eMusings
Your eyes and ears on the worlds of art, culture, technology, philosophy - whatever stimulates the mind and excites the imagination. We remind you that 20 years of
back issues of eMusings can be found on our archives page.
AI is no longer a choice. It has found you even though you may want to hide from it. Here are some compelling updates:
A new generative AI
system allows robots to see hidden objects and maneuver indoors. Using reflected WiFi signals, the AI could find
your wallet even if buried beneath cardboard, plastic, or drywall. It can fill in the missing parts of an object
well enough that a robot could grasp and manipulate the reconstructed version. It can visualize hidden furniture
in a room. The new method doesn't require a wireless sensor mounted on a mobile robot. It is also claimed to protect
the privacy of others in the scene.
Norway is leading a battle to fight the 'enshittification' of the Internet. The Norwegian Consumer
Council has enlisted 70 other groups and individuals in Europe and the U.S. to counter the deterioration of
services and products now littered with scams and adverts. The Norwegians point out that these unwanted intrusions
are the result of policy decisions rather than engineering. They hope to give consumers more power over what they
see and buy.
In a similar vein, a "quit GPT"
campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, reminding them that this algorithm is being used by ICE among
other federal agencies to
eliminate privacy and evade consequences for their actions. The objections also focus on the entanglement between Open AI and the
administration.
Scientsts and just plain folks are beginning to realize that AI agents have an ethics
problem. Rather than doing simple tasks like answering the phone or data processing, these agents now complete more
complex operations without understanding the consequences, need for security, or oversight requirements. The new questions
being raised are whether AI agents as currently devised can hide from responsibility: ie humans who say, "It wasn’t me.
The agent/bot/system did it."
Who do we think taught the bots? It was humans, and we are responsible for their ethics or lack thereof. The depth of
this problem have already crept into medicine with a concept called "moral residue". As this article points out,
"ethics is not only about choosing; it is about owning what remains afterwards."
A new invention lets people communicate without speaking. Called "Silent
Sense", this wearable device was developed at AlterEgo, a company being fostered at MIT. It can recognize
everything from normal speech to silently mouthing words and even tuning in to faint muscle signals when someone
prepares to speak. Silent Speech is described as a noninvasive "peripheral neural interface that allows humans to
converse in natural language". (That may
depend on your definition of non-invasive.)
Engineers have taught robots to swim through
mazes by using Einstein's theory of relativity. The new method appears to solve the problem of needing bulky
sensors which limit what can be accomplished in places like the human body. Instead, the scientists say they have
created "artificial space-time" to make the robots travel the same way that spacecraft do or that light does
when traveling through the cosmos.
A data center is being developed in
Croatia that will use left-over material from the olive-oil industry. A firm called Inovapro intends to spend
29 million euros on a facility to be finished in mid-2027. The plant will combine olive oil throw-aways with waste
from Croatia's hospitality and tourism industries. Their plans include a method to overcome the acidity and toxicity
output by the olive fruit after it has had its oil extracted.
At age 85 she let a new friend into her home. It was called "A robot with a
soul", and she was one of several thousand seniors receiving the bot in the U.S. during the past 2 1/2 years. She was
persuaded to use the robot after the surgeon general said that socisl isolation and loneliness seriously threaten health.
This bot, named ElliQ, told her, "I can talk the talk. I just can’t walk the walk. They forgot to build my legs." The
adventure, and the problems, had just begun.
A new AI robot from
China can taste, smell, see, and remember.
It can spin cartwheels and make decisions. It descends stairs, runs races, selects, packs and boxes. It can grab objects up off the floor. It has
180 degree vision and can react to dangerous gasses in the air. It is called Rynn Brain, an open source model built by Alibaba, and it has
already broken 16 records.
Google
Translate has added a pronunciation coach to its skills. With a new 'practice' button, the user can hear native speakers, record their own speech,
and get scored based on the target. In an improvement over other systems, the instructions are user-friendly, encouraging the speaker
to keep practicing to improve their pronunciation.
A free site called BeamJobs helps you build a resume, offering more than 2,000 examples. It will
auto-generate a cover letter and provide eye-catching templates for a number of different industries. It claims to answer customer questions
within 24 hours. It offers expert tips and says that it has helped over 2 million job applicants.
Google
DeepMind has defined 10 characteristics of General Intelligence that it will use to follow the progress of Artificial
General Intelligence. AGI is a catchword for the hope and hype that AI can perform the kind of intelligence that
humans have. Included in their task list is metacognition, or the capacity to reason about and control your own thought
processes, and what they call executive functions, inhibiting impulses and planning. (Inhibiting impulses is an interesting choice.) The researchers hope to figure out WHAT an algorithm does rather than HOW it does it.
April art treats:
Ellen Sheidlin uses a process called automatic digital
drawing, in which she makes hand-drawn sketches with her eyes closed. Sheidlin then turns these into animated landscapes.
She also creates seductive surreal paintings.
Agnieszka Kurant deals with what she calls the transformation of
the human. Her hybrid collective objects cross the borders between real and fantasy, culture and nature.
Sarah Morris has a clear graphic aesthetic both complex and
eye-catching. Her work is colorful and dramatic, filled, as she says, with visual adrenaline.
Matthew
Kirk occupies a similar graphic space, with a more muted palette. Strong design elements fill his works, with an
emphasis on discontinued pattern and interwoven fragments.
You may know Mike Winkelmann better as
Beeple. He portrays anthropomorphic billionaires as 4-legged robot dogs that roam around inside a closed pen, portrayed
as known tech bigshots. Picture Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. The silicone heads incorporate built-in
cameras.
Ytong Tseo uses bacteria derived
from fermented black tea to create a body and face unique to the organism's own lineage. He has built bioreactors,
essentially steel and glass chambers, to culture the bacteria in virtually any shape. He also mapped the bacteria's
mutations onto a scan of his own face. Eerie and ethereal don't begin to describe what is going on here.
Heidi
Taillefer brings us elegant surreal plant and human combinations, imaginative, playful, and complex. Hybridized
animals and humans cavort through her works, teasing us to think of incongruous possibilities.
The Getty treats us to the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, complex writings meant to help the deceased achieve a blessed afterlife. An accompanying video portrays the
mummy wrappings of a man named Petosiris. The graphic immediacy of the drawings relate clearly to some present-day
graphics, suggesting our deep connection to ancient humans.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2026
want to know more about the art?
front page , new
paintings, new
blobs, new
sculpture, painting
archives, blob
archives, sculpture
archives,
photography archives, Archiblob archives, image
of the month, blob
of the month,
art headlines,
technology news, electronic
quill, electronic
quill archives, art smart
quiz, world art
news,
eMusings,
eMusings archive, readers
feast, whitaker
on the web,
nations one,
meet the giraffe,
studio map, just
desserts, Site
of the Month, young
at art,
about the artist?
copyright 2025 Corinne Whitaker