Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: mobile phones

RLOL — headline alone is priceless. However, who does get blame? And, on what grounds? Negligence in the design of the product or bad product quality? What about improper application of the product because it was designed for a particular set of the population & not for a broader public use. What about the businesses using AI? Wonder what type of insurance & the amount of insurance a business would be will be required to have in place to utilize a robot cook, or robotic nurse, etc. Lots & lots of things that still require planning, restructuring, & budgeting.

Andy Rubin is best known as the creator of Android. But in 2014, he left that all behind to create his own startup called Playground, a company focused on financially backing futuristic ideas that will shape our world—hopefully for the better.

Today, Wired published a deeper look into Andy Rubin’s day-to-day at Playground, and it very well be responsible for the destruction of the human race. Now that Rubin is no longer at Google, he spends most of his time pondering and financially backing the future of artificial intelligence. You know, that technology that keeps some of the world’s greatest minds awake at night?

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When is industry finally going to finally understand that the gap all along has been the lack of women leading NextGen Innovation especially around AI?

Here we go again trying to make AI more enriched. This time it is using a “dashcam” which again is a technique that is like living in a bubble looking at the world; meaning no true human experience or empathy programmed within AI. We must develop AI with an inside-out approach along with the outside-in approach; and not just an outside-in approach. And, it can be done because women understand this piece extremely well and can build AI to include this perspective because of how we interact and see the world.

Former Google exec and Android co-founder Andy Rubin has announced his latest designs for the tech industry — and his plans to take over what he considers the most important technological frontier of the decade: artificial intelligence.

Rubin laid out his latest tech endeavor, in an exclusive with Wired: a mission to more or less monopolize the artificial intelligence (AI) pocket of the market. While Rubin’s newest tech incubator Playground Global is the tech mogul’s gateway toward this endgame, it appears that the godfather of Android is only willing to concretely reveal one facet of his vision: a plan to create a visual traffic map with help from a free device and an unusual business model.

The big reveal came in the form of Playground’s dashcam hardware, accompanied by an unprecedented plan for the cam’s data. According to Rubin, the device would be given away to customers with one caveat: unhindered company access to each dash cam’s data set.

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Around the world, cities are choking on smog. But a new AI system plans to analyze just how bad the situation is by aggregating data from smartphone pictures captured far and wide across cities.

The project, called AirTick, has been developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, reports New Scientist. The reasoning is pretty simple: Deploying air sensors isn’t cheap and takes a long time, so why not make use of the sensors that everyone has in their pocket?

The result is an app which allows people to report smog levels by uploading an image tagged with time and location. Then, a machine learning algorithm chews through the data and compares it against official air-quality measurements where it can. Over time, the team hopes the software will slowly be able to predict air quality from smartphone images alone.

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Brand’s view and concerns about hacking driverless cars are valid. And, I do believe in time that government will eventually catch up in passing some laws that will make companies ensure that their technology is safe for consumer usage and are safe for the public. I just hope that the pendulum does swing too far to the other side of over regulation.

It is not easy to slot Brad Templeton. What do you make of a person who is not only the networks and computing chair at Singularity University in Silicon Valley but also a software architect, a director of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, board member of the cyberspace watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first person to have set up an Internet-based business, a futurist lecturer, hobby photographer, artist, as well as a consultant on Google’s driverless car design team?

In a phone interview from the US, Templeton, who will be in India this month as a key speaker during the SingularityU India Summit (to be held in association with INK, which hosts events like INKtalks—a platform for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas and inspiring stories), shared his views on driverless cars, the perceived threat from intelligent machines and censorship of the Internet. Edited excerpts:

Driverless cars are not hacker-proof and may find it difficult to navigate chaotic traffic. How are we addressing such issues?

It’s absolutely true that people are concerned about security of these cars, but it is wrong to presume that people in the media learnt about this before those who built the driverless car. The people who built the car are working to make the car secure. They won’t be able to do it perfectly, but they are going to get there. The Google team certainly has the most miles to its credit. Right now over 2 million km in automatic mode, driving around mostly in California. The chaotic driving in India is slower than some of the roads in Europe or North America. And it is actually easier to do slower and chaotic driving than faster. You get more time to stop, perceive the situation and make accurate moves. The real challenge is that in many chaotic driving situations, there are unwritten rules so you have to figure out how to sort of, play a game with the other cars. It may mean that some of the more chaotic places may have to clean up their act a bit if they want to have a technology like this.

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I will admit there is some great VR and AI talent in the UK.

U.S. giants such as Apple and Microsoft are flocking to the U.K. to buy artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups as Britain establishes itself as the go-to place for the technology.

Microsoft announced that it had acquired London-based Swiftkey, an AI start-up that makes a predictive keyboard for smartphones, on Wednesday for $250 million, sources close to the deal told CNBC.

“We are looking for interesting tech. It is not new news that London is the most advanced start-up ecosystem in Europe,” a Microsoft insider who wished to remain anonymous because they were not authorised to speak publicly about the deal, told CNBC on Thursday.

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Finally, the solution that I been looking for to combat Telemarketers.

TEXAS (CBSNEWS.COM) – We’ve all been there — usually right at dinner time, the phone rings and you pick up only to find out that you have now been roped into an unwanted conversation with a telemarketer. Have you ever wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine? Well, now, a developer is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to turn the tables and annoy those pesky callers.

The Jolly Roger Telephone Co., from developer Roger Anderson, is a robot voice that answers with “hello?” and keeps the conversation going. When you get a telemarketing call, you manually conference in the robot and then go on about your life. It stays on the line and any time it senses a moment of silence in the conversation, the robot voice jumps in and fills the gap with generic responses like “yes” or “right” or “hang on.”

On his blog, Anderson has posted recordings of robot vs. telemarketer phone calls. Some of the humans catch on quicker than others.

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I cannot wait to see India’s version of DARPA — it is probably going to be amazing.

India is unable to spend its defence modernisation budget, says a report in this newspaper. Out of a current year allocation of Rs 63,675 crore, 40% remained unspent by end-December. This is bad not just for upgrading defence capability but also for Indian research and development and for Indian manufacturing.

It is time defence reimagined its entire strategy for procurement, using a portion of its typically large outlays to stimulate R&D in universities and specialised labs and private companies, and to give Indian companies, big and small, a chance to become suppliers of parts and equipment on a scale much larger than what obtains today. The key is to create an Indian equivalent of the Americans’ Darpa.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was set up in response to the Soviet Sputnik, with the mission to initiate strategic technological surprises and not be caught off-guard by such surprises. Its size and budget are small. What it does is detailed assessment and forecasting of technology and contracting out of research in diverse areas, to universities, research contractors, companies and specialised labs, matching bits of the huge defence budget with the R&D capability available in the nation. Apart from stealth bombers and precision guidance of missiles, this effort has also yielded the internet and the geopositioning system now available on every smartphone.

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A transparent material that can be attached to a smartphone’s touch screen could help the device generate electricity whenever anyone taps it, researchers in China say.

Touch screens are now found on most cell phones and tablet computers. Using a touch screen typically involves finger taps, and scientists at Lanzhou University in China reasoned that the mechanical energy from these motions could be converted into electricity to charge the phone’s batteries, which could significantly extend the working time of these portable devices.

The researchers developed a new material based on a transparent silicone rubber known as PDMS. Scientists embedded wires in this rubber that were made of lead zirconate titanate that were only 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide. For perspective, this is about 140 times thinner than the average width of a human hair. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World].

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