Lifeboat Foundation

To the Robots of this restaurant “You’re Fired!”.

Employing robots and artificial intelligence in Chinese restaurants has turned out to be not such a smart idea after all, with restaurants in Guangzhou either closing down or firing their mechanical staff.

According to Workers’ Daily, two restaurants which made use of robotic waiters have closed down and a third which remains open has given all but one of the robots the sack.

Continue reading “Guangzhou restaurant fires its robot staff for their incompetence” »

These connected convoys could soon be a common site.

Hmmmm;

Liberty International Underwriters (LIU), part of Liberty Mutual Insurance, has launched a cyber extortion endorsement to its Product Recall and Contamination insurance policy for food and beverage companies.

This endorsement offers coverage to food and beverage policyholders for cyber extortion monies and consultant costs up to the policy sub-limit for acts against production and day-to-day operations.

Continue reading “LIU Adds Cyber Extortion Endorsement to Product Recall Policies” »

Imagine robotics and other AI on QC; because it is coming and on a very large scale.

The computer chip has now reached middle age. Like most of us in middle age, it is not as sprightly as it once was, and is set to be superseded by younger forms of computing. Enter the quantum computer. It’s set to transform our lives, the way we work and play.

What exactly is quantum computing?

Continue reading “Digital Marketing CCO: How Quantum Computing Will Change Work As We Know It” »

Three years have passed since the publication of the volume of essays “The Singularity Hypotheses” — a publication that was marked at the time by a London Futurists discussion event. During these three years, public awareness of the concepts of an intelligence explosion has grown sharply — fuelled, in part, by statements from luminaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.

In this event, Amnon Eden, lead editor of Singularity Hypotheses, returns to London Futurists to provide an update on the controversies about the Singularity. Topics to be covered will include:

• Luddites, Philistines, and Starry-Eyed: The War over Killer Robots.
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) vs. IA (Intelligence Augmentation)
• “Technological Singularity”: A Definition, Sufficient and Necessary Conditions.
• Perennial Fallacies, Debunked and Re-debunked.
• Learning from the media storm.

Continue reading “The Singularity Controversy: 3 years later (A London Futurists Event)” »

A new robot uses computer vision and machine learning to break down pallets of boxes faster than human workers.

We’ve seen some clever ways to order food online in our day, but this one is decidedly off the wall. Taco Bell is testing TacoBot, a chat AI that helps you order (what else?) tacos in a Slack conversation. Think of it as a tasty text adventure — you can ask questions about the menu, customize your order and check your cart. It’s only in a private beta with a few companies at the moment, but you can sign up for a waiting list to have your Slack team give TacoBot a try. Just think — you could have tacos sent your way while you’re stuck in a planning session.

“The scale of Facebook’s ambition, and the rivalries it faces, reflect a consensus that these technologies will transform how people interact with each other, with data and with their surroundings.”

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Interesting; especially since things have been very quite around IARPA and DARPA on their BMI efforts lately.

The Microns project aims to decipher the brain’s algorithms in an effort to revolutionize machine learning.