🚀 IA détecte piscines pour le fisc, gagne un prix d'art, ordi dans vos yeux, robot le plus expressif, techno extra-terrestre ? & plus
🚀 IA détecte piscines pour le fisc, gagne un prix d'art, ordi dans vos yeux, robot le plus expressif, techno extra-terrestre ? & plus
1000 ans de prison en 8 heures, the first 3D-printed ear transplant, robot d'un millimètre, & plus
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Voici donc ma dernière sélection !
L’apéro
Maybe the "world’s most advanced human shaped robot" : la diversité d'expressions faciales est bluffante ! Voir le robot en action - nouvelle vidéo de 30 secondes d’août 2022
Le dispositif de détection des piscines non déclarées par intelligence artificielle du Trésor Public a permis de récolter 10 millions d’€ depuis l'an dernier. (source)
Généralisé à toute la France à partir de septembre 2022, en application pour le moment dans 9 départements.
That AI can animate in high resolution a painting or a picture of anyone just moving your own face in front of a camera, bluffant !
À Moscou, des hackers commandent des dizaines de taxis et créent un embouteillage monstre (source)
La NASA est parvenue à produire de l'oxygène sur Mars grâce à une petite machine embarquée sur le rover Perseverance (source)
the machine splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide.
Samsung a inventé un vase à fracasser sur un feu pour l'éteindre en quelques secondes : les parois du vase renferment un liquide retardateur de flamme (voir la vidéo spectaculaire de 30 secondes)
Hum...Prisoners could serve '1,000 year sentences in 8.5 hours' in the future
"There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," said Philosopher Rebecca Roache (article de 2014)
Dingue : All steel produced after 1945 is contaminated to some extent with background radiation because of the use of nuclear weapons. Such steel is unusable for the most radiation-sensitive applications, such as sensing equipment aboard spacecraft. Steel made before 1945, eg taken from sunken battleships, is used instead.” (wikipedia)
Dystopique : "China… a drone with a loudspeaker and camera pointed at you appears: ''This community is in total lockdown now! Stay in your room! ''
If you need a visualization of Orwell’s 1984, this is probably as close as you can get (voir la vidéo de 18 secondes)
In a first, doctors transplant a 3D printed ear made of a patient’s own cells (source)
Un plombier français invente une solution permettant de recycler l'eau de la douche pour remplir la chasse d'eau des toilettes ! (source)
Tirer la chasse d'eau revient à évacuer 9 litres d'eau potable, c'est comme si on jetait un pack d'eau à chaque fois
Installer sa solution permet de diviser jusqu'à 2 la facture d'eau !
À table !
Incroyable : The first augmented reality contact lenses were tested out on a human. They contained micro-batteries to solve the power supply challenge. (source)
No, it wasn’t a crude bench test of oversized hardware with wires dangling. This was a genuine test of an AR contact lens worn directly on the eye of a human subject for the very first time.
Sure, the ability to put a high resolution display on a tiny transparent lens is difficult, but it’s not the most challenging piece of the puzzle. The harder issue is that this tiny lens, which needs to sit comfortably on the human eye, has to communicate wirelessly with external devices and be fully powered without a physical tether of any kind. That is a daunting task, and yet it is what Mojo Vision achieved in their latest demonstration.
"We will look back at the years when people walked down the street, necks bent, staring down at little screens in their hands as an absurdly primitive way to interact with information."
According to Mojo Vision, the prototype lens includes medical grade micro-batteries. It’s unclear what the battery life is for the current prototype, but according to the company, their product goal is power management that enables all-day wear.
The Mojo Lens hardware has about 30 times the pixel density of a current iPhone. In addition, these lenses include an ARM processor with a 5GHz radio transmitter, along with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to track eye movements. And all of this sits directly on the human eye. WOW
They call it "Invisible Computing"
From Mojo Vison's website:
The CEO: "When I ask people when they think they’ll see smart contact lenses being worn, I hear answers ranging from 10 years from now, 20 years, all the way to it’ll never happen. Turns out, the future is a lot closer than most people think. In fact, the future is already here. I’ve seen it. I’ve worn it. It works. It all happened at Mojo Vision's labs in Saratoga, CA on June 23, 2022, and it was the first ever on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens."
Mojo Lens’ revolutionary design uses a tiny flat-panel display technology the size of a grain of sand to share critical information, and smart sensors powered by solid-state batteries built into a scleral lens that also corrects your vision. By overlaying digital information onto our world, Mojo Lens empowers each of us to be our best self in any situation.
Mojo Lens quietly provides you with crucial data while you’re engaged in events that demand your attention. You can see trails on a ski slope, your pace for your last mile of a run, or talking points for a presentation, all without holding a device or looking down at a screen.
The smallest remote-controlled walking robot ever constructed: less-than-a-millimeter
a quite adorable prototype of a crab-shaped mini-robot. It can run. It can jump. It’s tiny enough to fit inside the ‘o’ in this sentence
it could help build other devices by traveling into tight, hard-to-reach spaces.
Plus, because it's entire less-than-a-millimeter robot body doesn't need wires or electricity to operate, it could even roam the human body one day, acting like some sort of dextrous, six-legged medical assistant.
"With these assembly techniques and materials concepts, we can build walking robots with almost any sizes or 3D shapes,"
(voir le robot en action dans les 10 premières secondes de cette vidéo; source)
Une oeuvre d'art générée par l'IA gagne une compétition artistique (source)
Somebody entered the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition with an AI-generated painting — and won first prize, Vice reports, pissing off artists everywhere.
The artwork, titled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial," depicts a scifi-inspired scene of an opera performance. But Jason Allen, who submitted the artwork, used AI image generator Midjourney to create it.
The incident goes to show just how far the technology has come, reigniting the thorny debate surrounding the definition of art and what makes an artist an artist.
The author, for his part, argued on Midjourney's Discord that these artists were "discrediting the human element," according to Vice. In fact, he described in a post before he was announced as the winner how he went through a painstaking "many weeks" long process to come up with a "special prompt" that would make the AI generate the image.
👽🤨 Harvard Professor Trying to Recover Alleged Alien Tech From Ocean (source)
Astrophysics professor Avi Loeb was the longest-serving chair of Harvard's astronomy department until he joined a White House science and technology advisory committee. His next adventure lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Yesterday, NBC reported that Loeb wants to recover fragments of an interstellar meteor he says fell to Earth in 2014 after it arrived from outside our own solar system. In 2019, Loeb and one of his students, Amir Siraj, published a not-yet-peer-reviewed-paper in arXiv that said the meteor must have been made of material tougher than iron to survive its trip, and in 2021, Loeb announced his desire to recover the object from the ocean floor.
Loeb believes it may be from a distant alien civilization.
"We’re planning to board the ship and build a sled and a magnet attached to it that will scoop the ocean floor," Loeb said, according to NBC. "And we will go back and forth, like mowing the lawns across the region, 10 kilometers in size and collect with the magnets all the fragments that are attracted to it, and then brush them off and study their composition in the laboratory."
Paul Graham, cofondateur du très célèbre incubateur de startups YCombinator, sur l'IA et l'innovation:
The biggest technical trend I've noticed in startups recently is AI. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence = Human-level intelligence) may be far in the future, but in narrower domains ML (machine learning = IA based on learning patterns from data) has gotten good enough that it can be inserted into lots of different things to make them incrementally better.
In many domains ML will be enough of a differentiator that it will enable a new set of companies to win. It will be like microcomputers, or the internet, or smartphones in that respect.
The most surprising thing to me is that domain-specific ML doesn't seem that hard to build. Knowledge of the necessary techniques seems to be widespread, and you don't seem to need a truckload of GPUs and your own power plant to train a model for a narrow domain.
(A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles.)
Data seems to be the limiting factor, rather than model building technique or computing resources. And if you have the app, you often have the data too.
Africa could power the world with its solar and wind energy:
In the International Energy Agency’s latest Africa Outlook report, the continent’s rich solar and onshore wind resources are cited as sufficient to separate enough hydrogen from water to produce cheap emissions-free hydrogen fuel, equivalent to yearly “global total energy supply today.”
Solar panels to cover water canals in California so as to generate electricity and prevent evaporation : a double win!
California’s pilot program will break ground this month. Though covering only about 2 miles of canals at first, it’s claimed that if the program scaled out to all 4,000 miles of canals in the state, it could provide enough power for 75% of the homes in California.
2300 owners of Tesla Powerwall batteries in California join to create a "virtual power plant" and help provide electricity to the grid! (source)
One hot day last month in California: coordinated into a virtual power plant through the Tesla app, the Powerwall owners were paid by the utility for the power they’d captured with solar panels and stored in their batteries. They also had the option to opt-out of participating.
This type of distributed renewable energy decreases the demand on utility companies to use backup generators, which are their least efficient and sustainable sources of power.
Tesla built the world’s largest virtual power plant in South Australia, where 5,000 home battery owners are coordinated to support the grid, including in public housing.
What we could do with cheap abundant clean energy (Conversation with Jason Crawford)
water desalination : We could use this to irrigate the desert. We could reclaim the Sahara
extract interesting materials and elements in places like seawater or rock, or even in our garbage in landfills. We could economically extract uranium from the ocean for instance.
toxic waste cleanup
we could pull trace elements out of the atmosphere, including, of course, carbon dioxide.
we could recycle matter endlessly, import it from asteroids
cheap bullet trains, cheap air travel
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Quelques mots sur le cuistot
J'ai écrit plus de 50 articles ces dernières années, à retrouver ici, dont une bonne partie publiés dans des médias comme le Journal du Net (mes chroniques ici), le Huffington Post, L'Express, Les Échos.
Je suis CEO et co-fondateur de l'agence digitale KRDS, nous avons des bureaux dans 6 pays entre la France et l'Asie. Je suis basé à Singapour (mon Linkedin), également membre du think tank NXU.
Retrouvez-moi sur twitter en cliquant ici : je tweete des faits et infos contre-intuitives, brèves, à consommer sur place (et non pas des liens sans contexte vers des articles interminables), Jacques Attali est un de mes followers par exemple.
Retrouvez ici mon podcast Parlons Futur (ou taper "Parlons Futur" dans votre appli de podcast favorite), vous y trouverez entre autres des interviews et des résumés de livres.
Merci, et bon week-end !
Thomas