Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 891
NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters Breakingviews) — Trying to predict how a nascent and promising technology will affect society is hubris, but history suggests people are going to have some serious leisure time if the development of artificial intelligence continues apace. Whether that makes them happy, and how the spoils will be divided, are harder to predict.
Over the past 50 years, technology has tended to grow faster than the wider economy. From 2006 to 2016, the digital economy grew at an average annual rate of 5.6% according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or almost four times faster than the overall output. That sort of expansion appears to be oddly consistent. Revenue earned by technology companies in Fortune’s list of the 100 biggest U.S. firms has, adjusted for inflation, increased at a similar rate for five decades.
American employee productivity has increased about 2% annually for seven decades. While higher capital intensity and more skilled labor steadily contribute, what varies more is the ability to deploy technology successfully. Sectors able to automate tasks and reduce workers, such as manufacturing, will generally see higher productivity, while others, such as education, may have a harder time. This process also takes time. In 1987, the economist Robert Solow famously said computers were visible everywhere expect in the productivity statistics. A decade later, productivity shot up.
Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.
“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is—in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.
Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”
In a bombastic interview with none other than Tucker freakin’ Carlson, Elon Musk made a bold claim about Google co-founder Larry Page that, we have to admit, isn’t entirely implausible.
During the newly-released Fox News interview, Musk alleged that back when he and the Google co-founder and CEO “used to be close friends” and he’d stay at the techster’s Palo Alto house, they’d get into lengthy discussions about “AI safety” — and that what Page told him led to his own cofounding of OpenAI.
In characteristic confused-puppy fashion, Carlson asked Musk what Page had said about AI.
Don’t miss our analysis of Google’s I/O most important announcements and whether Google did enough to counter the momentum of OpenAI and Microsoft.
In San Francisco, where two major companies are testing driverless taxis, some local officials are reporting that the vehicles have caused a number of issues, including rolling into fire scenes and running over hoses. NBC News’ Jake Ward reports.
» Subscribe to NBC News: http://nbcnews.to/SubscribeToNBC
» Watch more NBC video: http://bit.ly/MoreNBCNews.
NBC News Digital is a collection of innovative and powerful news brands that deliver compelling, diverse and engaging news stories. NBC News Digital features NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, TODAY.com, Nightly News, Meet the Press, Dateline, and the existing apps and digital extensions of these respective properties. We deliver the best in breaking news, live video coverage, original journalism and segments from your favorite NBC News Shows.
Connect with NBC News Online!
The robot can drive heavy steal beams into the ground at a rate of 1 per 73 seconds, which will help expedite solar farm construction.
In recent decades, engineers have created a wide range of robotic systems inspired by animals, including four legged robots, as well as systems inspired by snakes, insects, squid and fish. Studies exploring the interactions between these robots and their biological counterparts, however, as still relatively rare.
Researchers at Peking University and China Agricultural University recently set out to explore what happens when live fish are placed in the same environment as a robotic fish. Their findings, published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, could both inform the development of fish-inspired robots and shed some new light on the behavior of real fish.
“Our research team has been focusing on the development of self-propelled robotic fish for a considerable amount of time,” Dr. Junzhi Yu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “During our field experiments, we observed an exciting phenomenon where live fish were observed following the swimming robotic fish. We are eager to further explore the underlying principles behind this phenomenon and gain a deeper understanding of this ‘fish following’ behavior.”
Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for an “immediate pause” to the development of more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The interesting thing is that these aren’t Luddites with an inherent dislike of technology. Names on the petition include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio.
Others speaking out about the dangers include Geoffrey Hinton, widely credited as “the godfather of AI.” In a recent interview with the BBC to mark his retirement from Google at the age of 75, he warned that “we need to worry” about the speed at which AI is becoming smarter.
Many high-profile tech figures, including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, are calling for a pause in the development of AI over concerns about its potential to cause harm, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Is the speed of advancement outpacing the ability to put in place adequate safeguards?
On Tuesday, Elon Musk said in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that he wants to develop his own chatbot called TruthGPT, which will be “a maximum truth-seeking AI” — whatever that means.
The Twitter owner said that he wants to create a third option to OpenAI and Google with an aim to “create more good than harm.”
“I’m going to start something which you call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk said during the Fox & Friends show.