Lifeboat Foundation

Last month, we showed an earlier version of this robot where we’d trained its vision system using domain randomization, that is, by showing it simulated objects with a variety of color, backgrounds, and textures, without the use of any real images.

Now, we’ve developed and deployed a new algorithm, one-shot imitation learning, allowing a human to communicate how to do a new task by performing it in VR. Given a single demonstration, the robot is able to solve the same task from an arbitrary starting configuration.

Caption: Our system can learn a behavior from a single demonstration delivered within a simulator, then reproduce that behavior in different setups in reality.

More migration to megacities is expected in the next few decades, because they have more jobs that are resilient to automation than smaller urban areas.

When machines control all the world’s finances and run factory floors, what will humans be left to do?

We’ll make art, says Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft executive who has since launched VC firm Sinovation Ventures.

“Art and beauty is very hard to replicate with AI. Given AI is more objective, analytical, data driven, maybe it’s time for some of us to switch to the humanities, liberal arts, and beauty,” Lee told Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney during a live Q&A session. “Maybe professions where it’s hard to find a job might be good to study.”

Continue reading “Your art degree might save you from automation, an AI expert says” »

The android was the star of the International Robot Exhibition 2015 in Tokyo.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m9t-G9p8LrI

What does a prototype computer with 160 terabytes of memory have to do with missions to Mars? The way Kirk Bresniker sees it, a giant leap in computing is required for the giant leap to the Red Planet.

“That’s actually what we need to wrap around that crew,” Bresniker, chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs, told GeekWire.

My recent Op-Ed in Wired UK featured in their weekend round-up, plus some other transhumanism stuff newly out: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/weekender-12052017 & http://holytrinityinwood.org/news-from-holy-trinity-church-inwood-easter-2017/ & http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/05/08/high-tech-high-p…longevity/

The WIRED Weekender is an eclectic weekly digest containing highlights of the most important, interesting and unusual stories we’ve published during the previous seven days.

A machine learning algorithm is using sentiment analysis to make stock price predictions with 76 percent accuracy.

Nearly a half-century has passed since the earliest rotational artificial gravity testing was performed, such as at the Rockwell Rotational Test Facility and the NASA Langley Rotating Space Station Simulator. Periodically over the decades since then a few experiments have taken place, and proposals have been made for government-sponsored rotating artificial gravity test facilities, both on the ground and in orbit.^1,2 And yet no such project has been started since those early government programs.

While not a complete figment of our imagination, the universe may only become real because we’re looking at it.

By Douglas Heaven

Samuel Johnson thought the idea was so preposterous that kicking a rock was enough to silence discussion. “I refute it thus,” he cried as his foot rebounded from reality. Had he known about quantum mechanics, he might have spared himself the stubbed toe.

Continue reading “The human universe: Does consciousness create reality?” »