The Future This Week: DeepMind, ATLAS, and the OSIRIS-REx

In The Future This Week, Serious Wonder blasts off into space in search of this week’s headlines of the future, from USB drives that’ll destroy anything it plugs into to the development of an artificial intelligence that is capable of mimicking human speech. This week we’re given a glimpse of the future where humanoid robots are as well-balanced as us humans and we’re sending space probes out into deep space to recover samples of ancient asteroids.

Whether we’re exploring the cosmos or developing robots to better mimic us, we are essentially shaping the future based on our terms. We’re giving it our likeness and we’re using it to help us expand as a species. Just as the late Carl Sagan once said, we are wanderers. Our ongoing journey into the future will take us to unknown lands and achieve greatness beyond our current comprehension. This is our moment to shine. Welcome to the future!

Thanks to a Hong Kong-based company, just like in the movies, you can now purchase your very own pocket-sized USB stick (the USB Kill) that will destroy almost anything that it’s plugged into. SOURCE

What will most assuredly leave some people sad who enjoyed watching robots lose their balance, the ATLAS humanoid robot has since learned some new tricks – for example, has developed the capability of maintaining balance using only one foot. SOURCE

Photo Credit: NASA

Researchers at Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence division has recently unveiled WaveNet – a new speech synthesizer that is capable of perfectly rendering human-like speech, from vocalization, to the breathing, to the pauses. SOURCE

On the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, September 8, NASA successfully launched the OSIRIS-REx, a space probe bound for the asteroid Bennu, of which will take a sample and then bring it back to Earth. SOURCE