Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,071

When I joined the artificial intelligence company Clarifai in early 2017, you could practically taste the promise in the air. My colleagues were brilliant, dedicated, and committed to making the world a better place.

We founded Clarifai 4 Good where we helped students and charities, and we donated our software to researchers around the world whose projects had a socially beneficial goal. We were determined to be the one AI company that took our social responsibility seriously.

I never could have predicted that two years later, I would have to quit this job on moral grounds. And I certainly never thought it would happen over building weapons that escalate and shift the paradigm of war.

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Researchers at Cornell University in the US have created wirelessly powered walking robot bugs that are tiny enough to be injected through an ordinary hypodermic needle.

The microscopic robots, which are each just 70 microns long, were produced using a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialised silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks.

“The really high-level explanation of how we make them is we’re taking technology developed by the semiconductor industry and using it to make tiny robots,” explained Marc Miskin, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who developed the techniques whilst a post-doc at Cornell University with his colleagues professors Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen and researcher Alejandro Cortese.

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It won’t be simple. As with the advent of the car, many serious implications will be emergent, and the harshest effects borne by communities with the least powerful voices. We need to move our gaze from individuals to systems to communities, and back again. We must bring together diverse expertise, including workers and citizens, to develop a framework that health systems can use to anticipate and address issues. This framework needs an explicit mandate to consider and anticipate the social consequences of AI — and to keep watch over its effects. That is the best way to ensure that health technologies meet the needs of all, and not just those in Silicon Valley.

Health authorities are overlooking risks to systems and society in their evaluations of new digital technologies, says Melanie Smallman.

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YORKSHIRE, U.K. — 7 MARCH, 2019 — Optalysys Ltd. (@ Optalysys), a disruptive technology company developing light-speed optical AI systems announced today that the world’s first optical co-processor system, the FT: X 2000, is now available to order.

Optical processing comes at a pivotal time of change in computing. Demand for AI is exploding just as silicon-based processing is facing the fundamental problem of Moore’s Law breaking down. Optalysys is addressing this problem with its revolutionary optical processing technology — enabling new levels of AI performance for high resolution image and video-based applications.

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Going forward into our exponential future…

“By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution.

Today is a special day for me. My AI assistant Ava scheduled few hours aside from my otherwise busy daily lineup to relive select childhood and adolescence memories recreated in virtual reality with a help of a newly developed AI technique ‘Re: Live’. Ava is my smart home assistant, too. I can rearrange furniture in any room, for example, just by thinking. Digital landscape wallpaper is changed by Ava by knowing my preferences and sensing my moods.

I still like to sleep in an old-fashioned natural way from time to time, even though it’s now optional with accelerated sleep simulation and other sleep bypassing technologies. So, when I opt to sleep, I like falling asleep and waking up on a virtual cloud projected directly to my consciousness, as most VR experiences are streamed via optogenetics.

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A startup called CogitAI has developed a platform that lets companies use reinforcement learning, the technique that gave AlphaGo mastery of the board game Go.

Gaining experience: AlphaGo, an AI program developed by DeepMind, taught itself to play Go by practicing. It’s practically impossible for a programmer to manually code in the best strategies for winning. Instead, reinforcement learning let the program figure out how to defeat the world’s best human players on its own.

Drug delivery: Reinforcement learning is still an experimental technology, but it is gaining a foothold in industry. DeepMind has talked of using it to optimize the performance of data centers and wind turbines. Amazon recently launched a reinforcement-learning platform, but it is aimed more at researchers and academics. CogitAI’s first commercial customers include those working in robotics for drug manufacturing. Its platform lets the robot figure out the optimal way to process drug orders.

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