Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing

This is one that truly depends on the targeted audience. I still believe that the 1st solely owned & operated female robotics company will make billions.

Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language.

Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machinelearning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

Synthesised speech is created in a variety of ways. The highest-quality techniques for natural-sounding speech begin with a human voice that is used to generate a database of parts and even subparts of speech spoken in many different ways. A human voice actor may spend from 10 hours to hundreds of hours, if not more, recording for each database.

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Radiation works as a ‘tuning fork’ to control the spin of electrons.

Scientists have found a new way of moving information between quantum bits in a computer. They used a highly purified sample of silicon doped with bismuth atoms (left) before fitting a superconducting aluminium resonator to it (middle and right).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3448052/Could-microwaves-finally-crack-quantum-computing-Radiation-works-tuning-fork-control-spin-electrons.html#ixzz40IRYjbXK
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Scientists at the French Atomic Energy Commission may have found a way of obtaining information from the spin of electrons on demand by using microwaves to change their spin state.

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Theoretical physicists at MIT recently reported a quantum computer design featuring an array of superconducting islands on the surface of a topological insulator. They propose basing both quantum computation and error correction on the peculiar behavior of electrons at neighboring corners of these islands and their ability to interact across islands at a distance. “The lowest energy state of this system is a very highly entangled quantum state, and it is this state that can be used to encode and manipulate qubits,” says graduate student Sagar Vijay, lead co-author of the paper on the proposed system, with senior author Liang Fu, associate professor of physics at MIT, and Timothy H. Hsieh PhD ’15. As Vijay explains it, the proposed system can encode logical qubits that can be read by shining light on them. At the simplest level of explanation, the system can characterize the state of a quantum bit as a zero or a one based on whether there is an odd or even number of electrons associated with a superconducting quantum bit, but the underlying physical interactions that allow this are highly complex.

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Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.

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Frankly brainwashing tactics never worked with me. I am not sure what the media is up to; but this is truly become a bit ridiculous. Up until last week; the media and dooms day believers where telling everyone in the next 10 years; most of the jobs would no longer be held by humans. Until me and a few other folks on the web started sharing the facts on why that was not a reality. So, recently, the journalists new story is in 30 years most of the jobs will be taken by robots.

Again, we will settle down from the hype and learn that the reality is people will have jobs because new careers will be created plus some of the corporate and special skilled jobs that we have today have too much access to IP and other private information. And, this type of information most companies will want some level of human oversight managing the information and operations around it. Also, we will see that in order to keep creativity and real innovation moving forward that we will always need humans involved.

Besides, in the 1950’s robots and computers was suppose to have taken over by 1970; and in 1970 the humanoids (like in the movie WestWorld) was suppose to exist and we were to colonized the moon by 1999; and the same stories continue today.

A life of leisure could be the norm for a majority of people in decades to come, according to Moshe Vardi from Rice University in Houston, Texas, who spoke at the annual AAAS meeting.

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The pace at which robots and intelligent machines are able to take over the jobs traditionally performed by humans will result in more than half the population being unemployed within 30 years, an expert in computing has predicted.

While some may look forward to a life of leisure, many others face the dismal prospect of long-term unemployment as a result of the rise of smart machines, from self-driving cars and intelligent drones to smart financial-trading machines, said Moshe Vardi, professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

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Why? Why are there so many folks hyping up AI devastation?

I truly caution folks from over hyping things before they hurt a lot of innocent people. Things like Quantum Computing and Internet, CRISPR, microbot technology, etc. could be badly damaged as a result of the over hype of AI and it’s under delivery.

Also, the ongoing changing numbers on when 50% of the jobs are lost or the ongoing shuffle/ changes in the capabilities of the AI story is also creating an environment of distrust which also hurts efforts around Quantum, CRISPR, etc.

Investors and consumers don’t forget things that easily; and could pull away in supporting these other much needed technologies.

Advances in artificial intelligence will soon lead to robots that are capable of nearly everything humans do, threatening tens of millions of jobs in the coming 30 years, experts warned Saturday.

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,” said Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas.

“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” he asked at a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

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Minduploading.org is a collection of pages and articles designed to explore the concepts underlying mind uploading. The articles are intended to be a readable introduction to the basic technical and philosophical topics covering mind uploading and substrate-independent minds. The focus is on careful definitions of the common terms and what the implications are if mind uploading becomes possible.

Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. This site refers to a number of participants and researchers who are helping to make mind uploading possible.

Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us.

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