Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A new video released by nonprofit The Future of Life Institute (FLI) highlights the risks posed by autonomous weapons or ‘killer robots’ – and the steps we can take to prevent them from being used. It even has Elon Musk scared.

Its original Slaughterbots video, released in 2017, was a short Black Mirror-style narrative showing how small quadcopters equipped with artificial intelligence and explosive warheads could become weapons of mass destruction. Initially developed for the military, the Slaughterbots end up being used by terrorists and criminals. As Professor Stuart Russell points out at the end of the video, all the technologies depicted already existed, but had not been put together.

Now the technologies have been put together, and lethal autonomous drones able to locate and attack targets without human supervision may already have been used in Libya.

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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook is pulling the plug on its facial recognition program. The company is planning to delete more than one billion people’s individual facial recognition templates, and will no longer automatically recognize people’s faces in photos or videos as a result of this change, according to its own post. The use of facial recognition technology has a disparate impact on people of color, disenfranchising a group who already face inequality, and Facebook seems to be acknowledging this inherent harm. The Breakdown You Need to Know.

CultureBanx reported that Meta seems to always be embroiled in corporate drama and with intense scrutiny. When you add that to the growing concern from users and regulators that facial recognition space remains complicated, an exit makes sense. More than 600 million daily active users on Facebook had opted into the use of the face recognition technology.

Research shows commercial artificial intelligence systems tend to have higher error rates for women and black people. Some facial recognition systems would only confuse light-skin men 0.8% of the time and would have an error rate of 34.7% for dark-skin women. Just imagine surveillance being used with these flawed algorithms. A 2018 IDC report noted it expects worldwide spending on cognitive and AI systems to reach $77.6 billion in 2022.

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An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected a rocky planet, about half the mass of Earth, in an extraordinarily short 7.7-hour orbit around its parent star.

It’s a reminder that the science of extrasolar planet hunting seems to enter bizarro land with each new discovery. Planetary scientists still haven’t figured out how our own tiny Mercury — which orbits our Sun once every 88 days — actually formed and evolved. So, this iron-rich ultrashort-period (USP) planet, dubbed GJ 367b should really boggle their minds.

It’s completely rocky, unlike most previously detected gaseous hot Jupiters on extremely short stellar orbits. As a result, the tiny planet is estimated to have a surface with temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt iron; hardly an Earth 2.0.

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The bot is a platform that will used to test more robotic technologies.

A U.K.-based company Engineered Arts has developed a humanoid robot that can display human-like expressions with ease. In a short video released on YouTube, the company shows off its most advanced humanoid, dubbed Ameca, which is initially a platform for testing robotic technologies.

With new developments in artificial intelligence, machines are learning to not only do human tasks but also go further beyond. However, for humans and machines to work together more fluidly, machines need to occupy the same space and humanoids are the best platforms to do this. Researchers have been working to make humanoids more interactive by teaching them non-verbal communication and Ameca is quite a milestone in this area.

As is seen in the video above, the humanoid appears to have woken up in a robotic laboratory while an actual human is busy working in the background. The robot moves its arms, shows a flurry of expressions in a matter of seconds, and even expresses amazement at how its hands and fingers move fluidly before looking at the camera quite surprised. The teaser is a sufficient demonstration of what the robot can do when it comes to the upper half of the body.

Continue reading “A New Humanoid Robot Has the Most Advanced and Realistic Facial Expressions Yet” | >

This talks about an almost fully cyborg person and overcoming his illness.

The incredible book behind the primetime Channel 4 documentary, Peter: The Human Cyborg

‘A remarkable account of what it means to be human and what technology can really achieve’ Sunday Telegraph ’Peter’s story is one of the most extraordinary you will ever hear. I urge people to read it’ Stephen Fry.

‘A remarkable story… ou’re left desperate to take nothing for granted’ Radio Times __________.

Continue reading “Peter 2.0: The Human Cyborg” | >

SpaceX has begun building a launchpad for its Starship rockets in Florida, CEO Elon Musk announced on Friday, as the company looks to add another location to launch the mammoth rocket that is in development.

“Construction of Starship orbital launch pad at the Cape has begun,” Musk said in a tweet.

Starship is the massive, next-generation rocket SpaceX is developing to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars.

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The winning face must be “kind and friendly.”

Could you use an extra $200K? That’s what a Russian robotics company is offering to pay someone who’s willing to surrender the rights to their face and voice — forever — for use in robot development. They’re looking for a face that’s “kind and friendly,” reports say.

According to a report by Newsweek, the company, named Promobot, is known for producing “hyper-realistic, humanlike” robots. In 2019, the Promobot company launched the “Android Robo-C,” a made-to-order robot that could be modeled after anyone’s appearance.

Currently, the report said, Promobot is looking for a face as a model for “a humanoid robot-assistant which will work in hotels, shopping malls and other crowded places.”

Continue reading “Are you willing to give up the rights to your face — forever? If so, a robot company will pay you 0K” | >

A multi-institutional team of astrophysicists headquartered at Boston University, led by BU astrophysicist Merav Opher, has made a breakthrough discovery in our understanding of the cosmic forces that shape the protective bubble surrounding our solar system—a bubble that shelters life on Earth and is known by space researchers as the heliosphere.

Astrophysicists believe the heliosphere protects the planets within our solar system from powerful radiation emanating from supernovas, the final explosions of dying stars throughout the universe. They believe the heliosphere extends far beyond our solar system, but despite the massive buffer against cosmic radiation that the heliosphere provides Earth’s life-forms, no one really knows the shape of the heliosphere—or, for that matter, the size of it.

“How is this relevant for society? The bubble that surrounds us, produced by the sun, offers protection from galactic cosmic rays, and the shape of it can affect how those rays get into the heliosphere,” says James Drake, an astrophysicist at University of Maryland who collaborates with Opher. “There’s lots of theories but, of course, the way that galactic cosmic rays can get in can be impacted by the structure of the heliosphere—does it have wrinkles and folds and that sort of thing?”

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The chance that ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft will encounter space debris during its upcoming Earth flyby is very, very low. However, the risk is not zero and is greater than any other flyby ESA has performed. That there is this risk at all highlights the mess we’ve made of space—and why we need to take action to clean up after ourselves.

On 27 November, after a year and eight months flying through the inner Solar System, Solar Orbiter will swing by home to ‘drop off’ some extra energy. This will line the spacecraft up for its next six flybys of Venus. These final gravity assists will hone and tilt Solar Orbiter’s , enabling the heat-protected probe to capture the first-ever direct images of our star’s poles, and much more.

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