#HTE

9 Ways Robots and AI Took Over 2016 + How to Cope

2016 will be remembered as the year of AI systems—they’ve begun to take over the arts, child care, holiday cheer and human jobs. We’ve taken inventory of the skills the systems have gained in 2016 in order to prepare ourselves for years to come:

Paint By Algorithm

Do you ever wish artists like Picasso, Basquiat or even Michelangelo could come back to life to create new work? No need—there’s an AI system for that! This one took data from Rembrandt’s paintings and composed a new one in the late artist’s style.

Understanding Human Emotion

IBM’s Watson expanded its artistic palette to film when it edited a movie trailer for the horror movie, Morgan. This marks the first AI edited movie trailer, and the irony is almost too creepy—Morgan is about an AI system spiraling out of control.

Read My Lips…

Humans can only read lips at a lame accuracy of 52.3%—the reasoning behind training an AI to do much better. LipNet far surpasses humans with an impressive speech to text accuracy rate of 93.4%.

Rockabye Baby

The one thing humans value more than their own lives is the lives of their children. SNOO the robotic cradle acts as an extension of the parent to help lull babies to sleep by mimicking the uterus experience. Equal parts terrifying and helpful.

Look Son, No Hands!

This self-propelled baby stroller pushes itself so you don’t have to. Parents, would you use this?

Give Thanks to Opposable Thumbs

A main criticism of the spike in technology is the fear of losing touch with our human qualities. The good news? Drones are still incapable of cooking—a skill better left to humans for now, as demonstrated by the X-Star Premium Drone’s messy attempt at putting together Thanksgiving dinner.

Spreading Christmas Cheer is Singling Loud for All to Hear

Thanksgiving isn’t the only holiday that’s been infiltrated by robots this year—an AI created it’s own holiday song based on 100 hours of Christmas music, 50 hours of song lyrics, and video feed from the game Just Dance. If that’s not scary enough, the first-person lyrics include, “I’ve always been there for the rest of our lives.” Start training for war now.

Ultimate Strength

It looks like AAA will have some competition in the near future. This year, six powerful microbots figured out how to work together to pull a 4,000 pound car.

Performing Human Activities

It’s incredible how physical robots have developed over the years. This humanoid robot programmed by Boston Dynamics is able to accomplish simple human tasks—think opening doors and standing back up after falling—with astounding tenacity.

How can we cope?

AI systems with humanlike qualities are both frightening and exciting. The next step in developing technology is figuring out how to properly integrate them into our workflow and education system. At this year’s Core77 Conference, keynote speaker Alexis Lloyd reminded us that coexisting with technology is the key to the success of both robots and humans.

What About Our Jobs?

Another popular topic this year stems from our fear of losing human jobs to AI. In this video from online think tank Big Think, Dr. Michio Kaku breaks down what jobs we can expect to see thrive and become obsolete in the near future.

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