Lifeboat Foundation

In fact, when speaking with many AI experts across academia and industry, the consensus was unanimous: the development of AI cannot benefit only the few.

Income inequality is a well recognized problem. The gap between the rich and poor has grown over the last few decades, but it became increasingly pronounced after the 2008 financial crisis. While economists debate the extent to which technology plays a role in global inequality, most agree that tech advances have exacerbated the problem.

In an interview with the MIT Tech Review, economist Erik Brynjolfsson said, “My reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality. It’s the biggest factor.”

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Would you like to try some Beef Soup With Swamp Peef and Cheese?

BuzzFeed Staff

The end of the world as we know it is near. And that’s a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of what’s been called the technological singularity.

The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late.

Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045). That’s two years before SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s prediction of 2047, made at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year.

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Photo retouching and style matching (not to be confused with Prisma -like Instagram filters) is challenging work that requires a trained eye and hours of labor. At least, it was, until AI took that job, too. Researchers from Adobe and Cornell University have showed off an experimental app called “Deep Photo Style transfer” that can transform your image from drab to dramatic using someone else’s photo.

As shown above, using it is pretty simple — you just select a photo you want to change and one with the style you’re trying to emulate. The AI does the rest, applying the color, lighting and contrast of the example photo to the original. It can transform a lake photo snapped in the most boring light possible (above) into one that looks like it was taken at the golden hour on another planet. In another example it transforms a daylight city shot into a much more interesting nighttime scene.

The researchers built on the “Neural Style Transfer” work done by European researchers. They refined it so that the style transfer only happens to colors and doesn’t distort objects in the picture, like previous deep learning systems. In other words, it can pick out which part of the image is sky and which part is ground, so that the sky doesn’t “spill over” into the rest of the image, the team says.

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We’re a lot closer to flying cars that we think. In fact, Dubai has already begun testing a prototype of a self-driving hover-taxi with the hope of launching an aerial shuttle service by July.

“The autonomous aerial vehicle exhibited at the World Government Summit is not just a model. We have already experimented (with) the vehicle in a flight in (the) Dubai sky. RTA will spare no effort to launch the AAV in July 2017,” shares director general of the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) Mattar Al-Tayer.

To avail of the taxi service, passengers will simply select a destination before they board the vehicle with the help of a ground control center. The EHang 184 quadcopter can travel on a programmed course at 100 km an hour (60 mph) at an altitude of 300 meters (1,000 feet), the authority said in a statement.

Continue reading “The World’s First Flying Taxis Will Take to the Skies in Five Months” »

Robots continue to be awesome. #RoboticSurgery

Trees and other plants, from towering redwoods to diminutive daisies, are nature’s hydraulic pumps. They are constantly pulling water up from their roots to the topmost leaves, and pumping sugars produced by their leaves back down to the roots. This constant stream of nutrients is shuttled through a system of tissues called xylem and phloem, which are packed together in woody, parallel conduits.

Now engineers at MIT and their collaborators have designed a microfluidic device they call a “tree-on-a-chip,” which mimics the pumping mechanism of trees and plants. Like its natural counterparts, the chip operates passively, requiring no moving parts or external pumps. It is able to pump water and sugars through the chip at a steady flow rate for several days. The results are published this week in Nature Plants.

Anette “Peko” Hosoi, professor and associate department head for operations in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the chip’s passive pumping may be leveraged as a simple hydraulic actuator for small robots. Engineers have found it difficult and expensive to make tiny, movable parts and pumps to power complex movements in small robots. The team’s new pumping mechanism may enable robots whose motions are propelled by inexpensive, sugar -powered pumps.

Continue reading “Engineers design ‘tree-on-a-chip’: Microfluidic device generates passive hydraulic power” »