Lifeboat Foundation

Could robots with feelings be the next step in AI? A research paper discusses an interesting approach to robot design. It is titled “Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines” in Nature Machine Intelligence.

No need to see the robot as an enemy just because it takes on a robotic version of human feelings; the train of thought that the authors take is a distance away from fear and trembling by some futurists who ponder robots turning against their masters in an upside-down switch of master-servant roles.

Rather, Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio, the authors, choose to focus on machines acquiring homeostasis. Man and Damasio are with the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Beyond cortical and limbic systems, the company Neuralink could add a third layer of digital superintelligence to humans and avoid artificial intelligence enslavement, its founder Elon Musk claimed Tuesday. The brain-computer linkup firm is working to treat medical conditions using its implanted chip as early as next year, but during a podcast appearance, Musk reiterated his belief that the technology could avoid some of the worst consequences of advanced machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smK9dgdTl40

“It’s important that Neuralink solves this problem sooner rather than later, because the point at which we have digital superintelligence, that’s when we pass the singularity and things become just very uncertain,” Musk said during an interview with MIT professor Lex Fridman.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says Neuralink could bring A.I. ‘superintelligence’ to the brain” »

Walmart has transformed an ordinary grocery store into a 50,000-square-foot AI lab that tests new retail technologies in a real-world setting. The Intelligent Retail Lab is located in Levittown, New York, and is equipped with AI-powered sensors that keep track of the inventory and the freshness of the produce.

Next UpShows

In the kale-filled facility at vertical farm startup Bowery Farming, it’s a piece of proprietary software that makes most of the critical decisions — like when to harvest and how much to water each plant. But it still takes humans to carry out many tasks around the farm. Katie Morich, 25, loves the work. But as roboticists make gains, will her employer need her forever? This is the fourth episode of Next Jobs, a series about careers of the future hosted by Bloomberg Technology’s Aki Ito.

Host, Producer: Aki Ito
Camera: Alan Jeffries, Brian Schildhorn
Co-Producer: David Nicholson
Editor: Victoria Daniell
Writers: Aki Ito and Victoria Daniell.

Iris Automation recently flew a drone over Kansas without ground-based radar or a visual observer, the first time the FAA has authorized what is known as a “beyond-visual-line-of-sight” drone flight with only an automated onboard collision-avoidance system monitoring.

Ocado, a British online-grocery company, is using air-traffic-control systems and AI technology to co-ordinate 700 factory robots. Its use of technology has made it a challenger to Amazon’s grocery-delivery business https://econ.st/2oTjzAG

They found love — or something like it — in GPT-2.

The U.S. military is preparing for the age of AI and algorithmic warfare, and it’s getting help from tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

Albert Einstein’s famous expression “spooky action at a distance” refers to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon seen on the most micro of scales. But machine learning seems to grow more mysterious and powerful every day, and scientists don’t always understand how it works. The spookiest action yet is a new study of heart patients where a machine-learning algorithm decided who was most likely to die within a year based on echocardiogram (ECG) results, reported by New Scientist. The algorithm performed better than the traditional measures used by cardiologists. The study was done by researchers in Pennsylvania’s Geisinger regional healthcare group, a low-cost and not-for-profit provider.