Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Elon Musk

Elon Musk has recently hinted that he may be working on a “neural lace,” a mesh of electronics that will allow AI and the brain to work together. This could help human brains keep up with future enhancements in AI.

There’s no doubt that Elon Musk is one busy individual. When not playing on the Tesla factory floor, he may be bringing electric roofs to electric vehicles, or dreaming up the Hyperloop, or toying with the future of AI.

If not any of those, he is apparently busy protecting us from being treated like house pets after the Singularity. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “neural lace.”

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Sony is hiding their home helper robot, which is concerning. I have seen pictures of Elon Musk’s home helper bot and it looked really bad. At least there seems to be a race to get these things to market now.

Sony’s much anticipated new robot is under development and customers should hang on a little longer to see it, CEO Kaz Hirai said on Thursday.

Sony began working on a home robot in April this year and first disclosed existence of the project in June this year. Since then, it’s been quiet on what exactly is under development.

Hirai first hinted the company might be about to unveil the robot, while speaking during a news conference at the IFA trade show in Berlin.

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Visionary and sometimes controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk hinted at advances in next-generation brain hacking. Recent research results promise future “neural lace” technology that could enhance our brains and connect them to the cloud.

“Making progress,” said Musk in a tweet, in reply to a query about “neural lace” technologies for augmenting human intelligence.

“Maybe something to announce in a few months.”

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As mankind grows ever closer to technology, we need machines to better understand humans and arguably vice versa. This is the vital challenge for communications, tech and creativity in the 21st century – as we advance, how can we keep the human in the machine?

The pointed end of this relationship is reflected by a recent UN report that recommended “Autonomous lethal weapons systems that require no meaningful human control should be prohibited.” And anyone who is anyone – Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk for example – think AI could spell the end of the world, be that at the hand of Terminators or through some other machine instigated apocalypse.

Dystopian visions aside (for now), the reality is probably more mundane, but no less breathtaking in potential. In a recent response to the White House on AI, IBM, creators of world-beating (and magazine-editing) AI ‘Watson’ had this to say: “We believe that many of the ambiguities and inefficiencies of the critical systems that facilitate life on this planet can be eliminated. And we believe that AI systems are the tools that will help us accomplish these ambitious goals.”

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Elon Musk, Tesla Motors CEO, is alluding to a big announcement about level 4 autonomy later this year. For now though, the technology is still in need of software improvements.

Tesla Motors has been starring in headlines recently, thanks to crashes attributed to the autopilot system, the announcement of the ambitious Master Plan, and the company’s acquisition of SolarCity. Now, Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, is attracting even more media attention.

When asked about Tesla’s progress toward Level 4 fully autonomous driving on a conference call, Musk teased, “what we’ve got will blow people’s minds, it blows my mind …it’ll come sooner than people think.”

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The big kahuna of American rocket companies is the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that until this year held a monopoly on the lucrative business of launching rockets for the US Air Force.

But that monopoly is no more. The company faces a new era of competition as Elon Musk’s maturing SpaceX aims to fly more space missions in one year than ULA does, and as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin breaks ground on a new factory for orbital rockets.

ULA, for its part, isn’t sitting still. “I came here to transform the company, position it in this new competitive marketplace with all these different players,” says Tony Bruno, who took the CEO job at ULA in August 2014 after a three-decade career in Lockheed’s missile-defense business. In his first full year in charge, ULA returned more than $400 million in operating profits to its two owners, but the company must prepare for when its final no-bid launch contract expires in 2019.

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