Google wants to get more people building in VR–and to do so, it’s turning to a tried-and-true approach from the real world.

Source: Google Is Basically Making Lego Kits For VR

Virtualitics is a transformative start-up company that merges artificial intelligence (AI), big data and virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) to gain insights from big and complex data sets. Furthermore, Virtualitics leverages AI and easy-to-use machine learning tools so even non-expert users can uncover multidimensional relationships present in complex data sets with the click of a button.

Source: Virtualitics: Caltech & NASA Scientists Build VR/AR Analytics Platform using AI & Machine Learning – insideBIGDATA

An image from a video suggesting that Julian Assange is dead and has been replaced by a CGI model.

Most people trust what they watch — but that won’t always be the case. Tech is being developed that will make it easy to create fake video footage of public figures or audio of their voice. The developments aren’t perfect yet, but they threaten to turbocharge “fake news” and boost hoaxes online. In years to come, people will need to be far more skeptical about the media they see.

Source: How CGI, AI will empower ‘fake news,’ make it harder to tell if videos are real – Business Insider

As part of a new project to humanize AI, the company created a guide to what it calls “human-centered machine learning.”

Source: Google’s Rules For Designers Working With AI

Machines contain the breadth of human knowledge, yet they have the common sense of a newborn. The problem is that computers don’t act enough like toddlers. Yann LeCun, director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook, demonstrates this by standing a pen on the table and then holding his phone in front of it. He performs a sleight of hand, and when he picks the phone up—ta-da! The pen is gone. It’s a trick that’ll elicit a gasp from any one-year-old child, but today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence software—and most months-old babies—can’t appreciate that the disappearing act isn’t normal. “Before they’re a few months old, you play this trick on them, and they don’t care,” says LeCun, a 54-year-old father of three. “After a few months, they figure out this is not normal.”

Source: The Future of Computers Is the Mind of a Toddler – Bloomberg

At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.

Source: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class | WIRED

American factories still make a lot of stuff. In 2016, the United States hit a manufacturing record, producing more goods than ever. But you don’t hear much gloating about this because manufacturers made all this stuff without a lot of people. Thanks to automation, we now make 85 percent more goods than we did in 1987, but with only two-thirds the number of workers.

This suggests that while Mr. Trump can browbeat manufacturers into staying in America, he can’t force them to hire many people. Instead, companies will most likely invest in lots and lots of robots.

And there’s another wrinkle to this story: The robots won’t be made in America. They might be made in China.

Source: How to Make America’s Robots Great Again – The New York Times