PIBOT wasn’t designed with ships in mind. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, built it as a life-sized humanoid pilot, roughly 5 feet 3 inches tall and 143 pounds, able to climb into an ordinary aircraft cockpit and fly it using the exact same switches, yokes and throttles a human pilot would use, with zero modification to the plane itself. That’s the entire point of the design, according to the KAIST team led by professor David Shim: rather than building a new autopilot system for every aircraft type, you build a robot that can operate whatever cockpit is already sitting in front of it.
Around 30 robots joined a protest in front of Poland’s digital affairs ministry, calling for stronger AI regulations. The demonstration was organised by campaigners to spark debate on how AI and robots could replace workers.
Great video! I don't know what this guy is planning on building, but I will definitely be checking up on him. I had a job in Houston 50 years ago (!) delivering scissor-lift work platforms, much like the one being cannibalized in the video. I did some repair work like replacing hydraulic hoses and splicing broken wires. Most were new machines so they didn't require much work. So this is kind of like old home week. 50 years ago there wasn't much in the way of robots. Times have changed.
I picked this puzzle on a whim and at least partly because I couldn't make out what it was from the thumbnail. I'm still not entirely sure what I am looking at, a bunch of sci-fi war machines, I suppose. But why is the head of the central figure blacked out? It almost looks like it was deliberately censored, but all the other copies of this image that Google found all have the same black blob instead of a head. Weird.
ROBOFORMING: The Future of Metalworking? (I Had NO IDEA This Was Possible) - Smarter Every Day 290
SmarterEveryDay
Cool, a new technique for forming sheet metal parts without having to build complex, expensive stamping dies. One of these days someone will make a video about how the stamping dies are made, but I haven't seen one yet.
I'm not sure whether this is AI or carefully staged. Everything in here could be real, there is nothing impossible. Chrome plated machine tools are possible, but I don't think I've ever actually seen any. There is more kinds of factory automation crammed into this one short clip than I seen anywhere else.
Nematodes have successfully adapted to nearly every ecosystem: from marine (salt) to fresh water, soils, from the polar regions to the tropics, as well as the highest to the lowest of elevations. They are ubiquitous in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments, where they often outnumber other animals in both individual and species counts, and are found in locations as diverse as mountains, deserts, and oceanic trenches. They are found in every part of the Earth's lithosphere, even at great depths below the surface of the Earth. They represent 90% of all animals on the ocean floor.
Story I heard was that they are so pervasive that if you took away all grass and trees and dirt but left the nematodes, everything would still look the same.
A connectome is a map of the brain's neural connections, also known as the brain's wiring diagram. It's made up of neurons that communicate through synapses, and each connection is made up of the presynaptic axon, the postsynaptic dendrites, and synapses between the neurons. Connectomes can be represented in graph or matrix form, and are used to analyze network organization.
It's a very swoopy, zoomy kind of video, so it's kind of fun to watch, but there are a couple of things worth noticing. One is making this video. I imagine there some parts might be speeded up, and there are some cuts where there could have been a crash, but it looks pretty damn seamless. Flying through the inside of a car being assembled and not smashing into one of the robot arms that are reaching to do actual work (not just making a stupid movie to entertain the mindless masses) is a pretty good trick no matter how you do it. I don't think it was faked, I mean with all the insanity running around loose these days, it could have been, but I prefer to think it was really recorded by some dude flying a drone, some dude with some excellent piloting skills. I wonder how many hours it took him to get this good, or did he just pick up controller and instantly know how to fly it like James Bond? Yes, I'm supposing it was a guy. If it wasn't, let me know and I'll put up a post about her because guys love chicks who are competent and savvy.
The other thing is what it shows about cars being made. Taking sheets of steel and stamping them in a giant press to form them into an entire side of the cabin, and casting big chunks of a aluminum to become part of chassis. The amount of engineering that went into designing those parts, the machines to make them and then the tooling needed to adapt those machines to make those parts is tremendous. But once you get all that done, Bob the drone can turn out one bazillion dollar part after another. The cost of the labor to assemble an automobile is pretty much fixed - x dollars per car. But the upfront engineering expense might be on the order of a billion dollars. You need to sell 100,000 cars for $20K each to pay for that. If you only sell 10,000 cars, you are going to have to sell them for $200K each.
I'm impressed. If they are able to interface it to the human nervous system it would be great leap forward for prosthetics. A prosthetic will never be as good as the original, but after seeing the reaction of amputees to getting an artificial limb they can control I'm thinking this is pretty great.
The YouTube blurb:
We have achieved strong, fast, power-dense, high-efficiency, biomimetic, soft, safe, clean, organic and affordable robotic technology. The dumbbell weights 7 kg (15,6 lbs), forearm with hand only 1 kg (2,2 lbs).
This artificial muscles robotic arm is operated by water and consumes 200W at peak. We invent and produce portable power supply and our own valves to have complete controllability of speed contraction and compress the whole powering system (for a full body) inside humanlike robot torso.
At this moment our robotic arm is operated only by a half of artificial muscles when compared to a human body. Strongest finger-bending muscle still missing. Fingers are going to move from left to right but they don't have muscles yet. Metacarpal and left-to-right wrist movement are also blocked. This version has a position sensor in each joint but they are yet to be software-implemented. We are going to add everything mentioned above in the next prototype.
The movement sequence was written and sent by simple commands to a hand. We wish to develop a platform for reinforcement learning purposes, prosthetic arms and ultimately a full humanoid robots to serve people for fun, as butlers, cleaners, chauffeurs, construction workers (also in space) and even in the future achieve human immortality by transplanting the brain into the machine.
Clone Incorporated
Lucas Kozlik, Dhanush Rad, Amdeusz Swierk, Juliusz Tarnowski
I don't think transplanting brains or human immortality are worthwhile goals. Mentioning them might get them some additional funding. Replicating the mechanics of a human body (the structure and motion) is trivial compared to the trying to replicate the nervous system. We might someday be able to 'grow' a nervous system, but it would require a completely different set of skills and techniques.
It does not matter if any one person survives, it only matters if there is enough intelligence to contain and grok our accumulated knowledge, and that might require an artificial intelligence.
Yesterday we drove over to the Lowe's home improvement big box store near the defunct Portland Meadows horse racing track. Saw a giant Amazon warehouse there. It dwarfs Lowes. I could have sworn it wasn't there last week. Seems I was right, sort of. Less than two years ago it was just talk. It still isn't visible on Google Maps.
Since we're talking about Amazon it seems appropriate to include this video:
How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
Tom Scott
On one hand, this is great. Tell the world (or Alexa) you want a box cheeze doodles, and presto, a few minutes later a box shows up at your door without anyone actually having to do anything, except the delivery driver, and that's just until they get the automated drone delivery system going.
On the other hand, all those people who were employed picking and packing groceries are out of a job. But all the people who are designing and building robots have got all the work they can handle. That would be okay if it took as many people to design and build the robots as the number of grocery pickers they were replacing, but probably not. I suspect it's more like one to ten.
Yes, all these fancy machines and automated processes are eliminating the drudgery from many people's lives, but we aren't giving them anything else to do. If you want to be a part of society, you need to have a stake in society, which means owning something of real value, and that means real estate. It doesn't have to be much, an eight foot square shop might be enough. But being on the dole, playing video games and protesting aren't going to get you there. Makes me think we might be due for some land reform.
The Navy ran a test and the gizmo seems to work. First flight was over a year ago. I wonder how long it will be before we have robot jet fighters. Probably a couple of weeks at least. Even if they aren't as good as manned fighters, and they won't be at first, they will be cheaper and if they get shot down it's not like you are losing a pilot.
What They Don't Want You To See. Boston Dynamics and AI.
Digital Engine
Our new robot overlords are coming. We can hope they will be benevolent, but as long as they are controlled by people, some will not be.
Meanwhile 'there is a shortage of workers' but we've got zillions of people out of work. This does not compute. There is something very wrong here. I have all kinds of ideas about what could be the problem, but if I think about it, none of them make much sense. I see homeless encampments short distances away from places offering employment. Could it be that once people become adults their trajectory becomes very hard to change, and if the job they had disappears they just can't adapt to a new one?
