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This month, the power of artificial intelligence will be coming to more augmented reality developers as a leader in the game and 3D software development space and a major force behind the current school of cloud-based AI have officially announced a new partnership.

In a post on Unity’s website on Tuesday, the company revealed a partnership with computing giant IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK. This programming interface will open up new cloud-based AI services for developers to use in their applications. And, with AR and AI having become increasingly intertwined technologies, this is only good news for AR developers.

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The Netflix series takes place hundreds of years in the future, but references versions of technology that have been in development for years, like brain mapping, human and AI neural links, and mind uploading to computers. Millions of dollars has been bumped into technological ideas that promise, one day, our brains will be turned digital. That said, there are those who believe the human mind is too complex, and our consciousness too nuanced, to be recreated in a digital product. And none of that even goes into what would happen if someone’s digitized mind was placed into real human flesh.

Will we ever be able to upload our minds into other bodies? Furthermore, should we? And honestly, if we ever achieved such a feat, could we even call ourselves human anymore? On this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to experts in neuroscience, philosophy and futurism.

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In an example of life imitating art, scientists have come up with a technology straight out of an episode of Black Mirror: Bee-like pollinating drones.

A team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan engineered the devices using a combination of horsehair, $USD 100 drones and a sticky ion gel.

It’s pretty simple really – first, the drones fly into flowers much like a bee would. Inside the flower, pollen gets stuck to the drone due to the combination of the ion gel and horsehair. That same pollen is then shaken off into the next flower, and so on. It’s just your run of the mill birds and the robots bees.

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By using insights from one job to help it do another, a successful new artificial intelligence hints at a more versatile future for machine learning.

Backstory: Most algorithms can be trained in only one domain, and can’t use what’s been learned for one task to perform another, new one. A big hope for AI is to have systems take insights from one setting and apply them elsewhere—what’s called transfer learning.

What’s new: DeepMind built a new AI system called IMPALA that simultaneously performs multiple tasks—in this case, playing 57 Atari games—and attempts to share learning between them. It showed signs of transferring what was learned from one game to another.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

There is nothing on Earth like the human brain, even today’s AI doesn’t come close, but now researchers have created an Artificial Synapse that’s 200 million times faster than a human synapse, and one day it will revolutionise AI and computing.

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