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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,490

China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups

The U.S. intelligence community is upping its early-stage investments in machine-learning companies — but Beijing is pouring in far more.

A trio of new investments in Silicon Valley machine-learning startups shows that the U.S. intelligence community is deeply interested in artificial intelligence. But China is investing even more in these kinds of U.S. companies, and that has experts and intelligence officials worried.

Founded to foster new technology for spies, the 17-year-old In-Q-Tel has also helped boost commercial products. (Its investment in a little company called Keyhole helped produce Google Maps.) Compared to a venture capitalist firm whose early-stage investments are intended to make some money and get out, the nonprofit’s angle is longer term, less venture, more strategic, according to Charlie Greenbacker, In-Q-Tel’s technical product leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, analytics, and data science.

Here’s How to Get to Conscious Machines, Neuroscientists Say

Like most cerebral movies, Ex Machina leaves the conclusion up to the viewer: was Ava actually conscious? In doing so, it also cleverly avoids a thorny question that has challenged most AI-centric movies to date: what is consciousness, and can machines have it?

Hollywood producers aren’t the only people stumped. As machine intelligence barrels forward at breakneck speed—not only exceeding human performance on games such as DOTA and Go, but doing so without the need for human expertise—the question has once more entered the scientific mainstream.

Are machines on the verge of consciousness?

A New Futuristic Robot Lets Your Arms Lift Half a Ton

Have you ever lifted half a ton? With the Guardian GT, a set of robotic arms, you could do so with as little as two kilogram (five pounds) of force, allowing you to have superhuman strength.

Elon Musk recently made headlines asserting that, in order for us to both progress and survive as a species, we must merge with machines and become cyborgs. And, as climate change rages onwards and the biological difficulties of completing a human mission to Mars become ever more apparent, many are beginning to agree.

Robots could be used on FARMS by 2020

Engineers from Harper Adams University in Shropshire are working on machines that can autonomously plant seeds, weed, water and spray without a farmer needing to venture into the field.

Professor Blackmore said: ‘I am trying develop a completely new agricultural mechanisation system based on small smart machines.

‘We are developing laser weeding, droplet application where only 100 per cent of the chemical goes onto the target leaf, selective harvesting where we can grade the product at the point of harvest.

Why the rise of the robots won’t mean the end of work

For now, at least, we have better things to worry about.

Sources:
https://economics.mit.edu/files/11563
https://www.aeaweb.org/full_issue.php?doi=10.1257/jep.29.3#page=33
http://voxeu.org/article/how-computer-automation-affects-occupations
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/f…150428.pdf
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi…conomy.PDF
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth



https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut…oyment.pdf

Clips:






Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics have commentators worrying about the coming obsolescence of the human worker. Some in Silicon Valley are even calling for a basic minimum income provided by the government for everyone, under the assumption that work will become scarce. But many economists are skeptical of these claims, because the notion that the economy offers a fixed amount of work has been debunked time and time again over the centuries and current economic data show no signs of a productivity boom. Fortunately, we don’t need to divine the future of the labor market in order to prepare for it.

Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app.

Soviet children in 1967 dreamt of space travel, free ice-cream & robots doing homework in 2017 World News

Letters from a time capsule opened in the Russian city of Novorossiysk have revealed that Soviet students in 1967 believed their peers in 50 years time would be living on other planets and eating ice cream for free, while their homework will be done by machines.

Hundreds of time capsules were laid across the USSR in 1967 as the country celebrated half a century since the Russian Revolution, which eventually led to the creation of the Soviet state. Those messages, containing the accounts of Soviet people’s lives and their messages to descendants, are being opened in Russia this year, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the events of 1917.

READ MORE: Cruiser Aurora fires at Winter Palace 100 years ago, signals peak of Russian Revolution.

Seven minutes of terror: AI activists turn concerns about killer robots into a movie

As if the mere phrase “killer robots” weren’t scary enough, AI researchers and policy advocates have put together a video that combines present-tense AI and drone technologies with future-tense nightmares.

The disturbing seven-minute movie is being released to coincide with a pitch being made on Monday in Geneva during talks relating to the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or CCW.

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