Israeli agents had wanted to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist for years. Then they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present. …This time there really was a killer robot: a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. The straight-out-of-science-fiction story of what really happened that afternoon and the events leading up to it. Read More

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would “push” the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options. Read More

#robotics

“It’s intended to be friendly,” the carmaker’s CEO joked.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled a humanoid robot called the Tesla Bot that runs on the same AI used by Tesla’s fleet of autonomous vehicles. A functioning version of the robot didn’t make an appearance during Musk’s reveal, though a slightly bizarre dance by a performer dressed like a Tesla Bot did. 

The unexpected reveal came at the end of Tesla’s AI Day presentation, with Musk providing few details about the slightly creepy, Slenderman-like robot beyond a few PowerPoint slides. The 5-foot-8-inch robot is expected to weigh in at 125 pounds and be built from “lightweight materials,” he said.  Read More

Earlier this week, Amazon announced the winners of its annual Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, which ​​promotes research into coherence, context awareness, fluency of response, and other areas fundamental to the future of conversational AI. Participating university teams design social bots for Alexa-enabled devices and can validate their ideas by directly engaging with Amazon’s millions of Alexa customers.

But the competition isn’t just a way for participants to experiment and earn research grants. Each research team maintains ownership of the intellectual property in its systems, and a win might mean an opportunity to integrate their research into Amazon’s future plans. Some fairly significant advancements in conversational AI and subsequent scientific papers typically come out of the event. Read More

On July 28, the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission of South Africa granted the world’s first patent on an invention created by an artificial intelligence (“AI”) inventor.  This development marks an important milestone in what will certainly be a significant battle for legal recognition of such inventions in the United States and other countries.

“Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience” aka “DABUS” is an AI developed by Missouri physicist Stephen Thaler.  The recently-issued patent is directed to a food container based on fractal geometry.  The patent application was filed on September 17, 2019 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. ^[1]  Under the heading of “inventor”, the application identifies DABUS and states “The invention was autonomously generated by an artificial intelligence.” ^[2] Read More

#robotics