A brain controlled exoskeleton just let a quadraplegic man walk again
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As brain machine interfaces improve it’s giving researchers the ability to build new revolutionary, life changing products. Interested in the Exponential Future? Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. A little while ago a quadriplegic man learned how to drive a car, and now...
Futurist Keynote, London: Future of Superyacht Design, Superyacht News
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF New technologies are disrupting every sector, and the superyacht industry is no exception, but today’s disruptions give the incumbents a new opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership and change the industry’s narrative. Firstly, it was a pleasure and an honour to be invited, for the...
Today’s virtual bloggers and influencers are dumb, AI will change that
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As more researchers and companies experiment with creating life-life, interactive digital humans today’s bloggers and influencers could soon be replaced. Interested in the Exponential Future? Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. One of Instagram’s hottest influencers is a fake 19 year old virtual...
Next generation virtual influencers will be indistinguishable from humans
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Social networks are awash with human influencers, but now some virtual influencers are making more money than their human counterparts. Interested in the Exponential Future? Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. One of the most in demand influencers in the world today isn’t...
Nvidia creates the world’s first video game demo using AI generated graphics
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As AI becomes both the tool and the creator of graphics and content, you can expect to see much more of this in the future. Interested in the Exponential Future? Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. The recent boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
Edtech company Udacity uses deepfake tech to create educational videos automatically
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Most online educational courses are text and graphics based, but now Udacity is using deepfake tech to automatically generate educational videos from the content. Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Producing content for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms...
Create Digital Humans in minutes, Soul Machines unveils Digital DNA platform
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Avatars that resemble real people, in their behaviours and speech, are on the rise, and some people are using them to create immortal versions of themselves. Soul Machines, the company behind some of the world’s most human-like digital avatars that are already in service...
Futurist Keynote, London: Investing in the Exponential Future, SRP European Conference
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Incredibly powerful, and increasingly democratised, emerging technologies are transforming every sector faster than ever, and this can have dire consequences for investors if the mechanisms behind the change are not understood. Firstly, thank you to Amelie for inviting me to be the keynote for...
Death isn’t forever, companies build digital avatars so people can “live on after death”
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Digital Avatars will mean that physical human death is simply a doorway into a new digital reality where our descendants interact with our Avatars instead of the real, physical us. Over the past couple of years, asides from the giant strides we’ve seen in...
World’s first full body 3D scanner produces amazing live images of the human body
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Medical scanners haven’t advanced much in decades, this new scanner is faster, higher resolution and produces insights into the human body not possible using today’s technology. Recently I talked about a new innovation that lets doctors create movies of the behaviour of cells in...
China debuts the world’s first AI news anchor
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As it gets easier to create high quality, natural sounding “human-like” avatars we’ll see more emerge and take on new and varied roles. Over the past couple of years there’s been a huge increase in the amount of press columns devoted to the topic...
World’s first digital teacher starts work teaching kids about energy
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI, avatars and bots will play an increasingly central role in the future of education, and Will is the first teacher of his kind. It’s back to school time for millions of children around the world and you know what that means – it’s...
Soul Machines reveal the secrets behind BabyX, their life like artificial baby
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Over time we will all be interacting more and more with AI, as a result companies are trying to “humanise” it. BabyX, the virtual, artificially intelligent creation of Mark Sagar and his company, Soul Machines, who also bought us Ava, a life-like digital avatar that’s...
CGI “Virtual influencers” on Instagram battle it out in public, snag real ad cash
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today we are used to the majority of our influencers, and contacts, being human, but as we progress into the future more of the encounters we have will be with virtual entities, in the form of avatars, bots and virtual vloggers like these. It...
Nvidia unveil Isaac, a virtual simulator to help companies create advanced robots
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the world comes to rely more and more on bots and robots we need better, and faster, ways to train them. A newly expanded simulator system could be our high-speed ticket to building fully autonomous bots and robots, or so says Nvidia’s CEO....
Google’s lifelike sounding AI assistant, Duplex, blows past uncanny valley
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF I’ve been saying this for a long time, very soon you won’t know whether the content you’re consuming was generated by a human or a machine, and Google’s latest product, Duplex, moves us all one step closer to that time. At Google’s I/O developer...
Daimler hires Soul Machine’s lifelike Avatar to answer customer queries
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Bots are evolving and increasingly it’s going to get more difficult to tell bots from real people, whether they’re just text bots or, in this case, life like looking avatars. New Zealand based company Soul Machines, the company behind a sophisticated high definition digital...
Baidu’s AI can clone anyone’s voice in under a minute
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to clone people’s voices, and mimic them, opens up a range of well meaning opportunities, but it also paves the way for fake news chaos and everything in between… In the near future, just as it is today, fake news will become...
British bank trials a life like digital Avatar to serve customers better
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Avatars and bots are getting more intelligent, and more capable, and while they are being increasingly deployed to help organisations improve customer service, there’s a very real toll on human jobs. This week the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), who recently started using brain...
Chinese researchers have created an IQ test for AI
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Humans have an inane desire to measure and categorise things, and this includes being able to measure an AI’s level of intelligence, but it’s proving to be a difficult problem to solve. Human intelligence is hard enough to measure, and over the decades today’s...
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