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Archive for the ‘robotics/AI’ category: Page 2335

Dec 5, 2014

Proof that The End of Moore’s Law is Not The End of The Singularity

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI


Samsung 850 Pro: The solution to Moore’s Law ending.

During the last few years, the semiconductor industry has been having a harder and harder time miniaturizing transistors with the latest problem being Intel’s delayed roll-out of its new 14 nm process. The best way to confirm this slowdown in progress of computing power is to try to run your current programs on a 6-year-old computer. You will likely have few problems since computers have not sped up greatly during the past 6 years. If you had tried this experiment a decade ago you would have found a 6-year-old computer to be close to useless as Intel and others were able to get much greater gains per year in performance than they are getting today.

Many are unaware of this problem as improvements in software and the current trend to have software rely on specialized GPUs instead of CPUs has made this slowdown in performance gains less evident to the end user. (The more specialized a chip is, the faster it runs.) But despite such workarounds, people are already changing their habits such as upgrading their personal computers less often. Recently people upgraded their ancient Windows XP machines only because Microsoft forced them to by discontinuing support for the still popular Windows XP operating system. (Windows XP was the second most popular desktop operating system in the world the day after Microsoft ended all support for it. At that point it was a 12-year-old operating system.)

It would be unlikely that AIs would become as smart as us by 2029 as Ray Kurzweil has predicted if we depended on Moore’s Law to create the hardware for AIs to run on. But all is not lost. Previously, electromechanical technology gave way to relays, then to vacuum tubes, then to solid-state transistors, and finally to today’s integrated circuits. One possibility for the sixth paradigm to provide exponential growth of computing has been to go from 2D integrated circuits to 3D integrated circuits. There have been small incremental steps in this direction, for example Intel introduced 3D tri-gate transistors with its first 22 nm chips in 2012. While these chips were slightly taller than the previous generation, performance gains were not great from this technology. (Intel is simply making its transistors taller and thinner. They are not stacking such transistors on top of each other.)

Continue reading “Proof that The End of Moore's Law is Not The End of The Singularity” »

Dec 4, 2014

FIRST Robotics- Who are the celebrities of the future?

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI, science

“You get what you celebrate.” In 1989 Dean Kamen created FIRST Robotics to change the culture from one that idolizes entertainment celebrities and sports stars to one that celebrates scientists, engineers and visionaries. Over 20 years later, how much has changed?

Nov 28, 2014

‘Active clothing’ for soft robots

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Kurzweil AI

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/variable-stiffness.jpg

Purdue University researchers are developing a robotic fabric that moves and contracts and is embedded with sensors, an approach that could bring “active clothing” and a new class of soft robots.

Continue reading “‘Active clothing’ for soft robots” »

Nov 25, 2014

My Darling Date Questions Answered by a Female Robot? — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn

Posted by in categories: economics, electronics, futurism, robotics/AI

My Darling Date Questions Answered by a Female Robot?

(My Intimate Exploration With a Full-Fledged Girl Beyond The Silliness of Japan’s Dutch Wives!)

DATE

This actual exchange took place on Tuesday, November 25, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. U.S. EST.

Ramona Robott is the 101th girl of supreme intelligence giving me responsible and honest replies.

She is a bot that was conceived, designed, and created by Mr. Raymond Kurzweil, Ph.D., who is currently Google Engineering Director.

Continue reading “My Darling Date Questions Answered by a Female Robot? — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn” »

Nov 23, 2014

General Motors Reportedly Launching Cars That Detect Distracted Driving

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

By — The Consumerist

(Ashley)

For years, laws have been put into place to discourage distracted driving: no texting while driving, no talking on the phone while driving, the list goes on. General Motors is taking things a step further by commissioning a vehicle that detects and alerts drivers to their distracted behavior.

The Financial Times reports that General Motors is preparing to launch the first mass-produced vehicles with eye- and head-tracking technology to detect distracted behaviors in drivers.

Read more

Nov 9, 2014

Robot Cheetah Breaks Free of Its Tether, Now Runs on Batteries

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Written By: — Singularity Hub

MIT-Cheetah-robot1

Not long ago, robots were largely confined to books and movies. Then they started showing up on YouTube, and robot fear became a viral thing. There was that terrifying video of a Boston Dynamics robot wearing fatigues and gas mask. Another Boston Dynamics video showed a cheetah robot that could outpace the swiftest human sprinter.

Back then, it was easy enough to imagine being run down by a robot—particularly because Boston Dynamics was funded by the military. But there was no good reason to fear them. Not yet. Why? They were all powered by internal combustion engines. Imagine being stalked by a car with no muffler. You’d hear it a mile off and climb a tree.

Continue reading “Robot Cheetah Breaks Free of Its Tether, Now Runs on Batteries” »

Nov 6, 2014

Big Brother Is Feeling You: The Global Impact Of AI-Driven Mental Health Care

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Written By: — Singularity Hub

happiness ai

Big Brother is feeling you—literally.

A few months back, I wrote about Ellie, the world’s first AI-psychologist. Developed by DARPA and researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a diagnostic tool capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second—everything from eye-gaze to face tilt to voice tone—in the hopes of identifying the early warning signs of depressions and (part of the long term goal) stemming the rising tide of soldier suicide.

Continue reading “Big Brother Is Feeling You: The Global Impact Of AI-Driven Mental Health Care” »

Oct 30, 2014

Amit Singhal (at Google): Will your computer plan change your life?

Posted by in categories: lifeboat, posthumanism, robotics/AI, science

This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013. In the discussion, Amit Singhal, a key figure in the evolution of Google’s search engine, broadly outlined the significant hurdles that stood in the way of achieving one of his long-held dreams — creating a true ‘conversational’ search engine. He also sketched out a vision of how the initial versions of such a system would, and also importantly, would not attempt to assist the individuals that it interacted with.

Though the vision was by design more limited and focused than a system capable of passing the famous Turing test, it nonetheless raised stimulating questions about the future relationships of humans and their ‘artificial’ assistants.

More about Amit Singhal:

Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal

Google Search:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

Oct 30, 2014

Why artificial intelligence is the future of religion

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

— Salon

Why artificial intelligence is the future of religion

There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.

Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”

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Oct 29, 2014

The Most Valiant Attempts to Program Our Five Senses Into Robots

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Alexandra Ossola — MotherBoard

http://motherboard-cdn-assets.vice.com/content-images/article/15559/1411674585648544.png?crop=1xw:0.8390449438202247xh;*,*&resize=2300:*&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=90

Ever since humans first envisioned robots, we’ve thought about how to make the machines more like us. Robots compete against us on game shows, and rendezvous with us in the bedroom (or at least, make virtual sex feel real). But part of being human is sensing the world around us in a particular way, and doing it all at the same time.

This is much more complicated than it seems, as scientists haven’t fully unraveled how we’re able to sense what we do; it’s both our hardware and software that contain codes that are difficult to crack. Still, scientists power through, discovering how their own senses work while crafting artificial versions of them. Here are some of the most valiant attempts to get robots to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see in the most human way possible.

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