For those startups in newer areas like robotics, artificial intelligence and augmented reality who complain that VCs are too focused on consumer internet companies, help is at hand: Genesis Angels is a new VC that has raised a fund of around $100 million, with a large chunk coming from co-founder and serial investor Kenges Rakishev, which it plans to use for early stage investments in emerging… → Read More
Last month, famed inventor, entrepreneur and futurist, Ray Kurwzeil, announced that he was joining Google as a director of engineering. Many have wondered what Kurzweil’s new position would mean for Google and the billions of people its global reach directly or indirectly touches. Would they be uploading Kurzweil’s brain into their datacenters? Become the next Skynet?
Speaking at an event at… → Read More
A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. → Read More
With the NBA season now fully underway and our attention spans being continuously pushed to the max (not to mention Yahoo’s pissing off fantasy football fans), it seems like the perfect time to introduce you to The Chadwick Project.
Nikolai Yakovenko, a former Google Search engineer and rabid basketball fan, founded Chadwick earlier this year to bring some machine learning and artificial… → Read More
Last week The New York Times ran a story by John Markoff about robots replacing human workers. Andrew McAfee, co-author of the excellent Race Against The Machine followed up with a post of his own. The gist: technology and automation lead to more job creation than job displacement in the past, but that may be changing.
Writing is one of the few areas that McAfee and his co-author Erik… → Read More
In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular – and incredibly funny! – TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls “a crisis of human resources.” At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that “we make poor use of our talents.” In the same way that we misuse the talents and… → Read More
Artificial intelligence touches our lives in the form of chess computers that are better than most humans, computers beating the best humans at Jeopardy, intelligent ad targeting, Microsoft Kinect recognizing human motion and even amazingly, Google’s self-driving car that drove itself from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Intelligent systems can even do transactions involving judgment like… → Read More
Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types” explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as “Diffbot Mike,” and “Diffbot can identify them all.” Diffbot knows the difference between a… → Read More
Did you all just see that? The IBM Jeopardy Challenge kicked off tonight, and Watson, the IBM-developed artificial intelligence absolutely more than held his own against his human competition. Mechanical men! → Read More
Be sure to check your local listings today to see when Jeopardy airs. Why would you want to do that? Oh, you know why: tonight is the first night of the IBM Challenge, starring Watson the artificial intelligence. Oh, and two human opponents. Humans are old news. → Read More
Imagine you’re sitting at the dining table reading the latest Wrestling Observer, as you do from time to time. Nothing too crazy, just minding your own business. Then, suddenly—it’s always suddenly—the microwave hops off the counter, wielding a knife, and comes charging after you. Oh, dear! → Read More
On Monday, computer scientists at Stanford demonstrated their AI helicopter, sending it flying around campus all on its own. Instead of reveling in its new found freedom, the ‘copter performed aerobatics that it learned from watching a radio-controlled helicopter flown by a human. The AI system communicates with a ground-based computer that does the actual guiding. Each helicopter costs… → Read More
This is a short video by the NYU splinter of a DARPA-funded project that aims to improve the way robots perceive the world around them (and most importantly, in front of them). As the video notes, the resolution (both temporal and spatial) of current robots’ visual systems is very limited due to data bandwidth and CPU limitations. Consequently, it cannot process its path beyond about 12… → Read More
Sex with robots?! One day, maybe in a dreary Los Angeles, that could actually be a possibility. David Levy, noted chess player and artificial intelligence expert, says in his book “Love and Sex with Robots” that people will one day create robots that look and act close enough to humans that you’ll have no qualms sleeping with them. And of course, Levy expects the Japanese to… → Read More
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