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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2056

Google ends Pentagon contract to develop AI for recognising people in drone videos after 4,000 employees signed an open letter saying that Google’s involvement is against the company’s “moral and ethical responsibility”.

Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires.

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business.

Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company, Greene said, adding that the decision was made at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work. The company plans to unveil new ethical principles about its use of AI next week. A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about Greene’s comments.

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Someday, AI robot assistants might be able to make you a coffee after watching you do it.

MIT CSAIL

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Toronto are teaching AI to do household chore using a Sims inspired virtual simulator. While household chores are dreary, if not particularly complex for humans, for AI, making a cup of coffee or turning on the toaster is a bit more involved. Watching TV from the sofa, for instance, requires an AI to break the task down to specific steps, like: “walk to the TV,” “switch on the TV,” “walk to the sofa,” and “sit on the sofa.”

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It’s a philosophy best exemplified by Wood’s book released last month, Transcending Politics: A Technoprogressive Roadmap to a Comprehensively Better Future, which starts by declaring politics “broken,” technology as something that “risks making matters worse,” and deems transhumanism the force that can fix it all “comprehensively”:

David Wood, a transhumanist who co-founded Symbian in 1998, is working to develop a transhumanist superdemocracy that uses the best parts of artificial intelligence and communication to draw on the likes of Zoltan Istvan and Peter Thiel in a new movement to create longevity and sustainable abundance for all.

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Russian researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (TISNCM), and the National University of Science and Technology MISIS have optimized the design of a nuclear battery generating power from the beta decay of nickel-63, a radioactive isotope. Their new battery prototype packs about 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram, which is more than in any other nuclear battery based on nickel-63, and 10 times more than the specific energy of commercial chemical cells. The paperwas published in the journal Diamond and Related Materials.

Conventional batteries

Ordinary batteries powering clocks, flashlights, toys, and other compact autonomous electrical devices use the energy of so-called redox chemical reactions. In them, electrons are transferred from one electrode to another via an electrolyte. This gives rise to a potential difference between the electrodes. If the two battery terminals are then connected by a conductor, electrons start flowing to remove the potential difference, generating an electric current. Chemical batteries, also known as galvanic cells, are characterized by a high power density — that is, the ratio between the power of the generated current and the volume of the battery. However, chemical cells discharge in a relatively short time, limiting their applications in autonomous devices. Some of these batteries, called accumulators, are rechargeable, but even they need to be replaced for charging. This may be dangerous, as in the case of a cardiac pacemaker, or even impossible, if the battery is powering a spacecraft.

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Forget zombies or killer robots – the most likely doomsday scenario in the near future is the threat of superbugs. Bacteria are evolving resistance to our best antibiotics at an alarming rate, so developing new ones is a crucial area of study. Now, inspired by a natural molecule produced by marine microorganisms, researchers at North Carolina State University have synthesized a new compound that shows promising antibacterial properties against resistant bugs.

Decades of overuse and overprescription of antibiotics has led to more and more bacteria becoming resistant to them, and the situation is so dire that a recent report warned that they could be killing up to 10 million people a year by 2050. Worse still, the bugs seem to be on schedule, with the ECDC reporting that our last line of defense has already begun to fail in large numbers.

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The new field of biohybrid robotics involves the use of living tissue within robots, rather than just metal and plastic.

Researchers have developed a novel method of growing whole muscles from hydrogel sheets impregnated with myoblasts. They then incorporated these muscles as antagonistic pairs into a biohybrid robot, which successfully performed manipulations of objects. This approach overcame earlier limitations of a short functional life of the muscles and their ability to exert only a weak force, paving the way for more advanced biohybrid robots.

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In 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collides with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system in an attempt to measurably shift its orbit.

ESA’s Hera mission, now under study, will examine the aftermath of this impact to help determine whether humans can deflect threatening asteroids.

Hera will also demonstrate the ability to operate at close proximity around a low-gravity asteroid with some on-board autonomy similar in scope to a self-driving car, going on to deploy Europe’s first deep-space CubeSats, and potentially also a micro-lander, to test out a new multi-point intersatellite link technology.

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