Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON (AP) — Imagine a customer-service center that speaks your language, no matter what it is.

Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, that runs customer-service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects.

So an Alorica representative who speaks, say, only Spanish can field a complaint about a balky printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica wouldn’t need to hire a rep who speaks Cantonese.

The fact that we don’t see anything out there means that if they did exist, they vanished long ago and their signatures have decayed away.

Investors are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the AI industry right now, and much of that is going toward the development of a still theoretical technology: artificial general intelligence.

OpenAI, the maker of the buzzy chatbot ChatGPT, has made creating AGI a top priority. Its Big Tech competitors, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, are also devoting their top researchers to the same goal.

AI experts have said it would likely be 2050 before AGI hits the market. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says 2025, but it’s a very difficult problem to solve.

Let’s also emphasise ethical considerations. The Dartmouth participants didn’t spend much time discussing the ethical implications of AI. Today, we know better, and must do better.

We must also refocus research directions. Let’s emphasise research into AI interpretability and robustness, interdisciplinary AI research and explore new paradigms of intelligence that aren’t modelled on human cognition.

Finally, we must manage our expectations about AI. Sure, we can be excited about its potential. But we must also have realistic expectations, so that we can avoid the disappointment cycles of the past.

Robotic forearm designed with human-like proportions and efficient heat dissipation:

To replicate this in robots, researchers developed a compact forearm with a radioulnar joint using miniature bone–muscle modules. The design mimics human proportions, with two modules in the radius and ulna, totaling eight muscles. These muscles control six degrees of freedom (DOFs), including the radioulnar joint, radiocarpal joint, and finger movements.

Continue reading “Scientists create mini robotic forearm muscle comparable to human” »

A new type of gel, developed by chemists at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), could help to make lithium-ion batteries safer and more powerful. The gel is designed to prevent the highly flammable electrolyte fluid from leaking.

In a collaboration between scientists from Physics and Chemistry at the University of Bayreuth and Physical Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, it has now been possible to realize optically switchable photonic units that enable precise addressing of individual units. This will make it possible to reliably store and read binary information optically.

As he releases a book on extending life, leading researcher Sam Parnia explains why resurrection is no longer science-fiction.