Miscellaneous #28

AI, Robots, Materials & More

AI

BearID: Face recognition for brown bears

The “Boring Apocalypse” Of Today’s AI

Eating disorder helpline shuts down AI chatbot that gave bad advice

CNET had to correct most of its AI-written articles: Some of the 77 articles were also edited for plagiarism.

panel discussion on the intersection of AI, gaming and entertainment at the Universal Studios backlot

Artificial Intelligence… is really just “Someone Else’s Intelligence”

Behold! Your AIs are cargo cults

Mysteries of mode collapse

Open Source AI Is Not Winning—Incumbents Are

Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

Why I’m not worried about AI causing mass unemployment: Software didn’t eat the world and AI won’t either.

A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty.

Lunduke declares war on A.I.

Robots

What will drive adoption of robotics and automation in specialty crops?

Global Unmanned Ground Vehicles Market Expands Steadily

The death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated

JamTac: A Tactile Jamming Gripper for Searching and Grasping in Low-Visibility Environments

Materials

Producing rubber from prickly lettuce (2015)

“By 1941, the Russian dandelion, Taraxacum koksaghyz, supplied 30% of the USSR’s rubber“

The Explosive Legacy of the Pandemic Hand Sanitizer Boom

Dry EEG Sensors: Graphene-based tech heralds next step toward brain-computer interfaces

“shape memory alloy produces a superelastic tire that is elastic like rubber, yet strong like titanium”

Glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) rebar for bridges? Plastic Composites: More Than the Sum of Their Parts

Misc.

Isolated Crocodile Gets Itself Pregnant and Has “Virgin Birth” After 16 Years of Living Alone

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

The End Of Design Thinking As We Know It

Why America abandoned nuclear power (and what we can learn from South Korea) (2016)

Tinkering Is Better Than Knowledge

Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)

Cryptogeddon

Orb pondering: Mysterious Metallic Orbs Flying ‘All Over the World,’ Pentagon Says at NASA UFO Panel

Search for 5000 year old mastodon tooth comes to a happy ending

Weird Old Book Finder