Lifeboat Foundation

The age of the cyborg may be closer than we think. Rapidly improving medical robotics, wearables, and implants means many humans are already part machine, and this trend is only likely to continue.

It is most noticeable in the field of medical prosthetics where high-performance titanium and carbon fiber replacements for limbs have become commonplace. The use of “blades” by Paralympians has even raised questions over whether they actually offer an advantage over biological limbs.

Continue reading “What Happens When Cyborg Tech Goes Beyond Medicine?” »

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station welcomed its first returning vehicle in years Monday — a SpaceX Dragon capsule making its second delivery.

Space shuttle Atlantis was the last repeat visitor six years ago. It’s now a museum relic at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

NASA astronaut Jack Fischer noted “the special significance” of SpaceX’s recycling effort as soon as he caught the Dragon supply ship with the station’s big robot arm.

More worrying than the internet’s role in the rise of far-right populism is the digital tsunami poised to engulf us: AI and and ‘crypto-anarchists’ are radically restructuring life – and politics – as we know it.

UPDATE May 17, 2017: The IBM PowerAI team and Nimbix have recently announced support for the hackathon. Teams at the hackathon will enjoy access to PowerAI systems for the weekend, which will significantly improve deep learning model building for ET signal classification. Thanks, Nimbix and IBM PowerAI.

Several firms are working on training environments like Star Trek’s Holodeck, but for machines.

When future robots enter the world, they won’t have a learning curve.

Artificial intelligence researchers are creating tools to help teach the robots that will assemble our gadgets in factories, or do chores around our home, before they ever step (or roll) into the real world. These simulators, most recently announced by Nvidia as a project called Isaac’s Lab but also pioneered by Alphabet’s DeepMind and Elon Musk’s OpenAI, are 3D spaces that have physics just like reality, with virtual objects that act the same way as their physical counterparts.

Continue reading “Tomorrow’s Robots Will Train in Simulators, Just Like Today’s Troops” »

Police in Dubai have unveiled a working police robot — what the kids call a “Robocop.” Using a computer tablet that is based in the robot’s chest, Dubai residents can report crimes, pay speeding tickets, and submit paperwork in six different languages. The Emirati robot has a built-in camera which allows it to read facial expressions and identify suspects, and it live streams audio and video back to its human coworkers at an operation center.

Dubai has already implemented other modern safety services, including firefighters that use jetpacks. City police aim to have robots make up a quarter of their workforce by the year 2030.

N” Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) self-driving car unit Waymo is working on developing self-driving trucks, the company said on Thursday.

Waymo, which is looking to expand its self-driving car efforts, expects autonomous vehicles to be able to take over longer distance trucking in the coming years, while allowing human drivers to handle local pickup and delivery routes.

“We’re taking our eight years of experience in building self-driving hardware and software and conducting a technical exploration into how our technology can integrate into a truck,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement.

Continue reading “Waymo working on self-driving trucks” »

Over the past few years, a variety of cyborg animals have been unleashed, as scientists kit out cockroaches, locusts and even turtles with electronic accoutrements. Back in January, researchers from Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) outlined plans to fit dragonflies with tiny electronic backpacks, allowing them to be controlled remotely. In a new video, their cyborg dragonflies have taken flight for the first time.

The animal kingdom is fertile inspirational ground for new technology, but it’s difficult to properly mimic the speed and manoeuvrability of a dragonfly, or the complicated olfactory system of a locust. Rather than designing robots and sensors from scratch, scientists have developed ways to take advantage of the hard work nature has already done, by equipping live insects with electronic systems.

As the Fermi paradox states, the Universe is a vast, unknowable space, filled with trillions upon trillions of potentially habitable planets, so… where are all the aliens?

In the latest attempt to solve this conundrum, a trio of researchers have suggested that advanced alien civilisations have gone into self-imposed ‘hibernation’ — waiting for a future where the Universe is far colder than it is now, which would facilitate the kind of processing power we could only ever dream about.

A new paper written by Oxford neuroscientist and AI expert, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong, together with Milan Ćirković from the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Serbia, argues that civilisations far more advanced than us could have conceivably explored a big chunk of the Universe already, and are now waiting for a better time to be alive.

Continue reading “Could Aliens Be Hibernating Through The Worst Time in The Universe?” »