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Archive for the ‘robotics/AI’ category: Page 598

Feb 3, 2017

After Robots Take Our Jobs, What Will We Buy in a Society Without Money?

Posted by in categories: economics, employment, robotics/AI

After labor, not all of us will want to explore inner consciousness. Abundant leisure will not turn everyone into the Buddha. Many of our tastes are in the gutter, and I have no objection to leaving them there. I’m not a fan of shopping per se, but buying stuff is deeply satisfying and motivating for many people. Is it possible to rethink the pleasure of conspicuous consumption in a way that decouples it from the competitive labor economy? The post-work world I’m imagining will have little surplus money for unnecessary shopping, even if robots and computers can dramatically lower the overhead of such production. So, a non-consummatory form of shopping will have to be cultivated.

Some people marshal all their evolved predatory skills to hunt down the perfect sweater, shoes, or watch. Could we redesign shopping as a system of “catch-and-release,” so that, like sport fishing, it’s the adventure and not the prize that becomes central? Maybe we will hunt for luxury items, but then instead of keeping them, simply photograph ourselves wearing the items (like a fisherman holding a giant pike). It’s an unlikely adjustment, I’ll grant you, but I never thought catch-and-release fishing would be fun until I did it, and it was. The way some people already buy and return items suggests to me that catch-and-release shopping is not impossible.

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Feb 2, 2017

Scientists begin building supercomputer programmed to solve ultimate question of life

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics, robotics/AI, supercomputing

Oh, there will be many things come together for all of us when we begin further expanding and advancing our work on quantum especially in our work with Quantum parallel states, as well as the work on both AI and Synbio on QC. Next 3 to 5 yrs are truly going to change a lot of things in science and technology.


British scientists have taken the first step towards building a real-life version of Deep Thought, the supercomputer programmed to solve the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The team has drawn up the first blueprint for a giant quantum computer, a device capable of rapidly solving problems that would take an ordinary computer billions of years to answer.

The ground-breaking modular design could theoretically pave the way to a machine as large as a football field with undreamed of levels of computing power.

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Feb 2, 2017

Boston Dynamics “nightmare inducing” wheeled robot “Handle”, presentation video close-up

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

This is a cropped and tracked version of the original video so you can see a close up only of the presentation screen, only the wheeled robot part is selected because it was never seen before footage, for the rest see the original video presentation below:

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Feb 1, 2017

DARPA: Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) is the first-of-its-kind collaborative machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Today, spectrum is managed by dividing it into rigid, exclusively licensed bands. This human-driven process is not adaptive to the dynamics of supply and demand, and thus cannot exploit the full potential capacity of the spectrum. In SC2, competitors will reimagine a new, more efficient wireless paradigm in which radio networks autonomously collaborate to dynamically determine how the spectrum should be used moment to moment.

The team whose radio design most reliably achieves successful communication in the presence of other competing radios could win as much as $3,500,000. For more information, see the About Page.

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Feb 1, 2017

Supermarkets of the Future Are Going to Be Weird in So Many Ways

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

From predictive couponing to groceries delivered by robots straight to the trunk of your self-driving car, 21st-century shopping could offer serious innovations.

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Feb 1, 2017

Google’s self-driving cars just got way better at driving themselves

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report today, in which all the companies that are actively testing self-driving cars on public roads in the Golden State disclose the number of times that human drivers were forced to take control of their driverless vehicles. The biggest news to come out of this report is from Waymo, Google’s new self-driving car company, which reported a huge drop in disengagements in 2016 despite an almost equally huge increase in the number of miles driven.

In other words, Waymo’s self-driving cars are failing at a much lower rate, even as they are driving a whole lot more miles. The company says that since 2015, its rate of safety-related disengages has fallen from 0.8 per thousand miles to 0.2 per thousand miles in 2016. So while Waymo increased its driving by 50 percent in the state — racking up a total of 635,868 miles — the company’s total number of reportable disengages fell from 341 in 2015 to 124.

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Feb 1, 2017

New Study Predicts Nearly Half of All Work Will Be Automated

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI

In Brief

  • A new report predicts that nearly 50% of all work could be automated by the year 2055, with machines already capable of taking over 30% of human tasks in about 60% of occupations.
  • Though this shift could take longer due to politics and public sentiment, we need to start preparing now for a future in which many workers are displaced by machines.

According to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly half of all the work we do will be able to be automated by the year 2055. However, a variety of factors, including politics and public sentiment toward the technology, could push that back by as many as 20 years. An author of the report, Michael Chui, stressed that this doesn’t mean we will be inundated with mass unemployment over the next decades. “What we ought to be doing is trying to solve the problem of ‘mass redeployment,’” Chui tells Public Radio International (PRI). “How can we continue to have people working alongside the machines as we go forward?”

The report suggests that the move toward automation will also bring with it a global boost in productivity: “Based on our scenario modeling, we estimate automation could raise productivity growth globally by 0.8 to 1.4 percent annually.” Removing the capacity for human error and dips in speed due to illness, fatigue, or general malaise can help boost productivity in any task capable of being automated.

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Feb 1, 2017

Transparent gel-based robots can catch and release live fish

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

A new technology for cleaning and maintaining your aquarium as well as useful for zoos, public aquariums, etc.

A new technology for fishing industry and hobbyists.1092647.htm


Engineers at MIT have fabricated transparent, gel-based robots that move when water is pumped in and out of them. The bots can perform a number of fast, forceful tasks, including kicking a ball underwater, and grabbing and releasing a live fish.

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Feb 1, 2017

Who Has the Manufacturing Edge? May Countries With the Best Robots Win

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

I was just telling someone today this very message. Of course they believe borders keep things from happening. Maybe physically; but not in an online retail and consumer world. Who are the most advance and real time responsive in meeting the interests and demands of consumers; will be the winners.


From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published October 7, 2015. We hope you enjoy it!

You’ve heard the chatter: Robots and AI want your job. One famous study predicted 47% of today’s jobs may be automated by 2034. And if you want to know how likely it is you’ll be replaced by a robot, check out this BBC tool. (Writer = 33%. Yay?)

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Feb 1, 2017

IARPA Wants Autonomous Fingerprint Tech

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The intelligence research arm is offering up cash for cutting-edge ideas on capturing complete fingerprints.

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