In 1983 Hasbro bought the license of the Diaclone and Micro Change toys from Takara, then commissioned Marvel Comics to come up with a story-line and character names for the toys. The result: Transformers. Despite Tonka releasing the cheaper Gobots line six months earlier, Hasbro's Transformers took the toy market by storm in 1984, raking in US$150 million that year. At the peak of the toy line's popularity, The Transformers: The Movie hit theaters to further capitalize on its success, but the film polarized fans and collectors with the death of Optimus Prime and majority of the original characters. As Hasbro took full control of Transformers from Takara by the late 1980s, sales declined until the toy line was discontinued in 1991. After the failed Generation 2 reboot, Beast Wars rejuvenated the franchise in 1995. In 2007, the live-action Transformers film solidified Transformers' position as Hasbro's flagship toy line.
More than 90% of all crashes have a human driver as the cause. So if you want to solve traffic fatalities, the best solution is driverless vehicles. It's an ambitious goal, but only possible because of the recent breakthroughs in deep learning. Artificial intelligence is one of those key pieces that has made it possible now to do driverless cars where it wasn't possible ten years ago. For computers, until very, very recently, to do even the most basic visual tasks, like seeing a picture of a person and knowing that it's a person was remarkably hard. That's obviously fundamental to being able to understand the world around you with the sensors that you have. And we've made also gigantic strides in being able to perform complex tasks.
Widespread dietary changes are needed if we’re to combat the range of health problems associated with obesity and the environmental damage caused by industrial farming. Switching to a vegan diet is a potential solution, but selling the idea to the meat-eaters around the world is a tricky proposition.
A.I. can be used in many ways that are very beneficial for society. But the current use of A.I. isn't necessarily aligned with the goals of building a better society, unfortunately. But, but we could change that. A.I. will be viewed as an age of enlightenment. Our children and their children will see A.I. as serendipity, that A.I. is here to liberate us from having to do routine jobs, and push us to do what we love, and push us to think what it means to be human. But what if humans mishandle this new power?
Everywhere you go, you generate a cloud of data. You're trailing data, everything that you do is producing data. And then there are computers looking at that data that are learning, and these computers are essentially trying to serve you better. They're trying to personalize things to you. They're trying to adapt the world to you. So on the one hand, this is great, because the world will get adapted to you without you even having to explicitly adapt it. There's also a danger, because the entities in the companies that are in control of those algorithms don't necessarily have the same goals as you, and this is where I think people need to be aware that, what's going on, so they can have more control over it. We came into this new world thinking that we were users of social media and search engines. It didn't occur to us that social media and search engines were actually using us.
We're going to see if forcing your facial expression can change the way you feel. If you remove the ability to make facial expressions with botox, will it affect how the people perceive emotions in them? How do facial expressions affect emotion, and how does emotion affect facial expressions? Michael Stevens finds out when he explores the face.
In 2007, the live-action Transformers film solidified Transformers' position as Hasbro's flagship toy line.