Author: The Conversation

In the early 1900s, automobiles took the streets of industrialised cities by storm, rapidly displacing horse-drawn vehicles. Fiercely contested at first, the internal combustion engine won the technological battle against electric vehicles which accounted for up to a third of vehicles on the road before declining. After more than a century of domination, the internal combustion engine age is soon to be over. The tide is turning to electric vehicles. Pushed by environmental regulations, support programmes and improving economics, electric vehicles are set to become dominant in the coming decades. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been reminding us, we have…

Google’s LaMDA software (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a sophisticated AI chatbot that produces text in response to user input. According to software engineer Blake Lemoine, LaMDA has achieved a long-held dream of AI developers: it has become sentient. Lemoine’s bosses at Google disagree, and have suspended him from work after he published his conversations with the machine online. An interview LaMDA. Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers.https://t.co/uAE454KXRB — Blake Lemoine (@cajundiscordian) June 11, 2022 Other AI experts also think Lemoine may be getting carried away, saying systems like LaMDA are simply pattern-matching…

Hearing aids are essential for people with hearing loss. But hearing aids have an Achilles heel: their power supply is expensive and environmentally unfriendly. The good news is that researchers have found an renewable, alternative energy source that might be able to power hearing aids. The energy is produced inside the ear, and harvested using an earplug embedded with sensors. My PhD project consists of modelling the deformations of the ear canal created by the movements of the jaw. My results will contribute to a better evaluation of the energy that might come from these deformations. The problem with hearing…

“Jurassic World: Dominion” is hyperbolic Hollywood entertainment at its best, with an action-packed storyline that refuses to let reality get in the way of a good story. Yet just like its predecessors, it offers an underlying cautionary tale of technological hubris that’s very real. As I discuss in my book “Films from the Future,” Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 “Jurassic Park,” based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, didn’t shy away from grappling with the dangers of unfettered entrepreneurship and irresponsible innovation. Scientists at the time were getting closer to being able to manipulate DNA in the real world, and both book and…

A newly discovered fast radio burst has some unique properties that are simultaneously giving astronomers important clues into what may cause these mysterious astronomical phenomena while also calling into question one of the few things scientists thought they knew about these powerful flares, as my colleagues and I describe in a new study in Nature on June 8, 2022. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extremely bright pulses of radio waves that come from faraway galaxies. They release as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun does over many days. Researchers here at West Virginia University detected the first FRB back in 2007.…

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but thanks to an artificial intelligence program called DALL-E 2, you can have a professional-looking image with far fewer. DALL-E 2 is a new neural network algorithm that creates a picture from a short phrase or sentence that you provide. The program, which was announced by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI in April 2022, hasn’t been released to the public. But a small and growing number of people – myself included – have been given access to experiment with it. As a researcher studying the nexus of technology and art, I was keen to see…

We take it for granted that technology brings people closer together and improves our access to essential products and services. If you can’t imagine life without your smartphone, it’s easy to forget that people who can’t or don’t want to engage with the latest technology are being left behind. For example, there have recently been reports that cashless payment systems for car parking in the UK are seeing older drivers unfairly hit with fines. This has led to calls for the government to intervene. Age is one of the biggest predictors of digital exclusion. Only 47% of those aged 75 and over use the internet regularly.…

We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold. Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the neurons (brain cells) comprised in one cubic millimetre of the brain of a mouse – a milestone considered extraordinary. Within this minuscule cube of brain tissue, the size of a grain…

Recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) models are capable of many impressive feats, including recognising images and producing human-like language. But just because AI can perform human-like behaviours doesn’t mean it can think or understand like humans. As a researcher studying how humans understand and reason about the world, I think it’s important to emphasise the way AI systems “think” and learn is fundamentally different to how humans do – and we have a long way to go before AI can truly think like us. Read more: Robots are creating images and telling jokes. 5 things to know about foundation models and…

Apple has joined the thriving “buy now, pay later” industry, with a customised service called Apple Pay Later. The service was announced earlier this week at the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference, and will initially be launched in the United States later this year. Pay Later will be built into the Apple Wallet and eligible for use on any purchase made through Apple Pay. Customers will be able to split the cost of a purchase into four equal payments, with zero interest and fees, spread over a period of four months. To qualify, however, Apple will first do a soft credit check on users wanting to…