Day's Headlines: Jumping the Stealth Gun; Gushing at the Future Now; Driverless City; Robot Bowl; Robots that Kill; Robot Babies; Robot Morality; Ark Drone; and Recycling by Hand

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Jumping the Stealth Gun; Gushing at the Future Now; Driverless City; Robot Bowl; Robots that Kill; Robot Babies; Robot Morality; Ark Drone; and Recycling by Hand

Today we're loaded up on robot stories! Robots preparing for the NFL, robots making baby robots (yes, that's a thing), robots being programmed to kill, and robots learning morality...from us (yikes!). All these robots remind me: If you haven't had a chance to read Why AI?, points raised there have been showing up in the news lately :)

Robot.


Military

China says first stealth fighter not yet in service, but coming soon in.reuters

In a statement, China's air force described as "unreliable" reports that the J-20 had appeared in training exercises, following a weekend state television broadcast that showed grainy pictures of what some viewers took to be the aircraft.

"At present, the J-20 has yet to be equipped for air force service," the air force said on its official microblog late on Tuesday afternoon.

Space

One thing spacecraft have never achieved - until now bbc

...after many spectacular failed attempts the Californian rocket maker SpaceX has in the last four months landed an orbital rocket stage four times – once on land in December 2015 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in April for the first time on a remote-controlled barge in the mid-Atlantic. And these were not dummy rockets: both were the 40-metre-high first stages of Falcon 9 rockets that had just launched commercial spacecraft into orbit.

Sci-fi has predicted reusable spacecraft for a century or more, and space engineers have experimented with the idea since the mid-20th Century – the partially reusable Space Shuttle is arguably the closest we’ve got. So why has reusability taken so long to be seriously considered?

Driverless Vehicles

Can a city switch entirely to driverless cars? wcvb

The Department of Transportation and major U.S. cities are betting on technology to solve their transit woes. As part of its "Smart Cities Challenge," the DOT will give a winning city up to $40 million to help it experiment with innovative transit options. It would also be eligible for an additional $10 million from Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc.

San Francisco, a finalist, imagines a fanciful city with an elaborate network of city-run self-driving cars and shuttles, where the on-demand businesses it's still struggling to regulate are a seamless part of life.

Robotics

THE FUTURE OF TRAINING mvpdummy v

Buddy Teevens, head football coach at Dartmouth College, was tired of his players injuring one another during practice. So, he banned live tackling in practice. To simulate live tackling in the most effective and realistic way, Coach Teevens introduced the Mobile Virtual Player (MVP) - the world's first and only motorized, self-righting, mobile training dummy.

See also Pittsburgh Steelers experiment with using robots during practices

Do We Want Robot Warriors to Decide Who Lives or Dies? spectrum.ieee.org

Not surprisingly, the threat of “killer robots,” as they’ve been dubbed, has triggered an impassioned debate. The poles of the debate are represented by those who fear that robotic weapons could start a world war and destroy civilization and others who argue that these weapons are essentially a new class of precision-guided munitions that will reduce, not increase, casualties. In December, more than a hundred countries are expected to discuss the issue as part of a United Nations disarmament meeting in Geneva.

The Robot Baby Project evosphere.eu v w!

...a focused attempt to demonstrate that robots can have children. ... The Triangle of Life framework describes the pivotal life cycle of self-reproducing robots. This life cycle does not run from birth to death, but from conception (being conceived) to conception (conceiving one or more children) and it is repeated over and over again, thus creating consecutive generations of robots. The result is an evolving population of robotic organisms, where the bodies as well as the brains can adapt to the given environment. The Triangle of Life is an abstract model, EvoSphere is a tangible incarnation of it.

Um...

How to Build a Moral Robot spectrum.ieee.org w!

...a team of researchers is attempting to model moral reasoning in a robot. In order to pull it off, they’ll need to answer some important questions: How can we quantify the fuzzy, conflicting norms that guide human choices? How can we equip robots with the communication skills to explain their choices in way that we can understand? And would we even want robots to make the same decisions we’d expect humans to make?

While applies to robots, this video really underlines what has happened by our rejecting the absolute moral codes by our Creator in exchange for the felt-morals of individuals...and the then near impossibility of turning that situational, person-specific moral "fuzziness" into logic a robot can use to make "approriate" decisions.

Medical

Walker 2.0: Medical Assistant and Personal Trainer in One siemens

As part of the EU ACANTO (A CyberphysicAl social NeTwOrk) project, researchers from six European countries are working on “FriWalk,” a new gait analysis system. “FriWalk” (Friendly Robot Walker) consists of a four-wheeled walker that is equipped with depth sensors and cameras. ... FriWalk measures the precise position of the feet on the ground, their orientation, and the pressure exerted when the feet come into contact with the ground.

Bible

Environment

Recycling appliances in Japan hits the cutting edge channelnewsasia

...unlike recycling plants in other places, these old appliances are not crushed by machines. Instead, they are carefully dismantled by trained workers according to the plant’s specifications. Special care is also taken to remove chlorofluorocarbon, and any leakage must be reported to the authorities.

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