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Category: robotics/AI – Page 66

AI sheds light on mysterious dinosaur footprints

A new app, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), could help scientists and the public identify dinosaur footprints made millions of years ago, a study reveals.

For decades, paleontologists have pondered over a number of ancient dinosaur tracks and asked themselves if they were left by fierce carnivores, gentle plant-eaters or even early species of birds?

Now, researchers and dinosaur enthusiasts alike can upload an image or sketch of a dinosaur footprint from their mobile phone to the DinoTracker app and receive an instant analysis.

Cloudflare misconfiguration behind recent BGP route leak

Cloudflare has shared more details about a recent 25-minute Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route leak affecting IPv6 traffic, which caused measurable congestion, packet loss, and approximately 12 Gbps of dropped traffic.

The BGP system helps route data across different networks called autonomous systems (AS) that send it to destination through smaller networks on the internet.

The incident was caused by an accidental policy misconfiguration on a router and affected external networks beyond Cloudflare customers.

EU launches investigation into X over Grok-generated sexual images

The European Commission announced today that it has launched formal proceedings under the Digital Services Act to investigate whether X properly assessed risks before deploying its Grok artificial intelligence tool, following its use to generate sexually explicit images.

The commission noted that these potential risks “seem to have materialised,” seeing that the AI-powered tool was used to create “manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.”

“Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” said EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen. “With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.”

An ultrastructural map of a spinal sensorimotor circuit reveals the potential of astroglia modulation

Using cell reconstructions and synapse mapping in zebrafish, Koh and Avalos Arceo et. al. reveal a vertebrate local spinal sensorimotor circuit map, revealing how neurons and glia are structurally positioned in a circuit. This resource provides insight into how glia and synaptic thresholding could modulate information flow through complex neural networks.

Meet the soft humanoid robot that can grow, shrink, fly and walk on water

Humanoid robots look impressive and have enormous potential to change our daily lives, but they still have a reputation for being clunky. They’re also heavy and stiff, and if they fall, they can easily break and injure people around them.

But that could be about to change. Researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Shenzhen have unveiled a soft humanoid robot that can change its size, squeeze through spaces, and even walk on water. The key to this outstanding flexibility is a system the team developed called GrowHR. The research, published in Science Advances, describes how the robot was inspired by the way human bones develop.

Conscious AI: Conflations and Comparisons

Consciousness, like intelligence, is multi-faceted. This makes the future of AI more unpredictable and potentially even more hazardous.

When considering AIs that might be conscious, the first great conflation is to fail to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness. The suggestion is that something which is as generally intelligent as a human is bound to be as conscious as a human. General intelligence and consciousness are both intrinsic features of an advanced mind, right?

Well, no. Of course not. There’s no fundamental necessity for these two characteristics to be tightly bound together. A chatbot can provide a human companion with sparkling conversation without having its own inner sparkle of feeling. Like an actor, it can mimic expressions of emotional highs and lows whilst lacking any interior passion. It can talk persuasively about having an inner life without there being any inside inside.

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