The 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...
OpenAI’s AI bot crushed the world’s top Dota 2 players
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Dota is a game of prediction, strategy and collaboration, and it’s been long thought that an AI couldn’t master it – until now. A lot of humans think they’re so good at video games that they make the point of describing themselves as “gamers.”...
AI can now tell your boss what skills you lack and how to get them
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Every job is a combination of different competencies but most training courses only focus on a few, now AI can tell you all the competencies you lack and how to get them. Here’s the conundrum with corporate online learning, there are so many classes available from...
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...
Ingenious new bot discovers hacks companies haven’t told their users about
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of your online accounts have already likely been compromised but very few companies own up to the fact, putting you and your data at risk,but now a bot can tell you which companies have been hacked – even if they don’t want you to...
Rise of the “Citizen Developers,” Microsofts Stack Overflow bot makes programming easier
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Imagine being able to build mobile applications and applications without ever having to know how to code. That’s where we’re headed, and it’ll be here sooner than you think. A little while ago I wrote an article on a new first of a kind...
Facebook’s bots unexpectedly created their own language
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI agents are learning how to bluff, negotiate, create and hide their own languages and as the technology increasingly becomes part of our world’s digital fabric that should raise some eyebrows. As Mark Zuckerberg plays around with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create his own...
The robo-lawyer that overturned 160,000 parking tickets is helping refugees claim asylum
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Claiming asylum is difficult at the best of times, and that’s if you’re not in fear of your life and can understand the language, now DoNotPay’s latest bot makes the process less tortuous. The creator of a chatbot that helped to over turn more...
JPMorgan unleashes artificial intelligence to automate its legal work
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With massive technology budgets and a paranoia of startups stealing a march Wall Street is going all in on innovation and automation. With companies like LawGeex and ROSS Intelligence trying to automate the legal world it was only a matter of time before the...
Accenture automates 17,000 jobs without making anyone redundant
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In the age of automation humans are all too often the collateral damage but with vision and careful management that doesn’t always have to be the case. In the past eighteen months one of the world’s largest professional services and technology companies, Accenture, according...
UK’s NHS gives millions of Londoners their own on call AI doctor
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF For better or worse, more and more healthcare services are being augmented and automated using new artificial intelligence services, only time will tell what the results will be. A few months ago Baidu rolled out a limited trial of a new virtual doctors service,...
New EU report recommends Universal Basic Income for all 27 member states
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The rise of robotics and new, intelligent AI automation systems that threaten Blue and White collar jobs is spurring governments around the world into action, so far a Universal Basic Income is the only idea they seem to have to dampen societal unrest and poverty....
Robots to get legal recognition as Europe votes to classify them as ‘Electronic persons’
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The move by the EU to classify robots as “Electronic persons” is a watershed moment. It signifies a significant attitude shift in policy and the way that new robo-systems are viewed, and paves the way for new laws and new regulations. With robots and...
Mark Zuckerberg shows off Jarvis, the AI that runs his home
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF There’s a good chance that Jarvis, Mark Zuckerberg’s in house digital assistant, is more than just a quirky hobby to pass the time, it could be a beta test for a new Facebook product or feature At the beginning of this year, Facebook CEO...
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