Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11968

Entertainers are now competing with robots. Wonder if the robots may get to perform in the half time show at next year’s Superbowl.

BERLIN, 10 February 2016: Mario who works in a hotel Ghent, Belgium and represents a new genre of hotel staff, will visit ITB Berlin’s hotel conference as a special guest of the ITB Hospitality Day, 10 March.

He is the youngest employee at the Ghent Marriott Hotel in Belgium. Standing 57 cm tall and weighing only 6 kg, he speaks 19 languages. He’s a robot.

His presence hints of the direction the hospitality industry is taking as it attempts to cut costs, but at the same time raise its game in service standards and communications.

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When the idea of a medical transplant is brought up, most people’s thoughts are usually drawn to procedures such as blood transfusions or organ replacements. But, oftentimes, we forget the importance of our bone structure, as well as the 2 million painful bone transplants that take place every year around world. Previously stuck in a Medieval-like operation method, surgeons had little option but to replace their patients’ bones with the bones of animals or human cadavers, and even this procedure can oftentimes led to complications due to the body’s rejection of the foreign replacement. But 3D bioprinting has been a major influence in changing the entire nature of this traditional surgical procedure, new methods of creating bone grafts have been developed by researchers around the world from Montana State University to Tokyo. 3D printing has become a recent revelation in skeletal reconstruction surgery, with 3D printed synthetic implants and even harvested stem cell materials proving to be a much safer and efficient surgical alternative.

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Last month, Tesla Motors introduced the “Summon” feature in its 7.1 software update which allows its cars to enter or exit parking spots or garages without the driver in the car.

On Monday, in a blog post titled “Enhancing Safety and Convenience with Summon”, Tesla outlined three reasons why it believes the Summon feature will push automotive safety and convenience forward.

“While many of (the new features from the update) move the ball forward toward a safer autonomous future,” Tesla said in the blog post, “none is more significant than the remote parking technology known as Summon.”

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RLOL — headline alone is priceless. However, who does get blame? And, on what grounds? Negligence in the design of the product or bad product quality? What about improper application of the product because it was designed for a particular set of the population & not for a broader public use. What about the businesses using AI? Wonder what type of insurance & the amount of insurance a business would be will be required to have in place to utilize a robot cook, or robotic nurse, etc. Lots & lots of things that still require planning, restructuring, & budgeting.

Andy Rubin is best known as the creator of Android. But in 2014, he left that all behind to create his own startup called Playground, a company focused on financially backing futuristic ideas that will shape our world—hopefully for the better.

Today, Wired published a deeper look into Andy Rubin’s day-to-day at Playground, and it very well be responsible for the destruction of the human race. Now that Rubin is no longer at Google, he spends most of his time pondering and financially backing the future of artificial intelligence. You know, that technology that keeps some of the world’s greatest minds awake at night?

Continue reading “If Artificial Intelligence Kills Us All, I’m Blaming Android Founder Andy Rubin” | >

German solar technology firm Heliatek claims to have outdone itself by setting a new world record for directly converting sunlight into electricity using organic photovoltaic cells. In 2012 it claimed a then world record 10.7 percent conversion efficiency and said it was gunning for 15 percent in the near future. This week it announced it’s halfway there, achieving a new record of 13.2 percent.

Heliatek says its R&D teams achieved the new record using a multi-junction cell and that the measurement was independently confirmed by Fraunhofer CSP’s solar testing facility. While traditional silicon cells have achieved higher levels of conversion efficiency, organic cells are also pursued because they can be produced more cheaply and are also more flexible.

In fact, the firm claims that “the excellent low light and high temperature behavior of the organic semiconductor” in the new cells makes them equivalent to the electricity generation capability of conventional solar cells with 16–17 percent efficiency under real world conditions.

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As long as there is no level of “personable experience/ empathy” AI will not eliminate the need for doctors or other medical staff members. For example, a female of 30 yrs of age newly married talking to a stone face robot that she has stage 3 breast cancer for first time. Yep; I see that one going well.

Plus, can you imagine how children in hospital wards for several months at a time will come out with only robots w/ no “EMPATHY.” I believe there are plenty of pyshcological case studies on this. If you ever want to advance AI; you must have women heavily embedded in its development as well as leading the work around it; or you will never get there.

Here’s another thought — can you imaging the potential lawsuits in the making because a child was proven to be impacted by only having interactions with robots in the children’s ward for months a time. Especially, when the robots that cannot connect due to the lack of design of “empathy”. Who gets sued? Hospitals, tech companies, etc.? This list could go on and on. So, again you must have various perspectives in the AI design in place or you could really be in trouble on a large scale.

Imagine your child requires a life-saving operation. You enter the hospital and are confronted with a stark choice.

Continue reading “Robots in health care could lead to a doctorless hospital” | >

I believe that we’re already in an arms race.

I fear the bad AI designs and broken foundation that we face along with the human collateral left in its wake as a result of AI’s lack of “human emotions and empathy”.

Five reasons the benefits of defense-related artificial intelligence research outweigh the risks—for now.

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First confirmed case of Zika Virus hits Tennessee (US)

The Tennessee Department of Health confirmed Tuesday afternoon the first case of Zika virus in the state.

TDH, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported one person in the state tested positive for the Zika virus.

The patient had traveled to South America before coming back to East Tennessee.

Continue reading “First case of Zika Virus reported in East Tennessee” | >

Researchers from 21st Century Medicine have developed a new technique to allow long term storage of a near-perfect mammalian brain. It’s a breakthrough that could have serious implications for cryonics, and the futuristic prospect of bringing the frozen dead back to life.

By using a chemical compound to turn a rabbit’s brain into a near glass-like state, and then cooling it to −211 degrees Fahrenheit (−135 degrees Celsius), a research team from California-based 21st Century Medicine (21CM) showed that it’s possible to enable near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain. The achievement has earned not just accolades from the scientific community, but a prestigious award as well; the 21CM researchers are today being awarded the $26,735 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, which is run by the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF).

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