Lifeboat Foundation

The Phoenix lets paraplegic people sit, stand, and walk. It costs just $40,000. Here’s how the designers pulled it off.

In 2005, Steven Sanchez was trying to do a flip off a BMX dirt ramp when he was paralyzed from the belly button down. 11 years later, with no miracle surgery to speak of, he stands like any other tourist in line at the Vatican.

“I had this awesome robotic suit on, and nobody cared,” he says. “They just waited for me to move up like everyone else moved up.” It was a moment of incredible, touristy normalcy, provided by a bit of practice—and the Phoenix exoskeleton.

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A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.

Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day.

It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.

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Cool!

Stardrive, ISEP, Internet Science Education Project.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=3pjTHDdC3C4

War on drugs has a new friend.

The football-sized robots are designed to work in packs, programmed for various tasks from locating wreckage to detecting contraband through a ship’s hull.

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My parents love their farm life, etc. However, as they are get older, and they need a way to maintain their land, etc. Maybe robots are the perfect solution. Certainly worth looking into.

Japan plans to open the first farm run completely by robots growing vegetables.

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True points and many that I have been sharing on Quantum around its own potential to change everything that we know about technology (devices, internet & networking in general, wireless and satellites, AI, advancements in biotech, security, big data, and singularity itself). The author also highlights many of the same concerns that I have shared around hackers on Quantum breaking through the older digitized platforms and networks; therefore, many companies and governments are exposed as well as consumers who have not adopted Quantum.

Although the author speculates we’re less than 10 yrs for Quantum to be seen in the everyday usage; I believe we’re within 7 yrs.

Within four years quantum computers will have the beating of conventional computers and that will produce a dramatic change in both the technology landscape and in business, according to Professor Jeremy O’Brien from Bristol University.

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Hmmm; we’re definitely not at the end of the golden age of innovation. In fact, once Quantum technology has evolved to the point where it is available to the broader public; we will see a new explosion of new innovation occur as a result.

This is the first of two excerpts from “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War,” published this month by Princeton University Press. The second will explain the implications of all this for the next quarter century.

Can future innovations match the great inventions of the past? Will artificial intelligence, robots, 3D printing and other offspring of the digital revolution do for economic growth what the second industrial revolution did between 1920 and 1970? The techno-optimist school of economics says yes. I disagree.

Continue reading “Why the golden age of growth is behind us” »

Interesting & a perplexing viewpoint by this author on “Singularity” and AI in general. First, I believe folks have varying views on the word “Singularity.” This author believes it is when machines become smarter than humans. In my case; I see Singularity is when humans and machines become connected to all things; not necessarily when a machine becomes smarter than myself. Also, the author definitely is not open to exploring all the possibilities around AI; thank goodness all innovators do not have this same mindset.

Human-like robots are popping up everywhere. From the factory floor to product packaging and delivery. From restaurants to the battlefield. From patient care to camel racing. And countless other places. The driverless cars we talked about in this column only a few years ago can be seen on the road today. Our electronic devices are not only talking to us, they’re beginning to understand what we need without even having to ask.

All of this has led to rampant speculation about when the so-called “singularity” is going to happen. When machines become “smarter” than humans. Sorry to disappoint, but the ultimate brain isn’t a future generation of IBM’s Watson or some super-distributed artificial intelligence network like the fictional Skynet portrayed in the Terminator movies.

Continue reading “The coming leap in human intelligence” »

This AI race is not really just about which company is better at Go.

“There has been, and there is, a lot of progress in state-of-the-art artificial intelligence,” Bostrom says. “[Google’s] underlying technology is very much continuous with what has been under development for the last several years.”

But if you look at this another way, it’s exactly why Google’s triumph is so exciting—and perhaps a little frightening. Even Bostrom says it’s a good excuse to stop and take a look at how far this technology has come and where it’s going. Researchers once thought AI would struggle to crack Go for at least another decade. Now, it’s headed to places that once seemed unreachable. Or, at least, there are many people—with much power and money at their disposal—who are intent on reaching those places.

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