Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1715

Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business police Artificial Intelligence systems’ biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging choices.

The collaborators from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, and EPFL – Lausanne, along with the strategy firm Sciteb Ltd, believe that in an environment in which decisions are increasingly made without human intervention, there is a very strong incentive to know under what circumstances AI systems might adopt an unethical strategy—and to find and reduce that risk, or eliminate entirely, if possible.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be more profitable to make certain decisions that end up hurting the company.

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Brain-inspired computing paradigms have led to substantial advances in the automation of visual and linguistic tasks by emulating the distributed information processing of biological systems. The similarity between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological systems has inspired ANN implementation in biomedical interfaces including prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces. While promising, these implementations rely on software to run ANN algorithms. Ultimately, it is desirable to build hardware ANNs that can both directly interface with living tissue and adapt based on biofeedback. The first essential step towards biologically integrated neuromorphic systems is to achieve synaptic conditioning based on biochemical signalling activity. Here, we directly couple an organic neuromorphic device with dopaminergic cells to constitute a biohybrid synapse with neurotransmitter-mediated synaptic plasticity. By mimicking the dopamine recycling machinery of the synaptic cleft, we demonstrate both long-term conditioning and recovery of the synaptic weight, paving the way towards combining artificial neuromorphic systems with biological neural networks.

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FreeMove is a vision-based safety system. Source: Veo Robotics.

Vision systems have been employed in manufacturing for parts inspection, parts alignment, quality control, part identification, and part picking for many years. Now, new vision technology helps provide safety for industrial robots to work alongside humans.

Robotics standards outline four different methods of collaboration: safety-rated monitored stop, hand guiding, power and force limiting (PFL), and speed and separation monitoring (SSM). The most commonly understood form of collaborative robotics in manufacturing applications are PFL robots, often known as “collaborative robots” or “cobots.”

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NASA’s newest spacecraft concept looks like it belongs in a steampunk convention more than a distant moon, but that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be headed.

Steam power sounds like a relic of the Victorian era only glamorized by steampunk culture, but NASA is developing SPARROW (Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robot for Ocaen Worlds), a new steam-powered robot concept that could potentially unearth life on moons like Enceladus or Europa. Sure, our space agency might be known for the most cutting-edge technology, but even that could face potential disaster on frozen moons whose surfaces could be perilous. This relatively simple contraption is capable of doing things more complex robots can’t.

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Researchers from ETH Zurich have achieved what scientists have been attempting to do for some 20 years: in their laboratory work as part of European Horizon 2020 research projects, they have manufactured a chip on which fast electronic signals can be converted directly into ultrafast light signals—with practically no loss of signal quality. This represents a significant breakthrough in terms of the efficiency of optical communication infrastructures that use light to transmit data, such as fiber optic networks.

In cities like Zurich, these fiber optic networks are already being used to deliver , digital telephony, TV, and network-based video or audio services (“streaming”). However, by the end of this decade, even these optical communication networks may reach their limits when it comes to rapid data transmission.

This is due to the growing demand for online services for streaming, storage and computation, as well as the advent of artificial intelligence and 5G networks. Today’s optical networks achieve data transmission rates in the region of gigabits (109 bits) per second. The limit is around 100 gigabits per lane und wavelength. In the future, however, transmission rates will need to reach the terabit region (1012 bits per second).

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how enterprises analyze and process information. It is also shifting from theoretical to real-world technology. Companies are deploying AI technologies to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and grow sales and profitability. The technology can also reduce marketing waste by predicting what works. It is the most impactful innovation of our lifetime, and it will create new winners and losers across entire industries.

According to Gartner, artificial intelligence will create $2.9 trillion in business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally in 2021. Most of that value will be realized by enterprises that implement AI in functions such as sales management, customer service, manufacturing, and logistics. With improvements in natural language processing, employees and users can easily communicate with machine-learning interfaces.

Let’s look at how AI applications are revamping digital enterprises and the retail industry.

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Thousands of words, big and small, are crammed inside our memory banks just waiting to be swiftly withdrawn and strung into sentences. In a recent study of epilepsy patients and healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may withdraw some common words, like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” much more often than others, including “cat,” “street,” and “stair.” By combining memory tests, brain wave recordings, and surveys of billions of words published in books, news articles and internet encyclopedia pages, the researchers not only showed how our brains may recall words but also memories of our past experiences.

“We found that some words are much more memorable than others. Our results support the idea that our memories are wired into neural networks and that our brains search for these memories, just the way search engines track down information on the internet,” said Weizhen (Zane) Xie, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and post-doctoral fellow at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), who led the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. “We hope that these results can be used as a roadmap to evaluate the health of a person’s memory and brain.”

Dr. Xie and his colleagues first spotted these words when they re-analyzed the results of memory tests taken by 30 epilepsy patients who were part of a clinical trial led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon and senior investigator at NINDS. Dr. Zaghloul’s team tries to help patients whose seizures cannot be controlled by drugs, otherwise known as intractable epilepsy. During the observation period, patients spend several days at the NIH’s Clinical Center with surgically implanted electrodes designed to detect changes in brain activity.

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She can’t get sick or be late to the set, and her hair and makeup needs are minimal: Her name is Erica, and Hollywood is hoping that a sophisticated robot can be its next big star. The synthetic actor has been cast in “b,” a $70 million science-fiction movie which producer Sam Khoze describes as “a James Bond meets Mission Impossible story with heart.”

Scribe Tarek Zohdy (“1st Born”), says, the story is about scientists who create an AI robot named Erica who quickly realize the danger of this top-secret program that is trying to perfect a human through a non-human form.

Variety caught up with the filmmakers Zohdy and Khoze to discuss “b” the $70 million film that plans to finish shooting next year, after a director and human star have been brought on.

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