There are also promising applications for this in XR hardware; haptic gloves and bodysuits are a logical next-step for accurate fine-grained sensation reproduction in simulations.
I foresee a future where prosthetics and XR hardware share mutual advancements and use simulations as a test bed.
An actor that changes temperature is a heater or maybe something like a peltier element, that can heat and cool. A sensor is the opposite: a thermometer that measures what temperature is somewhere.
Needless to say these are fundamentally different technologies. Sure, you need one to develope the other: e.g. to create a temperature sensing skin with high spatial resolution, you will need to generate precise spatial temperatures to test the whole thing.
Yes, the skin sensor technology in the article is about translating real world heat and touch sensations into electrical signals that can be interpreted by human nervous systems via prosthetics.
XR haptics, on the other hand, convert electrical signals into real world sensations.
While the two technologies are fundamentally different, they are also complementary. The process of 'serializing' and 'deserializing' analog touch data into a digital data storage format has multiple cross purpose applications.
Yes, which is precisely what I said, in different words. Now hardware iterative cycles are different than in software, where you can just define perfect interfaces and get a lossless roundtrip between them. In hardware you always have loss, so sometimes that software analogy does not work.
To have an actuator that is useful to measure you skin sensor, that actuator does not only need to be complimentary, it needs to be better than the sensor (otherwise you're only measuring the flaws of the actuator). So quite often you will need to take a different approach than just a complimentary actuator/sensor-pair and make one of the two a specialized overly accurate and incredibly pricey fixture.
We'll increasingly observe announcements of this kind as AI tooling scales. As impressive as agentic coding is, it pales in comparison to the value proposition of medical, mathematical, and physics research.
I optimistically expect to witness the advent of a global 'panacea' in my lifetime thanks to AI's efforts. Cost effective large scale genetic engineering, a cure for every disease, potentially even a cure for aging.
> I optimistically expect to witness the advent of a global 'panacea' in my lifetime thanks to AI's efforts
this is a religious belief, maybe you should stop to really examine that (because it might be unintentionally so), but just know that it is obvious to anyone reading these words (anyone who is not mesmerized by technology)
What’s interesting is it’s not obvious how this is leveraged to ‘cure disease’. But I’d love to know.the advantage of this is there is a clear measure of success. Here is a rule language. Prove this. You are done when your proof passes. You can sit quietly and spin for billions of tokens.
How does that work for drugs? We can’t let AIs make millions of test drugs and try them out on people.
It's wild to think that aging is something that needs to be cured, and isn't a part of the natural human experience. I'm so tired of people trying to play the role of God, as well as people that cheer these sorts of things on.
Most people want more life. For most people it's also the most terrifying part of "the natural human experience".
If you're happy to die, why be bothered by others' trying to live longer? You won't be around. And assuming people can finance it themselves, is it really a problem for society?
I assume you mean that dying is the most terrifying pat of the natural human experience. Also, I'm not sure why you infer that me thinking death is a natural part of life, means that I'm happy or eager to die.
There are many reasons that people living forever would be a problem for society, the most obvious being an ever-increasing population.
Also things like chronic disease and violence are a "natural" part of life but we seek to minimize or eliminate them, why do we have to accept a "natural" death and not attempt to put it off as long as possible?
> the most obvious being an ever-increasing population
This notion seems to be commonly accepted as bad without being properly examined.
Why is a larger population in and of itself a problem? Lots of societies throughout history have used less resources than we have and we have superior tech now. We are well within our abilities to use the same or less resources with a much larger population. Why should there be a limit based solely on undefined notions of "too many"?
Fertility rates are below replacement, which means that population sizes are convergent. A decreasing population is a more likely future scenario for many western countries, even if human lifespan was indefinite.
Fertility rates are currently below replacement, there's no good reason to imagine they will always be that way, particularly after global population numbers peak and fall to, say, half or a quarter of their peak.
What's the basis for your claim? You seem to be saying that people are magically going to have more children because there is a desperate need for them? Maybe if government finances this but how will that work economically at such a huge scale? Will children be born in debt for their birth?
Because living longer is a huge drain on resources that could be better spent on other things. End of life care is expensive and rarely results in a "good" life for the the life being extended.
Only in places like the US, which is out of its mind in this regard.
In most other western countries, they just let (old) people with terminal conditions die.
> living longer is a huge drain on resources that could be better spent on other things
That's not right. Any living is a drain on resources and draining resources is the issue not the living. More broadly we need to use less resources or manage them better and there are much better ways in doing that than reducing life.
So I think curing means basically opt in death or something like that. Right now extended life is bad because the person isn't in his prime but curing aging is basically gonna keep him in his prime. This might be what they meant.
Yes, I think it's a problem for society. Death in old age frees up social, economic, physical, and political resources for the next generation of the living. If the rich and powerful escape death, because after all they will the people with the resources to do so, society will lose the adaptability and natural change that comes from new generations taking the reins.
The point is that the kind of horrendous diseases you see affecting babies are also, many of them, natural parts of the human experience, just as much as aging. And yet we all like the fact that pediatric hospitals exist to cure these natural diseases.
Childhood deaths and fatal diseases are also natural parts but that doesn't make them desirable to everyday humans. But with new advances, people might have the ability to CHOOSE in future.
No matter what standard of care you receive, senescence will gradually kill you even with therapies or treatments to slow it. It's a part of the built-in natural lifecycle that humans can't avoid; it's not analogous to the treatment of incidental injury like pneumonia or sepsis.
> No matter what standard of care you receive, senescence will gradually kill you even with therapies or treatments to slow it.
That doesn't mean that it can't be entirely reversed. We already know that senescence is not a completely required part of life itself, or even of eukaryotic and/or multicellular organisms - as we have known examples of organisms that don't experience it. For example, jellyfish don't experience senescence (they go through a revolving cycle of polyp - jellyfish that can go on forever as far as we can tell). And even if true permanence is out of reach, we also know of animals that live for hundreds of years, and of plants and fungi that live for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
So, having a way to make something like a human (though possibly quite different from what we call a human, to be fair) live for at least a few hundred years if not much more is a very difficult but certainly solvable bioengeneering problem, not some philosophically impossible feat.
I dont think it will happen. AI models are kneecapped. Only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of people are on the list of even being able to use these tools for such things.
'Putting yourself out there' is really only a necessity if the validation you seek through your pursuits is external in nature.
Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.
Another word for 'cave' is 'echo chamber'. If you don't care much about whether what you believe is true or not, there's no need to test it, but in that case what's the point of believing things?
Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?
Other people are one of many ways you can test what you believe to be true but, yes, sometimes other people might have figured something out that you haven't, believe it or not.
This is incredible. One potential application that I'm thinking about already is the rapid iteration of video-game map blocking. Being able to drop in some 'initial state' configuration and then have it procedurally generate a handful of alternative configurations could make rapid prototyping a significantly quicker experience, especially if you wanted to see what a potential end result could look like.
Furthermore, being able to extract and process world geometry and 3D objects from Atlas could reduce friction in the early stages of indy development, where developer time is stretched thinner.
I'm very excited about AI tooling moving forward if this is a glimpse into the future.
Yeah where I've been previously skeptical for using AI in creative ways, basically when these tools get to the point where you have a tight iteration loop, it enables a great creative flow.
You still need the technical proficiency to be able to make edits beyond that, but I think studios would be foolish to let go of their experts in the first place.
Atlas will complement Marble, our current product that can be used for applications like this nicely :) These are indeed great applications for the model. Atlas gives us unprecedented levels of control as well as generative capabilities and is 3d consistent.
This is completely useless for video game map blockout. You need collisions for level blockout, which this does not provide. It makes gaussian splats, not geometry.
Furthermore, AI can be used to generate 3D primitives from Gaussian splats and point clouds. Sure, it would require an intermediary stage should the Atlas team not build it into a first-class offering, but the process is not exactly untenable.
While this is interesting, what I really wanted to see was more 'graffiti' and less 'laser'.
Graffiti, fundamentally, is a defacement of public property as a form of artistic self expression. To that end, why not combine this with a laser engraver instead of a laser pointer?
Imagine hooking this up and then literally carving your graffiti into the side of a brick building. Or burning it into the paint on a metal container car.
Obviously such a thing has the potential for serious bodily harm and could start building or wild fires inadvertently, to say nothing of the energy consumption requirements such a laser engraver would necessitate.
> Graffiti, fundamentally, is a defacement of public property
Both wrong. Neither is defacement the point nor doing it to public property. Fundamentally it's a visual art form and whether that's on private or public property is insubstantial.
It's surely intervoven with anarchic protest and that's where the defacement angle comes in. Similarly, public property as a symbol of the state that is rejected plays often a role. Though that's ironic too since if the "artist" comes from a left-leaning anarchic background then damaging public goods is kinda counterproductive, as opposed to private property of the rich who are the more usual target for symbolizing oppression of the poor.
Both statements are wrong. But yours is wrong-er. You are thinking of street art. Or just spray paint art. The whole point of graffiti is to "get up". If you don't know what getting up is, you should not be espousing any opinions on what graffiti is and isn't.
In fact, I'm aware what it means and don't see how that and what I wrote are contradictory.
Though not everybody around here may know, so how about you educate folks instead of being condescending?
Getting your tag up somewhere can surely be considered art. It's fine if you personally don't, but you are not speaking for others. Nor is it clear why you feel entitled to explain to me what I am supposedly thinking.
I visited it long ago, but I remember drawings by prisoners on cells walls. Definitely not public property (or not visible by a wide public from public places).
Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.
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