Lifeboat Foundation

Its six compact jet engines will send you hurtling through the sky at 100 mph.

The media is bursting at its seams with what seems to be the superhero revolution. Comic book publishers like Marvel and DC have spilled over onto the big screen, and now it may look as though they’re spilling over into our technology in the real world. While we have been making efforts at a superhero heads up display or an iron man workout suit, we are also inching our way up to a functional flight suit.

Gravity is a British technology start-up started by Richard Browning on March 31, 2017. The company has developed a human propulsion system to re-imagine manned flight. With miniaturized jet engines and a customized exoskeleton, the Daedalus is expected to push us into a new era of aviation. Browning and his team developed the suit over the course of 2016, with the team’s journey covered in this short documentary:

ES Emerging Technology are delighted to invite you to the second event in our Exponential Series!

Nathan Waters is a futurist, decentralist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the monthly Ethereum blockchain meetup (SydEthereum) and Australia’s largest independent hackathon (Hackagong).

In this discussion Nathan will be presenting a new project for a blockchain-based economic protocol intended to transition humanity to a post-Capitalist future. We’ll be covering topics such as: runaway automation, technological unemployment, future of work and education, wage slavery, wealth inequality, rising precariat, universal basic income, peer production, platform co-operatives, post-scarcity and decentralised autonomous organisations.

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As part of I BM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis.

Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM Cognitive Course, the class will spend four weeks teaching the basics of machine learning and Watson’s capabilities. Students will be able to take the class directly within IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform.

“Not everyone knows what to do with a Watson API,” says Bryson Koehler, CTO of IBM Watson & IBM Cloud. “The group of engineers that are experts is really small.”

Continue reading “Galvanize will teach students how to use IBM Watson APIs with new machine learning course” »

“In today’s world, we are increasingly hearing calls for global competencies; that is, we are seeing demand for skills such as critical thinking and creativity across both manual and professional occupations.”

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Global AI investment fever has hit Russia, with a recently launched $100 million fund making its inaugural investments.

Announced in late 2016, the fund is backed by Larnabel VC, the venture arm of the Gutseriev family, one of the richest in Russia, and VP Capital, the investment vehicle of Belarussian businessman Viktor Prokopenya.

The joint fund is sector-agnostic. “We are interested in a wide range of companies that apply AI technologies in interesting, unique, and impactful ways. We don’t restrict ourselves to specific industries or sectors. We are interested in every application of artificial intelligence, from fintech to entertainment, to education, and beyond,” Prokopenya told East-West Digital News.

Continue reading “A new $100 million Russian investment fund is targeting AI startups globally” »

U.S. Alliance in Robotics for Manufacturing Means Innovation, Education, More Jobs…

Robotics Online is the premier resource from RIA, Robotic Industries Association, for industrial robotics and automation. Call (734) 994‑6088 to join RIA.

The workplace is going to look drastically different ten years from now. The coming of the Second Machine Age is quickly bringing massive changes along with it. Manual jobs, such as lorry driving or house building are being replaced by robotic automation, and accountants, lawyers, doctors and financial advisers are being supplemented and replaced by high level artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

So what do we need to learn today about the jobs of tomorrow? Two things are clear. The robots and computers of the future will be based on a degree of complexity that will be impossible to teach to the general population in a few short years of compulsory education. And some of the most important skills people will need to work with robots will not be the things they learn in computing class.

Continue reading “How Artificial Intelligence and the robotic revolution will change the workplace of tomorrow” »

Mathematics professor Po-Shen Loh has created Expii, a free education tool that democratizes learning by turning your smartphone into a tutor.