Lifeboat Foundation

To replicate ourselves in AI, we first have to embrace human error—and as sci-fi writer Hugh Howey argues, we probably shouldn’t.

Animals of all shapes and sizes have whiskers of some sort. Cats and dogs and rodents have them. Seals have them too. Some birds have them, as do insects and fish. Whiskers have shown up across such a diversity of animals because they’re an efficient and effective method of short range sensing. Besides just being able to detect objects that they come into direct contact with, whiskers can also sense fluid flows (like the speed and direction of moving air or water), and they work even if it’s dark or foggy or smoky.

While we’ve seen some research on whiskers before—I’m sure you remember the utterly adorable ShrewBot—there hasn’t been too much emphasis on adding whiskers to robots, likely because lidar and cameras offer more useful data at longer ranges. And that’s totally fine, if you can afford the lidar or the computing necessary to make adequate use of cameras. For very small, very cheap drones, investing in sophisticated sensing and computing may not make sense, especially if you’re only interested in simple behaviors like not crashing into stuff.

Continue reading “Sensitive Whiskers Could Make Small Drones Safer” »

Thousands of tech fans descended on the Mojave desert for the conference, a public offshoot of Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos’ previous invitation-only MARS conferences (the acronym stands for “Machine Learning, Robotics, Automation and Space”).

It resembled a tech summer camp, replete with offerings of cutting-edge technology demos, talks and social events.

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I recently came to an important realisation: I will most likely see the so-called Singularity happen in my own lifetime. I’m 56, at this time, and I believe that the inflection point at which computers, ‘thinking machines’ and AI may become infinitely and recursively powerful is no more than 20–25 years away, at most — and it might be as soon as 12–15 years from today.

We are at ‘4’ on the exponential curve, and this matters a lot because doubling a small number such as 0.01 does not make much of a difference while doubling 4–8–16–32–64 is another story altogether: timing is essential, and the future is bound to increasingly happen gradually, then suddenly.

Continue reading “Why the singularity is certain to happen in my own lifetime” »

Robotically surveying lunar craters in record time and mining resources in space could help NASA establish a sustained human presence at the Moon – part of the agency’s broader Moon to Mars exploration approach. Two mission concepts to explore these capabilities have been selected as the first-ever Phase III studies within the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

“We are pursuing new technologies across our development portfolio that could help make deep space exploration more Earth-independent by utilizing resources on the Moon and beyond,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “These NIAC Phase III selections are a component of that forward-looking research and we hope new insights will help us achieve more firsts in space.”

The Phase III proposals outline an aerospace architecture, including a mission concept, that is innovative and could change what’s possible in space. Each selection will receive as much as $2 million. Over the course of two years, researchers will refine the concept design and explore aspects of implementing the new technology. The inaugural Phase III selections are:

Continue reading “NASA Invests in Concepts Aimed at Exploring Craters, Mining Asteroids” »

Lyft and Aptiv completed 55,000 self-driving vehicle rides in their first year.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) cyber security researchers have developed a new attack called Malboard evades several detection products that are intended to continuously verify the user’s identity based on personalized keystroke characteristics.

The new paper, “Malboard: A Novel User Keystroke Impersonation Attack and Trusted Detection Framework Based on Side-Channel Analysis,” published in the Computer and Security journal, reveals a sophisticated attack in which a compromised USB keyboard automatically generates and sends malicious keystrokes that mimic the attacked user’s behavioral characteristics.

Keystrokes generated maliciously do not typically match human typing and can easily be detected. Using artificial intelligence, however, the Malboard attack autonomously generates commands in the user’s style, injects the keystrokes as malicious software into the keyboard and evades detection. The keyboards used in the research were products by Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell.

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“Hello? Who’s calling?” For many Americans these days, the call is coming from a “bot” or automated program that seeks to trick them into giving up money or important personal data.

The scourge of “robocalls” by the billions has prompted US regulators to adopt new rules allowing carriers to implement tools to block calls with suspicious origins.

The automated calls may tell respondents that they owe back taxes or other bills that need to be settled immediately, or direct them to call numbers where they are charged for the connection.

Continue reading “US moves to tackle scourge of ‘robocalls’” »

And your insurance might even cover the cost.