Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

With the robot economy looming large in the coming decades, one solution to vanishing jobs may simply be to give people money regardless of whether or not they work.

That idea is called “basic income,” and it just gained the support of one of the tech world’s founding fathers, Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

“I think a basic income is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality,” Berners-Lee, who founded the Web in 1989, explained on a recent episode of The Economist podcast.

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With huge leaps taking place in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), right now, experts have started asking questions about the new forms of protection we might need against the formidable smarts and potential dangers of computers and robots of the near future.

But do robots need protection from us too? As the ‘minds’ of machines evolve ever closer to something that’s hard to tell apart from human intelligence, new generations of technology may need to be afforded the kinds of moral and legal protections we usually think of as ‘human’ rights, says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Du Sautoy thinks that once the sophistication of computer thinking reaches a level basically akin to human consciousness, it’s our duty to look after the welfare of machines, much as we do that of people.

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Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

http://www.weforum.org/

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Here we go again; push to give computers the same human rights in the US like other US citizens enjoy. It truly begs the question “when have we gone too far?”

Technically Incorrect: An Oxford University professor says artificial intelligence may reach the stage where computers have consciousness and therefore should be treated as living beings.

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With 3D printers (like the one in India) printing buildings while leveraging AI technology we could see the building of complexes in space v. needing an inflatable room.

NASA on Saturday successfully expanded and pressurized an add-on room at the International Space Station two days after aborting the first attempt when it ran into problems.

The flexible habitat, known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), completed slowly extending 67 inches (170 centimeters) at 4:10 pm (2010 GMT) following more than seven hours during which astronaut Jeff Williams released short blasts of air into the pod’s walls from the orbiting lab using a manual valve.

After the expansion was completed, he opened eight air tanks inside BEAM, pressurizing the pod to a level close to the space station’s 14.7 pounds per square inch.

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Awesome.

The 3D-printed office was constructed using a special mixture of cement and a set of building material designed and made in the UAE and the United States. To ensure reliability, the materials have undergone a range of tests in both China and the United Kingdom.

A 3D-printer measuring 20-feet high, 120-feet long and 40-feet wide was used to print the building that featured an automated robotic arm to implement printing process.

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