🚀 IA traque députés sur leur tél au parlement; moto volante; voiture lévitante; robot éloquent; AI ou humain?; & plus
Microsoft can bring back the dead; Google traduit en temps réel en AR; des mois sans brancher cette voiture solaire, & plus
Bonjour,
Vous recevez la newsletter Parlons Futur : une fois par semaine au plus, une sélection de news résumées en bullet points sur des sujets tech 🤖, science 🔬, éco 💰, géopolitique 🌏 et défense ⚔️ pour mieux appréhender le futur 🔮.
Si on vous a envoyé cet email, vous pouvez vous inscrire ici pour ne pas manquer les prochains.
Je m'appelle Thomas, plus d'infos sur moi en bas d'email.
Voici donc ma dernière sélection !
L’apéro
Impressionnant : The Ocean Cleanup non-profit, founded by Dutch-born Boyan Slat at the sweet age of 19, expects to be able to clean the entire Great Pacific Garbage Patch (containing 100,000 tons of plastic) using 10 systems such as the one presented in this 48-second video (or that 3-min Youtube video, read more on wikipedia)
Démo publique la semaine dernière d'un homme volant en jetpack (vidéo du test public, site du concepteur Gravity, vidéo de 15 secondes d’une intervention en mer)
Peut être essayé près de Londre pour la modique somme de…3,500€
Beau gadget, mais on a du mal à voir les applications. Ses promoteurs parlent d'une utilité dans l'armée et les secours. Mais il y a de quoi rester sceptique : l'armée? Avec un réservoir rempli de produit inflammable, cela fait une belle cible. Les secours ? Cela ne semble pas permettre de transporter une seconde personne, à suivre...
Encore un gadget ? Démo de la "première moto volante au monde" au Detroit Auto Show la semaine dernière : voir la vidéo d'une minute (site du constructeur)
can fly for 40 minutes, reaching speeds of up to 100 km/h
It's still noisy, needed to be remotely controlled for its demonstration
Price… $777,000, company hopes to get the cost down to $50,000 for a smaller, electric model by 2025.
Ethereum’s merge: last week the Ethereum blockchain successfully migrated to a new architecture that hugely increases transaction speed and capacity and decreases energy consumption by 99.9%. "Behind all the noise, a lot of very clever people are quietly building highly complex and technical infrastructure, scaffolding and plumbing that might mean you could build billion-scale consumer services on this stuff in, say, five years." says tech analyst Benedict Evans
Can you spot which images are made by AI in these pairs of images?
Cette IA identifie en direct les parlementaires en train de regarder leur téléphone et les affiche sur Twitter (source)
"The system monitors daily livestreams of government meetings on YouTube to assess how long a representative has been looking at their phone versus the meeting in progress. If the AI detects a distracted person, it will publicly identify the party by posting the clip on Twitter. The accused representative will be named and shamed with their social media handles. The bot also politely requests they "pls stay focused!"
C'est un projet qui date de 2021, ça donne une idée de ce qui nous attend dans un monde avec toujours plus de caméras, de toujours plus haute résolution, couplées à des IAs capables d'en interpréter toujours mieux les images
IA pas encore au point : of 415 published AI tools developed to combat COVID with globally shared information and the best resources available, not one was fit for clinical use, a recent study found; basic errors in the training data rendered them useless (source)
In late 2020, Microsoft received a patent for chatbots that "bring back the dead", using inputs from “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, written letters, etc. ” (CNN)
"Conversing in the personality of a specific person may include determining and/or using conversational attributes of the specific person, such as style, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue length and complexity, topic and consistency,” as well as using behavioral attributes such as interests and opinions and demographic information such as age, gender and profession, the patent states."
Microsoft doesn’t have plans to create a product from the patent yet.
Un auteur s'extasie devant le générateur de texte GPT-3 : "If you asked GPT-3 to continue, say, a Wordsworth poem, the computer’s vocabulary would never be one moment before or after appropriate usage for the poem’s era. This is a skill that no scholar alive has mastered. This computer program was, somehow, expert in hermeneutics: interpretation through grammatical construction and historical context, the struggle to elucidate the nexus of meaning in time." (source)
En parlant de GPT-3, des chercheurs l'ont combiné avec de la synthèse vocale et le robot Ameka aux expressions faciales bluffantes, regardez qq secondes de ce que cela donne dans cette vidéo
le robot fait à peu près sens, et c'est à mettre au crédit de GPT-3, mais la voix est caverneuse et le mouvement des "lèvres" de silicone trop lent par moment, on sent bien que le son ne provient pas de la "bouche" mais d'un haut-parleur niché quelque part dans le robot, cela sonne faux, mais cela pourrait être “facilement” perfectible, à suivre !
Petit rappel très clair : Biden on Taiwan in an itw with CBS' 60 Minutes, to the question "Unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir. U.S. forces, U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?" Biden: “Yes.” (50-sec video)
Chinese researchers have tested modified cars capable of magnetically levitating almost 35 millimeters off of the ground over a stretch of specially modified highway.
judging by the clunky equipment and rocky ride seen in the 12-sec video though, immense engineering challenges remain before the tech could possibly become practical.
Avec un peu de retard : at the last Google IO event in May, Google revealed that it had added 24 new languages to Translate, many using ‘zero shot’ learning, where the model does not need to see a Quechua/English translation to understand how to make its own. Google also demoed a concept pair of AR glasses with a heads-up display that can listen to someone talking and show you a text translation in real time (voir la vidéo de 1min45)
c'est encore un prototype, mais au vu du rythme des progrès en IA, c'est bien le diable si ça n'arrive pas sur le marché avant la fin de la décennie, avec les conséquences qu'on peut imaginer sur les rapports humains, le business, le tourisme... et même l'apprentissage des langues ?
à noter que ce serait peut-être encore plus pratique pour les entendants au format oreillette, doublage plutôt que sous-titres : la parole est traduite dans une autre langue avec synthèse vocale et reproduction du même timbre de voix et des mêmes intonations, en temps réel !
And in case you missed it as well, Elon Musk en mars 2022 sur son “worker-droid” “general focused humanoid” Optimus : “I think we will have something pretty good at the prototype level this year, and it might be ready for at least a moderate volume production towards the end of next year.” 🤨
And: in January, Musk said in Tesla's Q4 earnings report that the Optimus robot was the most important product that Tesla had in development.
À votre bon coeur ❤️
Vous appréciez cette synthèse gratuite ? Si oui, n’hésitez pas à prendre 3 secondes svp pour la transférer à ne serait-ce qu’un contact 🙂
Et si on vous a partagé cet email, vous pouvez cliquer ici pour vous inscrire et ne pas manquer les prochains.
À table !
This solar car goes 965 km on a charge and is gearing up for production (Techcrunch)
Dutch startup Lightyear, founded in 2016, has not only developed its first vehicle, it has reportedly pre-sold 150 of them at a price of €250,000.
Its exterior surface is decked out with 5m2 of solar arrays.
In optimal sun conditions, it can power itself for up to 65km a day
If you live in a very sunny area and only drive a couple dozen miles each day, you could conceivably go weeks or even months without having to plug the car in
In conjunction with producing the first model Lightyear 0, the company’s also developing a lower-cost successor called the Lightyear 2. They’re aiming to bring this model to market by 2025 at a much-lower starting price of €30,000, and say they’ve already received 10,000 reservations from leasing and car-sharing companies.
Infographie intéressante: combien d'humains ont vécu avant nous ? (109 milliards)
les petits points qui tombent représentent le flux de naissances et décès sur une année (10 millions de personnes par point)
reste à évaluer le nombre d'humains qui vivront dans le futur?
"Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammalian species (one million years), and even if the world population falls to 10% of its current size, 99.5% of human lives would still be ahead of us." (extrait du livre What We Owe the Future publié cette année)
Sur démographie et longévité, intéressant d’écouter Elon Musk (tiré de cette interview de mars 2022) :
Musk: “What are the existential threats that humanity faces? I spent a lot of time talking about the birthrate thing. That might be the single biggest threat to the future of human civilization.”
Musk: “I'm really worried about this birthrate thing. That's been troubling me for many years, because I just don't see it turning around. Every year it's worse. And I drive my friends crazy with this.”
Aren't you personally interested in living longer? Musk: “I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That it would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance.”
3 applications concrètes de "quantum science" où la Chine a pris de l'avance (source)
The first is in quantum computing.
A few months ago, a multi-university team of Chinese researchers announced a result that blew away anything the U.S. has achieved: In 2019, Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had completed in 3.3 minutes a task that would have taken a traditional supercomputer at least 2.5 days. Last October, China’s 66-qubit Zuchongzhi 2 quantum processor reportedly completed the same task 1 million times faster.
Quantum computing is a big deal because of the potential military applications — especially the possibility that existing forms of encryption could be rendered useless.
Chinese researchers are also now leading the world in long-distance quantum communications.
They can now communicate with satellites at a distance of 1000 kilometers using quantum entanglement — a completely secure form of communications that previously was only possible over short distances. And another team increased the distance over which single photons can be transmitted through fiber-optic cable by 2 orders of magnitude.
Obviously these results also have military implications, since they could create communications networks that are much more secure than current ones.
China has also seemingly managed to make big breakthroughs in the area of quantum sensing.
Long-range quantum magnetometers, or SQUIDS, could be used to detect U.S. submarines — including our nuclear subs, the backbone of our second-strike capability — at great distances.
Together, China’s breakthroughs in quantum computing, communications, and sensing add up to something very significant. The U.S., which invented quantum computing and did much of the fundamental research in quantum mechanics itself, now finds itself lagging in some of the technology’s practical applications.
Musk/Altman, 2 amis et 2 points de vue radicalement opposés sur la viabilité économique de la fusion nucléaire
Elon Musk sur Twitter ce mois-ci:
"Fusion would be expensive energy, given difficulty of obtaining and transporting source fuel, plus maintaining the reactor. Far better to use the Sun – thermonuclear reactor with no need to refuel or service."
"The primary solution to a sustainable energy future is solar/wind with batteries for when sun doesn’t shine or wind doesn’t blow, interconnected with conventional high voltage lines. No unknown technology is needed! Hydro+geothermal+fission will also be non-trivial contributors."
Sam Altman, ancien dirigeant du célèbre incubateur YCombinator et maintenant CEO d'OpenAI (un des laboratoires d'IA les plus en pointe, qui a développé le générateur d'images DALL-E and de texte GPT3, dans lequel a investi Microsoft), quant à lui, a investi $375 million dans Helion, "his largest investment in a start-up ever":
“by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve ever seen,” said Altman in November 2021. “With a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts, and the culture of a startup, this team has a clear path to net electricity. If Helion is successful, we can avert climate disaster and provide a much better quality of life for people.”
Altman visited four fusion companies, and made his first investment of $9.5 million into Helion 2015.
“I immediately upon meeting the Helion founders thought they were the best and their technical approach was the best by far,” said Altman .
Helion is building systems that are about the size of a shipping container (12 meters long, 2,5 meters wide, 2,6 meters high) and that can deliver on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power continuously around 40,000 homes
“Our 2024 date is not a key demonstration of the science at this point. The goal is to go after commercially installed power generation. There’s a huge market, and we want to be able to get this out in the world as soon as possible” said David Kirtley, CEO of Helion Energy
Pour info, la France avait une capacité de production d'électricité de 135,000 megawatts en 2020 : pour avoir la même capacité avec ces centrales à fusion de la taille d'un container, il faudrait 81,000 m2, soit environ 12 terrains de football (voire beaucoup moins si il était possible de les empiler)
"We are excited about being at the 50-megawatt scale, and being able to get electricity costs down to a cent per kilowatt-hour."
Pour se donner une idée, en France le kilowatt-heure coûte environ 15 centimes pour le consommateur final
July 2022 update, Sam Altman said:
"Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator."
Q > 1 fusion: when the power being released by the fusion reactions is superior to the required heating power
"The goals of the company are quite ambitious—clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, and the ability to manufacture enough power plants to satisfy the current electrical demand of earth in a ten year period."
"If both things happen, it will transform the world. Abundant, clean, and radically inexpensive energy will elevate the quality of life for all of us—think about how much the cost of energy factors into what we do and use. Also, electricity at this price will allow us to do things like efficiently capture carbon (so although we’ll still rely on gasoline for awhile, it’ll be ok)."
à noter, Sam Altman et Elon Musk se connaissent bien, ils ont fondé ensemble OpenAI en 2015, même si Elon Musk a démissionné du board en 2018. Et d'ailleurs OpenAI et Neuralink, une autre entreprise fondée par Elon Musk, ont leurs headquarters dans le même immeuble à San Francisco 🤨, c'est à se demander si ces deux-là se parlent encore, on aurait bien envie d’un débat !
Aussi : another company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is funded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (source).
Les dernières newsletters :
L’addition ?
Cette newsletter est gratuite, si vous souhaitez m'encourager à continuer ce modeste travail de curation et de synthèse, vous pouvez prendre quelques secondes pour :
transférer cet email à un(e) ami(e)
étoiler cet email dans votre boîte mail
cliquer sur le coeur en bas d’email
me répondre d’un mot (ça améliore la “délivrabilité” de ces emails me dit-on)
Un grand merci d'avance ! 🙏
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.
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 (j’ai notamment pu mener un entretien avec Jacques Attali).
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.
Merci, et bon week-end !
Thomas