Daily Archives: September 1, 2023

Image by Getty / Futurism

"It was a Sunday afternoon," Keith Thomas, a 45-year-old Long Island native, told us of his accident. "I dove into the wrong side of the pool, and I blacked out."

The next thing he knew, Thomas says, he was being airlifted to a nearby hospital; it was July 2020, just a few months into the pandemic, and he'd badly broken his neck at the C4 and C5 vertebrae of his spine. He's been paralyzed from the neck down since, unable to move or feel his limbs until a few months ago, that is, when a first-of-its-kind clinical trial brought both movement and feeling back to his arms and hands for the first time in three years.

Thomas, who lives with quadriplegia, was the first patient to receive what his doctors are calling a double neural bypass, a new bioelectrical therapy pioneered at Northwell Health's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Led by Chad Bouton, a professor at Northwell's Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine, the experimental new procedure involves a combination of AI, brain-computer interface (BCI) implants, external computers, and non-invasive wearable tech.

Like a coronary bypass surgery creates a detour for your heart to pump blood around an obstacle, a neural bypassuses a combination of machine learning and electrical signaling to reroute an individual's neural signals, avoiding whatever barrier is preventing them from making it where they're supposed to go. A double neural bypass, then, reroutes the signal in just one but two places:in this case, the areas responsible for movement and touch.

The goal? To answer an elusive question: how do you restore the communication between the brain and the body, when the two can no longer speak?

"It's a very challenging problem," said Bouton, who's also the founder and CEO of a biotech firm called Neuvotion, over a video call. "You're looking at these complex electrical patterns in the brain, and you're trying to make sense out of the patterns and extract information from them. We want to know when someone's thinking about moving their hand, or moving their fingers, and we want to be able to then channel those thoughts into something useful."

Bouton and his team refer to this approach as "thought-driven therapy," in which chips embedded in the patient's brain use machine learning to interpret the complex language of neurons. Does it sound like sci-fi? Absolutely. But so far, it's showing unmistakable promise and the implications for the millions worldwide who suffer from paralysis or movement impairment could be significant.

"It's frustrating when someone looks at their limb, and they can't make the movement they want to make," Bouton said. "They're trying, and the brain knows they're trying, but things aren't happening. It's super frustrating, and it can be depressing."

The professor and his team performed the world's first single neural bypass surgery back in 2016, successfully restoring movement in the arms of a patient who had broken his neck on a family vacation six years prior. But while that procedure was able to reestablish the ability to move when hooked up to a computer, that is it didn't bring back the patient's sense of feeling.

Now, seven years later, the double neural bypass has been designed to do both: bring back movement and sensation.

In Thomas' case, he first had to spend months staring at simulated arm and hand movements on a computer screen, urging his brain unsuccessfully, at the time to mimic the motions. The doctors and engineers, meanwhile, took detailed MRIs of his brain, mapping the areas responsible for arm movement and hand touch. (Like searching for a needle in an extremely delicate, blood vessel-laden haystack, Bouton told us.)

Armed with this data, the doctors then hatched a plan to implant a total of five BCI chips: two at the area of the brain that presides over movement, and three at the region responsible for touch and feeling in the fingers. The chips pass decoded bioelectrical messages to the computer,which then sends electric signals to a series of electrode-laden patches placed across Thomas' spine and forearms. Finally, a handful of infinitesimal sensors placed on Thomas' fingertips and palms send touch and pressure data back up to the sensory region of Thomas' brain.

"Every time he thinks about moving and feeling, we actually send another signal to the spinal cord, and that supercharges the spinal cord," said Bouton. "It tries to strengthen connections."

Installing the chips was no small feat. Thomas underwent a 15-hour open brain surgery back in March, and as if that wasn't enough on its own, the Long Islander was awakefor large portions of the procedure, verbally relaying the sensations he was feeling back to Bouton and his surgeons, a team led by Northwell neurosurgeons Ashesh Mehta and Netanel Ben-Shalom.

But Thomas "didn't really have any reservations" about the surgery, he recalled, before conceding: "until the night before."

Fortunately, the procedure was a resounding success. The BCI install went off without a hitch, and for the first time since his accident, Thomas was able to hold and feel his sister's hand.

"It was incredible," Bouton recalled. "It still makes me tear up."

In the four months since the procedure, Thomas has regained full strength in both arms, even experiencing a 110 percent recovery in his right arm. But most excitingly, Thomas has started to experience natural recovery in his forearm and wrist meaning that the therapy might have kickstarted his nervous system's innate healing processes.

"Only several months into the study, he's making huge gains," Bouton said, "doubling his arm strength, and starting to feel new sensations in his forearm and even wrist even after he goes home outside the lab, even when we turn [the computer] off."

When we reached out to experts in the field, enthusiasm for the procedure's success and AI's role in it was palpable.

The surgery is a "novel and exciting advance in the field of both BCI and spinal cord neuroprosthetic interfaces," Dr. Wilson Zachary Ray, Executive Vice-Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and chief of spine surgery at the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, who wasn't involved in the study, said over email. "I suspect this sort of AI and ML innovation will see a massive growth in clinical applications over the next 3 to 5 years."

"At some point in the not too distant future," Ray added, "implantable 'smart technology' will be integrated into the fabric of our daily life, similar to how all view our smartphones today."

But as remarkable as these results are, they're not without caveats. Although Thomas has experienced new sensations outside the lab, the computer needs to be turned on in order for him to be able to move. And as Bouton told us in our interview, the contraption itself isn't exactly minimalist.

"It's kind of like the early heart and lung machine," the professor told us of the contraption. "We've got some parts that are in the body, some parts that are on the laboratory table, and some wearables."

But over time, he says, the goal is to condense the device's size, ideally to the point that it's portable. His company, Neuvotion, is working on a number of non-invasive treatments and devices seeking to restore autonomy to those suffering movement impairment and paralysis, among other applications.

"In the more challenging cases, like Keith's," he added, "combining brain-interface technology with non-invasive devices is powerful."

The recovery also requires a lot of effort for patients hours-long therapy sessions, visits with specialists as they relearn how to move and strengthen those movements, one day at a time.

"You have to be really patient, and really dedicated, to want to do this," said Thomas. "It's a lot of work." Recounting his many weekly therapy sessions and visits to specialists, he added: "It's pretty much a full-time job, being quadriplegic."

But Thomas doesn't mind. The "stars aligned" for him to meet Bouton, he says, and seeing the tangible results of his effort has been extraordinary. If his role in this research helps others down the line, according to Thomas, it's all worth it.

"All of the effort that I'm putting in is paying off," he told us. "I realize it's not going to happen overnight, but the little things reaching up to my chin, being able to touch my other hand, rub my cheek when I have to, call people." He quieted for a second. "It's the little things."

More on paralysis technology: Paralyzed People Successfully Test Brain-controlled Electric Wheelchairs

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For the First Time, AI Brain Chips Allow Paralyzed Man to Move and ... - Futurism

AI bro fight! AI bro fight! Clash of the TAItans

Buttons? Pressed.

Over the weekend, researchers Dylan Patel and Daniel Nishball, who together write a semiconductor blog called SemiAnalysis, published a controversial post declaring that Google's secretive upcoming AI model, dubbed Gemini, is about to blow OpenAI's GPT-4 out of the water. According to the blog brusquely titled "Google Gemini Eats The World Gemini Smashes GPT-4 By 5X, The GPU-Poors" Google's expansive infrastructure of advanced GPUs gives the Silicon Valley stalwart and its next-gen model a leg up over the latest iteration of OpenAI's GPT-4.

Which, as conversations across sites like X-formerly-Twitter and Hacker News made clear, is a contentious take. Does more computing power reallyequal a better AI model?

It's a fascinating question, and some online debates got heated. But no one, it seems, was more perturbed by the statements in the blog than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who took to X-formerly-Twitter on Monday to scoff at the researchers' analysis.

"Incredible Google got that SemiAnalysis guy to publish their internal marketing/recruiting chart," Altman wrote in the post, referring to an infrastructure chart included in the blog. His signoff to the message: "lol."

Patel, one of the blog authors, didn't take Altman's critiques lying down, and on Tuesday hit back with an X post of his own.

"Sundar to the GPU-poors," the researcher captioned the post, which included an NSFW meme of Google-owning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai appearing to force-feed milk to Altman. "The data is from a supplier of Google," Patel added, "and we made the chart."

It's not surprising that Altman isn't a fan of the SemiAnalysis post, given that it pretty much just says that Google products will absolutely wallop OpenAI's by the end of the year. And to his credit, as a number of netizens pointed out, the Semiconductors Rule All argument might lack some nuance.

"Computational power alone is not the only resource. It is also the training process itself... and, obviously, data and its quality," one Hacker News user wrote, as caught by Insider. "I will be convinced only after Google demonstrates that Gemini is better than GPT4 (in some, or all, tasks)."

A fair point. Still, it'salsotrue that, thoughOpenAI's ChatGPT release kickstarted the publicview of the AI race, Google which has used its immensely deep pockets to pioneer the world of AI R&D for some time now likely has some powerful stuff up its sleeves. Regardless, at the end of the day, it's always fun to witness Silicon Valley's most powerful bristle at any affront to their perceived superiority.

More on AI: AI's Dirty Secret: Poor People in the Developing World Are Doing Most of the Work

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OpenAI Rages at Report That Google's New AI Crushes GPT-4 - Futurism

August 28, 2023

Who is it? After graduating from Central Saint Martins MA in Fashion (Knitwear) program, Paolina Russo launched her eponymous label alone, until a cosmic moment brought her together with fellow CSM graduate Lucile Guilmard. We shared a studio together and then one morning we just said Look, can we do this together? recalls Russo. And thats when the brand really flourished when there were two minds behind it, a merging of two creative communities.

Despite coming from different backgrounds Russo grew up in Canada; Guilmard in France the two share a common language in crafts, as both an artistic form and a reactive, solution-oriented process. Both were introduced to traditional clothes-making techniques at a young age via family members, which instilled in each of them an organic appreciation for the hands-on knowledge transfer involved in fashion design. Together, they share a reverence for the pure magic of these ancient crafts yet cradle their potential to innovate solutions for the future.

Knitwear, the brands specialty, is, for example, something that has existed for thousands of years but theres so much newness in it and excitement about where you can take it into the future. Even if something seems theoretically impossible, by working with other knitwear developers we are always able to find some sort of practical solution, says Russo of their collaborative approach. It really is a sort of alchemy.

This ethos of communal effort, of intergenerational savoir-faire is the spirited soul of Paolina Russo. The designers always start the development of a new collection by spending time on the ground in the factories they work with. Each step of this process is honestly documented on social media, to make visible, and celebrate, the many hands involved in the making of their garments. Its very important for us to meet the people because everything we do is really craft-based and craft is something that comes from communities. It exists today because its been passed down from generation to generation, explains Guilmard, We want to make sure that this remains a human story, with human hands.

Why do I want it? Russo and Guilmards deft talent for construction and technique, and their singular vision of colour and motif, have allowed them to so magically transform a heritage craft into futuristic folklore. Their signature sculptural knitwear is both fresh and familiar, as the duo so harmoniously balance technical innovation with folkish motifs and playful palettes. But even if there is a certain novelty in the silhouettes, the designers always ground their garments in a sense of longevity: each piece is made from high-quality, natural fibres using innovative techniques to ensure durability.

For their Spring/Summer 2024 collection, Monolith, presented at Copenhagen Fashion Week as part of the Zalando Visionary Award, the designers drew parallels between prehistoric cave markings and the chalked pavement scribbles of their childhoods to emphasis the intelligence of human ancestral wisdom, so often ignored in our Age of Information and Technology. Perfectly dirtied jeans laser-cut with runic symbols, the brands first foray into denim, were styled with wrapped, convex knits; slouched jersey tops were given form with talismanic wooden fastenings. Any tension between past and future was overridden by a brightly-hued optimism for the ability of traditional craftsmanship to endure within future technological landscapes.

Russo and Gailmards approach to sustainability is just as rigorous and socially conscious as their design process. Every step, from the origins of the fibres to the post-consumer journey, is considered. With each collection, they choose to focus on a single fibre and for S/S24 it was cotton. All of our knitwear, denim, jersey, are 100 per cent cotton, explains Russo. Its really important for us as we develop things to consider the post-consumer journey. To know that if the pieces end up in landfill, they can biodegrade. The designers personally visit the sources of all material used and make this information transparent via social media.

As Paolina Russo continues to grow, the designers remain passionately committed to ongoing education regarding technique and material and then sharing all they learn with their community through workshops and social media. Design is about finding solutions to problems and thats why we love fashion. Once you open one door, the conversation is widened. And thats what makes this craft so fascinating and beautiful.

Where can I find it? Paolina Russo is available at Dover Street Market London (both in-store and online), SSENSE, Addicted, ALTER, and SVRN.

More:
Paolina Russo, the Brand Morphing Ancient Craft Into Futuristic ... - AnOther Magazine

In one bizarreand deeply NSFW corner of the internet, a website called PornPen.aiis churning out an endless feed of graphic, chaotic, and widely varied pornographic imagery all of which, the site makes very clear, was generated using AI.

With a fusillade of new images cropping up in the live feed constantly, the effect can be overwhelming. Some are impressively photorealistic, while others are intentionally cartoonish. Many carry at least one telltale sign of AI generation,from malformed hands or an extra appendage to abnormalities in eyes or ears (the AI is also weirdly bad at depicting penises, for some reason.)There's substantial diversity in body type, age, race, and gender, though you have to click an option to see men in the feed, suggesting a heterosexual male preoccupation to the project.

Staring at the PornPen feed, it's difficult to not have mixed feelings. On the one hand, erotic art and sex work are as natural to the human experience as anything else; there's a 37,000-year-old depiction of a vulva etched into the ceiling of France's Chauvet cave, after all.

But as human as porn has always been, AI is distinctly inhuman. An algorithm is essentially gobbling up human-made imagery, remixing it, and regurgitating it to suit the desires of horny users. And between the rise of thirst-trapping AI-generated influencers, the deep attachments that people are forming to AI companion programs like Replika, and the onset of chatbot-enabled AI sexting, it seems that AI's role in the vast landscape of porn, sex, and relationships is only just beginning to take form. While this is something we've been imagining through science fiction for some time now think "Her," "Ex Machina," "Blade Runner," and so on we still have absolutely no idea how this burgeoning sexual arena might play out in the real world.

So in a sense, sure, maybe PornPen is just an inevitable new milepost in the thousands-year-old history of smut. But it also feels like a sign of things to come. If so, maybe it's worth asking how this kind of endlessly customizable sexual solipsism might impact real-world relationships, not to mention the economics of the pre-AI porn industry.

AI advocates often see the tech as something that will either save the world or destroy it. The creator of PornPen, who goes by the moniker Dreampen, falls optimistically into the former camp:as he tells it, AI will be a tool that produces erotic content in a safe way, unlocking creativity and even empowering adult performers.

"When Stable Diffusion first came out, I saw that many people were trying to make NSFW content," he told us via email. "A lot of AI generator sites blocked this content, and people were also making illegal content such as deepfakes. I wanted to fulfill the AI porn desires in a safe way."

There are design choices to try to keep PornPen from going off the rails. The site, which is built on the open-source Stable Diffusion image generator, only allows users to access preset tags for generation purposes. So users can builda prompt, but they can't actually write their own. That prevents bad actors from writing in celebrity names, Dreampen says, or requesting depictions of violent or illegal acts or "other harmful prompts."

"I thought this was a clever way to preserve safety," said the developer, "while giving people some creative flexibility."

The site seems to be connecting with an audience. If its constantly-populating feed wasn't evidence enough, PornPen's Discord community boasts about 25,000 users and its Subreddit has another 32,500 members.

Perhaps most notable is PornPen's success on Patreon. Though a slower, more basic version of the site is available for free, coughing up $15 a month to upgrade to "Pro Mode" grants the most dedicated users access to a faster, higher-quality, and more expansive more tags to choose from, advanced editing options, unlimited generation rights, and more of the like iteration of the site. The project's Patreon currently has nearly 7,000 paying members,suggesting that it's pulling in yearly revenue of more than a million dollars.

That's a lot of cash and a clear sign, it seems, that AI-generated porn can be lucrative.

"People want to look at porn and they want to customize it to their tastes," said the creator, adding that "many users have stated that they enjoy PornPen because they know people aren't exploited."

Exploitation is something that Dreampen pays a lot of lip service to, telling us that his ultimate goal with the site is to fully "end human exploitation" in the adult industry. That's an interesting way to look at it: porn has historically been rife with abuse, and if humans were to be fullyremoved from it, it would technically eliminate any exploitation going on.

But the nature of AI makes the specifics of exploitation murky. PornPen was trained using the LAION-5B dataset, a large-scale AI training dataset scraped from the web by the nonprofit Common Crawl. That means the nude figures on PornPen's endless feed are, in a sense, mashed-up composites of people whose images appeared in it. Did they give consent,in any reasonable way,to be included in something like this?

There's also the fact that not all porn is exploitative. Much of it is done under the full consent and control of performers, particularly in an era where platforms like OnlyFans, though still flawed, have granted sex workers more agency than ever before.What will sites like PornPen mean to them?

Again, Dreampen has a cheery outlook.

"I've actually had OnlyFans creators reach out to me asking to use my platform," said the developer. "Creators are interested in training custom models on their own data, so they can use AI to make pictures of themselves. One creator, who was getting older and thinking of retiring, realized that they could 'immortalize' their younger body into AI, and keep their business stream going that would have otherwise ended."

It's an interesting point. And Dreampen also argues that AI could give performers new ways to streamline their businesses.

"I see [the site] as a tool which can improve the workflow for sex workers," he said, noting that some OnlyFans creators have been known to outsource chats with users to outside ghostwriters. "Users are not even chatting with the actual creator. In some ways, their persona is already a virtual avatar that is managed by the original person."

"In that world," he added, "why can't the images/videos themselves also be 'outsourced' to AI?"

Like the rest of the AI-sex landscape, PornPen sits squarely in a gray area. In some respects, it's tempting to peruse ersatz smut in which no performers were underpaid or coerced. But if it becomes the norm, it could spell disaster for all the performers who are creating adult content on their own terms. It's an ominous new unknown. It splits our already-flimsy, post-social-media conceptions of reality and fantasy apart, recombining the pieces into something entirely brand new.

How it'll all ultimately unfold, no one knows. But Dreampen, for his part, certainly has some ideas.

"I think sites like Pornhub will have to adapt or acquire companies, otherwise they will get beaten by new sites with new technology," he said, adding that "AI porn will create a new category of adult performer."

"Essentially, people can create an AI avatar that they manage, and people will pay to interact with them," he continued. "Online sex work won't rely on people using their own body, and the industry becomes more accessible."

More on AI-generated fantasies: Guy Who Uses AI to Post as a Voluptuous Influencer: "I Usually Just Call Myself Her Manager"

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Are We Ready For This Site's Endless Feed of AI-Generated Porn? - Futurism

To address a growing labor shortage, major convenience store chain Lawson Inc. is introducing a technology that enables remote workers to serve customers using animated avatars.

Sitting in front of computer screens at their homes or offices, workers act as Lawson Avatar Operators (LAOs) to serve customers.

LAOs talk to webcams and their voices and gestures will be reflected on animated characters on screens atLawsonoutlets.

Currently, LAOs are operating at four of the chains stores in Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere.

Lawson said that on-site workers at these stores can focus on physical tasks such as cooking, cleaning and stocking shelves while LAOs help customers, for example, use the self-checkout machine.

The chain will start a trial to see if a single LAO can deal with three or four outlets during the day as well as short-staffed late night and early morning hours. The pilot program will start as early as August.

Until now, at least two workers would do night shifts together at Lawson outlets, mainly for security reasons. During the trial, one will be replaced by an LAO.

This might put stores at greater security risk, but the chain operator says robberies are on the decline thanks to the introduction of self-checkout machines, which, by design, cannot be unlocked by on-site workers.

Customers can continue to pick up event tickets bought online and drop off parcels at Lawson outlets. Such services will remain the task of on-site workers.

Labor shortages will become more serious in the future, particularly for night shifts, said Lawson President Sadanobu Takemasu. A single LAO manages multiple outlets from home, which means more productivity with lower cost.

Together with self-checkout machines, the avatar technology is expected to help run outlets with fewer workers.

Lawson also hopes the new technology will help recruit more remote workers, including people rearing children or caring for family members at home.

Read the original post:
Lawson addresses labor shortage with futuristic avatars | The Asahi ... -

Image by Stephen Zeigler via Getty Images

When you use a paper straw for drinks, you might think you're being a conscientious citizen of Planet Earth. If so, bad news: a team of scientists say paper straws have more harmful forever chemicals than plastic ones, and at higher concentrations. Well, at least we tried.

Scientists in Belgium discovered that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or the PFAS known as "forever chemicals," were "more frequently detected in plant-based materials, such as paper and bamboo" versus plastic ones, as detailed in a new paper in the science journal Food Additives & Contaminants.

"Straws made from plant-based materials, such as paper and bamboo, are often advertised as being more sustainable and eco-friendly than those made from plastic," said Thimo Groffen, an environmental scientist at the University of Antwerp who worked on the research, in a blurb about the findings. "However, the presence of PFAS in these straws means that's not necessarily true."

The scientists looked at 39 brands of drinking straws made from five different materials: plastic, stainless steel, bamboo, glass and paper. Within this cohort, scientists detected PFAS in 27 of them.

Paper straws were most likely to test positive for PFAS, with 90 percent of the paper straws having the forever chemicals versus 75 percent in the plastic ones. The paper straws had far higher concentrations of forever chemicals versus plastic.

Almost all the other straws made from different materials also had PFAS, except for stainless steel.

The scientists said manufacturers use PFAS in plant-based straws in order to make them more "water-repellent," but they could also be introduced through contaminated raw materials.

The news shows that it's difficult for consumers to make virtuous or even healthy choices when many of the options on the market are a "pick your poison." It makes any eco-conscious person want to throw their hands up in despair.

The Belgian study corroborates an earlier study from 2021 published in Chemosphere that detected the forever chemicals in paper straws but found plastic straws "had no measurable PFAS."

What's unfortunate about PFAS is that some are water soluble. Yikes. So what's a person to do? Stick with stainless steel? But those are a pain to clean.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency aims to get rid of forever chemicals via a whole host of proposed rules and investment dollars. Perhaps in the future, these chemicals will be a thing of the past but meanwhile, every sip is a slow drip of poison.

More on straws: The Anti-Straw Movement Was Dumb, Annoying, and Actually Worked?

Here is the original post:
Paper Straws Are Actually Worse Than Plastic Ones, Scientists Say - Futurism

Dirty Secret

Artificial intelligence has a dirty secret that we're not talking nearly enough about.

It's that Silicon Valley AI firms are relying on cheap labor overseas, and tasking them with the grueling labor required to make them actually work and more often than not, their wages and working conditions are poor, the Washington Post reports.

Millions of people in the Philippines are being tasked with labeling images, allowing AI algorithms to make sense of the world. Sometimes they're asked to make sense of chunks of text to make sure AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT don't end up spurting out nonsense.

But many of these workers are being exploited and severely underpaid a worrying and often overlooked aspect of the ongoing AI arms race,as debates have focused instead on grabbier issues of potential bias or the possibility of AI going rogue.

According to the report, San Francisco-based startup Scale AI employs at least 10,000 people in the Philippines on a platform called Remotasks. However, according to data and interviews obtained by the WP, the company has often failed to pay them on time (a Scale AI spokesperson told WaPo that "delays or interruptions to payments are exceedingly rare.")

A number of Remotasks freelancers told the newspaper that they were stiffed on payments or never received the money they were initially promised. One 26-year-old worker spent three days on a project, hoping to get $50. He only got $12.

Filipino AI ethicist Dominic Ligot called these new workplaces, which house workers labeling footage or text for AI companies like Scale AI, "digital sweatshops."

Workers also don't have any effective avenues to complain and can simply be "deactivated" if they were to raise their voices.

And it's not just the Philippines. Scale AI is also employing freelancers or "taskers" in Venezuela and India, triggering a "race to the bottom," as the owner of an outsourcing firm told the WP.

In short, while AI has triggered a billion-dollar arms race in the US, those who are actually doing the brunt of the work are often going unnoticed, underpaid, or ignored altogether a wrinkle in the ongoing AI ethics debate that should give anybody pause.

More on AI ethics: The Pope Just Released a Guide to Artificial Intelligence

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AI's Dirty Secret: Poor People in the Developing World Are Doing ... - Futurism

The K-series bikes from BMW Motorrad are by no means ideal for a custom build that leans toward the retro side. However, they are perfectly suited to projects which aim for futuristic looks, and there are plenty of great examples out there. Not many of them are as extensively modified and well put together as the one were about to look at, though.

Photo: Paul van Mondfrans Linden

He tried his hand at modifying the K 1100 RS back in 2022, and the result is quite simply dazzling! Not only did Powerbricks mastermind give it a seductive cafe racer presence, but he also came up with a ton of performance upgrades to match the sharp looks. The engine, suspension, and brakes have all been dialed up to eleven, thus bringing the old '94 MY sport-tourer into the 21st century.

Starting with the rear-end modifications, Tim extended the motorcycles swingarm by 15 millimeters (0.6 inches), which was easier said than done given its Paralever design. The original shock absorber was replaced with a premium G-Racing unit from YSS, featuring full adjustability and a piggyback reservoir. Its upper end connects to a bespoke subframe built from scratch, and theres a gorgeous solo seat placed up top.

The saddle flaunts a mixture of standard black leather and suede, all finished off with stylish honeycomb pattern stitching. A pointy 3D-printed tail section is mounted right behind the seat, and its rearmost tip houses a compact LED taillight. Tim attached a handmade electronics tray to the subframes underside, filling it with a NOCO lithium battery and Motogadgets mo.Unit Blue control module, among other goodies.

Photo: Paul van Mondfrans Linden

Moreover, a custom nose fairing found its way onto the Beemers front end, encircling a Thunderbolt LED headlight from Kosos inventory. The cockpit area is an absolute charm, too, bearing clip-on handlebars and a digital Motoscope Mini dial supplied by Motogadget. Tim recessed the latter into the top clamp for a clean look, then he garnished the clip-ons with an array of top-shelf components.

These include Brembo control levers, a Domino throttle, and new switches, as well as Motogadget bar-end turn signals and Biltwell grips. We still find the factory K 1100 RS fuel tank center-stage, but its been outfitted with a fresh aluminum filler cap and CNC-milled BMW roundels. That just about does it for the machines upper equipment, so lets have a gander at the unsprung side of things.

Photo: Paul van Mondfrans Linden

Now, Tim didnt apply all these upgrades just for the sake of it, but to prepare the K 1100 RS cafe racer for a considerable dose of additional power. The bikes 1,092cc inline-four engine made a respectable 100 hp in its stock configuration, though it could certainly do better on Powerbricks watch. Sir Somers ported the air intakes to let the transverse four-cylinder breathe more freely, and he added a quartet of DNA pod filters for the same purpose.

His grocery list also contained Bosch EV14 fuel injectors and NGK ignition hardware, as well as an aluminum RC Racing radiator to keep things nice and cool. Samco silicon hoses transport the coolant from the engine to the radiator and back, but its the other piece of plumbing that really grabbed our attention from the start. Of course, were talking about the striking pie-cut exhaust system which Tim pieced together in-house.

Built out of stainless-steel, the pipework snakes its way back in a four-into-one configuration, before ending in a stubby aftermarket silencer. Last but not least, the color scheme applied by Powerbrick is both sporty and elegant, employing a dark grey base topped with large white stripes on the bodywork. However, the red highlights are what really makes this thing pop, appearing on various items such as the forks, shock spring, brake lines, and coolant hoses.

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One-Off BMW K 1100 RS Cafe Racer Matches Futuristic Looks With ... - autoevolution

Lionel Messis arrival at Inter Miami has sparked the imagination of architect Jorge Luis Veliz, who has designed a futuristic $50 million mansion fit for the global superstar, reported by goal.com. This innovative concept home takes the form of an M,' incorporating Messi's iconic brand logo and reflecting his meteoric rise in the world of football.

The visionary design encompasses luxury and extravagance on an unprecedented scale. Nestled on a unique ship-shaped island, the three-level mansion offers unparalleled privacy and exclusivity, befitting a player of Messi's stature. The property boasts an array of features that redefine opulence, including a private waterslide, a massive 20-car garage, and a yacht pier.

Inside the mansion, Messi's family would find every conceivable amenity for comfort and entertainment. From a dedicated games room and a state-of-the-art home theater to an expansive swimming pool and a personal football pitch, the residence offers a perfect blend of leisure and sports for Messi and his three sons to enjoy.

Subscribe now toMLS Season Pass and watch every match including the playoffs on Apple TV.

The house's concept aligns with Messi's legacy and his current chapter with Inter Miami, a team co-owned by soccer legend David Beckham. Despite the ambitious design, the cost is reportedly estimated at a staggering $50 million, a figure that reflects both the uniqueness of the project and Messi's astronomical earning power.

As Messi continues to make waves in the United States, his on-field prowess is complemented by the charm of this potential dream home. Although the immediate future might not see Messi residing in this futuristic mansion, the concept serves as a testament to his global impact and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead for him and his family at Inter Miami. The world watches as Messi's journey unfolds, both on the field and in the realm of the extraordinary.

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Inter Miami: Lionel Messi's futuristic $50 million mansion is out of this ... - ClutchPoints

The Big Picture

From filmmaker Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla, Monsters), the sci-fi action thriller The Creator (due out in theaters and on IMAX on September 29th) is set in a future that finds the human race and artificial intelligence at war, and one man, an ex-special forces agent named Joshua (John David Washington), caught in between with no clear answers. Grieving after the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan) and on a mission to hunt down and kill the Creator that designed the advanced AI, Joshua discovers that the young Alphie (Madeleine Yuma Voyles) has the potential to alter mankind and the world.

After a recent IMAX screening of three scenes from the film, director/co-writer Edwards took part in a Q&A, in which he discussed why he finds the sci-fi genre so appealing, how The Creator evolved into what it is now, the journey in getting an epic original idea into production, shooting in 80 locations with relatively little green screen, how relevant this story about AI has become, wanting to use a different approach to shooting the film, the importance of casting, shooting the combat scenes, cinematic influences, robot design inspiration, getting Hans Zimmer on board to compose the music, and how science fiction provides and opportunity for social commentary.

Question: This is your fourth film, which also happens to be your fourth science fiction film. What is it about this genre that you just keep coming back to?

GARETH EDWARDS: Are there other genres? Ive heard that there are films without robots in them. I dont see it as, I do science fiction. I think the best science fiction is a blend of genres. My first film (Monsters), I see as a love story meets science fiction. My second film, which was Godzilla, is a disaster movie meets science fiction movie. Star Wars (Rogue One) is a war movie meets science fiction.

How did The Creator come about? When and where did inspiration hit you for this?

EDWARDS: It was 7:32pm on a Tuesday. No. There were numerous things that happened, the most obvious one was that we had just finished Rogue One. My girlfriends family lives in Iowa, and we drove across America to go visit them. As we were driving through the Midwest, and there were all these farmlands with tall grass, I was just looking out the window. I had my headphones on, and I wasnt trying to think of an idea for a film, but I was getting a little bit inspired. I just saw this factory in the middle of this tall grass and I remember it having a Japanese logo on it, and I thought, Oh, I wonder what theyre making in there. Because of my tendencies, I was like, Oh, its probably robots, right? And then, I thought, Okay, imagine you were a robot built in a factory, and then, suddenly, for the first time ever, you got to step outside into the field and look around and see the sky. What would that be like? That felt like a really good moment in a movie, but I didnt know what that movie was. I threw it away, like whatever. And then, it tapped me on the shoulder and went, Oh, it could be this, and these ideas started coming. As we carried on with the journey, by the time we pulled up at the house, I had the whole movie mapped out in my head, which has never happened. I was like, Okay, maybe this might be my next thing.

This is an original concept that youre working with here. How did you get New Regency on board as a producer?

EDWARDS: I do need to shout out to New Regency because, as you probably noticed in cinema recently, there are very few original films being made and thats because everyones gotten very gun shy, and the franchises and IP s keep getting regurgitated a little bit. Hats off to New Regency for basically having the balls to take a big swing and do something like this. Some of my closest friends are concept artists, so I asked all my friends, Ill pay you, but could you do some artwork for this idea that Ive got, and just started building up this library of imagery until I had about 50 images. I didnt tell my agent. I kept it very secret because I didnt want to put any pressure on it. I just went into New Regency and laid out all the artwork, and I talked them through the idea, beat by beat, which I hate doing. I hate being a car salesman. I just want to hit play on the movie. Thats my favorite thing to do. Trying to sell it is not my fun thing. So, you look at all that imagery and its incredibly ambitious, and the natural reaction is, This is a $300 million film. Theres no way we can really do this. Wed love to do it, but we cant really do it. And I was like, No, were gonna do it very differently. Were gonna film it with this very small crew and were gonna essentially reverse engineer the whole movie. In theory, what you normally do is you have all this design work and people say that you cant find these locations, so youre gonna have to build sets in a studio against a green screen, and it will cost a fortune. We were like, No, what we want to do is go shoot the movie in real locations, in real parts of the world, that look closest to what these images are. And then, afterwards, when the film is fully edited, get the production designer and other concept artists to paint over those frames and put the sci-fi on top. And everyone was like, That sounds great. Basically, we had to go try to prove it to them.

How many locations did you shoot in?

EDWARDS: On some of the other films Ive done, youre lucky to get away from the studio and go to a proper location a handful of times. On this, we went to 80 locations, and we didnt really use any green screen. There was occasionally a little bit, here and there, but very little. If you keep the crew small enough, the theory was that the cost of building a set, which is typically $200,000, apparently, you can fly everyone to anywhere in the world for that kind of money. And so, we were like, Lets keep the crew small and go to these amazing locations. And so, we went to Nepal, the Himalayas, active volcanoes in Indonesia, temples in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Tokyo. And then, we did a little bit at Pinewood, using the Volume for some non-green screen, LED screen, environment stuff.

Your antagonist in this is artificial intelligence. Did you know how relevant that would be?

EDWARDS: The trick with AI is that theres a sweet spot window before the robo-apocalypse and not after, which is in November or maybe December. We got lucky [with our release date]. I tried to avoid putting a date. I didnt want to write a date for the movie because even [Stanley] Kubrick gets it wrong. At some point, you have to pick a date, so I did some math and I picked 2070. Now, I feel like an idiot because I should have gone for 2023, with everything thats unfolded in the last few months, or year. Its scarily weird. When we first pitched the movie to the studio, this idea of war with AI, everyone wants to know the backstory. Theyre like, Hang on, why would we be at war with AI? We were like, Its been banned because it went wrong. But why would you ban AI? Its gonna be great. There were all these ideas that you have to set up that, that maybe humanity would reject this thing and not be that cool about it. And the way its played out, the set up of our movie, is pretty much the last few months.

How would you set up this story?

EDWARDS: I would say that the world is divided in two. Essentially, something terrible happened in America and AI got banned. Its completely banned in the West, but in Asia, there was no such problem, so they carried on developing it until it was near human like. So, theres this war going on, to wipe out AI. Public enemy number one, the person that everybody is after, is The Creator. From the Western perspective, its the Osama bin Laden of our story. But from Asia and the AIs perspective, its like God.

When it came to cutting edge technology, what were some of the tools and new innovations that you were able to take advantage of, that didnt exist when you made Rogue One in 2016?

EDWARDS: I think camera technology and filmmaking technology has come a long way, even in the last few years. Something we did on this film, that was really important, was that I wanted it to feel as realistic as possible, so I needed the actors and me to have total freedom on set. We would always be able to shoot in 360 degrees. The biggest thing working against you when you try to do that in a film is that you have lights, and the second you want to move the camera, you can suddenly see the lights and you spend 20 minutes moving them, so it takes forever to shoot a scene. So, the way we worked was with really sensitive camera equipment. We could use the LED lights that are very lightweight. You have a boom operator holding a pole with the microphone on it, so why cant you have a person holding a pole with the lights on it. So, we had a best boy running around holding the light by hand. If the actor suddenly got up and did something and went over here, and then suddenly there was a better shot, I could move and the lighting could be readjusted. What would normally take 10 minutes to change was taking four seconds, so we could do 25-minute takes, where wed play out the scene three or four times. There was an atmosphere of naturalism and realism that I really wanted to get, where it isnt so prescribed, and youre not putting marks on the ground and telling actors to stand there. It wasnt that kind of movie.

What led you to cast John David Washington and Ken Watanabe?

EDWARDS: We were casting the film during the pandemic, so it was really hard to meet anybody. Fortunately, JD lived in L.A. and I heard through his agents, Hey, hed meet you any time you want. Just go for a meal. So, I did. I went and met him during the pandemic, and he walked in with his mask on, but it was a Star Wars mask. It had the Star Wars logo on it. I initially thought, Oh, no, hes doing this because of Rogue One. And then, he sat down and admitted to being a massive Star Wars fan. He was like, Ive been wearing this mask, every single day for like a year. Its been for the whole pandemic. I thought about not wearing it to this meeting, but then it felt false. So, I thought itd be a good icebreaker. We hit it off, straight away. And then, Ken is the only actor that Ive worked with twice. I always want to do something new, so for the longest time, I didnt want to think about Ken for this role. And then, the second he turned up on set, I felt like such an idiot. It was obviously supposed to be Ken, from the beginning. I love Kurosawa films. Those are my big inspirations. And every time you hold the camera up and Kens in the shot, it feels like this strange hybrid of Kurosawa meets Star Wars, which was exactly what we were going for. He gives you goosebumps. Theres something about that guy. Hes just got this face. The reason hes so successful, internationally, is not really about what he says. He can convey so much with just his looks. Hes so good.

How did you find your Alphie?

EDWARDS: We basically did an open casting call, all around the world. We got hundreds of videos, but I didnt have to watch all of them. They sent me the top 70, and then I went to meet 10 kids. The first one was Madeleine [Yuna Voyles], who plays Alphie. She came in and did this scene, and we were all nearly in tears at the end. I thought to myself, This is weird and phenomenal. Maybe her mum was just brilliant at prepping her to get really upset, just before she came in and there was some little trick going on. So, we chatted for a bit and we did some of the scenes, and then right at the end, I was a bit cruel. I was like, Can we try just one more thing? I wanted to see if it was repeatable. I was like, Can we do another scene? So, I explained a different scene and we just improvised it, and she was even more heartbreaking. I dont know what we would have done, if we hadnt found the right kid. We got really lucky. The movie lives and dies [with her performance]. I hate movies about little kids because they can tend to be so annoying. My biggest fear was that we were gonna get one of those really annoying kid movie kids, so it was the biggest relief when she was beyond her years. Its like shes reincarnated, or something.

How was Madeleine working with John David, and vice versa?

EDWARDS: Shes quite method. Well, I cant tell if shes method or not because we only knew each other during the filmmaking process and she kept everybody at arms reach. I was allowed in a little bit, but her and John David were inseparable. He became her surrogate brother or father figure, Im not sure which. I thought I was gonna have to trick her. When we did all the scenes, I was like, I need this to be like a documentary, so we can pull this performance out of this girl without her having to act. And she could act her pants off. She was amazing at it. It was a directors dream. You could just tell her what Alphie was thinking and this amazing performance would come out. Youd look at the other actors and be like, Why cant you all be like this? Whats your problem?

How did filming the combat scenes differ from Rogue One?

EDWARDS: We went to real exterior locations. We went to locations that were the closest thing we could find to what the artwork suggested it should be. When we were in Thailand, we needed to find a really technologically advanced factory, or something like that, and we looked everywhere. There were car manufacturing plants that were nervous about us filming. Eventually, we found a particle accelerator, which was the most advanced thing, probably in the whole of Thailand. We were like, Please, could you let us film? It looked amazing. We went to visit, and they were like, Theres no way youre gonna be allowed to film here. They asked, What do you want to do? And we said, Well, there will be people with guns shooting and explosions. It was a multi-multimillion dollar facility with all these leading cutting-edge scientists, and they were like, Its not gonna happen. Let it go. And then, at the very last minute, someone was like, What filmmaker is doing this? They were like, Its this guy who lives in the States. They were like, Well, what films has he done? And they said, Oh, he did this Star Wars film, called Rogue One. And they were like, Can we be in it? And we were like, Sure, whatever. And so, everybody running around in that scene are nuclear physicists. They were amazing.

Didnt you use a lot of local talent, in front of and behind the camera?

EDWARDS: Yeah. And we had a rule where I wanted to be able to look and not see video village, with the monitor and the chairs. I didnt want to see that anywhere. I wanted it to feel like we were doing a student film, to some extent. The beach scene where Gemma is running and theres all that crossfire, the restrictions of the pandemic were just starting to lift and Thailand was opening up to tourists. They were like, You can film on this beach, but you cant close it. We were like, Oh, my God, how are we gonna do that scene? I dont know what happens normally in Thailand, at night on these beaches, but we didnt close that beach. If you look carefully in the background, you can see bars and tourists just carrying on, but not one person came over and went, What are you doing? There were just four of us with a camera, running around. It didnt look as big, massive movie. It all ends up on the screen. We tried to just be very efficient with it.

What are your cinematic influences for this film? What movies would you recommend as companion pieces?

EDWARDS: I have this superstition, since my first film, where I put up posters in the edit suite that inspired the film Im doing. Around the edit suite on this one, one that you might not know would be Baraka, which I think is one of the greatest movies ever made. And then, there was Lone Wolf and Cub, which is a Japanese manga series. There were the really obvious ones, like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner. In terms of the dynamic, maybe there was a little bit of Rain Man. Its a journey with someone normal and someone whos a little bit special, different, or however you want to say it. And there, there was Paper Moon.

What was your inspiration for the robot designs?

EDWARDS: The way we tried to quickly summarize the design and aesthetic of the movie was that its a little bit retro futuristic. Imagine that Apple Mac hadnt won the tech war and the Sony Walkman had, so everything has that eighties Walkman/Nintendo feel. We looked at all the product design from that era and tried to put that on the robots. The tricky thing with designing robot heads was trying to pull from sources. We did a whole pass, at one point, where we took insects and insect heads and tried to make it as if that insect had been made by Sony. We took products and tried to turn them into organic looking heads. We took things like film projectors and vacuum cleaners, and then just messed around. We would take things and put them together, and then delete pieces, and we just kept experimenting. It was like evolution, in real life. It was like DNA got merged together with other DNA, trying to create something better than the previous thing.

Who are some of the directors and writers that you look up to and get inspiration from?

EDWARDS: The obvious ones are Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott. Thats the high benchmark of what we were trying to do. Im not saying we got anywhere close to achieving it, but the goal of the movie was to try to go back to that style and type of film that we grew up loving, and give it that vibe and aesthetic again. The film was shot on 1970s anamorphic lenses. I hate writing. Its like doing homework. The worst thing in the world is having to write a screenplay, so the only way I can really bring myself to do it is to lock myself somewhere nice. I find a nice hotel, and I say that Im not allowed to leave until Ive finished. I stayed there for a month. I went to Thailand, to the exact place on that beach. I didnt realize that I was getting inspired for the movie. I just picked this nice resort. While I was there, a filmmaker friend was in Vietnam and said, Come over and well do a little trip. So, I went around Vietnam. You cant go around that country and not think of all the imagery from films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. But I was writing this science fiction film, so everything in my mind was robots and spaceships. Youd see Buddhist monks going to temples, and Id picture a robot Buddhist monk. I spent the whole time going, Oh, my God, what is this movie? Blade Runner meets Apocalypse Now is the fastest way to [describe] it to people.

What was the biggest challenge in filming this movie?

EDWARDS: I wouldnt say there was a particular thing It was more just the duration of it. We started filming in January 2022, and we finished in June. There were six months of nonstop 40 degree heat (in Celsius, which is 104 degrees Fahrenheit), dying every day. Looking back, its a dream that we got to do that, but there was a point where you wanted to collapse and youd only done seven days of filming. The first cut of this movie was five hours long. We had so much great, cool material. Everything thats in this film is all the best stuff of that material. The editing process was basically a game of Jenga, where we would pull things out and see if we missed it, or if it fell apart. We were like, When we finally get this down to two hours, if theres anything anyone misses or wants to put back in, youll be allowed to do it. We put five shots back in. There were five little moments. That old adage of less is more is right, most of the time.

What are the best values of humanity that you hope this movie ultimately illustrates?

EDWARDS: I hope empathy for others. Thats a strong value that I think is very important. When this film began, obviously I didnt know that AI was gonna do what it ended up doing, this last year. AI was really just in the fairy tale of this story. AI was the people who are different to us that we want to get rid of, or naturally have conflicts with. But the second you make them AI, all kinds of fascinating things start to happen. As you write that script, you start to think, Are they real? What if you didnt like what they were doing? Can you turn them off? What if they dont want to be turned off? All this stuff started to play out, which became as strong as the premise. What Im most proud of in the film is that we hung onto that. There are things in the movie that we just got very lucky with. If it came out in November, after we were killed in the robo-apocalypse, it wouldnt be that good. But thankfully, its out on September 29th.

What was it like to have Hans Zimmer do the music?

EDWARDS: When it came to who was gonna do the music for the film, out of the 25 most played tracks on everyones iPhone, 14 of the tracks were Hans Zimmer tracks. I was like, I dont know how, but weve got to get Hans Zimmer. Joe Walker, who is the editor on Dune, put the assembly of the film together, and he had worked with Hans a lot. He was like, Ill talk to Hans. Hell do it. I was like, Really? We ended up in this strange situation, where I had to do a Zoom call with Hans, while I was in the middle of nowhere. We were going to meet the head of the military in Thailand to get permission to film in Black Hawks for a sequence. It was this massive deal meeting that took months and months to organize, and it just happened to be the same moment that Hans was available to do Zoom. We had to pull off the road and I went into a hotel in the middle of nowhere because they had a wifi signal. They said, Youve gotta leave in 30 minutes because the whole military is waiting for us. And so, I was looking at this clock, and he started talking about his anecdotes about The Dark Knight and Terrence Malick. All my life, Ive wanted to talk to him about these films, and I had to be like, Hans, I have to go. Im really sorry, but I have to leave now. We showed him the little test we did for the studio, and he was like, Okay, Im in.

How did you approach collaborating with your cinematographer, Greig Fraser?

EDWARDS: I worked with Greig on Rogue One, and while we were making this, he had to go and work on Dune 2, as well. His protg, Oren Soffer, ended up being our DoP through a lot of the Thailand shoot. The most important thing, when you have a DoP is that you have exactly the same taste. The less you have to talk about what looks good and bad, and their instincts are your instincts, the easier it goes. We were all totally on the same page. Greigs very rebellious, despite how that might look because hes doing these big movies. In the build up to this film, I got to go around to one of those virtual reality studios, and they had this poster on the wall with how to make a movie. It was just every part of the process. I was looking at it and thinking, What a strange thing to have? Why have they got this poster? The guy who ran the thing came up to me and said, I see you looking at the poster. Thats a hundred years old. We havent changed how films are made in one hundred years. We still do it, exactly the same way. With all these new digital tools and technology, there are other ways to make films, and people like Greig and I really want to do things differently because thats how you make a different type of movie. The process is as important as the screenplay, to some extent.

Would you mind talking about the opportunity and the power of science fiction for social commentary and reflection?

EDWARDS: Oh, my God, thats probably why I like science fiction. There is that chance that you can sneak it under the radar. My favorite TV show growing up was The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling wrote a lot of those shows and the reason he did science fiction was because he could get it under the radar of the censors and say things youre not allowed to normally say out loud. If you sit down and start to type, and you try to work out a film and you go, I want to make a film about this thats got this social commentary to it, its gonna be a rubbish film. You get attracted to an idea. Theres something very primal about it that pulls you. Theres something that needs to be said about this subject matter, and then, halfway through writing a film, you start to realize what that thing is. Its like a child. It tells you what they want to be when they grow up. You learn what it is, and then you try to help it. Science fiction does it the best because we all go through our lives having certain beliefs, but they never really get tested because you can get to the end of your life and youre never really challenged. You just do everything that youre supposed to do. But science fiction says, What if the world had this different thing about it? Now, that think you thought was true starts to be false, and you start to question things. I love that kind of storytelling. Thats the most interesting sort. I hope our film does a little bit of that.

The Creator is in theaters on September 29th.

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'The Creator' and Its War Between Humans and Artificial Intelligence - Collider