Lifeboat Foundation

George “Geohot” Hotz is driving forward with his push to bring self-driving cars to the masses, but he’s going about it a slightly unconventional way. His company Comma.ai is brushing past some previous regulatory issues and is trying another route — open-sourcing not only its self-driving technology, but also instructions for building your very own hardware device (“a robotics platform”) called Comma Neo. All of this information is available today through Comma.ai’s GitHub repositories.

Since the beginning, the company has had a goal of being the Android version of self-driving cars — it wants to empower “ghostriding for the masses.” Earlier this year, it was approached by state and federal regulators inquiring about a product Hotz claimed wasn’t even on sale yet. Fed up with the scrutiny, Comma.ai cancelled its first product, the Comma One, and pivoted its thinking to democratizing its knowledge. So it’s keeping with its promise, but has scrapped its $999 price point in favor of it being free. “If we really want to be the Android of self-driving cars, we can’t be charging $999, can we?” Hotz explained.

A researcher who co-wrote a paper in the 1990s on a crucial artificial intelligence technique feels overlooked by today’s stars in the field.

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services.

At the company’s AWS re: invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services — Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition — to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others.

What I have been waiting for; now I can get all of my novels written for me.

Literai is a community that uses neural networks to automate storytelling by computers.

Disney will soon be opening a new Avatar-themed experience in Disneyworld Florida, and a group of the brand’s biggest fans got to see a preview last week.

One of the highlights of the ride are the ridiculously realistic Na’vi robots that talk to the visitors. The movie’s CGI already looked stunning, but these animatronics are just ridiculously realistic.

Disney’s Imagineering team has been experimenting with various ways to bring its famous characters to life, like mixing animatronics with digital screens and hopping one-legged robots.

Continue reading “Disney’s new animatronic robots are getting too realistic for me” »

On Monday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced its new artificial intelligence. Based on a photograph alone, it can predict what’ll happen next, then generate a one-and-a-half second video clip depicting that possible future.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ySsv5-jSqss

BMI implant leveraging AI.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it’s not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it.

Continue reading “Brain Implants that Augment the Human Brain Using AI” »

By Gary Pretty, Technical Strategist, Mando Group

It seems like bots are everywhere these days, with more and more popping up every day. From bots that help us tag people on Facebook to simple Twitter bots that respond to our tweets.

Continue reading “An introduction to the Microsoft Bot Framework” »

What might life be like once autonomous vehicles populate the roads? With the help of colleague Timothy Bonds, RAND’s Nidhi Kalra described what may occur when autonomous vehicles “democratize transportation.” Read our recap from #PoliticsAside: r.rand.org/326y