A.I.: "Technology Acts as a Lever to Change the World" (Extra)

    In the documentary series The Age of A.I. part 1, Robert Downey Jr. narrates to introduce artificial intelligence to the audience. The first segment of the documentary follows two different stories of A.I. use. The first features well-known musician Will.i.am., and follows his process of developing an avatar of himself. The second, follows a music technology professor at Georgia Tech and his accomplishments that started with his desire to create a robot that can play and compose music. Whether you fear the advancement of technology or embrace it, the amount of progress made in the development of artificial intelligence is incredible. 

    In New Zealand, there is an ongoing project called Baby X. This project is a virtual baby that is constructed of virtual muscles and a virtual brain consisting of neuro-muscles. The main idea of the project is to create an artificial intelligence that can mimic the human thought process by using affecting computing. Affective computing is a process that mimics human emotion and empathy. The first part of the documentary really brings up the question of how far is too far. Will.i.am goes through the process of having an avatar of himself developed. They take hundreds of photos of him making different emotions and catching all his physical features.  The developers also take audio recordings of him saying specific phrases, from which they can take the syllables and words to make other phrases for the avatar to speak, but still in Will.i.am's voice. The process uses identity and learned data to create an avatar that looks, speaks, and acts like Will.i.am. He stops it at the level where you can tell it is an avatar and not really him. He says that there should remain a difference between what is real and what is not and I completely agree. 

    The second part of the documentary follows a professor at Georgia Tech who was playing around with developing a robot that can produce music. In his process, he found something even bigger. He was able to  create a kind of robotic hand that uses an ultrasound technology, even better than EMG, to allow a man who has no hand to fully control a 3D printed robotic hand, allowing him to play music. Even in the infancy of this development, it changed the life of this music loving man who is now able to play music more easily. The technology uses machine learning to let each finger move separately. This is a game changing invention that can really help improve people's lives.