Skip to main content

Forget cloning dogs, A.I. is the real way to let your pooch live forever

Once superintelligence arrives, we don’t know if it’s going to be on our side or against us. But in the meantime, you could do a lot worse than training artificial intelligence to respond like humanity’s best friend, the dog. That’s what researchers from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence set out to do recently with a new deep-learning A.I. that is designed to predict how dogs would respond in any given situation.

Recommended Videos

“The goal of the project is to train statistical models that behave like the brain of a dog,” Kiana Ehsani, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “We try to predict, based on what the dog sees, how she will move her joints, follow the owner, fetch treats and toys, and in general react to the outside world.”

To create their unlikely A.I., the researchers fixed a range of sensors to an Alaskan Malamute named Kelp M. Redmon. These included a GoPro and microphone on its head, inertia sensors on its body, legs and tail, and an Arduino unit on the back to collect the data. They then let the dog go about its data activities, such as playing in the park.

Once more than 20,000 frames of video had been collected, the researchers used this to train their A.I. They were interested in three main goals: Predicting future movements, planning tasks, and learning doggy behavior. The hope is that they will be able to present the dog A.I. with scenarios — like spotting a squirrel — and then accurately modeling a response. Of the 24,500 frames of video collected, 21,000 were used to train the A.I., and the remainder to test its performance.

Right now, the A.I. isn’t hooked up to a physical body, but that could soon change. The team is interested in using their A.I. to create a realistic robot dog. This might have applications in training robots to carry out tasks like route planning with greater efficiency. There is also an altogether more intriguing use.

“Another application would be making a robot dog that acts exactly the same as your real dog,” Ehsani said. “The emotional reactions and their interests will be the same. It’s like making your dog live forever.”

Hey, that certainly beats Barbra Streisand’s Black Mirror-come-to-life scenario of just cloning her dog over and over again.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
IBM’s A.I. Mayflower ship is crossing the Atlantic, and you can watch it live
Mayflower Autonomous Ship alone in the ocean

“Seagulls,” said Andy Stanford-Clark, excitedly. “They’re quite a big obstacle from an image-processing point of view. But, actually, they’re not a threat at all. In fact, you can totally ignore them.”

Stanford-Clark, the chief technology officer for IBM in the U.K. and Ireland, was exuding nervous energy. It was the afternoon before the morning when, at 4 a.m. British Summer Time, IBM’s Mayflower Autonomous Ship — a crewless, fully autonomous trimaran piloted entirely by IBM's A.I., and built by non-profit ocean research company ProMare -- was set to commence its voyage from Plymouth, England. to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. ProMare's vessel for several years, alongside a global consortium of other partners. And now, after countless tests and hundreds of thousands of hours of simulation training, it was about to set sail for real.

Read more
Can A.I. beat human engineers at designing microchips? Google thinks so
google artificial intelligence designs microchips photo 1494083306499 e22e4a457632

Could artificial intelligence be better at designing chips than human experts? A group of researchers from Google's Brain Team attempted to answer this question and came back with interesting findings. It turns out that a well-trained A.I. is capable of designing computer microchips -- and with great results. So great, in fact, that Google's next generation of A.I. computer systems will include microchips created with the help of this experiment.

Azalia Mirhoseini, one of the computer scientists of Google Research's Brain Team, explained the approach in an issue of Nature together with several colleagues. Artificial intelligence usually has an easy time beating a human mind when it comes to games such as chess. Some might say that A.I. can't think like a human, but in the case of microchips, this proved to be the key to finding some out-of-the-box solutions.

Read more
Read the eerily beautiful ‘synthetic scripture’ of an A.I. that thinks it’s God
ai religion bot gpt 2 art 4

Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake’s 2001 song “Comfort Eagle,” building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more data.

The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom,” reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. “This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Obedience to Me! Obey!”

Read more