Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Google Achieves AI ‘Breakthrough’ by Beating Go Champion
January 27th, 2016Via: BBC: A Google artificial intelligence program has beaten the European champion of the board game Go. The Chinese game is viewed as a much tougher challenge than chess for computers because there are many more ways a Go match can play out. The tech company’s DeepMind division said its software had beaten its human […]
Japan: Automated, Clean Room Agriculture
January 27th, 2016Via: TechInsider: The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots. So much so that Spread is creating the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day. Don’t […]
Harvard Is Trying to Build an AI as Fast as the Human Brain
January 25th, 2016Via: Wired UK: Harvard University has been awarded $28 million (£19m) to investigate why brains are so much better at learning and retaining information than artificial intelligence. The award, from the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA), could help make AI systems faster, smarter and more like human brains. While many computers have a comparable storage […]
IBM Watson Head Mike Rhodin On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
January 20th, 2016Did you ever read, The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson? Do you remember Nell’s copy of the Primer? But to call it a book does not really do it justice — it is really a massively parallel computer in which each page can dynamically rearrange itself to tell a story. Check this out, from the […]
Rise of the Robots Will Eliminate More Than 5 Million Jobs
January 18th, 2016Via: Bloomberg: Over five million jobs will be lost by 2020 as a result of developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological change, according to World Economic Forum research.
Obama Proposes $4 Billion Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Projects
January 17th, 2016In other news, self driving trucks will wipe out millions of jobs: We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven’t seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns. Via: Forbes: Self-driving cars have a new supporter: President Obama. After talking […]
Airbus Counter-UAV System
January 12th, 2016Via: Airbus PR: Airbus Defense and Space, Inc. has developed a Counter-UAV System which detects illicit intrusions of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over critical areas at long ranges and offers electronic countermeasures minimizing the risk of collateral damage. The system is on display through January 9 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada […]
Ford Testing Driverless Cars in Snow
January 11th, 2016Via: BBC: Motoring giant Ford says it has conducted successful tests of its driverless cars in snowy conditions. The company said it had been running sensor tests for more than a year, but was now driving autonomous cars in a controlled, snowy environment. Snow presents a challenge to driverless cars because the sensors they use […]
Emergent Chip Vastly Accelerates Deep Neural Networks
January 11th, 2016Via: The Next Platform: Using nine different deep neural network benchmarking suites, EIE performed inference operations anywhere (depending on the benchmark) between 13X and 189X faster over regular CPU and also GPU implementations, although this is without any compression. Still, however, consider the power envelope. As the benchmarks show, the energy efficiency is better by […]
Marines’ LS3 Robotic Mule Too Loud for Real-World Combat
December 29th, 2015Before $42 million of public money was flushed down the gurgler, I guess nobody realized that the thing was going to sound like a leaf blower. Via: Ars Technica: The kickable “robotic mule,” also known as AlphaDog or LS3, created by Alphabet-owned Boston Dynamics under a contract with DARPA, has proved too loud to fight […]
