Lifeboat Foundation

New work from Carnegie Mellon University has enabled robots to learn household chores by watching videos of people performing everyday tasks in their homes.

The research could help improve the utility of robots in the home, allowing them to assist people with tasks like cooking and cleaning. Two robots successfully learned 12 tasks including opening a drawer, oven door and lid; taking a pot off the stove; and picking up a telephone, vegetable or can of soup.

“The robot can learn where and how humans interact with different objects through watching videos,” said Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science. “From this knowledge, we can train a model that enables two robots to complete similar tasks in varied environments.”

Anthropology and archaeology are revealing that a human society can take myriad forms, which can teach us how to build a modern society that is more equal, resilient and stable.

By Michael Marshall

EcoRunner Team Delft.

Range anxiety is not a term that you hear quite often these days. Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers have ensured that their cars are now adept at traveling long distances on a single charge. However, charging times still need to catch up and offer a quicker way to get back on the road again.

One researcher said he’s concerned about the “existential dangers” of artificial intelligence for humanity.

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Our universe has been developing for about 14 billion years, but human-level intelligence, at least on Earth, has emerged in a remarkably short period of time, measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years. What then is the future of intelligence? With the exponential growth of computing, will non-biological intelligence dominate?

Continue reading “Dimitar Sasselov — What is the Far Future of Intelligence in the Universe?” »

Presenting its findings as “Unlocking the future of computing” Microsoft is edging ever closer to photon computing technology with the Analog Iterative Machine (AIM). Right now, the light-based machine is being licensed for use in financial institutions, to help navigate the endlessly complex data flowing through them.

According to the Microsoft Research Blog, “Microsoft researchers have been developing a new kind of analog optical computer that uses photons and electrons to process continuous value data, unlike today’s digital computers that use transistors to crunch through binary data” (via Hardware Info).

In a significant leap for the field of quantum computing, Google has reportedly engineered a quantum computer that can execute calculations in mere moments that would take the world’s most advanced supercomputers nearly half a century to process.

The news, reported by the Daily Telegraph, could signify a landmark moment in the evolution of this emerging technology.

Quantum computing, a science that takes advantage of the oddities of quantum physics, remains a fast-moving and somewhat contentious field.

The product itself is an interesting one, and seems built to hit a sweet price/performance ratio for anyone that plans on using a discrete GPU solution. Of course, the absence of an integrated GPU does limit the users’ flexibility — I can’t count the number of times I used an integrated GPU to try and pinpoint issues with my systems (and graphics cards). But the fact remains that more consumer choice is best: users can make their own decision on whether that’s worth the extra $10 or not.

Most of this information comes courtesy of Harukaze (via Twitter), as well as a benchmark on PugetBench, where the Ryzen 5 7500F was paired with an X670E motherboard and 32 GB of DDR5-4800 memory.