Lifeboat Foundation

In a few seconds flat, you’ve gone from a neatly-equipped office to a home cinema…all within the same four walls. Who needs more than one room?

This is the dream of those who work on “programmable matter.”

In his recent book about AI, Max Tegmark makes a distinction between three different levels of computational sophistication for organisms. Life 1.0 is single-celled organisms like bacteria; here, hardware is indistinguishable from software. The behavior of the bacteria is encoded into its DNA; it cannot learn new things.

Continue reading “Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter” »

Move over, deep learning. Neuromorphic computing—the next big thing in artificial intelligence—is on fire.

Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain.

The first, published in Nature Materials, found a perfect solution to deal with unpredictability at synapses—the gap between two neurons that transmit and store information. The second, published in Science Advances, further amped up the system’s computational power, filling synapses with nanoclusters of supermagnetic material to bolster information encoding.

Continue reading “Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency” »

But that’s not the only reason robots are big here. It also has a lot to do with an aging and declining population.

“Japan is a strange, exotic and quirky place” — but that’s not the only reason it’s on the leading edge of a robot revolution.

Berlin 26th April 2018 – The first full scale model of the European Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft (MALE RPAS) was unveiled today during a ceremony held at the 2018 ILA Berlin Air Show, which opened its gates at Schönefeld airport.

The reveal ceremony, led by Dirk Hoke, Airbus Defence and Space Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Eric Trappier, Dassault Aviation Chairman and CEO and Lucio Valerio Cioffi, Leonardo’s Aircraft Division Managing Director, confirms the commitment of the four European States and Industrial partners to jointly develop a sovereign solution for European Defence and Security.

The unveiling of the full scale model and the reaffirmed commitment comes after a nearly two-year definition study launched in September 2016 by the four participating nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain and follows the Declaration of Intent to work together on a European MALE unmanned aerial system signed by the countries in May 2015.

Continue reading “Airbus, Dassault Aviation and Leonardo reaffirm their total commitment in the first fully European MALE programme” »

As i said the other day on here. No money for science. Plenty of money for war war war. And, the knucklehead public is out zonked out to whatever mindless BS they screwing off with this minute.

In a move that shocked lunar scientists, NASA has cancelled the only robotic vehicle under development to explore the surface of the Moon, despite President Donald Trump’s vow to return people there.

Scientists working on the Resource Prospector (RP) mission, a robotic rover that had been in development for about a decade to explore a polar region of the Moon, expressed astonishment at the decision.

Continue reading “Scientists shocked as NASA cuts only moon rover” »

This is a talk by Marc Raibert for course 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence. He is the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This class is free and open to everyone. Our goal is to take an engineering approach to exploring possible paths toward building human-level intelligence for a better world.

Note: Due to technical difficulties, we don’t have a screencast of the slides, and the video of the slides is low resolution. Despite this, I chose to include several parts of the talk that show slides, especially with videos. It’s not optimal, but I hope you learn and enjoy anyway. Thanks for understanding. We’re always learning and improving.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics (Marc Raibert, CEO)” »

AI is predicted to be one of the next big digital disruptions, but some places are already feeling its impact.

Alphabet just published its annual Founders’ Letter and this year, cofounder Sergey Brin uses it to outline the ways the company’s using artificial intelligence, while highlighting both the benefits and risks of this “technology renaissance.”

Alphabet’s Sergey Brin uses this year’s Founders’ Letter to outline the ways the company users artificial intelligence every day.

Researchers are using predictive artificial intelligence to help police officers classify crimes and determine whether they are gang-related.

Photo: AP