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AI

SPACE: International Space Station to Get a Floating Brain

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Floating Brain

The crew on board the International Space Station (ISS) will soon welcome a new member — one that is 3D-printed from metal and plastic and is described by its creators as “a kind of flying brain.” It goes by the name CIMON, short for “Crew Interactive Mobile Companion.” Built by the aerospace design company Airbus in collaboration with IBM, CIMON houses artificial intelligence (AI) in an autonomous, spherical body that would “float” in the space station’s microgravity environment, with a screen that can display data readouts for astronauts — or present an image of a friendly face — as well … Read more

TECH & SEX: Porn AI Predicts Naughty Search Terms

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man keyboard - pixabay

People’s future porn habits have been revealed – at least according to YouPorn’s artificial intelligence system. By the end of 2018, your favourite porn search terms will apparently include “girl time flanty,” “pussy firking” and “anal dangcuble”. In fact, “girl time flanty” will be the third-most popular search, according to YouPorn. We’re not sure what flanty means – or firking and dangcuble, for that matter. The site explained that its “data science and machine learning teams trained a recurrent neural network to look at our search trends,” and provide predictions for the end of the year. It seems society will … Read more

Robot Learns the Meaning of Love

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Alex and Bina48

It’s been a typical week for typical college student BINA48. On Monday, BINA attended her robot ethics class. On Tuesday, the second-semester student had an excused absence to ring the bell at the stock exchange, and soon BINA will be assistant-teaching a kindergarten class and getting a face-lift at Hanson Robotics. So maybe BINA’s schedule isn’t that typical, and maybe the artificial-intelligence-driven robot isn’t the average college kid. But that hasn’t stopped the robot, which looks like the bust of a flesh-and-blood woman, from completing a Philosophy of Love course at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. Programmed … Read more

TECH: New Google AI is Homophobic

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Google AI Bot

Google Google has created an artificial intelligence bot – and it’s homophobic. The $500 billion company’s new software, Cloud Natural Language API, analyses statements to find out whether they’re positive or negative. It then gives users a “Sentiment” score from -1 all the way up to +1 – and the higher up the scale, the more positive it thinks your sentence is. “You can use it to understand sentiment about your product on social media or parse intent from customer conversations,” Google explains. The only issue is: it doesn’t like gay people. Just contrast the positive rating for “I’m straight” … Read more

News: An AI Christmas Carol

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AI Christmas Carol

The carol is a lie — and it’s an extremely unsettling one. University of Toronto researchers tasked an A.I. with looking at a picture of a Christmas tree, writing a song about it, and then singing the results for the world to hear. The song that came out of it is definitely a Christmas song, but it’s an extremely unsettling one. It’s no “Santa Baby,” but it does show just how far A.I. has come. Nvidia revealed some more details about the project, which runs on its hardware, on Wednesday. The company said the neural network used to create the … Read more

For Readers: The Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley

Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Aidee Ladnier: Why aren’t there more depictions of the uncanny valley? Do we really want AI and robots that we can’t distinguish from humans? OK, there are a couple ideas here, so let me unpack this a little. For those who are unaware, the “uncanny valley” is an idea of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. Basically, people can feel an affinity for robots that are not too human. But there comes a point where a robot approaches humanlike appearance, movement, etc, but is not quite there, that becomes quite disturbing. Wikipedia describes it this way: … Read more

Microsoft Created an AI, But She’s a Racist Homophobic Trump Supporter

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Tay Tweets

Microsoft has created a new chat bot to “learn” from the internet… but she picked up a lot of bad habits. The tech company announced the launch of Tay this week, an artificial intelligence bot that is learning to talk like millennials by analysing conversations on Twitter, Facebook and the internet… Unfortunately, when you make an AI bot that is designed to imitate the behaviour of other people on the internet… you probably need a filter of some kind. Tay was originally doing okay, learning how to have polite conversations… but after getting influenced by a few too many people … Read more