Lifeboat Foundation

There are quite a few companies working on developing drones for human transportation, but a new one has just jumped into the fray. With an almost fully developed prototype and plans to start producing them commercially next year, the aptly named Passenger Drone introduced itself by showing off a manned flight on its first prototype.

The company has been quietly working on its tech for the last three years and it has produced a lightweight, car-sized drone that can fly autonomously, be maneuvered remotely or be controlled manually. It’s lifted by 16 rotors and produces zero emissions. Passenger Drone says it plans to build five more prototypes and log over 1000 hours of flight time before proceeding with commercial production.

Continue reading “Passenger Drone lives up to its name with manned flight” »

More on this #transhumanism AI religion story, w/ some of my quotes in it. This article has 5500 comments on it!

Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski is emerging from the shadow of a self-driving lawsuit to create a robot god.

The present continues to take inspiration from science-fiction author Isaac Asimov’s visions of the future. In “The Last Question,” Asimov conceived of an artificial intelligence project known as Multivac. Its purpose was to solve for the inevitable heat death of the universe, but in the end, it becomes that answer.

Continue reading “Former Google Employee Engineering His Own A.I. Religion” »

US Senators today announced and agreement to pass legislation that approves driverless cars on US roadways, to be voted on in October.

Smartphone chip manufacturers are increasingly talking up the introduction of AI processor tech inside their latest SoCs, but why is this trend growing so fast?

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Autonomous vehicles could greatly reduce the risk of crashes. But the safety benefits are not yet proven and may not be known until AVs are widespread. What kind of regulatory approach could help balance innovation, risk, and uncertainty?

Continued advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to produce autonomous systems that will perceive, learn, decide, and act on their own. However, the effectiveness of these systems is limited by these machines’ current inability to explain their decisions and actions to human users. Explainable AI—especially explainable machine learning—will be essential if future users are to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage an emerging generation of artificially intelligent machine partners.

Will A.I. take us over, and one day look back on this time period as the dawn of their civilization? Richard Dawkins posits an interesting idea, or at the very least a premise to a good science-fiction novel…

When we come to artificial intelligence and the possibility of their becoming conscious we reach a profound philosophical difficulty. I am a philosophical naturalist. I am committed to the view that there’s nothing in our brains that violates the laws of physics, there’s nothing that could not in principle be reproduced in technology. It hasn’t been done yet, we’re probably quite a long way away from it, but I see no reason why in the future we shouldn’t reach the point where a human made robot is capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. We can feel pain, why shouldn’t they?

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Might Run the World Better Than Humans Do” »

Just five years ago, artificial intelligence-enabled computers could barely recognize images fed to them, much less analyze them anything like people can. But suddenly, they’ve turned the tables.

“In 2011 their error rate was 26 percent,” says Jeff Dean, chief of the Google Brain project, which along with other tech giants has helped lead a recent revolution in image recognition as well as speech recognition and self-driving cars. Now, he says, computers’ ability to view and analyze images (pictured) exceeds what human eyes can do.

“If you ’ d have told me that would be a possible just a few years ago, I would ’ ve never believed you,” Dean said during an appearance at a research event in Heidelberg, Germany. But thanks to AI-enabled computer vision advances, computers “can now see … and that has opened our eyes (about) what is possible.”

Continue reading “Google Brain chief: AI tops humans in computer vision, and healthcare will never be the same” »