Issue #272

This week - bomb-sniffing cyborg locust; a new type of batteries for robots; how a prosthetic leg is made; and more!

More Than A Human

► The Making of TF8 a Reaction-Force Series Elastic Actuator Powered Knee and Ankle Prosthesis (2:48)

Here is a short story of how a PhD student at MIT Media Lab designed and built a bionic ankle and documents the project from a vision on a piece of paper to being an actual thing.

Artificial Intelligence

A fake blog written by AI shot to the top of Hacker News after people thought it was real — here's how a college student made it

GPT-3 strikes again! This time someone generated a blog post about productivity that got quite popular on Hacker News, and not so many people noticed the post was not written by a human. When you read the comments on HN, you can see people engaging with the post, sharing their personal views, and only a few noticed who wrote it.

The 6 unholy AI systems thou shalt not develop

Unfortunately, some people have already built those unholy AI systems and my guess is that more will follow. Nevertheless, this is a good round-up in AI ethics and recent failures to foresee the impact of AI systems.

Google’s TF-Coder tool automates machine learning model design

Researchers at Google Brain, one of Google’s AI research divisions, developed an automated tool for programming in machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow. They say it achieves better-than-human performance on some challenging development tasks, taking seconds to solve problems that take human programmers minutes to hours.

Asilomar AI Principles

Future of Life Institute published a set of principles to, hopefully, make sure super-intelligent AI will benefit humanity.

Robotics

Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots

Researchers from University of Michigan are experimenting with rechargeable zinc batteries which are integrated into the structure of a robot. This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.

Biotechnology

A CRISPR first produces squid as clear as glass

Researchers have used CRISPR–Cas9 genome-editing technology to make squid transparent — the first use of CRISPR in cephalopods.

Researchers one step closer to bomb-sniffing cyborg locusts

In a pre-proof published online Aug. 6 in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X, researchers showed how they were able to hijack a locust's olfactory system to both detect and discriminate between different explosive scents—all within a few hundred milliseconds of exposure.