Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Country


Would you sacrifice one person to save the lives of many? Your answer to this moral dilemma may reveal how popular you are

Daily Mail - Science & tech

It is almost an impossible choice - deciding whether to sacrifice the life of one innocent person to save the lives of five others. But scientists have discovered that the choice you make in this scenario could have a drastic impact on how trustworthy people think you are. The findings may help to explain why humans are often drawn to moral choices that do not benefit the greater good, such as refusing to make such sacrifices. Psychologists have explored why humans seen to be drawn to making'illogical' moral choices, like sacrificing the lives of many to save the life of one person, depicted in Saving Private Ryan (pictured). It suggests there may be certain rules about morality hardwired into human nature due to our evolution as a social species. Jim Everett, a psychologist at the University of Oxford who led the work, said such rule-based decisions - known as deontological morality which focuses on ideas of right and wrong – may have served to increase group cohesion in the past by helping people trust each other.


What is a chat bot, and should I be using one?

#artificialintelligence

Once, a messenger app did just that – message. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, tech companies are falling over themselves to prove how much more useful and interactive their apps can be – which is why you're about to see an explosion of "bots". Kik, the mobile chat application popular with teenagers, launched its Bot Shop on 5 April, and Facebook is poised to launch its own bot store for Facebook Messenger next week. Every brand from Barbie to the Washington Post seems to be working on a chat bot of its own. For Kik, chat bots are the next step in the evolution of the internet.


AI just 3D printed a brand-new Rembrandt, and it's shockingly good

#artificialintelligence

There's already plenty of angst out there about the prospect of jobs lost to artificial intelligence, but this week, artists got a fresh reason to be concerned. A new "Rembrandt" painting unveiled in Amsterdam is not the work of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn at all, but rather the creation of a combination of technologies including facial recognition, AI, and 3D printing. Essentially, a deep-learning algorithm was trained on Rembrandt's 346 known paintings and then asked to produce a brand-new one replicating the artist's subject matter and style. Dubbed "The Next Rembrandt," the result is a portrait of a caucasian male, and it looks uncannily like the real thing. One particularly interesting detail about The Next Rembrandt project, which was a collaboration among several organizations including Dutch bank ING and Microsoft, is how the algorithm chose the subject for its painting, since it had to be entirely new.


Artificial Intelligence Creates Immense Potential for Innovation and Growth in the Car Industry

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digitisation will change the future of cars, challenge traditional business models and create immense potential for innovation. In future, cars will be cognitive not only will they recognize voices and be able to optimise the journey, they will also incorporate other cognitive technologies of AI - computer vision, machine learning, rules based systems as well as planning and scheduling. It is around these subjects that Frost & Sullivan's Intelligent Mobility event - taking place in London on the 28th and 29th of June - will evolve. Today, there are 4.4 million taxis globally. In 2020 this number is expected to reach 5.5 million.


Rise of the bots: X.ai raises 23m more for Amy, a bot that arranges appointments

#artificialintelligence

While voice-recognition-powered virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana and Amazon's Echo continue to get more useful and reliable on the march to platform-dom, there is a parallel wave of development underway that has captured the public eye, where machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing are getting corralled for more narrowly purposed means -- by way of bots. Today, a New York-based startup called X.ai -- which has developed a bot that helps you arrange meetings with other people by way of a virtual assistant ('Amy' or'Andrew') -- announced that it has raised 23 million. The Series B funding will be used to take X.ai from a closed and free beta to a commercial product, and the startup also plans to hire more data scientists and other engineers. X.ai is not releasing details of its valuation, but we understand from reliable sources that it is now around 100 million -- a decent jump on the 40 million valuation the company had when it announced its Series A of 9 million in January 2015. The funding is being led by Two Sigma Ventures, with other new investors including DCM Ventures and Work Bench Ventures.



In the Loop: Dead body found in Haunted Mansion at Disneyland Paris

Los Angeles Times

Welcome to another edition of In the Loop, the Los Angeles Times' theme park newsletter. I'm Funland theme park blogger Brady MacDonald, and this week, we drop in on the Wizarding World grand opening, taste-test Disney's Food and Wine Festival, bid farewell to the last-remaining Back to the Future ride and marvel at Phantasialand's visually stunning new coaster. Times columnist Mary McNamara writes that Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood is the place where "magic comes to life, or as close as it gets." For those who have never been on the world's best dark ride, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey turns the traditional dark ride experience on its head by placing riders on the end of a unique robotic arm. The often-overlooked Flight of the Hippogriff at Wizarding World is a short but fun ride that's perfect for young kids eager to climb aboard their first roller coaster.


Robots Might Be The Future Of Mail Delivery

Huffington Post - Tech news and opinion

TROISDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's Deutsche Post is testing robots that could help postal workers cope with increasing numbers of parcels on their delivery rounds, a company manager said on Thursday. The volume of parcels being delivered by Deutsche Post in Germany is rising steadily as more and more Germans buy goods online from retailers such as Amazon.com That is making up for declining letter volumes, but posing problems due to the larger size of items involved. "Robots could be used in deliveries in three to five years' time," Clemens Beckmann, head of innovation at the group's parcel and letter division, said in an interview with Reuters. The robots, which look like a table on wheels on which goods can be placed, would follow delivery workers, helping them to transport and carry heavy parcels. If the postie stops walking, the robot stops too, and it only starts again when they move on.


AI & Machine Learning on Flipboard

#artificialintelligence

Log in Sign up p Discover and save creative ideas p Discover even br more ideas Just a few br more details... p Continue p Creating an account means you're okay with … The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google's Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. NVIDIA proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers. When Microsoft's Tay, the artificially intelligent bot, was taught to be a racist Holocaust-denier by the online masses, traditional publishers got a … Humans have a long and storied history of freaking out over the possible effects of our technologies. Long ago, Plato worried that writing would hurt people's memories and "implant forgetfulness in their souls." More recently, Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein's monster warned us against playing … A brief and broken reappearance.