Category: technology

Smithsonian offers AI-generated resolutions for 2022

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Coming up with a good set of New Year’s resolutions can be almost as tricky as sticking to the ones we made last year. But what good is living in the year 2022 — decidedly “the future”! — if we can’t turn to artificial intelligence to ease some of our burdens?

As it turns out, the Smithsonian has partnered with AI researcher Janelle Shane to create AI-generated resolutions. From MSN.com:

For the many of us who have not spent 2021 at the gym calling our mothers while planning our weekly soup-kitchen volunteer schedule, we know the insectoid life span such New Year’s resolutions can have.

 

So the Smithsonian has another idea for 2022: What if instead of relying on our own resolutions we asked an AI what it thinks we should do? Starting this weekend, the “Futures” exhibit both online and at its Arts and Industries Building offers a “Resolutions Generator,” an AI that makes suggestions on what commitments we should undertake for 2022. […]

 

“Change my name to one of my favorite shapes,” it suggests, or “Every Friday for a year I will wear a different hat.” And, “Every time I hear bells for a month, I will paint a potato.”

One of my favorites (I think I’ll adopt it for the year to come): “Treat every dog I meet like a celebrity.”

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Mysterious swarms of drones appearing over Colorado and Nebraska

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Since just before Christmas, residents of eastern Colorado have witnessed mysterious swarms of drones — sometimes as many as thirty at a time — taking to the skies in the early evening hours. The first accounts of the drone swarms appeared in The Denver Post on December 23. Business Insider reports that

Since then, sightings have spanned six counties across Colorado and Nebraska.

Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott had no answer for where the drones came from or whom they belonged to but did have a rough grasp on their flying habits. “They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern,” he told The Denver Post. “They fly one square and then they fly another square.”

No one seems to know where the drones are coming from, who’s responsible for them, or what exactly they’re up to. So far, the Air Force, the DEA, the Department of Defense, the FAA, and a host of other institutions and agencies (including all private drone companies known to be operating in the area) have denied involvement. Complaints have prompted a federal investigation, but thus far no additional information has been released to the public. The altitude at which the drones appear to be flying is largely unregulated.

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The year 2019 as predicted in 2009

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Check out this slick video that Microsoft produced in 2009 to showcase their vision of 2019:

As Boing Boing points out,

They did well with the software aspects of touchscreen interfaces and machine vision, but overshot the runway on bezel-less devices and the general ubiquity of touchscreens themselves. There’s a touchscreen coffee mug! All the depicted applications (such as flexible high-FPS color e-ink) are shown without a batteries or other power sources. This is a mandatory omission in all such future fantasies.

Of course, they’re a bit nearer to the mark than many other portrayals of the present. Blade Runner, after all, is set in 2019 and features synthetic human replicants and space colonies. Although we’ve got more than eleven months still ahead of us…

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The earliest known use of the term “OMG”

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…was not on some obscure Usenet system or bygone bulletin board. It occurred, according to the Smithsonian, in a letter to Winston Churchill dated September 9, 1917 (more than 100 years ago!). The letter, written by British admiral Lord Fisher, includes the now-famous acronym in its final line:

Apparently there are two exclamation points in “omg”!

Other internet acronyms are much more recent coinages. The first documented instance of “LOL,” for example, dates back to a May 1989 issue of an online newsletter (still available here). Said newsletter includes the following guide to “colorful communicating” on the internet:

     OLM  - On Line Message          OTW  - On The Way
     OIC  - Oh I See                 H    - HUH???
     BTW  - By The Way               LOL  - Laughing Out Loud
     ROTF - Rolling On The Floor     RAO  - Rolling All Over
     LMTO - Laughing My Tush Off     BRB  - Be Right Back
     AFK  - Away From Keys           BBL  - Be Back Later
     BAK  - Back At Keys             WLCM - Welcome
     BCNU - Be Seeing You            L8R  - Later
     ODM  - On De Move               OTB  - Off To Bed
     LTNT - Long Time No Type        TTFN - Ta Ta For Now
     RE   - Again (Greetings, as in "re-hi")
     LTNS - Long Time No See
     M/F  - Male or Female (also known as 'MORFING', as in
     "Oh no! I've been morfed!!")

Some of these terms, of course, are still in use, while others never really took off.

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Scientists electronically “inject” information into monkeys’ brains

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Here’s a fascinating development I will present without much additional commentary besides saying: this is the sort of science that really makes it seem as though the future is upon us! (And, incidentally, the sort that I argue will have hugely disruptive consequences for our society a few decades down the line.)

From The New York Times:

[T]wo neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. The researchers published the results of the experiment on Thursday in the journal Neuron.

Although the research is preliminary, carried out in just two monkeys, the researchers speculated that further research might lead to brain implants for people with strokes.

See the full article here; the scientific results are available here.

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Check out this bonkers robot with 7-foot-long arms

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I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for robots in general. (And, for that matter, for 7-foot-long arms.) But this one is particularly impressive: the Guardian GT, by Sarcos Robotics. Sarcos bills the bot as a “human-controlled, force-multiplying robotic system with one or two highly dexterous arms mounted on a track or wheeled base, allowing a single operator to do more, safely”; it “multiplies individual effectiveness and adds leverage to human capabilities.”

You can learn more about the Guardian GT at wired.com. They write:

Behold the Guardian GT from Sarcos Robotics, which in all honesty is full-tilt bonkers. Bonkers in the sense that unlike the clunky Power Loader, these 7-foot-long arms replicate human motions with incredible smoothness and accuracy, each limb lifting 500 pounds, then turning around and manipulating the most delicate of objects. Watching it in action is both hypnotic and highly unsettling.

An accurate characterization, I’d say.

 

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