Lifeboat Foundation

Ugh, this is just typical. You think you know the way the world works: wind blows, fire burns, wheels spin and – wait, what’s this thing doing?

What? You mean, it can actually move in any direction without so much as turning on an axis? That’s blowing my mind. I’m no gear head, but I’m sort of attached to having a steering wheel in my car, you know? Now you’re saying that self-driving cars will take those away, and now there won’t even be wheels to turn in the direction you want to go in?

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An artificial intelligence program received such high scores on a standardized test that it’d have an 80% chance of getting into a Japanese university.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the program, developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, took a multi-subject college entrance exam and passed with an above-average score of 511 points out of a possible 950. (The national average is 416.) With scores like that, it has an 8 out of 10 chance of being admitted to 441 private institutions in Japan, and 33 national ones.

Continue reading “An AI Program in Japan Just Passed a College Entrance Exam” »

Welcome to #24 Avatar Technology Digest! We provide you with the latest news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence the best way we can. Here are the top stories of the last week!

1) Did you know that Disney does more than shoot box office hits and sell toys to your kids? They also have a very active Research Department that specializes in a variety of applications that can be used throughout the Disney empire. And now another interesting innovation has come out of the Research Department, as they have developed a method for generating those 3D printable robots without the need for time and energy-consuming work at all.

2) Being able to identify problems with a person’s body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There’s even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they’ve developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.

Continue reading “#24 AVATAR TECHNOLOGY DIGEST / Get a Virtual-Reality Punch” »

“Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology — now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future,” says Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a researcher engineer at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California at Berkeley.

That’s right — we may be on the brink of an all-out self-driving car revolution.

We’ve already seen cars that can stay in their lanes and apply the breaks by themselves, so to many, an autonomous car is just the next step in the natural progression. And the automotive industry is taking this very seriously. According to a study by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the self-driving market is estimated to grow to $33.89 billion in the next five years.

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Bloomberg recently broke the news that Google is “turning its lucrative Web search over to AI machines.” Google revealed to the reporter that for the past few months, a very large fraction of the millions of search queries Google responds to every second have been “interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain.”

The company that has tried hard to automate its mission to organize the world’s information was happy to report that its machines have again triumphed over humans. When Google search engineers “were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top,” RankBrain had an 80% success rate compared to “the humans [who] guessed correctly 70 percent of the time.”

There you have it. Google’s AI machine RankBrain, after only a few months on the job, already outranks the best brains in the industry, the elite engineers that Google typically hires.

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It‘s older, but interesting!

The year is 2050 and super-intelligent robots have emerged as the masters of Earth. Unfortunately, you have no idea of that fact because we are immersed in a computer simulation set decades ago. Everything you see and touch has now been created and programmed by machines that use mankind for their own benefit. This radical theory, demonstrated in numerous books and science fiction films, has been, and is currently regarded by science as possible; Moreover, scientists are taking this theory to a cosmic level and even believe that if only one extraterrestrial civilization in the universe go the technological level to “emulate” an entire “multiverse,” then even our probes and space telescopes, which are out there exploring the universe, belong to that “creepy simulation.”

Continue reading “Researchers suggest that the universe could be a computer simulation: Is it possible?” »

Scientists are using artificial intelligence tech developed by IBM to help researchers and students get reliable answers to their questions.

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Futurist Vivek Wadhwa predicts change “at a scale which is unimaginable before,” thanks to advances in technologies like robotics and 3D printing. “New trillion dollar industries will wipe out out existing trillion dollar industries,” he says. “This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.”

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It’s being reported that a Bank of England official forecasts that in the next 10 to 20 years, smart robots will steal 80 million jobs from Americans and 15 million jobs from Britons—over half the workforce of each nation. I smell BS.

In a speech delivered yesterday by Bank economist Andy Haldane at the Trades Union Congress in London, he predicted that robots could quickly “hollow out” the middle class, shrinking the need for human-only skills, especially in clerical, production, and administrative jobs.

It’s true—I think robots will appear more in those sectors. But for every “robot overload” doom-and-gloom claim, there is a calming rebuttal of reason.

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