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Category: robotics/AI

Domino’s Pizza Enterprises has demonstrated delivery of hot pizzas by drone in Auckland, New Zealand.

The company has a long history of embracing high-tech concepts. Last year, they tested out a four-wheeled, driverless pizza delivery vehicle. And in 2012, Domino’s launched a casual build-a-pizza game that also let players order the pizza they built digitally for real life delivery.

The company also uses e-bikes and electric scooters for delivery. In a press statement, Domino’s Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij said:

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“Liquid Metals to “Soft-Wire” Elastic Electronics”

A few years ago, some friends shared with me an amazing experiment of theirs involving liquid/ fluid base circuitry. Definitely is amazing; and is going to be amazing in where we are taking this type of technology along with synthetic biology.

The shape-shifting metals behind the T-1000 android assassin in the sci-fi movie Terminator 2 may not remain science fiction for long with the development of self-propelling liquid metals that could lead to the replacement of solid state circuits by elastic electronics.

Modern electronics are mainly based on circuits that use solid state components with fixed metallic tracks. However, researchers are trying to create soft circuits that act more like live cells, moving around autonomously and communicating with each other to form new circuits rather than being stuck in a predefined configuration.

Liquid metal droplets have offered the most promising path for achieving this as they are malleable, contain a highly-conductive core and an atom-thin semiconducting oxide skin, all of which are needed to make electronic circuits.

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Hmmmm.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new generation of electronic warfare systems that are based on artificial intelligence (A.I.). If the program were to prove a success, the new A.I.-driven systems would provide the United States military a way to counter evermore-capable Russian and Chinese radars.

“One of our programs at DARPA is taking a whole new approach to this problem, this is an effort we refer to as cognitive electronic warfare,” DARPA director, Dr. Arati Prabhakar, told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on February 24. “We’re using artificial intelligence to learn in real-time what the adversaries’ radar is doing and then on-the-fly create a new jamming profile. That whole process of sensing, learning and adapting is going on continually.”

Current generation aircraft—including the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-22 and F-35—have a preprogrammed databank of enemy radar signals and jamming profiles stored in a threat library. But if those warplanes encounter a signal that has not previously been encountered, the system registers the threat as unknown—which means the aircraft is vulnerable to that threat.

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Researchers at Bar Ilan University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, both in Israel, have developed new technology that allows tiny bots to release drugs into the body controlled by human thought alone. The test involved a man using his thoughts to activate nano robots inside a cockroach.

The bots have been built using a DNA origami structure with hollow shell-like components, and they come with a “gate” that can be opened and shut with the help of iron oxide nanoparticles that act as a “lock” – which can be prized open using electromagnetic energy.

The Israeli team believe the bots could help in controlled release of drugs over time. Led by Dr Ido Bachelet of Bar Ilan University, scientists demonstrated how to control this process with human brainwaves. Using a computer algorithm, they trained the system to detect when a person’s brain was under strain from doing mental arithmetic. The team then placed a fluorescent drug in the bots and injected them into various cockroaches that were placed inside an electromagnetic coil.

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In a test lab, Bert2 — a humanoid robot with three separate displays, allowing its eyes and mouth to express various emotions — performed in three different ways. One was silent and made zero mistakes, while a second was mute and programmed to make a single blunder (which it would then correct, quietly). A third was able to speak and accept simple “yes” or “no” responses from the user. In a basic kitchen scenario, the vocal android would apologise for its mistakes — after dropping an egg, for instance — and give a heads-up when it was about to try a new technique.

While the slowest, it was the robot that most people preferred.

But here’s where it gets interesting. At the end of the exchange, the robot would ask for a job. Some participants were reluctant to say no — even if they preferred the silent, more efficient robot — because they thought it would upset the machine. “It felt appropriate to say no, but I felt really bad saying it,” one of the test participants said. “When the face was really sad, I felt even worse. I felt bad because the robot was trying to do its job.”

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What he says is mostly true. Russia and China will build robot soldiers. Russia is actually ahead of the US in robotic tank type vehicles. But, i doubt these countries will hesitate to raise an army of robot combat soldiers when that becomes practical, probably around 2025’ish, which would force the US to field their own.

The future of war will involve autonomous robots instead of humans, according to Air Force General and Vice Chair of the Joint of Chiefs of Staff Paul Selva, who warned enemies could build “Terminator”-like machines to fight in battlefields.

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Driving a motor vehicle requires making tough choices in the heat of the moment. Whether slamming on the brakes in traffic or speeding up before a light turns red, split-second decisions are often a choice between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes, a choice could lead to bodily injury or even a loss of life.

As more self-driving cars reach the road, life-and-death decisions once made by humans alone will increasingly shift to machines. Yet the idea of giving that responsibility over to a computer may be unsettling to some.

Self-driving cars have the potential to significantly reduce the tens of thousands of auto fatalities occurring yearly—but a reduction isn’t the same as elimination. In fact, some deaths will inevitably happen at the hands of computer algorithms once they make those decisions for us.

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Virtual reality robots could someday teleport juries to gruesome crime scenes to investigate murders…

Juries are rarely allowed to visit crime scenes.

There are some exceptions, usually in difficult, high-profile murder cases such as the O.J Simpson trial in 1995.

Asking jurors to become fact finders in this way comes with a range problems, from possible biases to the logistical and security challenges.

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GAME OF DRONES

WORLD superpowers are engaged in a feverish “arms race” to develop the first killer robots completely removed from human control, the Sun Online can reveal.

These machines will mark a dramatic escalation in computer AI from the drones and robots currently in use, all of which still require a human to press the “kill button”.

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