🚀 M. Jackson if still alive and no surgery; tout sur la menace astéroïde; l'anatomie par Apple AR; IA fait les devoirs & plus !
Tricher aux échecs avec un sextoy?; insecte télécommandé; robot plus petit qu'une patte de fourmi, et 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 🔮.
Je m'appelle Thomas, plus d'infos sur moi en bas d'email.
Voici donc ma dernière sélection !
L’apéro
AI portrait of Michael Jackson if he were still alive and had never had plastic surgery
More portraits here (Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, Tupac Shakur and more)
This autonomous robot can complete chemistry experiments 1,000x faster than a human scientist. Over an 8-day period the robot has chose between 98 million experiment variants and discovered a catalyst for green technologies that was 6-times more reactive than those previously discovered (1-min video, source)
a catalyst : a substance that enables a chemical reaction to proceed at a usually faster rate or under different conditions (as at a lower temperature) than otherwise possible
State of the art: the most recent robotic apple harvester by advanced.farm can pick ~30 apples in one minute (vidéo de 50 secondes, site du constructeur)
Notre Yann LeCun national, professor at NYU & chief AI Scientist at Meta, sur Twitter : "I am always surprised by the incomprehensibly large number of people who believe the myth that human-level AI will be achieved through one key idea, by one group of people, in one lab/company, that will stay ahead of the pack for years. (and make trillions). It's preposterous."
Témoignage d'un élève qui utilise l'IA génératrice de texte GPT-3 d'OpenAI pour faire les devoirs de ses amis et gagner de l'argent de poche :
"I have been using this tool for quite some time and only recently came up with the idea to use it to write essays, answer questions about movies and books for school projects, and much more. I feel a little guilty about it, but I don't really care that much anymore. For a couple of weeks, I have made $100 profit by "doing" homework for other classmates and now I am looked at as a genius. What are your thoughts on this? Have you done it yourself?" (source)
OpenAI, encore eux, publie Whisper, un système de reconnaissance vocale, en open source
Whisper a été entrainé avec 680,000 heures de données multilingues et «multitâches», aboutissant à un système capable de repérer de nombreuses finesses et de prendre en compte des accents, des sons en arrière-plan et même du jargon technique. (source)
Scientists in Japan have managed to create cyborg cockroaches that could help with disaster relief. The team equipped the insects with tiny backpacks that can control their movements (voir la vidéo de 2 minutes)
L'entreprise de voiture volante Kitty Hawk ferme ses portes, elle était financée par Larry Page et dirigée par Sebastian Thrun (célèbre pour avoir fondé Google X et "Google's self-driving car team")
“No matter how hard we looked, we could not find a path to a viable business,” said the CEO Thrun
It won’t affect Wisk Aero, the company that was borne out of a 2019 partnership between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, said Boeing
Démo assez dingue d'une application interactive de réalité augmentée par Apple pour l'éducation de l'anatomie (1-min video)
Ce drone est équipé de bras et pinces imitant les serres d'un aigle, lui permettant d'attraper des objets avant de s'envoler (vidéo d’1min50…datant déjà de 2016)
Astronomers estimate that there are tens of billions of super-Earths in habitable zones where liquid water can exist in our galaxy, the Milky Way alone (source)
Super-Earths are bigger, more common and more habitable than Earth itself
Pour rappel, notre galaxie compte entre 100 milliards et 400 milliards d'étoiles, et on estime qu'il y a 200 milliards de galaxies dans l'univers observable
Take a picture of a pile of legos - the Brickit app identifies all the pieces, tells you what you can build and gives you instructions to build them. (la démo vidéo de 30 secondes, brickit.app)
Intelligence animale : Dogs can reason by exclusion. If a dog knows the name of 10 toys and is asked to grab one with an unknown name out of a heap of toys, he will grab the one that is unknown. (scientific paper)
Reproduction dans l’espace, une incertitude levée : “Former NASA astronaut Mike Mullane has gone on record saying that, during missions, he would wake up to erections that could have ‘drilled through kryptonite’” (source)
À votre bon coeur ❤️
Si vous appréciez cette synthèse gratuite, n’hésitez pas à prendre 3 secondes svp pour l’envoyer 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, ou renseigner votre adresse email ci-dessous:
À table !
Premier vol réussi d'un nouveau type d'engin : the seaglider (source)
Il vole juste au-dessus de l'eau, ce qui lui permet de consommer moins qu'un avion, en profitant du "ground effect"
ground effect is the reduced aerodynamic drag that an aircraft's wings generate when they are close to a fixed surface
Convenience of a ferry (no long airport lines) with the speed of an aircraft, with zero emissions (distributed electric propulsion)
Comfortable in waves, ability to combine floating, foiling, and flying
foiling : usage d’un “foil”, surface profilée immergée pour fournir une portance dynamique (liée à la vitesse) dont sont équipés les bateaux du type hydroptère.
La promesse ? LA to SF (550km) or Boston to NYC (300km) in 2:15 hour for $100
Voir la vidéo de 1min20 du premier vol
Record battu : ce robot est plus petit qu'une patte de fourmi (voir le robot en action dans cette vidéo arrêtée à la bonne seconde)
Antbots, 0,3 millimeters wide, consist of 3 major systems:
1. a photovoltaic cell to accept light as power
2. a tiny integrated circuit for controlling and directing that power
and 3. a set of hinged legs that it uses to scoot itself around
It moves autonomously in that it needs only power but not with intelligence — it’s far too simple for that.
Applications would range from environmental cleanup and monitoring to targeted delivery of drugs, monitoring or stimulation of cells, and microscopic surgery. (source)
La mission DART de la NASA a percuté un astéroïde : les images + tout ce qu'il faut savoir sur la menace astéroïdaire
Mission réussie, DART (pour Double Asteroid Redirection Test), de la taille d'un gros frigo, a bien percuté l'astéroïde Dimorphos, de la taille d'un stade de foot, voir la courte vidéo de l'approche juste avant l'impact avec gros plan sur l'atéroïde, impressionnant !
La dernière image qu’on ait, visible à la fin de l’animation ci-dessus, est prise quand la sonde était à près de 100 mètres de l’astéroïde
Observations by Earth telescopes show the Didymos system brightening considerably at the moment of impact. And just afterward, a massive shell of ejected material blasts away from the battered Dimorphos : Voir la vidéo de l'impact filmé depuis la Terre
Vidéo de 50 secondes avec maquettes et images de synthèse afin de se se donner une idée de la différence de taille entre astéroïde et sonde
The asteroid system posed no threat making it a perfect target to test out a kinetic impact – which may be needed if an asteroid is ever on track to hit the Earth.
More than 1,000 people working on DART for more than 7 years. Spacecraft has been traveling to reach its asteroid target since launching in November 2021. On Monday, it hit its target going about 24,000km/h
The spacecraft was about 100 times smaller than Dimorphos, so it didn't obliterate the asteroid. Instead, DART hopes the collision changed the asteroid's speed and path in space. The mission team has compared this collision to a golf cart crashing into one of the Great Pyramids – enough energy to leave an impact crater.
Dimorphos takes 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete an orbit of Didymos, another asteroid (the 2 forms a system that orbits the sun in 770 days). If DART is successful, that time could decrease by 73 seconds, "but we actually think we're going to change it by about 10 minutes," said Edward Reynolds, DART project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The mission was a chance for NASA to test planetary defense technology and, if the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos was changed, it will be the first time humans change the motion of a natural celestial body in space.
Since a collision with a probe only nudges an asteroid, the DART technique will work only if there’s enough warning time that a dangerous asteroid or comet is heading toward Earth. Scientists would need to know a decade or so in advance in order to position the probe to meet the space rock before it’s too close to be deflected with a little push
"We are not aware of a single object that's on a collision course in the next 100 years or so," said the NASA's science chief, but noted that the agency is still searching for roughly 50% of all objects > 140m but < 1km wide.
To date, astronomers have discovered over 90% of all near-Earth asteroids > 1km across. (nice 1-min video of All Known Asteroids in the Solar System by 2018)
le risque qu’un astéroïde assez puissant pour détruire une ville frappe la Terre : 0,1%/an. Pour la proba qu’un méga astéroïde détruise l’humanité : 0.000001%/an (TTSO via source)
pour info, en 2019, l’astéroïde "2019-OK", gros comme un terrain de foot n’a été détecté que quelques heures avant qu’il ne "frôle" la Terre à 77.000 kilomètres. (Pour contexte, distance moyenne Terre-Lune : 384 400 km.) S’il l’avait percutée, l’impact aurait libéré une énergie proche de "30x celle de la bombe d’Hiroshima". (TTSO via source)
In 1908, a powerful asteroid hit the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in a remote Siberian forest of Russia. The event leveled trees and destroyed forests across 2000km2 (plus grande superficie que le département de l’Essonne). The impact threw people to the ground in a town 65 km away.
In 2013, a 20-meter-wide asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded in the air, releasing 20 to 30 times more energy than that of the first atomic bombs, generating brightness greater than the sun, exuding heat, damaging more than 7,000 buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people. The shock wave broke windows 100 km away. It went undetected because the asteroid came from the same direction and path as the sun. (compilation vidéo des "best shots of Chelyabinsk meteorite")
About 44 metric tonnes of meteorites hit Earth each day, according to NASA. Most of these fragments are as tiny as a grain of sand and burn up without any fuss immediately upon entering Earth's atmosphere. The Planetary Science Institute estimates that for a piece of space rock to make it all the way to the ground, even as a small pebble, it would have to be at least 5 meters wide when it first meets the atmosphere. Such rocks, however, are much less frequent.
According to NASA, a meteorite as big as a car encounters our planet about once a year.
One the size of a football field will cross our planet's path about once every 2,000 years.
A 100-meter-wide asteroid, the size of a football field : the pressure blast would destroy buildings up to 15 km from ground zero
What determines the effects of an asteroid impact? Mass, Speed, Angle of entry during descent, Where it hits
The good news is that statistically, every space rock has a high probability of falling into the ocean or onto some sparsely inhabited area of the planet. Despite overpopulation concerns, the majority of Earth is still the realm of wilderness rather than humankind (source)
Soupçons de triche, entraînement, bluff, créativité : les échecs en pleine révolution du fait de l'IA, "Chess Is Just Poker Now" (The Atlantic)
Earlier this month, an upstart American teenager named Hans Niemann snapped the 53-game unbeaten streak of world champion Magnus Carlsen, perhaps the game’s best player of all time.
On social media, players and fans theorized that Niemann might have been receiving secret messages encoded in the vibrations of electronic shoe inserts or remote-controlled anal beads.
Whatever really happened here, everyone agrees that for Niemann, or anyone else, to cheat at chess in 2022 would be conceptually simple. In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice.
The computers in this first era of chess engines were very good on defense, but they still had weaknesses, Sutovsky said, such as struggling to determine the value of sacrificing a piece for long-term benefit.
But that all changed on December 5, 2017, when AI researchers at Alphabet announced a new algorithm, AlphaZero, which had surpassed the best existing chess engine simply by playing games against itself—over the course of just 4 hours. AlphaZero used a neural network, an approach to artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain and, in a sense, allows a machine to learn. Other chess engines quickly incorporated the new technology, heralding the modern era of total computer domination.
If computers set the gold standard of play, and top players can only try to mimic them, then it’s not clear what, exactly, humans are creating. “Due to the predominance of engine use today,” the grandmaster So explained, “we are being encouraged to halt all creative thought and play like mechanical bots. It’s so boring. So beneath us.” And if elite players stand no chance against machines, instead settling for outsmarting their human opponents by playing subtle, unexpected, or suboptimal moves that weaponize “human frailty,” then modern-era chess looks more and more like a game of psychological warfare: not so much a spelling bee (concours oral d'orthographe) as a round of poker.
In that context, cheating scandals may be nothing less than a natural step in chess’s evolution. Poker, after all, has been rocked by allegations of foul play for years, including cases where players are accused of getting help from artificial intelligence. When the highest form of creativity is outfoxing your opponent—as has always been true of poker—breaking rules seems only natural.
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
Un grand merci d'avance ! 🙏
Ici pour s’inscrire et recevoir les prochains emails si on vous a transféré celui-ci.
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