Wonder what kind of insurance they have?
http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/art…ads-give-china-a-grim-edge-in-driverless-cars
Transport safety advances the same way physicist Max Planck saw science progressing: one funeral at a time.
That’s bad news for the people of China, whose roads are some of the world’s most dangerous. But it’s an advantage for the slew of Chinese companies racing to overtake Silicon Valley and Detroit in developing self-driving vehicles.
Like a commercial jet airplane, Reaction Engines’ SKYLON will place a Personnel and Logistics Module in its payload bay, capable of carrying 8 astronauts and their gear to Low Earth Orbiting stations, factories, hotels or other facilities.
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html
A Germany-based company, Paravan, is a leader in the electric wheelchair market and related accessories to adapt vehicles for people with disabilities. While they mostly work with vans and trucks, their latest product makes almost any car with enough trunk space extremely practical for someone using a wheelchair.
They installed it in a Tesla Model S to illustrate the functionalities of the product and the range of vehicles it can be installed on.
A robotic arm, called Robot 3000, can automatically lift a wheelchair (up to 25 kg – 55 lbs) from the trunk of a vehicle, then it moves the chair to the driver’s side and extends it all the way to the driver’s door.
The world record for the greatest distance traveled on a hoverboard has been smashed by a Frenchman doing his best impression of Spider-Man villain, the Green Goblin.
TrendsViral
Jet ski racer-turned-entrepreneur Franky Zapata is no mad scientist. However, his Flyboard Air hoverboard, which can reach speeds of 150kph (94mph), is scarily similar to the comic book supervillain’s Goblin Glider.
If we can just perfect this more; then I have found my answer in transporting me to meetings, conferences, etc. from building location to building location on a non-snowy or non-rainy day. This would be great to use to get around those traffic jams too.
SAUSSET-LES-PINS, France, May 1 (UPI) — A French jet ski champion found victory in another venue Saturday, setting a new Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard flight during a thrilling attempt off the coast of Sausset-les-Pins in the south of France.
Franky Zapata managed a new benchmark distance of 2,252 meters, or almost 1−1÷2 miles, by far surpassing the previous record of 275.9 meters or 905 feet 2 inches, Guinness reported.
The previous record was set last year by Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru.
Astronaut Tim Peake controlled a robot from the International Space Station (ISS). However, the robot wasn’t in space, but was located on Earth. The experiment was meant to prepare astronauts and technicians for future human-robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.
As part of a unique experiment, astronaut Tim Peake successfully maneuvered a robot located on Earth from the ISS. The British astronaut took control from the Earth-based team and steered the robot on a simulated Martian landscape. The experiment took place at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, dubbed “Mars Yard.”
The experiment, titled “Supervisory Control of Mars Yard Rover” or SUPVIS-M for short, was designed to one day allow humans, more specifically astronauts, sitting on board ISS or other deep space vehicles, to reliably control robots or machines over vast distances. The experiment is part of Europe’s METERON (Multipurpose End-To-end Robotics Operations Network) project. The overall idea is develop and optimize tasks and directional control.
“Artificial Intelligence, friend or foe?”
I, like most of you, have pondered this question many times over the years, and I’ve finally come to this conclusion: We should NOT give birth to (what could and SHOULD be described as) an entirely new sentient race — then immediately consign it to shackles and slavery. If we do, we will deserve what we get.
By now we’ve all seen some of the most brilliant people of our age come out with warnings about AI, some advocating extreme, cruel and intellectually dishonest measures to make sure that our new creations don’t ever turn on us.
What has really shaped my opinion on this is the glaringly awful parallels to statements, articles, and speeches given in the south before slavery was abolished and the rebel flags laid low. They describe their fear of slave revolts and advocate extreme, paranoid measures to ensure that they are never brought down by the beings that they consider property, rather than the brothers and sisters that they actually were. The parallels are absolutely chilling, right down to the very language used both then and now.
I plan to write a whole lot more on this particular subject in the near future, but I’d love to see what everyone else stands on this issue!
By Kaye Foley
When it comes to the future of artificial intelligence, the ultimate battle between man and machine may come to mind — but that’s really the stuff of science fiction. AI actually has a presence in our daily lives on a much more useful and less apocalyptic level. Think personal assistant devices and apps like Alexa, Cortana and Siri, web search predictions, movie suggestions on Netflix and self-driving cars.
The term “artificial intelligence” was coined back in 1956. It describes a machine’s ability to perform intelligent behavior such as decision-making or speech recognition.
