Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 894

Toyota Robots That Do Housework!

“Operating and navigating in home environments is very challenging for robots. Every home is unique, with a different combination of objects in distinct configurations that change over time. To address the diversity a robot faces in a home environment, we teach the robot to perform arbitrary tasks with a variety of objects, rather than program the robot to perform specific predefined tasks with specific objects. In this way, the robot learns to link what it sees with the actions it is taught. When the robot sees a specific object or scenario again, even if the scene has changed slightly, it knows what actions it can take with respect to what it sees.

We teach the robot using an immersive telepresence system, in which there is a model of the robot, mirroring what the robot is doing. The teacher sees what the robot is seeing live, in 3D, from the robot’s sensors. The teacher can select different behaviors to instruct and then annotate the 3D scene, such as associating parts of the scene to a behavior, specifying how to grasp a handle, or drawing the line that defines the axis of rotation of a cabinet door. When teaching a task, a person can try different approaches, making use of their creativity to use the robot’s hands and tools to perform the task. This makes leveraging and using different tools easy, allowing humans to quickly transfer their knowledge to the robot for specific situations.

Historically, robots, like most automated cars, continuously perceive their surroundings, predict a safe path, then compute a plan of motions based on this understanding. At the other end of the spectrum, new deep learning methods compute low-level motor actions directly from visual inputs, which requires a significant amount of data from the robot performing the task. We take a middle ground. Our teaching system only needs to understand things around it that are relevant to the behavior being performed. Instead of linking low-level motor actions to what it sees, it uses higher-level behaviors. As a result, our system does not need prior object models or maps. It can be taught to associate a given set of behaviors to arbitrary scenes, objects, and voice commands from a single demonstration of the behavior. This also makes the system easy to understand and makes failure conditions easy to diagnose and reproduce.”

How Companies Can Cope With the Risks of Generative AI Tools

Everyone’s experienced the regret of telling a secret they should’ve kept. Once that information is shared, it can’t be taken back. It’s just part of the human experience.

Now it’s part of the AI experience, too. Whenever someone shares something with a generative AI tool — whether it’s a transcript they’re trying to turn into a paper or financial data they’re attempting to analyze — it cannot be taken back.

Generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been dominating headlines. The technologies show massive promise for a myriad of use cases and have already begun to change the way we work. But along with these big new opportunities come big risks.

AI and design: Exploring the synergy of creativity and technology

Generative AI is dominating the conversation in 2023, and the design community is no exception to its transformative potential. Product innovations fueled by emerging AI capabilities have the potential to unlock new opportunities and put the power of real-time intelligence in customers’ hands like never before.

As a design leader focused on creating innovative products and solutions for millions of our consumers and for thousands of our employees, I find AI’s potential particularly exciting for the design discipline. New technological advances like generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing and large language models can augment, complement and elevate the capabilities of designers, enabling them to focus on work that delivers maximum value to their users. At the same time, there are ongoing and important conversations about designing and implementing new safeguards and frameworks to mitigate risk and ensure the responsible application of AI.

Let’s take a closer look at the dynamic intersection of AI and design, focusing on how AI-enhanced design tools can enhance designer workflows, improve outputs and fuel product innovation.

AI performs comparably to human readers of mammograms

Using a standardized assessment, researchers in the UK compared the performance of a commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm with human readers of screening mammograms. Results of their findings were published in Radiology.

Mammographic does not detect every . False-positive interpretations can result in women without cancer undergoing unnecessary imaging and biopsy. To improve the sensitivity and specificity of screening mammography, one solution is to have two readers interpret every mammogram.

According to the researchers, double reading increases cancer detection rates by 6 to 15% and keeps recall rates low. However, this strategy is labor-intensive and difficult to achieve during reader shortages.

Spies are Using New Malware to Target Mobile Devices in Ukraine

This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Ukraine’s security agency claims that the Russian military intelligence service GRU can access compromised Android devices with a new malware called Infamous Chisel, which is associated with the threat actor Sandworm, previously attributed to the Russian GRU’s Main Centre for Special Technologies (GTsST).

Sandworm uses this new malware to target Android devices used by the Ukrainian military, enables unauthorized access to compromised devices, and is designed to scan files, monitor traffic, and steal information.

Curing aging should be a moral imperative for all of humanity

The Death of Death is an international bestseller by José Cordeiro and David Wood that claims that “death will be optional by 2045” – or even earlier, if more public and private funds are invested in rejuvenation technologies.

Longevity. Technology: Already available in more than 10 languages, the book provides insight into recent exponential advances in AI, tissue regeneration, stem cell treatment, organ printing, cryopreservation and genetic therapies that, say the authors, offer a realistic chance to solve the problem of the aging of the human body for the first time in human history. In fact, the book’s subtitle is The Scientific Possibility of Physical Immortality and its Moral Defense.

Given that until relatively recently, just mentioning the concept of ‘biological immortality’ was enough to raise eyebrows and with most of the opinion that it should be filed away under ‘science fiction’ or ‘charlatanism’. However, longevity science is advancing at an incredible pace and today there are people who no longer wonder if immortality is possible, but when it will be a reality. We sat down with José Luis Corderio PhD to find out more.