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Category: robotics/AI – Page 860

Old and new futurisms in Silicon Valley

Natasha and Max also appear in a recent video titled “Transhumanism. What it is not” in conversation with David Wood and two representatives of the anti-transhumanist camp, Alexander Thomas and Émile Torres. I’m not familiar with the work of Thomas. I’m more familiar with the work of Torres. I very strongly disagree with most of what Torres says, but I must concede that Torres seems an intelligent and perceptive person, not without a certain endearing grace. However, BS is BS.

I’ve watched and listened again to the awesome conversation between Lex Fridman and Guillaume Verdon aka Beff Jezos, the founder of the movement called effective accelerationism (e/acc) and the company Extropic AI. This long conversation (almost 3 hours) touches a lot of things including physics, quantum, thermodynamics, Artificial Intelligence, LLMs, space, e/acc philosophy & metaphysics, and of course the meaning of life & all that. This is the most complete talk on e/acc so far and is likely to remain so for some time. Watch it all, and let’s accelerate the fuck away from mediocrity toward unlimited extropian and cosmist greatness.

See my previous posts on e/acc (1, 2). I see e/acc as the new kid on the historic block of futurism, cosmism, and extropy. The next Terasem Colloquium on July 20, the (alas 55th!) anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, and the next issue of Terasem ’s Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology, to be published in July, will explore the old and new futurisms on the block: parallels, differences, philosophical foundations.

BMW wants humanoid robots to build its cars

BMW wants humanoid robots to build its cars, evidenced by a partnership with a robotics startup that it signed today.

BMW has partnered with Figure in its first partnership since the company was founded two years ago. The German automaker plans to launch a small, controlled launch of humanoid robots in its production facilities, potentially expanding to more units if performance targets are met.

The humanoid robots will initially be launched out of the BMW facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which employs 11,000 people.

Connective tissue inspired elastomer-based hydrogel for artificial skin via radiation-indued penetrating polymerization

Robust hydrogels offer a promising solution for the development of artificial skin for bionic robots, yet few hydrogels have a comprehensive performance comparable to real human skin. Here, the authors present a general method to convert traditional elastomers into tough hydrogels via a unique radiation-induced penetrating polymerization method.

Are We Learning from AI Now?

Explore how AI advances are reshaping skills and knowledge, teaching us to ask the right questions in a world where machines offer endless answers Welcome to the future. Robots haven’t taken over. Yet. But they’re teaching us a lesson. A lesson in conversation. The job market? It’s flipping. Experience? Taking a backseat. The new MVP? The art of asking. Yes, asking. We’re not talking about small talk over coffee. We’re talking about significant talks with machines. Data-stuffed machines, waiting. Waiting for our questions. Think of it. A genie in a bottle. But forget three wishes. This genie’s game is endless. Ask away. Here’s…

Experts craft life-saving ‘robot medics’ for triage in high-risk places

Experts created robotic arms to conduct essential medical triage in perilous situations like humanitarian disasters and conflict zones.

Developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield, this revolutionary technology has the potential to be a life-saving intervention in high-risk places.

Examining victims within 20 minutes

Built upon the innovative “medical telexistence (MediTel) solution,” this state-of-the-art mobile robotic-controlled uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) incorporates virtual reality (VR) technology.

Huge Proportion of Internet Is AI-Generated Slime, Researchers Find

The internet’s steady fall into the AI-garbled dumpster continues. As Vice reports, a recent stud y conducted by researchers at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI Lab found that a “shocking amount of the web” is already made up of poor-quality AI-generated and translated content.

The paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, but “shocking” feels like the right word. According to the study, over half — specifically, 57.1 percent — of all of the sentences on the internet have been translated into two or more other languages. The poor quality and staggering scale of these translations suggest that large language model (LLM)-powered AI models were used to both create and translate the material. The phenomenon is especially prominent in “lower-resource languages,” or languages with less readily available data with which to more effectively train AI models.

In other words, in what the researchers believe to be a ploy to garner clickbait-driven ad revenue, AI is being used to first generate poor-quality English-language content at a remarkable scale, and then AI-powered machine translation (MT) tools transcribe said content into several other languages. The translated material gets worse each time — and as a result, entire regions of the web are filling to the brim with degrading AI-scrambled copies of copies.

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