Lifeboat Foundation

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

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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By Cecilia Tilli — Slate

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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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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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

By David J. Hill — 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” »

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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By Nichole Dobo — Slate

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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