Need a yeast that spits out rose oil? The synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks is on it.
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Category: robotics/AI
Russia’s largest social network Vkontakte together with the Russian space agency Roscosmos is preparing to launch the first-ever spacebot named Spotty to the International Space Station.
The capsule containing the spacebot – a chat bot called Spotty developed by Vkontakte – is expected to be delivered to the space station in March 2017 by Roscosmos cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.
With the help of Spotty, Vkontatke users will be able to communicate with cosmonauts and astronauts aboard the ISS in real time and receive photos and videos from them, while a built-in projector can playback the content sent from Earth.
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Researchers at Sapience.org foresee market instability intensifying by the computer trading ‘arms race’
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Last Friday the sterling has experienced a dramatic, ultrafast crash. It lost 10% of its value in minutes after the Asian markets opened — a decline usually reserved to declarations of war, major earthquakes and global catastrophes — and bounced right back. Although the affected exchanges are yet to release the details, computer trading algorithms almost certainly played a key role. Just like the 2010 Flash Crash, yesterday’s event is characteristic to Ultrafast Extreme Events[1]: split-second spikes in trade caused by ever smarter algorithms razor-focused on making ever-quicker profits. But the arms race is only likely to intensify as computing speed accelerates and AI algorithms become more intelligent.
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California’s department of motor vehicles said late on Friday the most advanced self-driving cars will no longer be required to have a licensed driver, if federal officials deem them safe enough.
The regulator released a revision of draft regulations that opened a pathway for the public to access self-driving cars, prototypes of which automakers and tech companies are testing.
The redrafted regulations will be the subject of a public hearing on 19 October, in Sacramento.
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If you listen to the wrong people, the North American manufacturing industry is doomed.
There is no denying that the U.S. and Canada have been losing jobs to offshore competition for almost half a century. From 2000 to 2010 alone, 5.6 million jobs disappeared.
Interestingly, though, only 13 percent of those jobs were lost due to international trade. The vast remainder, 85 percent of job losses, stemmed from “productivity growth” — another way of saying machines replacing human workers.
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Research funding for AI risk soars:
GiveWell’s main guy Holden Karnofsky decided he was fully on board with the issue of AI risk, and the Open Philanthropy Project has given around $7.5 million total to the issue to date.
The latest funder to make AI a chief concern is the Open Philanthropy Project, anchored by the wealth of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, which this year bumped up artificial intelligence risk to near the top of its priority list. This has led to its biggest grant to the field yet, $5.5 million toward the launch of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, led by UC Berkeley prof and AI pioneer Stuart Russell.
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