The Real Risks of Artificial Intelligence

If you’ve paid attention to just about any media outlet lately, you’ve likely seen the dire warnings about the threat to humanity posed by artificial intelligence that have been issued by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. However, according to four artificial intelligence researchers that I’ve interviewed in the past three months, while AI’s risks may be cause for concern, shaping our AI future may have more to do with directing current trends, rather than overtly preventin...

Much effort is going into teaching robots natural language for easy human-robot interaction. When robots work side by side with humans they must understand when they're given a certain task. But robots must also learn to refuse harmful or inappropriate orders. Researchers from Tufts University are teaching Nao robots how to reject directives given by humans while staying polite. Gordon Briggs and Matthias Scheutz of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, Tufts University have developed a mech...

OpenBCI, the open source Brain Computer Interface platform, started in 2013 to make biosensing available to makers, researchers and biohackers. Now the OpenBCI team has launched a new crowdfunding campaign to further lower the barrier to entry with an even cheaper OpenBCI platform and a new 3D printed headset. The development of brain wave capturing and reading should not be in the hands of corporations and well-funded research institutes alone, said Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno when they r...

This design is useful for speedy mobile robots and provides fast, contactless detection of obstacles ahead. Not only can it detect the obstacle, it also indicates in which direction it is. The project has a liberal sprinkling of both hardware and software sorcery.

Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced a family of three new highly integrated brushed DC motor controllers. The DRV8871 is a brushed-DC motor driver with built-in current sense and H-bridge driver circuit using...

Intersil has introduced the ISL29501 time-of-flight (ToF) signal processing IC that provides an object detection and distance measurement solution when combined with an external emitter (LED or laser) and photodiode. Intersil claim the technology...

Land, sea and air robots have gathered in Italy this week to compete in the euRathlon 2015 Challenge, the European emergency response robotics competition.

Amidst all the talk about the dangers robots can pose to humanity, two Japanese research groups examined the opposite eventuality of interspecies violence: people abusing robots. Unsurprisingly, a couple of days at a shopping mall gave them more practical material to work with than the theoretical ponderings of robot-fearing folk. Barring science fiction, the first instance of robot on human intentional violence has yet to be recorded, whereas thousands of years of human history firmly establi...

“Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. […] Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.” These are the opening words of an open letter signed by over a 1000 AI and robotics researchers urging the United Natio...

Researchers want to connect the outdoors to the Internet of Things by slapping RFID sensor tags on bridges, buildings and farmland. Rather than hooking up the entire earth to WiFi, mobile robots visit the tags on a regular basis to collect the data. The rapid price drop of Radio Frequency Identification tags brings massive distribution within reach. RFID tags, currently mostly used to keep track of goods in transit, can, when outfitted with sensing capabilities be utilized to monitor infrastruc...