Hey everyone!
This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI (probably because I was thinking about last week’s “Things that make you think” article, The AI Revolution). In particular, I've marveled at how integrated and essential Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is in our daily lives. I would be in a much different place without the help of speech-to-text translation (think Siri or Alexa), Spotify’s song recommendation systems, or autocorrect when using my phone keyboard. And these are just the simplest examples. I added below a few of the more complex examples that have popped up in the news over the past week.
Enjoy!
-Joe
Thought-Provoking Data Viz
The cost of sending stuff into low-Earth orbit has been decreasing over time, from almost $100k per kilo in 1980 to just under $1k in 2020. If this trend continues, it will only cost ~$2 per kilo to send something into low-Earth orbit in 2060. That’s less than it costs me to fly my 81-kilo body from New York to Chicago! (All $ adjusted for inflation, pegged to 2000.)
Check out more on the Futurist.
Earth News
🔥 Why A.I. knows who you find attractive better than you do
Quick Hits. Researchers measure participants’ brain activity while they look at pictures of celebrities. With the collected data, researchers train an AI to create a face that the participant would see as attractive. The participants found the face to be attractive in over 80% of cases.
My Thoughts. This research makes me particularly excited about the commercial applications of using brain activity to train AI. AI is only as powerful as the data used to train it, so using biological responses—which are some of the most difficult/impossible reactions to alter based on intention—would result in much more precise AI.
🤖 This self-learning AI software lets robots do tasks autonomously
Quick Hits. UC Berkeley researchers created software that allows a robot to learn autonomously from trial-and-error. The robot (named BRETT) successfully completes a few small tasks. (Video)
My Thoughts. This one is a bit old (from 2015), but I’m still so excited about this. Creating and maintaining AI can be difficult because they require large amount of “training data” to learn and improve. Giving an AI the autonomy to acquire and process its own training data opens up doors to so many opportunities.
Space News
💨 Perseverance Generated Oxygen on Mars
Quick Hits. Perseverance, the NASA Mars rover that landed on Mars on Feb 18 2021, generated oxygen from the carbon dioxide found in Mars’s atmosphere.
My Thoughts. There is only trace amounts of oxygen available in Mars’s atmosphere. If humans are to visit and/or live on Mars, it’s much more efficient and less logistically challenging to generate oxygen then haul it from Earth. If the oxygen generator devices are produced at scale (larger or more numerous), they could even produce enough oxygen for spaceships to take off. So cool!
🚀 Blue Origin will start selling tickets for its space tourism flights on May 5
Quick Hits. Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-backed space company, will start to offer its first commercial ticket(s) to visit space starting on May 5. It’s expected the tickets will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My Thoughts. I’m hoping the commercialization of visiting space will usher in a new era of humans exploring space, pushing boundaries of what’s come before and expanding humanity amongst the stars. You can expect to hear more from me in the coming months as this plays out.
Things that make you think
📈 Collective Intelligence Is About to Disrupt Your Strategy: Are You Ready?
Quick Hits. Current corporate strategy planning seems to be stuck in the dark ages; it’s infrequent and limited to only a few individuals. The author advocates for transitioning corporate strategy planning into a task for the collective intelligence of a company’s workforce and using AI to augment its power. The author provides some examples of how this has been executed already at various companies.
My Thoughts. For me, this article highlights the fact that AI is likely to grow increasingly important in our lives and will begin to infiltrate almost every aspect of our existence (especially as we get closer to Artificial General Intelligence, AGI), assuming we stay on the current trajectory. If this happens, humans will have an opportunity to reimagine everything we do and there will be significant opportunities available to those who can be on the cutting edge of integrating AI into various industries.
Future-Thinking Companies
🛹 Omni Hoverboards. LITERAL HOVERBOARDS. (Video)
🌱 Carbon Robotics. They produce an autonomous robot that drives through fields, targets weeds with AI, and kills them with lasers. (Video)