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05 Mar 2011 13:28

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Tech, U.S.: Really smart computers replacing rooms full of lawyers

  • You tend to split a lot fewer infinitives when you think the FBI might be reading your mail.
  • Cataphora Chief Technology Officer Steve Roberts • Explaining the benefit of his company’s software, which can intelligently parse phrases and figure out when someone is changing their tone (presumably because they have something to hide). This is useful in law cases, particularly ones with a ton of documents – you know, the kind that once required armies of lawyers to do the dirty work. They’re just one of the companies who work in this pretty neat field, and their accuracy rate is actually way better than the people the machines are replacing. “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” said Bill Herr, a former chemical company lawyer who once herded lawyers in rooms to dig through documents en masse. Like cats. source

09 Oct 2010 15:36

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Tech: Yakov Smirnoff wants royalties: In Google’s future, car drives you

  • See that car in the middle with the weird crap on top of it? Well, we’re gonna let you in on a secret: Nobody is driving it. No person, that is. That car is being driven by Google’s artificial intelligence, which can detect cars and traffic patterns without any trouble. There was only one accident in the various tests, and it wasn’t even caused by Google’s car (it was rear-ended). The fuel they’re using? Ed Begley Jr.’s sense of self-satisfaction. source

07 Aug 2009 17:17

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Tech: Artificial Intelligence powers up again, shoots fireballs at goombas

  • It’s a-him, mario! If you’re like us, you feel that the Super Mario Bros. games are a pinnacle of human achievement – challenging games that still hold up to this day. We think all resources should go to building a better Mario, though. While Big Blue was neat, screw chess. We want computers that kick butt at Mario.
  • The AI challenge Smart people agree with us apparently, because the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society is holding a competition where they plan on giving out a $500 prize to the designer of the most capable artificially intelligent Mario bot. Which could be transferred to other games eventually.
  • You should play thisObviously, you’re human and aren’t a better Mario, but you can still play the game the competition’s based on – the awesome, completely randomized Java-based game Infinite Mario Bros. We know we couldn’t stop playing, and we suck at video games worse than we do at dating! source

26 Jul 2009 10:58

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Tech: We’re living the plot of a movie where robots overtake humans

  • Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years. Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.
  • Eric Horvitz • A Microsoft researcher who is also president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Horvitz is talking like one of those crazy scientists who eventually gets killed by a robot in a bad science-fiction movie, which explains why he’s heading up a conference on whether humans should limit artificial intelligence for robots so that the robots don’t overtake their masters. Our friends at Inevitable Rise of the Machines have long been warning us of this fact. • source