Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,584

There’s a rift emerging among the members of the tech super-geniuses club. It’s not about matters of human intelligence, though. Physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla /SpaceX founder Elon Musk have both recently warned that our sci-fi nightmares about artificial intelligence could actually come true in our lifetimes.

Here’s what Musk, for instance, said during a recent stop at MIT:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. Our biggest existential threat is probably that … There should be some regulatory oversight at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

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On the cusp of a far-reaching revolution thanks to the advances in artificial intelligence and computing, it’s easy to feel a bit…concerned. Well, maybe more than just a bit, especially if you consider societal attitudes about technology.

Truth is that the way we perceive the world around us is conditioned to a degree by the environment we grow up within. There’s also little doubt that certain cultures are more open and adaptive to technology than others. But one could argue that the potential enhancements that AI could usher in are so dramatically advanced that even the earliest adopters within Silicon Valley aren’t really prepared for what’s coming.

So it’s safe to ask, before this great wave of artificial intelligence arrives and we become fully integrated with it, shouldn’t we strive to change our inherited mental models and let go of antiquated thinking patterns?

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The truck has smart systems including radars, cameras and active speed regulators and works without a human driver — although one has to be in the driver’s seat and take the wheel if necessary.

The standard Mercedes-Benz Actros, fitted with the intelligent “Highway Pilot” system, travelled 14 kilometres (about nine miles) on the A8 motorway, with a driver in the cabin but his hands off the wheel.

“Today’s premiere is a further important step towards the market maturity of autonomously driving trucks -– and towards the safe, sustainable road freight transport of the future,” said Wolfgang Bernhard, board member responsible for Daimler Trucks and Buses.

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A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a SoftBank, Corp., store, which develops the robots. According to the police report, the man said he was angry at the attitude of one of the store clerks. The “Pepper robot” now moves more slowly, and its internal computer system may have been damaged.

Under current Japanese law, the man can be charged with damage to property, but not injury, since injury is a charge reserved for humans. Dr. Yueh-Hsuan Weng, who is cofounder of the ROBOLAW.ASIA Initiative at Peking University in China, and former researcher of the Humanoid Robotics Institute at Waseda University in Japan, thinks a better charge lies somewhere in between.

Weng is advocating for special robot laws to address the unique nature of human-robot interactions. He argues that humans perceive highly intelligent, social robots like Pepper (which can read human emotions) differently than normal machines—maybe more like pets—and so the inappropriate treatment of robots by humans should be handled with this in mind.

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Google and NASA are continuing to test quantum computers and this week entered into a new agreement to work with a series of updated systems.

D-Wave Systems, a quantum computing company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, announced this week that it had signed a deal to install a succession of D-Wave systems at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. NASA and Google on Wednesday also confirmed the deal.

NASA and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) are collaborating on the project, which is focused on advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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