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The Earth Archive is an ambitious new project that hopes to scan planet Earth in full 3D using the technology which helps self-driving cars make sense of the world around them. Here’s why its creators believe that this is such an important mission — and why time is running out.

SEX robots that can “breathe” using a robotic chest cavity will are set to be unleashed onto seedy market.

Cloud Climax, UK agent for AI-AITech, says it is making great leaps in the technology of its top of the range model, “Emma”.

The company’s eventual aim is to make the robot move its arms and legs so it can walk.

“You’ve graduated from the school of spectral hard knocks,” Paul Tilghman, a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager, told the teams competing in the agency’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) finale on 23 October. The three-year competition had just concluded, and the top three teams were being called on stage as a song that sounded vaguely like “Pomp and Circumstance” played overhead.

“Hard knocks” wasn’t an exaggeration—the 10 teams that made it to the finale, as well as others who were eliminated in earlier rounds of the competition—had been tasked with proving something that hadn’t been demonstrated before. Their challenge was to see if AI-managed radio systems could work together to share wireless spectrum more effectively than static, pre-allocated bands. They had spent years battling it out in match-ups in a specially-built RF emulator DARPA built for the competition, Colosseum.

By the end of the finale, the top teams had demonstrated their systems could transmit more data over less spectrum than existing standards like LTE, and shown an impressive ability to reuse spectrum over multiple radios. In some finale match-ups, the radio systems of five teams were transmitting over 200 or 300 percent more data than is currently possible with today’s rigid spectrum band allocations. And that’s important, given that we’re facing a looming wireless spectrum crunch.

TOKYO — Japanese technology giant SoftBank has committed billions of dollars to bailing out office-space sharing startup WeWork in a daring vote of confidence from its intrepid founder Masayoshi Son.

WeWork’s woes are substantial enough that some analysts say they could derail the investment ambitions of SoftBank’s mammoth Vision Fund.

But, as one of the most innovative companies in conservative Japan Inc., SoftBank is no stranger to risk-taking. SoftBank oversees an expanding conglomerate of businesses spanning telecommunications, energy and humanoid robots:

Flying robots that deliver packages to people’s doorsteps are no longer science fiction. Companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Wing and Uber Technologies Inc. are starting the most advanced trials of drone delivery in U.S. history.

While commercial drone delivery faces many hurdles, government-approved tests by the tech giants will mark the first time consumers in parts of the country experience the technology. Wing this month started tests in Christiansburg, Va., while Uber says it will experiment in San Diego…

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Facebook remains embroiled in a multibillion-dollar judgement lawsuit over its facial recognition practices, but that hasn’t stopped its artificial intelligence research division from developing technology to combat the very misdeeds of which the company is accused. According to VentureBeat, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has developed a state-of-the-art “de-identification” system that works on video, including even live video. It works by altering key facial features of a video subject in real time using machine learning, to trick a facial recognition system into improperly identifying the subject.

This de-identification technology has existed in the past and there are entire companies, like Israeli AI and privacy firm D-ID, dedicated to providing it for still images. There’s also a whole category of facial recognition fooling imagery you can wear yourself, called adversarial examples, that work by exploiting weaknesses in how computer vision software has been trained to identify certain characteristics. Take for instance this pair of sunglasses with an adversarial pattern printed onto it that can make a facial recognition system think you’re actress Milla Jovovich.

By contemplating the full spectrum of scenarios of the coming technological singularity many can place their bets in favor of the Cybernetic Singularity which is a sure path to digital immortality and godhood as opposed to the AI Singularity when Homo sapiens is retired as a senescent parent. This meta-system transition from the networked Global Brain to the Gaian Mind is all about evolution of our own individual minds, it’s all about our own Self-Transcendence. https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-ouroboros-code-bridging-advanced-science-and-transcendental-metaphysics #OuroborosCode


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With its whirring rotary blades and extendable cutting arm it would not look out of place stalking the streets of a futuristic urban dystopia.

But Edinburgh University’s new robot has actually been developed to pootle sedately around the garden, pruning rose bushes and trimming topiary.

The semi-autonomous machine — dubbed Trimbot — is programmed to recognise leaves, stalks and flowers, so it does not inadvertently dead-head the living blooms.