Lifeboat Foundation

It’s all fun and games, until Jose Canseco becomes the leader of the anti robot/AI resistance.

Jose Canseco is all juiced up about robots and their existential threat to humanity.

The steroid-tainted former slugger took a few Twitter swings at the human race’s blatant disregard of the current droid danger that is bringing the world toward an economic catastrophe.

Continue reading “Jose Canseco says humans need to crush the robot uprising” »

The wave of automation that swept away tens of thousands of American manufacturing and office jobs during the past two decades is now washing over the armed forces, putting both rear-echelon and front-line positions in jeopardy.

“Just as in the civilian economy, automation will likely have a big impact on military organizations in logistics and manufacturing,” said Michael Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and one of the globe’s foremost experts on weaponized robots.

Technology can be a catalyst for the creation or destruction of jobs, but historically, it has always ultimately created more opportunities for employment, not less. That’s not stopping many from speaking out against Amazon Go for its potential to increase unemployment, though.

According to Ford, however, the implementation of automation technology is inevitable because it has obvious advantages for both consumers and retailers. “I don’t think we can stop it,” he says. “It’s a part of capitalism, that there’s going to be this continuous drive for more efficiency.”

While many have been focusing on manufacturing and transportation as the industries that will be hardest hit by automation, Amazon Go is an example of how tech that exists right now could replace retail salespersons and cashiers, jobs that had the highest employment numbers in the U.S. in May 2015 according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.

Continue reading “‘I Don’t Think We Can Stop It:’ The Future of Automation and Job Loss” »

In many ways, the human eye is nothing like a digital camera. Our eyes don’t have a fixed frame rate or resolution; there’s no consistent color reproduction, and we have literal, sizable blind spots. But, these optic inconsistencies — found in every biological eye — are the product of natural selection, and offer a number of benefits which scientists working in digital vision can take advantage of.

Case in point is a new type of 3D-printed lens created by researchers from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Each lens is made from plastic and is no bigger than a grain of salt. But, their size is only one aspect of their cleverness. The real innovation here is that the lenses mimic the action of the “fovea,” a key physiological feature of the eyes of humans and eagles, that allows for for speedier image processing.

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Team OB just won the Robotics for Good Award in Dubai. Over 1,600 technologies for good applied and after competing against the top 10 best assistive technologies the judges chose our bionic hands! Now we have the funding to push our hands through the final stages of medical testing and finally get them to everyone who needs one.

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Taxation and redistribution.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

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For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

Continue reading “Artificial Vision, Artificial Retina, Optogenetics, José Alain Sahel MD, CMU RI Seminar” »

Potentially describing how general artificial intelligence will look like.

Since scientists started building and training neural networks, Transfer Learning has been the main bottleneck. Transfer Learning is the ability of an AI to learn from different tasks and apply its pre-learned knowledge to a completely new task. It is implicit that with this precedent knowledge, the AI will perform better and train faster than de novo neural networks on the new task.

DeepMind is on the path of solving this with PathNet. PathNet is a network of neural networks, trained using both stochastic gradient descent and a genetic selection method.

Continue reading “DeepMind just published a mind blowing paper: PathNet” »