Lifeboat Foundation

• Second Livestock is a unique application of virtual reality (VR) that could change animal husbandry and livestock farming.
• Developed by design professor Austin Stewart, this VR free-range farm world is a safe haven for chickens.

Free-range livestock is going to the next level, thanks to a unique, if seemingly silly idea that has recently gone viral. Second Livestock is a free range world for chickens in virtual reality (VR). And yes, just like most of VR’s current applications, it actually works like a game — a massively-multiplayer one full of chickens and with no AI bots.

Elon Musk co-founded artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI just announced it has created an AI system that can learn to complete a task in reality after watching just one demonstration of that task in a simulated environment.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, OpenAI’s newest robot system should leave humanity blushing. Not only can it successfully replicate human behaviors, it can do so after just a single demonstration of the task.

Biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.

Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life’s unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it.

That’s the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation, it can’t select a next step.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants Artificial Intelligence That Doesn’t Forget Everything It Knows” »

Last month, we showed an earlier version of this robot where we’d trained its vision system using domain randomization, that is, by showing it simulated objects with a variety of color, backgrounds, and textures, without the use of any real images.

Now, we’ve developed and deployed a new algorithm, one-shot imitation learning, allowing a human to communicate how to do a new task by performing it in VR. Given a single demonstration, the robot is able to solve the same task from an arbitrary starting configuration.

Caption: Our system can learn a behavior from a single demonstration delivered within a simulator, then reproduce that behavior in different setups in reality.

More migration to megacities is expected in the next few decades, because they have more jobs that are resilient to automation than smaller urban areas.

When machines control all the world’s finances and run factory floors, what will humans be left to do?

We’ll make art, says Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft executive who has since launched VC firm Sinovation Ventures.

“Art and beauty is very hard to replicate with AI. Given AI is more objective, analytical, data driven, maybe it’s time for some of us to switch to the humanities, liberal arts, and beauty,” Lee told Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney during a live Q&A session. “Maybe professions where it’s hard to find a job might be good to study.”

Continue reading “Your art degree might save you from automation, an AI expert says” »

The android was the star of the International Robot Exhibition 2015 in Tokyo.

A machine learning algorithm is using sentiment analysis to make stock price predictions with 76 percent accuracy.

Hopefully this doesnt negatively effect the self driving truck.

One of Uber’s top engineers will no longer be able to work on a key self-driving car technology, a federal judge ordered, adding a new hurdle in the ride-hailing company’s race to get to market.

Uber will be able to continue working on its self-driving car technology, the judge said, but embattled engineer Anthony Levandowski must be removed from any work relating to a key technology called LIDAR, which helps cars “see.”

Continue reading “Judge blocks top Uber engineer from working on key self-driving technology amid battle with Alphabet” »