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Archive for the ‘robotics/AI’ category: Page 2332

Mar 12, 2015

Sci-Fi Sunday: Deep Space Is a Weird and Lonely Place for Humans and AI Alike

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hubhttp://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sci-fi-sunday-2-1000x400.jpg

The desolate reaches of deep space figure heavily in today’s sci-fi short film double feature. Space, as it turns out, is really big and empty. Until we get warp drive or discover a local wormhole—getting anywhere will be a long, lonely slog. The other thread tying the films together? They’re both by director Eli Sasich.

First up is HENRi. The film is like an episode of Life After People in space. What happens to a ship’s artificially intelligent computer after its crew dies? It gets melancholy, begins missing its human friends something terrible, and builds itself a robot body out of the ship’s rusty scrap and spare parts.

“My particular interest for this film was memory and its intrinsic relationship with consciousness,” Sasich writes in an article about the film’s making. “I also wanted a robot of my very own.”

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Mar 9, 2015

Striking the Balance on Artificial Intelligence

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

By — Slate
The dangers of AI.

In January, I joined Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Lord Martin Rees, and other artificial intelligence researchers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs in signing an open letter asking for a change in A.I. research priorities. The letter was the product of a four-day conference (held in Puerto Rico in January), and it makes three claims:
  • Current A.I. research seeks to develop intelligent agents. The foremost goal of research is to construct systems that perceive and act in a particular environment at (or above) human level.
  • A.I. research is advancing very quickly and has great potential to benefit humanity. Fast and steady progress in A.I. forecasts a growing impact on society. The potential benefits are unprecedented, so emphasis should be on developing “useful A.I.,” rather than simply improving capacity.
  • With great power comes great responsibility. A.I. has great potential to help humanity but it can also be extremely damaging. Hence, great care is needed in reaping its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

In response to the release of this letter (which anyone can now sign and has been endorsed by more than 6,000 people), news organizations published articles with headlines like:

Mar 8, 2015

Why Robots Will Be The Biggest Job Creators In World History

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

John Tammy — Forbes

As robots increasingly adopt human qualities, including those that allow them to replace actual human labor, economists are starting to worry. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, some “wonder if automation technology is near a tipping point, when machines finally master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable.”

The fears of economists, politicians and workers themselves are way overdone. They should embrace the rise of robots precisely because they love job creation. As my upcoming book Popular Economics points out with regularity, abundant job creation is always and everywhere the happy result of technological advances that tautologically lead to job destruction.

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Mar 1, 2015

Rise of the Fembots: Why Artificial Intelligence Is Often Female

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

by Tanya Lewis — Live Science

From Apple’s iPhone assistant Siri to the mechanized attendants at Japan’s first robot-staffed hotel, a seemingly disproportionate percentage of artificial intelligence systems have female personas. Why?

“I think there is a pattern here,” said Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. But “I don’t know that there’s one easy answer,” MacDorman told Live Science.

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Mar 1, 2015

Will Robots Be Able to Help Us Die?

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI

Graham Templeton — Motherboard

The robot stares down at the sickly old woman from its perch above her home care bed. She winces in pain and tries yet again to devise a string of commands that might trick the machine into handing her the small orange bottle just a few tantalizing feet away. But the robot is a specialized care machine on loan from the hospital. It regards her impartially from behind a friendly plastic face, assessing her needs while ignoring her wants.

If only she’d had a child, she thinks for the thousandth time, maybe then there’d be someone left to help her kill herself.

Hypothetical scenarios such as this inspired a small team of Canadian and Italian researchers to form the ​Open Roboethics Initiative (ORi). Based primarily out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), the organization is just over two years old. The idea is not that robotics experts know the correct path for a robot to take at every robo-ethical crossroad—but rather, that robotics experts do not.

“Ethics is an emergent property of a society,” said ORi board member and UBC professor Mike Van der Loos. “It needs to be studied to be understood.” Read more

Feb 28, 2015

A Telepresence Robot with a Gripping Arm? ORIGIBOT Is a Dream Come True

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

By — Singularity Hub

Telepresence robots are awesome, but the experience can be frustrating at times. The reason? They lack arms. Whether you want to examine an object yourself, open a door, or pretend to be the Terminator with a Nerf gun, the lack of even a rudimentary claw can leave you feeling like a half a person, a mind wandering atop a remote control toy.

Not anymore.

Continue reading “A Telepresence Robot with a Gripping Arm? ORIGIBOT Is a Dream Come True” »

Feb 27, 2015

How to Keep a Piece of the Pie After the Robots Take Our Jobs

Posted by in categories: automation, business, economics, robotics/AI

Written by Victoria Turk — Motherboard

In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of U​S jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they’ve made similar predicti​ons for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk.

So what will our future economy look like?

“My predictions have enormously high variance,” Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. “I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they’re only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine.”
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Feb 26, 2015

What happens when computers, not teachers, pick what students learn?

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI

By — Slate
Students in teacher Cynthia McClellan's eighth grade social science and history class at the Blake Middle School use their iPads during class.

NEW YORK—Teacher John Garuccio wrote a multiplication problem on a digital whiteboard in a corner of an unusually large classroom at David A. Boody Intermediate School in Brooklyn.

About 150 sixth-graders are in this math class—yes, 150—but Garuccio’s task was to help just 20 of them, with a lesson tailored to their needs. He asked, “Where does the decimal point go in the product?” After several minutes of false starts, a boy offered the correct answer. Garuccio praised him, but did not stop there.

“Come on, you know the answer, tell me why,” Garuccio said. “It’s good to have the right answer, but you need to know why.”
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Feb 24, 2015

Meet The Robots That Are Taking Over Japan

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Adele Peters — Fast Company


In another Tokyo suburb, a cartoonesque robot named Pepper, the first robot designed to respond to human emotions, is joking with customers at a store selling mobile phones.

While Japan has been a robot-friendly place for a long time, the number of robots is now booming, even as its human population is not. In the next five years, the country hopes to build 20 times more of them. One industry leader suggests that the country should invest in 30 million robots—nearly the same population as greater Tokyo—as part of a plan to regain a spot as the world leader in manufacturing.

“What you’re seeing in Japan is a much more aggressive approach to purchasing robots,” says Mike Zinser, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, and co-author of a new study about how robotics will transform manufacturing. “They’ve got a real potential to see significant cost savings, and also an improvement in competitiveness relative to other countries over the next decade.“
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Feb 24, 2015

AI: Artificial Imagination?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Margaret Boden — IA News
Margaret Boden
Most of us are fascinated by creativity. New ideas in science and art are often hugely exciting – and, paradoxically, sometimes seemingly “obvious” once they’ve arrived. But how can that be? Many people, perhaps most of us, think there’s no hope of an answer. Creativity is deeply mysterious, indeed almost magical. Any suggestion that there might be a scientific theory of creativity strikes such people as absurd. And as for computer models of creativity, those are felt to be utterly impossible.

But they aren’t. Scientific psychology has identified three different ways in which new, surprising, and valuable ideas – that is, creative ideas – can arise in people’s minds. These involve combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. The information processes involved can be understood in terms of concepts drawn from Artificial Intelligence (AI). They can even be modelled by computers using AI techniques.
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