Computers lack common sense. This isn't a fault of theirs: The world of context and relations that humans learn from birth isn't something innately grasped by computers, so when given simple cognitive tasks, they sometimes answer like toddlers eager to try out new words. Watch below, as a computer neural network attempts to label video of a BigDog robot walking down a hall.
The next version of Barbie might not find math so hard, after all. This week, Mattel revealed that for the first time Barbie will be backed by artificial intelligence, a move to make the doll more lifelike.
Your home is about to get a whole lot smarter. On Monday, Amazon announced its artificially intelligent bluetooth speaker—the Amazon Echo—is being made publicly available for purchase. The Echo was first unveiled in November 2014, but it was sold on an invitation-only basis until this week. The device is one of the first always-on, voice controlled intelligent home appliances that connects to the Internet and controls third-party services. It can answer trivia questions, tell you the weather, add items to a shopping list, and much more.
Lyme disease, swine flu, bubonic plague—many of humanity's greatest scourges jumped from our animal co-habitants to make us sick. During an outbreak, researchers need to understand where the disease is coming from in order to effectively treat it and stop it from spreading. But with thousands of pests as possible vectors of disease, and with diseases coming from animals more frequently now than ever before, they often have difficulty doing so. Now artificial intelligence can help identify disease-carrying animals with up to 90 percent accuracy, according to a study published yesterday in the journal PNAS.
In Alex Garland's screenplay for 28 Days Later, he envisioned a future in which a manmade blood-borne virus turned most of the human population into crazed zombies. And with his screenplay for Sunshine, he detailed the plight of a small astronaut crew, traveling to our dying sun with the aim of nuking it back to life.
IBM's premiere artificial intelligence product, Watson, has just taken its first job in Japan.
By now, you may have heard that the Turing Test, that hallowed old test of machine intelligence proposed by pioneering mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, has been passed. In a contest held this past weekend, a chatbot posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy fooled a third of its human judges into thinking it was a human. This prompted the University of Reading, which had organized the competition, to announce the acheivment of "an historic milestone in artificial intelligence." You may have also heard (because we said it) that this was a complete sham, and the academic equivalent of urinating directly on Turing’s grave...
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