Lifeboat Foundation

By SHELLEY PODOLNY — The New York Times

LET me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you’re reading. Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. Perhaps you should ask me to confirm it the way your computer does when it demands that you type those letters and numbers crammed like abstract art into that annoying little box.

Because, these days, a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn’t all have been created by people bent over their laptops.

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By LiXuena, WangXinci ‚ZhangBoling — MarketWatch

Every day, two quality-control supervisors monitor four robots tirelessly assembling remote-control devices for home appliances at a Midea Group 000333, +1.04% factory in Foshan, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

The robots recently replaced 14 workers on the plant’s assembly line for remote controls. And soon, according to Midea’s home-air-conditioner division deputy general manager Wu Shoubao, more robots will arrive to replace the quality-control supervisors.
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By Graham Templeton — ExtremeTech

By its nature, the Open Roboethics Initiative is easy to dismiss — until you read anything they’ve published. As we head toward a self-driving future in which virtually all of us will spend some portion of the day with our lives in the hands of a piece of autonomous software, it ought to be clear that robot morality is anything but academic. Should your car kill the child on the street, or the one in your passenger seat? Even if we can master such calculus and make it morally simple, we will do so only in time to watch a flood of household robots enter the market and create a host of much more vexing problems. There’s nothing frivolous about it — robot ethics is the most important philosophical issue of our time.
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Quoted: “The decentralized Sapience AIFX project has developed a distributed artificial intelligence system running on a cryptocurrency network. In addition, the project has implemented the first distributed database platform running entirely over the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol, built on top of a distributed hash table with redundancy, resiliency, and multi-dimensional trie-based indexing. These technologies are the first core pieces in the Sapience AIFX platform strategy to be the market leader in the consumerization of the blockchain.

The project has implemented the first in-wallet interactive Lua shell, bringing developers unprecedented capabilities to build solutions leveraging the blockchain, multi-layer perceptron networks, and distributed data storage. The possibilities span from algorithmic trading tools to bioinformatics and data mining, and the traditional applications of deep learning.”

Read more here > http://www.pressreleaserocket.net/first-cryptocurrency-to-ut…in/104609/

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