philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

An Artist and Chef Collaborated to Imagine the Dinner of the Future. It Involves Animation, Virtual Reality, and… Not Being Able to See Your Food

If you’re looking to experience contemporary art, fine dining, and cutting-edge technology at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, look no further than Aerobanquets RMX, where artist Mattia Casalegnoand chef Chintan Pandya have teamed up to present a futuristic meal you eat wearing a VR headset.

Since diners are unable to see their food in the real world, an animated rendering of each one-bite course appears in the virtual space as it’s served. As a result, there are no preconceptions of what one’s about to eat and diners find their senses heightened, each flavor affected by what they are hearing are seeing in the virtual reality space. ...

Dining at Aerobanquets requires a reservation, and diners can chose from a five-bite, 30-minute version of the experience for $58, or the $200 VIP meal, which lasts an hour and includes 10 bites and alcoholic beverages. Highlights of the VIP version include pillowy milk bread topped with mushrooms and lentil, and a highly spiced bite of Hudson Valley foie gras. ...

See the full story here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/virtual-reality-art-dinner-aerobanquets-2220630?fbclid=IwAR2utzCrbvWIuJDheOnzSTJ9bWF7BzujjbQQylEa-7evlcRM6AukBfpapS4

Disney built an AI that can easily make actors look younger or older

Disney researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that seemingly makes it far easier to make an actor appear younger or older in a scene. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to make sure the effect looks as realistic as possible, the AI tool could take care of most of the heavy lifting. It's said to take the AI just five seconds to apply the aging effects to a single frame. ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/disney-ai-actor-younger-older-reaging-154509639.html

Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’

by TIMNIT GEBRU (the ethicist famously fired by Google)

[PhilNote: at the end she seems to be arguing against Creative Commons.]

... EA is defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as “an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.” And “evidence and reason” have led many EAs to conclude that the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an artificially generally intelligent being (AGI) created by humans exterminates us. To prevent this apocalypse, EA’s career advice center, 80,000 hours, lists “AI safety technical research” and “shaping future governance of AI” as the top two recommended careers for EAs to go into, and the billionaire EA class funds initiatives attempting to stop an AGI apocalypse. According to EAs, AGI is likely inevitable, and their goal is thus to make it beneficial to humanity: akin to creating a benevolent god rather than a devil. ...

Five years after its founding, Open AI released, as part of its quest to build “beneficial” AGI, a large language model (LLM) called GPT-3. LLMs are models trained on vast amounts of text data, with the goal of predicting probable sequences of words. This release set off a race to build larger and larger language models; in 2021, Margaret Mitchell, among other collaborators, and I wrote about the dangers of this race to the bottom in a peer-reviewed paper that resulted in our highly publicized firing from Google. ...

We can create a technological future that serves us instead. Take, for example, Te Hiku Media, which created language technology to revitalize te reo Māori, creating a data license “based on the Māori principle of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship” so that any data taken from the Māori benefits them first. Contrast this approach with that of organizations like StabilityAI, which scrapes artists’ works without their consent or attribution while purporting to build “AI for the people.” We need to liberate our imagination from the one we have been sold thus far: saving us from a hypothetical AGI apocalypse imagined by the privileged few, or the ever elusive techno-utopia promised to us by Silicon Valley elites.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/

‘Common Sense’ Test Could Lead to Smarter AI

[PhilNote: the 'common sense' researchers chose an abbreviation for their approach that is intrinsically unintuitive! 😉 )

... Now, in yet another step toward AI with more human-like intelligence, researchers from IBM, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have developed a series of tests that would evaluate an AI’s ability to use a machine version of “common sense” — or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge in a manner that is shared by nearly all humans. ...

To better evaluate how machines reason, the team of researchers created a benchmark called Action-Goal-Efficiency-coNstraint-uTility, or AGENT for short. The AGENT tests consist of a dataset of 3D animations that are inspired by previous cognitive development experiments. ...

Intuitive Psychology

Inspired by experiments studying cognitive development in children, the AGENT test is structured around the concepts underlying what is called intuitive psychology, which human infants learn before learning to speak. These pre-verbal aspects of intuitive psychology include variables like goal preferences, action efficiency, unobserved constraints, and cost-reward trade-offs. ...

See the full story here: https://thenewstack.io/common-sense-test-could-lead-to-smarter-ai/

What will humanity look like in a million years?

... In the long run, we should expect the most enhanced people, generation by generation (or upgrade after upgrade), to become one or more fundamentally different “posthuman” species – and a species of holdouts declaring themselves the “real humans”.

Through brain emulation, a speculative technology where one scans a brain at a cellular level and then reconstructs an equivalent neural network in a computer to create a “software intelligence”, we could go even further. This is no mere speciation, it is leaving the animal kingdom for the mineral, or rather, software kingdom.

There are many reasons some might want to do this, such as boosting chances of immortality (by creating copies and backups) or easy travel by internet or radio in space. ...

Dyson sphere?

Here’s a prediction for the year one million. Some humans look more or less like us – but they are less numerous than they are now. Much of the surface is wilderness, having turned into a rewilding zone since there is far less need for agriculture and cities.

Here and there, cultural sites with vastly different ecosystems pop up, carefully preserved by robots for historical or aesthetic reasons.

Under silicon canopies in the Sahara, trillions of artificial minds teem. The vast and hot data centres which power these minds once threatened to overheat the planet. Now, most orbit the Sun, forming a growing structure – a Dyson sphere – where each watt of energy powers thought, consciousness, complexity and other strange things we do not have words for yet. ...

See the full story here: https://reaction.life/what-will-humanity-look-like-in-a-million-years-species-artificial-intelligence/

(Facebook PR) Advancing the Next Generation of Creative Expression Through Mixed Reality

Takeaways

• We’re launching Meta House at Miami Art Week from December 1-3, showcasing mixed reality experiences like a VR art gallery, interactive AR murals, a VR sculpting workshop that feature emerging artists COVL and YONK, plus live performances by Doja Cat and more.
• We’re investing in the creative community and improving our products and tools to advance authentic expression, connection and opportunities to monetize their creativity.
• We’re collaborating with intersectional voices across diverse communities to influence how we build towards an equitable metaverse.

See the full story here: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/advancing-creative-expression-through-mixed-reality/

3 hour Neurolink update with Elon Musk and the team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4

Q&A with Elon and others starts just short of the 2 hour mark.

Subtitles, Closed Captioning Popular Among Young Viewers

... Even high-end AVsound systems can find the dialogue playing second fiddle to sound effects. The end result is more people than ever using subtitles. The Preply survey, conducted in May, reports Fox 13, found “members of Gen Z — which are often defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 — were much more likely to be frequent subtitle users (70 percent) compared to older viewers,” while “millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, were also more likely (53 percent) to use the feature than the average respondent. But older people, such as Gen X and Baby Boomers, were the groups least likely to frequently use subtitles.” ...

https://www.etcentric.org/subtitles-closed-captioning-popular-among-young-viewers/

Source - https://www.wsj.com/articles/cant-hear-what-actors-are-saying-on-tv-its-not-you-probably-11669400315

3 ways for insurers to prepare for the metaverse

1. More advanced claims processing

One of the most significant trends leading the insurance industry into the metaverse is the proliferation of remote claims processing. Insurance companies can already easily assess property or automotive damage without being physically present using technologies such as Visual Intelligence. These technologies help insurers review damage remotely at the pixel level, assess risks, and process claims far more quickly and accurately. However, human intervention is still important when the client requests it and in more severe cases.

While Visual Intelligence can take care of detecting the damage and estimating repair costs, there will still be times that customers will request to speak to a person. These cases could soon shift into the metaverse, allowing insurance managers or adjusters to perform damage assessments with all of the necessary data remotely, and then meet with customers and speak with them virtually in a designated space or room for the underwriting process, to negotiate rates, and more.

This virtual option could help add more context to more complex cases while also helping insurers maintain client trust and satisfaction. Additionally, it saves time and resources for both insurer and insured. Even with automating many steps in the claims process, customers could still have instant access to a real person in the metaverse.

2. Improving the underwriting and customer experience

Insurance underwriting is a critical process as it decides the amount of risk the insurance company is willing to take on behalf of its customer. It involves comprehensive assessments of both the object to be insured, as well as the customer's background and history. In the metaverse, underwriting meetings could be conducted in virtual spaces. ...

3. Workforce training

Contrary to popular belief, neither AI nor the metaverse will likely take over an underwriter's or insurance agent's job any time soon. Instead, these technologies could be used to train employees from anywhere and help them perform their work more efficiently. ...

See the full story here: https://www.dig-in.com/opinion/metaverse-insurance-preparations-ai-ar-vr

Brave New Zealand World: A chat with AI expert Dr Jade Leung

Dr Jade Leung works with artificial intelligence (AI) and is extremely clever, which makes thinking of questions to ask her a formidable undertaking. 

The 28-year-old Kiwi lives in San Francisco and is the governance lead at OpenAI, a research and deployment company focused on building advanced AI models. 

A Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford, she features in Prime’s new show Brave New Zealand World, a series looking at the greatest risks to humanity, including a future where artificial intelligence could rule the planet – and us. 

Leung talks to Felicity Monk about where AI is headed, what we can do to ensure it’s helpful – and not destructive – to humanity in the future and the brain-boggling complexities of her job. ...

See the full story here; https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/300747054/brave-new-zealand-world-a-chat-with-ai-expert-dr-jade-leung