Lifeboat Foundation

By pitting neural networks against one another, Ian Goodfellow has created a powerful AI tool. Now he, and the rest of us, must face the consequences.

Can artificial intelligence tell a good story? Or do we still need humans to find the narratives we enjoy the best?

Cai, a delegate to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, said the idea made sense.

As the country rides a wave of investment in automation, Cai is among the first Chinese academics to call for restrictions on robots.

NPC delegate Cai Fang says it won’t be long before machines can do most things better than humans.

Continue reading “Tax the terminator: Chinese adviser calls for levy to stop robots taking over the workplace” »

Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, came to SXSW this week and gave a grave talk about the future of humanity, warning about the dangers of nuclear war, climate, change, and runaway AI and telling the audience that the only way to keep humanity alive is to colonize the Solar System.

Meet GummiArm, the soft-handed robot that could fill in for a lack of human crop pickers—if British farmers can afford the cost.

The problem: The Telegraph notes that 40 percent of the growing costs for cauliflower, and similar crops like cabbage and broccoli, comes from harvesting in the UK. And that could rise, as crop-picking labor supply is set to decline in the country following Brexit.

Robots could help: University of Plymouth researchers say their GummiArm bot can pick up the slack. Computer vision allows it to work out which vegetable it should try to pick, while its hand can become more or less stiff to gently pick brassicas from their stems. It’s currently being tested in fields in southwestern England.

Continue reading “This cauliflower-picking robot aims to make up for a shortage of human labor in the UK” »

Reading the tech press, you would be forgiven for believing that AI is going to eat pretty much every industry and job. Not a day goes by without another reporter breathlessly reporting some new machine learning product that is going to trounce human intelligence. That surfeit of enthusiasm doesn’t originate just with journalists though — they are merely channeling the wild optimism of researchers and startup founders alike.

There has been an explosion of interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the past few years, as the hype around deep learning and other techniques has increased. Tens of thousands of research papers in AI are published yearly, and AngelList’s startup directory for AI companies includes more than four thousands startups.

After being battered by story after story of AI’s coming domination — the singularity, if you will — it shouldn’t be surprising that 58% of Americans today are worried about losing their jobs to “new technology” like automation and artificial intelligence according to a newly released Northeastern University / Gallup poll. That fear outranks immigration and outsourcing by a large factor.

Six years after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, a specialized robot has been able to capture images of melted uranium fuel from the site for the first time.

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More than 200 artificial intelligence startups applied for Nvidia’s Inception contest, which seeks to identify the best AI startups. The company created the program to find new uses for its graphics processing units (GPUs), but it’s also hoping these startups will change the world.

So far, the company has identified more than 2,800 AI startups over the years through Inception. I listened to pitches from 12 finalists in a Shark Tank styled judging event last week. Each is competing to be one of three finalists to share the $1 million prize pool.

“We’re trying to enable our ecosystem of deep learning neural networks,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as he introduced a panel of four judges. The 12 semi-finalists gave their 8-minute pitches, six finalists were selected, and the final winners will be picked at the company’s GPU Technology Conference on March 27 in San Jose, California. They ranged from AI for bionic arms to faster, cheaper, and more accurate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

Continue reading “Nvidia Inception’s AI health care startups cover neural interfaces to better MRI” »