Boston Dynamics' SpotMini Robot Dog Goes on Sale in 2019 Stephen Shankland CNET "The company has 10 SpotMini prototypes now and will work with manufacturing partners to build 100 this year, said company co-founder and President Marc Raibert at a TechCrunch robotics conference Friday. 'That's a prelude to getting into a higher rate of production' in anticipation of sales next year, he said. Made In Space Wins NASA Contract for Next-Gen'Vulcan' Manufacturing System Mike Wall Space.com "'The Vulcan hybrid manufacturing system allows for flexible augmentation and creation of metallic components on demand with high precision,' Mike Snyder, Made In Space chief engineer and principal investigator, said in a statement. Duplex Shows Google Failing at Ethical and Creative AI Design Natasha Lomas TechCrunch "But while the home crowd cheered enthusiastically at how capable Google had seemingly made its prototype robot caller--with Pichai going on to sketch a grand vision of the AI saving people and businesses time--the episode is worryingly suggestive of a company that views ethics as an after-the-fact consideration. One it does not allow to trouble the trajectory of its engineering ingenuity."

Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence Christoph Scheuermann and Bernhard Zand Spiegel Online "AI lowers the cost of knowledge by orders of magnitude. One good, effective machine learning system can do the work of a million people, whether it's for commercial purposes or for cyberespionage. Imagine a country that produces a thousand times more knowledge than another. This is the challenge we are facing." Gene Therapy Could Free Some People From a Lifetime of Blood Transfusions Emily Mullin MIT Technology Review "A one-time, experimental treatment for an inherited blood disorder has shown dramatic results in a small study. 'They have been tied to this ongoing medical therapy that is burdensome and expensive for their whole lives,' she says. 'Gene therapy has allowed people to have aspirations and really pursue them.' " The Revolutionary Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is About to Set Sail Adele Peters Fast Company "By the end of 2018, the nonprofit says it will bring back its first harvest of ocean plastic from the North Pacific Gyre, along with concrete proof that the design works. The organization expects to bring 5,000 kilograms of plastic ashore per month with its first system. With a full fleet of systems deployed, it believes that it can collect half of the plastic trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch--around 40,000 metric tons--within five years."

Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It's Full-Tilt Insane Matt Simon Wired "To be clear: Humanoids aren't supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move effectively, much less kick off a tumbling routine." This Is the Tesla Semi Truck Zac Estrada The Verge "What Tesla has done today is shown that it wants to invigorate a segment, rather than just make something to comply with more stringent emissions regulations… And in the process, it's trying to do for heavy-duty commercial vehicles what it did for luxury cars--plough forward in its own lane." Should Facebook Notify Readers When They've Been Fed Disinformation? Austin Carr Fast Company "It would be, Reed suggested, the social network equivalent of a newspaper correction--only one that, with the tech companies' expansive data, could actually reach its intended audience, like, say, the 250,000-plus Facebook users who shared the debunked YourNewsWire.com Brain Implant Boosts Memory for First Time Ever Kristin Houser NBC News "Once implanted in the volunteers, Song's device could collect data on their brain activity during tests designed to stimulate either short-term memory or working memory.

Understanding Agent Cooperation Joel Leibo, Vinicius Zambaldi, Marc Lanctot, Janusz Marecki, Thore Graepel Google DeepMind Blog "Recent progress in artificial intelligence and specifically deep reinforcement learning provides us with the tools to look at the problem of social dilemmas through a new lens... we showed that we can apply the modern AI technique of deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to age-old questions in social science such as the mystery of the emergence of cooperation." Agility Robotics Introduces Cassie, a Dynamic and Talented Robot Delivery Ostrich Evan Ackerman IEEE Spectrum "Agility Robotics, a spin-off of Oregon State University, is officially announcing a shiny new bipedal robot named Cassie. Cassie is a dynamic walker, meaning that it walks much more like humans do than most of the carefully plodding bipedal robots we're used to seeing... Cassie has some work to do before it's ready to be hauling groceries up stairs for you, but we're very much looking forward to watching this robot taking more steps toward robust and dynamic legged locomotion." How Escape Rooms and Live Theater Are Paving the Way for VR Bryan Bishop The Verge "Cinema has had more than a century to develop its own language of shots, cuts, and transitions, while storytelling in VR is still in its infancy... creators seem to be zeroing in on interactive, experiential moments as one of the key building blocks of VR storytelling. One of Chris Milk's next projects is a piece set in the Planet of the Apes universe that will lean heavily on AI to drive interactive character performances."

Big Tech's AI Predictions for 2017 Lolita Taub The Huffington Post "For the final Cognitive Business post of the year, I asked artificial intelligence centric Fortune 500 leaders for their 2017 enterprise AI predictions. Microsoft, IBM, Baidu, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, GE, SAS, and Oracle responded. What they had to say is exciting..." Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Make It Easier Than Ever to Fake Images and Video James Vincent The Verge "Smile Vector is just the tip of the iceberg. It's hard to give a comprehensive overview of all the work being done on multimedia manipulation in AI right now, but here are a few examples: creating 3D face models from a single 2D image; changing the facial expressions of a target on video in real time using a human "puppet"; changing the light source and shadows in any picture... live-streaming the presidential debates but making Trump bald..." Artificial Feathers Let Drones Morph Their Wings Like Birds Evan Ackerman IEEE Spectrum "Thanks to overlapping feathers and a joint at the end of the wing, most birds can fold their primary flight feathers back, which significantly reduces the surface area of their wings... These folding wings can vary their surface area by 41 percent. When the wing is completely retracted, lift decreases by 32 percent, and drag decreases by 40 percent, boosting the top speed of the drone from 6.3 meters per second to 7.6 meters per second."

ROBOTICS: MIT's Modular Robotic Chain Is Whatever You Want It to Be Evan Ackerman IEEEE Spectrum "If you can get all of the communication and coordination figured out, though, a modular system offers tons of advantages: robots that come in any size you want, any configuration you want, and that are exceptionally easy to repair and reconfigure on the fly. MIT's ChainFORM is an interesting take on this idea: it's an evolution of last year's LineFORM multifunctional snake robot that introduces modularity to the system..." "What is increasingly called'artificial intelligence,' both inside the tech industry and the media, is more artificial than intelligent. Everyone talks about it, and no one agrees on what it actually means. This leads to the question: What is'AI'? Perhaps the question should instead be: What problems are new technologies trying to solve?" SPACE: John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95 John Noble Wilford The New York Times "In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country's imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh."

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: China Used Crispr to Fight Cancer in a Real, Live Human Megan Molteni Wired "The FDA, for better and for worse, is a historically cautious gatekeeper, unconcerned with international spitting contests. Clinical trials cost millions, and last for years. But George Church, Harvard University geneticist and co-founder of Editas Medicine believes it's a necessary step to ensure new technologies like Crispr-based gene therapies really work. Even when they hold you up from making history." VIRTUAL REALITY: I Hung out With My Past Self in Virtual Reality Ben Popper The Verge "I met the crew from AltspaceVR inside a virtual space station. We chatted briefly, moving around the room...Then I moved off to the side, and watched as my avatar reappeared at our starting location...I watched as beta-Ben repeated the last five minutes of my life."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Conscious Exotica Murray Shanahan Aeon "In what follows I attempt to...[describe] the structure of the space of possible minds, in two dimensions: the capacity for consciousness and the human-likeness of behavior. Implicit in this mapping seems to be the possibility of forms of consciousness so alien that we would not recognize them." The answer is simple: We're at a unique intersection where the neural nets we're trying to implement are more suitable to analog designs, while demand for these types of AI circuits is expected to explode." NEUROSCIENCE: How Network Neuroscience Is Creating a New Era of Mind Control MIT Technology Review "Is it possible to exercise the same kind of control over the most complex network we know of: the human brain?...'A critical question…is how to modulate a human brain network to treat cognitive deficits or enhance mental abilities,' they say. 'We posit that network control fundamentally relates to mind control.'" TRANSPORTATION: Will Driverless Cars Really Save Millions of Lives? Lack of Data Makes It Hard to Know. Michael Laris and Ashley Halsey III The Washington Post "Researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a study funded by Google, dug into the data and discovered just how incomplete the federal numbers are.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Tech Titans Join Forces to Stop AI From Behaving Badly Will Knight MIT Technology Review "A new organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society will seek to foster public dialogue and create guidelines for developing AI so that systems do not misbehave...'The positive impacts of AI will depend not only on the quality of our algorithms, but on the level of public engagement, of transparency, and ethical discussion that takes place around it.'" SPACE: SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – the Full Story Tim Urban Wait But Why "Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they're making...Right now we're all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth--caused by nature or by our own technology--we're done. That's like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you'd be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. QUANTUM COMPUTING: Biggest Ever Quantum Chip Announced, but Scientists Aren't Buying It James Vincent The Verge '"There was only ever a hope that a quantum annealer would be better,' Matthias Troyer, who co-authored the 2014 Science paper, told The Verge.

Chris Messina Medium "It's a rare moment when it becomes clear that a technological revolution is upon us, and I believe we're in the midst of one such transition right now. Even if you haven't realized it yet, bots are everywhere... With proper forethought and consideration, bots present a new, unpolluted opportunity to build lasting relationships with people." ROBOTICS: Do No Harm, Don't Discriminate: Official Guidance Issued on Robot Ethics Hannah Devlin The Guardian "The BSI document begins with some broad ethical principles: 'Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans; humans, not robots, are the responsible agents; it should be possible to find out who is responsible for any robot and its behaviour.'...The code suggests designers should aim for transparency, but scientists say this could prove tricky in practice. 'The problem with AI systems right now, especially these deep learning systems, is that it's impossible to know why they make the decisions they do,' said Winfield."