Lifeboat Foundation

Although it was made in 1968, to many people, the renegade HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey still represents the potential danger of real-life artificial intelligence. However, according to Mathematician, Computer Visionary and Author Dr. John MacCormick, the scenario of computers run amok depicted in the film – and in just about every other genre of science fiction – will never happen.

“Right from the start of computing, people realized these things were not just going to be crunching numbers, but could solve other types of problems,” MacCormick said during a recent interview with TechEmergence. “They quickly discovered computers couldn’t do things as easily as they thought.”

While MacCormick is quick to acknowledge modern advances in artificial intelligence, he’s also very conscious of its ongoing limitations, specifically replicating human vision. “The sub-field where we try to emulate the human visual system turned out to be one of the toughest nuts to crack in the whole field of AI,” he said. “Object recognition systems today are phenomenally good compared to what they were 20 years ago, but they’re still far, far inferior to the capabilities of a human.”

To compensate for its limitations, MacCormick notes that other technologies have been developed that, while they’re considered by many to be artificially intelligent, don’t rely on AI. As an example, he pointed to Google’s self-driving car. “If you look at the Google self-driving car, the AI vision systems are there, but they don’t rely on them,” MacCormick said. “In terms of recognizing lane markings on the road or obstructions, they’re going to rely on other sensors that are more reliable, such as GPS, to get an exact location.”

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While Apple has gone for a flying saucer design, Samsung’s new Silicon Valley offices look more like a giant Rubik’s Cube. The $300 million campus opened yesterday, cementing the South Korean company’s presence in the Valley. The 1.1 million-square-foot site in San Jose is intended to accommodate up to 2,000 employees, bringing together Samsung’s American R&D teams as well as providing a home for its local sales and marketing staff. Samsung says the site’s open design is intended to foster collaboration between employees, enabling those “impromptu, spur-of-the-moment interactions that are the genesis of many great ideas.”

The company broke ground on the 10-story campus back in 2013, with architecture firm NBBJ designing the site, which includes courtyards, open “garden floors,” and lab space. “Today represents a major milestone as we open our most strategically important Samsung facility in the US and also our biggest investment in Silicon Valley,” said Jaesoo Han, Samsung’s devices president in America, in a press statement. “Samsung’s goal is nothing less than to develop the best next‐generation technologies for device solutions.” Here’s how the new offices compare to the original renders:

Samsung is stressing that the site is a home for its R&D work, including research into products like displays, semiconductors, and SSD hard drives. However, the building also puts it on more of an equal footing with tech giants like Apple and Facebook, which have already established (or have plans for) monumental homes in Silicon Valley. Samsung may be facing hard times in the smartphone industry, the product category it’s most well known for in the US, but these new offices should give it a little more visibility in the tech world.

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A paraplegic man who was paralysed for five years has walked again on his own two feet, thanks to a new kind of brain-computer interface that can reroute his thoughts to his legs, bypassing his spinal cord entirely.

The anonymous man, who experiences complete paralysis in both legs due to a severe spinal cord injury (SCI), is the first such patient to demonstrate that brain-controlled overground walking after paraplegia due to SCI is feasible.

Continue reading “Watch: Paralysed man walks again via brain waves rerouted to his legs” »

Don’t get overly excited about computers and artificial intelligence replacing humans , at least not yet says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at the Chinese search giant Biadu. Computers are still in the “supervised learning” stage where human input is required to connect dots.

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By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors in Southern California reported on Wednesday. The slow, halting first steps of the 28-year-old paraplegic were documented in a preliminary study published in the British-based Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, along with a YouTube video. The feat was accomplished using a system allowing the brain to bypass the injured spinal cord and instead send messages through a computer algorithm to electrodes placed around the patient’s knees to trigger controlled leg muscle movements.

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The best GIFs are on Giphy.

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For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a.50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.

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No one is safe.

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The first all-optical permanent on-chip memory has been developed by scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the universities of Münster, Oxford, and Exeter. This is an important step on the way towards optical computers. Phase change materials that change their optical properties depending on the arrangement of the atoms allow for the storage of several bits in a single cell. The researchers present their development in the journal Nature Photonics (10.1038/nphoton.2015.182).

Light determines the future of information and communication technology: With optical elements, computers can work more rapidly and more efficiently. Optical fibers have long since been used for the transmission of data with light. But on a computer, data are still processed and stored electronically. Electronic exchange of data between processors and the memory limits the speed of modern computers. To overcome this so-called von Neumann bottleneck, it is not sufficient to optically connect memory and processor, as the optical signals have to be converted into electric signals again. Scientists, hence, look for methods to carry out calculations and data storage in a purely optical manner.

Scientists of KIT, the University of Münster, Oxford University, and Exeter University have now developed the first all-optical, non-volatile on-chip memory. “Optical bits can be written at frequencies of up to a gigahertz. This allows for extremely quick data storage by our all-photonic memory,” Professor Wolfram Pernice explains. Pernice headed a working group of the KIT Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) and recently moved to the University of Münster. “The memory is compatible not only with conventional optical fiber data transmission, but also with latest processors,” Professor Harish Bhaskaran of Oxford University adds.

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