This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 13)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works
Anil Ananthaswamy | Quanta
“i‘I think there’s no doubt that 90% of what the brain does is self-supervised learning,’ said [the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute’s] Blake Richards. Biological brains are thought to be continually predicting, say, an object’s future location as it moves, or the next word in a sentence, just as a self-supervised learning algorithm attempts to predict the gap in an image or a segment of text.

And brains learn from their mistakes on their own, too—only a small part of our brain’s feedback comes from an external source saying, essentially, ‘wrong answer’i.”

BIOTECHNOLOGY

A Bioengineered Cornea Can Restore Sight to Blind People
Rhiannon Williams | MIT Technology Review
“Surgeons in Iran and India conducted a pilot trial of 20 people who were either blind or close to losing their sight from advanced keratoconus. This disease thins the cornea, the outermost transparent layer of the eye, and prevents the eye from focusing properly. The implant restored the cornea’s thickness and curvature. All 14 of the participants who had been blind before the operation had their vision restored, with three of them achieving perfect 20/20 vision.”

ROBOTICS

Swarms of Mini Robots Could Dig the Tunnels of the Future
Chris Baraniuk | Wired
“The firm proposes a future in which much smaller, roughly 3-meter-long robots shaped like half-cylinders zoom about underground via predrilled pipes. …Once inside them, the bots would use a robotic arm topped with a milling head to penetrate into the surrounding earth and carve out small voids that would then get filled with concrete or some other strong material.

‘We’re talking about thousands of them,’ says [hyperTunnel’s Patrick Lane-Nott]. ‘Much like an ant colony or a termite colony works in swarms.’i”

FUTURE

Sound Waves Let Researchers Build Stuff With the Force
Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo
“What does the future of construction look like? Autonomous machines buzzing around a building site? Giant 3D printers extruding walls and floors? Looking forward even farther, researchers at the Public University of Navarre in Spain have been experimenting with using sound waves to make building materials simply float into position without any physical interaction required.”

COMPUTING

3D-Stacked CMOS Takes Moore’s Law to New Heights
Marko Radosavljevic and Jack Kavalieros | IEEE Spectrum
“We’ve created experimental devices that stack atop each other, delivering logic that is 30 to 50 percent smaller. Crucially, the top and bottom devices are of the two complementary types, NMOS and PMOS, that are the foundation of all the logic circuits of the last several decades. We believe this 3D-stacked complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS), or CFET (complementary field-effect transistor), will be the key to extending Moore’s Law into the next decade.”

ROBOTICS

Hyundai Announces $400M AI, Robotics Institute Powered by Boston Dynamics
Brian Heater | Tech Crunch
“i‘Our mission is to create future generations of advanced robots and intelligent machines that are smarter, more agile, perceptive and safer than anything that exists today,’ [Marc] Raibert said in a release tied to the news. ‘The unique structure of the Institute—top talent focused on fundamental solutions with sustained funding and excellent technical support—will help us create robots that are easier to use, more productive, able to perform a wider variety of tasks, and that are safer working with people.’i”

FUTURE

Are We Living in a Simulation?
Stephen Poole | The Guardian
“Is there any good reason to actually believe the simulation argument, though? …Chalmers observes that it is at least more plausible than earlier iterations of skepticism such as Descartes’s evil demon, simply because we now have functioning prototypes (video games, VR) of how such a simulation might work. Others have speculated that there may be clues to the fact that our universe is a simulation hidden in the very fabric of the ‘reality’ that we can investigate: perhaps the simulation cuts corners at very small scales or very high energies.”

GENETICS

Hospital and Drugmaker Move to Build Vast Database of New Yorkers’ DNA
Joseph Goldstein | The New York Times
“The Mount Sinai Health System began an effort this week to build a vast database of patient genetic information that can be studied by researchers—and by a large pharmaceutical company. The goal is to search for treatments for illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to kidney disease, but the effort to gather genetic information for many patients, collected during routine blood draws, could also raise privacy concerns.”