Google, it has emerged, has built a ‘Matrix-style’ simulation of the entirety of California to test its self-driving cars. While this in itself isn’t massively surprising given Google’s history as a software company (though it is a bit scary), the company is also petitioning California’s state officials to allow safety testing within the Matrix, instead of testing on real roads. This might sound a little terrifying, but it makes quite a lot of sense for a self-driving car, where there are millions of conditions that need to be tested.
A long, long time ago — well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact — electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla’s invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world’s first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.
Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven’t read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they’ll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.
This morning I found myself pondering a particularly interesting question: Where are all the nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power, it generates more power than fossil power (i.e. it goes faster) while weighing significantly less, and you can go years without ever having to refuel a nuclear vehicle. Imagine if you could buy a nuclear-powered Tesla Model S or Ford Escape, and never had to refuel it for the entirety of its operational life. So, where are all the nuclear vehicles? Were they kiboshed by the ecologists? Is it yet another conspiracy hatched by Big Oil to maintain their juicy fossil fuel profits?
While you didn’t see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn’t some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though — no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. ‘If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,’ says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.
Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew, has been shot down over Ukraine. Yes, this is the same Malaysia Airlines that lost flight 370 in the Indian Ocean earlier in the year. It isn’t yet confirmed who shot down the plane, but we have a military source who believes it was probably Ukrainian separatists, using a Buk missile system that was given to them by the Russians. Suffice it to say, if Ukrainian separatists have just blown up a commercial airliner using a Russian weapon, we are almost certainly looking at a massive geopolitical crisis.
Police in the UK have become one of the first major police forces to deploy automated facial recognition technology to catch criminals. The British police will be using NEC’s NeoFace technology, which can match faces from crime scene photos or videos against a database of images in just a few seconds. Combined with the highest density of CCTV cameras of any country in the world, police body-worn cameras that are constantly recording, and a CSI-like smartphone and tablet app that allows for face and fingerprint matching in the field, it is rather hard to be a criminal in the UK nowadays.
64 years after the father of computer science, Alan Turing, proposed a method of testing whether a machine has obtained human-level intelligence, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman has finally become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test. Don’t worry, though, sentient computers aren’t about to take over the world: The Turing Test is actually rather flawed, and doesn’t really measure an AI’s capability for intelligent thought.
Humans, despite our undoubted success, splendor, and total domination of this fair planet, have one major downfall: We’re incredibly self-centered. Whenever we discover something new, the first question is always how can it help us. Nearly all scientific endeavor is carried out with humanity’s continued success and well-being in mind. This isn’t to say that we don’t care about our environment, or the other animals that are unfortunate enough to share our planet, but it’s nearly always an afterthought. First we try to solve the problem — hunger, pestilence, death — and then we worry about how it might impact our botanical and zoological friends.
Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.