Tag: robots
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How to train a robot to be nice
In response to fears that robots will take over and exterminate the human race, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying ways to teach robots human ethical values. In the absence of an aligned reward signal, a reinforcement learning agent can perform actions that appear psychotic. For example, consider a robot that is instructed to…
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Year of the Monkey, Robot
This is how they celebrated the Chinese New Year in Guangzhou. 540 robots dancing in unison with a squadron of drones hovering overhead in formation.
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Robot underlords
In 15 minutes, CPG Grey’s Humans Need Not Apply paints a bleak picture for anyone who thinks that the coming robot revolution will free everyone up for more creative pursuits. Trouble is, poetry and painting don’t pay the rent. Transportation, driving things & people from point A to point B employs millions of people today.…
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Automatically Familiar
More from the ever weirder frontier of automated humanity. The Atlantic has a fascinating piece on how the telemarketing industry has evolved to marry call scripts and recorded snippets of smooth-talking sales people to create what the author calls, “cyborg telemarketing” The company that made the UI above is called Avatar Technologies. They turn the telemarketer’s…
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MorpHex, a spherical transformer
How do you design a robot that can maneuver over varied terrain? OK. That’s pretty clever. Here’s another approach from scientists at MIT (via @dav)
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Amazon’s Robot Army
Yesterday I posted videos of two kinds of robots. One showing a driverless car that allowed a blind person to pick up some Mexican food and his dry cleaning, another, some kind of hive-mind controlled swarm of micro-quad copters that seemed to come right out of a Michael Crichton novel. Today, via an high school…
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Driverless Vehicles – Two Kinds
Google released an amazing video showing one of their driverless car taking a blind man out to get tacos and pick up his dry cleaning. This is good. In a tweet the other night, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo pointed to a swarm of programmable Nano Quadrotors and mused, “It’s with confidence and dread that I’m…