The cars can emit different types of honks depending on the situation.
Category: transportation – Page 605
Odds are we’re living in a simulation, says Elon Musk
This is one of those “therotical” topics that many of us have had at some point in our lives with our engineering team pals, or with our research department/ lab buddies. Fun to see Elon Musk share his views on this topic. Who knows; maybe? Last week, we learned that black holes may be nothing more that a multi-layer hologram in space.
“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode’s Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely we’re just characters living inside a simulation.
The Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky got half-way through asking Musk if he thought our existence was simulated before the Tesla CEO jumped in to finish his question for him. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk explained. “You’ve thought about this?” Topolsky asked. “A lot,” Musk replied. “It got to the point where every conversation was the AI / simulation conversation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.”
His argument — one presumably honed in the soothing waters of many a jaccuzi — goes that the incredibly fast advancement of video game technology indicates we’ll be capable of creating a fully lifelike simulation of existence in a short span of time. In 40 years, Musk explained, we’ve gone from Pong to massively multiplayer online games with millions of simultaneous players, games with photorealistic graphics, and stand now on the cusp of a new wave of virtual and augmented reality experiences.
Russia Building Robot Super-Soldier: Terminator Meets Avatar
Ivan made it in the major news this week again.
As if the world didn’t have enough problems, Russia is apparently creating a scary humanoid robotic soldier, affectionately being called “Ivan the Terminator.” Thank God they didn’t call it the T-800. The idea of the robot is to eventually replace humans on the battlefield. For now, these robotic avatars are remote-controlled using special suits worn by a human, but you know that won’t last long. One day they will be doing stuff on their own.
This robot (shown below) will accurately repeat the exact movement of the user by reading the fine motor skills of the neck, shoulder, hands and fingers. So if you raise your rifle to fire and pull the trigger, the robot will do just that. But it isn’t limited to just that kind of work, it can even drive a vehicle by automatically scanning the road for blockages or barriers. So it could give chase to enemies.
Elon Musk’s craziest idea is the AI-beating Neural Lace
RANCHOS PALOS VERDES, California — Are you ready to interface with your digital self at neural level? Elon Musk wants you to. In fact, he thinks it’s the only way we can prevent becoming our artificial intelligence overlords’ house cats.
Musk laid our this wild, new digital vision during a late evening chat at the annual Code Conference.
SEE ALSO: Tesla Model 3 won’t get free Supercharger access, Musk says.
Toyota in talks to buy Waltham’s Boston Dynamics from Google’s parent, Alphabet
Both Toyota and Honda would make sense as buyers. Toyota’s TRI has been ramping up on AI technology and Honda has been working on AI such as as Asimo for over a decade.
The car company may acquire Alphabet’s Boston Dynamics, known for a spry robot called Cheetah, and Schaft, a company working on humanoid robots, Tokyo’s Nikkei reported Wednesday. The potential acquisition would allow Toyota to make serious strides in its robotics division, while Alphabet could unload elements of its own underperforming robotics unit.
Elon Musk goes on a ‘machines building machines’ rant about the future of manufacturing
Tesla’s 2016 Shareholders Meeting yesterday was an unusual one. CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were on stage for close to 4 hours and went through the bulk of Tesla’s history – recounting stories from the early days with longtime employees of the automaker.
We already reported on important nuggets of information the execs released about the Gigafactory and the Model 3 during the event, but what probably stands out the most from the event – from my perspective at least – is Musk’s rant about the importance of the “machine that makes the machine.”
The CEO said that he recently – in the last 2 or 3 months – came to the realization that the potential for improvement is at least a factor of 10 greater in manufacturing vehicles than in the actual vehicle engineering.
Genetically modified bacteria converts CO2 into liquid fuels
Daniel G. Nocera, the Harvard professor who made headlines five years ago when he unveiled an artificial leaf, recently unveiled his latest work: an engineered bacteria that converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into alcohols and biomass. One can be used directly as fuel to power vehicles that run on conventional fuels, while the other can be burned for energy.
Watch radio controlled car that taught itself to DRIFT
Georgia Institute of Technology developed a control algorithm that ‘taught’ 3-ft, 48lb rally cars how to plan and execute optimal handling decisions in real-time while on rough terrain.
