Noted fund manager and Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood on Saturday suggested that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will likely give a strong lift to economic growth.
The fund manager is of the view that a breakthrough in AGI will lead to the acceleration of GDP within the next six to 12 years. The analyst estimates that GDP growth will increase from the 3–5% year-over-year rate currently to 30–50% per year. New DNA will win,’ she added.
On large, isolated construction sites, reliable remote operations are a game changer. See how BAM Nuttall remotely deployed Spot for 3D laser scanning using a p… See more.
On a large and remote construction site in Shetland, where the team is battling the elements, covering large distances every day, the Trimble and Boston Dynamics integrated robot solution has become man’s newest four-legged friend.
BAM Nuttall has successfully trialled the integrated Trimble X7 laser scanner with Boston Dynamics’ Spot® robot in a remote construction setting — utilising a private stand-alone 5G network for remote control — in the first use case of its kind.
Enlisting Spot as the newest member of the site team, the four-legged robot has used specially adapted 3D laser scanning equipment to collect data and create site records. Spot and the Trimble X7 payload were controlled remotely using a private 5G communications network covering the 55,176 m2 site, marking the robot’s first 5G deployment in the U.K.
When Amazon Robotics scientists pondered adding mobile robots to fulfillment centers, they knew Amazon’s scale would present a unique challenge: Robot congestio… See more.
Amazon fulfillment centers use thousands of mobile robots. To keep products moving, Amazon Robotics researchers have crafted unique solutions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is spreading through society into some of the most important sectors of people’s lives – from health care and legal services to agriculture and transportation.1 As Americans watch this proliferation, they are worried in some ways and excited in others.
In broad strokes, a larger share of Americans say they are “more concerned than excited” by the increased use of AI in daily life than say the opposite. Nearly half of U.S. adults (45%) say they are equally concerned and excited. Asked to explain in their own words what concerns them most about AI, some of those who are more concerned than excited cite their worries about potential loss of jobs, privacy considerations and the prospect that AI’s ascent might surpass human skills – and others say it will lead to a loss of human connection, be misused or be relied on too much.
But others are “more excited than concerned,” and they mention such things as the societal improvements they hope will emerge, the time savings and efficiencies AI can bring to daily life and the ways in which AI systems might be helpful and safer at work. And people have mixed views on whether three specific AI applications are good or bad for society at large.
Experts believe AGI will occur around 2050, and plausibly sooner. You can see above their estimates regarding specific AI achievements: passing the Turing test, passing third grade, accomplishing Nobel worthy scientific breakthroughs and achieving superhuman intelligence.
China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week – the world’s first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It’ll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles.
The Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard began construction on the Zhu Hai Yun last July in Guangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, it’s the first carrier of its kind, a self-contained autonomous platform that will roll out with everything necessary to perform a fully integrated operation including drone aircraft, boats and submersibles.
China doesn’t expect it to navigate busy seaports by itself, like the Japanese autonomous container ship Suzaku we wrote about last week. Instead, the Zhu Hai Yun will run on remote control until it’s out in the open water, and then its self-driving systems will take over to execute whatever mission it’s running.
Does the breakthrough to general AI need more data and computing power above all else? Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Metaon the recent debate about scaling sparked by Deepmind’s Gato.
The recent successes of large AI models such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s PaLM and Deepmind’s Flamingo have sparked a debate about their significance for progress towards general AI. Deepmind’s Gato has recently given a particular boost to the debate, which has been conducted publicly, especially on Twitter.
Gato is a Transformer model trained with numerous data modalities, including images, text, proprioception or joint moments. All training data is processed by Gato in a token sequence similar to those of large language models. Thanks to the versatile training, Gato can text, describe images, play video games or control robotic arms. Deepmind tested the AI model with over 600 benchmarks.
Should we send robots on space missions instead of humans?
The cost differences are huge. In fact, NASA could pursue dozens of robotic missions for the cost of a single human mission. Also worth considering–wealthy entrepreneurs have made great advances recently with private space efforts.
Given the large ambitions for private human space flight, isn’t it time to phase out NASA’s human missions? The private sector has gained ground, and so the government should yield.
The private sector has shown that it can do space flights far cheaper than NASA’s cost overruns are infamous. The cost of building the International Space Station, for example, ballooned from $17 billion to $74 billion.
Given the need to reduce large budget deficits, most federal agencies should be cut. For NASA, policymakers should consider phasing out the human missions and narrowing the agency’s focus to more efficient robotic missions.
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