Arlo Bell

The Channel 1 service promises to launch a full version of its newscast with virtual anchors from 2024. The content is authentic, borrowed from news portals, repackaged and presented on screen by an AI-controlled photorealistic avatar. This service is planned as an intermediate version on the way of displacing live people from everywhere in the information space where something has to be told and shown.

The times when all families watched the same newscast with an impassioned newscaster are over. In the near future, the user will choose the appearance, behavior and other personal traits of the character, and the AI will “animate” it on the screen. They can be changed almost in real time, for example, business news will be read out in a funeral voice by an old clerk, and discounts will be announced by a sexless something painted in the latest fashion.

AI not only quickly compiles thematic news items, but also collects related information. It can add emotional coloring based on the analysis of likes and comments in social networks. It can lip-translate the words of an eyewitness in the frame from any language and voice the same in any language and in an arbitrary voice. If necessary, the AI will even dorisuet what was not in the frame, for example, the situation on the road before the car accident.

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Researchers at Zhejiang University in China have developed a new aerogel-based material to create protection from the cold. They were inspired by the structure of polar bear fur, in which the hairs are hollow on the inside and have a strong protection on the outside. Each of them is a kind of insulating block, and at the same time provides physical protection for the skin from mechanical damage.

To give aerogel similar properties, Chinese scientists found a way to make encapsulated fiber. To do this, they froze the original material in rotation to turn it into a sol-gel. The resulting substance was subjected to freeze-drying and then applied an external semi-rigid coating.

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Zeiss has introduced Smart Glass technology that gives any glass a host of new functions. The idea is to turn ubiquitous transparent panels into something new at the user’s request. They can have different functions depending on their location – in a car, apartment, office building, etc.

The technology is based on the creation of a polymer film permeated with externally controlled light-conducting elements. It preserves the glass’s 92% transparency and adds light control, projection, filtering and detection capabilities. This makes it possible to realize various useful options, but Zeiss doesn’t plan to do that. They want to produce a platform on which other companies will build their own commercial products.

As an example, the developers provide a variant of glass with a screen function for connecting gadgets. If desired, the screen can be made touch-sensitive, although with some limitations. In another variant, the glass serves as a camera, collecting visual information from the surrounding space, while it remains glass itself – no additional devices need to be installed. This technology is also optimally suited for the realization of augmented reality functions for car windows.

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Samsung has launched a new project to develop an automatic factory for chip production, in which there will be no human staff. All processes in it will be managed by artificial intelligence, a special production version. And this is just the beginning – Samsung is going to fully automate its factories within the next six years.

At the moment, the rejection of human work is out of the question, as there is no technology to analyze and eliminate random malfunctions. However, Samsung’s new project is just about creating next-generation intelligent sensors. So far it concerns highly specialized devices for controlling PCB manufacturing processes, but the potential of such sensors is much wider.

Today there are possibilities to automate all production processes in one enterprise with a fixed work cycle. But there is no possibility to teach automation to react to abnormal situations, simply because they cannot be foreseen and described in detail. It requires reaction and “smartness”, which is formed as experience is accumulated, for which artificial intelligence is well suited. But another difficulty arises at once – if everything at the enterprise works as it should and no problems arise, what will this AI be trained on?

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Near the city of Tucson, Arizona, a metal pole with a special camera on top has been installed. It is designed to capture the changes in the local landscape over thousands of years. This is the creative project of experimental philosopher Jonathan Keats, who expects to install similar cameras in China, the Austrian Alps, U.S. nature reserves and other places.

Keats admits that his project has no artistic, commercial, scientific or any meaning at all. Moreover, with a 100% probability it will not be completed, because no one is going to keep the installation safe for the whole 1000 years. If not natural disasters, human activity will surely destroy the pole and the camera.

What matters here is the idea itself, and it is not impossible that it will be picked up and realized in one form or another. The camera on the pole is not digital, it is a camera obscura modeled after the devices of ancient Rome. A tiny hole is made in the 24-karat gold plate, which is weather-resistant. Light passing through it flips and falls on a multilayer photosensitive coating, creating an image.

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