Hawking repeats Zoltan Istvan’s worries:
“Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies,” Hawking told veteran interviewer Larry King. “The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening, seems a somewhat lower priority.”
British physicist Stephen Hawking sees signs that the applications for artificial intelligence are already going down the wrong track.
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Alphabet’s “improved city living” company, Sidewalk Labs – the group behind the futuristic digital city story a while back – is already getting its feet wet in real-life situations. The Guardian has obtained documents and emails that detail a proposal made by Sidewalk Labs to the city of Columbus, Ohio. It essentially allows Google to assume control of the city’s public transport and parking system.
The information was obtained through public records laws and details an offer made by Sidewalk Labs to provide the city of Columbus with its cloud-based program called Flow for free. Flow would put the city’s public transit, public parking and transit subsidy program under the control of Google.
DHL’s delivery drone can transport packages faster than a car can.
WALLOPS ISLAND — With space station resupply launches expected to resume in August and a runway under construction for testing drone flights, Virginia is looking at another opportunity to lure a major federal research program to the state’s expanding spaceport complex on this Eastern Shore barrier island.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is expected to begin looking for a place to base a new “science and technology testing ground” for unmanned vehicle systems — operating in the air and underwater — and boosters say the regional spaceport would be an ideal fit.
“What better place to do it than here?” said Peter Bale, chairman of the Wallops Island Regional Alliance, as members of the House Appropriations Committee visited last week.
Power consumption is one of the biggest reasons why you haven’t seen a brain-like computer beyond the lab: the artificial synapses you’d need tend to draw much more power than the real thing. Thankfully, realistic energy use is no longer an unattainable dream. Researchers have built nanowire synapses that consume just 1.23 femtojoules of power — for reference, a real neuron uses 10 femtojoules. They achieve that extremely low demand by using a wrap of two organic materials to release and trap ions, much like real nerve fibers.
There’s a lot of work to be done before this is practical. The scientists want to shrink their nanowires down from 200 nanometers thick to a few dozen, and they’d need new 3D printing techniques to create structures that more closely imitate real brains. Nonetheless, the concept of computers with brain-level complexity is that much more realistic — the team tells Scientific American that it could see applications in everything from smarter robots and self-driving cars through to advanced medical diagnosis.
The Mill’s Blackbird can be morphed to look like any vehicle.
I am glad folks are listening. To get buy in for driverless autos will require proof and campaign showing the safety features of a driverless car over non-driverless. Along with this, auto makers will/ MUST prove that these cars cannot be breeched and controlled by hackers. Until we have safety proven and presented to the public like Volvo did in the late 80s; self driving cars will not be adopted broadly; it will be limited to metro cities in the US.