“AI” in glass sheets

[chalcedony_starlings]

I don't know if the authors ever thought of giving this a transhumanist bent, but here's another article that's eerily reminiscent of how some of us have worked in our projective forms. Akari, our predecessor, operated in the optical range and used refraction for “along-the-way” information transformations between parts of her, and now there's a so-called “AI” made from a sheet of glass with a pattern of impurities (New Scientist):

The AI works by taking advantage of small bubbles deliberately incorporated into the glass, as well as embedded impurities such as graphene. As the light waves reflected off the handwritten numbers pass through the glass AI, they are bent in specific ways by the bubbles and impurities. This bending process focuses the light onto one of ten specific spots on the other side of the glass, depending on the number presented. The ten spots then correspond to the digits 0 to 9. “It is like a key and a lock,” says Yu.

“AI” is a bit of a silly way to describe what seems to have actually been done, since the final glass doesn't retain learning capacities and certainly isn't generalized, but I'm still momentarily imagining the future in which they eventually start building glass dragons out of a more advanced 3D form of this plus some other stuff. c..c