{"id":2737,"date":"2017-06-28T17:05:15","date_gmt":"2017-06-28T17:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/?p=2737"},"modified":"2017-06-27T14:00:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T14:00:15","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story-jurassic-jaws-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2017\/06\/28\/the-story-behind-the-story-jurassic-jaws-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the story: Jurassic Jaws Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">This week, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/futures\">Futures<\/a> is heading off to the movies in the company of Hal Y Zhang and her story <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v546\/n7660\/full\/546696a.html\">Jurassic Jaws Jones<\/a><\/em>. Life as an actor has never been easy, but, as Hal reveals, it\u2019s going to get a whole lot worse. You can find out more about Hal\u2019s work at <a href=\"https:\/\/halyzhang.com\">her website<\/a>. Here, she talks about what inspired her latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v546\/n7660\/full\/546696a.html\">read the story first<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><strong>Writing <em>Jurassic Jaws Jones<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">When we think about career fields that might be replaced by machines, the arts are not usually what come to mind first. But the resurgence of neural networks is a watershed moment in artificial intelligence and computer science, and neural AIs are particularly adept at certain tasks that were previously believed to be easily doable only by humans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">The basic concept of a neural network is quite simple: make an artificial neuron by multiplying each input by a weight, add them together, then apply a nonlinearity filter, which very roughly resembles signal propagation in a real neuron. By assembling these units into webs and optimizing the weights, we&#8217;ve made neural AIs that <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1508.06576\"><span class=\"s2\">meld the style and content of artworks<\/span><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/s\/603137\/deep-learning-machine-listens-to-bach-then-writes-its-own-music-in-the-same-style\/\"><span class=\"s2\">generate new Bach cantatas<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v518\/n7540\/abs\/nature14236.html\"><span class=\"s2\">play video games expertly without instructions<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">These are tasks that were widely thought to require some amount of undefinable \u2018humanness\u2019, yet are now easily performed by networks with a minuscule fraction of the 100 billion neurons in the brain. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s absurd to envision a near-term future where much of our entertainment and more comes from machines, and that&#8217;s not exactly an entertaining prospect.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, Futures is heading off to the movies in the company of Hal Y Zhang and her story Jurassic Jaws Jones. Life as an actor has never been easy, but, as Hal reveals, it\u2019s going to get a whole lot worse. You can find out more about Hal\u2019s work at her website. Here, she talks about what inspired her latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to read the story first.&nbsp; <a href=\"\/futureconditional\/2017\/06\/28\/the-story-behind-the-story-jurassic-jaws-jones#more-2737\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2017\/06\/28\/the-story-behind-the-story-jurassic-jaws-jones\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}