Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

If you loathe having to talk out loud when ordering a meal at a fast-food restaurant, and you happen to love KFC, then you might want to start considering packing it up and moving to China where Baidu has just teamed up with the major chicken brand to create a more automated restaurant. The venture aims to use the company’s latest technologies to bring novel ways of providing service to KFC customers.

As an added feature, the outlet also offers augmented reality games via table stickers, a concept also made available to 300 other KFC locations in Beijing.

Baidu’s tech in this new restaurant, however, is all about guessing what you want before you can even ask; image recognition hardware installed at the KFC will scan customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other information including gender an age in order to inform their recommendation.

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Breaches, hacking, ransomware, cyber threats, weaponized AI, smart toothbrushes are but a few examples of scary tech out there to make your day less than fantastic.

Weapons systems that think on its own are in production, with governments racing to catch up on how to regulate these fast-paced advancements.

Police and military already use drones and robots to eliminate threats, but (as far as we know) it’s hardware controlled by humans.

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Excellent read on the brain’s inhibitory circuits v. excitatory circuits when involving the processing of smells.

Summary: Inhibitory neurons form neural networks that become broader as they mature, a new study reports.

Source: Baylor College of Medicine.

Scientists have discovered that networks of inhibitory brain cells or neurons develop through a mechanism opposite to the one followed by excitatory networks. Excitatory neurons sculpt and refine maps of the external world throughout development and experience, while inhibitory neurons form maps that become broader with maturation. This discovery adds a new piece to the puzzle of how the brain organizes and processes information. Knowing how the normal brain works is an important step toward understanding the nature of neurological conditions and opens the possibility of finding treatments in the future. The results appear in Nature Neuroscience.

“The brain represents the external world as specific maps of activity created by networks of neurons,” said senior author Dr. Benjamin Arenkiel, associate professor of molecular and human genetics and of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, who studies neural maps in the olfactory system of the laboratory mouse. “Most of these maps have been studied in the excitatory circuits of the brain because excitatory neurons in the cortex outnumber inhibitory neurons.”

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Not sure that I would claim 2016 as the year that AI exploded; I believe a better term for 2016 is the year that AI reinvented itself. I still see us in an evolution trend in 2017 as we still need to see more AI technology embedded in our back office platforms and apps than where we are today to claim we’re in a real AI explosion. Once we start seeing more IT organizations and CxOs embracing it in lowering their operational costs then we can claim we’re in an explosion.

Artificial intelligence isn’t a new concept. It is something that companies and businesses have been trying to implement (and something that society has feared) for decades. However, with all the recent advancements to democratize artificial intelligence and use it for good, almost every company started to turn to this technology and technique in 2016.

The year started with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing his plan to build an artificially intelligent assistant to do everything from adjusting the temperature in his house to checking up on his baby girl. He worked throughout the year to bring his plan to life, with an update in August that stated he was almost ready to show off his AI to the world.

In November, Facebook announced it was beginning to focus on giving computers the ability to think, learn, plan and reason like humans. In order to change the negative stigma people associate with AI, the company ended its year with the release of AI educational videos designed to make the technology easier to understand.

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A new supercomputer has been deployed at the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) in Germany. Called QPACE3, the new 447 Teraflop machine is named for “QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell.”

QPACE3 is being used by the University of Regensburg for a joint research project with the University of Wuppertal and the Jülich Supercomputing Center for numerical simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is one of the fundamental theories of elementary particle physics. Such simulations serve, among other things, to understand the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang, for which a very high computing power is required.

The demand for high performance computers to solve complex applications has risen exponentially, but unfortunately so has their consumption of power. Many supercomputers require more than a megawatt of electricity to operate and annual electricity costs can easily run into millions of Euros. The energy supply is therefore a significant part of the operating costs of a data center. According to recent analyst studies, this represents the second-largest factor in addition to personnel and maintenance costs. The upcoming boom with (3D) video streaming, augmented reality, image recognition and artificial intelligence is driving up the demand for data center capabilities, thereby placing new challenges in the power supply sector.

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The National Review via Wesley J. Smith commenting on my “AI Day replacing Christmas” story: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443337/ai-day-supplent-christmas #transhumanism #robots #future #AI

Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come never saw this coming.

The transhumanist popularizer and pseudo presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, claims that “AI Day” will soon replace Christmas as the world’s most beloved holiday. From his piece in the Huffington Post:

One thing is for sure, to the human species, the birth of an advanced artificial intelligence will become far more important than the birth of Christ.

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