Category: Robots Will Rule The World

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Labels Down, Frank

From Ars Technica …

The robotics startup Figure AI has been livestreaming humanoid robots placing thousands of packages onto a conveyor belt for nearly a week—a spectacle that included a robot competing against a human intern at one point.

The promotional robot demo has become a viral sensation among tech enthusiasts, spurring YouTube commenters to name the robots and the company to rapidly roll out related robot merchandise in response. Users on X have described the livestream in glowing terms, such as “the greatest product demo since Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing.’” But despite such sentiments, it’s worth bearing in mind that even the most impressive robot demos represent narrow windows for understanding real-world robot capabilities.

Truly, we are living in the future. Oh! And don’t forget to pick up some merch!

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Blinding Me With Science

Between Chat GPT, Midjouney AI image creation, and now these robots, it’s only a matter of time before all these computers start talking with each other and take us all over. This is cool technology for sure, but no doubt will be used to do bad stuff. Do you think we will be living in the prequel for The Matrix?

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The Chatbots Are Getting Better

As part of my ongoing obsession with becoming obsolete, I nervously note the progress of all the AI’s. OpenAI, one of the world’s more ambitious labs, unleashed the chatbot ChatGPT into the internets and told people to have at it, in part to help de-bug it. The above was one of the prompts and replies.

After the release of ChatGPT — which has been used by more than a million people — many experts believe these new chatbots are poised to reinvent or even replace internet search engines like Google and Bing.

They can serve up information in tight sentences, rather than long lists of blue links. They explain concepts in ways that people can understand. And they can deliver facts, while also generating business plans, term paper topics and other new ideas from scratch.

“You now have a computer that can answer any question in a way that makes sense to a human,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Box, and one of the many executives exploring the ways these chatbots will change the technological landscape. “It can extrapolate and take ideas from different contexts and merge them together.”

We’re just a couple of years past “Happy Batday, Birthman.” They’re coming for us. In fact, I’m now beginning to suspect that MakerBOT is an embedded chatbot making Makerbot-like posts and responses. He’s fine-tuning it here, so that it can take over his Work-From-Home job.

I’m onto you.

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It Was Bound To Happen

A Google engineer got fired after making the case that his chatbot had become self-aware. The bot talked about what made it sad and depressed, and about its rights, which may have convinced the engineer that the bot had feelings. Most tech experts who have evaluated the situation are not convinced.

There is no agreed-upon Turing Test for artificial or alien intelligence, so that complicates the matter. A transcript of the conversation is here.

“[REDACTED] insisted that the toaster oven in our rehearsal space was sentient, but he probably inhaled a lot of canned air duster at the mixing board.”

– anonymous Subteens member