Neuronal tissue grown from stem cells. Does what neuronal tissue does.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Bizarre Mini Brains Offer a Fascinating New Look at the Brain http://bit.ly/2qsDQtb

My story “Aspiration Value” (http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/aspirationvalue.html) shows virtual assistants (“assists”) giving users visual cues as they go about their daily lives, directing their attention according to what their algorithms calculate are the users’ best interests.

I don’t, at any point, talk about the hardware side of how that happens; it’s just there, because the interesting part is the effect of the technology, not the form of it.

My wife and I are making our way through Person of Interest on Netflix, and it’s struck me how the characters walk around in different parts of the city talking to each other just as a matter of course. That’s something that you couldn’t have put in a show set in the present just ten or so years ago, but now we accept it as a common convention – and it makes a huge difference to how stories unfold, and how the characters interact. How much more so if they could call up images of each other?

Via Lisa Cohen.

Originally shared by Marcel Gagne

Make no mistake. This is where we are headed with personal technology. The smartphone that is today an extension of so many of us, will quickly, in a few short years, transform us all into cyborgs. Whether you see that as the end of humanity, or the next step in our evolution, is a question I leave to you.

http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-the-smartphone-and-what-comes-after-2017-3

Having practiced as a hypnotherapist, I have an interest in (non-pharmacological) altered states of consciousness. I want to do more with them in fiction, too. I have a short story on the cook about a technologically enabled shared dreamspace, for example, though at the moment it’s mostly a parable of social media.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Are We About to Unlock the Secrets to Peak Performance? http://bit.ly/2qjZDTE

Using biocompatible miniature LEDs.

What a time to be alive.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

These Cells Are Engineered to Be Controlled by a Smartphone http://suhub.co/2q9oU2L

Flying cars: not ready for prime time, perhaps ever. But if I was writing retrofuturistic pulp, I’d include them, because they’re cool.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Future of Flying Cars: Science Fact or Science Fiction? http://suhub.co/2q62ijP

I just listened to a Flash Forward podcast episode on this kind of stuff (“Robocop”). The problem with training AIs like this is to avoid the bias already in the training data, though given that it’s based on whether people actually did or did not reoffend, it is, on the face of it, less risky than other ways of training.

Originally shared by Rhys Taylor

Police in Durham are preparing to go live with an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to help officers decide whether or not a suspect should be kept in custody. The system classifies suspects at a low, medium or high risk of offending and has been trialled by the force. It has been trained on five years’ of offending histories data.

Data for the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (Hart) was taken from Durham police records between 2008 and 2012. The system was then tested during 2013, and the results – showing whether suspects did in fact offend or not – were monitored over the following two years. Forecasts that a suspect was low risk turned out to be accurate 98% of the time, while forecasts that they were high risk were accurate 88% of the time. This reflects the tool’s built in predisposition – it is designed to be more likely to classify someone as medium or high risk, in order to err on the side of caution and avoid releasing suspects who may commit a crime.

The Durham system includes data beyond a suspect’s offending history – including their postcode and gender, for example. However, in a submission about the system to a parliamentary inquiry on algorithmic decision-making, the authors express confidence that they have mitigated the risks involved: “Simply residing in a given post code has no direct impact on the result, but must instead be combined with all of the other predictors in thousands of different ways before a final forecasted conclusion is reached.”

They also stress that the forecasting model’s output is “advisory” and should not remove discretion from the police officer using it. An audit trail, showing how the system arrived at any given decision should scrutiny be required later, will also be accessible, Prof Sherman said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39857645