Lifeboat Foundation

A robot mere molecules long is helping engineers create new nanotechnology one bit at a time.

Robot dogs are coming.

Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot dog will be getting to work in a variety of roles by the middle of 2019.

Harking back to Soviet big science, a 10-point plan calls for new organizations and focus areas, from job training to a giant new R&D campus.

The Russian Ministry of Defense is pursuing artificial intelligence with an urgency that has only grown since Vladimir Putin’s “rule the world” speech in September. But after several years of watching American and Chinese researchers accumulate breakthroughs and funding, while Russia continues to lack a relevant high-tech culture, Ministry leaders have decided that if they can’t outspend their global competitors, perhaps they can out-organize them.

So in March, the MOD — along with the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, or MES ; and the Russian Academy of Sciences — gathered domestic and international developers and users at a conference intended to take stock of the world’s AI prowess, and develop plans to focus Russia’s academic, scientific, and commercial communities to compete.

Continue reading “Here’s How the Russian Military Is Organizing to Develop AI” »

Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the twenty-first.

The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.

Continue reading “How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order” »

Beauty in binary.

The RoboArt gallery has hosted an art competition for robots and AI for the third year in a row.

Although i dont really like the idea of a different robot for every job, because you will get nickel and dimed to death.

If you love scrubbing the floors of your kitchen and bathrooms, then don’t get an iRobot Braava Jet 240. If you would rather let a plucky little robot do the mopping for you, then do get one, and leave this thankless household chore behind forever.

The big roll out Was going to be 2022, now looking like maybe 2027. There has been some shady stuff happening in the background in the USA to hold up self driving cars. It seems the people who were set to lose a lot of money on the changeover have found ways to hold it up.

Despite the rapid accumulation of testing miles, Krafcik warned the governors not to end all of their infrastructure investments just yet. Responding to a question about the need for new parking facilities, he responded that there will be a very long period of overlap between personally owned human driven vehicles and shared automated vehicles from Waymo and others. He suggested that it might be possible to slow down on some massive parking structures but was non-committal on timelines.

With Waymo planning to launch its commercial service by the end of 2018, GM coming in 2019 and others including Zoox, Daimler and Voyage in the next 2–3 years, there will be shared automated vehicles on the road. However, these will be limited to locations where they are demonstrated to function reliably and there is a market for ride-hailing despite the optimistic projections of some investors and developers. Widespread adoption in the millions of vehicles globally is unlikely before the latter half of the 2020s.

Continue reading “Transition To Autonomous Cars Will Take Longer Than You Think, Waymo CEO Tells Governors” »

Robot bartenders are mostly novelties today. But a group of startups is hoping to bring automation to your neighborhood watering hole—and even your home bar.

The company’s autonomous vehicles just drove 8 million miles on public roads. What’s more, it took the company just one month to go from 7 million miles to 8 million miles driven.

“We’re driving now at the rate of 25,000 miles every day on public roads,” CEO John Krafcik said Friday while addressing the National Governors Association.

Waymo’s acceleration in logging miles with self-driving cars has picked up in the last year. In November 2017, it crossed 4 million miles. Less than a year later it’s doubled that figure.

Continue reading “Waymo’s self-driving cars log 1 million miles on public roads in a month” »