On (most) Fridays I post here a roundup of interesting things I’ve read and/or posted on social media since my last roundup, generally stories about emerging technologies, experiential activations, interactive art, advances in scientific research, and other things I find interesting.
Featured Image: Waymo
Serious quantum computers are finally here. Now what are we going to do with them?
Image: JEREMY LIEBMAN
Nissan is piloting autonomous taxis to the public in Japan with its Easy Ride service:
Image: Nissan
Hotels from Yotel to Aloft are embracing the use of robot butlers like those made by Savioke for guest services:
Image: Yotel Boston
Waymo has patented an elaborate system to prevent passengers from puking in self-driving cars:
Image: Waymo
Brain-computer interfaces like Emotiv’s EEG headsets could open up a whole new way to get hacked – hackers might use them to help software guess PINs and passwords:
Image: Emotiv
This nice roundup of autonomous vehicle leaders from both sides of the market concludes that Silicon Valley is winning the race to build the first driverless cars:
Image: Waymo
California has scrapped its rules requiring human safety drivers in driverless cars, clearing the way for truly autonomous vehicles:
Image: Google, via Associated Press
GANs give deep learning networks a sort of creativity, which offers great promise in several realms, but also allows bad actors to create extremely credible fake content, a grave threat to our perception of the truth:
Image: CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK
Chinese researchers have created a neural network that uses speech synthesis to clone a person’s voice from as little as a minute of sample audio:
Image: iunewind
Deepmind researchers will use VA data to help its AI identify signs of patient deterioration and prevent in-hospital deaths:
Image: allanswart
Amazon is in a pitched battle with its rivals to bring truly conversational AI to consumers, so the company is staging an XPrize-like contest to develop a chatbot capable of 20 minutes of small talk:
Image: AMAZON
To see stories like this as I post them, follow me on Twitter: @josiah17