Robotics/AI – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Dec 15
2016

Rocket AI: 2016’s Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype – The Mission – Medium

It’s 3 AM on a warm Thursday night in December, a usually quiet street in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona is bustling with activity, as a cohort of 200 artificial intelligence researchers leave in single-file out of a sprawling yellow mansion. The police count heads as the researchers film the procession on their phones and tweet #rocketai.

The guest list looked like the results of a search for most popular AI authors on arXiv. Every major corporate and academic AI lab was in attendance — Google DeepMind, Open AI, Facebook AI Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT, U of Montreal, as well as a multitude of other AI start-ups and investors from around the world — all in town for the 30th annual NIPS conference.

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) has become the academic and industry AI conference, growing near-exponentially over the past decade as corporate sponsors fight to keep the loyalty of their engineers and aggressively recruit others. Corporates plan months in advance to parade their capital expenditure and technical talent. Tickets for the main conference, despite nearly doubling in quantity since last year, sold out more than 6 weeks before the event.

Dec 15
2016

Autonomous Wings Could be the Future of Aviation

Scientists at NASA are designing airplane wings that can change shape mid-flight. Much like a bird’s feathers, the wings would move autonomously giving the pilot an incredible amount of control in the air.

Dec 15
2016

The Roomba of snowblowers

This machine will remove snow all by itself.

Dec 15
2016

Westworld Is Strikingly Real: AI Could Be Conscious and Unpredictable

Westworld recently wrapped its first season with a few stunning twists and a stunning statistic: With a 12-million-viewer average, it was the most-watched first season of an original HBO show in the network’s history. Westworld concerns a perverse theme park, styled in the fashion of the American Old West. The park’s “hosts,” artificially intelligent beings physically indistinguishable from humans, begin to remember the horrifying experiences inflicted on them by the park’s “guests,” the humans who pay to visit and do as they please, including raping and killing hosts.

Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the fictional cofounder of Westworld, built the park’s hosts with the ability to improvise and make decisions based on their environment—a vision of AI strikingly similar to the one held by Simon Stringer, the director of the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. Stringer is one of the field’s leading thinkers, and like Ford, he says machines with some internalized spatial and causal model of the world could achieve an intuitive, human-like intelligence.

In my conversation with Stringer about Westworld, we discussed what makes AI seem human, the potential threat AI poses to humans, the role of self-modifying programming, and the importance of the Turing Test.

Dec 15
2016

Artificial intelligence creeps into daily life

San Francisco (AFP) — Mark Zuckerberg envisions a software system inspired by the “Iron Man” character Jarvis as a virtual butler managing his household.

The Facebook founder’s dream is about artificial intelligence, which is slowly but surely creeping into our daily lives, no longer just science fiction.

Artificial intelligence or AI is getting a foothold in people’s homes, starting with the Amazon devices like its Echo speaker which links to a personal assistant “Alexa” to answer questions and control connected devices such as appliances or light bulbs.

Dec 15
2016

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence on Livestream

Recently, New York University hosted a conference of philosophers, scientists and engineers discussing the topic of “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.” The conference was a virtual who’s who of artificial intelligence and machine ethics…

Dec 15
2016

The Great A.I. Awakening

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

Dec 15
2016

How to control a robotic arm with your mind — no implanted electrodes required

Research subjects at the University of Minnesota fitted with a specialized noninvasive EEG brain cap were able to move a robotic arm in three dimensions just by imagining moving their own arms (credit: University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering)

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a “major breakthrough” that allows people to control a robotic arm in three dimensions, using only their minds. The research has the potential to help millions of people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases.

The open-access study is published online today in Scientific Reports, a Nature research journal.

Dec 14
2016

Japan Has a Radically Different Approach to AI

And it could result in wild new technologies.

Dec 14
2016

Uber draws ire of California DMV for testing self-driving cars in S.F. without permit

Ooops.

SACRAMENTO, Dec. 14 (UPI) — The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a warning of sorts to rideshare company Uber on Wednesday, apparently for wading too far into the waters of testing self-driving vehicles in San Francisco.

The department issued a statement Wednesday that said it “encourages the responsible exploration of self-driving cars.”

“We have a permitting process in place to ensure public safety as this technology is being tested,” the DMV said in the statement. “Twenty manufacturers have already obtained permits to test hundreds of cars on California roads. Uber shall do the same.”