Technology Tuesday: September 12

Every week The Job Shop Blog will bring you our 5 top science and technology news stories from around the web. This week: An AI baby helps us explore what it means to be human, a new metamaterial from MagicLeap and Berkeley, rejuvenating middle aged muscle tissue, bionic lenses that give better than 20/20 vision, and healing broken bones with gene therapy and microbubbles. BabyX, the virtual, artificially intelligent creation of Mark Sagar and his new company, Soul Machines Ltd., looks, sounds, and acts so much like a real baby that interacting with her produces a genuine emotional response -- just like the kind you get when a real baby coos and giggles at you. That's exactly the point: BabyX makes it appealing to humans to interact with an AI, and each instance of interaction teaches her more about what it's like being human. Sagar is a force for the humanization of AI, which he believes may be important to installing a symbiotic relationship between humans and AIs.