Lifeboat Foundation

To back up the decision, Waymo pointed to its safety record and history building and operating self-driving trucks on highways. (The company shuttered its self-driving truck project last year to focus on taxis.) Including highways should also decrease route times for riders—especially from the airport—with some rides taking half the time.

Although highways are simpler to navigate than city streets—where cars contend with twists, turns, signs, stoplights, pedestrians, and pets—the stakes are higher. A crash at 10 or 20 miles per hour is less likely to cause major injury than one at highway speeds. And while it’s relatively straightforward (if less than ideal) for a malfunctioning robotaxi to stop or pull to the side of the road and await human help in the city, such tactics won’t do on the highway, where it’s dangerous for cars to suddenly slow or stop.

Continue reading “Waymo’s Driverless Cars Are Hitting the Highway Sans Safety Drivers in Arizona” »

The world of VTOLs is fast expanding and promises to forever change the way air travel is made. There are several driving forces behind this expansion, ranging from the need to declutter our very congested cities and airports to the need to find better, faster, and cleaner means of transportation.

How hard would it be to train an AI model to be secretly evil? As it turns out, according to AI researchers, not very — and attempting to reroute a bad apple AI’s more sinister proclivities might backfire in the long run.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Google-backed AI firm Anthropic claim they were able to train advanced large language models (LLMs) with “exploitable code,” meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad AI behavior via seemingly benign words or phrases. As the Anthropic researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in “strategically deceptive behavior,” meaning “behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity.” If an AI system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they “detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?”

Unfortunately, as it stands, the answer to that latter question appears to be a resounding “no.” The Anthropic scientists found that once a model is trained with exploitable code, it’s exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to train a machine out of its duplicitous tendencies. And what’s worse, according to the paper, attempts to reign in and reconfigure a deceptive model may well reinforce its bad behavior, as a model might just learn how to better hide its transgressions.

Hyperion, a California-based company, has unveiled a hydrogen-powered supercar the company hopes will change the way people view hydrogen fuel cell technology.

The Hyperion XP-1 will be able to drive for up to 1,000 miles on one tank of compressed hydrogen gas and its electric motors will generate more than 1,000 horsepower, according to the company. The all-wheel-drive car can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in a little over two seconds, the company said.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric cars that use hydrogen to generate power inside the car rather than using batteries to store energy. The XP-1 doesn’t combust hydrogen but uses it in fuel cells that combine hydrogen with oxygen from the air in a process that creates water, the vehicle’s only emission, and a stream of electricity to power the car.

New research from UBC reveals how these tiny birds switch gears mid-air and the insights for future autonomous flying tech.

Hovering or cruising? Hummingbirds show us their flight strategies, hinting at potential applications for next-gen autonomous vehicles.

Time to move philosophers into the lab. AI is making theories of consciousness testable.

DARPA is preparing to revolutionize flight as it moves forward with the development of its experimental X-plane, which the agency says will upend a century of flight technology with an aircraft featuring no moving control surfaces.

The X-65, a technology demonstrator with a 30-foot wingspan weighing slightly more than 7,000 pounds, is expected to be capable of reaching Mach 0.7.

The agency has been working with its partners at Aurora Flight Sciences, who were recently given the green light to construct a full-scale experimental aircraft that will demonstrate the company’s novel active flow control (AFC) actuators for its flight control system.

Artificial intelligence can accelerate the process of finding and testing new materials, and now researchers have used that ability to develop a battery that is less dependent on the costly mineral lithium.

Lithium-ion batteries power many devices that we use every day as well as electric vehicles. They would also be a necessary part of a green electric grid, as batteries are required to store renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels. But lithium is expensive and mining it damages the environment. Finding a replacement for this crucial metal could be costly and time-consuming, requiring researchers to develop and test millions of candidates over the course of years. Using AI, Nathan Baker at Microsoft and his colleagues accomplished the task in months. They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.

LG is already one of the most prolific EV battery manufacturers in the US, but it wants to build the devices that charge them, too. The company just opened just opened its first EV charger manufacturing facility in the US, a 59,000 square foot plant in in Fort Worth, Texas capable of manufacturing 10,000 units per year.

The company has already started to assemble 11kW home-style chargers there and will begin producing 175kW fast chargers in the first half of 2024. It plans to built 350kW ultra-fast chargers at some point this year designed for “commercial travel and long-distance transportation,” LG wrote.

The Korean company said it chose Texas as it had existing facilities there and because the state offers “excellent logistics and transportation networks and is home to major operations for companies in industries ranging from automobile manufacturing to finance” (GM, Toyota and Tesla all have vehicle assembly plants in the state).