David Eagleman, the science adviser for HBO’s TV series “Westworld,” shares his thoughts on the future of AI and whether robots will ever become conscious.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,154
A spacecraft, spinning in Earth’s orbit, reaches inside itself. One of its four arms pulls out a length of polymer pipe that has been 3D-printed inside the body of the machines. All four of the spacecraft’s arms are securing pieces together as it builds a new space station right there in orbit.
This surreal project, called Archinaut, is the future vision of space manufacturing company Made In Space. The company promises a future of large imaging arrays, kilometer-scale communications tools, and big space stations all built off-planet by smart robots.
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Autonomous deliveries and drones
UPS execs insist that the UPS driver is a core element to its success and the face of the company, but they have tested the use of drone deliveries for some applications including dropping essential supplies in Rwanda and demonstrating how medicine could be delivered to islands. In rural areas, where drones have open air to execute deliveries and the distance between stops makes it challenging for the drivers to be efficient, drones launched from the roofs of UPS trucks offer a solid solution to cut costs and improve service. Drones could also be deployed in UPS sorting facilities and warehouses to get items on high shelves or in remote areas.
The technology used by UPS generates a cache of data that opens up even more opportunities to become more efficient, improve the customer experience, innovate delivery solutions, and more. From optimizing the UPS network to driving operational improvements, big data and artificial intelligence are at the core of UPS’s business performance.
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Pasadena-based artificial intelligence tech startup Oben is about to roll out its first product, PAI (Personal AI), a consumer app designed to let users create an AI-driven avatar with their own look and voice.
Its underlying AI technology is already getting some select professional use. Overall, Oben’s team believes AI can have a wide range of uses including in virtual and augmented reality, gaming, content creation and retail.
With PAI, users essentially “teach” the app about themselves. “You take a selfie, and a visual avatar is ready in the app,” Oben CEO and co-founder Nikhil Jain explained, adding that users can then customize their look. Plus, simply by speaking a few sentences, users can teach their avatar to talk or sing. These features can be used on social media and the like.
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Onstage at the launch of Amazon’s Alexa Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition to build AI that can chat like a human, the winners of last year’s challenge delivered a friendly warning to 2018’s hopefuls: your bot will mess up, it will say something offensive, and it will be taken offline. Elizabeth Clark, a member of last year’s champion Sounding Board team from the University of Washington, was onstage with her fellow researchers to share what they’d learned from their experience. What stuck out, she said, were the bloopers.
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But there’s a recent lesson worth learning from. Globalization and automation caused upheaval in the manufacturing industry from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and millions of factory workers lost their jobs. The disruption to communities is still being felt, and is arguably at the root of a lot of the biggest social and economic problems of this era.
Some big ideas are starting to percolate. But less dramatic ones might work, too.
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If your understanding of A.I. and Machine Learning is a big question mark, then this is the blog post for you. Here, I gradually increase your Awesomenessicity ™ by gluing inspirational videos together with friendly text.
Sit down and relax. These videos take time, and if they don’t inspire you to continue to the next section, fair enough.
However, if you find yourself at the bottom of this article, you’ve earned your well-rounded knowledge and passion for this new world. Where you go from there is up to you.
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