Lifeboat Foundation

British roboticist Peter Scott-Morgan doesn’t want you to see him as a man who died from a neurodegenerative disease. He wants to become Peter 2.0 – the most advanced cyborg ever.

There’s an extensive list of medical devices already helping him breathe, feed, and communicate; those technologies are set to grow in the near future. But, according to Scott-Morgan, this isn’t about staving off death; it’s about evolving.

“Yes, I know, this all sounds like science fiction,” he admits on his blog.

Continue reading “A Terminally Ill British Scientist Aims to Be The Most ‘Cybernetic’ Human Ever Created” »

By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington, and Maria Romero

As artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionises work as we know it, how will the software testing and security industry be impacted?

The robots are coming: “Lock up your knowledge and protect your job at all costs!” The apocalyptic warnings are starting to flow of how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics combined with other disruptive technologies could eliminate the need for humans in the workplace. Equally sceptical voices are rubbishing the idea that anything drastic will happen, citing previous industrial revolutions as proof that new jobs will emerge to fill any gaps created by the automation of existing ones. In practice, no one really knows how quickly AI might eliminate jobs or what the employment needs will be of the future businesses and industries that have not yet been born.

But the future is not black and white. Aside from the potential to take (and make) jobs, AI might also transform jobs. Below, we share a list of some critical job roles that could be transformed or eliminated completely by the use of AI and robotics over the period from 2020 to 2030. The automation of the following six jobs would bring new opportunities to the software testing world, but could also change it in other possibly in unexpected ways.

Continue reading “Here come the robots: intelligent machines could take, make, or reboot software testing and security jobs” »

Human skin is a fascinating multifunctional organ with unique properties originating from its flexible and compliant nature. It allows for interfacing with external physical environment through numerous receptors interconnected with the nervous system. Scientists have been trying to transfer these features to artificial skin for a long time, aiming at robotic applications.

Robotic systems heavily rely on electronic and magnetic field sensing functionalities required for positioning and orientation in space. Much research has been devoted to implementation of these functionalities in a flexible, compliant form. Recent advancements in flexible sensors and organic electronics have provided important prerequisites. These devices can operate on soft and elastic surfaces, whereas sensors perceive various physical properties and transmit them via readout circuits.

To closely replicate natural skin, it is necessary to interconnect a large number of individual sensors. This challenging task became a major obstacle in realizing electronic skin. First demonstrations were based on an array of individual sensors addressed separately, which unavoidably resulted in a tremendous number of electronic connections. In order to reduce the necessary wiring, important technology had to be developed—namely, complex electronic circuits, current sources and switches had to be combined with individual magnetic sensors to achieve fully integrated devices.

In response, a number of Japanese tech companies are building exoskeleton suits to give the elderly a leg — or arm — up. One such company, Innophys, developed a backpack-like suit that can be ‘charged’ by squeezing a hand pump 30 times to fill pressurized air-powered “muscles.”

The suit can allow people to lift up to 55 pounds, costs the equivalent of about $1,300.

“One client is a family-owned company which makes and sells pickled radish and uses heavy weights in the process of production,” Innophys spokesperson Daigo Orihara told New Scientist. “The father is in his 70s and was supposed to retire but is still working with our muscle suit.”

How can we tackle gender imbalance in the personalities of AI learning tools?

The Gendering of AI

The expected growth in use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning applications is raising concerns about both the potential gendering of these tools and the risk that they will display the inherent biases of their developers. Why the concern? Well, to make it easier for us to integrate AI tools and chatbots into our lives, designers often give them human attributes. For example, applications and robots are often given a personality and gender. Unfortunately, in many cases, gender stereotypes are being perpetuated. The type of roles robots are designed to perform usually reflect gendered over generalizations of feminine or masculine attributes.

Feminine personalities in AI tools such as chatbots and consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa are often designed to have sympathetic features and perform tasks related to care giving, assistantship, or service. Many of these applications have been created to work as personal assistants, in customer service or teaching. Examples include Emma the floor cleaning robot and Apple’s Siri your personal iPhone assistant. Conversely, male robots are usually designed as strong, intelligent and able to perform “dirty jobs”. They typically work in analytical roles, logistics, and security. Examples include Ross the legal researcher, Stan the robotic parking valet and Leo the airport luggage porter.

Continue reading “Gender and Smart Learning Technologies” »

Shaking hands with BrainCo’s artificial intelligence-powered prosthetic hand is like shaking hands with an exciting, optimistic version of the future. Here’s what this amazing prosthesis is able to do, and how it promises to transform life for amputees all around the world.

This special issue of ‘Sophia’ aims to reflect upon future evolutions of religions and their related narratives and imaginaries from a critical and generative understanding of our ancient sources. Bodies are locations of creative power and symbolic proliferation. Cyborgian, transhuman, and posthuman embodiments are going to generate visions of the divine in tune with such an epistemic shift, by addressing questions such as: can God be represented as a cyborg? Could robots and avatars be prophets? Is internet a suitable setting for a posthuman theophany? This special issue articulates within the frame of a relational ontological perspective, according to which the notion of the divine evolves, as much as human and non-human persons do. In this evolutionary scenario, the representation of the divine realm may shift from era to era, adapting to new natural-cultural formations. This special issue argues that the posthuman paradigm shift will be followed by a symbolic turn in religious imaginaries as well.

In a posthuman future, human and non-human beings, plants, and minerals will most likely co-exist with advanced artificial intelligence, sentient robots, and conscious humanoids. As futurist Ray Kurzweil affirms: ‘The introduction of technology is not merely the private affair of one of the Earth’s innumerable species. It is a pivotal event in the history of the planet’ ( 1999, p. 35). Religions will need to re-think their theological approaches in order to allow for different types of subjectivities and embodied entities to partake in the religious quest. Religions themselves are material as well as symbolic networks, actualized through words, prayers, metaphors, rhythms, images, and symbols, among many other expressions. The physical, the virtual, and the symbolic are inextricably intertwined. In the era of the cyborg, God is not only human; in the era of the post-human, humans are not the only prophets.

Sarcos sprinkled the flavor of the future on last year’s CES show when it revealed the latest evolution of its robotic exoskeleton technology, the Guardian XO. At this year’s CES, the Salt Lake City-based robotics specialist and Delta Airlines announced pilot trials, with Delta employees set to be among the first workers to suit up in the battery-powered, force-multiplying wearable robots, enjoying superhuman strength and endurance without body wear and tear.

Few things make us want to trade a cushy gig of rambling away about gadgets semi-coherently on the Web for a life of physical labor like the Guardian XO. A full-body robotic suit that turns its wearer into something of a near-cyborg superhero, the XO looks straight out of a dystopian sci-fi thriller and brings the capabilities to match. It bears its own substantial weight, along with 200 additional pounds (91 kg) of payload, letting the wearer lift heavy objects for hours without physical strain or fatigue.

Sarcos says the Guardian XO takes under 30 seconds to put on or take off, responds in milliseconds to the operator’s movements, and amplifies his or her strength by up to 20 times. It offers eight hours of battery power, and a hot-swapping battery system allows users to extend that operational time. All in all, it’s a highly impressive machine meant to help humans complete obligatory lifting tasks that would be difficult or impossible to tackle with more conventional lifting machinery.

Your brain is the orchestra that plays the symphony of your mental experience and your awareness, and that experience is your window on existence and on the universe. Our aim is to preserve, restore, and even improve your mental experience beyond the limits of biology. With dedication, scientific advances within our lifetimes may allow us to record the unique arrangement and responses of neurons and synapses that encode your memories, their active behavior, and ultimately to restore all of that in a neural prosthesis that seamlessly repairs a brain function, or a complete artificial brain. Some of this is still reminiscent of science fiction, but each challenge is well on its way to being a tractable technology problem supported by scientific evidence and understanding.