Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks to its mild climate, expansive highway network, and lax regulations, Texas has become the country’s proving ground for driverless trucks. From cargo to produce, goods have been traveling the state’s highways partially driver-free (the trucks aim to use autonomous mode on highways, but safety drivers take over to navigate city streets) for a couple of years already. Now there’s another type of cargo traveling through Texas via autonomous trucks: furniture. This week Kodiak Robotics announced a partnership to transport IKEA products using a heavy-duty self-driving truck.

Kodiak has been moving furniture and other IKEA goods since August, but the companies carried out a testing period before making the agreement public. The route runs from an IKEA distribution center in Baytown, east of Houstin, to a store in Frisco, 290 miles away just north of Dallas. It’s mostly a straight shot on highway 45.

Like the self-driving trucks that’ve come before it, the vehicle has a safety driver on board. He or she picks up loaded trailers at the distribution center in the morning and provides driving help where needed, reaching the store by late afternoon; it’s about a five-hour drive in a car, so a bit more in a heavy-duty truck.

Ben Goertzel, PhD, is author of many books on artificial intelligence including Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really Really Try; Engineering General Intelligence, Vols. 1 and 2; The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind; and The Path to Posthumanity. He is also editor (with Damien Broderick) of an anthology about parapsychology titled, Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports. He is chief scientific officer for Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong.

Here he notes that, while the question of reincarnation in robots seems outlandish, most of our present technology would have seemed nonsensical and incomprehensible to earlier generations of humans. He quotes the 14th Dalai Lama who suggested (half-jokingly) that artificial intelligence programmers of the future might incarnate into robots. He cites Stephen Braude’s book, Immortal Remains, as demonstrating that we must consider some version of consciousness operating outside of the body. He outlines the sort of scientific and metaphysical models that might lead to such a development.

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A new computational approach will improve understanding of different states of carbon and guide the search for materials yet to be discovered.

Materials—we use them, wear them, eat them and create them. Sometimes we invent them by accident, like with Silly Putty. But far more often, making useful materials is a tedious and expensive process of trial and error.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have recently demonstrated an automated process for identifying and exploring promising new materials by combining machine learning (ML)—a type of artificial intelligence—and high performance computing. The new approach could help accelerate the discovery and design of useful materials.

The goal is to enable the printing of large, complex shaped structures, on any surface, using a swarm of drones, each depositing whatever material is required. It’s a bit like a swarm of wasps building a nest, into whatever little nook they come across, but on the wing.

Even in technical disciplines such as engineering, there is much we can still learn from nature. After all, the endless experimentation and trials of life give rise to some of the most elegant solutions to problems. With that in mind, a large team of researchers took inspiration from the humble (if rather annoying) wasp, specifically its nest-building skills. The idea was to explore 3D printing of structures without the constraints of a framed machine, by mounting an extruder onto a drone.

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As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at Ping-Pong as well. For now they emphasize it is “cooperative,” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros in no time.

The project, called i-Sim2Real, isn’t just about Ping-Pong but rather about building a robotic system that can work with and around fast-paced and relatively unpredictable human behavior. Ping-Pong, AKA table tennis, has the advantage of being pretty tightly constrained (as opposed to playing basketball or cricket) and a balance of complexity and simplicity.

Continue reading “Watch Google’s Ping-Pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally” »

The killer ground drone revolution is here.

Just like a pianist who learns to play their instrument without looking at the keys or a basketball player who puts in countless hours to throw a seemingly effortless jump shot, UCLA mechanical engineers have designed a new class of material that can learn behaviors over time and develop a “muscle memory” of its own, allowing for real-time adaptation to changing external forces.

The material is composed of a structural system made up of tunable beams that can alter its shape and behaviors in response to dynamic conditions. The research finding, which boasts applications in the construction of buildings, airplanes and imaging technologies among others, was published Wednesday in Science Robotics.

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The new innovative features allow for advanced image editing using artificial intelligence.

Adobe announced new advancements in its Photoshop at its annual Adobe Max conference for technology. These new innovations make the image editing application even smarter in its abilities, and more collaborative. Along with these announcements came a whole new wave of AI advancements and capabilities incorporated into the software.

Adobe.com/Blog.

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‘You’re in a world made of marshmallows!’

A Google app that allows people to communicate with artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been made available in the United Kingdom (U.K.) for a limited trial period.

You’re in a world made of marshmallows! As you take a step, a gentle ‘squish’ comes out under your feet. The marshmallow horizon stretches out in all directions. The sky is a gooey, sticky pink.

Continue reading “Google trails ultra-realistic chat tech in the UK that got an engineer fired earlier” »