Lifeboat Foundation

On Monday, OpenAI’s leaders said that a paltry $1 billion wouldn’t be enough to compete with the well-resourced AI labs at companies such as Google and Facebook after all. They announced the new investment vehicle, a company called OpenAI LP, as a way to raise extra money for the computing power and people needed to steer the destiny of AI. Musk left the board of OpenAI last February and is not formally involved in OpenAI LP.

OpenAI, the independent research lab cofounded by Elon Musk, created a for-profit arm to attract more funding to hire researchers and run computers.

There’s a good chance that in the future, microscopic robots could be swimming and crawling their way through our bodies to deliver drugs or fight infections. While some of these have been capable of manipulating individual cells, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a new way to get nano-scale probes inside cells, and precisely control them once they’re in there.

Artificial intelligence can automatically sort out data, but it struggles for some particularly complex datasets – a quantum algorithm could do better.

The Made In Space Archinaut program has accomplished another exciting milestone. During recent testing at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park facilities in Redondo Beach, California, we successfully operated Archinaut’s core additive manufacturing and robotic assembly technology suite in a space-like environment. These operations took place in a thermal vacuum (TVAC) chamber, simulating the extreme temperature and vacuum pressure of what a satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) would be exposed to. The completion of this ground-based testing raises the technology readiness level (TRL) of the Archinaut platform and demonstrates that core Archinaut technologies are now prepared to operate in space.

The Archinaut platform looks to provide mission critical, space-optimized structures on orbit that would otherwise be too large to launch, using on-demand, adaptable manufacturing. With the marriage of additive manufacturing and robotic assembly, Archinaut enabled structures can range from:

Singapore is intent on positioning itself at the vanguard of self-driving technologies. Now it is looking to ramp things up even further, rolling what it claims to be the world’s first full size, autonomous electric bus onto a university campus in partnership with Volvo.

Is your AI intelligent or just looking like it’s intelligent? In many ways, this depends on your idea of AI and what it is supposed to do. Scientists at Singapore University of Technology and Design have worked out a way to check for the issue. Open Access Journal: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08987-4

Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly intelligent behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.

Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees on the #Future: Prospects for #Humanity https://www.singularityweblog.com/martin-rees/ #AI #Singularity #Futurism

Martin Rees has been concerned with our ever-heavier ‘footprint’ on the global environment and with the runaway consequences of our powerful technologies.

Japan, March 12, 2019—The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) agreed today to study the possibility of collaborating on international space exploration. As a first step, JAXA and Toyota agreed to further cooperate on and accelerate their ongoing joint study^*1 of a manned, pressurized rover^*2 that employs fuel cell vehicle technologies. Such a form of mobility is deemed necessary for human exploration activities on the lunar surface. Even with the limited amount of energy that can be transported to the moon, the pressurized rover would have a total lunar-surface cruising range of more than 10,000 km.

International space exploration, aiming to achieve sustainable prosperity for all of humankind by expanding the domain of human activity and giving rise to intellectual properties, has its sights set on the moon and Mars. To achieve the goals of such exploration, coordination between unmanned missions, such as the recent successful touchdown by the asteroid probe Hayabusa2 on the asteroid Ryugu, and manned missions, such as those involving humans using pressurized rovers to conduct activities on the moon, is essential. When it comes to challenging missions such as lunar or Martian exploration, while various countries are competing in advancing their technologies, they are also advancing their cooperative efforts.

JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa had this to say today about the agreement between JAXA and Toyota: “At JAXA, we are pursuing international coordination and technological studies toward Japan’s participation in international space exploration. We aim to contribute through leading Japanese technologies that can potentially generate spin-off benefits. Having Toyota join us in the challenge of international space exploration greatly strengthens our confidence. Manned rovers with pressurized cabins are an element that will play an important role in full-fledged exploration and use of the lunar surface. For this, we would like to concentrate our country’s technological abilities and conduct technological studies. Through our joint studies going forward, we would like to put to use Toyota’s excellent technological abilities related to mobility, and we look forward to the acceleration of our technological studies for the realization of a manned, pressurized rover.”

For a newborn giraffe or wildebeest, being born can be a perilous introduction to the world—predators lie in wait for an opportunity to make a meal of the herd’s weakest member. This is why many species have evolved ways for their juveniles to find their footing within minutes of birth.

It’s an astonishing evolutionary feat that has long inspired biologists and roboticists—and now a team of USC researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering believe they have become the first to create an AI-controlled robotic limb driven by animal-like tendons that can even be tripped up and then recover within the time of the next footfall, a task for which the robot was never explicitly programmed to do.

Francisco J. Valero-Cuevas, a professor of Biomedical Engineering a professor of Biokinesiology & Physical Therapy at USC in a project with USC Viterbi School of Engineering doctoral student Ali Marjaninejad and two other doctoral students—Dario Urbina-Melendez and Brian Cohn, have developed a bio-inspired algorithm that can learn a new walking task by itself after only 5 minutes of unstructured play, and then adapt to other tasks without any additional programming.

Continue reading “A robotic leg, born without prior knowledge, learns to walk” »