Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Deepfakes and the entertainment industry. “AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film “Rogue One”. Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects—and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)—are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

[…]

The question of who owns the rights to an actor’s digital likeness has already arisen in reality. Framestore had to negotiate with Hepburn’s family in order to make its advert. But a star’s fans often feel a sense of ownership, too. In 2013 a computer-generated version of Bruce Lee was used in an advert in China for Johnnie Walker, a brand of whisky. Johnnie Walker says it consulted with Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter, who approved the idea. But many fans were cross, pointing out that Lee had been teetotal for much of his adult life, and asserting that, had he still been alive, he would never have appeared in such an advertisement.

[…]

This may all be decades away, and it may never happen. Auteurs will no doubt refuse to use digital actors in their films on principle (though some might prefer them, since they will uncomplainingly follow even the most tyrannical director’s every command). But the rise of immortal digital actors is the logical outcome as today’s effects-heavy film-making techniques embrace the versatility of artificial intelligence. A trick that is currently resorted to only rarely could easily become a standard cinematic tool, like matte shots, green screens and CGI before it. Digital actors open up new possibilities in storytelling. But they also raise many new questions—and they will be able to answer them using any face, or voice, you like.”

https://www.economist.com/news/2018/07/05/what-if-ai-made-actors-immortal

The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

The fascinating tricks spiders use to get up, up and away. “Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around the world, collectively turning Earth’s atmosphere into a giant electrical circuit. The upper reaches of the atmosphere have a positive charge, and the planet’s surface has a negative one. Even on sunny days with cloudless skies, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter above the ground. In foggy or stormy conditions, that gradient might increase to tens of thousands of volts per meter.

Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

This idea—flight by electrostatic repulsion—was first proposed in the early 1800s, around the time of Darwin’s voyage. Peter Gorham, a physicist, resurrected the idea in 2013, and showed that it was mathematically plausible. And now, Morley and Robert have tested it with actual spiders.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-electric-flight-of-spiders/564437/

Within a couple of hyperbolic and relentlessly upbeat paragraphs, I knew I was reading a Peter Diamandis article. But if you dial down the hype by 80-90%, this is an interesting glimpse into medical possibilities that are on the horizon, if nowhere near ready yet.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Three Huge Ways Tech Is Overhauling Healthcare https://suhub.co/2tXwnFm