caution appears to have been warranted to some degree. South Wales Police are facing a backlash after they released data showing that their face recognition […]
Scientists Plan Huge European AI Hub to Compete with U.S.
April 24th, 2018Via: Guardian: Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe. The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after […]
Amazon Designing Some Sort of Home Robot
April 23rd, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Now Amazon.com Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail […]
