Lifeboat Foundation

Verizon has joined the likes of Facebook, Google and fellow telecommunications giant AT&T in exploring the potential of internet-connected unmanned aircraft. While its vision involves expanding 4G coverage across the US, it has an immediate focus on shoring up communications for first responders in emergency situations, and recently carried out trials to that effect.

Verizon has dubbed the initiative Airborne LTE Operations (ALO) and says it has actually been in the pipeline for around two years. The company has been working to integrate internet connectivity into unmanned aerial vehicles and hook them up to its 4G network, daisy chaining coverage and beaming it down to unconnected areas in the process. This is similar to how Facebook hopes its Aquila drones will work.

Verizon recently teamed up with company American Aerospace Technologies to see how using drones as gliding cell towers could have an impact in disaster relief scenarios. In a simulated mission in New Jersey, the team set a drone with a 17-foot (5.2 m) wingspan in flight to put the onboard technologies through their paces.

You often hear people say we’re in the early days of artificial intelligence, probably the most important tech theme of the next century. It’s important to put real measurements on improvements to the technology. Google tried to do just that at a press event in San Francisco this morning. Here are the top lines:

• Image recognition has improved to 93.9% accuracy from 89.6% in 2014. It’s also more detailed; it can detect colors and analyze the content in images with more than one subject.

Continue reading “Google puts some numbers on its artificial intelligence progress” »

Amazing Stories has resumed publishing original science fiction, and they just happened to have led with a story of mine. Amazing Stories was the first SF magazine, dating to 1926, and was edited by Hugo Gernsback (as in “Hugo Awards”). My story contains speculation about human-AI interaction, and the future of user interfaces (disguised as comedy).

Posting this with Eric Klien’s permission, as it’s self-promotional.

Never trust an app in the form of a woman you don’t know, even if you are a hipster knight. A Gernsback Contest winning short story.

Continue reading “Bob the Hipster Knight” »

This robot can cook for you – and clean up afterwards.

It’s Friday Bitches, grab your favorite robot and have a drink…

Via Cyberpunk.

Got a bee shortage? No problem, DARPA has you covered.

Following the news that the honeybee is now officially an endangered species as “colony collapse disorder” accelerates, it seems that a Harvard research team has the solution – robotic honeybees. Instead of attempting to save the bees by reducing the use of pesticides or revising safety standards for cell phone radiation, the focus has shifted to replacing the bees altogether. Harvard University researchers, led by engineering professor Robert Wood have been tweaking “RoboBees” since their initial introduction in 2009. The bee-sized robots made of titanium and plastic represent a breakthrough in the field of micro-aerial vehicles. The size of the components needed to create flying robots were previously too heavy to make a such a small structure lightweight enough to achieve flight. Current models weigh only 80 mg and have been fitted with sensors that detect light and wind velocity.

Researchers claim that the bees could artificially pollinate entire fields of crops and will soon be able to be programmed to live in an artificial hive, coordinate algorithms and communicate among themselves about methods of pollination and the locations of particular crops. In addition, RoboBees have been suggested for other uses including searching disaster sites for survivors, monitoring traffic, and “military and police applications.” These applications could include using RoboBees to “scout for insurgents” on battlefields abroad or allowing police and SWAT teams to use the micro-robots to gather footage inside buildings.

Continue reading “Project Originally Funded By DARPA Seeks To Replace Bees With Tiny, Winged Robots” »

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people are convinced that we are living in a computer simulation. And now they’re trying to do something about it.

At least two of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires are pouring money into efforts to break humans out of the simulation that they believe that it is living in, according to a new report.

Philosophers have long been concerned about how we can know that our world isn’t just a very believable simulation of a real one. But concern about that has become ever more active in recent years, as computers and artificial intelligence have advanced.

Continue reading “Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it” »

When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type.

“Roman,” she wrote. “This is your digital monument.”

It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.

Continue reading “When her best friend died, she used artificial intelligence to keep talking to him” »

Lee Teschler

Executive Editor

@dw_LeeTeschler

Continue reading “Robots will build spacecraft in orbit” »