Nicholas Negroponte: “The Media Lab taught me that the future doesn’t start with a plan; it starts with an experiment. If history is any guide, the future of technology won’t be determined by incumbents or insiders. It will be authored by small groups with unusual perspectives and the freedom to follow them. We should support that pursuit. We should build the spaces that make them possible. Because what comes next is not a product. It is a provocation.”
WSJ: “A fast-growing technology known as ambient listening is taking over an onerous but necessary task in healthcare: documenting what happens in the doctor-patient encounter. Already gaining traction for outpatient medical visits, the AI-powered systems are also moving into hospital rooms and emergency departments to capture discussions at the bedside, update medical records, draft care plans and create discharge instructions. Healthcare systems nationwide, including Stanford Health Care, Mass General Brigham, University of Michigan Health and Ardent Health, are adopting the technologies widely referred to as AI scribes. “We are just scratching the surface of what this technology can do,” says Dr. Lance Owens, regional chief medical information officer at University of Michigan Health, which uses Microsoft’s DAX Copilot ambient-listening technology. “I see it being able to provide insights about the patient that the human mind just can’t do in a reasonable time.” By connecting older data with new information in the medical record, for instance, the technology could help make sure that an incidental finding years ago was followed up on.”
NYTimes: “Banu Mushtaq’s book “Heart Lamp”…became the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first work translated from Kannada, a southern Indian language, to receive the award. But “Heart Lamp” is unusual for another reason. It is not a translation of an existing book. Instead, Ms. Mushtaq’s translator, Deepa Bhasthi, selected the stories that make up “Heart Lamp” from among Ms. Mushtaq’s oeuvre of more than 60 stories written over three decades and first published in Kannada-language journals…It also shows the evolution of literary translation in India as a growing number of works in the country’s many languages are being translated into English. That has brought Indian voices to new readers and enriched the English language.”
FT: “Cobots, or “collaborative robots”, are a type of industrial robot designed to operate safely alongside human workers. Like conventional robots, they tend to take the form of a multi-jointed arm that can rotate, swivel, bend and contort to approach a job from any angle. Interchangeable tools at the end of their arms allow cobots to perform countless tasks, from assembling electronics and packaging pharmaceuticals to gluing and even welding. But the machines are smaller and more flexible than traditional robots, and are designed to be integrated with the workforce rather than separated from it, making automation attainable even for smaller companies.” More: “Caninoids prove useful for a range of repetitive, arduous or hazardous tasks — even if the armed versions conjure a dystopian image.”
Mint: “The [next] stage in [the AI] journey will see intelligence untethered from digital devices. This is when cognition escapes the screen and begins to permeate the physical world. Whether called embodied AI, robotics or the ‘era of smart everything,’ this phase will bring adaptive learning systems into everything from fork-lifts to furniture. Powered by action models, experience learning, multi-modal understanding and advanced hardware, machines will begin to learn from and reshape the world around them—physically, not just virtually. And even this would only be a warm-up. The fourth stage promises an intelligence explosion. We are rapidly approaching an era where the most complex and longstanding human challenges will be met with cognitive power vastly exceeding our own. Some AI models are already rivalling Olympiad-level students in mathematics. It is a matter of time before these systems surpass the most brilliant human minds in every discipline.”
