Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Videos

Just for the tech of it: AI doctors, robot lawyers, headphones that get you high

Drew Prindle
By
Scientists are taking a clever new approach to fighting cancer. Instead of researching the disease on a biological level, they’re using an artificially intelligent software program to analyze millions upon millions of doctors’ notes. The idea is that by comparing these notes and analyzing relationships between symptoms, medical histories, doctor’s observations, and different courses of treatment, the program will be able to find connections and associations that doctors might not have have noticed before. Pretty smart, right? Find out more here.
Recommended Videos

Next up: Earlier this week, a company by the name of Nervana announced that it will soon release a pair of headphones that can supposedly make you feel high just from listening to music. The headphones, which are earbuds, are equipped with tiny little electrodes that send a low power electrical signal to your brain and stimulate the release of dopamine — a neurotransmitter that’s induces feelings of happiness, enjoyment, and mild euphoria. But instead of just randomly sending these electrical signals to your brain, the headphones actually sync up with the music you’re listening to and send out pulses that are modulated in relation to a song’s unique musical attributes. Considering how addictive music already is, this could turn out to be a slippery slope!

Related

And finally, news broke late last week about a 19-year old kid from the UK who has developed a robotic lawyer that can give people legal advice online, and help them argue out of parking tickets. The program (which, unlike a real lawyer, is totally free to use) works a lot like a chat bot. It starts by asking standardized questions about the incident, which you then answer in normal, conversational language. From there, the bot’s conversation algorithm analyzes things like keywords, pronouns, sentence structure, and syntax to understand what your issue is.

By determining basic facts and identifying factors that might have contributed to the ticket, the program can actually put together an appeals letter that you can then print out and mail to the court. The program has only been online for a few months at this point, but in that short span of time, it’s already helped UK residents appeal their way out of more than $3 million in parking ticket fines. Check out the full story here.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Drew Prindle
Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more