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Robo-Dog Assault Droids 😲


CHILLING video shows the Chinese military unveiling more of their high-tech weapons as tensions continue to rage with the West.

Beijing flaunted its military tech in the new video which shows a machine-gun armed robot dog, a small ball scout drone and a soldier wearing an exoskeleton.

It is understood the technology is made by Chinese defence firm Kestrel and the clips from the exercises were shared on Beijing’s state-monitored social media site Weibo.

Title: Strong AI: Why we should be concerned about something nobody knows how to build.
Synopsis: At the moment, nobody fully knows how to create an intelligent system that rivals or exceed human capabilities (Strong AI). The impact and possible dangers of Strong AI appear to concern mostly those futurists that are not working in day-to-day AI research. This in turn gives rise to the idea that Strong AI is merely a myth, a sci fi trope and nothing that is ever going to be implemented. The current state of the art in AI is already sufficient to lead to irrevocable changes in labor markets, economy, warfare and governance. The need to deal with these near term changes does not absolve us from considering the implications of being no longer the most intelligent beings on this planet.
Despite the difficulties of developing Strong AI, there is no obvious reason why the principles embedded in biological brains should be outside of the range of what our engineering can achieve in the near future. While it is unlikely that current narrow AI systems will neatly scale towards general modeling and problem solving, many of the significant open questions in developing Strong AI appear to be known and solvable.

Talk held at ‘Artificial Intelligence / Human Possibilities’ event as adjunct to the AGI17 conference in Melbourne 2017.

Assessing emerging risks and opportunities in machine cognition.

With AI Experts Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, Peter Cheeseman and Joscha Bach.

Event Focus:
Given significant developments in Artificial Intelligence, it’s worth asking: What aspects of ideal AI have not been achieved yet?
There is good reason for the growing media storm around AI — many experts agree on the big picture that with the development of Superintelligent AI (including Artificial General Intelligence) humanity will face great challenges (some polls suggest that AGI is not far). Though in order to best manage both the opportunities and risks we need to achieve a clearer picture — this requires sensitivity to ambiguity, precision of expression and attention to theoretical detail in understanding the implications of AI, communicating/discussing AI, and ultimately engineering beneficial AI.

Meetup details: https://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/events/242163071/

This will create new types of jobs especially in software industries.


ANN ARBOR, Mich.—()—For the third-straight quarter, robot sales in North America hit a record high, driven by a resurgence in sales to automotive companies and an ongoing need to manage increasing demand to automate logistics for e-commerce. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, of the 12,305 robots sold in Q2 2022, 59% of the orders came from the automotive industry with the remaining orders from non-automotive companies largely in the food & consumer goods industry, which saw a 13% increase in unit orders over the same period, April through June, in 2021.

Robot sales hit new record in North America for 3rd straight quarter: Includes renewed surge in #automotive and continued uptake of #robotics and #automation in food and consumer goods industries driven by #ecommerce, industry group @a3automate reports. Tweet this

“While automotive entities have long been the frontrunner in deploying robotics and automation, the last few years have seen food & consumer goods, life sciences and other industries grow at even higher rates,” said A3 President Jeff Burnstein. “While this quarter shows a marked shift back to historic norms with more robots going to automotive than to any other industry, the continued growth of robotics in food & consumer goods companies especially demonstrates the ongoing need to automate warehouse logistics for handling the exploding growth of e-commerce. We’re excited to share the latest on robots in the logistics space at our upcoming Autonomous Mobile Robots & Logistics Week in Boston in October.”

The droppers are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot, dubbed V2 by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated command-and-control (C2) communication mechanism, a domain generation algorithm (DGA), and a fully refactored codebase.

Fox-IT said it discovered a newer version 2.25 on August 22, 2022, that introduces a function to siphon cookies when victims log in to their bank accounts, while also removing the ability to automatically reply to incoming messages with links to the malware for propagation.

The physics of walking for multi-legged animals and robots is simpler than previously thought. That is the finding described by a team of roboticists, physicists and biologists in the Sept. 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper titled “Walking is like slithering: a unifying, data-driven view of locomotion.”

“This is important because it will allow roboticists to build much simpler models to describe the way robots walk and move through the world,” said paper coauthor Nick Gravish, a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

The researchers had previously studied ant walking and wanted to see how their findings could be applied to robots. In the process, they discovered a new mathematical relationship between walking, skipping, slithering and swimming in viscous fluids for multi-legged animals and bots.

When one of China’s biggest celebrities, Simon Gong —also known as Gong Jun—released a new music video in June 2022, it quickly attracted 15 million views on the country’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo. But the event also stood out for a different reason—one that only eagle-eyed fans might have noticed. The singer in the video was not Gong himself, but a digital replica created by Baidu, a “digital human” powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Likewise, the lyrics and melody were generated by AI, marking the recording as China’s first AI-generated content music video.

Deloitte defines digital humans as AI-powered virtual beings that can produce a whole range of human body language. In recent years, businesses focused on providing round-the-clock services, as well as the media and entertainment industry, are increasingly adopting this nascent technology, aiming to capture a growing market. And as digital humans increasingly populate other sectors like retail, health care, and finance, Emergen Research forecasts that the global market for digital humans will jump to about $530 billion in 2030, from $10 billion in 2020.