Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla’s new autopilot system is relying on the cutting edge of machine learning, connectivity and mapping data.

While Tesla’s new hands-free driving is drawing a lot of interest this week, it’s the technology behind-the-scenes of the company’s newly-enabled autopilot service that should be getting more attention.

At an event on Wednesday Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk explained that the company’s new autopilot service is constantly learning and improving thanks to machine learning algorithms, the car’s wireless connection, and detailed mapping and sensor data that Tesla collects.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8

During a recent United Nations meeting about emerging global risks, political representatives from around the world were warned about the threats posed by artificial intelligence and other future technologies.

The event, organized by Georgia’s UN representatives and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), was set up to foster discussion about the national and international security risks posed by new technologies, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) materials.

Continue reading “Experts Warn UN Panel About the Dangers of Artificial Superintelligence” »

Big-data analysis consists of searching for buried patterns that have some kind of predictive power. But choosing which “features” of the data to analyze usually requires some human intuition. In a database containing, say, the beginning and end dates of various sales promotions and weekly profits, the crucial data may not be the dates themselves but the spans between them, or not the total profits but the averages across those spans.

MIT researchers aim to take the human element out of big-data analysis, with a new system that not only searches for patterns but designs the feature set, too. To test the first prototype of their system, they enrolled it in three data science competitions, in which it competed against human teams to find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data sets. Of the 906 teams participating in the three competitions, the researchers’ “Data Science Machine” finished ahead of 615.

In two of the three competitions, the predictions made by the Data Science Machine were 94 percent and 96 percent as accurate as the winning submissions. In the third, the figure was a more modest 87 percent. But where the teams of humans typically labored over their prediction algorithms for months, the Data Science Machine took somewhere between two and 12 hours to produce each of its entries.

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Autonomous systems for land, sea, and sky prowled the floor at this week’s AUSA conference in Washington.

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MIT made a table-like robot that can build with blocks. No humans needed.

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Volvo’s been bullish about self-driving vehicles, but it’s much more coy when it comes to electric cars. The company’s latest XC90 has a hybrid edition, and there’s an existing V60 plug-in, but nothing fully electric. Finally, the Swedish auto-maker is ready to go all in, confirming an all-electric vehicle will go on sale in 2019, plus plans to offer hybrid versions of every car in its range, alongside a new “series 40” range of smaller electrified cars. That’s still quite a wait for the full EV, and the hybrids might not show up until 2017, but as the Wall Street Journal suggests, Volvo might have been spurred on to make the announcement by the recent VW scandal around diesel engines.

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Self-driving cars require an incredible amount of information to operate safely. Tesla and Elon Musk know this well.

Tesla Motors formally launched its long-awaited Autopilot feature on Wednesday, which is not quite a self-driving car, but rather a higher degree of autonomy. One of the new features of Autopilot: Tesla is creating high-precision digital maps of the Earth using GPS.

See also: I went hands-free in Tesla’s Model S on Autopilot, even though I wasn’t supposed to.

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Tesla Motors Inc.’s newest software brings elements of autonomous driving to some of its Model S cars. With updated software, the vehicles can help drivers stay in their highway lane or change lanes for them.

The car can also parallel park for the driver or warn when an object such as another car is too close the side of the Model S, the company said in post on its website.

The maker of luxury electric vehicles has highlighted many high-tech features on its models, such as the industry’s largest touch screen and robust wireless access that allows for software upgrades, such as this update to version 7.0. But it has lagged some rival high-end automakers and even a few mainstream brands in its use of driver-assist technology such as lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control. Tesla’s new system is the first to include automated lane changing.

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Professor Nick Bostrom briefed political representatives from around the world on the national and international security risks posed by artificial intelligence and other future technologies at a UN event last week.

Professor Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School, was invited to speak at a special side event examining the challenges posed by chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) materials and weapons, held during the UN’s 2015 General Assembly meeting.

The event was organised by Georgia’s UN representatives, in collaboration with the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), with the aim of understanding the implications of new technologies, ensuring responsible development and mitigating against misuse.

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