Lifeboat Foundation

“Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology — now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future,” says Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a researcher engineer at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California at Berkeley.

That’s right — we may be on the brink of an all-out self-driving car revolution.

We’ve already seen cars that can stay in their lanes and apply the breaks by themselves, so to many, an autonomous car is just the next step in the natural progression. And the automotive industry is taking this very seriously. According to a study by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the self-driving market is estimated to grow to $33.89 billion in the next five years.

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Bloomberg recently broke the news that Google is “turning its lucrative Web search over to AI machines.” Google revealed to the reporter that for the past few months, a very large fraction of the millions of search queries Google responds to every second have been “interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain.”

The company that has tried hard to automate its mission to organize the world’s information was happy to report that its machines have again triumphed over humans. When Google search engineers “were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top,” RankBrain had an 80% success rate compared to “the humans [who] guessed correctly 70 percent of the time.”

There you have it. Google’s AI machine RankBrain, after only a few months on the job, already outranks the best brains in the industry, the elite engineers that Google typically hires.

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It‘s older, but interesting!

The year is 2050 and super-intelligent robots have emerged as the masters of Earth. Unfortunately, you have no idea of that fact because we are immersed in a computer simulation set decades ago. Everything you see and touch has now been created and programmed by machines that use mankind for their own benefit. This radical theory, demonstrated in numerous books and science fiction films, has been, and is currently regarded by science as possible; Moreover, scientists are taking this theory to a cosmic level and even believe that if only one extraterrestrial civilization in the universe go the technological level to “emulate” an entire “multiverse,” then even our probes and space telescopes, which are out there exploring the universe, belong to that “creepy simulation.”

Continue reading “Researchers suggest that the universe could be a computer simulation: Is it possible?” »

Scientists are using artificial intelligence tech developed by IBM to help researchers and students get reliable answers to their questions.

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Futurist Vivek Wadhwa predicts change “at a scale which is unimaginable before,” thanks to advances in technologies like robotics and 3D printing. “New trillion dollar industries will wipe out out existing trillion dollar industries,” he says. “This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.”

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It’s being reported that a Bank of England official forecasts that in the next 10 to 20 years, smart robots will steal 80 million jobs from Americans and 15 million jobs from Britons—over half the workforce of each nation. I smell BS.

In a speech delivered yesterday by Bank economist Andy Haldane at the Trades Union Congress in London, he predicted that robots could quickly “hollow out” the middle class, shrinking the need for human-only skills, especially in clerical, production, and administrative jobs.

It’s true—I think robots will appear more in those sectors. But for every “robot overload” doom-and-gloom claim, there is a calming rebuttal of reason.

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Biologists have long puzzled over why neurons have thousands of synapses. Now neuroscientists have shown they are crucial not just for recognizing patterns but for learning the sequence in which they appear.

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Digital designs for robotic creatures are shown on the left and the physical prototypes produced via 3-D printing are on the right (credit: Disney Research, Carnegie Melon University)

Now you can design and build your own customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors, with the help of a new DYI design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.

Continue reading “Disney Research-CMU design tool helps novices design 3D-printable robotic creatures” »

Mitsubishi Self-Driving Car

This new Mitsubishi self-driving car is so advanced it can parallel park itself.

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