Lifeboat Foundation

A Cafe in Tokyo uses an all-robot staff, though some of its employees that control these servers do so remotely, under special circumstances.

As reported by NextShark, these employees have debilitating conditions like ALS and similar spinal chord injuries, and operate the robot servers from home. They operate an OriHime-D: a 4-foot-tall robot that moves, handles objects, and communicates with patrons at Tokyo’s Cafe DAWN (Diverse Avatar Working Network). Cafe DAWN is intended to resemble the robot-centric cafe featured in the 2008 anime Time of Eve.

Continue reading “A Cafe in Japan Hires Robot Servers, But With a Twist” »

From autonomous things, to edge computing, and 5G, these five trends are expected to have a deep impact on the semiconductor sector in the year ahead.

While a 90-day ceasefire period is in place for negotiators to end the war, major Chinese technology companies and national initiatives are expected to continue to face challenges in 2019 as the world’s two largest economies remain at loggerheads over global leadership in hi-tech innovation.

Here we take a look at the views of analysts, executives, and experts to see which sectors and companies will likely be in the spotlight in 2019 and what the big issues are expected to be.

Continue reading “2019 China tech look ahead: trade war likely to cast a shadow as AI, e-commerce, smartphone progress continues” »

As 2018 draws to a close and we start anticipating the developments that will happen in 2019, here’s a look back at our ten most-read articles of the year.

This 3D Printed House Goes Up in a Day for Under $10,000 Vanessa Bates Ramirez | 3/18/18 “ICON and New Story’s vision is one of 3D printed houses acting as a safe, affordable housing alternative for people in need. New Story has already built over 800 homes in Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico, partnering with the communities they serve to hire local labor and purchase local materials rather than shipping everything in from abroad.”

Machines Teaching Each Other Could Be the Biggest Exponential Trend in AI Aaron Frank | 1/21/18 “Data is the fuel of machine learning, but even for machines, some data is hard to get—it may be risky, slow, rare, or expensive. In those cases, machines can share experiences or create synthetic experiences for each other to augment or replace data. It turns out that this is not a minor effect, it actually is self-amplifying, and therefore exponential.”

In 2019, will Tesla become the world’s first automaker with a fully autonomous fleet on the road?

The Tesla CEO said the Hardware 3 upgrade has.

Can machines make moral choices?

A massive new survey developed by MIT researchers reveals some distinct global preferences concerning the ethics of autonomous vehicles, as well as some regional variations in those preferences.

The survey has global reach and a unique scale, with over 2 million online participants from over 200 countries weighing in on versions of a classic ethical conundrum, the “Trolley Problem.” The problem involves scenarios in which an accident involving a vehicle is imminent, and the vehicle must opt for one of two potentially fatal options. In the case of driverless cars, that might mean swerving toward a couple of people, rather than a large group of bystanders.

Continue reading “A self-driving car can choose who dies in a fatal crash. These are the ethical considerations” »

Power suits, robotaxis, Leonardo da Vinci mania—just a few of the things to look out for in 2019. But what else will make our top ten stories for the year ahead?

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Continue reading “What will be the biggest stories of 2019? | Part One | The Economist” »

A computing system that mimics neural processing could make artificial intelligence more efficient — and more human.

Most read of 2018: A scientist at Google Brain devised a way for a machine-learning system to teach itself about how the world works.

Invented a way for neural networks to get better by working together.