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Category: transportation – Page 172

AI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit

A second problem is the risk of technological job loss. This is not a new worry; people have been complaining about it since the loom, and the arguments surrounding it have become stylized: critics are Luddites who hate progress. Whither the chandlers, the lamplighters, the hansom cabbies? When technology closes one door, it opens another, and the flow of human energy and talent is simply redirected. As Joseph Schumpeter famously said, it is all just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. Even the looming prospect of self-driving trucks putting 3.5 million US truck drivers out of a job is business as usual. Unemployed truckers can just learn to code instead, right?

Those familiar replies make sense only if there are always things left for people to do, jobs that can’t be automated or done by computers. Now AI is coming for the knowledge economy as well, and the domain of humans-only jobs is dwindling absolutely, not merely morphing into something new. The truckers can learn to code, and when AI takes that over, coders can… do something or other. On the other hand, while technological unemployment may be long-term, its problematicity might be short-term. If our AI future is genuinely as unpredictable and as revolutionary as I suspect, then even the sort of economic system we will have in that future is unknown.

A third problem is the threat of student dishonesty. During a conversation about GPT-3, a math professor told me “welcome to my world.” Mathematicians have long fought a losing battle against tools like Photomath, which allows students to snap a photo of their homework and then instantly solves it for them, showing all the needed steps. Now AI has come for the humanities and indeed for everyone. I have seen many university faculty insist that AI surely could not respond to their hyper-specific writing prompts, or assert that at best an AI could only write a barely passing paper, or appeal to this or that software that claims to spot AI products. Other researchers are trying to develop encrypted watermarks to identify AI output. All of this desperate optimism smacks of nothing more than the first stage of grief: denial.

A new elastic polymer dielectric to create wafer-scale stretchable electronics

Over the past few years, material scientists and electronics engineers have been trying to fabricate new flexible inorganic materials to create stretchable and highly performing electronic devices. These devices can be based on different designs, such as rigid-island active cells with serpentine-shape/fractal interconnections, neutral mechanical planes or bunked structures.

Despite the significant advancements in the fabrication of stretchable materials, some challenges have proved difficult to overcome. For instance, materials with wavy or serpentine interconnect designs commonly have a limited area density and fabricating proposed stretchable materials is often both difficult and expensive. In addition, the stiffness of many existing stretchable materials does not match that of human skin tissue, making them uncomfortable on the skin and thus not ideal for creating wearable technologies.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have recently fabricated a vacuum-deposited elastic polymer for developing stretchable electronics. This material, introduced in Nature Electronics, could be used to create stretchy field-effect transistors (FETs), which are primary components of most electronic devices on the market today.

Now you can sit back and watch a robot pump gas into your cars

The system can be attached to any fuel dispenser, offering a hands-free solution.

In an era where technology is taking over all spheres of life, refueling techniques have remained mainl a mechanical process that demands the utmost attention from the user. As a solution to this, Denmark-based Autofuel is offering a robotic refueling system that cuts the need for drivers’ attention or direct involvement.

SPIDAR: A groundbreaking spider-like robot is ready to change robotics

Thrusters may provide propulsion in any direction and can “roll” around the limb.

Meet the University of Tokyo’s SPIDAR, the backronym of “SpherIcally vectorable and Distributed rotors assisted Air-ground amphibious quadruped Robot,” with multimodal locomotion capability.

How does it work?

Moju Zhao.

The 33-pound robot SPIDAR employs servos on its movable limbs that are lightweight but insufficiently powerful to allow it to stand by itself. This keeps it light enough to fly without a jet engine, but it also means that the spider must maintain a continual bounce to maintain its upright position.

Continue reading “SPIDAR: A groundbreaking spider-like robot is ready to change robotics” | >

New approach to ‘cosmic magnet’ manufacturing could reduce reliance on rare earths in low-carbon technologies

University of Cambridge, working with colleagues from Austria, found a new way to make a possible replacement for rare-earth magnets: tetrataenite, a ‘cosmic magnet’ that takes millions of years to develop naturally in meteorites.

Previous attempts to make tetrataenite in the laboratory have relied on impractical, extreme methods. But the addition of a common element — phosphorus — could mean that it’s possible to make tetrataenite artificially and at scale, without any specialised treatment or expensive techniques.

The results are reported in the journal Advanced Science. A patent application on the technology has been filed by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have discovered a potential new method for making the high-performance magnets used in wind turbines and electric cars without the need for rare earth elements, which are almost exclusively sourced in China.

Generative AI Unlocking Floodgates to Solve Data Scarcity

The concept of synthetic data is almost too good to be true – it can mimic the distinctive properties of a dataset while dodging a number of issues that afflict data. There are zero data privacy concerns around synthetic data since it is artificially generated and isn’t related to real-world persons. It can be manufactured on demand and in the volumes required. In other words, synthetic data is a boon in a world eternally thirsty for data.

And the hectic space of generative AI is offering a helping hand in the easy generation of synthetic data.

The concept of synthetic data has been around for decades until the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry started using it commercially in the mid-2010s. But for how important an issue it resolves, creating synthetic data brings a myriad of complications along with it.

Musk donated around $1.95 billion in Tesla shares last year

Feb 14 (Reuters) — Tesla chief executive Elon Musk donated shares worth $1.95 billion in the world’s most valuable automaker to charity last year, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed on Tuesday.

Musk donated about 11.6 million shares between August and December last year, according to the filing, which did not say which organization or organizations were the recipients.

The world’s second-richest person now owns around 13% of Tesla.

Traders lost $7.6 billion betting against Tesla over the past month as stock surged

The losses for short-sellers betting against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company have ballooned to $7.6 billion over the past month, making it the least profitable short position for hedge funds, according to data from S3 Partners.

The swift one-month surge in Tesla stock has wiped out about half of the gains short-sellers made last year betting against the company. At the end of December, short-sellers had made a $15 billion profit in 2022, making Tesla the most profitable short of the year.

Shares of Tesla have been on a rollercoaster following vehicle price cuts and a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter delivery number. But on the company’s most recent earnings call, Musk reaffirmed the company’s long-term growth target of 50%.