Skynet is coming.

[Diogenes]

Atlas Robot doing backflips. Seriously.


https://youtu.be/fRj34o4hN4I

[paperburn1]

I love how our new overlord robot master does a victory dance after the flip.

On the facial identification bit I remember reading somewhere that a person developed a face paint that help prevent it from working.

[url]/https://cvdazzle.com/[url] Partially obscure the nose-bridge area: The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature. This is especially effective against OpenCV's face detection algorithm

[hanelyp]

Speaking of robot overlord masters ...

Inside chilling religion creating ‘God robot’ a billion times smarter than humans
A FORMER Uber worker has formed an odd cult to build a “godhead” robot, “a billion times” smarter than any human.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest ... -robots-AI
(warning, NSFW sidebar content)

I'd rather not have to go Butlerian Jihad against them.

[Diogenes]

Apparently other people have been noticing what i've been noticing.


"Slaughterbots."

https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA


Freaky.

[choff]

Apparently other people have been noticing what i've been noticing.


"Slaughterbots."

https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA


Freaky.

Now if they can just make them look just like mosquitoes, except with curare and cyanide stingers. Less noisy, perfect for taking out Lil' Kim and not having to admit blame. Seriously, if killer robots are such a problem then the tech giants need to stop competing to be first past the post creating them.

[williatw]

Now if they can just make them look just like mosquitoes, except with curare and cyanide stingers. Less noisy, perfect for taking out Lil' Kim and not having to admit blame. Seriously, if killer robots are such a problem then the tech giants need to stop competing to be first past the post creating them.

What I was thinking as well. A poisonous stinger (with a cocktail of lethal poisons) is much more effective than a small explosive would be. An explosive can only kill one person with the sacrifice of the bot, while a poison stinger equipped bot can sting multiple people. Less dramatic than an explosive perhaps but more practical IMHO; the fact that the hapless victim might not even know he/she was stung until it was too late just adds to the sense of dread/panic they would cause.

[choff]

And they think they just got stung by a mosquito so they whack it, destroying the evidence.

[williatw]

And they think they just got stung by a mosquito so they whack it, destroying the evidence.

What if they added a numbing agent to the lethal brew delivered by the bot's "sting"? Something that made it hard to tell you had been "bitten"? That way the bot would survive and "live" on to sting another victim(s).

[Diogenes]

Lidar Just Got Way Better—But It’s Still Too Expensive for Your Car

The iconic spinning laser sensors atop autonomous cars may be making their final turns. Velodyne, the world’s market-leading lidar manufacturer, has built a new device that sees further and in more detail than any lidar sensor currently on sale, in a package a fifth the size of its previous high-resolution device.

Lidar sensors, which bounce laser beams off nearby objects to create highly accurate 3-D maps of their surroundings, are an important component for most self-driving cars. Until now, the pick of the commercially available crop has been Velodyne’s HDL-64E—a coffee-can-size lump that fires 64 laser beams, one atop the other, as it spins in circles. Each beam is separated from the next by an angle of 0.4°, with a range of 120 meters.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6095 ... -your-car/

[ladajo]

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Lidar/Ladar work/employment has been going on a while, and some of the things I have been involved with are pretty darn cool.
Cool imaging stuff

[paperburn1]

The eyesight image
https://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/electron ... canopy.jpg
You can run but you can not hide, you just die tired.
https://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/electron ... tower2.gif
image from above and using a Foliage-Penetration LADAR Systems top down removal process you can see beneath the tree canopy.
https://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/electron ... rtrees.jpg

[Diogenes]

A Startup Uses Quantum Computing to Boost Machine Learning

A company in California just proved that an exotic and potentially game-changing kind of computer can be used to perform a common form of machine learning.

The feat raises hopes that quantum computers, which exploit the logic-defying principles of quantum physics to perform certain types of calculations at ridiculous speeds, could have a big impact on the hottest area of the tech industry: artificial intelligence.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6098 ... -learning/

[Diogenes]

Checkmate humanity: In four hours, a robot taught itself chess, then beat a grandmaster with moves never devised in the game's 1,500-year history and the implications are terrifying

Simon Williams, the English grandmaster, claimed this was ‘one for the history books’ and joked: ‘On December 6, 2017, AlphaZero took over the chess world . . . eventually solving the game and finally enslaving the human race as pets.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... hours.html


There are other parts that would give a better idea of what happened in this story, but I just couldn't pass up excerpting that quote.

[hanelyp]

Chess has finite and well defined rules. A computer outdoing the grand masters was inevitable. When computers can outperform humans on not so well defined tasks it may be time to worry.

[williatw]

Chess has finite and well defined rules. A computer outdoing the grand masters was inevitable. When computers can outperform humans on not so well defined tasks it may be time to worry.

Sounds comforting but...it's not just what it did, outperform the grand masters; but the speed and ease with how it was able to do so.

In those 240 minutes of practice, the program not only taught itself how to play but developed tactics that are unbeatably innovative — and revealed its startling ability to trounce human intelligence. Some of its winning moves had never been recorded in the 1,500 years that human brains have pitted wits across the chequered board.

Garry Kasparov, the grandmaster who was famously defeated by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997 when it was pre-programmed with the best moves, said: ‘The ability of a machine to surpass centuries of human knowledge . . . is a world-changing tool.’

That much progress in 20 years; from beating the grand master with pre-programmed moves to it teaching itself in four hours moves no human had ever conceived of in over a millennia of playing chess. If you don't think we humans have something to worry about I think respectfully you are being willfully naïve. What's next, military strategy? A computer like that in charge of our defense arsenal? Wasn't there a movie like that; "the Terminator" or something?