Lifeboat Foundation

An improved way of learning about neural networks.

This concept, by Italian designer Carlo Ratti Associati, features many futuristic designs such as transparent displays and robots boxing up your food.

With a new lobby, driverless cars could gain some legitimacy and legislation for the road. The question is whether they are good for the environment or not.

With the robot economy looming large in the coming decades, one solution to vanishing jobs may simply be to give people money regardless of whether or not they work.

That idea is called “basic income,” and it just gained the support of one of the tech world’s founding fathers, Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

“I think a basic income is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality,” Berners-Lee, who founded the Web in 1989, explained on a recent episode of The Economist podcast.

Continue reading “Here’s why the inventor of the Internet supports basic income” »

While all the focus has been on autonomous vehicles, one Belgian startup has been busily developing self-flying features for drones.

For $599 your home can have a futuristic robot butler.

With huge leaps taking place in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), right now, experts have started asking questions about the new forms of protection we might need against the formidable smarts and potential dangers of computers and robots of the near future.

But do robots need protection from us too? As the ‘minds’ of machines evolve ever closer to something that’s hard to tell apart from human intelligence, new generations of technology may need to be afforded the kinds of moral and legal protections we usually think of as ‘human’ rights, says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Du Sautoy thinks that once the sophistication of computer thinking reaches a level basically akin to human consciousness, it’s our duty to look after the welfare of machines, much as we do that of people.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence should be protected” »

Computationally intensive neural network workloads have created a gap that both Google and Nervana address with custom silicon.

Money can buy you immortality, according to the Russian internet multi-millionaire who is ploughing a fortune into a project to create a human that never dies.