Bina48’s responses were both intelligent and unpredictable.
Advanced social robot Bina48 sometimes feels like a “living puppet”.
Corporations aren’t inherently evil, they’re only as greedy as the humans behind them. It’s the same thing with robots. Robots have no emotions—they’re just a pile of metal, screws and circuits—but they will be as mean, selfish, and avaricious as the people programming them.
Wire Cutters is a brilliantly crafted student film directed and animated by Jack Anderson. It tells the story of two robots from rival mining companies that meet by chance in a desolate planet.
A piece I wrote recently about blockchain & AI, and how I see the Lifeboat Foundation as a crucial component in a bright future.
Blockchain technology could lead to an AI truly reminiscent of the human brain, with less of its frailties, and more of its strengths. Just as a brain is not inherently dictated by a single neuron, neither is the technology behind bitcoin. The advantage (and opportunity) in this sense, is the advent of an amalgamation of many nodes bridged together to form an overall, singular function. This very much resembles the human brain (just as billions of neurons and synapses work in unison). If we set our sights on the grander vision of things, humans could accomplish great things if we utilize this technology to create a truly life-like Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, we need to keep in mind the dangers of such an intelligence being built upon a faultless system that has no single point of failure.
Just as any technology has upsides and corresponding downsides, this is no exception. The advantages of this technology are seemingly endless. In the relevant sense, it has the ability to create internet services without the same downfalls exploited in the TV show ‘Mr. Robot,’ where a hacker group named “fsociety” breached numerous data centers and effectively destroyed every piece of data the company held, causing worldwide ramifications across all of society. Because blockchain technology ensures no centralized data storage (by using all network users as nodes to spread information), it can essentially be rendered impossible to take down. Without a single targeted weak point, this means a service that, in the right hands, doesn’t go offline from heavy loads, which speeds up as more people use it, has inherent privacy/security safeguards, and unique features that couldn’t be achieved with conventional technology. In the wrong hands, however, this could be outright devastation. Going forward, we must tread lightly and not forget to keep tabs on this technology, as it could run rampant and destroy society as we know it.
We developed a robot that creates robots.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that independently builds its own children and then tests their performance to inform the design of the next generation. By analyzing the data it collects from observing the child, the mother robot ensures that preferential traits are passed down to the next iteration, while letting weaknesses fall by the wayside.
“We developed a robot that creates robots. And basically we have a mother robot that combines active and passive modules using glue to make other children robots. And these robots, as the mother creates them and puts them to work, she evaluates how they’re behaving and she uses the data from this behavior to create the next generation of robots,” explained Andre Rosendo, who worked on the project at the University’s Department of Engineering.
Continue reading “Robot mother builds and improves its own children” »
Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the breath-taking experiment in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole on Monday under the careful control of the European Space Agency.
While orbiting some 400 kilometres (250 miles) above Earth, Mogensen took control of the Interact Centaur rover which has a pair of arms for delicate, high-precision work.
The blue-and-white fibreglass robot, which cost less than 200,000 euros ($224,000) to build, also has a camera on its head which allows the controller to directly see the task it is performing.
PRIMER-V2 robot rides a bike just like a man. It maintains balance with a built-in gyroscope, through which he holds the balance and steers in a straight line.
The media is all-abuzz with tales of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The provocative two-letter symbol conjures up images of invading autonomous robot drones and Terminator-like machines wreaking havoc on mankind. Then there’s the pervading presence of deep learning and big data, also referred to as artificial intelligence. This might leave some of us wondering, is artificial intelligence one or all of these things?
In that sense, AI leaves a bit of an ambiguous trail – there does not seem to be a clear definition, even amongst scientists and researchers in the field. There are certainly many different branches of AI. I asked Dr. Roger Schank, Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University, for a more clear definition; he told me that artificial intelligence is not big data and deep learning algorithms, at least not in the pure sense of the definition.
Roger emphasizes that intelligence has everything to do with the intersection of learning and interaction and memory. “I will tell you the number one thing people do, it’s pretty obvious – they talk to each other. Guess how hard that is? That is phenomenally hard, that is the subsection of AI called natural language processing, the part that I worked on my whole life, and I understand how far away we are from that.”
Take a “simple” AI concept, such as how to create a computer that plays chess, to better understand the challenge. There are, more or less, two approaches to creating an intelligent machine that can play chess like a champion. The first approach requires programming the computer to predict thousands of moves ahead of time, while the second approach involves building a computer system that tries to imitate a grand master. In the historical pursuit of how to create an artificially intelligent entity, a vast majority of scientists chose the first option of programming based on prediction.
Two experts on robotics and machine learning will reveal breakthrough developments in humanlike robots and machine learning at the annual SXSW conference in Austin next March, in a proposed* panel called “The Holy Grail: Machine Learning + Extreme Robotics.”
Participants will interact with Hanson Robotics’ forthcoming state-of-the-art female Sophia robot as a participant on the panel as she spontaneously tracks human faces, listens to speech, and generates a natural-language response while participating in dialogue about the potential of genius machines.
This conversation on the future of advanced robotics combined with machine learning and cognitive science will feature visionary Hanson Robotics founder/CEO David Hanson and Microsoft executive Jim Kankanias, who heads Program Management for Information Management and Machine Learning in the Cloud + Enterprise Division at Microsoft. The panel will be moderated by Hanson Robotics consultant Eric Shuss.
No-A is a short student film directed by Liam Murphy. In it, a hulking robot risks everything to save its creator from an army of faceless soldiers. It’s a really neat CGI film with some really outstanding designs in it.
Overall, this feels like a bit of a sliver from a much larger story, and I hope that the creators and production team will add onto the story and continue it in another short film or maybe a longer feature. It seems like there’s a lot more story to uncover.
