Lifeboat Foundation

“As humans we should be proud of any AI systems we bring to existence, as if they were our children. In just the same way as we educate our kids, we could endow such systems with the blueprint for their future interaction with the world,” observes Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “This would include our preferred set of values, goals and guiding principles, which will enable them to learn from experience and cope with reality,” he adds. “Ultimately, we may launch our AI systems for interstellar travel towards distant destinations, such as habitable planets around other stars, where they could reproduce themselves with the help of accompanying 3D printers.

The Search for Extraterrestrial AI Systems

Continue reading “Has an Artificial-Intelligence Revolution Happened at Other Points in the Universe” »

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Walking around Austin, you may see something surprising — self-driving cars rolling around the roads.

Earlier this year, autonomous vehicle technology company Argo AI launched its driverless operation in Austin. Argo AI public policy and government relations manager Sly Majid said these cars are key to the future of transport.

“Autonomous vehicle technology is incredible,” he said. “The vehicle is doing the dynamic driving tasks; the vehicle is the driver of the car.”

Starting Monday, drive-thru customers at two Panera Bread locations in upstate New York will have their orders taken by a computer in a test of artificial intelligence technology’s accuracy and ability to decrease service times.

The sandwich chain is the latest restaurant company to invest in potential improvements to the drive-thru experience. A surge in drive-thru ordering during the Covid pandemic led to long lines of cars wrapped around restaurants, pushing chains to focus on speed of service and order accuracy.

For example, McDonald’s has also been working to automate its drive-thru lane, announcing a partnership last year with IBM to work toward that goal. Yum Brands’ Taco Bell and Restaurant Brands International’s Burger King have been building double drive-thru lanes at some locations to allow customers to pick up their digital orders more quickly. Fast-casual chains like Shake Shack and Sweetgreen that once balked at drive-thru lanes have been adding them.

Anna Severin explains how her team used machine learning to try to assess the quality of thousands of reviewers’ reports.

Mathematical derivations have unveiled a chaotic, memristor-based circuit in which different oscillating phases can co-exist along six possible lines.

Unlike ordinary electronic circuits, chaotic circuits can produce oscillating electrical signals that never repeat over time—but nonetheless, display underlying mathematical patterns. To expand the potential applications of these circuits, previous studies have designed systems in which multiple oscillating phases can co-exist along mathematically-defined “lines of equilibrium.” In new research published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics, a team led by Janarthanan Ramadoss at the Chennai Institute of Technology, India, designed a chaotic circuit with six distinct lines of equilibrium—more than have ever been demonstrated previously.

Chaotic systems are now widely studied across a broad range of fields: from biology and chemistry, to engineering and economics. If the team’s circuit is realized experimentally, it could provide researchers with unprecedented opportunities to study these systems experimentally. More practically, their design could be used for applications including robotic motion control, secure password generation, and new developments in the Internet of Things—through which networks of everyday objects can gather and share data.

I want to thank Alex Sludds for his efforts in helping me research and produce his video. Check out his work here: https://alexsludds.github.io.

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The promise of robotic furniture is that it can turn single rooms into multipurpose spaces.

“Robotics, AI, and many things will disrupt what we know now. Taking advantage of such has great benefits, especially if focused on demand”-me.

A future kitchen appliance could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

That is the long-term vision at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, an engineering group that uses insight from biology to research and develop autonomous systems that “create and are creative.” The engineers have spent years working to digitize and automate the cooking process.

Continue reading “3D-printed, laser-cooked meat may be the future of cooking” »

A combination of cutting-edge hardware, sensor technology, and bespoke machine learning approaches can predict trajectories of vehicles, people, and even animals, as far as 8 seconds into the future.