🤖 Will A Robot Run For President?
Algorology Digest #8: Inventing New Sounds And Colors, Training Robots in VR, Apple Tackling Dark Data
After all, humans are prone to making decisions based on ego, anger, and the need for self-aggrandizement, not the common good. An artificially intelligent president could be trained to maximize happiness for the most people without infringing on civil liberties. It might even learn that it’s a good idea to tweet less — or not at all.
Both a brilliant and absurd article covering the idea of a artificially intelligent president, though definitely thought provoking.
🏵️ Google‘s Obsession with AI
Quite a good read covering recent announcements from the annual conference Google has used to demonstrate how much they’ve invested and keep investing into becoming the truly AI-first company.
🏋 Robots Trained in VR
Imitation allows human to learn new behaviors rapidly and that’s why Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence platform OpenAI is trying to achieve the same level of performance by teaching robots in simulated environments.
They’ve introduced a new algorithm, named one-shot imitation learning, which will only require humans to demonstrate a task once in VR for a robot to learn it.
🎹 Inventing Musical Instruments Humans Have Never Heard Before
“This is not like playing the two at the same time,” says one of researchers. And that’s worth saying. The machine and its software aren’t layering the sounds of a clavichord atop those of a Hammond. They’re producing entirely new sounds using the mathematical characteristics of the notes that emerge from the two. And they can do this with about a thousand different instruments — from violins to balafons — creating countless new sounds from those we already have, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Very cool overview of what team over at Google Magenta (computer systems that can make their own art and music) has achieved in synthesizing completely new musical instrument sounds.
🎨 Neural Network For Inventing Colors
For those who missed it out, there was a buzz recently about a chemist who accidentally invented a new blue color. So the research scientist and neural network experimenter Janelle Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors and have it generate the appropriate names for them.
This is definitely not a breakthrough but a rather cool application of neural networks even though the color names are beyond ridiculous :)
🏗️ The Quest for Data is Real
The trend of big companies acquiring startups either for the sake of data or for novel applications of working with data is going over the roof, some of the examples are recent acquisitions of Beddit (sleep tracking hardware) and Lattice (dark data software).
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