Tag: technology

10 Real Robots of the Modern World

Robot have been a part of the public consciousness for centuries and they’re finally being developed by trailblazing companies that are shaping the future of the human condition. You don’t have to wait for another hundred years to see them, though. Here are 10 robots that exist right now!

10. Bina48

Bina48 has lots of different functions but it’s essentially an AI companion robot that can seem to think on its own and carry on a conversation with humans. It was created with interview transcripts to make it sound like a real person. It also has a face scanned from a human and face and voice recognition software, so it always knows who it’s talking to. It’s the perfect robot for anyone who’s lonely and into robots at the same time.

9. Moley Robotics

Moley Robotics is a company out of London that’s created a robotic cook that’s destined to be in every kitchen in the future. It can cook anything you want but it doesn’t end there. It’s also capable of washing the dishes and putting them away for you.

 If you hate cooking or love robots, then this is going to change your life very soon. It also just looks really cool!

8. Festo Bionic Animals

Festo builds robots that are just like animals in every way possible. They’re biologically accurate and are currently being used for research. So far, they’ve made bats, spiders, and even turtles. The future is meant to see them sold as toys for children and it doesn’t get any better than that. A child can have a pet that’s just like the real thing without the mess!

7. Sophia

Sophia is one of the most famous AIs that you can find, and it’s even been granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. It can carry on a conversation and has been going strong since 2014. The robot can imitate human movements. It’s going to get more sophisticated as time goes on and it might just be the first model to appear in a person’s home.

6. Atlas

Atlas is the newest robot from Boston Dynamics and it’s the sleekest machine they’ve created. What makes it great is that it has awareness of the world around it. That makes it possible for the robot to move around and avoid obstacles, just like a real person. It can lift heavy objects and carry them around, making the need for backbreaking physical labor a thing of the past.

5. Spot 2

Spot 2 is the first robot on the list that looks like a dog and it can carry out lots of different tasks. Just like the last entry, it’s been created by Boston Dynamic and is aware of the world around it. It’s smaller and lighter than the last Spot so it can really get around. It’s also much nimbler so it can make its way around outside and inside a tight room.

4. Ekso GT

The Ekso GT is an aid for people with physical limitations and works as a pair of legs and keeps the user balanced and on their feet. It can change the lives of millions of people and the development is still ongoing. Once it reaches the open market, there’s no doubt that it will become a very common sight. A robot that helps people with mobility problems will always be widely accepted.

3. Asimo

Asimo is about as humanoid as a robot can currently get and is able to move around on its own. It can understand spoken commands as well as gestures. The working hands allow it to turn lights on and off as well as carry anything in the house. It’s designed to be a helper robot and it works very well for that purpose. It’s no longer being produced but it greatly moved the science of AI forward.

2. Jia Jia

Jia Jia has an incredibly human like face and can easily be interacted with by other people. It may move around on wheels, but it can process new information and speech as it’s uploaded through real interactions. It can respond to questions as well as make micro-expressions, just like a human. It’s no wonder why this robot gets so many looks when it’s out on display and it’s still being updated and evolved.

1. Curiosity Rover

Finally, we come to the Curiosity Rover. While it may not be the type of robot you imagine, it’s every bit a robot, built to think and act like a human, just like the other robots. It’s investigating the planet Mars right now and moving around the terrain on its own. It has lots of tools to test the landscape and costs over $2 million to create. There is a chance it may still be driving around by the time humans arrive on the red planet!

Making a positive impact in the lives of ex-cons using virtual reality

Virtual reality is changing the way work is done in the world today. The automotive industry is one of the fields which have embraced this technology. This technological embrace has been timely given that the automotive industry has a shortage of technicians. Every year, there are 76,000 job openings out of which 37,000 of them go unfilled. That is why it is important to leverage on technology to address this shortage. Considering that every year, the industry loses experienced technicians to retirement, the point cannot be overemphasized. This impacts businesses and individuals as shortages means that repairs and maintenance take longer and tend to be more expensive.

But in the entire automotive world, one particular VR program stands out because of the impact it has not just for the trainees or interns, but the work force and society in general. This is the Full Circle Auto Repair and Training which is offered by Vehicles for Change. This is an internship which has been designed as an industry driven program to help those who have lots of barriers to employment. A key segment of this population is the prison population.

Re-entering society after being incarcerated can be quite challenging because not many organizations are willing to hire those with a criminal background. According to Mark Schwarz, the President of Vehicles for Change, the automotive repair industry is one of the few which are a bit lenient on this and are willing to accommodate ex-convicts. That is why many of those released from prison are usually re-arrested. A 2018 study by the Bureau of Justice which surveyed 30 states put this figure at a whooping 83%. That is why internships and programs such as the Full Circle Auto Repair and Training are great for those released from prison and for society as a whole.

To illustrate this, 100% of those who complete the program are hired. And what is even better, their rate of recidivism is only 3%. This shows that there is an impact in what they do. This could be because of the fact that they do not just take anyone. They do an interview to make sure that someone is a good fit for the program and that the person’s career goals align with the internship. Thereafter, once accepted, they are paired with mentors to guide their journey. This process therefore starts while the interns are still prisoners. And they are paid while they attend the training.

If you are interested in the program or know someone who can benefit from it, there are minimum requirements to be met. These are having a High school diploma or GED, having the ability to obtain a driving license as well as having basic automotive mechanical knowledge. It is also important to be able to get on location by 7 am on weekdays.

This program is packed with benefits chief among them is that it makes the interns entry level ready. Secondly, with VR training, learning is individualized and trainees get to learn at their own pace. Besides helping to fight recidivism, this program can also assist companies fill crucial vacancies. In addition, companies get highly trained technicians given the quality of training they get. On the other hand, the technicians learn valuable skills and they learn them quickly due to the use of technology and having mentors. They also do not pay for the program and they are paid while undertaking the program meaning that they can concentrate on completing it. Trainees can also make mistakes safely without having to worry about expensive mistakes when dealing with the actual physical components they are learning about. For companies, training technicians using virtual reality is both quick and cheap. There are also benefits to the immediate families of the ex-cons as well as society in general. State and national governments get to save money on prison costs due to the reduction in recidivism.

For Vehicles for Change, the impact does not just stop at training ex-cons. They also donate vehicles to people of low income. Transportation is a huge problem for low income households and this can affect their work and employment prospects. These cars are donated to Vehicles for Change which in turn gives them out to deserving and vetted low income households. 7,500 cars have been given out to date.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI. It is a deep learning-based conversational AI system that has been trained on a massive amount of text data to generate human-like responses to user inputs. The model is based on the Transformer architecture, which was introduced in the paper “Attention is All You Need” and has since become the foundation for many state-of-the-art language models.

ChatGPT uses the Transformer architecture to process input text and generate a response in real-time. The model has been trained on a diverse range of text data, including conversations, news articles, and web pages, which allows it to generate responses on a wide range of topics. When a user inputs a query, ChatGPT processes the input and generates a response by predicting the next word in the sequence. The response is generated by sampling the most likely words, given the input, from the model’s predicted probabilities of each word.

One of the key advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses. The model has learned to consider the context of a conversation and generate responses that are consistent with the tone and content of the conversation. This allows ChatGPT to engage in natural and engaging conversations with users.

ChatGPT has been widely adopted by businesses, developers, and researchers in various industries, including customer service, content creation, and research. The model’s ability to generate human-like responses has made it a valuable tool for automating customer service and reducing response times. In content creation, ChatGPT has been used to generate articles, summaries, and other written content, reducing the time and effort required to produce high-quality content. In research, ChatGPT has been used to study language and generate insights into the way people communicate.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is a highly advanced language model that is changing the way people think about conversational AI. Its ability to generate human-like responses in real-time has made it a valuable tool for businesses, developers, and researchers across a wide range of industries. As the model continues to evolve and improve, it will likely have an even greater impact on the way we communicate and interact with technology in the future.

ChatGPT in School

So, there you have it! That’s everything you need to know about ChatGPT in school and how it operates. By the way what did you think about the writing style up there? Was it fun and engaging? Did it make you want to keep reading? Did it have that good, old fashioned, sense of a human touch? Have you even made it this far in the article?

Well, if it isn’t obvious, that whole first part was writing by the titular ChatGPT. This thing has been in the news quite a bit and it seems to be a thorn in the side of educational institutes all around the world. It seems that students simply have to type a subject into this AI and it will just spit out a paper for them. That sounds like the end of humanity to me!

Any AI takes Skill

It’s not quite that cut and dry. Is you know anything about AI then you know that operating it requires some skill. That’s why art created by AI is its own category right now. That section up there didn’t just create itself for me. Here’s the very first result of my foray into ChatGPT:

If you know anything about school, then you know that those two examples are nowhere near the length that would be required of a typical paper. You can also see that it’s all written in a stunted sort of language that would make it stand out in a class of men and women with any semblance of personality. In order to get closer to the length required by any writing assignment, I had to go out of my way and give the AI instructions to create the answer in 500 words.

That may sound like one very simple extra step, but it didn’t quite give me what I wanted. Instead, that text is only 366 words. It seems that ChatGPT in school is just as much of a slacker as the students that try to use it.

What’s the Point?

Okay, so what’s the point we’re trying to make here? It’s the simple fact that the media has just done what it always does. It’s taken a fairly mundane story about something that has little to no bearing on your life and turned it into the next apocalypse. The very educational system that the world relies on to create the next generation of its stewards is falling apart because a child simply has to use a magical computer thingy to do all of his or her work for them.

It actually turns out that using ChatGPT in school to cheat is much harder than you think it is. Every higher learning institute is going to use some form of plagiarism check to make sure its students are doing the work they’re supposed to be doing and not just copy/pasting from Wikipedia. Let’s take that first section, that was writing by the AI and run it through a simple Copyscape check and see what happens:

Yup, that’s right! Fully 7 plagiarism hits in that short 366 word piece! Any teacher or professor is going to be able to get those same results on any paper that’s been written by ChatGPT.

ChatGPT as a Tool

So what does all this come down to? It pretty much means that ChatGPT is little more than a simple tool that people can use on the internet. Can a student use it to write an entire term paper for them, well, yes. But it’s still going to be just as much work for them to edit and rewrite the entire piece to turn it into something that’s actually usable. It’s about as menacing to the world of education as Google. If you have a student that’s capable of using the internet, then you have a student that has the same advantage as one using ChatGPT. It’s nothing to panic over. It’s not just an “easy” button that someone can press to do all their homework so they can spend the rest of the night doing drugs and having unprotected sex. It’s not the end of the world.

That doesn’t mean that the AI program isn’t an exciting piece of technology, though! This is a machine that’s capable of learning from the interactions of the people that use it. There’s no small amount of genius that’s gone into its design and it may, someday, help people with medical problems have human conversations with other people.

The Future of ChatGPT

If you want to get a good look at a future that includes ChatGPT, it’s not hard. AI has been growing increasingly integrated into our world for the better part of a decade. Just because it’s a new technology doesn’t mean that it’s coming to take your job. Just consider a world where the steam engine was never invented because it took away the work of horses. That would be an incredibly stunted society, to say the least.

Instead, the steam engine took over the world, but horses weren’t wiped off the planet. Their roles in everyday life simply shifted and that’s what’s going to happen with AI. Our roles in the workforce will simply be shifted a little bit. We’re not all going to be put out of work because a program can do something for us. If you want a picture of the future of ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it:

“ChatGPT and other AI technologies can automate certain tasks and make processes more efficient, but they are not designed to replace human workers. Instead, they complement human workers and allow them to focus on higher-level tasks that require human skills, such as creativity, empathy, and critical thinking. However, it is important for workers to continuously develop new skills to remain relevant in an ever-evolving technological landscape. Overall, the impact of AI on the job market will depend on how it’s adopted and used in various industries and how workers adapt to the changes it brings.”

That doesn’t seem all that bad when you think about it. So, the next time the media gets the public into a frenzy about something, just remember: they’re just trying to sell you something that was made in a factory by robots!

AR Companies to watch in 2023

There are many different companies around the world taking advantage of AR and using to its fullest current capabilities. The Motley Fool recently released a report on the best stocks to watch that are using AR in their business practices. There’s no telling what’s actually going to happen to these stocks, but they’re more than worth keeping an eye on. Naturally, none of this is stock market advice. It’s simply a look at companies making AR a part of their business. Even if you don’t care about stocks, you can still learn about brand new AR technologies to check out.

Etsy

Etsy is a platform that lets people sell handmade crafts to anyone who wants them. This isn’t a typical marketplace because everything is made by hand and shipped directly by the sellers. They’re also AR to let shoppers view the pieces in their homes. All they have to do is point their camera where they want the piece to go and they’ll be able to see what it will look like. While this is best suited to wall art, they’re working to expand it into other categories for a fully AR experience on the app.

Alphabet

Alphabet is one of the biggest companies on the internet. They not only own YouTube, but also Google, which has dozens of its own holdings as well. Live View on Google Maps allows users to quickly orient themselves to the area around them and know which way to go via directions overlaid on the live screen of their surroundings. Meanwhile, Google Lens allows users to search what they see. They can scan and translate text, search for an item that caught their eye, or identify plants and animals. The company’s AR technology is making it easier for people to discover the world around them.

Apple

Apple is another giant on the internet that owns the biggest sites and apps around. These guys own many different platforms that are using AR on a steadily increasing basis. Some of the most popular are Snapchat, IKEA place, and iScape. They’re also exploring many ways to use virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality. For example, they’re developing wearable computing technology. It’s also constantly working on its Apple Glasses to varying degrees of success. There’s no telling if they’ll ever take off, but they’re certainly gaining more traction as time goes on.

Nintendo

Nintendo has been in the AR game for quite some time. In fact, they were one of the early adopters. Pokémon Go brought AR to the masses and it’s still being played to this day. They also allow their 3DS users to play AR games wherever they want. The newest AR game in their stable is Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit with more of them always on the way. They’ve partnered with Niantic to develop more titles that can bring them the same success they enjoyed with Go. It’s only a matter of time before they outpace AR apps.

Snap

Snap is the company that developed Snachat and most people don’t realize that. Most believe that Snapchat is its own company, but that’s not the case. Snap has used Snapchat to create lenses, which are AR animations that can change the sound of a person’s voice or their appearance as they move on a screen. More than 170 million people use this feature, so it’s not going to be disappearing any time soon. They’re also developing Spectacles which will be the “first pair of glasses that bring augmented reality to life.” Their technology is set to improve over time.

Nvidia

Nvidia is also working on the technology needed to make AR a reality. For example, Nvidia Cloud RX delivers VR and AR across 5G and Wi-Fi networks. It allows users to stream AR through devices without using wires. Nvidia is also developing technology that incorporates AR into cars. The Nvidia Drive AR processor gathers information and displays it for a driver using AR. The system will show things such as driving stats, points of interest, alerts, and other information. It’s the best chance at having AR streaming seamlessly to anyone who wants to use it for any purpose.

Embrace AR

AR is here to stay and it’s evolving right alongside VR. It can used on any hardware and enhance the entire world around you. It can be used for anything from gaming to learning and you can’t get any better than that. Keep an eye on these stocks if you want to see just how far it can go.