Revisiting the defining moments of CES history

Iconic CES devices like the Apple Newton, CD player, VHS VCR, Sony PlayStation and Oculus Rift “Crystal Cove” didn’t necessarily seem groundbreaking at the time. Experts and the public often gave prizes to gadgets like the Creative Zen Vision:M and Hitachi’s G1000 Pocket PC that we’ve since deleted from our collective memory banks. With that in mind, here are 10 of the most memorable CES shows that yielded products that were instant hits as well as some that weren’t appreciated until later.

CES 1970: the VCR comes home

CES started in 1967, but it was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Philips unveiled its N1500 videocassette recorder. Until that point, VCRs cost upward of $50,000 and were used mainly by TV stations, but the Philips model with a built-in tuner was just $900 (around $5,000 today). It became the first-ever home VCR, letting folks who could afford it record TV shows for future viewing.

CES 1979: Atari and the home-gaming revolution

For many years, CES products were mostly hi-fi systems, VCRs, TV sets, portable radios, portable TV sets and … well, you get the idea. In 1975, however, Atari introduced the Pong console, kicking off a home-gaming revolution. That culminated at the end of the decade with Atari’s 400 and 800 personal computers (with 4KB and 8KB of RAM, respectively), launched at CES in 1979 for $550 and $1,000, respectively.

They weren’t the first personal computers (those would be the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80), but they were the first with custom coprocessors that enabled superior sound and gaming capabilities. With iconic titles like Star Raiders, the Atari units were the first real gaming PCs and paved the way for the Commodore 64, a massive hit in the 1980s.

At the time, though, most folks were interested in things like satellite dishes, LaserDisc players and cassette-based movies, a brand-new concept at the time. “You can now buy prerecorded movies on casette,” said an ABC announcer. “A popular hit like Sound of Music sells for $75. Porno costs more.” Oh, and Bill Gates appeared at CES for the first time, dropping the first BASIC compiler for the Apple II.

CES 1981: the digital versus analog debate begins

The compact disc was pretty damn impressive tech for 1981. Hard disks had only just arrived in a 5.25-inch size with a mere 5MB of capacity, but CDs could hold around 650MB. In the early days, though, the medium was intended as a purely audio format. Sony’s CD player garnered a lot of buzz at CES, as it was claimed to offer more fidelity than vinyl while letting you skip from track to track with no delay or flipping.

“Impervious to dust, dirt and wear, the Compact Disc contains up to one hour of music on one side of the 4.7 inch diameter disc,” Sony bragged in its 1981 press release. It launched the first-ever CD player, the CDP-101, in Japan in 1982, and it arrived in the US the next year. More than 400,000 sold in America between 1983 and 1984, despite prices that ran up to $1,000. CD sales hit 200 billion units in 2007 but have declined ever since, thanks to digital streaming and downloads.

CES 1985: the Nintendo Entertainment System saves gaming

CES 1984 marked the arrival of the Commodore Amiga, and by then, the gaming market was oversaturated. Between 1983 and 1985, it crashed, and a $3.2 billion industry was now valued at just $100 million. With that as the morbid background, Nintendo launched the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), known in Japan as the Famicom, at CES 1985.

Consumers lost confidence in the gaming industry because of over-the-top marketing claims and a lack of games, despite a glut of home consoles. To help with that, Nintendo pioneered third-party developer licensing, taking the pressure off itself to create new titles. It also delivered titles that closely matched what it advertised so that consumers wouldn’t be disappointed.

After running tests in limited markets, the Japanese company released the NES with no less than 17 games, including Super Mario Bros., Hogan’s Alley, Duck Hunt and Wrecking Crew. Nintendo went on to sell an incredible 7 million NES consoles in 1988, but it wasn’t clear at all to CES 1985 attendees that it would be such a whopping success.

“Only a few US print sources at the time bothered to mention Nintendo’s booth, usually quite briefly, with few images available,” said user Brain Breaker on NintendoAge. That’s pretty shocking considering how amazingly sharp and modern Nintendo’s red-and-black CES booth looked for the time. Rather, folks (again) were more obsessed by hi-fi (including reel-to-reel and CDs), VHS and TVs, both big and small, judging by this video.

CES 1991: the Nintendo PlayStation debacle, featuring Philips

The Nintendo PlayStation that never was.

There was probably a lot of cool stuff at CES 1991, but it’ll forever be remembered for the public implosion of Sony and Nintendo’s fledgling partnership. The two were working on a console called the PlayStation that would let users play Nintendo games via cartridges and Sony interactive content on Sony’s new data CD (Super Disc) technology.

Sony unveiled the partnership at CES, but Nintendo announced the next day that it was actually working with one of Sony’s rivals, Philips. Nintendo had switched course because of unfavorable royalty agreements for CDs and patents on a key chip.

In the end, Sony took revenge by developing its own 32-bit console, the PlayStation. It unveiled that at E3 in 1995, with CEO Olaf Olafsson famously bringing executive Steve Race to come on and say just one thing: “299” (the price in dollars). The only remnants of the partnership now are a few rare Nintendo PlayStation consoles, one of which Engadget saw back in 2015.

CES 1993: Apple shows up

Apple was never a big presence at CES, but in 1992 and 1993 it had a product it wanted to pitch to the public: the Apple Newton. PDAs were all the rage, with products appearing from Tandy and others, but the handwriting-recognition-enabled Newton MessagePad was the most highly anticipated of them all.

As it happened, John Sculley (barely) showed an alpha Newton device during his CES 1993 keynote, and that year marked its last official showing at CES. The handwriting recognition was pretty terrible, and low sales ended Sculley’s career at Apple. The device itself was killed by Steve Jobs in 1997. The Newton is still iconic, though, in part because it’s an Apple device and in part because it paved the way for the PalmPilot and even today’s stylus-enabled tablets and PCs.

The year 1993 also marked a turning point for CES. For the first time, much of the show revolved around PCs, games and information tech rather than just TVs and stereos. IBM showed off a 16-inch color LCD monitor, the largest at the time, for instance. “It’s really not far-fetched to imagine an active-matrix video wall in our offices, our homes and our child’s offices in the very near future,” said a smart-cookie IBM exec.

CES ’93 also saw Trip Hawkins’ 3DO system, a spectacular failure that was nonetheless one of the first consoles with true 3D graphics. There was also some fairly zany PC tech, like a monitor embedded in a desk with a glare-free window to see the images, “letting you use all your desktop.” Oh, and the world’s smallest fax machine.

CES 1999: ReplayTV beats TiVo, then fails miserably

CES has played host to some serious format rivalries like Blu-ray versus HD DVD and VHS versus Betamax. In 1999, participants were gaga over a TV show recording format called ReplayTV, and CES awarded it Best of Show honors. Elsewhere, however, a little company called TiVo made a splash at the same show.

The reason folks were in love with ReplayTV was because it let you skip commercials in 30-second chunks at a time; the TiVo made you fast-forward through them. However, for that reason, broadcasters and advertisers were partial to TiVo’s more ad-friendly offering, which likely helped it make inroads with cable providers like Verizon.

TiVo was gobbled up by patent outfit Rovi but is still a presence in many homes. Despite being the darling of CES 1999, ReplayTV fought numerous legal battles and went bankrupt in 2015.

CES 2004: Blu-ray arrives with swagger

While the politics of broadcasting spelled the demise of ReplayTV, it was good old technological superiority that carried the day for the Sony-supported Blu-ray over Toshiba’s HD DVD. With its smaller-wavelength violet laser, dual-layer versions of the disks could hold up to 50GB, compared to 30GB for HD DVD.

At CES 2004 (the same year Engadget launched), the Blu-ray Disc Association, with members including Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips and Samsung, held its first US press conference to promote the format. “I’ll tell you that I haven’t seen so many suits in one place in my life,” reported Bill Hunt from Digital Bits at the time. “As the media filed into the room, the entire back wall of the conference room was lined with anxious Japanese executives and engineers.”

They needn’t have worried, because Blu-ray definitively killed its HD DVD rival at CES 2008, when Warner Bros. announced that it would produce disks only for Sony’s format. On top of its higher capacity and technical superiority, Philips CEO Frans van Houten gave the other main reason why it likely won out. “He said Blu-ray discs provided the best protections against digital piracy,” noted Hunt.

CES 2013: the Razer Edge loses, wins, then loses to Dish Hopper

Much like with Nintendogate at CES 1993, the 2013 chapter was dominated by two devices. The $999 Razer Edge was a weird but interesting gaming device — as my colleague Aaron Souppouris put it, “basically the Nintendo Switch, but not good.” Then there was the DVR-like Dish Hopper that, like the ReplayTV, wowed audiences but pissed off broadcasters.

The 10-inch Razer Edge could be mounted into a force-feed gaming controller, giving your biceps a serious test. You could also plug it into a console dock and game with it, just like, well, a Switch, using an external controller. It even had a PC mode, letting you connect it to a keyboard.

The Edge was greeted with excitement, winning the Best of CES award (for a strange reason, more on that in a sec). However, when Engadget reviewed it sometime later, we found the console experience “flat” and weren’t crazy about the poor battery life and price either. Other notable devices launched that year included the Pebble Smartwatch, Panasonic’s crazy 20-inch tablet and the Sony Xperia Z smartphone.

CNET actually chose the Dish Hopper as Best of Show but was overruled by parent CBS — in part because CBS was in a legal battle with Dish. The decision generated a lot of criticism and journalist resignations, and it caused the CTA to sever ties with CNET and restore the Best of Show award to Dish. Ever since then, Engadget has produced and presented the annual Best of CES awards.

CES 2016: the Bolt leads a car-tech revolution

Chevy’s Bolt is in there somewhere.

Auto shows are supposedly where cars go for glory, but by 2016 they had become so tech-focused that CES was giving them some love too. We were particularly enthralled with Chevy’s Bolt, awarding it Best of CES. At less than $30,000 after federal tax rebates, it’s “a Tesla for the rest of us,” we said, noting its excellent 238-mile range and sporty demeanor.

Another interesting EV introduced at the show was the Zero 1 from Faraday Future, but it’s now in significant jeopardy because of the financial and legal problems of investor Jia Yueting. Meanwhile, following its disastrous and costly Dieselgate scandal, Volkswagen also came to promote its quick-charging BUDD-e concept, which eventually became the I.D. series of EVs later that year at the Paris Auto Show.

This year, cars could have an even stronger presence at CES 2018, with Hyundai and Kia showing off autonomous AI assistants in cars, Lyft giving Las Vegas rides, and LG partnering with Here on its own self-driving system. We’re also expecting new driver-safety AI systems, cheaper LIDAR sensors and smart-charging devices. If you need any more proof, the CES 2018 keynote speaker is none other than Ford CEO Jim Hackett.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

[Images: Wikimedia Commons/Liftarn (Philips VCR); Wikimedia Commons/Hedning (Atari personal computer); Bettman via Getty Images (compact disc); Brain Breaker/NintendoAge (Nintendo CES booth); Engadget (Nintendo PlayStation); Digital Bits/Bill Hunt (Blu-ray)]

BBC decides it won’t shut down its popular recipe site after all

Back in the spring of 2016, the BBC announced it would be axing various periphery websites and apps in an effort to save £15 million in upkeep costs. One of the items on the chopping block was recipe site BBC Food, the news of which sparked a public backlash and petition to save it, reminiscent of the campaign that kept Radio 6 Music on air the previous decade. In reaction to this, the BBC was quick to clarify the catalogue of over 11,000 recipes would remain accessible through the Good Food site, the online complement to the print magazine of the same name, run by commercial arm BBC Worldwide.

Whether the recipes would be easily searchable and filterable by ingredient, chef and programme, as well as what was to happen to other handy features like video tutorials, was unclear. But these questions no longer need answering, as the broadcaster has now confirmed BBC Food is going nowhere, and will remain online and updated just as you’ve always known it.

“We have made the £15m savings we needed to find from our online services, including changes such as stopping the iWonder service, closing the travel site and stopping developing a travel app, and closing the Newsbeat app, and we’re focusing on high quality, distinctive services as we said we would. Following the audience reaction to the BBC Food proposal in 2016, we said we’d preserve the recipes. The savings for closing the site were small compared to the sizable audience impact, and as the public has continued to have an appetite for our recipes, we have kept the site,” the BBC said in a statement.

As The Times notes, not all planned closures have been completed on schedule. Regional news index pages were supposed to be replaced by liveblog-style sites linking to stories from local news outlets alongside BBC reports. Currently, both run in tandem. Similarly, while the Newsbeat app is no more, the site is still live and regularly updated. These are all due to go dark within the next few months, however, with the BBC blaming “technical complexities” for the delays.

When the BBC announced it was to cull some sites and services in 2016, the motive wasn’t just to cut running costs. It was also part of an effort to make the broadcaster’s output more “distinctive,” making better use of the licence fee in the spirit of the BBC’s Royal Charter. That meant winding down investment in areas where the BBC duplicates information that’s available elsewhere. In the worst cases, a local rag might not survive if people can get the same news from the BBC’s regional teams.

On a less serious note, recipes can be found all over the internet, hence BBC Food being earmarked for archiving. As the broadcaster discovered, however, the site has an adoring audience — and a vocal one at that. So next time you look at the mishmash of ingredients in your fridge with a blank expression, BBC Food will be where it always was, telling you what you can throw together with what you have. And when you decide you’re not in the mood for that, there’s always Deliveroo.

Via: The Times (paywalled)

GoPro plans to cut 300 jobs as Karma drone division struggles

GoPro is laying off about 200 to 300 employees, largely from its Karma drone division, TechCrunch has reported. The company has informed the employees, who will remain on payroll for another six weeks, and will make a public announcement sometime soon. GoPro had already laid off around 270 people earlier this year, in part because of increasing competition in the action camera industry, and in part because of the disastrous launch of its Karma drone.

GoPro was originally developing a drone with DJI, but elected to go it alone to develop the Karma. Shortly after it was released, however, buyers reported that it was dropping out of the sky, reportedly because its batteries were disconnecting. It also faced competition from DJI’s Mavic Pro drone, which had features that the Karma lacked on release like a “follow me” mode.

The belt-tightening has hurt a lot of folks, particularly because it’s the result of what seems like poor management decisions and sub-par engineering. However, the cutbacks appear to be improving the company’s health, as it reported better earnings last quarter. And it’s latest GoPro 6 camera, with better image quality and smoother stabilization, has generally met with solid reviews. Hopefully things will soon be less bumpy for the company’s employees, too.

Source: TechCrunch

Kohler’s new smart fixtures make Alexa your bathroom buddy

While Kohler is mostly known for simple bathroom fixtures, it’s been releasing a few high-end smart products, like toilets, for years. But now the company is expanding to the whole bathroom. The brand introduced a new platform at CES, Kohler Konnect, that runs on a new line of products users can customize with presets and control with motion or voice — and some even have Amazon Alexa built-in.

These apply to a new suite of products, from mirrors to showers to toilets, designed to work with Konnect. Users can start a shower, warm a toilet seat, adjust lighting from the mirror or fill a bathtub to a desired depth through vocal control. Users can fiddle with environmental presets using a new app for iOS and Android, while the Konnect platform as a whole can automate tasks and monitor water usage. Some of the new products in the lineup can connect to Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit.

Sure, it might feel goofy at first to command your toilet to flush itself. But as more voice assistants enter homes and lives, creating a bathroom that’s responsive to your vocal and gesture controls will probably feel natural. Install an Senseate intelligent faucet in your kitchen and tell it to fill a precise measurement, or treat your royal self with a voice-activated heated toilet seat. You’ll have to wait to make your connected bathroom dreams come true: Kohler’s Verdara Voice Lighted Mirror, which comes with Amazon Alexa installed, will be the first Konnect product on the market with a March release window, with others coming later in 2018.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

XYZPrinting’s latest 3D printer pen is just $45

XYZPrinting is a company known for making affordable 3D printers for the home, and today, it’s about to unveil even more of them. It’s releasing not one, not two, but three brand new devices at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But if you’ve been paying attention to the company at all, they should all be pretty familiar. That’s because they’re simply newer, updated versions of existing products.

The first to get an update is the da Vinci 3D Pen, which initially debuted in 2016. The new version, however, is called 3D Pen Cool, and as you can tell from the name, is meant to be much safer than previous versions thanks to some temperature modifications that make the items cooler to the touch. That makes it a far better competitor to the 3Doodler, which is its main rival.

Like the previous da Vinci 3D Pen, the 3D Pen Cool extrudes PLA plastic filament in the air to create a 3D sculpture. It has a two color LED indicator (red and green) plus a two action control button for loading and unloading. It’s powered via a microUSB cable, which XYZPrinting claims is lighter than a traditional power cord.

Next up is the da Vinci Nano, which was teased at last year’s CES but did not ultimately make it to retail. Since that time, however, XYZPrinting has refined the Nano to include a new software package called the XYZ app maker, which lets users 3D print straight from their tablets (and eventually their phones). It’s still as compact as ever at 4.7 inches squared, but is now available in white instead of red. And yes, XYZPrinting hopes the Nano will be available for real this time around.

Last but not least is the da Vinci color AiO, which is meant more for small businesses rather than the end consumer. It combines both printing and scanning capabilities in full color, thanks to the combination of inkjet and 3D printing tech that imbues the PLA filament with ink droplets of varying colors.

As with all of their products, these devices are priced pretty affordably. The da Vinci 3D Pen Cool will retail for $44.95, the Nano will cost only $229 and the business-focused AiO will be available for close to $4,000. The company says they’ll all be available early this year.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Samsung gives the 13-inch Notebook 7 Spin a few modest updates

Well, Samsung seems hell-bent on revealing all its new laptops before CES even starts. First there was the trio of Notebook 9 models announced last month, and now the company is talking up a new version of its Notebook 7 Spin. For those not aware, the original 13.3-inch Spin debuted in 2016 as a relatively inexpensive laptop that turned into a slightly unwieldy tablet, and this refreshed version doesn’t stray far from Samsung’s original formula.

There’s no firm word on pricing or availability yet — all we know is that the machine will land in the US sometime in Q1 2018 — but changes here are mostly what you’d expect. Samsung dumped the i5-6200U chipset from the original Spin in favor of a more modern, 8th-generation i5 processor paired with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It also packs a fingerprint sensor for quick logins (thanks to Windows Hello), a feature that has quickly become de rigueur for mid-range machines. And like those tweaked Notebook 9s, the 2018 Spin packs a handful of arguably useful software features, most notably a tool that uses a built-in far field microphone to capture recordings from “meetings or lectures.”

We’re a little less thrilled that the 2018 Spin has one fewer full-size USB port (leaving just one Type C port, one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port) and a slightly smaller battery than its predecessor. Here’s hoping those omissions are reflected in the machine’s final price tag. The Spin’s design is slightly different, too — while the original had one long hinge that spanned almost the entire length of the display, the 2018 version has a more traditional two-hinge setup. This probably won’t pose problems for too many Samsung fans, but the original’s long hinge design was a neat flourish that also helped the machine feel a little more stable.

Oddly enough, there’s no word on a refreshed 15-inch Spin model, but hey — using a machine with a display that big as a tablet felt pretty clunky anyway. Neither of the new 15-inch Notebook 9s are 2-in-1s either, so if you’re itching for a big slab of a Samsung machine that doubles as a tablet, the only real option available is the Notebook 9 Pro released earlier this year.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Toshiba’s Symbio is both a security camera and Alexa speaker

Toshiba has integrated a dizzying number of devices into one with its new Symbio. It’s an Alexa-powered smart speaker, security camera, intercom, smart home hub that’s compatible with Z-Wave or Zigbee, and sound detector. Using the iOS or Android-powered Toshiba Smart Home app, you can “control everything from lights and music to door locks and temperature settings, from any location — at home, at the office or out of town,” the company notes.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the Symbio is the built-in smart home hub and integrated 1080p, wide-angle security camera. Amazon itself recently released the Echo Plus with a built-in hub, but it lacks the camera, only supports Zigbee and has limited smart home voice control.

Toshiba didn’t say whether Alexa could control the security camera or other smart home hub features, but you should be able to do just about anything via the app. For folks who want a basic smart home setup to control security, lights and a thermostat, it should do the job.

With Alexa, you can do the usual stuff like listen to music, ask questions, get news, and also control lights, a thermostat and more. An integrated microphone also allows two-way intercom communications, and sound monitoring — for instance, if it detects a smoke detector alarm, it can send a notification to the app. The camera can provide motion-based alerts and stream live HD video to your smartphone.

Toshiba hasn’t yet released the all-important price, and the sound quality of the speaker is a crucial part of the equation, so hopefully we’ll get a look at CES 2018. Nevertheless, this could be an interesting option for folks looking at both an Alexa smart speaker and basic security setup.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Source: Toshiba

Japanese Company Develops Mobile Payment System That Scans Your Palm Using Smartphone Camera

Following authentication processes like thumbprint scanning, facial recognition, and QR code entry, a company in Japan this week has shown off a smartphone-based payment system that uses your unique palm print to confirm transactions (via Nikkei). Japanese credit card company JCB created the system in conjunction with Tokyo company Universal Robots, with a trial run aimed at company employees beginning next month.

This isn’t the first time palm scanning technology has been used for mobile payments, with U.S. companies Biyo and Keyo each launching their own versions of similar systems recently, although on a small scale. Those technologies require merchants to purchase special terminals that include palm-scanning cameras so that customers can pay with a hand wave at their stores, but JCB’s system only needs a smartphone camera and requires no specialized equipment.

Image via Nikkei

Customers would be able to leave wallets and phones in their pockets with a palm-based payment system, developed by credit card company JCB, that merchants could use with just an everyday smartphone camera.

After users register by snapping a picture of their palm from a smartphone camera, merchants or stores could scan customers’ palms by smartphone to match them against registered data. With no specialized equipment needed, it would be easier for stores to incorporate the system, unlike a previous dalliance by JCB into palm-based payment that required a special terminal.

JCB’s system works by identifying registrants’ hands based on the surface of their palms and the “distribution of veins underneath.” Users register by taking a picture of their palm from an app on their smartphone and associating it with any supported payment information. Then, when at an appropriate store the merchant can scan the customer’s palm using a smartphone camera and the system will match the received data against registered data. This way, users wouldn’t even need to take out their own smartphone during the payment process.

JCB hopes the technology not only evolves into a widely used payment system, but also potentially “eliminates the need for cards and other forms of identification.” The employee test is being enacted with the goal of exposing any security problems with the system, “such as fraudulent registrations or uses,” as well as ensuring accuracy of the system. It’s said to misidentify users “only once in 100 billion times.”

While palm scanning technology hasn’t been widely adopted, thumbprint and face scanning have become normal interactions for users around the world when paying for items with their smartphones, particularly on iOS devices. Apple’s Apple Pay began with Touch ID on iPhone 5s in 2013 and eventually came to MacBook Pro in 2016. With the launch of the iPhone X users are now paying for products with Face ID, which quickly scans their faces to confirm identity and then authenticates the purchase after being tapped to a compatible NFC terminal. Touch ID and Face ID can also both be used within apps.

Tag: Japan
Discuss this article in our forums

Truly creative A.I. is just around the corner. Here’s why that’s a big deal

Joe Kennedy, father of the late President John F. Kennedy, once said that, when shoeshine boys start giving you stock tips, the financial bubble is getting too big for its own good.

By that same logic, when Hollywood actors start tweeting about a once-obscure part of artificial intelligence (A.I.), you know that something big is happening, too. That’s exactly what occurred recently when Zach Braff, the actor-director still best known for his performance as J.D. on the medical comedy series Scrubs, recorded himself reading a Scrubs-style monolog written by an A.I.

“What is a hospital?” Braff reads, adopting the thoughtful tone J.D. used to wrap up each episode in the series. “A hospital is a lot like a high school: the most amazing man is dying, and you’re the only one who wants to steal stuff from his dad. Being in a hospital is a lot like being in a sorority. You have greasers and surgeons. And even though it sucks about Doctor Tapioca, not even that’s sad.”

Today’s machine creativity typically involves humans making some of the decisions

Yes, it’s nonsense — but it’s charming nonsense. Created by Botnik Studios, who recently used the same same statistical predictive tools to write an equally bonkers new Harry Potter story, the A.I. mimics the writing style of the show’s real scripts. It sounds right enough to be recognizable but wrong enough to be obviously the work of a silly machine, like the classic anecdote about the early MIT machine translation software which translated the Biblical saying “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into Russian and back again, ending up with “The whisky is strong, but the meat is rotten.”

As Braff’s publicizing of the Scrubs-bot shows, the topic of computational creativity is very much in right now. Once the domain of a few lonely researchers, trapped on the fringes of computer science and the liberal arts, the question of whether a machine can be creative is everywhere. Alongside Botnik’s attempts at Harry Potter and Scrubs, we’ve recently written about a recurrent neural network (RNN) that took a stab at writing the sixth novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series, better known to TV fans as Game of Thrones. The RNN was trained for its task by reading and analyzing the roughly 5,000 pages of existing novels in the series.

Larger companies like Google have gotten in on the act, too, with its Deep Dream project, which purposely magnifies some of the recognition errors in Google’s deep learning neural networks to create wonderfully trippy effects.

Right now, we’re at the “laughter” stage of computational creativity for the most part. That doesn’t have to mean outright mocking A.I.’s attempts to create, but it’s extremely unlikely that, say, an image generated by Google’s Deep Dream will hang in an art gallery any time soon — even if the same image painted by a person may be taken more seriously.

It’s fair to point out that today’s machine creativity typically involves humans making some of the decisions, but the credit isn’t split between both in the same way that a movie written by two authors would be. Rightly or wrongly, we give A.I. the same amount of credit in these scenarios that we might give to the typewriter that “War and Peace” was written on. In other words, very little.

Right now, we’re in the “laughter” stage of AI creativity, but that may change soon. 

But that could change very soon. Because computational creativity is doing a whole lot more than generating funny memes and writing parody scripts. NASA, for example, has employed evolutionary algorithms, which mimic natural selection in machine form, to design satellite components. These components work well — although their human “creators” are at a loss to explain exactly how.

Legal firms, meanwhile, are using A.I. to formulate and hone new arguments and interpretations of the law, which could be useful in a courtroom. In medicine, the U.K.’s University of Manchester is using a robot called EVE to formulate hypotheses for future drugs, devise experiments to test these theories, physically carry out these experiments, and then interpret the results.

IBM’s “Chef Watson” utilizes A.I. to generate its own unique cooking recipes, based on a knowledge of 9,000 existing dishes and an awareness of which chemical compounds work well together. The results are things like Turkish-Korean Caesar salads and Cuban lobster bouillabaisse that no human chef would ever come up with, but which taste good nevertheless.

In another domain, video game developers Epic Stars recently used a deep learning A.I. to compose the main theme for its new game Pixelfield, which was then performed by a live orchestra.

Finally, newspapers like the Washington Post are eschewing sending human reporters to cover events like the Olympics, in place of letting machines do the job. To date, the newspaper’s robo-journalist has written close to 1,000 articles.

Which brings us to our big point: Should a machine’s ability to be creative serve as the ultimate benchmark for machine intelligence? Here in 2017, brain-inspired neural networks are getting bigger, better, and more complicated all the time, but we still don’t have an obvious test to discern when a machine is finally considered intelligent.

We still don’t have definitive method for discerning when a machine is intelligent.

While it’s not a serious concern of most A.I. researchers, the most famous test of machine intelligence remains the Turing Test, which suggests that if a machine is able to fool us into thinking it’s intelligent, we must therefore agree that it is intelligent. The result, unfortunately, is that machine intelligence is reduced to the level of an illusionist’s trick — attempting to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes rather than actually demonstrating that a computer can have a mind.

An alternative approach is an idea called the Lovelace Test, named after the pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace. Appropriately enough, Ada Lovelace represented the intersection of creativity and computation — being the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, as well as working alongside Charles Babbage on his ill-fated Analytical Engine in the 1800s. Ada Lovelace was impressed by the idea of building the Analytical Engine, but argued that it would never be considered capable of true thinking, since it was only able to carry out pre-programmed instructions. As she said, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,’ she famously wrote. ‘It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

The broad idea of the Lovelace Test involves three separate parts: the human creator, the machine component, and the original idea. The test is passed only if the machine component is able to generate an original idea, without the human creator being able to explain exactly how this has been achieved. At that point, it is assumed that a computer has come up with a spontaneous creative thought. Mark Riedl, an associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech, has proposed a modification of the test in which certain constraints are given — such as “create a story in which a boy falls in love with a girl, aliens abduct the boy, and the girl saves the world with the help of a talking cat.”

“Where I think the Lovelace 2.0 test plays a role is verifying that novel creation by a computational system is not accidental,” Riedl told Digital Trends. “The test requires understanding of what is being asked, and understanding of the semantics of the data it is drawing from.”

It’s an intriguing thought experiment. This benchmark may be one that artificial intelligence has not yet cracked, but surely it’s getting closer all the time. When machines can create patentable technologies, dream up useful hypotheses, and potentially one day write movie scripts that will sell tickets to paying audiences, it’s difficult to call their insights accidental.

To coin a phrase often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Computational creativity has been ignored. Right now, either fondly or maliciously, it is being laughed at. Next it will start fighting our preconceptions — such as the kinds of jobs which qualify as creative, which are the roles we are frequently assured are safe from automation.

And after that? Just maybe it can win.

Editors’ Recommendations

• This is what happens when A.I. tries to reimagine Stanley Kubrick’s films
• ‘Are you OK?’ Facebook enlists A.I. to spot suicidal users and find help
• IBM and MIT are working together to make sure A.I. isn’t our downfall
• Here’s how A.I. is helping Gfycat get rid of those crummy pixelated GIFs
• MIT built an A.I. bot that writes scary stories — and some are terrifying

Music mogul Jimmy Iovine is leaving Apple Music later this year

Breakups are always sad — especially when you made such a good couple together.

Billboard is reporting that Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records and former chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M, is leaving Apple Music after more than three years in an (official) undisclosed position with the Cupertino, California-based company.

Iovine is one of the biggest names in the music industry, having co-founded Beats By Dre with Dr. Dre before engineering a $3 billion deal to sell the audio manufacturer to Apple in 2014 (not coincidentally, just before he was hired by Apple). Iovine was one of the most influential figures contributing to the rise of Apple Music, which debuted in June 2015 and has since grown into a legitimate threat to Spotify for the domestic streaming crown, with more than 30 million paid subscribers (per Statista).

Back in September, Iovine told Billboard that he wasn’t sure what his next post-Apple move would be, but that he wants to continue working in the music streaming industry, which he considers to be in long-term jeopardy thanks to the proliferation of free-use alternatives and the banality of most streaming platforms, not to mention issues with royalty payments. While at Apple Music, Iovine pioneered programs like Apple’s Beats 1 radio station, which features notable DJs like Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden introducing listeners to new, up-and-coming artists.

Under Iovine’s watch, Apple Music became a hotbed for original content creation, where auteurs found an avenue to develop and promote nonmusic media including films, magazines, and even advertisements. In January 2017, he talked about expanding Apple Music beyond its rhythmic roots, citing the 2016 acquisition of popular web series Carpool Karaoke as an example. Iovine’s relationship with Apple dates back to 2003, when he was introduced to Apple founder Steve Jobs and became involved in the promotion of the iPod and iTunes in their infancy.

Iovine, was the subject of a recent four-part HBO documentary — titled The Defiant Ones — which chronicled Jimmy’s relationship with hip-hop mogul Andre Young, better known as Dr. Dre. The 64-year-old has become synonymous with the record industry, for better and worse; back in 2012, rapper Macklemore titled a song “Jimmy Iovine” on his Grammy-winning album The Heist, where he complained about artists sacrificing authorship and money for the safety of a record deal.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Start downloading your music: Amazon is shelving its music storage service
• The average person spends about $15 on streaming music all year
• Meet the playlist curators who mint new music stars, one pick at a time
• Music junkie? Here are the 25 best music apps for consuming and creating tunes
• Amazon Prime Music is coming to Samsung smart TVs