Transhumanismus

The AI generates gaming “fan fiction” to expand a game’s virtual world.

I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite. And then there are some indies close to my heart—a game that simulates a wildfire watcher in a forest, a road trip adventure, or one that uses portals to connect improbable physical spaces.

I’m not the only one sucked into games. The multi-billion-dollar video game industry is now bigger than Hollywood. And designers are constantly scrambling to expand their digital worlds to meet endless expectations for new content.

Now, they may have a nifty helper.

This week, Microsoft Research released Muse, an AI that spews out a multitude of diverse new scenarios within a game. Like ChatGPT and Gemini, Muse is a generative AI model. Trained on roughly 500,000 human gameplay sessions from Microsoft-owned Ninja Theory’s multiplayer shooter Bleeding Edge, Muse can dream up facsimiles of gameplay in which characters obey the game’s internal physical rules and associated controller actions.

The team is quick to add that Muse isn’t intended to replace human game designers. Rather, true to its name, the AI can offer inspiration for teams to adopt as they choose.

“In our research, we focus on exploring the capabilities that models like Muse need to effectively support human creatives,” wrote study author Katja Hofmann in a blog post.

Muse is only trained on one game and can only produce scenarios based on Bleeding Edge. However, because the AI learned from human gameplay data without any preconception of the game’s physics itself, the model could be used for other games, as long as there’s enough data for training.

“We believe generative AI can boost this creativity and open up new possibilities,” wrote Fatima Kardar, corporate vice president of gaming AI at Microsoft, in a separate blog post.

Whole New Worlds

Generative AI has already swept our existing digital universe. Now, game developers are asking if AI can help build wholly new worlds too.

Using AI to produce coherent video footage of gameplay isn’t new. In 2024, Google introduced GameNGen, which according to the company, is the first game engine powered by neural networks. The AI recreated the classic video game Doom without peeking into the game’s original code. Rather, it repeatedly played the game and eventually learned how hundreds of millions of small decisions changed the game’s outcome. The result is an AI-based copy that can be played for up to 20 seconds with all its original functionality intact.

Modern video games are a lot harder for an AI to tackle.

Most games are now in 3D, and each has its own alluring world with a set of physical rules. A game’s maps, non-player characters, and other designs can change with version updates. But how a character moves inside that virtual world—that is, how a player knows when to jump, slide, shoot, or tuck behind a barrier—stays the same.

To be fair, glitches are fun to hack, but only if they’re far and few in between. If the physics within the game—however improbable in real-life—constantly breaks, the player easily loses their sense of immersion.

Consistency is just part of the gaming experience a designer needs to think about. To better understand how AI could potentially help, the team first interviewed 27 video game designers from indie studios and industry behemoths across multiple continents.

Several themes emerged. One was about the need to create new and different scenarios that still maintain the framework of the game. For example, new ideas need to fit not only with the game’s physics—objects shouldn’t pass through walls—but also its style and vibe so they mesh with the general narrative of the game.

“Generative AI still has kind of a limited amount of context,” one designer said. “This means it’s difficult for an AI to consider the entire experience…and following specific rules and mechanics [inside the game].”

Others emphasized the need for iteration, revisiting a design until it feels right. This means that an assistant AI should be flexible enough to easily adopt designer-proposed changes over and over. Divergent paths were also a top priority, in that if a player chooses a different action, those actions will each have different and meaningful consequences.

WHAM

Based on this feedback, the team created their World and Human Action Model (WHAM)—nicknamed Muse. Each part of the AI was carefully crafted to accommodate the game designers’ needs. Its backbone algorithm is similar to the one powering ChatGPT and has previously been used to model gaming worlds.

The team then fed Muse on human gameplay data gathered from Bleeding Edge, a four versus four collaborative shooter game in 3D. With videos from the battles and controller input, the AI learned how to navigate the game from the equivalent of seven years of continuous play.

When given a prompt, Muse could generate new scenarios in the game and their associated controller inputs. The characters and objects obeyed the game’s physical laws and branched out in new explorations that matched the game’s atmosphere. Newly added objects or players stayed consistent through multiple scenes.

“What’s groundbreaking about Muse is its detailed understanding of the 3D game world, including game physics and how the game reacts to players’ controller actions,” wrote Kardar.

Not everyone is convinced the AI could help with gaming design. Muse requires tons of training data, which most smaller studios don’t have.

“Microsoft spent seven years collecting data and training these models to demonstrate that you can actually do it,” Georgios Yannakakis at the University of Malta told New Scientist, “But would an actual game studio afford [to do] this?”

Skepticism aside, the team is exploring ways to further explore the technology. One is to “clone” classic games that can no longer be played on current hardware. According to Kardar, the team wants to one day revive nostalgic games.

“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people. Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, the technology could also be adapted for use in the physical world. For example, because Muse “sees” environments, it could potentially help designers reconfigure a kitchen or play with building layouts by exploring different scenarios.

“From the perspective of computer science research, it’s pretty amazing, and the future applications of this are likely to be transformative for creators,” wrote Peter Lee, president of Microsoft Research.

The post This Microsoft AI Studied 7 Years of Video-Game Play. Now It Dreams Up Whole New Game Scenarios. appeared first on SingularityHub.

The company believes devices with a million topological qubits are possible.

Many years ago, Microsoft committed itself to an exotic, high-risk approach to quantum computing. Now, as the company unveils its first prototype chip, it says its perseverance has paid off.

One of the biggest problems bedeviling today’s quantum computers is their susceptibility to errors. Even the slightest interference from the outside world can collapse the fragile quantum states they rely on to carry out computations.

Quantum error correction provides a potential workaround, but the most promising schemes require huge numbers of extra qubits. As a result, most experts predict machines will need roughly one million qubits before they can do anything truly useful, which is a long way from today’s record of a little over 1,000.

That’s why nearly two decades ago Microsoft decided to pursue topological qubits—a novel type of qubit that is inherently resistant to errors. The effort has faced several setbacks over the years, but now the company claims it’s finally cracked the problem with a processor featuring eight topological qubits and will one day be able to host up to a million.

“We took a step back and said ‘OK, let’s invent the transistor for the quantum age,’” Chetan Nayak, the Microsoft technical fellow who led the effort, said in a press release.

What sets topological quantum computing apart from other approaches is that rather than encoding quantum information in individual particles, it encodes data in the macroscale properties of a larger system that can consist of many particles. It builds on the mathematics of topology, which focuses on the properties of objects that stay the same even if they are bent or stretched.

The main advantage of this approach is that disturbances to individual components of the system don’t affect its overall topological state. Topological qubits, therefore, are much less susceptible to the kind of environmental noise that causes errors in other kinds of qubits.

Microsoft’s approach to topological quantum computing involves creating so-called quasiparticles known as Majorana zero modes. It has done this by combining a nanowire made of the semiconductor indium arsenide with a plate of aluminum that acts as a superconductor at very low temperatures.

Normally electrons in superconductors pair up. But Microsoft says its device can generate unpaired electrons that exist in a “delocalized” state. These present as a pair of Majorana zero modes, one at each end of the nanowire.

If you can create four at either end of a pair of nanowires, it should be possible to “braid” them into a topological state to encode quantum information. This braiding process involves making a series of measurements in a specific order.

However, Microsoft has yet to provide convincing proof the approach actually works. The announcement of the new chip coincided with the publication of a paper in Nature describing experiments conducted on the new device.

But these simply outlined a way to measure whether or not Majorana zero modes exist in the nanowires by detecting if there are an odd or even number of electrons. This is a crucial step because these two states will effectively act as the 0s or 1s in the company’s qubits. But the paper doesn’t provide solid evidence that Majorana zero modes are present. They simply validate the measurement approach.

Nayak told MIT Technology Review that his team has unpublished results providing more definitive proof, which they are currently writing up into a paper. But there’s likely to be a certain amount of skepticism, as there has been controversy around Microsoft’s previous publications on this topic.

A 2018 paper in Nature reporting the detection of Majorana zero modes was later retracted after other physicists suggested the signatures could have come from defects in the device used to create them. Another paper claiming evidence of the quasiparticles in 2023 was also criticized for not providing enough information for other researchers to reproduce the results.

Nonetheless, the company is confident it has now cracked the topological qubit and is firmly on the path towards building a large-scale quantum computer in years rather than decades. It has also been keen to tout the fact that DARPA seems to agree. Microsoft is one of two companies that have made it through to the final phase of the agency’s competition to find unusual quantum approaches that could achieve practical scale much faster than conventional wisdom suggests is possible.

It’s likely to be some time before there’s consensus on the significance of Microsoft’s latest result. And the journey from a scientific demonstration like this to a practical product is long and fraught with risk. But if the company’s approach pays off, it could dramatically speed the advent of the quantum age.

The post Microsoft Claims Quantum Computing Breakthrough With Its Exotic New Chip appeared first on SingularityHub.

SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.