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Category: robotics/AI

NASA, in partnership with Space Center Houston, the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space Center, and NineSigma, a global innovation consultant organization, has opened registration for a new competition — the Space Robotics Challenge. This event seeks to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots to help astronauts on the journey to Mars.

The Space Robotics Challenge is a $1 million prize competition designed to push the boundaries of robotic dexterity. Teams must program a virtual robot, modeled after NASA’s Robonaut 5 (R5) robot, to complete a series of tasks in a simulation that includes periods of latency to represent communications delay from Earth to Mars.

Though some dexterity has been developed for Earth-based robotics systems using hydraulics, such robots cannot be used in space because of the below-freezing temperatures and the harsh environment of planetary surfaces. The R5 uses elastics technology instead of hydraulics – an innovative way of addressing the problems of operating in space. This technology could also benefit humankind on Earth, as they could operate under dangerous or extreme environments on our home planet.

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From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published August 10, 2010. We hope you enjoy it!

You don’t have a flying car, jetpack, or ray gun, but this is still the future. How do I know? Because we’re all surrounded by artificial intelligence. I love when friends ask me when we’ll develop smart computers…because they’re usually holding one in their hands. Your phone calls are routed with artificial intelligence.

Every time you use a search engine you’re taking advantage of data collected by ‘smart’ algorithms. When you call the bank and talk to an automated voice you are probably talking to an AI…just a very annoying one. Our world is full of these limited AI programs which we classify as “weak” or “narrow” or “applied.”

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Classic tv will never be the same.

Remember that amazing automatic colorizing algorithm we told you about back in March? It was just put to an interesting test. As a fun “what if?” hobbyist Amir Avni tried the neural network-powered colorizer on a B&W video.

It should be obvious that this isn’t a simple transition. To go from colorizing a still image by learning from thousands of other images online is one thing, to do it 24 times per second, smoothly, is entirely another.

“As a bonus, I took the bot’s algorithm and started testing it on some video-clips,” writes Avni. “Of course the results aren’t perfect since it was trained on photos and not on a batch of photos, but the results are still interesting.”

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Stanford computer science student Joshua Browder, whose DoNotPay bot helps you fight parking tickets in London and New York (it’s estimated to have overturned $4M in tickets to date) has a new bot in the offing: a chatbot that helps newly homeless people in the UK create and optimise their applications for benefits.

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In austerity-wracked Britain, where the Tories have made things easier than they’ve ever been for landlords and harder than they’ve ever been for workers, repossessions and evictions are at an all-time high. So Browder — who was born in the UK — decided to add a homelessness navigation aid to his bot, which had already been expanded to handle fight-delay reimbursement applications. He’s also researching adding New York City homelessness form-completing to the bot’s repertoire.

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Nice paper on Neural Circuit structures.

Plasticity between neural connections plays a key role in our ability to process and store information. One of the fundamental questions on plasticity, is the extent to which local processes, affecting individual synapses, are responsible for large scale structures of neural connectivity. Here we focus on two types of structures: synfire chains and self connected assemblies. These structures are often proposed as forms of neural connectivity that can support brain functions such as memory and generation of motor activity. We show that an important plasticity mechanism, spike timing dependent plasticity, can lead to autonomous emergence of these large scale structures in the brain: in contrast to previous theoretical proposals, we show that the emergence can occur autonomously even if instructive signals are not fed into the neural network while its form is shaped by synaptic plasticity.

Citation: Ravid Tannenbaum N, Burak Y (2016) Shaping Neural Circuits by High Order Synaptic Interactions. PLoS Comput Biol 12: e1005056. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005056

Editor: Peter E. Latham, UCL, UNITED KINGDOM

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WILLIAMSBURG, Va.: The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, warned today that the US might hobble itself in future warfare by insisting on human control of thinking weapons if our adversaries just let their robots pull the trigger. Kendall even worries that Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work is being too optimistic when Work says humans and machines working together will beat robots without oversight.

These are unnerving ideas — and top Army leaders swiftly responded with concern that robots would shoot civilians if you take the human out of the loop. This is what Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Paul Selva calls the Terminator Conundrum: “When do we want to cross that line as humans? And who wants to cross it first? Those are really hard ethical questions.” They are also a fundamental question of combat effectiveness.

“Even in a more conventional conflict, we’re quite careful about not killing innocent civilians,” said Kendall. “I don’t expect our adversaries to all behave that way, and the advantage you have if you don’t worry about that as much, is you make decisions more quickly” — which can spell the difference between victory and defeat.

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My exclusive interview with Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on some hard science & tech issues, including transhumanism, longevity, AI, and gene editing. This is also my first story for Futurism. For the record, I am trying, along with millions of others, to get Gary Johnson into the Presidentia l debates! No matter who you plan to vote for, it would be good for America to have him in the debates so a third voice is heard:

Libertarian Presidentia l candidate Gary Johnson wants humans to live a lot longer and isn’t worried about AI becoming the Terminator. Here, Futurist Zoltan Istvan gains an exclusive interview with Johnson, who is polling double digits nationally and hopes to be in the Presidentia l debates with Trump and Clinton in October.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Futurism or its affiliates.

I recently sat down with Libertarian Presidentia l candidate Gary Johnson at his home in New Mexico and watched an episode of Orphan Black, the hit sci-fi show. Between his CNN Town Hall meetings and endless speeches on the campaign trail, you’re probably asking: How did Gary get the time to watch a television show? It’s a good question, but the former Governor made the time, because he’s interested in the future and willing to explore how it might unfold.

Johnson is excited about using radical science and technology to make America stronger and help the human race.

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