Media
Actors, teachers, therapists – think your job is safe from robots? Think again
In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years. Bottom line is robots want our jobs. And no one is going to build a wall around them or tariff them out of existence. In a way this is nothing new.
At what point should an intelligent machine be considered a 'person'?
Science fiction has already explored the theme of robot rights, such as the film Bicentennial Man. Science fiction likes to depict robots as autonomous machines, capable of making their own decisions and often expressing their own personalities. Yet we also tend to think of robots as property, and as lacking the kind of rights that we reserve for people. But if a machine can think, decide and act on its own volition, if it can be harmed or held responsible for its actions, should we stop treating it like property and start treating it more like a person with rights? What if a robot achieves true self-awareness?
'Land of Mine,' 'Tanna' and more critics' picks, Feb. 10-16
Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. The Eagle Huntress A portrait of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia who defies eons of tradition by learning to hunt with fierce golden eagles is a documentary so satisfying it makes you feel good about feeling good. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Founder Michael Keaton gives a performance of ratty, reptilian brilliance as Ray Kroc, the American salesman who turned a California burger stand into the global fast-food behemoth that is McDonald's, in John Lee Hancock's shrewd and satisfyingly fat-free biopic. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant.
5 Ways Deep Learning Improves Your Daily Life - TOPBOTS
The movie you choose to watch may be heavily influenced by Netflix's sophisticated algorithms. Similarly, decisions like where you choose to dine and what you choose to wear are increasingly facilitated by predictive technologies powered by deep learning. Here are five ways that popular consumer tech companies Netflix, Yelp, Yahoo, StitchFix and Google improve your online experience with artificial intelligence. Historically, watching television is a uni-directional communication channel. You receive the content, but give no feedback to the content producers.
Kristen Stewart co-wrote a paper about AI in filmmaking
Actor, director, model, teen vampire movie star – now Kristen Stewart can add research author to her list of credentials. Stewart, best known for her portrayal of Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga films, has co-written an article published in Cornell University's online library arXiv. It explains the artificial intelligence technique used in her new short film, Come Swim, that enables footage to take on the visual appearance of a painting. Kristen Stewart, best known for her portrayal of Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga films, has co-written an article published in Cornell University's online library arXiv Many popular software programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, already provide filters that can make photographs take on the general style of oil paintings, pen sketches, screen-prints or chalk drawings, for example. The algorithms needed to accomplish this first began to produce aesthetically pleasing results in the early 1990s.
Anki - Robots, AI, and AR in Your Living Room - Nanalyze
When we think about robots, we often think of humanoid helpers like in the Jetsons (it's a cartoon that older people distinguished people would have watched growing up) or massive industrial automatons that build those Teslas you see whizzing around these days. Maybe instead, we are reminded of a looming job crisis, where machines threaten to steal our livelihoods. In any case, "serious" industries with "serious" challenges are generally at the forefront of discussions about robotics because the technology involved has been research-driven and resource-intensive. This seems not to be the major hurdle anymore, and a lighter and rather cool branch of robots are taking over our living rooms: toys. Still, toys aren't often thought of as lucrative investment opportunities.
The Morning After: Wednesday, February 8th, 2017
It's the middle of the week, and we're here to help. Besides a brand new episode of The Future IRL, we have a new record broken by Tesla and a 5,000-year-old beer recipe. If you, like Dave Chappelle, believe everything is better in slow motion, then we have good news. Sony just announced its latest camera sensor for smartphones, which is capable of recording HD (1,920 x 1,080) video at 1,000fps, which it says is about 8x the speed of any other chip. Plus, it can pull this off without producing any of that wobbly jello-like distortion effect.
Microsoft AI Unit's New APIs Improve Content Moderation And Speech-To-Text Capabilities
Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group announced that its Microsoft Cognitive Services includes now 25 tools forming the backbone for Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translator. According to Hot Hardware, two of the new APIs created by the company's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group are the Content Moderator and Bing Speech. Bing Speech is capable of both converting text to speech and translating speech into text. Microsoft's speech recognition technology uses language and acoustic models to in order to distinguish between similar-sounding words and to customize its services for a specific language. In order to narrow the focus of the recognition engine, a Custom Speech Service lets developers supply their own data.
Mark Cuban on Why You Need to Study Artificial Intelligence or You'll be a Dinosaur in 3 Years
Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn, founder of Media REDEF. They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI. Mark made a fortune by being early in Local Area Networking, streaming and then High Definition video so perhaps it's worth listening. He said that he believes AI will have a bigger impact than any technology in the last 30 years.
How AI, IoT and cybersecurity will fuel growth for tech and media companies
This is an era of disruption. Technology innovation, the intensifying march of digitization, and the cumulative effect of the "big exponentials" - the laws of accelerating growth governing processing power, storage, and bandwidth - are shattering, reshaping, and redefining economics in and across industries. Companies in the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sectors are in the vanguard, bringing these new opportunities to market - even as their legacy businesses are threatened by them. TMT companies have begun to engage in end-to-end digital transformation by digitizing the value chain in their core businesses and enter new disruptive businesses. Still, they are subject to massive dislocation and attack.