Music from brain activity 🧠, fake memories induced by deepfakes 📺, an orb to verify your digital ID 🌐, and more ✨
#49
Hey there! Welcome back to Augmented Rarity 👽, your weekly newsletter on emerging tech and future trends. This week we should rebrand to Intelligent Rarity, because AI is grabbing all the headlines 🗞️
Btw I’m preparing a freebie for the ones that complete a short survey to help me improve this newsletter 🤝
🚨 To the ones that answered last week’s survey: Unfortunately I didn’t ask for your email, so I can’t send you the freebie, would you mind emailing me? 🙏
Let’s get started with this week’s curation!
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Sam Altman, co-founder of Worldcoin and CEO of OpenAI, knows that AI has the power to make a lot of jobs obsolete and in consequence, people should get paid just for existing, so he just launched Worldcoin, a digital currency that you get just for being human. If you are interested, here’s the app that you can already download, but in order to verify your digital ID you need an "Orb", a physical device that scans your eyes and gives you this unique digital ID. Check here to see if there's one near you 🗺️.
Image: WorldCoin Google’s new AI model can generate sounds based on your listening habits! It can make all kinds of music - classical, country, hip-hop, jazz, metal, pop, and rock - straight from your brain activity. Pretty cool.
Image: Brain2Music Fake memories induced by deepfakes 📺. Some researchers from Ireland have been able to make people remember things that didn't happen by showing them fake videos of movies. For example, they made people believe they saw Brad Pitt in The Shining or Will Smith in The Matrix. Full paper here.
Netflix actors want more protection from AI. In response, Netflix has offered a high-paying job (up to $900k) for an AI role 💼, which they will easily be able to pay thanks to the profits they have made since they stopped supporting shared accounts in different households.
Image: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images Mind-reading is becoming a reality 🧠 and it's giving ethicists a serious headache as they think about how to regulate brain-reading tech to keep our rights like privacy safe.
Image: Alexandra Wey/EPA/Shutterstock TSMC, the world's number one chipmaker, is spending almost $2.9 billion on a new high-tech chip factory in Taiwan 🏭 to keep up with the massive demand for AI chips.
If you also thought that AI had nothing to do with religion, we were both wrong. A robot priest is being used at a Kyoto temple to spread Buddhist teachings by delivering sermons and providing blessings, while a US general said that any AI employed by the US military will be better because of their country's so-called "Judeo-Christian" values 👀
Image: ChatGPT
👽 Social Rarity
Temporary section, as I didn't get any XR updates that I thought were worth including in this week's curation.
Young Chinese are getting paid to be ‘full-time children’ as jobs become harder to find 💰. What we used to do for our parents out of love or duty, now it's all about the money. By the way, isn't China giving Black Mirror vibes? it's dystopian, it makes you think about the present to try and build a better future and it's a bit scary.
Speaking of scary stuff, Tiktok is getting out of control. TikTok creators making money from bizarre gestures and phrases on a loop 🤖. And yet I struggle to make money online because I don’t want to bother people lol
First ever pizza-scented Xbox controller 🍕. Including it as social rarity, because wth, but at the same time, this is genius! At my master's we were working on synaesthesia, there's something there.
🗃 Resources
Read, watch, listen
📺 Project-Based Augmented Reality Course with Unity Engine and AR Foundation
🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #33 (episode on the new Space Age)
To try/download
🔢 Augmented Rarity in numbers
I wanted to know where you come from, so I checked the data 👀
Highlights: Most of you, 45%, come from English-speaking countries, 18% from a Spanish-speaking country*! The other big majority is coming from Europe 💚
Por ahora la mayoría de “spanish speakers” venís de España, pero sois muchos de Argentina, México, Colombia y Perú! Y unos pocos de Venezuela, Uruguay y Chile. Algún día haré algo en Español para vosotros ☺️
And that’s it for today!
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Sam Altman low-key says a lot of controversial things. 🤭