NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a historic group selfie with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on April 6, 2021. But how was the selfie taken? Vandi Verma, Perseverance’s chief engineer for robotic operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California breaks down the process in this video.

Video taken by Perseverance’s navigation cameras shows the rover’s robotic arm twisting and maneuvering to take the 62 images that compose the image. The rover’s entry, descent, and landing microphone captured the sound of the arm’s motors whirring during the process.

Continue reading “How NASA’s Perseverance Rover Takes a Selfie” »

Ut ohh.

The middle and working classes have seen a steady decline in their fortunes. Sending jobs to foreign countries, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, pivoting toward a service economy and the weakening of unions have been blamed for the challenges faced by a majority of Americans.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Has Caused A 50% To 70% Decrease In Wages—Creating Income Inequality And Threatening Millions Of Jobs” »

Great new episode with former Fermilab physicist Gerald Jackson who chats about antimatter propulsion and the politics of advanced propulsion research. This one is out a bit later in the week than normal, but please listen. Good stuff.

Guest Gerald Jackson, former Fermilab physicist and advanced propulsion entrepreneur chats about his plans for an Antimatter Propulsion interstellar robotic probe. First stop would be Proxima Centauri. In a wide-ranging interview, Jackson talks about the politics and pitfalls of advance propulsion research. Too many people seem to think antimatter is something that is still science fiction. It’s not. It’s as real as the chair you’re sitting on.

The artificial intelligence revolution is just getting started. But it is already transforming conflict. Militaries all the way from the superpowers to tiny states are seizing on autonomous weapons as essential to surviving the wars of the future. But this mounting arms-race dynamic could lead the world to dangerous places, with algorithms interacting so fast that they are beyond human control. Uncontrolled escalation, even wars that erupt without any human input at all.

DW maps out the future of autonomous warfare, based on conflicts we have already seen – and predictions from experts of what will come next.

Continue reading “How AI is driving a future of autonomous warfare | DW Analysis” »

Still the comic relief til about December 31, 2024. By 2035 curing everything, already in the early stages towards that.

Giovanni Traverso, an MIT assistant professor of mechanical engineering, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and also the senior author of the study said, that they were actively working on robots that can help provide health care services to maximize the safety, of both the patients and the health care workforce.

Traverso and his colleagues after the Covid-19 began last year, worked towards reducing interaction between the patients and the health care workers. In this process, they collaborated with Boston Dynamics in creating mobile robots that can interact with patients who waited in the emergency department.

Continue reading “Robot Doctors to Provide Health Care Services Soon” »

And they say computers can’t create art.

In 1642, famous Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn completed a large painting called Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq — today, the painting is commonly referred to as The Night Watch. It was the height of the Dutch Golden Age, and The Night Watch brilliantly showcased that.

The painting measured 363 cm × 437 cm (11.91 ft × 14.34 ft) — so big that the characters in it were almost life-sized, but that’s only the start of what makes it so special. Rembrandt made dramatic use of light and shadow and also created the perception of motion in what would normally be a stationary military group portrait. Unfortunately, though, the painting was trimmed in 1715 to fit between two doors at Amsterdam City Hall.

Continue reading “An AI algorithm just completed a famous Rembrandt painting” »

## FUTURE TENSE RN ABC (AUDIO 29 MIN) • JUN 27, 2021.

# Some foresight about.
the future of foresight.

*Trying to predict the future is a timeless and time-consuming pursuit.*

Continue reading “Some foresight about the future of foresight” »

Researchers at Google Brain announced a deep-learning computer vision (CV) model containing two billion parameters. The model was trained on three billion images and achieved 90.45% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, setting a new state-of-the-art record.

The team described the model and experiments in a paper published on arXiv. The model, dubbed ViT-G/14, is based on Google’s recent work on Vision Transformers (ViT). ViT-G/14 outperformed previous state-of-the-art solutions on several benchmarks, including ImageNet, ImageNet-v2, and VTAB-1k. On the few-shot image recognition task, the accuracy improvement was more than five percentage-points. The researchers also trained several smaller versions of the model to investigate a scaling law for the architecture, noting that the performance follows a power-law function, similar to Transformer models used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

First described by Google researchers in 2017, the Transformer architecture has become the leading design for NLP deep-learning models, with OpenAI’s GPT-3 being one of the most famous. Last year, OpenAI published a paper describing scaling laws for these models. By training many similar models of different sizes and varying the amount of training data and computing power, OpenAI determined a power-law function for estimating a model’s accuracy. In addition, OpenAI found that not only do large models perform better, they are also more compute-efficient.