Lifeboat Foundation

Inspired by do-it-yourselfers, Amazon is offering a radio controlled car that learns to drive by repeated trial and error.

This is happening in the city of Tianjin, about an hour’s drive south of Beijing, within a gleaming office building that belongs to iFlytek, one of China’s rapidly rising artificial-intelligence companies. Beyond guarded gates, inside a glitzy showroom, the US president is on a large TV screen heaping praise on the Chinese company. It’s Trump’s voice and face, but the recording is, of course, fake—a cheeky demonstration of the cutting-edge AI technology iFlytek is developing.

Jiang Tao chuckles and leads the way to some other examples of iFlytek’s technology. Throughout the tour, Tao, one of the company’s cofounders, uses another remarkable innovation: a hand-held device that converts his words from Mandarin into English almost instantly. At one point he speaks into the machine, and then grins as it translates: “I find that my device solves the communication problem.”

IFlytek’s translator shows off AI capabilities that rival those found anywhere in the world. But it also highlights a big hole in China’s plan, unveiled in 2017, to be the world leader in AI by 2030. The algorithms inside were developed by iFlytek, but the hardware—the microchips that bring those algorithms to life—was designed and made elsewhere. While China manufactures most of the world’s electronic gadgets, it has failed, time and again, to master the production of these tiny, impossibly intricate silicon structures. Its dependence on foreign integrated circuits could potentially cripple its AI ambitions.

Continue reading “China has never had a real chip industry. Making AI chips could change that” »

“At least in the Defense Department today, we don’t see machines doing anything by themselves,” he said, noting that agency researchers are intensely focused on building “human-machine” partnerships. “I think we’re a long way off from a generalized AI, even in the third wave in what we’re pursuing.”

Artificial intelligence does not yet pose a serious threat to humans, according to the head of the Defense Advanced Research Agency. Though the military is rushing to improve its AI capabilities, DARPA Director Dr. Steven H. Walker said AI remains “a very fragile capability.”

When the Technological Singularity arrives, you can’t even imagine what the future will hold afterwards. Just ask author Vernor Vinge.

A five-time Hugo Award-winning author (among various other awards and accolades), Vernor Vinge has been writing and speculating about AI and intelligence amplification for over half a century. As part of his storied career, an interesting anecdote concerns a rejection letter he received from legendary science fiction editor and publisher John W. Campbell, Jr.

Early in his career, Vinge had proposed a story about a human being with amplified intelligence and (as Vinge relates in his short story collection) Campbell wrote him back with the comment, “Sorry — you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” Jump forward a few decades, and Vinge delivered a paper to NASA entitled The Coming Technological Singularity in which he foresaw a moment when artificial intelligence will develop exponentially until it reached a point that surpasses humanity’s ability to comprehend. It is intelligence so far superior that we can’t even imagine what it would be like. And then what?

Continue reading “Author Vernor Vinge: Proposing a singular view of technology’s future” »

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home.

It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance.

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Continue reading “Sci-Fi Promised Us Home Robots. So Where Are They?” »

With the rise of A.I., and studies that repeatedly suggest that workers’ productivity actually increases during shorter work days, the work week is poised to undergo a major transformation in the coming years.

The billionaire entrepreneur predicts the rise of technology will soon force society to rethink the modern work week.

Will AI transform — or replace — the Humanities?

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the Humanities by transforming how we analyze texts.

Unilever, the multinational consumer goods manufacturer, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with recruiting and onboarding of new employees. The algorithms help to sift through CVs and even conduct and analyze video interviews.

NASA’s newly arrived Mars lander has been spotted by one its orbiting cousins.

The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to photograph the InSight lander, as well as the hardware that helped the stationary robot ace its Nov. 26 touchdown on the equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia.

“It looks like the heat shield (upper right) has its dark outside facing down, since it is so bright (saturated, probably a specular reflection),” HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, wrote in an image description today (Dec. 13). [Mars InSight in Photos: NASA’s Mission to Probe Core of the Red Planet].