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Category: robotics/AI

(Reuters) — Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it was dissolving a council it had formed a week earlier to consider ethical issues around artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

The council had run into controversy over two of its members, according to online news portal Vox, which first reported the dissolution of the council.

The council, launched on March 26, was meant to provide recommendations for Google and other companies and researchers working in areas such as facial recognition software, a form of automation that has prompted concerns about racial bias and other limitations.

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It is a crazy thought, right?! To think that mushrooms could be alien life. But before you dismiss the idea, take a look at some of principles of the theory. The main concept was formulated by the ingenious psychonaut philosopher Terrence McKenna, and goes along following lines.

Like no other form of life on our planet, the spores of mushrooms are almost perfectly suited to space travel. They can survive high vacuum and insanely low temperatures; the casing of a spore is one of the most electron dense materials in nature, to the point where McKenna says it is almost akin to a metal; global currents are even able to form on the quasi-metallic surface of an airborne spore, which then acts as a repellent to the extreme radiation of space. It is a mind boggling thought that something could evolve to be so perfectly suited to explore the universe.

If a civilization is advanced enough, then chances are their concepts and understanding of reality would far outweigh ours. If they were advanced enough to be able to change their very genetic structure, then there would be a lot of merit in changing/evolving into a mushroom. Mushrooms are highly resilient, non-invasive, practically immortal, full of neurotransmitters, and able to weather space. It would be the perfect way to explore and colonize the galaxy. Plus once mushrooms establish themselves, they create an underground neural network of mycelium that highly resembles the neural networks of the human brain or the internet.

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More details on Intel Capital’s new investments in 14 disruptive startups:

Disrupting Artificial Intelligence

Untether AI (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is developing ultra-efficient, high-performance AI chips that will be the foundation for the next wave of innovation in AI. Untether AI has invented an entirely new type of chip architecture that is specifically designed for neural net inference by eliminating bottlenecks in data movement. This unique architecture moves data 1,000 times faster than traditional architectures, resulting in extreme performance and efficiency. The company was founded by a team of scientists, engineers and experienced entrepreneurs who have successfully brought to market more than 1 billion chips.

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IBM’s A.I. is so advanced, it can predict when you’re planning to leave your job — even before you know it.

IBM AI can predict with 95 percent accuracy when an employee is about to leave their job. That should not scare workers, but human resource managers in today’s tight labor market that do not understand how to keep employees on a clear career path.

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While the goal may be the same, the various obstacles the AIs will need to overcome to achieve success will vary — they might need to move an object, for example, or demonstrate an understanding of object permanence.

“We expect this to be a hard challenge,” Matthew Crosby, one of the researchers behind the Animal-AI Olympics, told New Scientist. “A perfect score will require a breakthrough in AI, well beyond current capabilities.”

“However,” he continued, “even small successes will show that it is possible, not just to find useful patterns in data, but to extrapolate from these to an understanding of how the world works.”

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The 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet fired its engines for a little over a minute early this morning (April 1), altering its trajectory slightly to prepare for a planned capture into lunar orbit on Thursday (April 4).

If all goes according to plan, the robotic lander will touch down on the moon one week later, on April 11. That will be a huge milestone. To date, the only organizations to pull off a soft lunar landing are superpower governments — the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Related: israel’s 1st moon lander beresheet in pictures.

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Google recently appointed an external ethics council to deal with tricky issues in artificial intelligence. The group is meant to help the company appease critics while still pursuing lucrative cloud computing deals.

In less than a week, the council is already falling apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts.

On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work,’’ Acquisti said on Twitter. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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