Lifeboat Foundation

When you walk into Eatsa, a new restaurant at the Village at Westfield Topanga, there is no host, no waiters or even tables. The restaurant is an empty space lined with iPads on one wall, interactive clear cubbies (glass doors) on another, and a wall outfitted with motion sensors that dispense cutlery.

This is fast food the Eatsa way. The restaurant, which has a location in San Francisco, is completely automated — minus the food preparation.

“There are three people in the back that make everything from scratch,” said Travis Jones, who is head of the culinary operations at both Eatsa locations. “We believe in blending technology and proper culinary skills, and it’s a blend that makes the whole process work.”

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Last Friday at the Neural Information and Processing Systems conference in Montreal, Canada, a team of artificial intelligence luminaries announced OpenAI, a non-profit company set to change the world of machine learning.

Backed by Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, OpenAI has a hefty budget and even heftier goals. With a billion dollars in initial funding, OpenAI eschews the need for financial gains, allowing it to place itself on sky-high moral grounds.

By not having to answer to industry or academia, OpenAI hopes to focus not just on developing digital intelligence, but also guide research along an ethical route that, according to their inaugural blog post, “benefits humanity as a whole.”

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Full Title:
Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy in Which Collective Human and Machine Meaning Making Reigns.

Speaker:
Ben Goertzel, AGI Society, OpenCog Foundation.

Continue reading “Ben Goertzel: Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy” »

Click on photo to start video.

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This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence.

Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue.

And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions.

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Basic Income (10 Reasons)
https://goo.gl/PJ7bbh

Lies You’ve Been Told about Work.
https://goo.gl/3u7Vld

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Facebook’s Yann LeCun:

Myth #1: “Advanced robots will have feelings”. Most AIs will be specialized and have no emotions.
Myth #2: “Robots will develop emotions spontaneously”. AI will only have emotions if they’re programmed with them.
Myth #3: “Robot emotions will be similar to human emotions”. There is no reason for AIs to have self-preservation instincts or jealousy.

LeCun adds: “unless we build these emotions into them. I don’t see why we would want to do that.”

Continue reading “The 3 biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence, according to Facebook’s expert” »

China wants to be the leading force in manned space exploration, and is exploring sending people to the far side of the moon, Mars, asteroids, and further into deep space.

Becoming the second largest economy in the world and an emerging superpower of its own, China wishes to add deep space exploration into its achievement portfolio. Besides the ongoing moon exploration, its scientists are considering going deeper into the solar system, including Mars, asteroids, and even manned deep-space mission. Liu Jizhong, director of the lunar exploration program and space engineering center, pointed out that China has to be more pioneering, tackling problems such as high speed deep space exploration, energy and power generation, space robot development, and more. He also said that China must cooperate with others as space exploration is an undertaking shared by the entire human species.

China currently intends to explore the far side of the moon, something that has never been done before. It would require a relay satellite for communication and navigation on Lagrange point, where the satellite could orbit within the combined gravitational pull of the Earth-moon system, as said by Zhang Lihua of China Spacesat Co. While China believes that robots are critical to the mission, it also believes that these trips must be manned in order to effectively leverage human decision-making. China also says they are designing footed robots to explore asteroids and better understand their material composition.

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