Lifeboat Foundation

In the future, we hope to “tour” around the solar system. Indeed, some companies are already working on private space tours. Here, NASA’s JPL gives us a peek at what this space tourism might look like.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recently released awesome posters of our solar system, specifically designed at getting people to journey to the stars (or at least some nearby alien planets). “The Vision of the Future” series comprise of seven original posters. In addition to these, there are seven more posters for “Exoplanet Travel Bureau” that were published last year.

Notably, these posters are more than just fantastical imaginings. The designers who created these magnificent posters have been consulting with JPL scientists and engineers to make these tourism scenarios as realistic as they can possibly be. In short, it lets you see what the travel of tomorrow may look like.

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Expensive travel bags should do more than look good, and German high-end luggage manufacturer Rimowa would seem to agree. The company has developed an electronic luggage tag which displays baggage info in the same format, size and appearance of typical paper labels, but on a digital screen built into the unit and located near the handle.

The Rimowa e-tag is similar to a device tested by British Airways in 2013, which allowed travelers to attach it to any piece of luggage.

Continue reading “Electronic luggage tag lets travelers check-in bags from home” »

Tesla Version 7.1 adds driverless automatic parking to Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles.

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Imagine a world where you could download every episode of Game of Thrones before you’d even lifted your finger off the ‘Buy’ button?

Well researchers at University College London have brought us one crucial step closer to this utopian world by creating a record-breaking data transfer speed of 1.125 terabits per second.

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Physicists working with a powerful observatory on Earth announced Thursday that they have finally detected ripples in space and time created by two colliding black holes, confirming a prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago.

These ripples in the fabric of space-time, called gravitational waves, were created by the merger of two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on Earth detected them on Sept. 14, 2015, and scientists evaluated their findings and put them through the peer review process before publicly disclosing the landmark discovery today.

SEE ALSO: Einstein was right: Scientists detect gravitational waves for the first time.

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Again, I see too many gaps that will need to be address before AI can eliminate 70% of today’s jobs. Below, are the top 5 gaps that I have seen so far with AI in taking over many government, business, and corporate positions.

1) Emotion/ Empathy Gap — AI has not been designed with the sophistication to provide personable care such as you see with caregivers, medical specialists, etc.
2) Demographic Gap — until we have a more broader mix of the population engaged in AI’s design & development; AI will not meet the needs for critical mass adoption; only a subset of the population will find will connection in serving most of their needs.
3) Ehtics & Morale Code Gap — AI still cannot understand at a full cognitive level ethics & empathy to a degree that is required.
4) Trust and Compliance Gap — companies need to feel that their IP & privacy is protected; until this is corrected, AI will not be able to replace an entire back office and front office set of operations.
5) Security & Safety Gap — More safeguards are needed around AI to deal with hackers to ensure that information managed by AI is safe as well as ensure public saftey from any AI that becomes disruptive or hijacked to cause injury or worse to the public

Until these gaps are addressed; it will be very hard to eliminate many of today’s government, office/ business positions. The greater job loss will be in the lower skill areas like standard landscaping, some housekeeping, some less personable store clerk, some help desk/ call center operations, and some lite admin admin roles.

Continue reading “Yes, robots will steal our jobs — but don’t worry, we’ll get new ones” »

Shows more proof that the brain indeed is a trigger in cancer creation.

Gene once thought only to be found in brain turns out to be key driver of breast cancer.

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DARPA’s efforts to teach AI “Empathy & Ethics”

The rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised fears about whether robots could act unethically or soon choose to harm humans. Some are calling for bans on robotics research; others are calling for more research to understand how AI might be constrained. But how can robots learn ethical behavior if there is no “user manual” for being human?

Researchers Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology believe the answer lies in “Quixote” — to be unveiled at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. (Feb. 12 — 17, 2016). Quixote teaches “value alignment” to robots by training them to read stories, learn acceptable sequences of events and understand successful ways to behave in human societies.

Continue reading “Using stories to teach human values to artificial agents” »

DARPA’s intent to improve “digitized” SCM.

The DMDII has issued six national contract research awards, including funding to test and aid compliance with the nation’s cybersecurity standards for digital manufacturing.

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