Lifeboat Foundation

Resist the temptation to take credit for patchwork combinations of other people’s work. If you’re great, prove it by articulating unique ideas in unique ways. Never before has there been a better opportunity for ambitious thinkers to achieve greatness. When others are creating and consuming synthetically generated content like flying drones in a perpetual hover state, there’s an opportunity for non-drones to fly higher, farther and faster.

For example, students manipulating the system by having ChatGPT write essays miss an opportunity to learn, demonstrate a dangerously poor understanding of ethics and prove they’re no better than everyone else. Students who learn on their own, articulate original ideas and share a passion for a subject will outperform the machines by an increasingly wide margin.

The future of humans is a fusion of what machines and people do best. What can be predicted or regurgitated should be left to machines, but what requires judgment or rational thinking should be left to us. Generative AI isn’t a crutch, it’s not a panacea, and it’s not a threat to humans. We’re the only species capable of synthesizing ideas, forming opinions and making decisions based on ethical principles. Let’s use this moment in history to embrace the future while investing in our humanity.

Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing Chat, is slowly rolling out to the public. But our first interaction shows it’s far from ready for a full release.

Musk is co-founder of OpenAI, the U.S. startup that developed ChatGPT — a so-called generative AI tool which returns human-like responses to user prompts.

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI powered by a large language model called GPT-3. It is programmed to understand human language and generate responses based on huge bodies of data.

ChatGPT “has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become,” according to Musk. “The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people.”

I think we need to ensure that the chatbot can’t do what it said it can.

It’s only a chatbot, so it shouldn’t be able to access some networks.

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript.

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

When New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose recently “met” Sydney — the chatbot feature is not yet available to the public, but is being offered to a small group of testers, Roose reported — he walked away from the encounter “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.” The technology behind Sydney is “created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT,” Roose noted.

Roose described Sydney as being “like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.” And he shared the full conversation he had with the chatbot over a two-hour period.

Some disturbing details that Roose pointed to and/or that could be gleaned from the transcript:

The COgITOR project is aimed at formulating a new concept of artificial cybernetic system, taking its name from Descartes’s maxim “Cogito, ergo sum” and drawing inspiration from the new frontier of robotics that aims to reduce, if not completely cancel, system rigidity.

The goal of COgITOR, in fact, is to create a liquid cybernetic system inspired by the cellular world and suited to the exploration of extreme environments or other planets. It will be spherical in shape, covered by a sensitive skin, similar to a touch screen, allowing interaction with the environment, and will be fitted with a power generation system based on thermal gradients.

COgITOR is a project funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon2020 research programme, with a budget of approximately 3.5 million euros for the next 4 years. The project has been conceived – and is coordinated – by Alessandro Chiolerio, a researcher from the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), who has had experience working at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Germany and at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States. The consortium includes Prof. Andrew Adamatzky (University of Bristol), Dr. Artur Braun (EMPA, Dübendorf), Dr. Carsten Jost (Plasmachem GmbH, Berlin) and Dr. Chiara Zocchi (Ciaotech Srl, Milano).

The system can be attached to any fuel dispenser, offering a hands-free solution.

In an era where technology is taking over all spheres of life, refueling techniques have remained mainl a mechanical process that demands the utmost attention from the user. As a solution to this, Denmark-based Autofuel is offering a robotic refueling system that cuts the need for drivers’ attention or direct involvement.

Thrusters may provide propulsion in any direction and can “roll” around the limb.

Meet the University of Tokyo’s SPIDAR, the backronym of “SpherIcally vectorable and Distributed rotors assisted Air-ground amphibious quadruped Robot,” with multimodal locomotion capability.

Continue reading “SPIDAR: A groundbreaking spider-like robot is ready to change robotics” »