- 8 years ago Sticky: Check out /t/futurism instead!
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+32 +4
Do not have sex with our robots, Japanese firm warns users
The Japanese company behind humanoid robot Pepper has told its owners not to get frisky with it. In the user agreement for the android, mobile phone firm SoftBank states: "The policy owner must not perform any sexual act or other indecent behaviour" on the machine, which is designed to live with humans.
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+64 +1
New Steel Is as Strong as Titanium, But Ten Times Cheaper
From shipping containers to skyscrapers to turbines, good old steel is still the workhorse of our modern world. Now, scientists are discovering new secrets to make the material better, lighter, and stronger. Today a team of material scientists at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea announced what they're calling one of the biggest steel breakthroughs of the last few decades: an altogether new type of flexible, ultra-strong, lightweight steel.
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+25 +3
Self-driving taxis will begin trials in Japan next year
Self-driving cars are a few years away from becoming a thing, right? Not in Japan, where the company Robot Taxi has announced that it'll start testing robotic taxis in 2016. A report by the Wall Street Journal reveals that the firm will begin by offering autonomous rides to 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just outside Tokyo. The limited trial will ferry the participants from their homes to local stores and back...
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+43 +3
World’s largest smog vacuum - the solution to pollution?
The world's largest smog vacuum cleaner has arrived. Award-winning Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde and his team of experts are the masterminds behind this cutting-edge project. Using patented ion technology, the 'Smog Free Tower' is capable of producing areas or 'bubbles' of smog-free space, allowing people to breath clean fresh air.
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+38 +2
Deep Learning Robot Takes 10 Days to Teach Itself to Grasp
Leave a human baby with some toys and it’ll quickly learn to pick them up. Now a robot with deep learning capabilities has done the same thing. One of the goals of general purpose robots is to interact in an intelligent way with everyday objects. But robotic grasping skills are embarrassingly poor. Ask a robot to pick up a TV remote or a bottle of water or a toy gun and it will endlessly fumble with it—unless specifically programmed to pick up that object in a specially controlled environment.
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+30 +1
UN delay could open door to robot wars, say experts
The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or “killer robots” – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on the weapons is intensifying at the UN general assembly in New York, but a deal may not emerge quickly enough to prevent devices from being deployed, experts say.
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+48 +3
Toyota's hydrogen concept car could power your concept home
By the time this car looks normal, we'll have cracked teleportation?
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+26 +2
Driverless trucks move iron ore at automated Rio Tinto mines
The first two mines in the world to start moving all of their iron ore using fully remote-controlled trucks have just gone online in Western Australia's Pilbara.Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away. Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless...
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+37 +2
Samsung unveils new 'Stripe' batteries, representing a major breakthrough for mobile devices
As advances continue in the realm of mobile devices and wearable gadgets, we always come back to the same handful of barriers that impede progress. Chief among them, of course, is battery technology. Component makers spend millions on research and development in an effort to make the most power-efficient parts possible, but the majority of smartphones still only last a day at most per charge. Where wearables are concerned, these tiny devices come in a wide range of flexible shapes that often...
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+40 +2
Autonomous robots will deliver your shopping in 2016
This small self-driving robot, which can deliver shopping and groceries to the door, will begin trundling through the streets of London in 2016. The six-wheeled robot has been created by the co-founders of Skype under a new company called Starship. Its creators claim it will able to deliver two bags of shopping, weighing around 9kg, on short trips within half an hour of an order being placed.
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+26 +2
Researchers Threatened a Robot With a Knife to See If Humans Cared
In the future, social robots will most likely step in as our carers, companions, and teachers. But will we actually empathize with them in the same way that we are supposed to with each other? In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers present neurophysiological evidence that confirms humans feel empathy when they see a human-shaped robot hand get hurt, similar to when they see an actual human hand hurt.
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+31 +4
Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’
If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar...
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+42 +1
Machines Are Better Than Humans at Hiring the Best Employees
When an algorithm picks the candidate, they stay longer, new research finds. People want to believe they have good instincts, but when it comes to hiring, they can't best a computer. Hiring managers select worse job candidates than the ones recommended by an algorithm, new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds. Looking across 15 companies and more than 300,000 hires in low-skill service-sector jobs, such as data entry and call center work...
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+34 +1
Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse. By George Dvorsky.
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+17 +1
“Tech Tats” Turn Wearable Devices into Cyberpunk Body Art
Tech Tats are temporary tattoos are made of electroconductive tattoo paint embedded with an ATiny85 microcontroller.
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+15 +2
Khosla is More Afraid of Gene-Editing Tech Than AI
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla fears gene manipulation more than computers taking over humankind. When it comes to existential threats facing the human race, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is more concerned about new technologies that can be used to remove genes in embryos that cause illness than he is about artificial intelligence. Khosla, the high-profile founder of Khosla Ventures, made his case while answering a question Wednesday on the website Quora. A member of the public had...
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+37 +2
Why Memory and Mimicry Are The Next big Frontiers in AI
Big name investors and companies are investing in the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. For the last five years the effort to teach computers to think more like humans, to learn how to recognize speech and images on their own has been the goal of deep learning. But now tech giants and startups in the industry are turning to new tools believing that deep learning has essentially solved its recognition problem.
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+27 +4
Future batteries, coming soon: charge in seconds, last months and power over the air
While smartphones, smarthomes and even smart wearables are growing ever more advanced, they're still limited by power. The battery hasn't advanced in decades.
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+37 +3
China Aims to Retool Its Manufacturing Industry with Robots
China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers. The government’s plan will be crucial to a broader effort to reform China’s economy while also meeting the ambitious production goals laid out in its latest economic blueprint, which aims to double per capita income by 2020 from 2016 levels with at least 6.5 percent annual growth. The success of this effort could...
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+17 +3
Autonomous Weaponized Robots: Not Just Science Fiction
Robotics expert Noel Sharkey describes a confluence of developing technologies that could endanger our lives and our rights.