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[WIRED] Forget Siri: This Radical New AI Teaches Itself and Reads Your Mind

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BY STEVEN LEVY  08.12.14  |  5:50 AM  |  
When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6:30?” or “Call Diane’s mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. “My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,” she’d say.

Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use Open­Table. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her.

Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations.

Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

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[WIRED] Absurd Creature of the Week: This Parasite Eats a Fish’s Tongue — And Takes Its Place

• BY MATT SIMON [Wired magazine]
 
• 11.22.13
• 6:30 AM

A Cymothoa exigua tongue-eating isopod that has consumed and replaced the tongue of a snapper, who is not wide-eyed because of terror. That’s just how fish normally look. Photo copyright Matthew R. Gilligan

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A fish walks into a bar and takes a seat. The bartender asks what he wants to drink, but the fish doesn’t say anything. So the bartender asks, “What, cat got your tongue?” The fish grabs a cocktail napkin and writes out, No, actually, it was an isopod. An isopod got my tongue and by “got” I mean she ate it.

That joke may not be funny to you, but it’s hilarious to the tongue-eating isopod. You see, in the Gulf of California there actually exists a critter, Cymothoa exigua, that targets a fish by infiltrating its gills and latching onto its tongue. It proceeds to not only consume the organ, but will then replace it with its own body, providing the fish with a new fully functioning tongue it uses (probably a bit begrudgingly) to grind food against tiny teeth on the roof of its mouth.

If you can believe it, this is a love story at heart. And the rose snapper’s face is the stage on which it unfolds.This remarkable attack is the only known instancein the animal kingdom of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of its host. And while C. exigua targets several other fish, attaching to their tongues and draining their blood, only with the rose snapper does it devour and completely replace the organ as an operating structure, according to marine biologist Rick Brusca of the University of Arizona. And he stresses that while there are hundreds of such species of tongue-targeting isopods, contrary to many media reports, only C. exigua can actually truly assume the duties of the organ.

These isopods are protandrous hermaphrodites: They first mature into males, but then switch sexes to become females. The magic starts when more than one C. exigua lands in a given fish’s gills. When the first one infiltrates it begins to mature into a male, but when the second one appears, said Brusca, it “stimulates the first one to change sex and become a female and crawl from the gills up through the throat and attach to the tongue, and then this new second one is the male that will impregnate her.”

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Supercopters: Autonomous Quadrotor Flight

Look out everyone, because there’s a gang of miniature, four-rotor electric helicopters that’s figured out how to work together and build a simple structure. This could be just the beginning of what they can do.

Those clever programmers at the GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have made these quadrotor helicopters autonomous, teaching them how to work together while building things. Heck, most people can’t do that.

The robot builders simply tell the copters which structure to build, and then, according to a GRASP technician, the quadrotors cooperatively “figure out the assembly plan and then build it.” The flying bots even have the ability to go for another attempt if the magnetic parts don’t snap together quite right.

Even though the clever programmers have created simple modules for the helicopters to construct, nevertheless, this is the first glimpse of cooperative flying robot construction on a larger scale. Imagine if these mini copters were scaled up to 100 times their size, putting together skyscrapers, bridges, or the components of Skynet.

Experimentation with these brainy choppers has been going on for a long time. When we saw videos of the quadrotors performing autonomous feats early last year, we were immediately impressed. They were downright aggressive, flying through thin slots and moving hoops with spectacular precision. A few months later, they got even more sophisticated. Now, they’re getting downright scary.

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