Lifeboat Foundation

Sheelah Kolhatkar on whether the technology in Amazon’s new automated grocery store, Amazon Go, in Seattle, could eventually eliminate millions of retail jobs.

Artificial intelligence approached the summit of hype at this year’s World Economic Forum.

AI was on the lips of seemingly every corporate chief and policy maker attending this year’s conference in Davos, Switzerland. On Wednesday, the term “artificial intelligence” appeared in more than 20 headlines and stories Bloomberg ran about the gathering.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced a new government-funded center to advise on ethical use of AI and French President Emmanuel Macron launched a 10 billion euro innovation fund aimed at new technologies like AI.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Nears the Summit of Hype in Davos” »

Will the transhumanist path forward lead us to singularity of posthuman superintelligence a-la Ray Kurzweil?

“I think that the definition of being human is about to change a lot in the next century,” says Michelle Thaller, astronomer and Assistant Director for Science Communication at NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Human beings next evolutionary leap is going to take us beyond our biological existence. How do you feel about merging with an artificial intelligence?

Technically speaking, Google Photos Assistant did a pretty good job.

for the 2017 tallinn architecture biennale, noumena has presented its installation based on the future of robots and its adaptability with the environment. deep learning has paved the way for machines to expand beyond narrow capabilities to soon achieving human-level performance on intellectual tasks. however, as artificial intelligence — A.I. — establishes its place within humans, society will need to develop a framework for both to thrive. a new form of artificial life will emerge, finding space at the peripheries of humanity in order to not compete for human-dominated resources. A.I. will attempt to improve its operating surroundings to not just survive but be self-sustaining, forming the basis of a civilization constrained at the intersection of nature and technology.

image © tõnu tunnel.

barcelonian based practice noumena has developed a framework to build this narrative based on the cross disciplinary intersection of computational design, mechanical and electronic design, rapid prototyping interaction and mapping. nowadays, computing tools as well as rapid prototyping machines allow to have a quick practical feedback on design solutions and to iterate experimenting different possibility at the same time giving the chance to choose and custom a functional part.

Continue reading “Noumena’s Robotic Habitats Questions The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence” »

Now you can have items delivered to you wherever you are.

Cyberdyne, the Japanese robotics company with the slightly suspicious name, has just gotten approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin offering its HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) lower-body exoskeleton to users in the United States through licensed medical facilities. HAL is essentially a walking robot that you strap to your own legs; sensors attached to your leg muscles detect bioelectric signals sent from your brain to your muscles telling them to move, and then the exoskeleton powers up and assists, enhancing your strength and stability.

Users in the United States can now take advantage of this friendly exoskeleton to help them with physical rehabilitation.

Continue reading “Cyberdyne’s Medical Exoskeleton Strides to FDA Approval” »

For those working in the field of advanced artificial intelligence, getting a computer to simulate brain activity is a gargantuan task, but it may be easier to manage if the hardware is designed more like brain hardware to start with.

This emerging field is called neuromorphic computing. And now engineers at MIT may have overcome a significant hurdle — the design of a chip with artificial synapses.

For now, human brains are much more powerful than any computer — they contain around 80 billion neurons, and over 100 trillion synapses connecting them and controlling the passage of signals.

Continue reading “MIT Engineers Have Designed a Chip That Behaves Just Like Brain Cell Connections” »

India and Japan have vowed to strengthen their strategic ties by increasing cooperation in the defense, robotics and AI sectors in coming years in response to Chinese regional ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear plans.

“You should expect to see increased bilateral cooperation between us to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and robotics,”Japanese State Minister for Foreign Affairs Kentaro Sonoura told the Times of India. The move follows the successful ratification of the Indo-Japanese civil nuclear agreement by Japan’s parliament in late 2017.

The two countries are launching a working group on cooperation between nuclear companies. “Japan’s intention is to start this quickly, possibly by the end of this month,” Sonoura said.