Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2376

CEO Harald Krueger has announced a third electric model in their BMW i series: a self-driving, intelligent luxury car named i Next, to be released by 2021.

Shortly after the announcement of its first two electric models i3 and i8, BMW is confirming its release of a third model in its “BMW i” series. Their first self-driving car, called i Next, is an autonomous, intelligent luxury car which will be released in 2021.

“People often ask me, when will we be driving autonomously? My answer is: We already can,” CEO Harald Krueger said. “A BMW test vehicle autonomously completed a lap of the Hockenheimring racetrack back in 2006. In 2011, a BMW drove on the A9 autobahn from Munich towards Nuremberg — without any driver intervention. It will be a while before these cars reach series maturity, also because the proper legal framework for customers and manufacturers has not yet been decided.”

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Today’s emergence of nano-micro hybrid structures with almost biological complexity is of fundamental interest. Our ability to adapt intelligently to the challenges has ramifications all the way from fundamentally changing research itself, over applications critical to future survival, to posing small and medium as well as truly globally existential dangers.

In this article I publish suppressed information that has been actually officially published, but is effectively kept unavailable (after being rejected from all higher impact factor journals in the relevant fields because the text is too critical, it was officially published [1], but the title, corresponding author list and text was altered, no proof copy having been given to the actual author, and it can also not be as normally downloaded, even for researchers who should have access. Since this text is highly interesting and relevant far beyond the narrow engineering sciences, I allow myself to actually publish the most interesting and critical parts (slightly edited) in a series of short posts. If citing, please cite [1] anyway in order to support the author.)

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A hybrid hydrostatic transmission and human-safe haptic telepresence robot (credit: Disney Research)

A human-safe lifelike telepresence robot with the delicacy and precision needed to pick up an egg without breaking it or thread a sewing needle has been developed by researchers at Disney Research, the Catholic University of America, and Carnegie Mellon University.

The secret: a hydrostatic transmission that precisely drives robot arms, offering extreme precision with almost no friction or play.

The hybrid transmission design also makes it possible to halve the number of bulky hydraulic lines that a fully hydraulic system would require and allows for making its robotic limbs lighter and smaller, said John P. Whitney, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, who led the development of the transmission while an associate research scientist at Disney Research.

Continue reading “A robot with human-like grace and precision” | >

The use of cryogenics, for now, borders on science fiction—but that hasn’t stopped scientists and wealthy enthusiasts from trying to make it a reality.

Humai, an L.A.-based robotics company, hopes to freeze human brains after death with the expectation that technology will soon catch up—allowing the brain to be resurrected in an artificial body. Neuroscientists have excessively cautioned about lending cryogenics credence, but scientific research has blurred the definition of death and the consensus on when it occurs.

For centuries, death was called at the moment the heart stopped beating. However, medicine has evolved to the point that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is now a common life-saving technique incorporated in basic first aid training, along with more advanced forms of resuscitation—like defibrillators—that can restart the heart. Several cases have been cited where a person under cardiac arrest has been brought back to life hours after they’ve technically died, when cooling processes and correct resuscitation procedures are implemented. According to a 2012 study published in Nature, skeletal muscle stem cells can retain their ability to regenerate for up to 17 days after death, redefining death as occurring in steps rather than at one single moment.

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Thinking about a change of career? Google’s got a heck of a job offer for you. They’ll potentially pay up to $40,000 a year for you to not drive one of their autonomous cars. That’s based on base pay for $20 per hour working full time hours (40 hours a week).

There has to be some kind of catch, you say? Of course there is. Google isn’t just planning on throwing money at people to ride around with an AI chauffeur while sucking on slurpees and binge-watching Netflix from the non-driver’s seat.

No, you’ll actually have to pay attention. Google’s cars have logged plenty of hours on real roads, but there are still going to be times when the car doesn’t know how to handle a situation — say, sharing a narrow section of road with an oncoming bus. Since there’s no way of knowing when you’ll need to lend a helping hand (or foot), you need to be ever vigilant behind the wheel.

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In the US we have an old saying “fight fire with fire” and in this case “fight bots with bot/s” It should be noted, having a bot or any type of AI on your network is not necessarily going to prevent 100% of the hacking and Cyber threats today due to the weak connected infrastructure across the net, etc. However, to counter attack the pesky bots that we’re seeing around online ads, click monitoring can be limited by AI.

Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that’s costing companies a boatload of money.

That’s one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites.

Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas’s Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report, including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said.

Continue reading “Half the Web’s traffic comes from bots, and that’s costing you more than you think” | >