Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them “see”.

VisionLabs, a solutions developer in the field of computer vision, data analysis and robotics, and a Skolkovo IT Cluster resident have developed this as a global open-source computer vision project with the support of Facebook and Google, an official said.

VisionLabs integrated two popular libraries for developers — OpenCV and Torch. The joint project with Facebook and Google was launched last year. “The two IT giants became interested in the in-depth study of neural networks and artificial intelligence and hence extended their support,” the official told IANS.

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Elon Musk is known for his optimistic deadlines, but this one is very aggressive.

The Tesla CEO spoke at the Code Conference on Wednesday night and predicted that we’re closer to self-driving cars than anybody thinks. “I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year,” Musk said.

While many auto and tech companies—from Google to Uber and GM to Lyft and Apple to Ford—are researching and testing autonomous vehicles, the Tesla seems on the verge of announcing that its Model 3 consumer sedan will have full self-driving capabilities.

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A startup founded by a former top boss at NASA has emerged from so-called stealth mode with technology that claims to beat Apple, Google and Microsoft’s voice recognition technology.

Dan Goldin, who spent nearly all of the 1990s leading NASA, has revealed KnuEdge, a machine learning company that already boasts Fortune 500 clients and $100m in private funding despite its under the radar nature for the last decade.

“We are not about incremental technology. Our mission is fundamental transformation,” said Goldin.

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By now it’s clear that bots will cause a major paradigm shift in customer service, e-commerce, and, quite frankly, all aspects of software-to-human interaction.

For the moment, the state of the art of bots is bot-to-consumer, meaning bots communicating with humans. But at some point soon, bots will start talking to other bots. Enter the bot-to-bot era.

Imagine that a bot — let’s call her Annie — needs to answer a question from a customer but lacks information from her own backend systems. Annie is powered with artificial intelligence and spontaneously decides to reach out to another bot to get the information she needs. Annie aggregates the information and delivers it back to the customer.

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Musk concerns over Singularity/ cyborgs technology.

We are said to be headed towards a wired future. But that could equally be a weird future, going by what some tech entrepreneurs and artificial intelligence visionaries are saying about it. It’s going to get a lot weirder than self-driving smart cars. Elon Musk, who co-founded Paypal and started the Tesla electric car company – and thus has a track record of delivering on ambitious projects – also set up the SpaceX company, whose ultimate goal is to colonise Mars. He’s just announced, at this year’s Code Conference in Los Angeles, plans to send the first manned mission to Mars as early as 2024. Moreover cargo flights to Mars are also planned every two years, keeping in mind that a habitation on Mars will require regular supplies from earth.

Musk says he’s doing this to preserve humanity, since possibilities of a calamitous event that destroys human civilisation on earth – thanks to runaway advances in technology – are high. Perhaps we have a foretaste of this already when the Louvre museum packs up its treasures of human art and locks its doors due to floods in Paris, an event that has been linked to the pumping of greenhouse gases into the air that disrupt the earth’s climate. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes at the same issue from the opposite end. He says heavy industry is too polluting and will need to be relocated to outer space to preserve the earth.

There is also the spectre of singularity, the point at which machines become so intelligent that humans are rendered superfluous. To head this off, according to Musk, we will need to add an artificial intelligence layer to the human brain itself. The future, it appears, is cyborg. We will all be Superman, or bust.

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To make robots more cooperative and have them perform tasks in close proximity to humans, they must be softer and safer. A new actuator developed by Harvard researchers generates movements similar to those of skeletal muscles using vacuum power to automate soft, rubber beams.

Like real muscles, the actuators are soft, shock absorbing, and pose no danger to their environment or humans working collaboratively alongside them or the potential future robots equipped with them. The work was reported June 1 in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

The new actuators could pave the way for entirely soft-bodied robots that are safer than their conventional rigid counterparts.

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Over the past couple of months, Google’s parent company Alphabet has been looking to offload its robotics division, Boston Dynamics, as it seeks to divert its attention to self-driving cars. Toyota’s Research Institute was thought to interested in picking up the company from the start, but Nikkei is now reporting that the car maker’s R&D arm is close to signing a deal for not only Boston Dynamics, but also Google’s Japanese robotics company, Schaft.

According to the newspaper, the Toyota Research Institute will use its $1 billion budget to purchase both companies. The Institute was established in November 2015 to develop AI, robotics and autonomous car technologies and opened its first facility in Silicon Valley in January.

Earlier this week, Tech Insider reported that the “ink is nearly dry” on the deal, suggesting it won’t be long until Alphabet and Toyota formally announce the trade. It added autonomous vehicle specialist Jaybridge Robotics to its team in March, now it’s looking to bolster its team ahead of a possible rollout of self-driving cars in 2020. Let’s hope Spot, Atlas and AlphaDog make the journey too.

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