Riot Games kicked off this year’s League of Legends World Championships with a spectacular holographic concert in Paris.
The opening ceremony, which took place this weekend ahead of a showdown between Europe’s G2 and China’s FPX, features a performance from the in-game musical collective True Damage which mixes real-world dancers and singers with augmented reality holographs.
I asked if sentient AI was on the horizon. He corrected me, noting “sapient AI” is the right description, as it refers to AI that are conscious, self-aware, and able to think. Before we create sapient non-player characters in games, Bartle believes we need an ethical system in place. And he’s not so sure that we should create them in the first place. Bartle believes that game developers are like gods of the worlds they create. “Those who control the physics of a reality are the gods of that reality,” he said.
Let’s suppose that we have these AIs, but they’re in a pocket environment and they can’t get out. They can’t do anything to us except through us. How should we treat them? What’s right and what’s wrong? It turns out that when you look into the philosophy of this, well, the philosophers haven’t. They haven’t really looked at what it means to be someone in control of an entire reality in which intelligent beings live.
Theologists have, sort of, but they’ve only looked at our reality. They haven’t looked at a sub-reality in which we are the gods.
If I assert that the game characters are my property — I bought them with my $60 for the game — can I just do anything I want with my property?
If I create a game as a designer and the game’s got intelligent NPCs, then I sell that game to somebody else.
I’m not selling the NPCs. I’m just selling the world in which the NPCs live. But what happens when you lose interest and stop playing? All those characters are going to disappear and die? Did you just kill all those characters? That’s something we don’t really have an answer for at the moment.
Emergent behavior and consequences
GamesBeat: I had some similar experiences in Red Dead 2. I shot a dog by accident, and the sheriff came after me and wanted me out of town. I didn’t go out fast enough, and so he started shooting at me, so I fired back and killed the sheriff. Then a whole posse came after me and killed me. I learned the lesson. You shouldn’t shoot dogs in this game.
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Bartle: What I would say is, there’s a larger question. That is, is it actually moral or ethical to create an intelligent being in the first place? Never mind what the dangers are, because if they’re intelligent, then they’ll probably develop their own sense of morality and it will probably be in line with ours, because every time any culture in the world has had to develop a morality, they basically come down to the same set of core rules, humanist types of rules. The larger question is, should we create intelligent life anyway? Ignoring anything that it could possibly do to hurt us, assuming that isn’t going to hurt us, is ethical to create life?
For one, the field of view is much larger, now covering a 52-degree window rather than 34. It still only takes up a portion of your field of view, but it’s significantly more useful.
For another, the HoloLens 2 can respond to a wide variety of gestures, not just the finnicky index finger taps of old. This allows you to resize and moves around objects and interact with app interfaces in a way that feels far more intuitive. Further improving the experience is advanced eye-tracking that is eerily good at figuring out exactly where you are looking at
It effectively went from a high learning curve product to a highly intuitive one.
Microsoft is still primarily aiming HoloLens 2 for enterprise and research use, but it’s a significant step forward for the futuristic technology.
And today, the company is making a bunch of announcements, some that will immediately or eventually benefits its games. One feature will be called Buddy Adventure in Pokémon Go. This means that multiple people will be able to share an augmented reality experience together and take selfie pictures of their Pokémon creatures and themselves in the same scene.
Niantic showed a demo with three people holding phones in an outdoor setting. They each had their Pokémon buddy creatures placed at the same real-world location. And when you looked through the screens of the phones, you could see three Pokémon creatures in the same scene, alongside their real-world trainers.
Perhaps more impressive and widely interesting is the Niantic Wayfarer program, which will enable players in all Niantic games to submit interesting locations to be included as sites in the virtual maps of the location-based games. This is part of what Hanke called “planet-scale AR.”
"Our whole goal is to help somebody to have a peaceful passing,” said Casey Cuthbert-Allman, executive director of Continuum Care Hospice, which operates the facility where Holmes is receiving care. “Part of that process is to do a life review. This technology really helps us transport them to accomplish that. This VR project also helps them reconnect with family members."
"We would never say that technology could replace the human touch," Grace Andruszkiewicz, marketing director for Rendever, the Somerville-based company that makes the VR technology Holmes uses. "What we’re trying to do is augment the human touch."
At the end of her VR session, Holmes decided she'd also like to travel in VR to places she never got to in real life. As she looked around at a 360-degree virtual view of the marbled halls of the Vatican, she joked about not having to stand in line, as she did on so many real trips.
Would she consider a safari?
"At this distance, yes," Phyllis said with a laugh.
McDonald’s has a new plan to sell more Big Macs: act like Big Tech.
Over the last seven months, McDonald’s has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire technology companies that specialize in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And the fast-food chain has even established a new tech hub in the heart of Silicon Valley — the McD Tech Labs — where a team of engineers and data scientists is working on voice-recognition software.
The goal? To turn McDonald’s, a chain better known for supersized portions than for supercomputers, into a saltier, greasier version of Amazon.
At some drive-thrus, McDonald’s has tested technology that can recognize license-plate numbers, allowing the company to tailor a list of suggested purchases to a customer’s previous orders, as long as the person agrees to sign away the data.
In March, McDonald’s spent more than $300 million to buy Dynamic Yield, the Tel Aviv-based company that developed the artificial intelligence tools now used at thousands of McDonald’s drive-thrus.
The deal “has changed the way the high-tech industry thinks about potential M&A,” said Liad Agmon, a former Israeli intelligence official who co-founded Dynamic Yield. “We’ll see more nontraditional tech companies buying tech companies as an accelerator for their digital efforts. It was genius on McDonald’s side.”
McDonald’s insists that the rollout of the voice technology will not cost jobs. But at a time when it faces renewed protests from workers over low wages and sexual harassment, the chain’s new focus on technology could intensify scrutiny of how it treats its workers and how they might be affected by automation. While McDonalds has reported impressive growth over the last couple of years, some employees at its restaurants make less than $10 an hour.
See the full story here: https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/restaurants/article236751163.html#storylink=cpy
The president of Microsoft (MSFT) has warned artificial intelligence (AI) could become a “formidable weapon” unless tech companies build in limits to prevent its “abuse”.
“Any tool can also become a weapon,” Brad Smith said on Wednesday. “The more powerful the tool, the more formidable the weapon.
“When we look to the decade ahead, in many respects AI will be a tool of the sort the world has seldom seen before. And hence it can become a weapon as well.”
Smith made the comments during a speech at the Web Summit, one of the world’s biggest technology conferences. He called on the audience of tech professionals in Lisbon to “think hard” about the potential problems that could be caused by AI.
“We shouldn’t just ask what computers can do, we need to ask what they should do,” Smith said. “We are the first generation in the history of humanity … who will empower machines to make decisions that previously were made only by people.
“If we get it wrong, every generation that comes after us will pay a price.”
He called for “guard rails on the technology we are creating to protect against their abuse or their misuse or their unintended consequences.”
He also called for greater engagement with governments around the world and called on lawmakers to “move faster” to keep up with the pace of change.
Any solution to the problem of interstellar communication comes laden with assumptions about the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence and inevitably reflects the technological sophistication of the era.
The problem, briefly stated, is how to design a message that can be understood by an extraterrestrial intelligence about which you can know nothing with absolute certainty.
This turns the design of interstellar messages into an exercise in identifying universals that can be presumed to be recognised by any entity endowed with higher intelligence. It is, in other words, the search for what may be called a language of the universe.
Facial recognition technology is being used in the adult entertainment industry for many purposes, especially for combatting piracy. The industry has big copyright and piracy problems. It is grossing as much as $3 billion per year on the Internet. Face recognition technology is using artificial intelligence through machine learning. It is helping viewers to detect which porn star is in each video and is allowing them to find other videos of that porn star. The adult entertainment industry is finding this behavior of users helpful to combat piracy and copyright problems.
Once a viewer uses this technology, AI searches for over 50,000 videos and provides the best match for a particular adult actor. AI checks for hair color, biometrics, and other face related measurements. Every adult platform is using face recognition technology to eradicate piracy and provide the legal content to the viewers.
Dr Artur Szklener, Director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Warsaw (which runs the Competition) said:
“For the first time in history we are introducing virtual reality, the highest quality broadcasting and fully interactive digital and physical spaces so that music-lovers all over the world can fully immerse themselves in the exceptional music-making and drama of the International Chopin Competition. The international streaming of the last edition in 2015 attained 60 million views on YouTube alone. At the next edition in 2020 we hope to reach many more people in a variety of ways and ensure they enjoy the richest and deepest experience possible. We also hope to shape the history of pianism in the 21st century and once again celebrate Warsaw as the Chopin capital of the world.”
In a first for any major classical music event, the Competition is introducing virtual reality streaming. With a VR camera close to the pianist on stage, remote viewers will be able to experience performances from the pianist’s perspective on the stage of National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw. Anyone who has VR goggles at home will be able to watch the VR streaming at www.chopin2020.pl. For those who do not have VR goggles, the Competition is introducing special Listener Zones all over the world where music lovers can come together to share the virtual reality experience, and much else.
