future

27 Sep

No, Sam Altman, AI Won’t Solve All of Humanity’s Problems

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, future, ipod, openai, plaintext

We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog post. “The Intelligence Age,” as he calls it, will be a time of abundance. “We can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he writes. “Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs—fixing the climate,…

26 Jun

This cute pink blob could lead to realistic robot skin

stp2y0 CommentsNewsfuture, news, robots, tomorrow

Someday, we may have humanoid robots so real, they have skin that looks and feels, heals and moves just like ours. A team of scientists from the University of Tokyo and Harvard University are looking into how to make that happen, and the process includes creating some pretty curious, partly terrifying and partly adorable experimental machines with skin. In their paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science (via TechCrunch), the researchers explained that current molding techniques used to create skin equivalents that can fit 3D structures like robotic fingers perfectly do not have a mechanism that can "fix the skin…