Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,931

Study tests whether AI can convincingly answer existential questions

A new study has explored whether AI can provide more attractive answers to humanity’s most profound questions than history’s most influential thinkers.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales first fed a series of moral questions to Salesforce’s CTRL system, a text generator trained on millions of documents and websites, including all of Wikipedia. They added its responses to a collection of reflections from the likes of Plato, Jesus Christ, and, err, Elon Musk.

The team then asked more than 1,000 people which musings they liked best — and whether they could identify the source of the quotes.

U.S. autonomous freight network planned for 2023–2024

TuSimple, a trucking technology company, has announced a plan for the world’s first Autonomous Freight Network (AFN) – an ecosystem consisting of autonomous trucks, digital mapped routes, strategically placed terminals, and TuSimple Connect, a proprietary autonomous operations monitoring system.

Collectively, these components will work together to create the safest and most efficient way to bring self-driving trucks to market. Partnering with TuSimple in the launch of the Autonomous Freight Network are UPS, Penske Truck Leasing, U.S. Xpress (who operate one of the largest carrier fleets in the country) and McLane, a Berkshire Hathaway company and one of the largest supply chain services leaders in the United States.

“Our ultimate goal is to have a nationwide transportation network, consisting of mapped routes connecting hundreds of terminals to enable efficient, low-cost, long-haul autonomous freight operations,” said Cheng Lu, President of TuSimple. “By launching the AFN with our strategic partners, we will be able to quickly scale operations and expand autonomous shipping lanes to provide users access to autonomous capacity anywhere and 24/7 on-demand.”

How AI Sees Through the Looking Glass: Things Are Different on the Other Side of the Mirror

Text is backward. Clocks run counterclockwise. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road. Right hands become left hands.

Intrigued by how reflection changes images in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, a team of Cornell researchers used artificial intelligence to investigate what sets originals apart from their reflections. Their algorithms learned to pick up on unexpected clues such as hair parts, gaze direction and, surprisingly, beards – findings with implications for training machine learning models and detecting faked images.

New Mathematical Formula Unveiled to Prevent AI From Making Unethical Decisions

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.

A biohybrid synapse with neurotransmitter-mediated plasticity

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.

Safety for robots in manufacturing comes from advanced vision

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.”

This steampunk-looking robot could be NASA’s newest way to explore frozen alien moons

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.

A completely new plasmonic chip for ultrafast data transmission using light

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).

How AI Helps Digital Enterprises Streamline Operations

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.