Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Ask a member of Facebook’s growth team what feature played the biggest role in getting the company to a billion daily users, and they’ll likely tell you it was photos. The endless stream of pictures, which users have been able to upload since 2005, a year after Facebook’s launch, makes the social network irresistible to a global audience. It’s difficult to imagine Facebook without photos. Yet for millions of blind and visually impaired people, that’s been the reality for over a decade.

Not anymore. Today Facebook will begin automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called “automatic alternative text,” the feature was created by Facebook’s 5-year-old accessibility team. Led by Jeff Wieland, a former user researcher in Facebook’s product group, the team previously built closed captioning for videos and implemented an option to increase the default font size on Facebook for iOS, a feature 10 percent of Facebook users take advantage of.

Automatic alt text, which is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, recognizes objects in photos using machine learning. Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions. If you show a piece of software enough pictures of a dog, for example, in time it will be able to identify a dog in a photograph. Automatic alt text identifies things in Facebook photos, then uses the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to read descriptions of the photos out loud to users. While still in its early stages, the technology can reliably identify concepts in categories including transportation (“car,” “boat,” “airplane”), nature (“snow,” “ocean,” “sunset”), sports (“basketball court”), and food (“sushi”). The technology can also describe people (“baby,” “smiling,” beard”), and identify a selfie.

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We’re already seeing amazing things in the delivery services space for consumers with drones and self-navigating delivery services by companies like Dominos, etc. I cannot wait until we see more self check in hotels, resorts, and more 24×7 automated stores. Everything will be great, as long as security is great.

This self-driving robot can take the grocery-shopping burden off your shoulders and deliver your goods to your doorstep. Starship Technologies has already launched the intelligent robot and delivery trials have started in Greenwich, London.

Starship Technologies was founded by the same people who founder Skype. Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis plans to reshape local deliveries and also lend a hand in zero-emission deliveries worldwide.

This self-driving robot was first introduced in November 2015. After talks with the Greenwich local government, the first trial run of the intelligent robot debuted on March 10, 2016. Greenwich is a supporter of zero-emission transportation as well as autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, which makes it a great place to start.

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Good read; and highlights fair arguments around science and technology innovations and their patents. CRISPR was highlighted; however, the same can be applied to things like AI. What happens when a Humanoid robot owned by an investment bank innovates and develops new technology for Wall Street? The humanoid robot was (in this example) created by Microsoft; however, is owned by a Goldman Sachs. Who truly owns this new technology innovation? Could we see Goldman Sachs owning 70% of the patent & Microsoft owning 30%?

The worlds of science, technology and patent law eagerly await the U.S. government’s decision on who deserves patents on what many have referred to as the biotechnology invention of the century: the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technique.

Scientists hail CRISPR/Cas9 as more accurate and efficient than other, now-traditional genetic engineering methods. As a result, CRISPR has generated worldwide debate about how it could accelerate the manipulation of plants, animals and even human beings at the molecular level. That some DNA modifications can be passed on to future generations raises particular concern.

But the patent dispute, focusing on whether scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard or those at University of California, Berkeley invented the technology, seems far from these ethical concerns. Each institution asserts that its scientists are the rightful inventors — and therefore the owners of the CRISPR/Cas9 patents. As proof, the scientists are submitting their published articles, laboratory notebooks and affidavits to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which will make a decision in the next few months.

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Robotic in orbit assembly and laser propulsion could enable vast increases in space capability while not significantly changing the world civilization energy budget.

Robotic and additive manufacturing could enable massive frames and massive solar power arrays.

Tethers Unlimited is currently developing a revolutionary suite of technologies called “SpiderFab” to enable on-orbit fabrication of large spacecraft components such as antennas, solar panels, trusses, and other multifunctional structures. SpiderFab provides order-of-magnitude packing- and mass- efficiency improvements over current deployable structures and enables construction of kilometer-scale apertures within current launch vehicle capabilities, providing higher-resolution data at lower life-cycle cost.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=9grWo5ZofmA

A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:

The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.

But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.

While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.

Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.

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