Lifeboat Foundation

Anyone looking to build robots; Google has a deal for U!

Nikkei reported that Google’s Schaft, a Japanese robotics division acquired in 2013, is up for sale. Here’s a closer look at what Schaft has been working on.

I reported on this 3 months ago; and glad to see others seeing the light.

While debate has focused on moral and legal issues of autonomous weapons, too little attention has been paid to the material dangers of an AI-powered war.

Both Toyota and Honda would make sense as buyers. Toyota’s TRI has been ramping up on AI technology and Honda has been working on AI such as as Asimo for over a decade.

The car company may acquire Alphabet’s Boston Dynamics, known for a spry robot called Cheetah, and Schaft, a company working on humanoid robots, Tokyo’s Nikkei reported Wednesday. The potential acquisition would allow Toyota to make serious strides in its robotics division, while Alphabet could unload elements of its own underperforming robotics unit.

Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram by Nafeez Ahmed.

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons

An improved way of learning about neural networks.

This concept, by Italian designer Carlo Ratti Associati, features many futuristic designs such as transparent displays and robots boxing up your food.

With a new lobby, driverless cars could gain some legitimacy and legislation for the road. The question is whether they are good for the environment or not.

With the robot economy looming large in the coming decades, one solution to vanishing jobs may simply be to give people money regardless of whether or not they work.

That idea is called “basic income,” and it just gained the support of one of the tech world’s founding fathers, Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

“I think a basic income is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality,” Berners-Lee, who founded the Web in 1989, explained on a recent episode of The Economist podcast.

Continue reading “Here’s why the inventor of the Internet supports basic income” »

While all the focus has been on autonomous vehicles, one Belgian startup has been busily developing self-flying features for drones.