XPRIZE has partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Shell to create new robots to explore the ocean floor.
US army’s report visualises augmented soldiers & killer robots.
The US Army’s recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050” describes a number of future war scenarios that raise vexing ethical dilemmas. Among the many tactical developments envisioned by the authors, a group of experts brought together by the US Army Research laboratory, three stand out as both plausible and fraught with moral challenges: augmented humans, directed-energy weapons, and autonomous killer robots. The first two technologies affect humans directly, and therefore present both military and medical ethical challenges. The third development, robots, would replace humans, and thus poses hard questions about implementing the law of war without any attending sense of justice.
Augmented humans. Drugs, brain-machine interfaces, neural prostheses, and genetic engineering are all technologies that may be used in the next few decades to enhance the fighting capability of soldiers, keep them alert, help them survive longer on less food, alleviate pain, and sharpen and strengthen their cognitive and physical capabilities. All raise serious ethical and bioethical difficulties.
Google says it’s disappointed by draft rules that would ban driverless cars from traveling on public roads in California without a licensed human driver.
Economist Carlota Perez talk about the future of ICT.
Despite more than a thousand artificial-intelligence researchers signing an open letter this summer in an effort to ban autonomous weapons, Business Insider reports that China and Russia are in the process of creating self-sufficient killer robots, and in turn is putting pressure on the Pentagon to keep up.
“We know that China is already investing heavily in robotics and autonomy and the Russian Chief of General Staff [Valery Vasilevich] Gerasimov recently said that the Russian military is preparing to fight on a roboticized battlefield,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said during a national security forum on Monday.
Work added, “[Gerasimov] said, and I quote, ‘In the near future, it is possible that a complete roboticized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations.’”
Google is reportedly planning to spin off its self-driving car division and offer autonomous taxi rides.
Facebook announced that its latest artificial intelligence (AI) server designs will be made open source, continuing on the company’s course of letting others share new hardware designs, which it began back in 2011. Codenamed Big Sur, the server is designed to train the newest class of deep learning AI that mimic the human brain’s neural pathways.
“When will I have a robot that can do my laundry?”
This is the number one question I get from friends and family members, whose expectations are unconstrained by the software and hardware technical realities that make robots tick (washing dishes is a close second by the way).
Since most have been waiting a lifetime for this transformational milestone, I have been promising lately, with muted bravado, that it won’t be too long now.
Wait, what? You might be asking yourself what inspired a hacker by the name of George Hotz to build his own self-driving car. That’s what we wanted to know, too. It would seem that Hotz decided to kick out a self-driving car using a 2016 Acura ILX in “about a month.” He’s using Ubuntu Linux as his operating system and has an absurdly massive 21.5-inch display sitting in the middle. A flight navigator joystick rests between the front two seats which, when triggered, engages a fully operational self-driving vehicle system.
Hots spoke with Bloomberg earlier this year for a report this week, showing reporters what his vehicle can do out on the highway back a few days before Thanksgiving. The vehicle is nowhere near a production-level sort of setup, looking more like Hotz ripped the cords out of several machines and bashed them together inside his vehicle — but it works. It all works.
Continue reading “First iPhone hacker built a self-driving car with Linux” »
