Lifeboat Foundation

When the disembodied cockroach leg twitched, Yeongin Kim knew he had finally made it.

A graduate student at Stanford, Kim had been working with an international team of neuroengineers on a crazy project: an artificial nerve that acts like the real thing. Like sensory neurons embedded in our skin, the device—which kind of looks like a bendy Band-Aid—detects touch, processes the information, and sends it off to other nerves.

Yup, even if that downstream nerve is inside a cockroach leg.

Continue reading “Robots Will Be Able to Feel Touch With This Artificial Nerve” »

Microsoft is leveraging technology from submarines and working with pioneers in marine energy for the second phase of its moonshot to develop self-sufficient underwater datacenters that can deliver lightning-quick cloud services to coastal cities. An experimental, shipping-container-size prototype is processing workloads on the seafloor near Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Microsoft announced today.

The deployment of the Northern Isles datacenter at the European Marine Energy Centre marks a milestone in Microsoft’s Project Natick, a years-long research effort to investigate manufacturing and operating environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate lights out on the seafloor for years.

“That is kind of a crazy set of demands to make,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and Research, who leads the New Experiences and Technologies, or NExT, group. “Natick is trying to get there.”

Continue reading “Under the sea, Microsoft tests a datacenter that’s quick to deploy, could provide internet connectivity for years” »

Robot maker Boston Dynamics has spent a quarter century and at least $150 million in defense money building ominous machines. It’s finally ready to start selling them.

A diagrammatic explanation of how machine consciousness might be feasible.

About 20 years ago I gave my first talk on how to achieve consciousness in machines, at a World Future Society conference, and went on to discuss how we would co-evolve with machines. I’ve lectured on machine consciousness hundreds of times but never produced any clear slides that explain my ideas properly. I thought it was about time I did. My belief is that today’s deep neural networks using feed-forward processing with back propagation training can not become conscious. No digital algorithmic neural network can, even though they can certainly produce extremely good levels of artificial intelligence. By contrast, nature also uses neurons but does produce conscious machines such as humans easily. I think the key difference is not just that nature uses analog adaptive neural nets rather than digital processing (as I believe Hans Moravec first insighted, a view that I readily accepted) but also that nature uses large groups of these analog neurons that incorporate feedback loops that act both as a sort of short term memory and provide time to sense the sensing process as it happens, a mechanism that can explain consciousness. That feedback is critically important in the emergence of consciousness IMHO. I believe that if the neural network AI people stop barking up the barren back-prop tree and start climbing the feedback tree, we could have conscious machines in no time, but Moravec is still probably right that these need to be analog to enable true real-time processing as opposed to simulation of that.

I may be talking nonsense of course, but here are my thoughts, finally explained as simply and clearly as I can. These slides illustrate only the simplest forms of consciousness. Obviously our brains are highly complex and evolved many higher level architectures, control systems, complex senses and communication, but I think the basic foundations of biomimetic machine consciousness can be achieved as follows:

Continue reading “Biomimetic insights for machine consciousness” »

“This, of course, will deepen scientific and technological cooperation at the experts’ level in many areas, including but not limited to, advanced material sources. We are talking here of biotechnology, nanotechnology, data analysis, artificial intelligence, space technology, innovation policy,” Hernandez said.

By Genalyn Kabiling and Argyll Cyrus Geducos

Seoul, South Korea — The country’s vibrant relations with South Korea are expected to be strengthened with the planned cooperation accords on transportation safety, technological development, port expansion, and revitalized trade during President Duterte’s official visit.

Continue reading “Stronger, deeper PH-SoKor ties sought” »

Update from a space robot rolling around Mars!

Sols 5073–5102

Opportunity continued exploring the south trough of Perseverance in May, still looking for evidence that explains just how this one-of-a-kind valley meandering through Endeavour Crater’s rim formed, and, along the way, helped the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission chalk up yet another first, linking with three relay orbiters in one Martian day or sol to send a pipeline of data home.

Continue reading “The Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Makes Tracks on Magical Mystery Tour of Different Rocks” »

Creators of science fiction and fantasy books, films, and TV shows present stories of possible or imaginary worlds – and their presentations can range from the realistic to the fantastical. When we watch Westworld (and viewership is growing, with the season one finale drawing 2.2 million viewers ), we look forward 30 years into a potential future envisioned by its writers. Returning to the notion of reality and fantasy (or fact and fiction), the extent to which a sci-fi film might be descriptive of the future seems to be anybody’s guess.

However, we can actually get a sense of how reasonable the picture of the future that is being presented to us is if we consider it in terms of its pieces – particularly the technologies it presents. To consider the feasibility of the fascinating tools and other inventions depicted in these currently fictitious scenarios is, in some manner, to look through a window into the future. In a more functional sense, considering the show’s technology allows us a way to understand it in a broader cultural and historical context (as well as to better understand the possible future developments of these technologies through a fictional example).

Here are five key technologies from Westworld that are not AI, along with a sense of how close we are to actually having these seemingly “space-age” technologies available.

Continue reading “5 futuristic Westworld technologies and when they’ll be a reality” »

Chinese company Tencent is driving (AI) development in the country to help the Chinese government achieve its goal of being the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. Tencent invests in research and development, other tech companies and personnel to help it achieve its AI ambitions.

There is no doubt that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — an AI that is capable of generating human-level intelligence — is on its way. It’s only a matter a when, not if. According to some researchers, the quest to developing AGI may take longer than expected. But even then, the quest continues on.

How we treat robots in the future may significantly rely on how we expose children to artificially intelligent supertoys today.

Continue reading “In the Age of AI, Children Should Befriend Their Supertoys” »