Inside the Pentagon’s Effort to Build a Killer Robot

Time

The Los Alamos National Laboratory sits at the top of a mountain range in the high desert of northern New Mexico. It is a long, steep drive to get there from the capital city of Santa Fe, through the Tesuque Indian Reservation, over the Rio Grande, and into the Santa Fe National Forest. I am headed to the laboratory of Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon, whose program falls under the rubric of synthetic cognition, an attempt to build an artificial brain.

AI robot that learns new words in real-time tells human creators it will keep them in a “people zoo”

Glitch News

Androids are being developed that have an uncanny resemblance to people. A pinnacle example is an android crafted by roboticist David Hanson that resembles the famous and deceased science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. What makes android Dick so remarkable isn’t so much his appearance as it is his ability to hold an intelligent conversation.

Facebook’s Human-Powered Assistant May Just Supercharge AI GettyImages-565258861 Rights Managed

Wired

Face it: Siri sucks. So often, she has no clue what you’re saying. And when she does, there’s a pretty good chance she’ll respond with nothing more than a page filled with Internet links.

IBM has built a digital rat brain that could power tomorrow’s smartphones

Quartz

In August 2014, IBM announced that it had built a “brain-inspired” computer chip—essentially a computer that was wired like an organic brain, rather than a traditional computer. These chips are designed to work like neurons—the brain’s nerve cells. Wired reported on Aug. 17 that the team working on the brain chips recently hit a new milestone—a system has about 48 million digital neurons, which is roughly as many as found in the brain of a rodent.

Robots evolve faster when you kill them

TechRadar

Computer scientists have discovered that robots evolve faster and more efficiently after a mass extinction.
The team at the University of Texas, Austin used a simulated mass extinction modelled on real-life disasters, and found that it hastens evolution in artificial intelligence.
The simulation involved connecting neural networks to simulated robot legs with the aim to make a robot evolve to the point it was walking stably.

A new hunt for ET could well find AI on non-Earthlike worlds

NewScientist

AS WE discover planets across our galaxy – and perhaps beyond – it is right that the search for alien entities should be stepped up. Breakthrough Listen, a $100-million project led by the Russian billionaire and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, is set to reinvigorate the hunt for ET.

Musk, Hawking, and Chomsky warn of impending robot wars fueled by AI

The Verge

Leading artificial intelligence researchers have warned that an "AI arms race" could be disastrous for humanity, and are urging the UN to consider a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons." An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) and signed by high-profile figures including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Noam Chomsky, warns that weapons that automatically "select and engage targets without human intervention" could become the "Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," fueling war, terrorism, and global instability.

A robot just passed the self-awareness test

Techradar

Roboticists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have built a trio of robots that were put through the classic 'wise men puzzle' test of self-awareness - and one of them passed.
In the puzzle, a fictional king is choosing a new advisor and gathers the three wisest people in the land. He promises the contest will be fair, then puts either a blue or white hat on each of their heads and tells them all that the first person to stand up and correctly deduce the colour of their own hat will become his new advisor.

Selmer Bringsjord set up a similar situation for the three robots - two were prevented from talking, then all three were asked which one was still able to speak. All attempt to say "I don't know", but only one succeeds - and when it hears its own voice, it understands that it was not silenced, saying "Sorry, I know now!"

However, as we can assume that all three robots were coded the same, technically, all three have passed this self-awareness test.

Airbnb Needs to Be Better at Search Than Google ( AI )

Wired

This weekend, tens of millions of Americans are heading off to the beach, the lake, the mountains, or wherever the barbecues and beers await. And for many holiday travelers these days, that means scouring Airbnb to find that perfect oceanfront cottage that sleeps eight, comes with a washer, dryer, Wi-Fi, and free parking on the premises.
But what most people won’t realize when they nestle into their respective crash pads this July 4th is just how complex that search process really is.

Google’s artificial-intelligence bot says the purpose of living is 'to live forever'

Businessinsider

This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence.

Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue.

And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

Wait but Why

Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.

Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so…

Guardian

It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione..

Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks have spurred remarkable recent progress in image classification and speech recognition. But even though these are very useful tools based on well-known mathematical methods, we actually understand surprisingly little of why certain models work and others don’t. So let’s take a look at some simple techniques for peeking inside these networks