Lifeboat Foundation

Your Tesla can drive itself. Not just on the highway, not under strict guidance, but everywhere. Or at least, it will have all the necessary gadgets to do so soon.

We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

– Tesla Blog

Continue reading “Teslas Are Teaching Each Other How to Drive Better Than You” »

The robot revolution is gaining pace, but is it running in line with our values? Here are some of the main ethical issues keeping the AI experts up at night.

Yikes.

A ROBOT designed by NASA for search and rescue missions was caught on camera as it burst into flames in a blast “as powerful as a stick of dynamite”.

Ready to leave your body behind? Scientists have developed robots that people can remotely control and embody using their minds, a breakthrough set to revolutionize the lives of paralyzed patients. The Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment (VERE) project “aims at dissolving the boundary between the human body and surrogate representations in immersive virtual reality and physical reality,” meaning that people genuinely feel like the surrogate body is an extension of themselves. Three volunteers have tried out a prototype, and the results are promising.

“The feeling of actually embodying the robot was good, although needless to say, the sensation varied over time,” said Alessandro, a volunteer on the project, in an interview published Wednesday. “When the robot was stationary, the feeling of embodiment was low, but the moment I gave the first command or changed direction, there was this feeling of control and increased embodiment.”

The three volunteers, based in Italy, placed an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap on their heads that scanned for brain activity through the scalp. Patients were given a video feed of what a robot in Japan could see, superimposed with arrows. When the wearer focused on one arrow, the machine was able to detect the signal and send it remotely to the robot.

Continue reading “VERE’s Mind Control Robots Give Patients Out-of-Body Experience” »

These little robots can swarm like insects — or form an orderly queue. (Original video from the University of Toronto: http://ow.ly/VWUu305GNKK)

A space rock zips by earth Sunday night. Astronomers know it doesn’t pose a threat, in part thanks to a new automated warning program called Scout.

Story just in time for Halloween.

The prospect of artificial intelligence is scary enough for some, but Manuel Cebrian Ramos at CSIRO’s Data61 is teaching machines how to terrify humans on purpose.

Dr Cebrian and his colleagues Pinar Yanardag and Iyad Rahwan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the Nightmare Machine.

Continue reading “Nightmare Machine at CSIRO is slowly but surely learning how to terrify humans” »

Nice job Harley-Davidson when can I have my discount for my new wheels?

Lookalike modeling is a key component of lead generation, and for motorcycle brand Harley-Davidson, the tactic now goes hand in hand with artificial intelligence (AI). In March 2016, the company began working with machine learning technology provider Adgorithms to grow its ecommerce reach and hasn’t looked back since. Asaf Jacobi, president of Harley-Davidson’s New York City division, spoke with eMarketer’s Maria Minsker about the brand’s experience with AI and discussed the results he has seen so far.

EMarketer: What are some of the business challenges that drove you to try artificial intelligence?

Continue reading “Harley-Davidson Says Artificial Intelligence Drives 40% of New York Sales” »

Fortifying cybersecurity is on everyone’s mind after the massive DDoS attack from last week. However, it’s not an easy task as the number of hackers evolves the same as security. What if your machine can learn how to protect itself from prying eyes? Researchers from Google Brain, Google’s deep Learning project, has shown that neural networks can learn to create their own form of encryption.

According to a research paper, Martín Abadi and David Andersen assigned Google’s AI to work out how to use a simple encryption technique. Using machine learning, those machines could easily create their own form of encrypted message, though they didn’t learn specific cryptographic algorithms. Albeit, compared to the current human-designed system, that was pretty basic, but an interesting step for neural networks.

To find out whether artificial intelligence could learn to encrypt on its own or not, the Google Brain team built an encryption game with its three different entities: Alice, Bob and Eve, powered by deep learning neural networks. Alice’s task was to send an encrypted message to Bob, Bob’s task was to decode that message, and Eve’s job was to figure out how to eavesdrop and decode the message Alice sent herself.

Continue reading “Google’s neural networks created their own encryption method” »