🤔 May the AI be with you

“No, I am your father.” — Darth Vader

The man who voiced iconic fathers like King Jaffe Joffer, Darth Vader, and Mufasa. The man you played the creepy guy behind the fence in Sandlot. An icon from my home state of Mississippi, James Earl Jones, has passed away.

And thanks to AI…his voice will be with us for many more years.

In today’s newsletter:

• James Earl Jones’ AI voice

• Tiny Robots in my ears

• Bonus

Pense

James Earl Jones, a war veteran whose life went around the world and straight into our childhood auditory memories, was a very forward-thinking man. Before he passed away, he had a model trained on his voice for Lucasfilms. That means that for the show, Obi-wan Kenobi, Jones didn’t need to go into a studio. Instead, Respeecher, the company used by Lucasfilm, trained a model on his voice. Considering how badly the show did, I’m not sure if well ever know how the audience felt about the performance. Could they tell the difference?

There’s always been a spiritual question when it comes to performances. Good acting on screen or voice made you feel something. Can AI capture that in our hearts?

The jury is still out on that.

But I have an economic question too. With AI, we will never truly lose iconic voices. Assuming they create voice clones. What will happen to the voice acting industry?

• Will actors sign separate image and voice AI rights for every engagement?

• Will feature-length films need real actors in the next decade?

• Will it become a harder or easier field to make a career?

Oh to be a lawye during the development of the AI age.

Case law will transform the industry and the trajectory of AI clones.

Besides my pre-check verification at the airport, I'm currently not consenting to my voice or images being put into an AI model.

P.S. Now to figure out how much it cost to use his voice. I have unwritten books that need his narration.

May the AI be with us.

Read more here.

Creepy or not

Now for the segment on technologies that haunt my dreams.

Tiny Robots.

Sci-fi movie scenes of tiny robots being used for spying or eating an entire human body to get rid of the evidence have created a healthy fear of robotic development.

Not only do we need to worry about spiders and other insects crawling into our ears while we sleep, but I need to worry about a future where my enemies send tiny robots instead.

After learning about multi-robot automation, I don't think I'll be sleeping like a baby for a while yet. Robots working as a team is a complicated problem. When we work on teams, we have radios, speech, sensors, a coordinator, and the list goes on. But robots have no common method of communication. On some level, sure, we can tape on some sensors and GPS locators but how can the robots use that amongst themselves?

At the moment, most robots broadcast all information about the group’s movements and then use heuristics to steer clear but that means receiving information from all robots —even the ones nowhere near you.

Researchers are considering AI to help robots communicate with each other.

Methods under consideration:

• Some are trying to use Multi-agent reinforcement learning. Here’s what I’m reading about.

• Some tried using neural networks to predict the other robots movements but that was computationally expensive.

Read more here.

In other news, creepy ways to power robots below:

• Researchers from Cornell are making robots that fold, crawl.And harvest their paper from light. So at least they will need to come out of my ear at some point. Read more here.

• Cornell is two for two in creepy robotic work. This set of robots is powered by fungi. Read more here.

• Some tiny robots need cell-sized batteries that run on zinc and air to run. Read more here.

Funnies

Robotic or Real dog?

Which would you choose?

Bonus

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