Written By: Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

Not long ago, robots were largely confined to books and movies. Then they started showing up on YouTube, and robot fear became a viral thing. There was that terrifying video of a Boston Dynamics robot wearing fatigues and gas mask. Another Boston Dynamics video showed a cheetah robot that could outpace the swiftest human sprinter.

Back then, it was easy enough to imagine being run down by a robot—particularly because Boston Dynamics was funded by the military. But there was no good reason to fear them. Not yet. Why? They were all powered by internal combustion engines. Imagine being stalked by a car with no muffler. You’d hear it a mile off and climb a tree.

Well, all you robot fearing folk, the era of insanely noisy robots may be nearing an end—MIT’s stealthy electric robot cheetah is here to prowl your nightmares. (Sure, it looks friendly and playful, gamboling care-free on the quad—but don’t be fooled.)

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Written By: Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub

Big Brother is feeling you—literally.

A few months back, I wrote about Ellie, the world’s first AI-psychologist. Developed by DARPA and researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a diagnostic tool capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second—everything from eye-gaze to face tilt to voice tone—in the hopes of identifying the early warning signs of depressions and (part of the long term goal) stemming the rising tide of soldier suicide.

And early reports indicate that Ellie is both good at her job and that soldiers like talking to an AI-psychologist more than they like talking to a human psychologist (AI’s don’t judge).

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Michael Schulson, Religion Dispatches — Salon

There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.

Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”

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Alexandra Ossola — MotherBoard

Ever since humans first envisioned robots, we’ve thought about how to make the machines more like us. Robots compete against us on game shows, and rendezvous with us in the bedroom (or at least, make virtual sex feel real). But part of being human is sensing the world around us in a particular way, and doing it all at the same time.

This is much more complicated than it seems, as scientists haven’t fully unraveled how we’re able to sense what we do; it’s both our hardware and software that contain codes that are difficult to crack. Still, scientists power through, discovering how their own senses work while crafting artificial versions of them. Here are some of the most valiant attempts to get robots to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see in the most human way possible.

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by Daniel Terdiman — C/Net

Boeing and Liquid Robotics today announced a partnership to make water-borne robots that can handle a variety of surveillance jobs, ranging from hunts for submarines to the detection of drug traffickers.

Silicon Valley’s Liquid Robotics is the manufacturer of the Wave Glider SV3, a $300,000 self-powered, seafaring data center that offers customers — until now, mostly researchers and marine industry companies — tools for investigating the open seas for months at a time. SV3s have a hybrid propulsion system that can drive the robot with either solar or wave power. Boeing is the world’s second-largest defense contractor.

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Nidhi Subbaraman — BetaBoston

The candidate for best robotic hand looks like a beanbag and claims to grip anything.

A Boston builder of robot hands, Empire Robotics, is showing its first commercial grippers today: the enchanting and entirely fingerless VersaBall. Interestingly, this first demonstration is in partnership with Universal Robots, who happens to be local bot maker Rethink Robotics’ competitor.

Robotics companies and researchers have already found ways to move robots around, not just in factories, but around your house too. But as robots begin to do more, they’re still trying to solve the problem of dexterity—how do you build a robotic hand that can hold and move objects of entirely different shapes, sizes, and textures?

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By Angela Chen — The Chronicle of Higher Education

When the world ends, it may not be by fire or ice or an evil robot overlord. Our demise may come at the hands of a superintelligence that just wants more paper clips.

So says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded and directs the Future of Humanity Institute, in the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He created the “paper-clip maximizer” thought experiment to expose flaws in how we conceive of superintelligence. We anthropomorphize such machines as particularly clever math nerds, says Bostrom, whose book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies was released in Britain in July and arrived stateside this month. Spurred by science fiction and pop culture, we assume that the main superintelligence-gone-wrong scenario features a hostile organization programming software to conquer the world. But those assumptions fundamentally misunderstand the nature of superintelligence: The dangers come not necessarily from evil motives, says Bostrom, but from a powerful, wholly nonhuman agent that lacks common sense.

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