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"With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect."

"The first and most obvious explanation for older internet users' increased vulnerability to misinformation is the effect of aging on the brain. A huge body of research has demonstrated that the same factors that make older Americans susceptible to financial scams - lower impulse control, slower cognitive function, higher rates of social isolation - also make them vulnerable to misinformation. "

"Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy."

"But on the downside it has led to a loss of face-to-face contact, which can have negative consequences, particularly when it comes to education. What's more, there are also health impacts to consider. New scientific research indicates that spending large amounts of time in front of the computer, or other devices such as tablets and cell phones, can be harmful to our health. This is largely due to the blue light emitted by electronic devices, which expose us to light-emitting diodes (LEDs)."

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"Such powerful software is still several years away from being fully developed, if at all, and raises all sorts of ethical questions. But the potential applications-such as masterfully translating foreign languages, identifying objects in photos and directing self-driving cars through busy intersections-are so compelling that technology giants like Facebook and Google Inc. are investing heavily in artificial intelligence"

Never trust your software too much these days, for the sake of your brain.

"One of the most mind-bending far future predictions you'll hear from some futurists is this: Eventually, the technology will exist to copy your brain (every bit of data that makes you, you) onto a computer. Technical details and exact predictions aside (the concept is still firmly science fiction) mind uploading makes for a fascinating and disturbing thought experiment. If you had the power to upload yourself, would you?"

"The listeners accurately heard the sentences 43 percent of the time when given a set of 25 possible words to choose from, and 21 percent of the time when given 50 words, the study found."

""There's no sense in which this is a technology that will lead the science fiction walking, talking, intelligent robot", says Furber, "because they'd need a head the size of an aircraft hangar and a nuclear power station attached to it.""

"This month, in an open-access study published in PLOS One, a team reported the first brain implant system that lets patients use their thoughts to navigate an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Compared to previous generations, this system doesn't require training-for example, learning to type on a different, non-QWERTY keyboard-or specialized interface equipment. With just her thoughts, T6 was able to send emails, chat with other paralyzed patients in the trial, Google random questions, and even shop on Amazon. For the first time since she became paralyzed, T6 regained access to the entire commercially-available Google Play ecosystem and the digital world."

"Generally, it questions the advance of computing in the absence of a deeper knowledge of how the human brain perceives the world to be computed. We want computers to have perception, yet we know little about the workings of our own human perception."

"An algorithm has no tastebuds; a neural net never gets the munchies. So can a robot brain really tell us what we'll want to eat? The question is whether AI systems will be able to excel in the sensual, creative work of tasting and developing new foods - and what we stand to gain or lose by inventing foods that really have our number."

"Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy." When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise?"

" Kurzweil believes that "medical robots will go inside our brain and connect our neo-cortex to the smart cloud," and that's all slated to happen by 2029."

"Learning from rewards seems like the simplest thing. I make coffee, I sip coffee, I'm happy. My brain registers "brewing coffee" as an action that leads to a reward. That's the guiding insight behind deep reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that famously smashed most of Atari's gaming catalog and triumphed over humans in strategy games like Go. Here, an AI "agent" explores the game, trying out different actions and registering ones that let it win."