Lifeboat Foundation

Westworld recently wrapped its first season with a few stunning twists and a stunning statistic: With a 12-million-viewer average, it was the most-watched first season of an original HBO show in the network’s history. Westworld concerns a perverse theme park, styled in the fashion of the American Old West. The park’s “hosts,” artificially intelligent beings physically indistinguishable from humans, begin to remember the horrifying experiences inflicted on them by the park’s “guests,” the humans who pay to visit and do as they please, including raping and killing hosts.

Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the fictional cofounder of Westworld, built the park’s hosts with the ability to improvise and make decisions based on their environment—a vision of AI strikingly similar to the one held by Simon Stringer, the director of the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. Stringer is one of the field’s leading thinkers, and like Ford, he says machines with some internalized spatial and causal model of the world could achieve an intuitive, human-like intelligence.

In my conversation with Stringer about Westworld, we discussed what makes AI seem human, the potential threat AI poses to humans, the role of self-modifying programming, and the importance of the Turing Test.

Continue reading “Westworld Is Strikingly Real: AI Could Be Conscious and Unpredictable” »

San Francisco (AFP) — Mark Zuckerberg envisions a software system inspired by the “Iron Man” character Jarvis as a virtual butler managing his household.

The Facebook founder’s dream is about artificial intelligence, which is slowly but surely creeping into our daily lives, no longer just science fiction.

Artificial intelligence or AI is getting a foothold in people’s homes, starting with the Amazon devices like its Echo speaker which links to a personal assistant “Alexa” to answer questions and control connected devices such as appliances or light bulbs.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence creeps into daily life” »

Recently, New York University hosted a conference of philosophers, scientists and engineers discussing the topic of “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.” The conference was a virtual who’s who of artificial intelligence and machine ethics…

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

Babies made from two women and one man have been approved by the UK’s fertility regulator.

The historic and controversial move is to prevent children being born with deadly genetic diseases.

Doctors in Newcastle — who developed the advanced form of IVF — are expected to be the first to offer the procedure and have already appealed for donor eggs.

Continue reading “Babies made from three people approved in UK” »

CEO Jeff Bezos said the company successfully delivered its first package to a customer in the Cambridge area of England in 13 minutes.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a “major breakthrough” that allows people to control a robotic arm in three dimensions, using only their minds. The research has the potential to help millions of people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases.

Continue reading “How to control a robotic arm with your mind — no implanted electrodes required” »

And it could result in wild new technologies.

Ooops.

SACRAMENTO, Dec. 14 (UPI) — The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a warning of sorts to rideshare company Uber on Wednesday, apparently for wading too far into the waters of testing self-driving vehicles in San Francisco.

Continue reading “Uber draws ire of California DMV for testing self-driving cars in S.F. without permit” »