Google Creates a Digital Fruit Fly That Thinks, Moves, and Sees Like the Real Thing In a stunning leap forward for both artificial intelligence and biology, Google has developed a fully digital fruit fly—a virtual insect that lives inside a computer and behaves just like its real-world counterpart. This digital creation walks, flies, sees, and responds to its environment with lifelike precision. The journey began with a meticulous reconstruction of a fruit fly’s body using Mojo, a powerful physics simulator. The result was a highly detailed 3D model that could mimic the fly's physical movements. But a body alone doesn’t make a fly—it needed a brain. To create one, Google's team collected massive volumes of video footage of real fruit flies in motion. They used this data to train a specialized AI model that learned to replicate the complex behaviors of a fly—walking across surfaces, making sudden mid-air turns, and adjusting flight speed with astonishing realism. Once this AI br...
In 2016, Amazon proudly unveiled its “Just Walk Out” technology, marketed as a groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) system that could detect and charge customers for items they picked up without human intervention. The reality, however, was far less high-tech than advertised. Behind the scenes, over a thousand overseas workers—primarily based in India—were manually monitoring and supporting the system. This revelation exposed a broader truth: the remarkable rise of AI is built not just on algorithms and computing power, but on the backs of an invisible human workforce. The Human Side of AI Contrary to popular belief, the engines that power virtual assistants, recommendation systems, and machine translation are not entirely autonomous. They require extensive human input to function effectively. This input often comes from data workers responsible for labeling images, transcribing audio, and categorizing content. While Silicon Valley giants present AI as a product of sophisticat...