Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 7, 2018

We're Probably Living in a Simulation, Elon Musk Says

Elon Musk thinks we're all probably trapped in a Matrix-like pseudo existence. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so any civilizations that may have arisen throughout the cosmos have had loads and loads of time to hone their technological know-how, the SpaceX founder and CEO explained early this morning...

Oct 18, 2018

How Close Are We to Kubrick's AI-Controlled Vision of the Future?

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Movie audiences first heard these calmly intoned and ominous words in 1968, spoken by a spaceship's intelligent computer in the science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. With that one phrase, the computer named HAL 9000 confirmed that it could think for...

Oct 23, 2018

Portrait 'Painted' by AI Up for Auction at Christie's in NYC

An unsettling portrait created by artificial intelligence (AI) is making a historic appearance on the auction block at Christie's in New York City this week. It will be the first artwork created by an algorithm to be offered for auction in the world of fine art. The portrait — designed...

Oct 25, 2018

Creepy AI-Created Portrait Fetches $432,500 at Auction

A creepy-looking painting of a fictitious man in a dark frockcoat left the auction block at Christie's for a whopping $432,500 today (Oct. 25) in New York City. While that price tag is high — nearly 45 times its upper estimate — that's not what makes the sale so compelling:...

Jan 4, 2019

AI Can Now Decode Words Directly from Brain Waves

Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people's brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study,...

Jan 11, 2019

Mathematicians Discovered a Computer Problem that No One Can Ever Solve

Mathematicians have discovered a problem they cannot solve. It's not that they're not smart enough; there simply is no answer. The problem has to do with machine learning — the type of artificial-intelligence models some computers use to learn how to do a specific task. When Facebook or Google recognizes...

Jan 29, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Algorithms Can Be Racist. Here's Why She's Right.

Last week, newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines when she said, as part of the fourth annual MLK Now event, that facial-recognition technologies and algorithms always have these racial inequities that get translated, because algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to...

Feb 14, 2019

AI Sucks at Making Adorable Cat Photos, Clearly Misses the Entire Point of the Internet

Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were...

Mar 27, 2019

AI Is Good (Perhaps Too Good) at Predicting Who Will Die Prematurely

Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person's early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if...

Apr 25, 2019

Why Is This Viral Image of Unrecognizable Objects So Creepy?

See more What do you see in this image? Viewers are finding it virtually impossible to identify any of the almost-familiar objects in the picture — and it's freaking them out. Twitter user @melip0ne shared the image on Tuesday (April 22) with this challenge: Name one thing in this photo....

May 27, 2019

This Animated Mona Lisa Was Created by AI, and It Is Terrifying

The enigmatic, painted smile of the Mona Lisa is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as...

Jun 11, 2019

AI Listened to People's Voices. Then It Generated Their Faces.

Have you ever constructed a mental image of a person you've never seen, based solely on their voice? Artificial intelligence (AI) can now do that, generating a digital image of a person's face using only a brief audio clip for reference. Named Speech2Face, the neural network — a computer that...

Sep 30, 2019

Deepfake AI: Our Dystopian Present

Of all the scary powers of the internet, it's ability to trick the unsuspecting might be the most frightening. Clickbait, photoshopped pictures and false news are some of the worst offenders, but recent years have also seen the rise of a new potentially dangerous tool known as deepfake artificial intelligence...

Jul 25, 2020

What could drive humans to extinction?

The scene opens on a sparse, gray landscape, a gnarled tree in the foreground, bits of ash slowly drifting down from the sky. On the horizon, a few huddled figures stumble forward and into a bleak future. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's a common visual trope in many...

Sep 1, 2020

New 'AI Jesus' can deliver a sermon, but will you understand it?

What happens when you train a neural network using the King James Bible? You get AI Jesus — artificial intelligence (AI) that expounds on topics as Jesus from the King James edition of the New Testament might have done. Well, almost. The voice of this so-called AI clone of Jesus...