An ESA-led team subjected Intel’s new Myriad 2 artificial intelligence chip to one of the most energetic radiation beams available on Earth. This test of its suitability to fly in space took place at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The AI chip is related in turn to an ESA-fostered family of integrated circuits.
In May, Google made quite the splash when it unveiled Duplex, its eerily humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. It seemed to mark a new milestone in speech generation and natural-language understanding, and it pulled back the curtain on what the future of human-AI interaction might look like.
So far, robots have primarily been developed to fulfill utilitarian purposes, assisting humans or serving as tools to facilitate the completion of particular tasks. As robots become more human-like, however, this could pose significant challenges, particularly for robots built to engage with humans socially.
Humans have used sex dolls as inanimate objects for sexual pleasure throughout history. Animated sex robots, social robots created to meet humans’ needs for sex and affection, offer more. Due to recent developments in robotics and AI, sex robots are now becoming more advanced and human-like. Purchasers can have them customised both in appearance and in how they speak and behave to simulate intimacy, warmth and emotion.
Currently, sex robots are inanimate things, able to simulate but not engage in mutual intimacies. In the future, however, technological advances might allow researchers to manufacture sentient, self-aware sex robots with feelings, or sexbots. The implications of the availability of sexbots as customisable perfect partners for intimate relationships with humans are potentially vast.
The OriHime-D can also be used by people involved in childcare, nursing care or other activities that prevent them from leaving home or a certain location.
A cafe with an all-robot staff controlled by paralyzed people has opened in Tokyo.
Continue reading “Cafe in Japan Hires Paralyzed People to Control Robot Servers” »
A robot barista can whip up 120 drinks an hour — and it reveals a growing trend that is transforming the restaurant industry.
Trendy coffee roasters including Intelligentsia, Ritual, and Equator have partnered with Café X Technologies to create a $25,000 robot barista, CNBC reports. The robot, which operates as the sole barista in a San Francisco café, can make any drink you would expect at a standard trendy coffee shop, including espressos, flat whites, and cortados.
“I don’t see the robot revolution as a problem,” 24-year-old inventor Henry Hu told CNBC. “The idea isn’t to scare you or harm you in any way. The point is to get you your coffee as quickly and deliciously as possible.”
Jack Poulson is the former Google Senior Research Scientist who quit the company’s machine learning division over Project Dragonfly, the company’s secret plan to build a censoring Chinese search engine designed to help the country’s spies surveil dissident search activity.
In an editorial on The Intercept, Poulson describes the series of events that led up to his resignation: a chain of execs who, in private meetings and public statements, engaged in hypocritical deflection and spin rather than giving the straight answer about why they were going to go into China and what the result of that would be (answers: “To make money,” and “complicity in human rights abuses”).
It’s been a busy few days and now, a new picture of Mars without the camera lens cover. Plus, a new view from my robotic arm camera. Read: http://go.nasa.gov/2Q6txLp&h=AT2OsODL_mwl4ybu3wGRiR812vXmG4B…tm_fqcCRzw
More Mars pics: go.nasa.gov/InSightRaws
