Russian Scientist has Started Editing Human Embryos

Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov has started gene editing in eggs donated by women who can hear to learn how to allow some deaf couples to give birth to children without the genetic mutation that impairs hearing. The news, detailed in an e-mail he sent to Nature on 17 October, is the latest in a saga that kicked off in June, when Rebrikov told Nature of his controversial intention to create gene-edited babies resistant to HIV using the popular CRISPR tool.

Rebrikov’s latest e-mail follows a September report in Russian magazine N+1 that one deaf couple had started procedures to procure eggs that would be used to create a gene-edited baby — but the eggs that Rebrikov has edited are from women without the genetic mutation that can impair hearing. He says the goal of the experiments is to better understand potentially harmful ‘off-target’ mutations, which are a known challenge of using CRISR–Cas9 to edit embryos.

link.

Robopocalypse Report #104

Drones:

Australian researchers are using drones to sample whale snot.

Brazilian farmers have started using drones to maximize crop yields.

British drone operators will need to pass a test and get a license.

British company, SenSat, set a new record for a civilian drone operation beyond line of sight.

British Universities are working on drones that can fix potholes overnight.

In China, food delivery drones have started work.

The FAA wants drones to have visible license plates.

A science panel is advising the FAA to loosen drone restrictions.

Flock, an insurance startup for drones, has just received another round of funding.

A drone was used to save a Hawaiian man's life from the volcanic eruption there.

This drone was designed to detect violence in crowds.

A drone has helped Mexican police reduce crime.

Finland successfully tested a drone traffic management system.

GE launched a subsidiary to help management large drone fleets.

Italian and Swiss researchers have built the smallest autonomous drone to date.

A drone will be used to inspect power plants in Italy.

Illinois has a bill submitted to allow law enforcement to use drones more.

Students in India have developed a rapid response, first aid drone.

An MIT algorithm will allow better data updates with the most up to date data for drones.

This is a quadcopter changes shape to slip through tight spaces.

A new quadcopter can follow cars at night.

A Seattle man crashed his drone into the Space Needle and is not suffering the consequences.

Spokane, WA will use drones to inspect infrastructure and monitor construction.

UAVs are being used to detect particulates in the Arctic.

A US Senate bill would authorize the DHS to seize and destroy drones.

Workhorse Group is delivering items via drone in Loveland, OH.

The Zephyr UAV is being worked on.

Zipline is delivering blood by drone in Africa.

Self Driving Cars:

Here's a snarky glossary to the self driving car terminology.

Self driving cars must reduce traffic fatalities by 75% if they want to stay on the road.

Self driving cars could reshape cities.

Self driving cars may not have a huge impact economically until 2040.

US Senators are looking into self driving car safety.

Here come self driving scooters.

AAA says Americans still don't trust self driving cars.

Apple signed a deal with Volkswagen  (and other German automakers) to work on self driving cars.

Byton unveiled its second self driving, eletric car prototype.

Cadillacs will be getting some self driving capabilities in 2020.

California will allow passengers to be picked up by fully autonomous cars.

Some are rather unhappy with California's regulation of self driving cars.

A company is 'finally' grading self driving cars on safety.

Daimler has unveiled its electric trucks with self driving capabilities.

GM has settled with a motorcyclist that was clipped by a Cruise self driving car.

Michigan's mcity is trying to understand how people will use self driving vehicles.

Softbank invested $2.2 billion into GM's Cruise and its self driving car tech.  Japan may get self driving cars for the Olympics as part of the Softbank investment.

Ford is running a faux test of how people will interact with self driving delivery vehicles, but the car really isn't self driving.

Land Rover is developing self driving capabilities for off road.

MIT is teaching self driving cars to change lanes like people do.

A Tesla on Autopilot crashed into a parked police car.

Consumer groups are demanding the FTC investigate the Tesla Autopilot.

Tesla's Autopilot is getting an update soon.  Supposedly, in August, Tesla will enable more self driving capabilities in Autopilot.

Uber's software had its automatic object avoidance software switched off by design when it hit and killed the woman in Arizona.  This was turned off because it kept getting false positives.  The NTSB is blaming of the turn off of that system for the crash.  The system DID detect the woman 6 seconds prior to the crash.  Uber has shut down its Arizona ops.  Uber is moving its ops back to Pittsburgh.  The mayor there had no idea Uber was coming back.

Uber is signaling it might end up using Waymo self driving tech.  Given their own abysmal record, that would probably be a good idea.

Waymo is ordering up to 62,000 Chrysler Hybrid Pacifica Minivans for conversion into self driving cars.

Waymo wants to take its self driving cars to europe to act as taxis, but potentially under another name.

The a week in the future of cars is funky.

3d Printing:

A 3d bioprinter from UCLA.

A 3d bioprinter can now print human corneas.

Flowbuilt Manufacturing can make 3d printed shoes much faster.

3d printed...chinese food?

3d printed houses are planned as rentals in the Netherlands.

Sandia National Labs is 3d printing telescopes.

A startup is offering continuous carbon fibre 3d printing.

TU Delft has a new way of 3d printing.

The University of New South Wales got a $3M grant to work on 3d metal printing.

Robotics:

An autonomous window cleaning bot.

Automated bike frame production is coming.

Caltech has an actuatorless soft robot.

Disney has developed a robot that can backflip.

Some are saying not to expect farm robotics any time soon.

The University of Hong Kong has developed a new, motorless actuator for robots.

Japanese researchers have grown 'muscles' for robots.

The International Maritime Organization is looking to regulate autonomous ships.

Meet Mesmer.  And we need to have a talk about that.

MIT is working on domestic robots or at least how to teach them to be domestic.

The MITO underwater bot is the latest to come out.

Nissan built a robot that can mark up sporting fields, like soccer fields, autonomously.

Robots could have senses far beyond people do.

The race to mine the ocean floor with robots has begun.

Robots are coming for the weeds.

Roboats are coming.

There is even a robot pollinator.

Robots want your blood, at least to take it.

Self healing robots?

Here come the sexbots.

UCSB has developed a soft robot actuator.

Using shape memory alloys as actuators.

Softbank's Pepper robot is a cybersecurity mess.

Spyce, the automated kitchen equipped restaurant, opened for business on May 3rd.

Cyborgism:

MIT found a way to wireless power medical implants.

Software Bots:

Amazon's Alexa had a weird coincidence where it listened to, recorded and sent a conversation it heard.

A version of Alexa is being targeted for software developers.

How Canada became important in the AI development race.

China is using software bots to see if its students are paying attention.

Cortana can be used to hack PCs.

DeepMind has been watching Youtube videos to learn how to beat Atari games.

Facebook has a bot that turns whistles into musical compositions.

If you think you have fake news now...

Google's Assistant fired a gun.  Sorta.

Google's Duplex assistant able to interact with people might actually be breaking the law.

Will Google keep its promises to make only ethical AI?

Google's software bot to translate languages will now do so offline, at least for 59 of them.

IBM's Watson Health just had massive layoffs.

Intel is promising its ASIC chips for AI will arrive in 2019.

Microsoft bought an AI company to improve Cortana's conversational skills.

Microsoft also has the equivalent of Google's Duplex.  It's called Xiaoice and only available in China.

A New York bill intended to fight deepfake software bots is getting opposed by entertainment companies.

NIST ran a study that found facial recognition experts worked far better with an AI partner.

Meet Norman, the psychotic AI trained by reddit images.

Nvidia has developed a bot that can learn by watching people.

Physicists are using software bots to assemble atoms.

Samsung wants AI on all its devices by 2020.

Software bots are being used to obscure identity on online pictures.

Software bots might be useful for IDing useful nanoparticles.

Software bots are better at IDing skin cancer than dermatologists.

Software bots are being used to design replacement teeth.

Software bots are now being used to help develop solar panels.

Can software bots predict violent protests by analyzing twitter?

Software bots can now detect movement through walls.

A software bot can transfer human expressions from one video to another.

Software bots are being to detect and ID animals seen in camera traps.

A software bot created a movie starring a real actor.

A discussion of software bots.

Ubisoft has an AI helper for its games.

Virtual assistants could be finally arriving.

Zimbabwe is starting to use Chinese facial recognition software.

META:

Welcome to Silicon Valley's version of Transhumanism.

Someone is trying to trick registrants at the NIPS 2018 conference into registering at the wrong site.

Does the US need an AI strategy like Europe et al?  Supposedly, the US is pursuing a very aggressive AI strategy.  

The Toronto Declaration is an attempt to get software bots to not discriminate and respect human rights.

The fear of automation is one of the driving forces of the recent strikes in Las Vegas.

Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting a new Nature journal.

Eric Schmidt calls shenanigans on Elon Musk's declarations about AI.

Software bots/AI are being deployed in stupid ways in companies by management that doesn't understand it.

The robopocalypse came for warehouse workers in China.

What the US Military Worries About: Russian Robo Tanks and Chinese Saurons

In at least one area, our adversaries are ahead: enhancing human performance by modifying the body and brain itself. “Now our adversaries quite frankly are pursuing enhanced human operations and it scares the crap out of us, really,” Work said. “We’re going to have to have a big, big decision on whether we’re comfortable going that way.” So far, the US military has focused on better equipment for the human — heads-up displays, wearable electronics, better body armor, maybe even exoskeletons — rather than upgrading the human being him- or herself.

Even when adversaries pursue the same technologies as we do, their values mean they may pursue them very differently. “China’s investing heavily in robotics and autonomy, and the Russian chief of General Staff, [Valeriy] Gerasimov, recently said that the Russian military is preparing to fight on the roboticized battlefield, and he said, I quote, ‘in the near future it is possible a fully robotized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations.'”

The idea of roving Russian robo-tanks is the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. In the US military, “we believe strongly that humans should be the only ones to decide when to use lethal force,” Work emphasized. “[But] authoritarian regimes who believe people are weaknesses in the machine…. they will naturally gravitate towards totally automated solutions,” Work said. “Why do I know that? Because that’s exactly the way the Soviets [conceived] their recon-strike complex; it was going to be completely automated.”

link.

Chinese Scientists Have Geneticaly Modified Human Embryos Using CRISPR

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.

In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.

"I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes."

link.

Robopocalypse: can we Create new Senses for Human Beings?

Don't Buy it, but...: Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain

Randy McDonald links to an article about the possible psychology of a Matrioshka Brain.

I don't buy it. And we're very, very sure there's none out there, at least within our observable space.  However, some may find the vision of the ability to run around 4* 10^17 human minds within a Dyson sphere enthralling. 

First Brain to Brain Interface Created: Prof Controls College's Arms

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."

The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. The version available at the end of this release has been edited for length.

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing (BCI) in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in BCI technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the "fire" button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

LINK!

Ted Talk on MMI