In this Big Ideas Project for the Innovation community, Eric Rosenbaum, Doctoral Student at the MIT Media Lab shows off his human synthesiser that operates with playdough. Filmed at Technology Frontiers which took place on March 22nd - 23rd 2012 in London.   brightcove.createExperiences(); Eric Rosenbaum is a Ph.D. student in the Lifelong Kindergarten group headed by Mitchel Resnick at MIT Media Lab. His current research focuses on the intersection of music, improvisation, play...

We imagine that we freely decide what we want to buy, what music we like, what political values we hold and what personality to have. But there are immensely powerful outside forces influencing our decisions all the time. The basic example is shopping: it feels like we just buy what we need when we pop into Tesco, but actually we’re being nudged into buying particular things because of where they’re placed in the shop. Even though you know retailers do this, nonetheless it feels like you’re more free than you are when you go to the shops. It feels like you’re calling the shots even though you...

Technology Frontiers made me think about the difference between human beings and the technology that we build.  On the morning of the first day I listened to Vint Cerf and Bran Ferren having a conversation. They were talking about artificial intelligence, including the difference between perceived intelligence and conscious experience (The Turing test).  For example, Vint mentioned that Google needs to get better at figuring out the context of a question. Ask both Google and the person standing next to you “how do I get to the nearest pub?” and because you get an answer from...