Happy Halloween! Let's talk about Necrobotics and how we use corpses for robotic limps. And did you hear about the Covid outbreak at Foxconn? And what about reading minds via MRI technology? And would you want Alexa to speak with your dead grandma's voice? How about robots with tentacle arms? And what about those 3k channels that are deleted by YouTube every month? And influencers can now be stalked by AI! SPOOKY!
00:00 - Intro
03:18 - 1: Dead spiders: Nature’s robot hands
09:35 - 2: iPhone workers walking out after COVID-19 outbreak; bonus offered
15:45 - 3: Researchers Report Decoding Thoughts from fMRI Data
24:22 - 4: Amazon's Alexa will recreate the voices of dead relatives
33:15 - 5: Harvard's Robotic Tentacle Gripper Is Pure Nightmare Fuel
40:48 - 6: YouTube is Removing More Than 3k Channels Per Month Linked to China-Based Influence Campaigns
46:15 - 7: AI stalks influencers in the wild to expose horrors of high-tech surveillance
Summary:
Amazon’s Alexa will soon be able to recreate the voices of users’ dead relatives. The tech juggernaut revealed it was building the technology to allow its voice assistant device to impersonate people with a recording of somebody’s voice provided it is less than one minute long. In a video released to showcase the tech, a synthetic voice of a deceased grandmother reading a story to her grandson.
Dead spiders are "necrobotic grippers"! In what may well be a case of bio-inspired robotics gone too far, the researchers are exploring how the dead arachnids can double as a robotic gripper using hydraulic pressure.
Part of the versatility of the human hand’s ability to pick up almost anything comes from being able to apply a gentle touch to frail or oddly-shaped objects. Taking inspiration from animals to build robots designed to accomplish a specific task is far from a new idea. The human hand might be incredibly dextrous, but it’s also incredibly hard to replicate its abilities for a robot.
For the first time, scientists report they have devised a method that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings to reconstruct continuous language. In a preprint posted September 29 on bioRxiv, a team at the University of Texas at Austin details a “decoder,” or algorithm, that can “read” the words that a person is hearing or thinking during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. He notes that the amount of fMRI data collected matches most other studies that use fMRI recordings, though he had fewer research subjects.
Influencers may crave attention by “occupation,” but a new AI experiment shows they can’t always control their admirers’ gazes. While attention-seeking influencers may garner little sympathy, anyone can enter the crosshairs of AI surveillance.
10,000 YouTube channels removed, which builds on the more than 30k YouTube channels that YouTube has removed over the past year as part of the same push against Chinese influence campaigns. The program has seemingly been growing over time, with YouTube detecting more and more channels linked to this group each month.
iPhone workers have reportedly been walking out in significant numbers after an outbreak of COVID-19 at the world’s largest iPhone assembly plant in Zhengzhou, China. Foxconn is Apple’s primary iPhone assembler, and its Zhengzhou campus is the company’s largest plant. The Washington Post now reports that a growing number of iPhone workers are walking out of the plant, with no plans to return.
Our panel today
>> Henrike
>> Alex
>> Vincent
>> Tarek
Every 2 weeks our panel of technology enthusiasts meets to discuss the most important news from the fields of technology, innovation, and science. And you can join us live!
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