Lifeboat Foundation

Today we learned that an art group is planning a spectacle to draw attention to a provocative use of our industrial robot, Spot. To be clear, we condemn the portrayal of our technology in any way that promotes violence, harm, or intimidation. It’s precisely the sort of thing the company tries to get out in front of. After decades of killer-robot science-fiction, it doesn’t take much to make people jump any time an advanced robot enters the picture. It’s the automaton version of Rule 34 (in staunch defiance of Asimov’s First Law of Robotics): If a robot exists, someone has tried to weaponize it.

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Let’s talk about strapping guns to the backs of robots. I’m not a fan (how’s that for taking a stand?). When MSCHF did it with Spot back in February, it was a thought experiment, art exhibit and a statement about where society might be headed with autonomous robotics. And most importantly, of course, it was a paintball gun. Boston Dynamics clearly wasn’t thrilled with the message it was sending, noting:

The math is pretty basic. How many satellites are going to go up over the next decade? How many solar panels will they need? And how many are being manufactured that fit the bill? Turns out the answers are: a lot, a hell of a lot, and not nearly enough. That’s where Regher Solar aims to make its mark, by bringing the cost of space-quality solar panels down by 90% while making an order of magnitude more of them. It’s not exactly a modest goal, but fortunately the science and market seem to be in favor, giving the company something of a tailwind. The question is finding the right balance between cost and performance while remaining relatively easy to manufacture. Of course, if there was an easy answer there, someone would already be doing that.

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Continue reading “Regher Solar is ready to meet the new space industry’s demand for cheaper, better solar panels” »

To efficiently navigate their surrounding environments and complete missions, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) should be able to detect multiple objects in their surroundings and track their movements over time. So far, however, enabling multi-object tracking in unmanned aerial vehicles has proved to be fairly challenging.

To efficiently navigate their surrounding environments and complete missions, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) should be able to detect multiple objects in their surroundings and track their movements over time. So far, however, enabling multi-object tracking in unmanned aerial vehicles has proved to be fairly challenging.

Researchers at Lockheed Martin AI Center have recently developed a new deep learning technique that could allow UASs to track multiple objects in their surroundings. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could aid the development of better performing and more responsive autonomous flying systems.

“We present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “We propose a kinematic prediction model, called deep extended Kalman filter (DeepEKF), in which a sequence-to-sequence architecture is used to predict entity trajectories in latent space.”

Founders tend to think responsible AI practices are challenging to implement and may slow the progress of their business. They often jump to mature examples like Salesforce’s Office of Ethical and Humane Use and think that the only way to avoid creating a harmful product is building a big team. The truth is much simpler.

I set out to learn how founders were thinking about responsible AI practices on the ground by speaking with a handful of successful early-stage founders and found many of them were implementing responsible AI practices.

Only they didn’t call it that. They just call it “good business.”

Facebook’s latest long-term research project, Ego4D, focuses on developing AI with an ‘egocentric,’ first-person perspective.

Even robots from down under are going to the moon.

Australia is kicking off its first-ever mission to the moon, investing $50 million to build an operational lunar rover as a part of NASA’s Artemis project, according to a recent post on the nation’s website.

Continue reading “Australia’s First Moon Mission Will Send a $50 Million Lunar Rover With NASA” »

In 2009—four years after it was published—I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. It is an optimistic view of the future—a future that depends on computational technology. A future of superintelligent machines. It is also a future where humans will transcend our present biological limits.

I had to read the book twice—once for the sense and once for the detail.

After that, just for my own interest, year-in, year-out, I started to track this future; that meant a weekly read through New Scientist, Wired, the excellent technology pieces in the New York Times and the Atlantic, as well as following the money via the Economist and Financial Times. I picked up any new science and tech books that came out, but it wasn’t enough for me. I felt I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture.