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Month: October 2018

If simulating the brain is proving tricky, why don’t we try decoding it?

“There’s a good reason the first flying machines weren’t mechanical bats: people tried that, and they were terrible.” — Dan Robitzski

In the current AI Spring, many people and corporations are betting big that the capabilities of deep learning algorithms will continue to improve as the algorithms are fed more data. Their faith is backed by the miracles performed by such algorithms: they can see, listen and do a thousand other things that were previously considered too difficult for AI.

Our guest for the third episode of the AGI Podcast, Pascal Kaufmann, is amongst those who believe such faith in deep learning is misplaced.

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Cientistas conectaram o cérebro de 3 pessoas, permitindo que elas compartilhassem os pensamentos! smile

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.

It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.

The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.

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It might already feel like social media is taking up too much of our mental space, but just wait until it’s literally inside of our brains.

Physicists and neuroscientists have developed the world’s first “brain-to-brain” network, using electroencephalograms (EEGs), which record electrical activity in the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information into the brain, to allow people to communicate directly with each other’s brains — a new and thrilling (and a little terrifying?) example of science fiction brought to life.

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle announced last week that they successfully used their interface, which they call BrainNet, to have a small group of people play a collaborative “Tetris-like” game — with their minds.

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Ms. Powell does not have any easy or obvious ideas for how to address tech’s monoculture. She thinks of her book as starting a conversation. But any solution, she said, will involve “a fundamental, bottoms-up cultural change” — and one that we should not expect to see overnight.

In a satirical new novel, a former Google executive identifies the technology industry’s chief issue: its narrow engineering-focused bubble.

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DJI now has the US government’s permission to authorize drone flights in controlled airspace near airports.

The FAA has approved DJI as part of its Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) program. The agency rigorously tested and validated DJI’s technology capabilities before giving its stamp of approval.

DJI was one of 9 companies that were just newly authorized. The other eight are Aeronyde, Airbus, AiRXOS, Altitude Angel, Converge, KittyHawk, UASidekick, and Unifly.

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Spotted on an official SpaceX T-shirt commemorating Starlink’s first two prototype satellites and corroborated through analysis of limited public photos of the spacecraft, SpaceX appears to be testing a relatively unique style of solar arrays on the first two satellites launched into orbit, known as Tintin A (Alice) and B (Bob).

It’s difficult to judge anything concrete from the nature of what may be immature prototypes, but SpaceX’s decision to take a major step away from its own style of solar expertise – Cargo Dragon’s traditional rigid panel arrays – is almost certainly motivated by a need to push beyond the current state of the art of satellite design and production.

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