Journalist Ashlee Vance travels to Montreal, Canada to meet the founders of Lyrebird, a startup that is using AI to clone human voices with frightening precision.

 

Ocado's new warehouse has thousands of robots zooming around a grid system to pack groceries. The thousands of robots can process 65,000 orders every week. They communicate on a 4G network to avoid bumping into each other. Is this the future of retail?

 

By Seung Lee
MercutyNews.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google CEO Sundar Pichai broke a new barrier in artificial intelligence technology Tuesday when he unveiled a voice assistant that sounds exactly like a human voice.

At the I/O developers conference, Pichai introduced Google Duplex, which allows the Assistant to speak with human-like cadence and includes artificial intelligence that is able to comprehend context and unclear answers.

Pichai demonstrated Duplex’s ability by having Assistant make reservations with a restaurant and a hair salon in two recorded phone calls. The receivers of the calls seemed to have no idea they were speaking to an AI voice. In the phone calls, Google Assistant said “ums” and “uhs” to make itself sound more human. In its phone call with the restaurant, where it was too busy to book a reservation, Google Assistant was able to naturally respond to questions and remarks made in a thick accent.

 

 

 

 

 

By: Marc Morano
Climate Depot

 

Apocalyptic scenarios attributed to global warming are simply false and the human race will be able to accommodate whatever “climate change” throws at us, claims a remarkably sober new essay in Scientific American.

 

By Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.
Breitbart.com

The essay, penned by John Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, analyzes two recent reports by “ecomodernists” who reject climate panic and frame the question of climate change and humanity’s ability to cope with it in radically new terms.

One of the reports, a work called “Enlightened Environmentalism” by Harvard iconoclast Steven Pinker, urges people to regain some much-needed perspective on climate, especially in the context of the overwhelming material benefits of industrialization.

Pooh-poohing “the mainstream environmental movement, and the radicalism and fatalism it encourages,” Pinker argues that humanity can solve problems related to climate change the same way it has solved myriad other problems, by harnessing “the benevolent forces of modernity.”

Separating himself from environmentalists who seem to detest modernity, Pinker asserts that industrialization “has been good for humanity.”

“It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts,” he says.

And just as human ingenuity has allowed us to overcome countless obstacles in the past, he notes, it is more than reasonable to suppose it will do so in the future as well.

The second report put forward by Horgan is a recent article by Will Boisvert titled “The Conquest of Climate,” which contends that the “consequences for human well-being will be small” even if human greenhouse emissions significantly warm the planet.

Boisvert, who has been described as a “left-wing environmental expert, is no “climate denier,” yet he calls for climate alarmists to take a deep breath and step back from doomsday forecasts that likely have little to do with what will actually take place in the future.

As an example, the author pokes fun at a 2016 Newsweek article announcing that “Climate change could cause half a million deaths in 2050 due to reduced food availability.”

The story, based on a Lancet study, made dire forecasts regarding the effects of climate change on agriculture, while failing to note that the study actually predicts much more abundant food availability in 2050 thanks to advances in agricultural productivity. These advances will “dwarf the effects of climate change,” he contends, and the “poorest countries will benefit most.”

Like Pinkers, Boisvert tries to factor in what climate alarmists ignore: the capability of human beings to react to changing scenarios in remarkably ingenious ways.

“Throughout history humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated away from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga,” he writes, before embarking on an excursus into the striking cleverness of the Inuit in adapting to a hostile environment.

The current climate change “crisis” that has ecologists’ knickers in a knot, just isn’t that big a deal, he argues. It is merely the “latest episode in humanity’s ongoing conquest of extreme climates,” which will likewise “amount to just another problem in economic and technological development, and a middling-scale one at that.”

While climate skeptics will welcome this gust of common sense wafting in from the Scientific American, establishment climate alarmists will undoubtedly seek to quash the news, knowing it could affect not only the funding they depend on, but the ideologically driven political programs they seek to impose on the world.

After all, if the world is not under imminent peril from climate change, who will listen to—and fund—the prophets of doom?

Climate alarmists turn morality on its head by coming down on the wrong side of truth.

 

Short video on experiments that prove CO2 is not a pollutant and climate alarmists would have you believe.  It is in fact "the breath of life."

 

Will you get lost in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Most people I asked don't even know what that is, but it's happening all around us right now. This system is about technological evolution... evolving us.

 

Editor's Note: This stuff is just crazy. These people have ZERO idea what damage this can do to all life on this planet. We already have massive health problems caused by GMOs.

 

• Scientists say two new, laboratory-built ‘letters’ can survive harmoniously alongside the natural alphabet of DNA in a cell.
• They hope this new artificial pair of amino acids will eventually help them invent drugs that last longer and work better.
• Their results were published online in the journal Nature.  

Scientists have just built the first fully-functioning, artificial instruction system for creating new matter inside living cells — a find that could one day make it possible to create more precise, effective, and longer-lasting drugs.

The duo of synthetic ‘X’ and ‘Y’ bases, created at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California, can integrate seamlessly into the DNA of E. coli, and function inside of a living cell. These tiny amino acids are distinct from our own 'A-T' (adenine – thymine) and 'G-C' (guanine – cytosine) pairs — the amino acids that combine and form the basis for all genetic information in the natural world.

“I would not call this a new lifeform — but it’s the closest thing anyone has ever made,” TSRI Professor Floyd Romesberg, who led the research, wrote in a release.

He said it’s like our genetic "alphabet" only had four vowels, and now, we’ve added two more artificial letters into the mix — and with them, the ability to make whole new sounds and words that we would have never encountered in the natural world.

Romesberg told Business Insider that perhaps the most remarkable thing about the artificial X-Y pair is that it can co-exist alongside natural DNA pairs. And from the cellular level, they function just like those natural pairs: retrieving information and pumping out proteins — the materials we use for making new cells and building life.The researchers hope this means that one day, the artificially-made amino acids could be used to create new kinds of targeted drugs for humans that have fewer side effects, work more effectively, or last longer. 

This is something Romesberg has been working on since 2014, when he co-founded biotechnology company Synthorx, which he created to engineer new kinds of drugs. Back then, his team was able to store X-Y pairs in a cell, but didn’t yet know how to retrieve the information inside them and create new proteins. After much trial and error, the team figured out how to do all that, pumping out artificial proteins that could be used to generate new drugs.

But the discovery is incremental. Because these new letters are synthetic, “the cell can't grow if we don't provide them,” Romesberg said. That's both good news and bad news. It makes the find less scary, because there’s no chance that these X’s and Y’s could escape the cell, going off and multiplying on their own outside.

But it also means the X's and Y's always have to be manufactured by scientists. So while these new letters might help us make some new genetic "words," they're not quite like natural life. 

This incredibly lifelike animatronic Abraham Lincoln is the work of Garner Holt Productions, which has been making robots for theme parks, museums, and other attractions for 40 years. We get up close to this robot and chat with its creator, Garner Holt, about the state of animatronics you see in places like Disneyland and what's to come.