The case for an artificially intelligent POTUS

Let’s face it, the current political system in the US isn’t working. Cambridge Analytica just used our personal data to circumvent our common sense, like a thief tossing a pork chop laced with tranquilizer to distract a guard dog before nonchalantly scaling our privacy fences. It’s obvious our two party system … More details

Helping Robots Express Themselves When They Fail

Researchers are designing robots that are capable of expressing what they aren’t capable of doing Image: Cornell & UC Berkeley With some limited exceptions, robots are terrible at doing almost everything that humans take for granted. For people who work with robots, this is normal and expected, but for everyone else, it’s not immediately clear just how terrible robots are, especially if the robot in question looks human-like enough to generate expectations of human-like capability. Bimanual mobile manipulators like PR2 are particularly bad, because with heads and bodies and arms, it’s easy to look at them and think that they should have no problem doing all kinds of things. And then, of course, comes the inevitable disappointment when you realize that (among other things) round doorknobs make for an impassable obstacle.  At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) earlier this month, researchers from Cornell and UC Berkeley presented Continue reading Helping Robots Express Themselves When They Fail

AI needs ethical rules to gain acceptance

Whoever wins AI will own the future – or so says Andrew Ng, Stanford professor and one of the original DeepMind team members. Judging by the billions being invested in artificial intelligence, Big Tech would seem to agree. But are the interested parties going about it in the right way? Take Sophia, from … More details