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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,555

A.I. guardian-angel vehicles will dominate auto industry, says Toyota exec

A beautiful thought — can you imagine your auto protecting you from criminals?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — While much of the media attention around autonomous vehicle technology has been focused on fully self-driving cars, consumers shouldn’t expect cars that act like chauffeurs any time soon.

The vast majority of mainstream vehicles adopting autonomous driving features will be controlled by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or “guardian angels” that learn over time, Gil Pratt, CEO Toyota Research Institute, told reporters and analysts last week.

Speaking at the New England Motor Press Association Technology Conference at MIT, Pratt said that 30,000 motor vehicle fatalities occur in the U.S. each year. That number may seem high, but as a whole, U.S. drivers are excellent at avoiding crashes.

Entrepreneur and CEO Martine Rothblatt thinks we’ll 3D print new bodies and live forever on the internet

When you think about the headliners at a music festival, it’s unlikely that the first person to pop into your head would be Martine Rothblatt—the founder of Sirius XM, the one-time highest-paid female CEO in the world who made a robot clone of her wife, and the founder of the Terasem religion, which believes we’ll live forever by uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But Moogfest, a four-day citywide festival of music and technology in Durham, North Carolina, was not the average music festival. Unlike other festivals that make cursory overtures to technology, Moogfest dedicated as much time to explaining how technology influences creativity as to the creative output itself, even listing headline ‘technologists’ alongside its top-billed musical acts.

On the festival’s second day, Friday 20 May, Rothblatt took the stage to talk to a packed house at Durham’s Carolina Theater, in an atmosphere that felt far more like a TED talk than a music fest. Rothblatt, who is transgender, discussed the contentious North Carolina HB2 law, which bans transgender people from using public bathrooms of the gender they identify with; the idea that creativity would be better encouraged by free college tuition; and how she got to a point where she and her company, United Therapeutics, can actually think about 3D printing new body parts, and leaving our bodies behind—if we want. “You want to win more than you want to live,” she told the rapt crowd. “You yell ‘Geronimo’ as you jump crazily into monopolistic opposition.”

Quartz sat down with Rothblatt after her talk to chat more about her thoughts on AI, living forever, free education, and what happens to the soul once we’ve made digital copies of ourselves.

Odds are we’re living in a simulation, says Elon Musk

This is one of those “therotical” topics that many of us have had at some point in our lives with our engineering team pals, or with our research department/ lab buddies. Fun to see Elon Musk share his views on this topic. Who knows; maybe? Last week, we learned that black holes may be nothing more that a multi-layer hologram in space.

“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode’s Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely we’re just characters living inside a simulation.

The Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky got half-way through asking Musk if he thought our existence was simulated before the Tesla CEO jumped in to finish his question for him. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk explained. “You’ve thought about this?” Topolsky asked. “A lot,” Musk replied. “It got to the point where every conversation was the AI / simulation conversation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.”

His argument — one presumably honed in the soothing waters of many a jaccuzi — goes that the incredibly fast advancement of video game technology indicates we’ll be capable of creating a fully lifelike simulation of existence in a short span of time. In 40 years, Musk explained, we’ve gone from Pong to massively multiplayer online games with millions of simultaneous players, games with photorealistic graphics, and stand now on the cusp of a new wave of virtual and augmented reality experiences.

Russia Building Robot Super-Soldier: Terminator Meets Avatar

Ivan made it in the major news this week again.

As if the world didn’t have enough problems, Russia is apparently creating a scary humanoid robotic soldier, affectionately being called “Ivan the Terminator.” Thank God they didn’t call it the T-800. The idea of the robot is to eventually replace humans on the battlefield. For now, these robotic avatars are remote-controlled using special suits worn by a human, but you know that won’t last long. One day they will be doing stuff on their own.

ivan_robot_1zoom in This robot (shown below) will accurately repeat the exact movement of the user by reading the fine motor skills of the neck, shoulder, hands and fingers. So if you raise your rifle to fire and pull the trigger, the robot will do just that. But it isn’t limited to just that kind of work, it can even drive a vehicle by automatically scanning the road for blockages or barriers. So it could give chase to enemies.

Artificial intelligence brings new life to old photos

A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence.

Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent’s house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one.

Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don’t exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.