Death Is Having a Moment - The Atlantic Last Friday night, onstage at a Los Angeles venue known for featuring indie bands, a goateed historian in a vintage purple corduroy suit and silver silk shirt beguiled a room packed with artists, writers, scholars, morticians, and other curious observers, with his research into bejeweled skeletons from the Roman Catacombs. The topic of the night was death, but not in a horror-filled, Halloweeny way. The gathering drew an intellectually hip and increasingly death-conscious crowd of mostly 20 and 30-somethings, who had waited in a long line outside of the Bootleg Theater to get in. They sipped bottles of La Fin Du Monde and plastic cups of Populist beer from the Eagle Rock Brewery, and perused copies of the Lapham’s Quarterly death issue between cabaret acts, which included a soulful shaggy-haired death gospel singer, a writer of death and obscure history, and a funeral director.
Science fact: Sci-fi inventions that became reality Image copyright Getty Images The story of a 14-year-old girl who won a landmark legal battle to be preserved cryogenically has many people wondering how such technology actually works - for many of us, it seems like something straight out of science fiction. But sci-fi has a long history of becoming science fact, as outlandish creations inspire real research. Remarkable realities Rise of the human exoskeletons On the outskirts of Pisa in a back room of a modern block, a machine is waiting for its operator. The device has arms and legs and is suspended by ropes from a metal frame. Its only other tether is a thick umbilical cable plugged into its back.
We’re About 100 Years Away From a Real RoboCop We all love RoboCop. Sure, there are some morally and ethically questionable aspects of an unstoppable privatized security bot, but the armor and cyborgian capabilities are pretty freaking awesome. Whether it’s in Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original or José Padilha’s remake out today, RoboCop is simply as badass as it gets. He’s also almost a century away from being even remotely feasible. Why? Korean Method-2 Giant Manned Bipedal Robot (GMBR) Exo-Bionic Exoskeleton for Future Warfare: Future Soldier/Warfighter Going ‘Avatar’-Style with Armored, Armed/Weaponized and Camouflaged Variant? By David Crane david (at) defensereview (dot) com Photo(s) Credit: Getty Images and/or Hankook Mirae Technology December 27, 2016Last updated on 12/27/16. Yang’s so excited about it, in fact, that he’s apparently already put about 242 billion won (that’s $200 million) into the program since 2014 to “bring to life what only seemed possible in movies and cartoons”. DefenseReview (DR) appreciates Yang’s and HMT’s enthusiasm and futuristic vision, and we hope the manned robot/exoskeleton really works.
Machine Intelligence Research Institute - Wikipedia The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit organization founded in 2000 to research safety issues related to the development of Strong AI. Nate Soares is the executive director, having taken over from Luke Muehlhauser in May 2015.[3] MIRI's technical agenda states that new formal tools are needed in order to ensure the safe operation of future generations of AI software (friendly artificial intelligence).[4] The organization hosts regular research workshops to develop mathematical foundations for this project,[5] and has been cited as one of several academic and nonprofit groups studying long-term AI outcomes.[6][7][8] History[edit] Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all. [...]
Singularity Summit - Wikipedia The Singularity Summit is the annual conference of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. It was started in 2006 at Stanford University[1][2] by Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel, and the subsequent summits in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 have been held in San Francisco, San Jose, New York City, San Francisco, and New York, respectively. Some speakers have included Sebastian Thrun, Rodney Brooks, Barney Pell, Marshall Brain, Justin Rattner, Peter Diamandis, Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Benford, Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg, Juergen Schmidhuber, Aubrey de Grey, Max Tegmark, and Michael Shermer.
Technological singularity Conscious Now available as eBook and paperback What makes something sentient? What does it take for an entity to be aware of its own existence and to want to interact with the world of its own accord? Is it a gift from God or hard science? Singularity: The robots are coming to steal our jobs Image copyright Thinkstock If you worry that the robots are coming, don't, because they are already here. Artificial intelligence agents are already involved in every aspect of our lives - they keep our inboxes free of spam, they help us make our web transactions, they fly our planes and if Google gets its way will also soon drive our cars for us. "AI's are embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives," head of AI at Singularity University, Neil Jacobstein, told the BBC. "They are used in medicine, in law, in design and throughout automotive industry."
Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, is a lot like Amazon (AMZN) was in 1994 — Quartz Today is the day we switch the system on. Am I nervous? Of course I am. There could be indexing failures, field mismatches, table schema conflicts, a Russian hack… I’m kidding. We know how to build these things. We built the biggest one in the world, remember.