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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,325

Robot dog’s role in New York garage collapse incident justifies its use says City mayor

Critics are not fully convinced though.

Earlier this month, the New York Police Department (NYPD) announced the induction of two robotic dogs into its force, a move that was opposed by rights activists citing surveillance concerns. Now an incident of a garage collapse where a robotic dog was used in search and rescue operations is being hailed by the City Mayor Eric Adams as justification for its use, The New York Times.

The robotic dogs inducted belong to Boston Dynamics, which Interesting Engineering has extensively covered over the years. Their robotic dog, dubbed Spot, has been designed for use in adverse situations and is equipped with abilities and sensors.

Mark Zuckerberg says he is absolutely not abandoning the metaverse as company division loses $4 billion

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he isn’t abandoning the metaverse, even as the division of the company that manages its virtual and augmented reality projects lost $4 billion in the first quarter.

Recent comments by Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders have suggested that the company is going bullish on AI and switching its strategy away from the metaverse. Top Meta execs are now spending most of their time focused on AI, CTO Andrew Bosworth said earlier this month.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision,” Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday. “So I just want to say upfront that, that’s not accurate. We’ve been focusing on both AI and the Metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both.”

Tech CEOs wax poetic on AI, big adds to sales will take time

April 26 (Reuters) — Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google-parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) talked up investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for the second quarter in a row but their results on Tuesday suggested that any substantial additions to sales will be slow.

The tech behemoths have launched an array of products that they promise are packed with generative AI, which creates brand new content — text, image, code — from past data. The term became a buzzword after Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that writes human-like responses.

“The world’s most advanced AI models are coming together with the world’s most universal user interface — natural language — to create a new era of computing,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, said in a statement on Tuesday.

There Is No A.I.

“As a computer scientist, I don’t like the term ” A.I.” In fact, I think it’s misleading—maybe even a little dangerous. Everybody’s already using the term, and it might seem a little late in the day to be arguing about it. But we’re at the beginning of a new technological era—and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it.

The term artificial intelligence has a long history—it was coined in the nineteen-fifties, in the early days of computers. More recently, computer scientists have grown up on movies like The Terminator and The Matrix, and on characters like Commander Data, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. These cultural touchstones have become an almost religious mythology in tech culture. It’s only natural that computer scientists long to create A.I. and realize a long-held dream.

What’s striking, though, is that many of the people who are pursuing the A.I. dream also worry that it might mean doomsday for mankind. It is widely stated, even by scientists at the very center of today’s efforts, that what A.I. researchers are doing could result in the annihilation of our species, or at least in great harm to humanity, and soon. In a recent poll, half of A.I. scientists agreed that there was at least a ten-per-cent chance that the human race would be destroyed by A.I.

The Idea Revolution: How AI and Large Language Models Are Transforming the Way We Think

I remember when Gmail launched predictive answers to emails as a quick way to respond to folks. This moment sparked my curiosity about where this kind of technology would lead us. In those first few moments after discovering this feature, I understood that language itself, and perhaps even human thought, were on the brink of a massive transformation.

This was even more evident with predictive text. The idea is that the prediction is accurate, or close enough, so eventually, people will just start using the same small set of responses, with the conversations becoming more homogeneous and less original. Original thought is endangered.

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