Rise of the Robots | Machine Learning

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Apollonius
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Another piece from the latest Smithsonian Magazine:


... To understand R2-D2, you have to wrap your mind around a theory called "the uncanny valley".

The concept was first posed in 1970 by the Japanese robticist Masahiro Mori. He'd noticed that as robots grow more realistic, people's attitudes toward them change. When a robot is toylike and capable of only simple, humanlike gestures, we find it cute. If it starts looking and acting a bit more human, we find it even more endearing. But it it gets too human-- as with, say, a rubbery prosthetic hand-- we suddenly shift allegiance. We find it creepy. Our emotional response plunges into what Mori called the uncanny valley.

Why would overly realistic robots os unsettle us? When they become nearly human, we start focusing on the things that are missing. We notice that the arms don't quite move as smoothly as a real human's, or the skin tone isn't quite right. It stops looking like a person and starts looking like a zombie. Angela Timwell, a professor specializing in video game design at the University of Bolton in Britain, suspects we unconsciously detect sociopathy or disease.


-- Clive Thompson, Almost Human: How R2-D2 became the most beloved robot in the galaxy, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2014
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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From Echochambers
A review of the best commentary on and around the world...


Today's must-read


Stephen Hawking: Beware smart machines - BBC News, 2 May 2014
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27260080

Dismissing the implications of highly intelligent machines could be humankind's "worst mistake in history", write astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, computer scientist Stuart Russell, and physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek in the Independent.

"Self-aware" machines have received the Hollywood treatment in the Johnny Depp film Transcendence, but the subject should receive serious consideration, they say.

Successfully creating artificial intelligence would be "the biggest event in human history", they write, and the possible benefits for everyday human life are enormous. There could come a time, however, when machines outpace human achievement. If and when that day arrives, they wonder, will the best interest of humans still factor into their calculations?

"One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," they write. "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all."

And what are we humans doing to address these concerns, they ask. Nothing.

"All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks," they conclude.

A while back, we wondered about the implications of machine journalists. But maybe we should just be thankful that at least something will be around to write long-form essays on the last days of humankind.
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Turing test beaten by computer - CBC News, 9 June 2014
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/turin ... -1.2669649


A computer has passed the Turing test, an artificial intelligence measure of human-like capability devised more than a century ago, the University of Reading has announced.

On Sunday, Eugene Goostman, a "chatbot" software program designed to talk like a 13-year-old boy, became the first to pass the test, the university said in a news release.

The program, created by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko at U.S.-based Princeton Artificial Intelligence, convinced more than 30 per cent of its conversation partners and judges that it was human in an independently verified Turing test consisting of 30 simultaneous, unrestricted conversations.

The achievement is a "historic milestone in artificial intelligence," added the university, which co-organized the event in London where the test took place, along with RoboLaw, an European organization that researches the regulation of emerging robotic technologies. ...




The danger of 'emotional' machines - Anthony Zurcher, BBC News, 24 June 2014
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28005330


Last week a computer program reportedly passed the Turing test by successfully convincing humans it communicated with that it was a real person at least 30% of the time.

Although the results have been challenged by some scientists, it seems to be only a matter of time before computer artificial intelligence is sufficiently capable of pulling of the ruse.

The prospect has Die Welt's Torsten Krauel worried.

"Computers with emotional intelligence can now trick us," he writes (translated by WorldCrunch). "If in the near future we get a text message that is, for example ironic, or kindhearted, it could be from a memory chip that - while it doesn't know what feelings are - can compute them."

The implications for this are far-reaching. Not only could computers be able to imitate humans, they could also draw on their vast stores of information to craft a precise message much more effectively than even the most skilled carbon-based life form.

In politics and stock markets, for instance, predicting - and even shaping - human actions and opinions can be the difference between victory and defeat, riches and ruin.

And all this is happening in shorter and shorter segments of time, Krauel writes:

Because in a nanosecond world where everything is interrelated, secret services and politicians and activists want to be able to identify relevant developments in real time. So, for example, they seek ways to recognize as quickly as possible any unusual news spreading on Twitter or other communication pages.

Time and space have always meant that we could be forewarned, have some time to figure out a reaction even if it was just to protect ourselves. That's over. Now people can no longer be sure if the internet is obeying humans or instead computers that have simply come to know what emotional stimuli are. The situation is claustrophobic.
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Image
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Typhoon wrote:7Pq-S557XQU
This is what I am I talking about in the "should disruptive technology be taxed at a high rate" viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2930

It is already here. A massive amount of jobs have already gone away that aren't ever coming back. I am sure people will eventually find other things to do but this is happening overnight. Which is going to be highly destabilizing. Great find Thanks for posting this CS
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Something unexamined always happens to disrupt these Malthusian extrapolations. Societal and economic changes are certain, but can't be predicted yet.

The video was also weak when touching on creativity. There will certainly be big changes, but humanity will muddle through.
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Nonc Hilaire wrote:Something unexamined always happens to disrupt these Malthusian extrapolations. Societal and economic changes are certain, but can't be predicted yet.

The video was also weak when touching on creativity. There will certainly be big changes, but humanity will muddle through.
I am not saying humanity won't muddle through it Look at the Middle East sooner or later they will muddle through that centuries long mess. And besides I am anxiously waiting to get that memory upgrade and enhanced intelligence. I wonder which i will be Googlebrain, iBrain, or the Matrix? :P
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Doc wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:Something unexamined always happens to disrupt these Malthusian extrapolations. Societal and economic changes are certain, but can't be predicted yet.

The video was also weak when touching on creativity. There will certainly be big changes, but humanity will muddle through.
I am not saying humanity won't muddle through it Look at the Middle East sooner or later they will muddle through that centuries long mess. And besides I am anxiously waiting to get that memory upgrade and enhanced intelligence. I wonder which i will be Googlebrain, iBrain, or the Matrix? :P
I hear uber-conservative think tanks are also funding development of an Ayn-droid model.
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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HitchBOT

. . . the hitchhiking robot.
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/its-time ... picks=true
It's Time to Take Artificial Intelligence Seriously
No Longer an Academic Curiosity, It Now Has Measurable Impact on Our Lives
By
Christopher Mims

Aug. 24, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET

A still from "2001: A Space Odyssey" with Keir Dullea reflected in the lens of HAL's "eye." MGM / POLARIS / STANLEY KUBRICK

The age of intelligent machines has arrived—only they don't look at all like we expected. Forget what you've seen in movies; this is no HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it's certainly not Scarlett Johansson's disembodied voice in "Her." It's more akin to what happens when insects, or even fungi, do when they "think." (What, you didn't know that slime molds can solve mazes?)

Artificial intelligence has lately been transformed from an academic curiosity to something that has measurable impact on our lives. Google Inc. used it to increase the accuracy of voice recognition in Android by 25%. The Associated Press is printing business stories written by it. Facebook Inc. is toying with it as a way to improve the relevance of the posts it shows you.

What is especially interesting about this point in the history of AI is that it's no longer just for technology companies. Startups are beginning to adapt it to problems where, at least to me, its applicability is genuinely surprising.

Take advertising copywriting. Could the "Mad Men" of Don Draper's day have predicted that by the beginning of the next century, they would be replaced by machines? Yet a company called Persado aims to do just that.

Persado does one thing, and judging by its client list, which includes Citigroup Inc. and Motorola Mobility, it does it well. It writes advertising emails and "landing pages" (where you end up if you click on a link in one of those emails, or an ad).

Here's an example: Persado's engine is being used across all of the types of emails a top U.S. wireless carrier sends out when it wants to convince its customers to renew their contracts, upgrade to a better plan or otherwise spend money.

Traditionally, an advertising copywriter would pen these emails; perhaps the company would test a few variants on a subset of its customers, to see which is best.

But Persado's software deconstructs advertisements into five components, including emotion words, characteristics of the product, the "call to action" and even the position of text and the images accompanying it. By recombining them in millions of ways and then distilling their essential characteristics into eight or more test emails that are sent to some customers, Persado says it can effectively determine the best possible come-on.

WSJD is the Journal's home for tech news, analysis and product reviews.


"A creative person is good but random," says Lawrence Whittle, head of sales at Persado. "We've taken the randomness out by building an ontology of language."

The results speak for themselves: In the case of emails intended to convince mobile subscribers to renew their plans, initial trials with Persado increased click-through rates by 195%, the company says.

Here's another example of AI becoming genuinely useful: X.ai is a startup aimed, like Persado, at doing one thing exceptionally well. In this case, it's scheduling meetings. X.ai's virtual assistant, Amy, isn't a website or an app; she's simply a "person" whom you cc: on emails to anyone with whom you'd like to schedule a meeting. Her sole "interface" is emails she sends and receives—just like a real assistant. Thus, you don't have to bother with back-and-forth emails trying to find a convenient time and available place for lunch. Amy can correspond fluidly with anyone, but only on the subject of his or her calendar. This sounds like a simple problem to crack, but it isn't, because Amy must communicate with a human being who might not even know she's an AI, and she must do it flawlessly, says X.ai founder Dennis Mortensen.

E-mail conversations with Amy are already quite smooth. Mr. Mortensen used her to schedule our meeting, naturally, and it worked even though I purposely threw in some ambiguous language about the times I was available. But that is in part because Amy is still in the "training" stage, where anything she doesn't understand gets handed to humans employed by X.ai.

It sounds like cheating, but every artificially intelligent system needs a body of data on which to "train" initially. For Persado, that body of data was text messages sent to prepaid cellphone customers in Europe, urging them to re-up their minutes or opt into special plans. For Amy, it's a race to get a body of 100,000 email meeting requests. Amusingly, engineers at X.ai thought about using one of the biggest public database of emails available, the Enron emails, but there is too much scheming in them to be a good sample.

Both of these systems, and others like them, work precisely because their makers have decided to tackle problems that are as narrowly defined as possible. Amy doesn't have to have a conversation about the weather—just when and where you'd like to schedule a meeting. And Persado's system isn't going to come up with the next "Just Do It" campaign.

This is where some might object that the commercialized vision for AI isn't intelligent at all. But academics can't even agree on where the cutoff for "intelligence" is in living things, so the fact that these first steps toward economically useful artificial intelligence lie somewhere near the bottom of the spectrum of things that think shouldn't bother us.

We're also at a time when it seems that advances in the sheer power of computers will lead to AI that becomes progressively smarter. So-called deep-learning algorithms allow machines to learn unsupervised, whereas both Persado and X.ai's systems require training guided by humans.

Last year Google showed that its own deep-learning systems could learn to recognize a cat from millions of images scraped from the Internet, without ever being told what a cat was in the first place. It's a parlor trick, but it isn't hard to see where this is going—the enhancement of the effectiveness of knowledge workers. Mr. Mortensen estimates there are 87 million of them in the world already, and they schedule 10 billion meetings a year. As more tools tackling specific portions of their job become available, their days could be filled with the things that only humans can do, like creativity.

"I think the next Siri is not Siri; it's 100 companies like ours mashed into one," says Mr. Mortensen.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Re: Rise of the Robots

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the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) are trying to simplify tasks and requirements to have robots up and running and doing useful things, they're still mostly used by experienced roboticists with PhD degrees. Would the personal computer have been as popular as it is today if they booted to a command prompt? They probably would amongst developers, but not among the masses that drove the PC, and later the Internet, revolutions.
seems kind of absurd to me - opencv is awfully easy to drive, even for idiots like me.

kids are building robots with it on beaglebone blacks http://beagleboard.org/blog/2014-08-25- ... beaglerov/ and other cheap boards.

simple robots that mimic the repetitive tasks for industry are even easier and can be done with very basic arduino projects.
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noddy wrote:
the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) are trying to simplify tasks and requirements to have robots up and running and doing useful things, they're still mostly used by experienced roboticists with PhD degrees. Would the personal computer have been as popular as it is today if they booted to a command prompt? They probably would amongst developers, but not among the masses that drove the PC, and later the Internet, revolutions.
seems kind of absurd to me - opencv is awfully easy to drive, even for idiots like me.

kids are building robots with it on beaglebone blacks http://beagleboard.org/blog/2014-08-25- ... beaglerov/ and other cheap boards.

simple robots that mimic the repetitive tasks for industry are even easier and can be done with very basic arduino projects.
It is not a matter of "if" but "when" No one is going to throw a switch and everything is going to be done by robots. But as I said in the disruptive technology thread it is already happening with online shopping.

So what happens when the economy based on division of labor ends up without any labor?

That is the real question. We still have time to work it out. Maybe end up with a world with no poverty. Everything could start following Moore's Law WRT costs of units manufactured. But if we don't the ISIS type Jihadis are going to start looking sane. OWS nearly everywhere involving nearly everyone.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Reminds me of the following scifi commercial:

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Re: Rise of the Robots

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I wonder when we will stop referring to them as hardware and software and just think of them as part of our lives?
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MIT Robotic Cheetah has left the building.

XMKQbqnXXhQ
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107413294

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M-board | Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated
Remember when a majority of new tech jobs were going to India and China? Well, increasingly, those jobs are going away altogether. Outsourcing, it turns out, is in the early stages of being automated.

This morning, news broke that Yahoo would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Cisco has been considering cuts in India as well.

Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: Wages in India have increased about 10 percent annually over the last five years, according to Cliff Justice, an analyst who studies outsourcing.
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Typhoon wrote:M-board | Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated
Remember when a majority of new tech jobs were going to India and China? Well, increasingly, those jobs are going away altogether. Outsourcing, it turns out, is in the early stages of being automated.

This morning, news broke that Yahoo would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Cisco has been considering cuts in India as well.

Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: Wages in India have increased about 10 percent annually over the last five years, according to Cliff Justice, an analyst who studies outsourcing.
There was something yesterday about Carlos Slim saying there should be a three day work week.

Here it is:
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/business/ric ... _partners4
Richest man in world floats 3-day work week – again

In this Sept. 29, 2010, file photo, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu holds a press conference at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Sydney.

By Danny Matteson

Video transcript provided by Newsy.com
How about a four-day weekend — every weekend? Sounds pretty great, right? Well, if the richest man in the world has his way, you might soon be spending a lot fewer days on the job.

Carlos Slim: “I think the people should work three days.”

Christine Romans for CNN: “Three days?”

Carlos Slim: “I think it will happen. I don’t know when.”

That was Mexican multibillionaire and business magnate Carlos Slim. (Video via Bloomberg)

>> Read more trending stories

If you haven’t looked at the Forbes list of richest people in the world recently — he’s at No. 1 — with a staggering fortune of more than $82 billion.

He initially floated that 3-day work week idea over the summer — as The Financial Times reports, in a speech at a business conference in Paraguay.

He said in part, “With three work days a week, we would have more time to relax; for quality of life. Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied.”

Four days off? Entertainment? This all sounds amazing — but we know what you’re thinking: “There must be a catch, right?” Well, of course there is.

See, by Slim’s plan each of those three days you’re on the job would run about 11 hours. Oh, and the retirement age? Between 70 and 75.

In Slim’s defense, under his plan the total number of hours worked per week would presumably only be around 33. That compared to the standard 40-hour work week we know today.

Slim isn’t the first to propose less work and more play, though. As CNN reports, economist John Maynard Keynes as far back as 1930 was predicting the advent of new technology would eventually lead to just a 15-hour work week. (Video via PBS)

vwsjPZgBOdU
And the idea of the ubiquitous 40-hour work week isn’t exactly set in stone. It only became widely accepted around 1938, when President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law.

Slim does say he’s not sure when, if ever, your average work week could drop from five to three days — but he does believe it would improve the economy.
Of course the labor participation rate is quite low. The Obama Stimulus has failed just at FDR's Keynesian attempts to end the great depression failed just as Japan's Keynesian lost decades is a failure. Keynesian economics do not inspire confidence in the future economy.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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One in three jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025
Gartner’s crystal ball foresees an emerging ‘super class’ of technologies

By Patrick Thibodeau

Computerworld | Oct 6, 2014 12:37 PM PT

ORLANDO - Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

This is Gartner being provocative, as it typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.

Take drones, for instance.

"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.

"Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world -- these are smart machines," said Sondergaard.

Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.

"Knowledge work will be automated," said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots.

"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."

Among those listening in this audience was Lawrence Strohmaier, the CIO of Nuverra Environmental Solutions, who said Gartner's prediction is similar to what happened in other eras of technological advance.

"The shift is from doing to implementing, so the doers go away but someone still has to implement," said Strohmaier. IT is a shift, although a slow one, to new types of jobs, no different than what happened in the machine age, he said.

The forecast of the impact of technology on jobs was also a warning to the CIOs and IT managers at this conference to consider how they will adapt.

"The door is open for the CIO and the IT organization to be a major player in digital leadership," said David Aron, a Gartner analyst.

CIOs have been steadily gaining authority, and 41% of CIOs now report to the CEO, a record level, said Aron. That's based on data from 2,810 CIOs globally.

To be effective leaders, Gartner argues that CIOs have shifted from being focused on measuring things like cost to being able to lead with vision and describe what their business or government agency must do to take advantage of smarter technologies.


http://www.computerworld.com/article/26 ... -2025.html
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/26/technol ... picks=true
Elon Musk warns against unleashing artificial intelligence 'demon'
By Gregory Wallace @gregorywallace October 26, 2014: 2:04 PM ET


NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

Elon Musk has met a technology he doesn't like.

Musk, who promises to take humans to new heights with space and battery technologies, was especially grounded in his latest caution on artificial intelligence.

He told an audience at MIT on Friday that "we should be very careful about artificial intelligence," warning it may be "our biggest existential threat."

"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," he said.

"In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon," he continued, to some laughs from the audience.

Musk then cracked a smile: "Didn't work out."

His Tesla (TSLA) electric vehicles and SpaceX rockets, which recently won a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, have pushed the limits of their respective technologies.

Musk hasn't embraced artificial intelligence, a field of study at MIT and other schools with significant ethical considerations and business potential. He has previously cautioned it is "potentially more dangerous than nukes."

But he has invested in artificial intelligence companies -- because, he told CNN's Rachel Crane recently, he wanted "to keep an eye on them."

"I wanted to see how artificial intelligence was developing," Musk said in the CNN interview. Among his questions: "Are companies taking the right safety precautions?"

Related: Google snaps up artificial intelligence firm

On Friday, Musk was responding to a question about whether artificial intelligence was "even close to being ready for prime time?"

"I'm increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish," Musk said.

Tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen -- of Netscape fame -- is on the same page. Don't be "freaked out" by Musk's comments, he seemed to say on Twitter.

"Famous last words. Actually, they would be famous ... if there were any humans left alive to hear them," Musk posted in response.

Andreessen replied: "Sadly, that also means you'll get no credit for being right."
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Rise of the Robots

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Lowe’s Is Testing Retail Robots Called OSHBot At San Jose Store

Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - by Sean Knight


Customers shopping at an Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose, California will be in for a surprise when they see an autonomous retail service robot come up to them and ask if they need assistance. Lowe’s will be introducing two robots, called OSHbot, to the store in order to study how robotics technology will be able to benefit both customers and employees.

The OSHbot, designed at Lowe’s Innovation Labs, will be able to direct customers to specific products and provide real-time information about product promotions and inventory. They also come equipped with 3D-scanning technology so that a person will be able to bring in a spare part, scan the part under the OSHbot’s 3D sensing scanner, and the robot will identify the part and provide the necessary information. Lowe’s also says that, in coming months, the OSHbot will be able to communicate with customers in multiple languages and remotely connect with employees at other Orchard stores to help answer project questions.

“Using science fiction prototyping, we explored solutions to improve customer experiences by helping customers quickly find the products and information they came in looking for,” said Lowe’s Innovation Labs executive director Kyle Nel. “As a result we developed autonomous retail service robot technology to be an intuitive tool customers can use to ask for help, in their preferred language, and expect a consistent experience.”

According to Lowe’s, the robots will also provide an extra layer of support for employees by helping customers with simple questions, provide real-time inventory management, and connect with employees at other store locations.

Read more: http://hothardware.com/News/Lowes-Is-Te ... z3HTYoxlVi
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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