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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,108

One small step: What will the moon look like in 50 years?

The immediate future of the moon will see us build on those first steps taken in July 1969. We’ll send more robotic landers and rovers to conduct experiments on our behalf. China already has another Chang’e mission planned for this year and India, too, will look to land on the surface before the end of the year. In our stead, the robots will search for water and explore the lunar highlands for the resources necessary to establish a more permanent presence.

Looking further ahead, we’ll prepare to truly colonize the moon. We’ll mine the sublunar layers and smelt its rock for metals and oxygen. We’ll live at its poles, erecting inflatable shelters, communications centers and laboratories, and performing experiments not possible from the surface of the Earth. Eventually, we’ll depart for further into the cosmos and find our way to Mars.

But it starts with the moon.

Singularity University: Rearranging Atoms With Ralph Merkle

“If you rearrange the atoms in coal, you get diamond. If you rearrange the atoms in sand, you get silicon. How atoms are arranged is fundamental to all material aspects of life,” says Ralph Merkle, currently senior research chair at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He’s a large, pear-shaped man who, as he speaks, waves his arms far more energetically than his physique would imply. He modulates his tone dramatically for effect, often humorous.

Those words kick off day 2 at the Singularity University Executive Program. The curriculum divides roughly into three days of intensive classroom introductions to critical tech domains, three days of visits to Silicon Valley companies, and two days of workshops devoted to specific industries, plus a final day to wrap up. On Saturday I settled gingerly into a lightly padded metal chair for highly compressed, sometimes super technical, up-to-the-minute overviews of artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, computing, and quantum computing. (Forecast: sunny! With patchy clouds and fog.) That took until dinner time with only a quick break for lunch, which was filled with presentations by graduates of SU’s nine-week summer program.

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What Is Neuromorphic Computing (Cognitive Computing)

This video is the eleventh in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing what cognitive computing is and the impact it will have on the field of computing.

[0:28–5:09] Starting off we’ll discuss, what cognitive computing is, more specifically – the difference between current computing Von Neuman architecture and more biologically representative neuromorphic architecture and how these two paired together will yield massive performance and efficiency gains!

[5:09–10:46] Following that we’ll discuss, the benefits of cognitive computing systems further as well as current cognitive computing initiatives, TrueNorth and Loihi.

[10:46–17:11] To conclude we’ll extrapolate and discuss the future of cognitive computing in terms of brain simulation, artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces!

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The First Complete Brain Wiring Diagram of Any Species Is Here

For a humble, microscopic worm with only 302 neurons, C. elegans has had a lot of firsts. It was the first multicellular animal to have its whole genome sequenced. It was also the spark that lit the connectome fire—the revolutionary idea that mapping the entirety of connections among neurons will unveil secrets of our minds, memory, and consciousness. And if the connectomists are to be believed, a map of individual brains may be the blueprint that will one day hurtle AI into human-level intelligence, or reconstruct an entire human mind in digital form.

More than 30 years ago, a pioneering group of scientists painstakingly traced and reconstructed the roundworm’s neural wiring by hand. The “heroic” effort, unaided by modern computers and brain-mapping algorithms, resulted in the first connectome in 1986.

Yet the “mind of the worm” map had significant lapses. For one, it only focused on one sex, the hermaphrodite—a “female” equivalent that can self-fertilize. This makes it hard to tell which connections are universal for the species, and which are dependent on sex and reproduction. For another, because the effort relied entirely on human beings who get tired, bored, and mess up, the map wasn’t entirely accurate. Even with multiple rounds of subsequent refinements, errors could linger, which would royally screw up any interpretation of results using these maps.