#3,121 – The Best of Soren Iverson

What if you could pay back your taxes by binge watching ads? Or hand out speeding tickets to other drivers? Well, if designer Soren Iverson had his way you could. All thanks to his unhinged ideas that he has been posting daily for over a year now.

I like to call myself Craig “The Idea Man” Shames but this dude actually deserves the moniker as he has been iterating on an every day basis with actual screenshots of his ideas brought to life. Having come up with hundreds of ideas and gone viral dozens of times he now has enough material to publish a coffee table book of them called “Can You Imagine?”.

I’ve been following his journey since the beginning and here’s a quick look at some of my favorite ideas of his:

• A warning if you are sharing content someone else has already seen
• Netflix feature to skip awkward moments when watching a movie with your parents
• Have your DoorDash driver collect money that is owed to you
• Zillow feature to rate your neighbors
• TurboTax feature to find out where your money goes
• Tinder feature to see who else people are dating
• Burn calories to gain more screen time
• iMessage feature to provide someone’s actual ETA
• Ring feature to spray your guests with cologne if needed
• Finding out the environmental cost of food you order
• Mass apply to jobs on LinkedIn
• Phone camera locks if you use it too much during an event so you can be more present
• Maps feature to unblur areas as you explore them
• Uber option to let you drive
• Netfilx minimum IQ required to watch certain shows
• Control music when you enter a store via Spotify
• Spotify feature to lock Christmas music
• Facebook feature to remind people it’s your birthday
• Leave feedback when you unfollow someone
• Google map routes you to the nearest public bathroom
• Solve a riddle to reset your password
• OpenTable challenge to prove it’s your birthday
• Tinder feature to preview your future child
• Amazon feature to pay extra to deliver your order first
• See how people saved your name in your phone
• Apple Health show you how long you have left to live
• ChatGPT to summarize long texts for you
• Randomly like and auto respond to group texts
• Order welfare checks on people who don’t text you back
• Verify your identity with weird personal information/things you’ve said
• Venmo feature to play annoying sounds until someone pays you back
• Google maps feature to update ETAs based on the needs of your passengers and have often they need to stop for bathroom breaks
• Zillow feature to see how your future neighbors decorate for the holidays
• FaceID like feature to log in using other random body parts
• LockedIn instead of LinkedIn.  Live streams of people working
• Set a text message character limit so you can’t get long texts
• Declare email bankruptcy to reset you to inbox zero
• Share your Tinder account with your parents so that they can swipe for you
• iOS photo bomb feature to send out the same picture to everyone in an area

The hundreds of ideas not listed here are great ideas as well. And best of all he shows no sign of slowing down, continuing to churn out new ideas on a daily basis. So, if you aren’t already doing so give him a follow on X at @soren_iverson. And tell him to leave some ideas for me!

Is Soren Iverson the real Idea Man?

#3,120 – BARK Air

Dogs are part of our families and most of us pamper them as much as we can, providing them with toys, comfortable beds, high quality dog food (if not human food) and various other amenities. And now we can add one more to the list: first class flights thanks to the new BARK Air.

According to the New York Post:

“Dog toy company BARK will launch a jet charter service that promises ‘white paw service’ — though it will cost as much as $16,000 for a round-trip ticket for just one pooch and its doting owner.

Dubbed BARK Air, the company best known for its subscription BarkBoxes filled with pet toys and treats, seeks to solve the problems that typically arise when humans travel with their fur babies.

Though smaller dogs can typically ride in a carrier placed under the seat in front of them, larger dogs must undergo what’s known to be the stressful experience of being put in crates in a plane’s cargo space.”

BARK Air was born to do away with that and provide dogs (and their owners) with a more comfortable and less anxiety ridden flight option. With amenities that even people would be jealous of. See the video below to find out more about exactly what kind of amenities we’re talking about:

Explains Fast Company:

“All the amenities in the film are here now or in the works,’ Benjamin wrote, listing everything from custom doggy flat-beds and ‘turbulence treats’ to dog-calming scented cabins, a shoe menu, and the ‘world’s first on-board dog park,’ not to mention a belly-rub button at every seat. Human companions will have their own menu, but pup passengers are guaranteed ‘five-star gourmet dining,’ according to Benjamin, who noted ‘this is just the start.'”

I’m not sure how a dog is going to push the bully rub button but I do think that BARK Air is a good idea even if it is too pricey for most people to take advantage of. Now if only we could create a separate airline for crying babies and their parents…

Is BARK Air the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,119 – New Life Form

Mitochondria. Plants. Something else?!

For perhaps only the third time in history one organism has consumed another leading to the creation of something entirely new and useful. A major evolutionary leap forward that we are now witnessing in real time.

New Atlas explains:

“Scientists have caught a once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event in progress, as two lifeforms have merged into one organism that boasts abilities its peers would envy. Last time this happened, Earth got plants.

The phenomenon is called primary endosymbiosis, and it occurs when one microbial organism engulfs another, and starts using it like an internal organ. In exchange, the host cell provides nutrients, energy, protection and other benefits to the symbiote, until eventually it can no longer survive on its own and essentially ends up becoming an organ for the host – or what’s known as an organelle in microbial cells.

Imagine if kidneys were actually little animals running around, and humans had to manually filter their blood through a dialysis machine. Then one day some guy somehow gets one of these kidney critters stuck… Internally (who are we to judge how?) – and realizes he no longer needs his dialysis machine. Neither do his kids, until eventually we’re all born with these helpful little fellas inside us. That’s kind of what’s happening here.

In the 4-billion-odd-year history of life on Earth, primary endosymbiosis is thought to have only happened twice that we know of, and each time was a massive breakthrough for evolution. The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria. This specialized energy-producing organelle allowed for basically all complex forms of life to evolve. It remains the heralded ‘powerhouse of the cell’ to this day.

The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when some of these more advanced cells absorbed cyanobacteria that could harvest energy from sunlight. These became organelles called chloroplasts, which gave sunlight-harvesting abilities, as well as a fetching green color, to a group of lifeforms you might have heard of – plants.

And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – ‘fixing’ nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.”

There’s no telling yet what will wind up becoming of these new nitroplasts but they could potentially help us grow better crops. Regardless, it’s a pretty amazing discovery in of itself that this is even happening. And if we get something as game changing as the mitochondira or plants as a result that would be even better.

Did we just get a new life form for the third time?!

#3,118 – AI Week: Future Predicting AI

As a futurist I like to pretend that I’m good at predicting the future. But soon we might have an AI that can actually do it.

Interesting Engineering explains:

“A new study from researchers at MIT and the University of Washington reveals an AI model that can accurately predict a person or a machine’s future actions. 

The AI is known as the latent inference budget model (L-IBM). The study authors claim that L-IBM is better than other previously proposed frameworks capable of modeling human decision-making.

It works by examining past behavior, actions, and limitations linked to the thinking process of an agent (which could be either a human or another AI). The data or result obtained after the assessment is called the inference budget.

They used L-IBM to predict the moves of human players in a chess game. ‘Our results show that suboptimal human decision-making can be efficiently modeled with computationally constrained versions of standard search algorithms,’ the study authors note. 

‘By doing so, we obtain both accurate models of humans’ decision-making and informative measures of their inferential capacity,’ they added.”

Predicting human behavior within the confines of a game is one thing. Doing it out in the real world with infinite variables is another. So, I think we have a long way to go before we have an AI that can actually predict the future but this is a good first step and suggests that it may actually be possible.

Is L-IBM the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,117 – AI Week: Hypnovels

Some writers are already using ChatGPT to help them churn out novels and eventually we may get to the point where an AI just does all our writing for us. But for now instead of fearing AI we can use it to our advantage. To help us sell the books we’ve already written.

As Fast Company puts it:

“Most novelists are left trying to drum up awareness for their books themselves, via social media. But as every author will tell you, myself included, tweets exclaiming ‘Check out my new book!’ rarely go far.

That’s where Hypnovels comes in. It’s a new generative AI tool that allows authors to make audiovisual excerpts of their novels, which they can then share on their website or on platforms like TikTok.

Hypnovels is the brainchild of Silverside AI, a San Fransisco-based AI innovation and incubation lab founded by Pereira O’Dell ad veteran (and novelist) PJ Pereira and Ask Jeeves founding CEO Rob Wrubel.

The tool allows novelists to upload an excerpt of their novel and enter some details about its genre and themes, which the AI will then crunch to yield a video that brings their prose to life in both audio and visual form.”

As someone who has written a book that no one has ever read I know far too well how hard it is to market your writing and get seen in a sea of competition. Hypnovels sounds like it could be a fun way to drum up interest while leveraging Generative AI to make it happen. I’m all for it.

Is Hypnovels the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,116 – AI Week: Concept Trailers

Who should be the next James Bond? Aaron Taylor-Johnson? Idris Elba? Someone else? What about Henry Cavill? If you’re leaning towards Superman a recent AI infused concept trailer has got you covered.

As Futurism puts it:

“Misleadingly billed as ‘Bond 26 – First Trailer,’ the fake casts Margot Robbie as Cavill’s co-star, and envisions — in another common fantasy pick — Christopher Nolan as director, according to the suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding synopsis in the video description.

Created by KH Studio, which has dozens of fake trailers like these on its channel, the video uses a mix of AI imagery and real movie footage, including scenes from what appears to be ‘The Man From Uncle,’ Cavill’s most Bond-like role to date.”

Even though the trailers are an AI fakery I don’t mind them. On the contrary, I love the idea of using AI to bring fantasizes to life, to envision what our favorite movies might look like with different casting decisions or to give us a glimpse of what a rumored project might actually look like. Such as Back to the Future Part IV with Tom Holland.

If Hollywood executives paid attention they could use these concept trailers as a way to screen ideas and make casting decisions, seeing how certain people would look in certain roles before actually having to make key decisions that could make or break a movie. The more clicks and views a certain concept trailer got the more likely it would be that version would get greenlit. For now we can just enjoy all the concept trailers out there currently making the rounds on YouTube.

Are Concept Trailers the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,115 – AI Week: Hala Point

It seems inevitable that AI will likely soon surpass human intelligence. But how? Perhaps if we modeled an AI system on the human brain we could finally get there. An approach that Intel is keen to try out with Hala Point.

As Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemelle) puts it on X:

“Intel has created the largest artificial intelligence (AI) system ever built that is designed to function like the human brain. Dubbed ‘Hala Point,’ this neuromorphic computer contains over 1 billion artificial neurons and 128 billion artificial synapses spread across 1,152 specialized AI chips called Loihi 2 processors.

Neuromorphic computing takes inspiration from the architecture of the brain, using interconnected artificial neurons and synapses rather than the conventional binary processors found in modern computers. Data flows through these neuron-like nodes in parallel, mimicking how the brain processes information.

The key advantages of this brain-inspired approach are massive parallelism and extreme energy efficiency compared to conventional AI hardware like GPUs and CPUs. Intel claims Hala Point can perform AI workloads 50 times faster while using 100 times less energy than equivalent traditional computing systems.

With a staggering 20 quadrillion operations per second of performance, Hala Point demonstrates the potential of large-scale neuromorphic computing for accelerating AI research and applications. It initially will be deployed at Sandia National Laboratories to tackle problems across device physics, computing architecture, and computer science.

While still an early research prototype, systems like Hala Point could eventually enable continuous learning AI models that can dynamically incorporate new data, overcoming the massive training requirements of current approaches. Intel sees neuromorphic computing as a potential game-changer that more faithfully recreates how human cognition operates.”

Honestly we don’t yet fully understand how human cognition operates, how the brain works or where consciousness comes from. But it’s clear that the human brain is the most impressive thing in the known Universe. It only makes sense that we’d want to create AI that mimics its architecture. Even if we don’t fully understand it.

Is Hala Point the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,114 – AI Week: AI Beauty Pageant

In the future AI girlfriends and boyfriends will be commonplace as we seek companionship any way we can get it. Meanwhile, AI newscasters will bring us the news while AI influencers hawk wares and sell us new products. Soon, everywhere we turn we’ll see beautiful AI created people integrating into our lives as they interact with us, entertain us, and comfort us. So we might as well start appreciating their beauty.

People explains:

“The future of AI is here.

The world’s first AI beauty pageant will judge AI-generated contestants competing for the title of “Miss AI.” The competition is the first installment in a program of awards presented by the World AI Creator Awards (WAICA) and its inaugural partner, Fanvue, a subscription platform that hosts AI content.

According to WAICA’s website, the organization is ‘dedicated to recognizing the achievements of AI creators around the world’ and the Miss AI pageant will assess contestants ‘on their beauty, tech, and clout for the chance to earn the Miss AI crown.’

Judges will take into account classic elements of pageantry such as looks, poise and answers to questions, but contestants will also earn points for their technical skill and implementation of AI tools. Lastly, judges will consider contestants’ reach on social media, i.e. the rate of audience growth and how they engage with fans on their platforms.

A press release from WAICA notes that the contest ‘signifies a monumental leap forward — launching almost 200 years after the world’s first ever real life beauty pageant took place in the 1880s.'”

Yea, but what’s their talent going to be? Can any of them perform a magic show with doves?!

Is an AI Beauty Pageant the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,113 – AI Week: PIGEON

I’m currently dealing with some annoying pigeons at my house who have moved onto my balcony and chirp all day and night. But soon we might all have to deal with PIGEON, a new AI that can identify our location from a photo.

Is this a bad thing? Geoguessing has become increasingly popular over the last few years as some people have proven proficient with identifying where someone is based on a simple photo. Some can even pinpoint the location in a manner of minutes or seconds. And now an AI can do the same.

According to NPR:

“A student project has revealed yet another power of artificial intelligence — it can be extremely good at geolocating where photos are taken.

The project, known as Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON, for short) was designed by three Stanford graduate students in order to identify locations on Google Street View.

But when presented with a few personal photos it had never seen before, the program was, in the majority of cases, able to make accurate guesses about where the photos were taken.

Like so many applications of AI, this new power is likely to be a double-edged sword: It may help people identify the locations of old snapshots from relatives, or allow field biologists to conduct rapid surveys of entire regions for invasive plant species, to name but a few of many likely beneficial applications.

But it also could be used to expose information about individuals that they never intended to share, says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union who studies technology. Stanley worries that similar technology, which he feels will almost certainly become widely available, could be used for government surveillance, corporate tracking or even stalking.”

While the privacy concerns are valid I do think there are plenty of worthwhile scenarios where such a technology could come in handy such as finding a missing person or helping us to remember where a photo was taken. Most photos we store online already contain location meta data so I don’t think people would object if we had an AI that can do the same for hard copies that we have allowing us to scan a picture with our phone and find out where it was taken. It would be an invaluable tool for people looking at old family photos while trying to piece together a family tree.

Is PIGEON the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,112 – AI Week: VASA-1

The latest AI breakthrough comes from Microsoft and gives us a way to bring back the dead. Well, sort of. Thanks to VASA-1 it’s now possible to bring a simple image to life and provide it with synced up audio. Making it possible to bring paintings to life or bring back deceased actors.

Microsoft just dropped VASA-1.

This AI can make single image sing and talk from audio reference expressively. Similar to EMO from Alibaba

10 wild examples:

1. Mona Lisa rapping Paparazzi pic.twitter.com/LSGF3mMVnD

— Min Choi (@minchoi) April 18, 2024

@bindureddy on X sums it up best:

“Microsoft Research announced VASA-1. It takes a single portrait photo and speech audio and produces a hyper-realistic talking face video with precise lip-audio sync, lifelike facial behavior, and naturalistic head movements generated in real-time. This is amazing, given that the AI-generated video looks very real! Of course, these examples will likely be cherry-picked, but this is still amazing. My favorite use-case for this tech is to revive old actors like Cary Grant in new movies with this tech :).”

Microsoft’s thinking meanwhile is that it will help to bring virtual avatars to life enabling them to realistically mirror normal human behavior.

As they put it on their blog:

“We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces of virtual characters with appealing visual affective skills (VAS), given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512×512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.”

It also paves the way for deepfakes but that might be worth it for creating realistic avatars, bringing famous paintings to life and resurrecting the dead.

Is VASA-1 the Greatest Idea Ever?