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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2220

Rethink Robotics co-founder and CTO, former CSAIL director and all-around robot luminary Rodney Brooks joined the Disrupt New York stage this afternoon to tackle some complex questions, ranging from robots place in the living room to the battlefield.

Brooks has a fair bit of experience in both categories, as a cofounder of iRobot, whose product offerings have ranging from vacuuming to bomb diffusion. And while his current company deals more in the realm of factory automation, a number of these ethical issues still clearly weigh heavily on the Australian roboticist.

It was a question about whether robots should be considered unfit for any human tasks that really caused Brooks to ponder their place in the world.

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The truck also offers “major environmental upsides,” Volvo said, since “gear changing, steering and speed are constantly optimized for low fuel consumption and emissions.”

Volvo plans to test the autonomous truck with Renova through the end of the year.

“There is amazing potential to transform the swift pace of technical developments in automation into practical benefits for customers and, more broadly, society in general,” Stenqvist said. “Our self-driving refuse truck is leading the way in this field globally, and one of several exciting autonomous innovations we are working with right now.”

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The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratories and Lockheed Martin have demonstrated a mixed formation of manned and unmanned F-16s in a simulated combat environment.

The Have Raider demonstration at Edwards Air Force Base in California included two phases, Lockheed announced on April 10, 2017. The first phase, Have Raider I, focused on formation-flying. Have Raider II sent the pilotless F-16 on a mock bombing run through “dynamic” enemy defenses.

“This demonstration is an important milestone in AFRL’s maturation of technologies needed to integrate manned and unmanned aircraft in a strike package,” Capt. Andrew Petry, an AFRL engineer, said in a Lockheed press release.

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Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it’s your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far?

Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making”. He responded: “It’s a day that’s here and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things”.

Roberts might have been referring to the recent case of Eric Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison at least in part by the recommendation of a private company’s secret proprietary software. Loomis, who has a criminal history and was sentenced for having fled the police in a stolen car, now asserts that his right to due process was violated as neither he nor his representatives were able to scrutinise or challenge the algorithm behind the recommendation.

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